Calling all Scottish Shooters,

Early Bird Booking for Partnerships 2.0 closes at 5pm, Wednesday 10 September 2008.

The Forum, which is being is being hosted by the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, will explore how to develop audiences for the arts, film and the wider creative industries by maximising (Web 2.0) technology and new partnerships.

Chaired by Scottish broadcaster and journalist Muriel Gray, international keynote speakers include Zurich-based Gerd Leonhard, one of the world’s leading media futurists, and Brian Newman, CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute in New York. Pat Kane, lead singer with Scottish band Hue and Cry, will lead a seminar on a musician’s quest to find a business model in this age of networks. Further participants – just confirmed – include Richard Hadley, Audiences Europe Network, Hannah McGill, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Roberta Doyle, National Theatre of Scotland.

The Forum will attract a wide audience of professionals, united by their passion for audiences and audience development.

For booking information, please visit www.scottisharts.org.uk or contact forum08@scottisharts.org.uk.

Gee Whiz kids, sorry about our long blogging silence. The writers all buggered off on holiday and left nobody in charge. Fools!

Anyway, our last post was about DIY Days in LA and now you lucky West Coasters get to do it all again in San Francisco tomorrow (Sunday, August 17th). So if you’re in the Bay Area get yourselves to 111 Minna Gallery tomorrow. Registration starts at 10am and as before there are lots of great folk involved and I’m sure it will be super-useful if you’re trying to figure out what’s going on with film production and distribution in this digital age. And what we can all do to make sure that it works better for independent filmmakers in the future! All the info is at diydays.com

Hey Folks

Current TV, From Here to Awesome and the Workbook Project are doing a FREE event on July 26th in Los Angeles that you should attend if you’re in town.

DIY DAYS
How do we sustain ourselves as filmmakers and storytellers in this day of shifting film distribution systems? How do we monetize our film and get the word out? Presented by From Here to Awesome the Workbook Project and Current TV – DIY DAYS aims to answer these questions with a day of panels, roundtable discussions and workshops: A look at how to fund, create, distribute and sustain.

Proposed Discussion Topics
- New Forms of Storytelling
- New models of Finance, Production and Distribution
- Audience Building & The Audience Becoming Collaborators
- War Stories: “What’s The Real Deal?”
- Self-Sustaining: what to know when trying to make a living from your art
- Case Studies (Arin Crumley, Lance Weiler, M dot Strange and others discuss the making and
distribution of their work)

Open Discussion Topics
- What are you working on? What are you looking for?
- How do you consume your media?
- What needs to change in order for you to sustain?

We’ve lined up a diverse group of speakers from all sides of the industry.

Speaker List
Robert Greenwald – Outfoxed, Wallmart the High Cost of Low Price, Iraq for Sale
Tommy Pallotta – producer of A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life
Mark Pellington – director of Henry Poole is Here, Arlington Road and Mothman Prophecies
Marshall Herskovitz – Blood Diamond, Quarterlife
Lance Weiler – The Last Broadcast, Head Trauma
Arin Crumley – Four Eyed Monsters
M dot Strange - We Are the Strange
Ondi Timoner – DiG, Join US, We Live in Public
Saskia Wilson-Brown – Current TV
Micki Krimmel – expert in social media and online community
Jon Reiss – Bomb It
Alex Johnson – digital media strategist / filmmaker
Christy Dena – cross-media strategist and designer
Matt Hanson – filmmaker and founder of A Swarm of Angels
Timo Vuorensola – director of Space Wreck and co-founder of wreckamovie.com

More info at diydays.com

Those who have been following the recent is-the-sky-falling-on-independent-film debate might be interested in The Conversation “a two-day conversation — definitely not a conference — about the future of cinema, video, games, and telling stories with new media” coming up in Berkeley, CA later this year and bought to you by Ken Goldberg, Scott Kirsner, Tiffany Shlain and Lance Weiler. Here’s more info about some of the speakers and subject areas to be covered:

• Reed Hastings / Founder & CEO, Netflix
  How is the home viewing experience evolving?
• Phil Tippett / Founder, Tippett Studio
  Jonathan Rothbart / Co-founder, The Orphanage
  The future of visual effects
• Sara Pollack, Film Manager, YouTube
  Alex Afterman, Founder, Heretic Films
  Tiffany Shlain, Director, “The Tribe” & “Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence”
  Jonathan Marlow, Director of Content Development, Vudu
  The new landscape of distribution
• Mike Curtis, HD for Indies
  Jeremiah Birnbaum, Founder, San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking
  Insights from the edge of digital cinematography and post-production
• M dot Strange, Animator and Filmmaker, “We Are the Strange”
  Building a fan base online
• Gregg Spiridellis, Co-founder, JibJab Media
  Michael Ferris Gibson, Director, “24 Hours on Craigslist” & Producer, “Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story”
  New avenues for creativity and storytelling
• Michaelene Risley, Independent filmmaker
  New approaches to fundraising
• Alex Lindsay, Founder, Pixel Corps
  Producing high-end series for the Web
• Lance Weiler, Director, “Head Trauma” and Game Developer, “Hope is Missing”
  Peggy Weil, Artist & Game Developer, “Gone Gitmo” and “The Redistricting Game”
  Opportunities at the Convergence of Games and Cinema

If you need a little help sorting out your RSS feeds from your Wikis then check out the videos on The CommonCraft Show. Lee LeFever explains the basics in a wonderfully clear way and will get you started with some suggested links to try out. Topics include:

Twitter
Social Networking
Social Bookmarking
Blogs
Wikis
RSS

Paul Harrill over on Self-Reliant Film has compiled a great list of resources about the Red One digital camera – from forums and wikis to training videos and software.

Great quote from Steven Soderbergh on the Red website: For me, this is Year Zero; I feel I should call up Film on the phone and say, “I’ve met someone.”

The latest DIY list from Workbook Project contains some cool new links to check out including Friendfeed, Indiegogo, Plugoo and Sprout Builder. Sound like gobbledygook? This is Web2.0 baby. It’ll become a second language soon. Check it out!

Photoshop Express is a new free online photo editing application from Adobe. Of course it doesn’t give you all the tools of the desk-based application but it’s free and it looks pretty nifty. Webware has a review here. I was a bit alarmed to hear about their terms so be careful if you make any of your photos public:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Premiere Express is also available for free so check it out if you need to do some basic editing. Just read those terms first!

SXSW have podcast a few of their panels from the recent fest. There are a few film-related ones like Video Production for the Web & Mobile Devices, Animation and Digital Effects on a Budget and Digital Cinema for Indies – but I urge you to listen to all of the interactive podcasts as well. It’s a really great way to get a sense of what is happening in the world of web and gaming technology and you never know what ideas are out there that might be relevant for you as a filmmaker. Personally I always find the interactive podcasts the most mind-expanding.

Liz Rosenthal created Power To The Pixel to create a forum for the independent film community with the latest in depth information and knowledge about new opportunities available in the transforming digital media landscape.

She held a one-day conference in London in October last year and all the videos from the sessions are now online so you can hear from industry pioneers like Lance Weiler, David Straus, Kelly DeVine, Robert Greenwald, Matt Hanson and others without leaving your computer.