ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

11 years, 9 months ago - Vasco de Sousa

No Film School is made by people who know no more than you do. The market for shorts is probably better now than it was 20 years ago. (But many of the initial funding sources have dried up.)

With your ideas, you can start your own website like No Film School, and put advertisements next to your content. If you have enough money, you can even compete with Youtube, DailyMotion and Vimeo.

To make money off shorts, put adverts on them. That's it really.

No one wants to buy what they can see for free, unless it's something like stock footage (or stock music) that they can use in their own creation. So, in the future the adverts will be built into the shorts more and more (big car companies are already commissioning shorts from well known directors.)

11 years, 9 months ago - Robin Schmidt

Actually no blue touch paper to be lit, I completely agree with you. I wish I didn't but you're right. I guess I was kind of trying to postulate an idea about the creative force being more valuable than the end product. At the end of the day, shorts are a niche concern, their own bizarre little eco system that don't really leave anyone satisfied, unless programmed together or of a certain length. Except that there are always exceptions to that blah di blah di blah.

Rich people pay for the most expensive art sure but art can be acquired by everybody at all price points. That's why it's fun. This was really just a thought experiment trying to unify a distribution model with a reappraisal of the value of work alongside apprenticeships and different ways of looking at our audience.

It won't change anything but it got people thinking and that's a win for me.

11 years, 9 months ago - Marlom Tander

Lighting blue touch paper and standing well back....

If people found the freestanding Short Format (circa 10-20mins) engaging, every commercial TV channel in the world would be comissioning Shorts because they would fit perfectly between the ads.

My take is very simple, most audiences want Story, and filmmakers lack of success with shorts, but great success with longer formats - half hour, feature, series etc, provides empirical evidence that (being nice about it) the Short is a very challenging format in which to deliver a Story that big enough audiences appreciate. By big enough, I mean big enough to pay for it, whether direct, by adverts or whatever.

WHY this might be I'm not going to get into, to be honest, I don't know. But the empirical evidence can't be denied.

Go very short and it's all good again - a quick punchy gag, blog or point works really well. And I used the term freestanding because there is an audience for related linked shorts, as the guys at Yogscast prove every day :-)

So what is the real life purpose of a freestanding Short? To impress a very small but specific audience - people who might hire you, commission you or fund you. The rest of the world is unlikely to be interested, get over it.

Conclusion - make your shorts for fun, or as an investment in your career but don't confuse them with something that might pay... It's not about Distribution, it's actually about the medium itself.

BTW, not sure if I got that Art thing entirely, but the art market is all about Positional Goods, where the whole point of ownership is the status it proclaims. Basically rich people pay for art for the ownership bragging rights it confers.

Cheers

11 years, 9 months ago - Adriano Cirulli

First truly new ideas on shorts distribution I've come across. How can we give this model a try?

11 years, 9 months ago - Robin Schmidt

I think you've kind of missed the point of the piece. Big car companies commissioning films from well-known directors is very old news (BMW did it first and best with their series 'The Hire' way back when.)

What you've proposed here is exactly what we already have. Yawn.