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Arin
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.
This talk has been evolving over the last year since we began to give it and during that time more things have happened including releasing the film on YouTube for free with our spout.com/foureyedmonsters 1 dollar per sign up campaign. This talk details the creation of our film through the audience building phase of releasing the video podcast and then the theatrical release, DVD release and free YouTube release. We then talk about the doors this process has opened up including an unannounced 100K distribution deal to get our film and video podcast on TV and get the DVD re-released and this time be available in retail. Stay tuned at www.foureyedmonsters.com in the publicity category of our blog for further developments around that.
The audience had some good questions when we were done and everyone we met that night at the reception seemed very interested in what we had accomplished and wanted may wanted us to get involved in their projects. Unfortunately we can't watch everyones film and give everyone advice and distribute other peoples work. People have to look at what we've done and what we've posted online and deduce from all of that what they can do on their own. Us posting so much info online is our way of helping as many people as we can so one on one special attention doesn't take us away from our own filmmaking.
So thats also why we've released the above video in the public domain so their is no copyright on it and so that anyone can show our Four Eyed Monsters Case Study Presentation at any film school. You can also download our keynote file or power point file of our presentation which includes most of the little videos between slides and present our talk to film students.
And if you are putting together a conference or workshop we've prepared a 12 minute distribution story video that has most of the same information as the above 30 minute video. And of course, feel free to re-edit or do whatever you'd like with the raw footage of this talk or any of the other power to the pixel talks posted here.
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.
Kelly Devine talks about how Renew Media has a new project called Reframe which is basically an aggregator for aggregators. The need for this comes from the fact that when someone like Amazon or iTunes or Netflix is trying to have everything that ever existed they need to add things to their systems in chunks rather then one by one. So a smaller collections can be added in bulk to the big pool. Reframe is trying to be one of those smaller collections but first they need content to be in that small colleciton.
The first aggregator they are aggregating for is Amazon and they've managed to get much better deal terms then a filmmaker could ever get as a stand alone piece of content. So good for them. Power in numbers. Just like unions. But at the end of the day, what they are doing is just another quick fix to make them and some filmmakers a little bit of money but a couple years from now it will be looked back upon as an experiment that lead to a more sustainable solution.
The spirit of renew media is a good one so I hope to see their role evolve over time to things beyond 2 inches in-front of our faces.
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.
