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.

With changes in technology allowing for cheaper production and distribution than ever before, short films are exploding. But how do you get the damn thing funded? And how do you know which distribution options are legit? The new Shooting People book on short film is hot off the press to help you maneuver through the creativity and confusion of the new shorts landscape. The book is called Get Your Short Film Funded, Made and Seen and it will help you do just that. Editor Tricia Tuttle has done an amazing job creating a directory of contacts, as well as compiling interviews with filmmakers, funders and distributors. The focus of the book does tend towards Europe - but I conducted some US interviews to give a sense of what is happening this side of the pond so there are also interviews with people like Matt Dentler from SXSW, Trevor Groth from Sundance, Jason Meil from Curent TV, and Brent Hoff from Wholphin.

You can download the first chapter for free here:

shootingpeople.org/shortsbook

The Shooters gang are all up in Edinburgh for the film festival there at the moment. There is a limit to how much time I can spend on the road (unfortunately!) so I can’t be there this year. But you can follow the adventures of Shooting People on the Festival Focus blog and on Ben’s Blog - Ben is currently developing a feature project and has written lots of brilliant entries that I’m sure other filmmakers will identify with. He’s also a much better writer than me. Damn him.