The credits roll, there is applause, and not too many people walked out. The festival premiere of your debut film is over. You relax, a year’s worth of stress magically departing your body. Sure, there will be tough times ahead; distribution is difficult. But, for the moment, you congratulate yourself on a job well done. But don’t relax too much, warn a trio of festival heads. Your next big job as a director looms sooner than you think. The audience Q&A you’ll lead in just a minute or two is surprisingly important when it comes to your film’s future life. […]
Online video’s come a long way in the seven-and-a-half years since the launch of YouTube, but it’s no secret that the landscape’s still constantly changing for filmmakers, both independents and studios. The big question, still, is how to best monetize online viewing, as a few recent developments have illustrated. Karin Chien has a great piece in the current issue of Filmmaker (available for subscribers here) about how some YouTube stars have built up massive audiences that have, in turn, supported them financially and empowered them to deal with Hollywood on favorable terms. But we all know that going viral can […]
“This is the future and the future is now,” declares director Larry Clark on the website for his new film, the Rome Grand Prize-winning Marfa Girl. And when Clark says “now,” he means now — the film will stream today, at 6:00 PM Eastern time, for 24 hours, and that may be the only time you’ll ever get a chance to see it. From the site: I will put the film on my first and only website, larryclark.com, which is the only place one will ever be able to see the film…. It will stream for $5.99 for access to […]
Every movie deserves a great poster. It’s the visual signature that establishes the world, the stakes and tone of the movie, but is also the familiar and identifiable touchstone that (potential) fans will see as it pops up online, at festivals and while browsing their VOD menu. I want to start by noting that for better or for worse, I kinda get off on “leaping without looking”. Maybe that’s a flaw but I don’t have much patience for formal training. So take this breakdown with the knowledge that there may be better ways to do things, or techniques I’m flat-out […]
I’ll make this brief. Attention spans are not what they used to be. Everything I learned in film school failed to include tips on the pitfalls of the digital age of storytelling — because there wasn’t much of one back in 2000. I currently write a lot for youth audiences, and also web series. With web series, it’s basically trying to sum up an entire scene in one page. Or the entire episode in five pages. Trying to bend a whole story arc, pieces of the series arc, plus character motivations, subplots and gods forbid a beat or two — […]
Earlier this month Comcast made an unsolicited bid to buy the Walt Disney Company for $66 billion. Other than acknowledging the offer, neither the Disney board nor management has formally responded to the offer. Over the last decade, Comcast has moved aggressively through a series of mergers and acquisition to become the nation’s largest cable television operator and, potentially, media combine. The Disney bid comes about two years after federal regulators approved Comcast’s $30 billion acquisition of NBC Universal. In 2002, Comcast acquired AT&T’s cable and broadband holdings for $29 billion. In 2004, it made a $48 billion bid for […]
Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I, the filmmaker’s uber-controversial follow-up to his Gotham Award-winning I Am a Sex Addict, was today picked up by Factory 25. Matt Grady’s Brooklyn-based boutique distribution company will give the film a simultaneous digital and theatrical release in December, which will qualify the doc for awards consideration. The film, in which Zahedi gleefully pokes fun at the Middle Eastern benefactor who is bankrolling his movie, had its world premiere at SXSW earlier this year — and has been banned in the United Arab Emirates for blasphemy. From today’s press release: Brooklyn, NY (November 6, 2012) […]
As indie makers know all too well, movie distribution is undergoing a major restructuring. The shift from analog media to digital production, post-production and distribution technologies not only changes how movies are made and distributed, but how people view them. Theatrical moviegoing is declining; since 2002, ticket sales have declined by nearly 20 percent. Making matters worse, DVD sales are shrinking. And video streaming revenues, while growing, are doing so at a rate insufficient to make up the difference. Readers of Filmmaker are urged to check out a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, “Now playing at a living […]
“I think we, as an independent filmmaking community, focus way too much on the U.S.,” says Annie Roney, the Sausalito-based founder of documentary foreign sales agent and distributor ro*co films. “There’s a whole big world out there of potential viewers for documentaries. And I think the hunger for them is growing worldwide in the same way that it is here.” Helping to quench that hunger is a new partnership between ro*co and the London-based Bertha Foundation that will enable films from the ro*co catalog to be available digitally in international markets via iTunes. “We share a common goal with The […]
There’s something we should have learned in the last five years, which is the most important lesson we can carry into the next 20 years: ignore audience at your own peril. For a while now, indie film’s m.o. has been, “Build it and they will come.” Well, audiences have stopped coming. A few years ago, if you asked a young indie filmmaker who his or her audience was, you heard “everyone.” Nowadays, ask an indie filmmaker about audience and most likely you get “I don’t know,” or perhaps just panicked silence. But we keep making thousands of indie films a […]