Some useful ideas explored here from New Breed - these are part of an on-going series from Filmmaker Magazine and The WorkBook Project to document the Filmmaker Summit held last Saturday at Slamdance (more about this to follow soon).

Filmmakers Zak Forsman and Kevin K. Shah of Sabi Pictures arrive at Park City with an intent to define the questions most relevant to independent distribution options. Insights from Brian Newman, Dan Mirvish, Jon Reiss and Ira Deutchman open a path toward discovering some real solutions.

SABI filmmakers Zak Forsman and Kevin K. Shah move away from identifying the questions toward some possible answers that may, in fact, lead to the solutions we seek. Insights from Linas Phillips (Bass Ackwards), Habib Azar (Armless), Dan Mirvish, and Brian Newman are fleshed out with more thoughts from the pre-Filmmaker Summit roundtable.

SABI filmmakers Zak Forsman and Kevin K. Shah move away from identifying the questions toward some possible answers that may, in fact, lead to the solutions we seek. Insights from Linas Phillips (Bass Ackwards), Jon Reiss and Brian Newman are fleshed out with more thoughts from the pre-Filmmaker Summit roundtable.

Select stories from the Spring issue of Filmmaker Magazine are now online and there are a couple of articles I particularly recommend as far as tools you can use goes:

Esther Robinson tells you how to keep your credit sweet.

And Jon Reiss gives some great pointers on marketing DVDs on the web.

Filmmakers talk about shooting films with still camera.

And Lance Weiler talks about building community on torrent sites.

Super producer and super nice guy Ted Hope gave a keynote address at Film Independent’s Filmmaker Forum in Los Angeles over the weekend. If you need to gird your loins for the challenges and opportunities ahead you should read it because you, dear readers, are the TRULY FREE FILMMAKERS he is talking about, or at least you can be.

A THOUSAND PHOENIX RISING
How The New Truly Free Filmmaking Community Will Rise From Indie’s Ashes

I can’t talk about the “crisis” of the indie film industry. There is no crisis. The country is in crisis. The economy is in crisis. We, the filmmakers, aren’t in crisis.

The business is changing, but for us –us who are called Indie Filmmakers — that’s good that the business is changing. Filmmaking is an incredible privilidge and we need to accept it as such – and accept the full responsibility that comes with that priviledge.

The proclamations of Indie Film’s demise are grossly exaggerated. How can there be a “Death Of Indie” when Indie — real Indie, True Indie — has yet to even live?
Yes, there’s a profound paradigm shift, and that shift is the coming of true independence. The hope of this new independence is being threatened even before it has arrived. Are we going to fight for our independence and can we even shoulder the responsibility that independence requires? That is: will we ban together and work for our communal needs? Are we ready to leave dreams of stardom and wealth behind us?

When someone says “Indie is dead”, they are talking about the state of the Indie Film Business, as opposed to what are actually the films themselves. They can say “The sky is falling” because for the last fifteen years, the existing power base in the film industry has focused on films fit for the existing business model, as opposed to ever truly concentrating on creating a business model for the films that filmmakers want to make.

This is where we are right now: on the verge of a TRULY FREE FILM CULTURE, one that is driven by both the creators and the audiences, pulled down by the audience and not pushed onto them by those that control the apparatus and the supply. We now have the power and the tool for something different, but will we fight to preserve the internet, the tool that offers us our new freedom? Can we banish the the dream of golden distribution deals, and move away from asking others to distribute and market it for us? Can we accept that being a filmmaker means taking responsibility for your films, the primary responsibility, all the way through the process? That is independence and that is freedom…

Read the full transcript on Filmmaker Magazine’s website.

We’re doing a bit of a catch-up on things that have been happening in the blogosphere over the past few weeks and wanted to draw your attention to this piece by Noah Harlan on the Filmmaker Magazine blog – written after he returned from the Sundance Producer’s Lab. In it he addresses online, ad-supported business models and comes to the conclusion that “In an ad-based model you would need a minimum of at least 800,000 viewers and possibly as many as 3.3 million just to break even.” Give it a read and make sure to read the comments – there are interesting thoughts from people like Jan Rofekamp (FilmsTransit), Doug Block (D-Word) and Scott Kirsner (CinemaTech).