New-Age theme and awkward delivery aside, there are some good ideas in there. Some attending the conference really enjoyed Joe Neulight & David Straus' presentation. Some really needed to hear what they were saying. Others were rolling their eyes or yawning the whole time. Personally, I felt a little embarrassed for them. I felt like the reason they stayed focused on abstract concepts was due to the fact that after all this time they still don't really have anything to new to show us.
When Withoutabox created the film festival submission system it was completely revolutionary but now a ton of time has passed with no new products to help filmmakers.
So it was unfortunate that at this talk they had no site demo or new tools to announce. And to make matters worst tools they talked about in their digimart presentation 1 year ago still haven't manifested.
Withoutabox did however mention that they'd have a dashboard for filmmakers to use to distribute their work across the web soon. Whatever thats worth. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it but if it sounds like I'm being hard on Withoutabox, I am. We are all on the same team but I feel we have to keep each other in check sometimes.
To credit Withoutabox, they did help us out big time in April of 2006 when they sponsored our self-distribution research. They enabled us to move out of Susan's parents' basement and back to NYC. David Strauss' enthusiasm is pretty impressive and Joe's Understanding of New Media is very on point and even provided us with great feedback on our film when we were working on our final edit.
Actually, the Heart Map we hired Brian Chirls to create was a project that we brainstormed partly at Withoutabox's offices in LA. Also I plan to use the film festival submission a little bit more in the future. But film festivals and the way films get to them needs to evolve which I talk about in my post about the Adventures in Self Distribution video which was the last panel of the day.
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