Do Your Best!
It’s time to start your holiday gift giving. I assume you are giving all of your loved ones memberships to film support organizations or community theaters, right? But there are some things that money can’t buy, and we should all make sure our giveaway goodie bag is filled with them.
This list are some of my gifts I have gathered specifically for you. I want to thank you for being part of this, for reading and contributing to this community. You appreciate. You support. You read. You share. You do. You give me hope and courage and faith.
How can I give back? I ask myself this all the time. We all should. Can I do more? What can I provide? How best to show my thanks?
Consider each of these #SimpleFixes a small token of my appreciation for you. Each will make our lives better. Each of these can be built and we will all be closer to a world we want, one that supports the culture we love, the culture we want to contribute to and be part of.
I am donating my ideas to the world. I want nothing back — although I would like them to happen. Call it a Potlatch. I am giving away these babies, these cherished goods, but this should be a group effort. Imagine if we all generated a “simple fix” to enhance the things we care about? Even each of us giving one #SimpleFix a year would move us forward far faster. We may even be able to alter our course so we and IndieFilm don’t fall off the cliff into oblivion!
It’s time we used our cognitive surplus and made some things happen, don’t you think?
Most of these Simple Fixes have not yet been done. You may have noticed that I have done some of these though, but need your help with them still. If you join in, we are going to start to gain momentum.
I recognize it’s not enough just to list them as I now have. We must build them, and soon. Maybe a whole bunch of us need to gather, together with our friends in tech, and start to solve it.
If we ran together, I think we’d have enough speed to really fly. Check out the list below, and let me know what more you have to add. I have written further about each of them if you click through the links.
- Listing What You Love (In Film). I believe in this for everything, but building such a list will give you something to fall back on in times of chaos or confusion. It will lift your work from mediocre to good and from good to great. You can start this one alone at home in your room. You should not be able to leave film school until you have done this exercise. You should not be permitted to make a film unless you know what you love. If I had my way, you could not be in the film industry without having had described what makes up your pleasure. I have expanded my list from the original 32 to include five more. Where’s yours at?
- List Of Where You Can Get Funding For Your Film. This one I have built. Check it out here. It is no doubt missing a whole bunch, so please suggest what to add to it.
- List Of People You Recommend We Hire. Where is this? It should be a simple thing to build. Can someone tell me where I can recommend some people? It needs to be more specific than LinkedIn. It should require a bit of work, a sincere and detailed recommendation.
- Generate Music Playlists For Your Films. This is just Best Practices. But it isn’t done. It should become habit.
- List Of Recommended Keywords For All Films To Choose Between. Imagine if we had an agreed upon list of 100? It would make search and discovery so much easier.
- Lock Your Hashtag Early. Again, this is Best Practices.
- List Where Your Film Elements Are On Festival Applications. Think of it. If all festival applications just listed where you stored your elements, the question of preservation would be one step closer to being solved. Great films have been lost forever already, in terms of having the elements to create a true archive version.
- Train Filmmakers To Budget The Full Lifespan Of A Film. This is the concept behind the initial A2E OnRamp (the Direct Distribution Workshop). But again it is what should be taught in filmmakers. We have trained people on halfway. We need to know how to budget a film through release. I have hopes of franchising the A2E Onramp Workshop and bringing it all over the world. Let me know if you’d like to bring to your school or community. Of course we need a sponsor to do that, so if you know one of those too, please let me know.
- Identify Film Images As “Film Images”. If we want to build the necessary tools for discovery and sharing we have to be able to find what it is we want to talk about. If I understand this world correctly, a simple identifier written into the code for all film images will do the trick quite nicely.
- Organize Celebrities/Movie Stars To Tweet In Support Of Specific Indie Films. Everyone wants to give back, right? And this will only take them a second.
Okay now that we know what needs to be done, let’s do it. It’s amazing what can happen when you put good people in a room. We can build it better together.
I have to imagine that some of you reading this right now, have a similar list to mine. I have shown mine; won’t you show yours? Or maybe just add to this list in the columns below. Or if you want, I will give you this blog to post your simple fix. We have to get moving.
