This is not my real blog. This just has some of my older posts and is used for commenting on other blogspots.
Please go to ArinCrumley.com to see my real blog.
Thanks,
Arin
This video was a panel moderated by Liz Rosenthal and including Lance Weiler, Jeremy Nathan and Matt Hanson as we all spoke about our thoughts on the future of distribution. Despite end of the day exhaustion some good audience questions sparked an interesting dialog that closed Power to the Pixel on a bright vision for the future.
One of the topics discussed was festivals. The basic point being made was that they are no different then any other distributor of a film in that they should provide revenue and audience information to the content owner. Lance pointed out with distributing Head Trauma he used the LA Film Festival as a PR platform for to pre-hype a self-distribution theatrical release he had lined up to take place after the film festival. Needless to say he didn't need to find a distributor at the festival and instead simply focused on putting the film in-front of audiences and reviewers and having a good time at the premiere. He also used the fact that he was giving his film a theatrical release to leverage a DVD retail release with Heretic Films which he structured so it would kick off one month after the theatrical release began.
Jeremy Nathan said in south africa he's made money from festivals and gotten information on audience members. Susan and I explained that hasn't been our experience and outlined how we wanted to see film festivals evolve.
We've been thinking about this for a while and have decided that there are three things that can make todays film festival world be more accommodating to filmmakers.
1. Get a cut of what they collect from screenings.
2. Get information about who buys tickets to see our film and if possible who liked the film. (festivals usually poll audience for audience award.)
3. Get them to buy some DVDs to sell after the screenings and they'll get half the proceeds.
4. Don't charge us submission fees.
In exchange for this we'll notify our audience base in the area of the screening and send them all info about the screening. That way if a film comes to a festival they bring their audience with them rather then simply hoping the festival will have the right audience for the film. Indie films are so all over the place that the chance of a festival having the right audience is pretty low anyway
But in the future I think film festivals should be just like any other distributor. There is a license on a film that allows others to monetize the film. So they do what ever curating they want. Maybe have a 1000 people help program the festival, maybe have only 1 person program it all. Whatever they want. Then they make a play list and assign the play list to different theaters and each theater gets essentially a video podcast that pulls down HD versions of the films to say a mac mini or whatever is playing back the digital films. Then they can post an event which phones home to the movies home base online and then anyone in the area who had bookmarked the film saying they want notifications when it's screening would find out. A film festival could even publish a list of 100 films they've narrowed down and let the festival attendees help decide between them or even base the prime time selection slots on this information by having the audience pre-bookmarking the ones they are most interested in seeing on the big screen.
So the idea of a film only being available in film festivals and then going to theaters then DVD then VOD then TV then internet is obviously going to pass. It's just going to become available when it's done. But as a film starts to pick up traction film festivals will continue to be a good place to find audiences that can lead to finding more audiences so in the end, festivals can be a good thing. All they have to do is what everyone else has to do, evolve.
Matt Hanson talks about his project A Swarm of Angles and the general concepts behind collaboration in the digital era. I personally would love to see collaborative editing tools evolve to the point where you could upload raw footage and anyone could add to the meta data like it was a wiki. They could ad captions, comments, notes, languages, time code based tags etc... And in some cases it might be possible for meta data to be automatically added to your footage similar to the way everyzing.com uses computers to transcribe footage. The key in my mind is to have both automatic as well as organic transcribing and then use software to have the automatic transcription basically become time code anchor points to the human transcription.
In a system where raw footage is online rather then trapped on your computer anyone can be involved either as someone simply watching and rating raw footage or by actually selecting clips to add to a timeline they create and then post back online.
The missing link here is a URI for raw footage. URI stands for uniform resource identifier and they are very important to the what comes after web 2.0 which is the Semantic Web. A URI is basically a standardized home base that any other site or software can refer to when it needs that object. If you had that for raw footage then you'd have a place where software could refer to when it needed meta data information or needed to download a portion of the master in high res to compile a final edit.
And of course your final edit would already have all of it's meta data that it needs thanks to the software being able to refer to the URI. You could choose to flatten or keep the meta data live if it was still a rough cut.
Brett Gaylor from Open Source Cinema and I have spoken about this concept and he says it would be a god sent for his open source collaborative editing film he's working on called Basement Tapes. Susan Buice and Matt Hanson also had a quick talk about it after power to the pixel and he expressed a lot of interest and we'll probably be working together in some capacity to continue to brainstorm how this all could work.
