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.

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:

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