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
Three very short clips were taken from the above video and posted to the new From Here to Awesome Video Feed. Look for the video feed and subscribe on iTunes, Miro, YouTube, MySpace and Blip.TV and several other video sites. Thanks to TubeMogul and Mike Hedge for cross posting that video to so many sites.
Thank to taxiplasm.net for shooting this panel on the DVX-100.
Please feel free to sample and re-post any part of or all of this video. Please link to ArinCrumley.com as the original place the video posted.
Last week a film festival I co-founded called From Here to Awesome was introduced and got a lot of blogosphere attention. This is an interview that NewTeeVee conducted with Lance and I. After the interview they posted a raw .mp3 of the full conversation and wrote up a blog post on NewTeeVee.
I've you've made a film you think the world should there is a good chance you should really be a part of From Here to Awesome. Read the details on how to submit here. You can also see photos documenting the creation of this film festival in this flickr set. Please spread the word!!!! FromHereToAwesome.com
I was at The Art Party at Galapagos in December 2007 and the concepts in Brook Goldbergs art jumped out at me so I decided to record some video. Then the organizer of Party offered to introduce me to Brook and I recorded this audio clip.
People show up and get on a list and then perform a couple songs and there is tons of video and photography happening of it all. Check out The Appartment MySpace page.
To get all of the performances coming out of the Appartment go to their YouTube page.
This footage was shot in 720 24pn on the HVX-200 and color corrected in final cut studio with color correction filter lowering saturation and boosting mids and whites. I encoded the footage into the Apple TV codec using compressor and then changed the file name from a .m3v to a .mov and uploaded to Tubemogul.com where it was cross posted to my blip channel where I logged in and edited this HTML and then arincrumley.com and a few other sites got the cross post. Check my tutorial on this uploading and cross posting process.
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.
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.