After the Power to the Pixel Conference at the drinks reception I also met Michela Ledwidge who has a project called ModFilms that is also exploring URI based video editing stuff and is interested in future development.
While we are all about opening up raw footage other filmmakers I've spoken to feel weird about having raw material available to the public. Thats why I think it would be smart for a system like this to allow passwords on custom RSS feeds that are generated for a particular user. That way if you aren't that user, the RSS feed doesn't work and you don't get all of the dailies from the film in your Miro player.
The thing about video editing is you never have enough time with the footage and you never have enough tools to dig through it to find the gems. I hope a system like this can be built in time for our next film which will be very inspired by a Swarm of Angels because it will also be an online collaborative project that I'll write more about in the future.
This presentation was by Jeremy Nathan from DV8 which is a production company trying to deviate from the normal production approach. The most interesting thing about South Africa is that there seems to be the chance to have that area of the world leap ahead embracing new technologies that the already modern world will have a harder time with because of the difficulty of transitioning from an old system. So because their old system really wasn't that established and because success there requires so much hard work anyway, it's not a big leap to build a system of distribution that puts that burden on the production companies rather then third party middle men. The other cool thing about Africa is that audiences seem eager for non-mainstream content and are starting to have more and more access to the internet.
Getting a small taste of how media exists in south Africa has made me think that the democratic playing field is really important to maintain world wide. No point in Africa building a system that isn't compatible with the rest of the world just because they are more nimble and can act faster then we can.
Here is a scenario. A film comes out in Africa and does well there and therefor starts to catch on else where. Bi-lingual fans transcribe the film into hundreds of languages and professional transcribers give it a final edit. It's then release in theaters and burned to DVD on demand stations across the world wherever people would like to see it. The creator of that project now has a budget form the proceeds that went directly to them to turn around and make another film. There would be no delay in payment or waiting for a market to buy the film. It would all be scaled by the audience depending on how it was catching on. So it's the youtube viral video model scaled to an international film industry that allows creators to make money will staying true to the integrity of free culture.
And the amount of time it takes a movie to scale to it's full potential will increasingly become quicker and quicker as social discovery tools improve and eventually it will only take a few days or even one day and maybe eventually half a day. Could you imagine a film posted by a kid in a third world country making it to theaters by that evening?
I called Lance Weiler a one man power house in our talk explaining to the audience that there is a lot you can do as one guy. Now Lance does have his wife who helps him as well as a programming buddy and other team members but for the most part, it's all him and he gets an amazing amount done and pulls off some incredible things that have brought him a lot of financial reward and opportunity. He's about to start on a 5 million dollar film he's going to shoot in 3D and all of this is happening as he's just found out the great news that he's going to be a father and it's a boy. So as if life isn't about to get way crazier, the past 9 years have been pretty intense for him. One of Lances accomplishments is he got a movie to re-tract it's statement about being the first digitally distributed film to theaters pointing out that it actually was a movie he co-created called the Last Broadcast.
Lance and I recently spoke together in Vancouver and he explained the innovative back story of The Last Broadcast but in this talk he focuses on his recent film Head Trauma and his online reality game Hope is Missing.
The highlight of Head Trauma for me is the Alternative Reality Game that he built around the film which includes live music while the film plays in theaters, text messaging from the characters that follow you out of the theater and websites that record your voice over the phone. He does crazy things like call the cops to break up gurilla screenings that he set up and then will text message the crowd as the police helicopter flies over head with their search lights. And then he'll direct people to websites at the same time he has his software call them and then loops their voice into the website causing an eerie echo and then has when they try to click the exit box the phone tells them, "where do you think you're going, I'm not done yet!"
It's Horror 2.0 and Lance is the master of it all and I'm sure him and his cohorts are giggling in the corner as it all goes down. But fun and games asside, there is so much to learn from lance and his ultra confident rock solid approach to getting things done. Susan and I often refer to lance in conversations saying we have to do what lance would do.
In his talk he also explains what the Workbook Project which susan and I are occasional contributors to and which is an amazing resource for filmmakers needing to wade through the hundreds of tools that exist. It's also a great place to learn through osmosis by listening to other creatives talk about their work through podcast interviews.
