Kudos to my Twitter feed for brushing the dust off this nearly year old video of Cassian Elwes and other producers covering the basic economics of film financing. For every experiential tidbit acquired by aspiring filmmakers on sets, in the classroom, or at home, there is a disproportionate amount of information available on the first step towards making one’s film: securing the money, and making the most of it. Elwes touches upon pre-sales and credits, though the independent film industry standard for debut directors is proven to lie within private equity. In the informational short clip, the producers discuss why the […]
A class action lawsuit alleging that a group of Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Apple, Pixar, Intuit and Intel, conspired to fix the wages of computer engineers has been cleared to proceed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Writes Mark Ames at Pandodaily, “…Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.” The suit is the result of a 2010 Obama Department of Justice anti-trust investigation. Pando has extensive details and has also […]
While many Sundance filmmakers last year this time were nervously awaiting distribution deals, one had done something completely different. Upstream Color director Shane Carruth entered the festival with a DIY distribution plan already in place. He partnered with Sundance Artists Services’s Joseph Beyer and distribution consultant Michael Tuckman, devised a theatrical campaign and swift VOD rollout, and was already at work on merch for the large fan base eager for the follow-up to his cult classic Primer. Carruth and his team pre-screened the film for journalists, including Filmmaker, and, we responded by endorsing both the movie and its distribution paradigm, […]
TIFF’s acclaimed Evolution exhibition — celebrating the career of hometown boy David Cronenberg — had just closed when OCAD University hosted a free discussion between him and TIFF CEO Piers Handling. For the past five months, the art school has been partnering with Toronto International on The Cronenberg Project, a multimedia exploration of the director of Dead Ringers, Crash and A History of Violence. It’s appropriate that the discussion before an audience of 325 students and VIPs centered on Cronenberg’s student years, early films and architecture. The talk began with excerpts from Stereo (1969) and Crimes of The Future (1970), […]
The following is a guest post by Jeremy Teicher, who debut feature, Tall as the Baobab Tree, landed him on Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces” list in 2013. A documentary-narrative hybrid, the film was shot in Sinthiou Mbadane, Senegal – a small rural village with no running water or access to electricity – with nonprofessional actors and a four-person crew. Tall as the Baobab Tree premiered a year ago at Rotterdam and is out now on VOD through iTunes, SundanceNOW, YouTube and a host of other digital platforms thanks to Sundance Artist Services and IFFR in the Cloud. I thought the […]
Warning! This piece contains major spoilers for David and Nathan Zellner’s wonderful new film, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. If you’ve yet to catch Kumiko (which premiered earlier this week at Sundance), read on at your own risk. Tuesday night at Sundance’s annual short filmmaking awards (held, as all great award ceremonies are, at a bowling alley), David and Nathan Zellner delivered something of an impromptu keynote about the many joys and headaches of independent filmmaking. The brothers, who have had nearly half a dozen films at the festival over the years – as well as three features – talked about […]
Held once a month on a Saturday and lasting the whole day, CPFF is an online film festival with both public and private viewing capabilities. Conceived by Sherri Wasserman, “a citizen of the realm of timezone independence,” the idea is that viewers watching solo from their homes or private spaces can connect with other viewers watching the same film at the same time. The theme of the festival, born out of this concept of the solitary viewer, is “Prisons Real & Imagined.” Wasserman explains the ideas behind the festival: We, as a group of watchers, are (mostly) in physical isolation. […]
A three-time Webby Award winner and a 2009 World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader,” who has exhibited at MoMA and built the world’s largest time capsule with Yahoo!, Jonathan Harris can now add the firestarters IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling – for his latest interactive project I Love Your Work – to his esteemed CV. In it Harris invites us on an online journey not to the Arctic Ocean with Alaskan Eskimos – as he did in his previous piece, The Whale Hunt – but into the lives of nine women residing in a much hotter climate, that of the […]
Providing exposure for its entries is simply not enough for the Slamdance Film Festival, Sundance’s alterna-sister. In January 2010, Slamdance announced a distribution partnership with Xbox and Zune, thus realizing Slamdance Studios. Last year, they partnered with Cinedigm to release four titles on VOD, and today, they announced the acquisition of their 2013 Grand Jury Prize Winner, Nicole Teeny’s Bible Quiz, for a limited theatrical release. In partnership with Virgil Films, Slamdance Studios will release the documentary about the world of competitive Bible verse memorization in New York and Los Angeles, before moving to Houston, Kalamazoo, Lubbock and Austin in cooperation […]
I think I incorrectly titled my last post. Compared to the rate I am moving at now, my pace on Day Three seems utterly turbo. I am combining the last two days because there is a bit less to report. A good number of our crew members had flights cancelled due to a snow storm in New York City, which allowed for a bit more time to reflect all together. Memphis screened at the Sundance Resort on Tuesday evening. While the movie played for a different audience than we had interacted with over last four days, our crew sat in […]