I’m part of a Shooting People team teaching a workshop on how filmmakers can best use the web at the Frontline Club in London on Saturday, July 4th. The workshop will include case studies on films that have harnessed the power of the web, tips on using social media, and online strategy and resources for filmmakers. If you’re looking for help distributing and marketing your film online then Digital Bootcamp is for you! I’m working on some lovely slides for it right now.

I’m really excited to see Brett Gaylor’s Girl Talk documentary, RiP: A Remix Manifesto, which recently won the audience award at IDFA. The more I read and learn about Creative Commons, debates around fair use and the amazing work of people like Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, the more I realize what a vital debate this is to be having at this time. The ability to re-use and re-mix has always been part of our creativity. With innovations in technology and the growth of the web, these elements are increasingly intrinsic to the way we tell stories, They are what constitute our culture. Outdated copyright laws should not be allowed to stifle this mashed-up explosion of production. The RiP trailer pithily lays out some of these issues. As Lessig puts it: “There’s no way to kill this technology. We can only criminalize it. If this is a crime then we have a whole generation of criminals.”

I’m at the second and final day of The Conversation today. I’ve been too busy to blog but you can follow updates from me and other attendees on Twitter.

I’ll post an update when footage from the panels is put online. Lots of good ideas coming up that should be shared.

Just a heads up that I am also blogging over on the Shooting People TOOLS blog about the new(ish) digital, webbified world of production and distribution. Check it out for a link to download the Shooting People/BAFTA Short Sighted book of contacts for filmmakers making shorts (including some tips for filmmaking in a Web2.0 world written by moi), plus lots of other good stuff: most recently links to the Peter Broderick indieWIRE articles on new distribution strategies and The Film Panel Notetaker’s coverage of Independent Film Week. I’m always keen to hear about good blogs/websites/conferences etc. covering the intersection of film and the web so please leave a comment if you have any suggestions/tips.

I’m moderating this panel on Monday at 10am at the Conference during Independent Film Week. If you want to find out where the money is, and I know that you do!, please stop by.

FILMMAKING 2.0
Show Me the New Money
Where do you begin when navigating the wide variety of traditional and new media services, sites and opportunities being promoted to assist filmmakers in raising money? How do these tools and services differ from traditional private equity and film financing models? How can the right mix of all three help you access new sources while getting you that much closer to production?

Monday, September 15th, 10am – 11am

Panelists:
Miles Beckett, CEO, EQAL
Ryan Harrington, Indiepix Studios
Slava Rubin, CEO, IndieGoGo
Joel Wright, VP Interactive Media, Paradigm

It has been so frustrating not having time to blog about all the films and other events I attended at HotDocs and then Tribeca. Work has foiled me every time. It has just been a nutty couple of weeks – full of good things but no time to sit and think and write. Yesterday I got home and was so tired that I watched the end of Music and Lyrics and then the end of Just My Luck before crashing out at 9.30pm. Not one of my better TV-watching moments!

I attended a really interesting panel last week at Tribeca called Reuse Remix Renew – covering copyright and digital culture in advance of the release of the Tribeca Institute’s Sample This! licensing toolkit for filmmakers which should be available later this Summer. The panel included DJ Spooky – aka Paul D. Miller, That Subliminal Kid, who has recently released a book he has edited called Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. He said that his 1996 album Songs of a Dead Dreamer would probably not be released today because litigation against sampling has become so much more robust. Spooky thinks of this work as an “invisible sculpture made of fragments of history” and the battles over copyright come down to “who owns memory?” for him. He talked about how the old model of copyright is based on scarcity but now culture is “ubiquitous, downloadable, everywhere, all the time” and smart folk, like Google, are tapping into this new model and making millions. He went on to talk about the bootleg economy that is dominant in many countries in the world and to note that the way that the law is currently written and the way that we actually live are parting ways. We are moving toward a gift economy and people are having to work out how to monetize this in new ways. Digital literacy will be a big deal as we move forward in this new world.

Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons, is one of the people working to increase digital literacy and explore new ways of allowing legal reuse, remixing and sharing of creative work. “People are going to engage with things they love,” he said “so you have to create business models that accept this and work around it. People are not going to stop downloading but they respect the flexibility of Creative Commons.”

Jennifer Urban and Himanshu Singh from the USC Intellectual and Technology Law Clinic are working with the Tribeca Film Insitute to develop the Sample This! toolkit. Clinics like theirs help filmmakers with issues over fair use and the toolkit came out of this work.

Himanshu Singh, Eric Steur, Paul D. Miller, Jennifer Urban and moderator Georg Szalai from The Hollywood Reporter.

While I was thinking about fair use, sampling and copyright I re-discovered this awesome performance by Jamie Lidell so I’m embedding it here for some extra sample-tastic pleasure.

