Scott Kirsner has a useful post on CinemaTech entitled How To Get Your Film on iTunes (… It’s Not Easy) - which explains how you have to go via an aggregator first. Kirsner says Amazon’s CreateSpace is the best alternative option if you just want to do it yourself (films can then be sold via Amazon Unbox, a digital download service) but “you’ll have to drive customers to your work — unlike iTunes, where the customers are already buying movies in big numbers.”

Moviestorm has launched some free software that allows you to make simple animated films, quickly and easily. This is obviously great for first-timers but perhaps it could also be useful for more experienced filmmakers who want to test out ideas quickly? The basic package is totally free so give it a try and see what you think. Thanks to SXSW News Reel for the info!

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

John August, director of The Nines and also a screenwriter with a great blog, has written a really candid, useful post, partly in response to Mark Gill’s comments, about what he learned about distribution after his experiences with The Nines. Read his take on indiefreude and why acceptance to Sundance does not mean that you’ve made it and there’s money in the bank. He also makes the important point that there is much success to be found in Gill’s 99.9% failure rate for indie films:

We need to ask, “Failure for whom?” Even a movie that doesn’t earn its budget back will likely make money for its distributors, once you factor in video and TV sales. More crucially, a good indie film generates future work for its stars and filmmakers. So there’s a lot of success to be found in that 99.9% failure.

He finishes with this:

My advice? You should make an indie film to make a film. Period. Artistic and commercial success don’t correlate well, and at the moment, only the former is remotely within your control.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have made the same movie but completely rethought how it went out into the world. I would have challenged a lot of the standard operating procedures, which seem to be part of an indie world that no longer exists. The Nines would have likely made just as little at the box office, but could have made a bigger impact on a bigger audience. Ultimately, I think that’s how you need to measure the success of an indie film’s release: how many people saw it.

The good people at the Center for Social Media have published a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. Here’s what they say about it:

This document is a code of best practices that helps creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances.

This is a guide to current acceptable practices, drawing on the actual activities of creators, as discussed among other places in the study Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video and backed by the judgment of a national panel of experts. It also draws, by way of analogy, upon the professional judgment and experience of documentary filmmakers, whose own code of best practices has been recognized throughout the film and television businesses.

Have you had a look at the films in The YouTube Screening Room yet? Launched in June, the Screening Room is a curated space that allows you to watch 4 new films every second Friday - many of them films that have played at film festivals like I Met The Walrus. Brent Hoff from Wholphin explains why this is such a great thing, as the Screening Room facilitates “an explosion of community. . . based solely on what people love.”

Sara Pollack, Film Manager at YouTube, wrote about her thoughts about the role of YouTube and digital distribution back in May in The Independent:

We’re starting to see ever more sophisticated uses of the medium, from major studios as well as indepen-dent film-makers. Of course, most people simply put their finished work on YouTube to promote their films and to make some money from advertising. But many are putting experimental ideas on the site to gauge the reaction and refine their plans, while others have used viewer feedback to determine where in the world to arrange showings when distribution budgets are tight. The point is that film-makers are involving the viewer in every stage of the process – from ideas-generation, to editing, to distribution.

Movie-making has always been about collaboration. But the new kinds of interactivity we’re seeing are blurring the division between fans and film-makers. Look at m.strange’s We Are the Strange, which viewers have translated into 17 different languages; look at

Four Eyed Monsters, which is about the couple who made it and how they met on a social networking site, and which has drawn so many video responses from viewers that they’ve edited their favourites into a follow-up film.

The mainstream is catching on. After its success online, Four Eyed Monsters got a DVD release, and after 32 million views, an amateur nature film called Battle at Kruger has been adapted for an hour-long National Geographic special

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

Mark Gill’s talk at the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Financing Conference has been causing a right old kefuffle in the independent film community. It was read nearly 100,000 times on indieWIRE in 4 days. Here’s an upbeat nugget to wet your whistle:

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.

This weekend is the Hide and Seek Festival in London (27-29 June) and tomorrow they start with Hide and Speak - a day of discussions on games and the future of play.

Lots of Toolsy issues being covered and, interestingly, a session considering what might be gained from not using the technology available.

Friday 27 June 2008

- The ARGs Don’t Work, 9.30am-1.00pm
There’s a major problem with the structure of alternate reality games (ARG). How do you keep your core players happy while making something that lets the casual audience in throughout the life of the project? An international panel of ARG designers meet to discuss their experiences and their visions for the future.

- And Some History for Good Measure, 2.30-3.10pm
Pervasive games explore the space where games overlap with other cultural forms. This talk looks at some of the highlights of games-plus-something-else from the last thousand years or so, from an educational arithmetic game of the Middle Ages to alternate rule sets for duelling.

- Taking the Pervasive Game Turing Test, 3.30-5.00pm
The Pervasive Game Turing Test poses this question: could I be having an equal or greater amount of fun playing this game without using technology? This issue has challenged us at Hide and Seek to consider the role of technology in every game that we make. From text messaging to Wii hacks to GPS (Global Positioning System), a panel of games and technology designers discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of going past paper and pen.

Hide and Seek is a festival of social games and playful experiences, running in London from the 27-29 June 2008.

For more information, bookings and the full programme of events visit their website.