These are the producer/innovators who have been constantly reinventing their wheels to suit the ever changing terrain of independent film production. Changes have come thick and fast, for Ted anyone basing their financial model on a film made before the 15th September 2008 is hopelessly out of date. For those of you who don’t memorise the Economist, that was the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.

The key message I drew from their detailed and honest accounts of making films outside the studio system was one of flexibility. “I’m budget agnostic,” declared Ted proudly “I’m budget agnostic, I’m format agnostic, I’m content agnostic.” “And there’s a fourth,” added Christine “We’re platform agnostic too!” Thanks largely to the groundbreaking work of HBO and the arrival of the authored multi-part, doing TV is no longer the resort of the director who can’t get a gig (afterall, if it’s good enough for Scorsese…) There is still a sense of snobbery towards the web but Christine is currently very active there and sees it as an inspiring new territory.

There were other gems, worked to a fine shine through years of experience. For Ted all films fall into one of two categories, either “proofs” in which the filmmaker sets out to demonstrate what they know (“…and generally bore me by being over engineered”) or “experiments” which are made to see what you can learn. Whilst Christine has finally perfected a question to see if a potential director is crazy… “have you ever had a relationship with another living thing, ever?”

Perhaps though the most interesting insight amid all these strategies for embracing the flux was their sanguine approach to Crowd Sourcing. When the subject came up you could feel the sun-warmed post-lunch room suddenly bristle to attention. Crowd Source is the newest new game and the buzziest buzz word in town and surely we were about to hear some pearls that would help us crack it open… but neither seemed that moved. “This is not a way of gaming the system or getting free money” says Ted “You need to really think through what you are actually offering your investors… you have a responsibility to know the names of everyone in your crew. This goes for everyone funding your film.”

The most powerful thing about crowd sourcing is not that it enables you to get money from a faceless horde hidden on the far side of your firewall. Rather it is an amazing tool for building a community around your project, for enabling a lot of small people to invest and become a part of your film – but you have to actively let them in, you can’t just take the money and send out the DVDs in six months…

Of course we all just want to be given our creative head, but if you want someone to invest you need to let them do a little more than just give you money, you have to let them care. In this at least I guess as ever, the more things change, the more they stay the same…

You can find the twitter stream for the day at #aiday and in case you didn’t notice you can follow Chris and I @blainebrothers – and please do.

Oh and you can find Chris’ beautiful notes from the day here – http://goo.gl/l1udD

Ted Hope…
on IMDB: www.imdb.com/name/nm0394046/
on Twitter: twitter.com/TedHope
his blog: http://blogs.indiewire.com/tedhope/

Christine Vachon…
on IMDB: www.imdb.com/name/nm0882927/
on Twitter: twitter.com/kvpi

Producer Ted Hope Discusses the Future of Finding Film Audiences from Reel 13 on Vimeo.

You can also read the full text of Hope’s keynote address, delivered at the Arthouse Convergence in Salt Lake City just before Sundance, on indieWIRE.

In one of his posts, Hope linked to this excellent resource on social media by Beth Kanter (check out her blog on how nonprofits can use social media). I follow her on Twitter because her observations are often very relevant for filmmakers too. Twitter has become a useful tool for finding out about exciting things happening in the world of Web2.0, social media and technology – and I have been introduced to lots of great people and ideas through it. It is definitely worth investigating although it can also be something of a time-suck. You have been warned.

A THOUSAND PHOENIX RISING
How The New Truly Free Filmmaking Community Will Rise From Indie’s Ashes

I can’t talk about the “crisis” of the indie film industry. There is no crisis. The country is in crisis. The economy is in crisis. We, the filmmakers, aren’t in crisis.

The business is changing, but for us –us who are called Indie Filmmakers — that’s good that the business is changing. Filmmaking is an incredible privilidge and we need to accept it as such – and accept the full responsibility that comes with that priviledge.

The proclamations of Indie Film’s demise are grossly exaggerated. How can there be a “Death Of Indie” when Indie — real Indie, True Indie — has yet to even live?
Yes, there’s a profound paradigm shift, and that shift is the coming of true independence. The hope of this new independence is being threatened even before it has arrived. Are we going to fight for our independence and can we even shoulder the responsibility that independence requires? That is: will we ban together and work for our communal needs? Are we ready to leave dreams of stardom and wealth behind us?

When someone says “Indie is dead”, they are talking about the state of the Indie Film Business, as opposed to what are actually the films themselves. They can say “The sky is falling” because for the last fifteen years, the existing power base in the film industry has focused on films fit for the existing business model, as opposed to ever truly concentrating on creating a business model for the films that filmmakers want to make.

