Distribution
Filmmaking - Distribution
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Born Out Of Necessity: Monica Peña on Ectotherms and its Immediate Post-Fest Streaming Launch
For most filmmakers, having a feature on the festival circuit is bookended by anticipation. There’s the nervous feeling that no one will ever agree to show the film, then the nervous feeling that the screening will go over terribly, followed by the anxiety-addled wait to hear from a distributor that your film will make it out of the enclave and into the public. For her debut feature, Ectotherms, a no-budget take on four Miami teenagers ambling across their sun-blasted landscape on the way to a black metal concert, Monica Peña decided not to make waiting an option. After the film’s […]
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FCC Closed Captioning Rules Threaten to Remove Movie Titles from Digital Storefronts
Beginning today, scores of movies are threatened with removal from digital download and streaming sites, including iTunes, due to new FCC closed captioning regulations. The rules, mandated in a January, 2012 revision of 2010’s Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, require newly acquired movie and other content shown on the internet to be closed captioned if this content was shown on television with closed captioning after September 30, 2012. The rule also affects library titles that are currently or will be shown on television with captions as well as new acquisitions that will be captioned on television in the […]
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Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Doron Weber on Science on Screen and Live Distribution
Last month, I wrote an article about the rise in live supplements to theatrical screenings. Turns out, this is hardly a novel idea. Coolidge Corner, an arthouse theater smack dab in the Boston suburb of Brookline, has been merging the two formats for nine years running. With the help of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Coolidge spearheaded the Science on Screen series, in which selected films are programmed alongside specialists who contextualize the narrative within science and technology, which is not necessarily as straightforward as it sounds. Take, for instance, a recent screening of 8 Mile, which was followed by professors […]
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Thoughts Towards the Killer App of Indie Film
I’m a writer-director/producer with a couple of features under my belt. Since the last one was released (Burning Annie), the world’s economy collapsed, half of the studios’ arthouse labels folded, and the audiences for music, books, and film splintered into a million fragments. At the same time, smartphones and app-culture rose to dominance. My new film Laundry Day is in post. As I warily eye the world that I will be releasing my baby into, I’m somewhat alarmed by the large and growing divide between modern audiences and modern distributors, and how inadequate the trends of the moment are for […]
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IFP Launches New Web Series Initiative
Yesterday IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced that an annual lab for web series will be added to its existing programs for narrative and documentary films. The Web Storytellers Sidebar, part of IFP’s RBC Emerging Storytellers program, is designed to promote web series through an in-depth consultation during Independent Film Week in September, with additional logistical support extending beyond. Up to five series–in any stage of development, production, or post–will be selected to participate in the conference, which constitutes the largest meetings-based film forum in the United States. As part of their acceptance, the projects also will have exclusive access to additional IFP web series […]
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ornana’s Jim Cummings on How To Make a Short Film and Get It Seen
Short films are a peculiar enterprise. They are well regarded as an investment vortex, with nearly zero prospects for return and lots of prospects for expense. Many are made and vanish after a run on the festival circuit, if they are even seen at all. But they are also an essential tool for honing one’s craft, and, given the bitesized format, ripe for cultivating an audience. I was impressed by the intelligence and honesty Jim Cummings displayed in his talk on the digital recession at SXSW, so I asked if he’d be interested in doing a quasi-followup for Filmmaker. Given ornana’s […]
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The Book of Lone Peak: Distributing and Marketing the Short Film
For ten days in January a documentary called The Book of Lone Peak ranked as the top-selling short film on iTunes. The film, which profiles a high school basketball team from the town of Highland, Utah, was made by New York City-based filmmaker Ben Altarescu and a fifteen-year-old journalism student named Zack Samberg. The pair moved quickly to push the project through to completion before the basketball players left for post-high school pursuits. The filmmakers talked with me about how a professional filmmaker and teenager collaborated and how they helped push the film on iTunes and other platforms. Filmmaker: You both came to this project […]
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Should You Stream Your Festival Premiere on VHX?
Good podcast conversation today at TFI Live with Jason Guerrasio speaking with producer Marilyn Ness (E-TEAM) and Indiegogo’s John T. Trigonis about the nascent trend of live streaming features for crowdfunding backers. They discuss the live stream of Steve James’ Life Itself alongside its Sundance premiere. For $25, 1,900 Indiegogo backers took James and his team up on their offer. Trigonis talks about the effort from the Indiegogo point of view, and Ness discusses why she and her team couldn’t do such a release. The conversation expands to include discussion of the types of films that would and would not […]
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Contemporary as Repertory: Aaron Schimberg and Jon Dieringer on Go Down Death at Spectacle
Perhaps it’s the fabulist way its characters relay their inverted sense of normality or their ragged way of dress, but something about Aaron Schimberg’s debut feature Go Down Death is unshakably anachronistic — and it’s not just the black-and-white 16 mm. Fitting then, that the film accounts for the first-ever theatrical run at the Williamsburg repertory theater, Spectacle. Screenings begin this Friday, with select showings in Smell-o-Vision, the aromatic brain child of producer-editor Vanessa McDonnell, who considers Go Down Death to be the ultimate vehicle for “the weird perfumes and other odd tinctures I’ve made out of plants, foods, etc.,” aside from […]
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Robert Herrera on the App and Distribution of the Basketball Documentary The Gray Seasons
It’s been two full decades since Hoop Dreams, but any basketball documentary is still bound to be compared to that iconic film. Still, technological changes over those 20 years beg the question of how Steve James and Kartemquin Film would handle distributing the film today. When director Robert Herrera was faced with the same challenge for his new film The Gray Seasons, about the women’s basketball team at St. Louis University, he struck upon a series of festival screenings, simultaneous cable PPV and VOD (via Vimeo on Demand) availability, and finally a DVD release and iOS app that encapsulates much of […]