First Liz introduces Robert Greenwald by first talking about how often times independents are still rather dependent on others. She then points out all of the ways Robert Greenwald really is dependent on very little more then audiences and organizations being passionate about his films subject matter. No need for huge companies and profits and marketability and all the things his mainstream counter part Michael Moore has to deal with.
Robert Greenwald spoke to power to the pixel via a video tape he created explaining some recent experiences on his film Iraq For Sale. Rober Greenwalds Distribution started before the film was made by talking to various human rights and anit-war groups before making the film and collected interest from over 100 groups. Then they used emails from previous films they made to reach out to raise money for "Iraq for sale". They got 3,000 people to donate an average of 100 dollars each raising the 300,000 dollars they needed to make the film in a matter of just 2 weeks.
Then to release the film they set up screenings in peoples homes using a technology that they've now published for all filmmakers to use at www.bravenewtheaters.com. Any filmmaker can sign up there in a few minutes and we've been using it to let our online fanbase set up screenings of Four Eyed Monsters.
He also talks about the new medium of making short form videos and how his filmmaking is evolving from figuring out how to tell a story in 2 hours to figuring out how to tell a story in 2 minutes as they build out their YouTube account.
Robert Greenwald is one of my hero's and definitely has influenced a lot of how we've dealt with our distribution and fan base outreach. And I'm going to be completely honest, I have not seen any of his feature films yet but am interested in seeing all of them and hope that some day I'll be making films about subject matter as important as the topics he chooses to tackle. He's a true radical.
Michael points out that in some ways we have a new system of gate-keeping and then David Straus points out that more and more filmmakers are starting to be empowered as distributors. Then Joe Neulight gets very defensive about how slow things have moved in the past two years and promises for more Withoutabox services for self distribution in the spring.
Then questions from the audience reiterate the new gate keeper contradiction as well as provide a call to action to have meta data about movies contain alternative audio tracks for the blind and captions for the hearing impaired. I thought this was an interesting point because ideally most content and user interfaces would be able to work either with no audio or with only audio. This is the kind of thing digital media should promise if people can do their jobs and get it all designed right.
Now the panel was called, "new distributors" which is a great name but Withoutabox kept talking about "self distribution." Wait a minute, what are the new distributors doing if I still have to self distribute my work? Here is the thing. I've learned through Four Eyed Monsters Distribution effort. There is no such thing as Self-Distribution unless your selling DVD-R's of your movie in the subway.
The second you make 1,000 dvds from a replication company or decide to use a fulfillment company to ship your DVDs or an e-commerce solution to collect the money online it's no longer truly self distribution. It's simply having made a deal with someone that is facilitating the distribution of the film. But what people mean by self distribution of course is that you hold onto your rights. That way you can do all of the things a distributor would do and essentially have your own distribution company powered by various distribution services available to anyone.
This is good because it's a democratic approach. It's an empowering concept because with enough commitment anyone can do this. And we have. So we are glad this is possible. But should this be the answer for the business model of the future?
This is a very good point and even with our pretty large audience base online we've still had a hard time selling DVDs on the web. We think it will go a lot better once we are in retail for our demographic.
See the problem with holding onto your rights is that you are also holding onto the incentive for others to monetize your film and make you money. You shouldn't give all your rights stupidly away, but you should find smart ways to provide companies with some of the rights to your film. And eventually I think it would be amazing to entrust the rights to your film in a universal license.
The Universal License Concept as it stands at the moment:
In the future I hope that instead of a filmmaker distributing their work themselves or having a company buy all the rights and distribute it, a piece of content will be able to distribute it's self. The content literally needs to grow legs and walk away from the creators and lawyers that too often keep it tied down.
Now and then the content should write home and send money that it's made back to it's parents. Once a license exists that you can attach to a piece of content that defines how others can distribute it defining the financial splits for various types of distribution, then I think there will be an explosion in innovative ways to distribute high quality content. There will also be an explosion in new user habits that will take us the rest of the way out of the DVD era and help the film industry narrowly avoid the fate of the music industry now that it's in the post CD era.
If you enable any new company to easily become a "new distributor" then the services and monetization solutions will be created that will help the content owners find audiences and make money.
So the missing link is that there will have to be a standard way of publishing complete works online in high res along with a license that lets any 3rd party service monetize the work and send money to the payee information on the standard license on the work.
