Nearly a year after its SXSW premiere, ornana’s Confusion Through Sand will have its PBS premiere tonight, ahead of Dan Krauss’ The Kill Team. The animated short will be available for free on Vimeo tomorrow, but for the time being, you can watch a behind the scenes video of the collective’s creative process. Filmmaker spoke to director Danny Madden and producers Jim Cummings and Ben Wiessner about the trajectory of their latest film, from a joint Kickstarter campaign, through division of labor, and securing distribution. Filmmaker: You packaged your Kickstarter campaign as a sort of two for one deal, raising post funds for euphonia and production funds for Confusion Through Sand. […]
BitTorrent has been flirting with creators for a little while now, releasing Thom Yorke’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes to the tune of $20 million in sales, as well as a free supplement to The Act of Killing, which was downloaded by 3.5 million in a month alone. Leave it to iconoclastic comedian David Cross then to push the envelope and digitally release his debut Hits for a pay what you wish pricetag. The film will also be available on iTunes, likely for the $14.99+ standard, but Cross is putting his stock in the erasure of the middleman, encouraging audiences to “decide how much tickets cost and…pay […]
Fox Searchlight has struck early, acquiring Noah Baumbach’s highly anticipated Mistress America two weeks before its premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. As described in the press release, “In Mistress America, Tracy (Lola Kirke) is a lonely college freshman in New York, having neither the exciting university experience nor the glamorous metropolitan lifestyle she envisioned. But when she is taken in by her soon-to-be stepsister, Brooke (Greta Gerwig) – a resident of Times Square and adventurous gal about town – she is rescued from her disappointment and seduced by Brooke’s alluringly mad schemes.” The film is written by Baumbach […]
The year’s most fascinating entertainment story gets even more so today, as the Seth Rogen/James Franco North Korea-baiting The Interview becomes available for online rental and purchase via YouTube, Google Play and Sony’s own site, with a limited theatrical release occurring tomorrow. (As I post this, Sony’s site just reveals the film’s poster art.) Only days after issuing a statement saying the studio “had no plans” to release the film, it has suddenly become the poster child for the day-and-date exhibition of a studio release — a distribution strategy the theater chains have been balking at for years. From Todd […]
Following this week’s Sundance announcements, I linked in my newsletter to two articles I wrote back in 2009: “So You Didn’t Get into Sundance” and “Letter from the Future.” This first is a consoling “what to do next” kind of piece, and the second is an only partly tongue-in-cheek riff on alternative ways to approach festival distribution. The latter owes a lot of Jon Reiss, who in articles written for Filmmaker and elsewhere has advocated for making your festival premiere your premiere and to make a DIY distribution your plan A, not some hastily considered fallback plan when a big […]
If Britain’s recently enacted legislation – specifically, the Brazil-sounding Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 – wasn’t on your radar, you can be forgiven. As an American it wasn’t on mine either. Basically, this is an amendment to the U.K.’s 2003 Communications Act, which now requires that those producing online porn in the U.K. must come under the same BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) scrutiny as those producing DVDs for the sex shop market. Innocuous enough, right? Problem is, this new law bans British porn producers from depicting a variety of fairly ordinary BDSM practices. Among the list of over […]
Along with the usual “ten best” lists, year’s ends in the movie blogosphere have recently included producer and Fandor CEO’s exhaustive surveys of the film industry’s good and the bad — the business practices, social trends and technological issues that improve or deteriorate our lives as both filmmakers and film viewers. This year, prior to their complete unveiling at his Hope for Film blog, Hope has given three outlets early previews. Below, here at Filmmaker, are 10 More Bad Things about the Film Business, following up on Hope’s first ten over at Keyframe and 10 Really Good Things about the […]
Ted Hope — producer, Good Machine co-founder, and now CEO of Fandor — is no tongue-tied wallflower in the independent film community. Indeed, his passionate commentary, counsel and editorializing on topics ranging from net neutrality to making better films to a “systems reboot” of the independent film economy seem to be everywhere these days. But while his website, Twitter account and frequent speeches at industry events may make it seem that his opinions have been enabled — or at least turbo-charged — by this current social media age, he has, in fact, been lobbing list-driven rhetorical broadsides for years. (Don’t […]
In a small Vermont town on the edge of the Green Mountain National Forest, an hour and a half from Albany NY, the Independent Television and Film Festival (ITVFest) holds its annual get together. Taking place in the fall, ITVFest is very similar to a film festival, with screenings, panels and talks given by content producers. But rather than films, it focuses on TV and web entertainment. ITVFest started in L.A. in 2006, then moved to Vermont in 2013. I attended some of the screenings of web productions in a large tent set up for the event, as well as […]
Factory 25 will distribute Alexandre Rockwell’s Little Feet on a double bill with 25 New Face Frances Bodomo’s Boneshaker. The films will open at the IFC Center on December 12 and will be available for streaming on Fandor and Vimeo the same day. Little Feet was previously part of a Vimeo on Demand TIFF deal in which Vimeo gave the filmmakers $10,000 in exchange for 30-day exclusive distribution rights. Rockwell won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 1992 with In The Soup, and Little Feet harkens back to the film’s 16mm black and white camerawork. Said Factory 25’s Matt Grady of the paired acquisition, “Both films are very […]