Recently I saw some smart messaging from IndieFlix. This 30 second spot acknowledges that Netflix is the reigning king of streaming entertainment on the mass media side, but it encourages movie lovers to expand their range of options to include indie films on the IndieFlix platform.
Rich McCormick writes a piece for The Verge about a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers that predicts that streaming video services will make up 43% of the American film industry. Read on to learn where the revenue growth is coming from (spoiler: it isn't at the expense of movie theaters).
A fun graphic from the Oak Cliff Film Festival web site this year. The OCFF begins on June 19th. If you're in the Dallas area, check it out.
By now you've probably heard about the nasty fallout of the delivery of digital downloads to Veronica Mars backers: the disappointed fans and the offers of refunds to backers who ended up buying copies of the film from Amazon and iTunes. It speaks a lot to how much services like iTunes have become the default entertainment ecosystems and the fact that, if you want to try to buck that trend with a Veronica Mars-shaped Trojan horse, the execution had better be flawless.
Sadly, South By Southwest is a thing of the past for yours truly – at least until I'm not working for a film festival that happens around the same time of year. I do enjoy watching the internet turn its attention to Austin, though. One of the highlights is the "Do It Like A Local" video, which has become an annual tradition for the folks at Flow Nonfiction. I love the production design in these -- the subtle sound effects, the slightly over-saturated picture, the omnipresent bottles of Topo Chico. Tune in for restaurant recommendations and SXSW survival tips.
Scott Macaulay for Filmmaker Magazine:
Simple Machine, the online distribution platform connecting filmmakers to non-theatrical venues, is offering quarterly $1,000 grants to new small, innovative film festivals.
The catch? The budget of the entire event should be completely covered by the grant.
My usual advice for people who tell me they want to start a film festival is "don't," but I could see some really interesting "micro-festivals" coming out of this.
Those interested in the grant are encouraged to send a simple email pitch to grant@smplmchn.com. See here for more details.
From The D-Word, an online community for documentary filmmakers.
Long before Facebook, long before Twitter, there was The D-Word.
This year, The D-Word will celebrate its 15th year – a remarkable amount of time for a free online community built on peer sharing to survive, let alone thrive. And thriving we are. With over 10,600 members from 127 countries, we’re a virtual community that truly reaches documentary filmmakers the world over.
In all these years we’ve only gone through one redesign, made possible by the generosity of D-Word members back in 2007. Now, in time for our 15th birthday, we’d like to update our design and functionality, and once again we’re turning to our community to help make that happen. We’ll be launching a 6-week crowdfunding campaign on March 3 with a goal of raising $15,000 to cover the costs of the upgrades. Call it our “15 For 15” campaign.
The D-Word has long been one of my go-to places to gauge the trends and concerns of the documentary film community. If you've never been there and you make docs, you owe it to yourself to go there now. If you're already aware of them, it's time to go back and chip in a few bucks.
I especially like this promise in their list of intended new features: Friendly, modern emails which don't look like they were created in 1999.
Allow me, half-jokingly, to also suggest: A logo bigger than 155x41 pixels.
Two months ago on the podcast, I interviewed the Sundance Film Festival's Joe Beyer about his passion project: Rex Ranch. As Sundance's Director of Digital Initiatives, Joe has been involved in the waging of more Kickstarter campaigns than anyone I know. But when he finally took on a crowdfunding campaign of his own, he went bigger. Way bigger.
Find out what has happened with Rex Ranch since then.
Oh, Oxford Film Festival goodie bag – you have yet to disappoint.
Waiting for the game to start? Anticipating the junk food buffet to come? Allow me to suggest the perfect appetizer for both: The Great Chicken Wing Hunt, a little film that debuted at last year's Atlanta Film Festival and now awaits you on iTunes and Hulu. If the title doesn't clue you in, it's about our nation's obsession with the spicy bundles of chicken meat known as Buffalo wings, which are a staple of Superbowl Sunday repasts. Enjoy.
Warning: this is one of those horrible gallery-style articles that makes you want to install ad-blocking software and swear off browsing the internet forever. If you want a quick overview of some of the highlights and recurring trends at the Sundance Film Festival, however, this will definitely do the trick. Read the whole thing at Rolling Stone and get ready to click repeatedly.
It's that time again – a selection of short films from this year's Sundance Film Festival are available on YouTube. I quite like Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns because it's a great example of what you can do with a film in just a couple of minutes -- and then play the most coveted festival in the land.
After highlighting their favorite projects of 2013, Kickstarter follows up with a review of the 20 projects that have a presence at the Sundance Film Festival. (Interestingly, not all of them are films.)
One of the best things about crowdfunding films is that little thrill that happens when a project you back makes it into a big festival. Two of the projects I backed (Blue Ruin and Drunktown's Finest) are playing in Park City this week. I had little to do with that success other than giving a few dollars to each, but it's a nice feeling regardless.
Thom Powers, who programs documentary films for more film festivals than is probably good for him, gathered the latest in doc distribution wisdom from a wide range of filmmakers. A must-read.
My favorite tidbit:
ALEX GIBNEY (DIRECTOR, WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS): Ask every dumb question you can think of. The dumb questions are always the best ones because they tend to provoke the clearest answers. Don’t ever pretend to know more than you do. That is the best way to get conned.
 | The Better Film Festival Submissions Toolkit has a very simple purpose: to help you improve the way you submit your work to film festivals.
Divided into 7 core tasks with a discussion of each task, the 16-page Toolkit is designed for quick reading and gives you concrete, actionable tasks to make your film submissions package better. Best of all, you'll get the insight you need to better understand what programmers look for and how to submit with confidence. |