The proof that this is necessary is in how all of the "new distributors" on the stage have a problem getting enough good content. Lack of compensation and sluggish paperwork are the things that prevent good content from appearing in places where it should. So a universal license you put on content can eliminate needing to go through paperwork and create accounts on thousands of platforms.
Now currently the answer is to have non-exclusive agreements that give a website rights to do whatever they want with a film and if you're lucky sometimes they will share money if they monetize your content. But the split is really bad considering how little they do and that you are the one that made the content.
Once we have a universal license the environment for monetizing digital media will mature and the majority of proceeds will go to the creators which will instigate more culture being made by those that prove they make relevant culture.
A universal license for media starts to sound like a pretty involved thing. But we know one thing. We need a world in which it's legal to give a copy of a movie you like to a friend. And we also need a world where any company can become a professional distributor monetizing content without first having to go out and get a catalog of content.
A new subscription service putting content on cell phones in a foreign country, a new micro cinema network, a new company that gives you access to content but also lets you invest half of your monthly subscription fees into new works from your favorite artists. It's in the interest of audiences and content creators to let other companies innovate new ways to bring the two of them together.
It should never be one company doing all the innovating. We see problems today with waiting for YouTUbe to have higher quality video while the technology exists today to get HD videos to the end user via Bittorrent Technology that YouTube doesn't have the infrastructure to adopt.
In a universal media publishing standards environment, open source communities as well as companies could be implementing these solutions. So I propose Creative Commons gets a grant from someplace to get together a team of experts in their fields to spend a few days together in a room and draft this universal license.
It needs to be designed in a way that can likely be adopted by independent media. It might be sort of like drafting the constitution of the united states and there might be a few fist fights over how it should be made. I don't think the people working on it should be representing any companies cause that will corrupt it's design. It should just be people that happen to have the experience needed to make this thing in a way that is fair to filmmakers and gives enough incentive to new distributors to create platforms and services that do a good job monetizing content.
Susan and I hope to make a second film that will be done in a couple years and we want to see this system up and running by then so please, jump on it. Do you think this is possible? Please post comments below.
Liz explains how the day will unfold and thanks her crew and sponsors. She gives a good over view that will be helpful to watch if you are considering watching all of the power to the pixel videos.
Brian Chirls and I were just getting acquainted with our laptop recording device and finding left over space on almost empty tapes and had to adjust the shutter in the middle of this clip so sorry about that.
Liz did a good job lining up sponsorships from Skillset, Film London, The London Development Agency, The UK film Council, Digital Horizons, FDMX, Sohonet, WiseGuy PIctures, AllCity, Screen International, Shooting People.
And I have to say, Tishna Molla, Josephine Lott, Ella Weston, Katy Swarbrick were all very friendly, helpful and all impressively attractive as well.
Paula Le Dieu said at her power to the pixel presentation on October 26th 2007: "The very very best of film is frankly not anything unless someone sees it. So on of the biggest battles an independent filmmaker faces is obscurity. How on earth do we get more people to see the work that we make." To see the entire power to the pixel conference go to: http://www.arincrumley.com or http://www.powertothepixel.com
Editor of Screen International Michael Gubbins said on October 26th 2007 at Power to the Pixel: "The world as it is, is broke. The distribution mechanism that we are seeing right now as far as independent film is concerned makes no sense what so ever. And I think what we're now seeing is a period of waking up to the idea that theres nothing to go back to and only really beginning to engage in what possibly may come. That makes for very disturbing and very exciting times." Thats reasonably well put. View all of the power to the pixel presentations at: http://www.arincrumley.com
Arin Crumley has bee responsible for many firsts. In october 2005, him in has collaborater Susan Buice became the first indie filmmakers to use video podcasting to create additional content about their feature film. In January of 2006 the first feature film to be available for theatrical screenings upon request through a web sign up form. In September of 2006, the first film to use a google map to calculate the cities with the strongest demand for the film and then use that information to convince movie theaters to book the film. In January of 2007, the first feature length film to screen in the virtual world Second Life. In June of 2007 the first entire feature film to be posted to YouTube in it's. And in August of 2007 the first feature film to be posted to MySpace.
Keep an eye on Arin Crumley for more short projects as well as game changing feature films and feel free to get in touch if you'd like to be a part of any of his projects.
