Distribution
Filmmaking - Distribution
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ro*co Goes iTunes
“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 […]
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Investing in Audience
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 […]
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Encrypting Basic TV
On October 12, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unanimously approved a measure to allow the major cable companies to encrypt basic tier programming. Basic tier consists of traditional “over-the-air” broadcast channels. Previously, the leading Multi-System Operators (MSOs) were permitted to only encrypt programming offered as part of more expensive packages. The major MSOs have long argued that providing non-encrypted basic tier service was inefficient, expensive and opened them to theft-of-signal piracy. They complained that the restriction imposed unfair competition on them because alternative TV services providers like satellite and telcos (e.g. Dish and AT&T) were exempt from the regulation. The […]
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Can Hackathons Save Independent Film?
Technology, collaboration and the rewards of spontaneous thinking — hackathons harness all three in events that are equal parts meet-up and late-night college term-paper deadline marathon. These multi-day crash sessions are popular in the tech world, gathering strategists, designers and developers to produce everything from fleshed-out concepts to fully designed apps. But does the hackathon format have anything to offer film? Can the problems of independent film — challenges of audience-building, discovery, and monetization — find their solutions in such accelerated brainstorming? Bond Influence and Strategy sought to find out this past weekend with Hacking Film, New York’s first film-centric […]
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Dennis Dortch on the Secrets of Web Success
Dennis Dortch is the director of the Sundance film A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy, available to watch on Netflix now. He also has created a veritable empire on YouTube with his channel Black & Sexy TV consisting of two successful web series, The Couple and The Number, and two more on the way. He and his team are currently crowdfunding a film based on The Couple. In this interview he talks about the difference between creating a film and creating content for the Web, how to juggle multiple web series at a time and how to keep […]
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Another Web is Possible
Most mobile and wireline users rely on a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) to access the web. Such ISPs include big dogs like AT&T and Verizon, Time Warner and Comcast, as well as small fries like Earthlink and Juno. However, there is a second class of ISP that is little discussed: nonprofit ISP. Nonprofit ISPs involve two different types of providers – municipal or community networks and nonprofit corporations. In 2001, there were only 16 government-run networks in nine states. Today, there are an estimated 150 communities around the country with their own publicly-owned broadband networks. In the face of […]
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5 Things to Know Before Submitting to The Tribeca Film Festival
Here’s Tribeca Film Festival Director of Programming Genna Terranova on her way to work while imparting some useful info about submitting to the 2013 edition. Early deadline, believe it or not, is October 19.
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The Screen Matters
The way we watch TV shows is changing. Whether one is watching a movie or other program over a TV set, a PC or a mobile device, the size of the display screen matters in terms of a viewer’s appreciation of a show. A recent study by two ad service firms, YuMe and IPG Media Lab (IPG Mediabrands), analyzes consumer viewing experiences, comparing four TV screens – traditional TV, online TV, a PC and a smartphone. As it reports, “while the size of the video screen did drive more excitement, variables such as ad clutter, creative content, and context had […]
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An Independent Filmmaker Confronts Piracy
Producer Matt Compton says he knew the feature he produced — a “thinking man’s horror film,” Midnight Son, directed by Scott Leberecht — would eventually be pirated. “I always knew the film would end up on the torrent sites,” he writes in an email, “and that there would be nothing I could do about it. If the major studios can’t stop piracy, surely an indie producer such as myself can do nothing.” But he wasn’t prepared for his film to show up three weeks before the film was commercially available, when whatever word-of-mouth to be gained by the filesharing couldn’t […]
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Wong Fu Productions on Why Filmmakers Should Embrace YouTube
Our friends at the National Film Society sent over this video interview with the filmmakers who go by the name of Wong Fu Productions. If you don’t know them, what’s wrong with you? They have 1.2 million subscribers and over 190 million views. Here, they give us tips on audience building and navigating the waters of the video sharing giant.