Marc Andreessen has written an interesting post about how the writer’s strike may accelerate a shift of power from the studios to the talent. He argues that the entertainment industry is shifting toward the entrepreneurial model of Silicon Valley which means that the creators will also be the owners of their product. I think many of the points he makes are very prescient but all this talk about free this and free that glosses over the time and talent that it takes to use many of these new tools well when it comes to promotion and distribution over the web. Also, is it really that easy to get a venture capitalist interested in your latest documentary about Chad (Africa not Lowe)? I’m not so sure. Still, it’s definitely worth a read and here’s an excerpt:

What would a new entertainment media company, producing original content, look like in the age of the Internet?

• Starting from the end of the process: you know distribution is now nearly free. Put it up on the Internet and let people stream or download it.
• Marketing is also free, due to virality. Let people email your content to their friends; let people embed your content in their blogs and on their social networking pages; let your content be searchable via Google; let your content be easily surfaced using social crawlers like Digg. All free.
• Production is very cheap. Handheld high-definition video cameras cost nearly nothing. You can do almost every aspect of production and post-production on any Mac. Hell, you can even score an entire movie for free — there are hundreds of thousands of bands on the Internet who would love to have their music embedded in a new entertainment property as promotion for the bands’ concerts and merchandise.
• The creators of the content are the owners of the company. The writers, actors, directors — they are the owners. They have a direct, equity-based economic stake in the company’s success. They get paid like owners, and they act like owners.
• Financing is straightforward: venture capital, just like a high-tech startup. We live in a world in which financing a high-quality startup is simply not difficult — not for a high-quality technology startup, and increasingly not for a high-quality media startup. Modern financiers love being co-owners of a new company with the talent that will make the company successful — and that’s how it will happen here.

I discovered the Whole Earth Catalog when I was at college and working in a small independent bookstore in Brighton in the UK. The catalog was originally published in 1968 and contained a wealth of information from books to tools to classes and beyond. It had a joyful DIY, countercultural feel and every page contained huge amounts of amazing ideas. I discovered Buckminster Fuller through Whole Earth and immersed myself in his ideas about “whole systems.”

Whole Earth had a profound influence on many technologists. People have described it as a kind of pre-internet internet. Steve Jobs called Whole Earth one of the bibles of his generation, “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth colleagues have shaped many aspects of our contemporarty digital world, inspiring the birth of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) and WIRED magazine. As Tim O’Reilly says, “A huge amount of the O’Reilly sensibility, a mix of practicality and idealism, was learned from the Whole Earth Catalog. And of course, the Whole Earth Catalog is one of the wellsprings of the modern DIY movement, for which Make: magazine is now carrying the torch.”

The sections of the catalog included industry and craft, communications, and community, all ideas that continue to inspire us at Shooting People as filmmaking moves into the world of Web 2.0. In this spirit we have launched our new TOOLS blog where we will continue the fine tradition of communicating and sharing resources with each other. It’s not quite as nice as the Whole Earth Catalog to hold in your hands but I hope that it will be useful nonetheless.

If you haven’t checked out Lance Weiler’s Workbook Project yet then go there now because it is fast becoming an invaluable toolbox for indie filmmakers. The Workbook Project describes itself as “a social open source experiment for content creators” and Wired Magazine have called Weiler “One of twenty-five people helping to re-invent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood.”

Here’s more about it from the site:

Our goal is to create a free resource for content creators that will become a user contributed repository of information. The concept is part of a “social open source experiment” called the workbook project. It’s a simple concept, the workbook is meant to be spread and edited. Meaning that content creators can add their own info, war stories, advice etc. We’re hoping that the workbook can grow as a resource. We’re building it with an open source “client side” wiki called tiddlywiki that can be saved to the desktop, edited and then uploaded again.

The goal is to have it grow organically as people add what they feel is important. Then over time, the various “additions” can be collected or at least interlinked so that the information can be shared. The first edition of the workbook will include extensive info about:

* Raising capital
* High Production Values with no money
* Putting together a 17 city theatrical release
* Building a fan base and creating buzz
* Clearance and Delivery issues
* A look at actual contracts
* Getting your work into retail and rental outlets
* Making a TV deal
* How to deal with world sales
* Emerging Markets

If you are making or distributing a film and want to learn more about how to use the tools of Web 2.0 to help you then The Workbook Project is a good place to start.

www.workbookproject.com

Tomorrow Unlimited, a bunch of very creative people who used to be involved with RES, are putting on “a weekend showcase of emerging creativity and ideas” here in New York June 8-10. The Series then moves to Los Angeles June 14-17.

One of their panels is on participatory filmmaking: If anyone can be a director now, what happens when everyone’s a director? Matt Hanson, Martin Percy and Chris Doyle will all be participating. I’m particularly interested to hear what digital film festival onedotzero founder Matt Hanson has to say about making A Swarm of Angels – an open source film project, funded and made collectively. Matt calls this Cinema 2.0.

Go to www.thecreatorsseries.com for more info about the weekend.