We’re pretty excited to let you know that we’ve up to a strategic partnership with VODO (short for voluntary donations), an experiment in new distribution from Shooter Jamie King. What’s the idea? Well, Jamie is also one of the directors of Steal This Film, a film that he achieved over 5 million downloads for by working with Pirate Bay to promote and distribute the film for him. He also received more voluntary donations for the film than he would have earned from sharing advertising revenue on those views with Youtube or any of the other revenue sharing online distributors.

Since then he has created a distribution union of many leading p2p sites ( The Pirate Bay, Mininova, Miro, TorrentFreak, Isohunt, Plube, OneDDL, Vuze, Frostwire and others) whose accumulative daily users top 40 million. They have agreed to promote one VODO film a month on their front pages. This means that free complete copies of the films will be released to all these site and VODO, which is short for voluntary donation, will collect all and any donations which are given as a result.

The project went live with Ivo Gormley’s documentary “Us Now” as the first test. The film achieved 100,000 downloads in the first four days and a bunch of attention, which ain’t bad at all. VODO is backed by the Arts Council, The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation, Emerald Fund and Goldsmith’s College. Shooting People is coming on board as a strategic partner, offering engagement and support for a number of reasons:

We applaud these kinds of distribution experiments which are driven by a love of independent content and a desire to make the work of independent filmmakers (rather than mega bucks for corporate entertainment conglomerates) sustainable in the digital era. We wanted to give Jamie our public support.
VODO needs quirky, smart and adventurous filmmakers to consider using this approach. Shooting People has loads of those.
We wanted to stay close to the results, lessons and new ideas that will come out of this experiment and be able to share that with the community. Can P2P sites drive large audiences to new work, not just famous titles? Can a donation culture be developed amongst those who are no longer paying for content up front? How many downloads are needed to trigger one donation? Is it possible to build a fan base for filmmakers this way? Can you sell content to TV stations after they have been a pirate hit? There are many important questions here that can only be answered by sucking and seeing.

So please go to VODO.net to find out more: www.vodo.net

Check out Arin Crumley’s latest project to bring audiences to films and films to audiences, OpenIndie. Using the site users will be able to request screenings in their area – much like Arin and co. did with the famous Four Eyed Monsters heart map – and organize their own screenings. He still needs to raise more money for the project on Kickstarter so if you think this is a good idea lay some money down to help him on his way!

Esther Robinson is da bomb! Seriously. She’s a brilliant filmmaker (A Walk Into The Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory) and a tireless supporter of artists and creativity. She used to work at Creative Capital and in that spirit of professional development and sustainability has recently founded ArtHome to “help artists build assets and equity through financial literacy, homeownership, self-sufficiency and the responsible use of credit.” Hear, hear I need help with all of that! You can read her excellent Filmmaker article on using credit cards wisely here but you should also watch her inspiring presentation from DIY Days in Philly below – the notion of building a strong body of work over a lifetime, a creative path that can be sustained (as opposed to hobbling from under-resourced project to under-resourced project), definitely appeals to me.

This is from DIY Days in Philly.

This year SXSW have opened up their panel picker voting system to the Film Conference (it used to be just Interactive). You have till Friday, Sept 4th to cast your vote for the panels you like best.

Some interesting data to make you think more about how and why you use social media.

Nina Paley gave a great and very transparent talk at DIY Days in Philadelphia about her distribution strategy for Sita Sings the Blues and why she believes that giving away things for free can make good business sense. On the film’s website Paley says: “I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.”

Watch her talk here:

New American Vision have created a guide to various digital distribution platforms. It looks like they have some good resources, definitely worth perusing to make sure you’re aware of all of your options. Any they’ve missed?

Check out their top 10 digital distribution tips too.

Getting funding for your film is wonderful but there are also lots of potential pitfalls and complications. The good folk at Active Voice have created a website to help both filmmakers and funders steer a course through these turbulent waters. Check out The Prenups and download a copy for youself.

I created a wiki – digitalbootcamp.wikispaces.com – for the Shooting People Digital Bootcamp workshop conducted on July 4th 2009 at the Frontline Club – taught by James Mullighan, Harriet Fleuriot and myself. Like the workshop itself, most of these resources are aimed at documentary filmmakers but narrative filmmakers can find lots of good ideas here too. Please add to the wiki if you have additional links, tips and tricks to share – we want plenty of collaboration in the spirit of the wiki!