This is where we are right now: on the verge of a TRULY FREE FILM CULTURE, one that is driven by both the creators and the audiences, pulled down by the audience and not pushed onto them by those that control the apparatus and the supply. We now have the power and the tool for something different, but will we fight to preserve the internet, the tool that offers us our new freedom? Can we banish the the dream of golden distribution deals, and move away from asking others to distribute and market it for us? Can we accept that being a filmmaker means taking responsibility for your films, the primary responsibility, all the way through the process? That is independence and that is freedom…

Read the full transcript on Filmmaker Magazine’s website.

Here’s how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year– generally with budgets under $10 million–maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That’s one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir wrote a follow up piece with this final, positive-ish conclusion:

The indie booms of the ’80s and ’90s crested and collapsed in their turn, but the best filmmakers always survived — and without fail every year moviegoers turn some totally unlikely release into a big hit. As far as the old-fashioned movie experience is concerned, Gill is probably right that in a few years we’ll have half as many films released in half as many theaters. This will be a sad transition for many of us, sure. But the movies weren’t killed by television, they weren’t killed by VHS and DVD, and they can’t be killed by whatever’s happening now.

The New York Times’ David Carr concluded thus:

Some of Mr. Gill’s peers in the industry told me he was more Captain Obvious than prophet. Still, he got people’s attention because by the time he finished talking, it sounded as if he were pitching a particularly gruesome horror movie: “The strongest of the strong will survive and in fact prosper. But it will feel like we just survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming.”

Brian Newman, CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute, doesn’t disagree with Mark Gill but argues that most truly independent filmmakers are not remotely affected by the fate of Warner Independent, Picturehouse, New Line, Paramount Vantage et al:

Mark Gill’s analysis, even the parts I would debate, is fairly accurate, but pretty much meaningless to 99% of the indies I (and you) know. For most of us – those making truly indie films, and those watching them – not one of Gill’s thirteen disaster points mean anything to us.

Nothing.

Picturehouse, Warner Independent, etc and all – wouldn’t distribute most of the films that I’ve seen and/or supported this year, have nothing to do with what we call Indie, and are for all intents and purposes meaningless to us. I’m not saying I haven’t liked any of their films, or that they haven’t been important to the movie business. I am saying that few of these companies would ever pick up 99% of the films accepted to Sundance (or any other fest) anyways, and that whether or not they tank has no real impact on the majority of indies I know. For them, they haven’t truly had a distributor for their films since perhaps the early 90s, if ever. And they’ll keep making their films, their audiences will keep finding ways to see them – be it at festivals or online or through a hand-me-down VHS tape. So, for the rest of us, points 1-13 add up to possibly one thing- less parties to try to get into at Sundance, but not much more in terms of indie film.

Newman adds:

Bottom line- very few people are doing well in the film business. Kinda like in America in general, but that’s another blog post. It’s about time that filmmakers wake up to this fact collectively, and come up with their own models. No one can afford to keep making films per the usual model. People are spending a lot more making their films than what they are earning back.

Producer Ted Hope sent out an email to friends and colleagues saying that we are at a cultural crossroads and that we need to step up as a community and fight the good fight :

We are between things and the old model no longer works and the new one is undefined. But I see some real hope nonetheless.

This change has been much discussed for the last fifteen years, but the digital revolution is very slow in coming. This slow trickle has, in my opinion, allowed for a withering away of what truly made the indie film world unique, which is the glue that kept it a community and not just a demographic. Digital downloads won’t be anyone’s salvation, but the internet can truly rebuild what has collapsed — but it’s time to look at the infrastructure first.

Time and time again, films emerge that define a community and the community comes out to support in droves. Similarly, it truly feels to me that we are at a cultural crossroads, where we — as a community of filmmakers and film lovers — are in real danger of losing access to a dynamic range of personal cinema, unless the various communities start to take steps to unite and speak up for the world they want. We can’t keep settling for the crap that is hoisted upon us.

There are new models emerging as people and organizations experiment and try new things. Just look at the work of Lance Weiler, Matt Hanson, Brett Gaylor, Liz Rosenthal, Peter Broderick, Four Eyed Monsters, Withoutabox, B-Side, Breaththrough Distribution, IndiePix… and Shooting People!

Are we feeling optimistic? Well, there’s a lot of testing and inventing and experimenting to be done and there’s a lot at stake but hell yeah! We’re not going to stop making films (and we know there is an audience out there thirsty for innovative, creative and visionary work – and for work that isn’t as prescriptive as the solution for successful films that Gill proposes, go make your dark, rambling Western if you can pull it off!) so we’re going to have to figure this out. Together.