What Issues Do Filmmakers Need To Track?

A creative life is a precarious thing.  Actions occur that could profoundly effect your ability to earn a living doing what you love.  We get blindsided again and again, sometimes not recognizing things until they are too late to alter them.  It’s one of the reasons I have tried to meticulously track for you what are the good thing and bad things happening in indie film these days.  Yet, it seems to me we all need to do a better job of tracking them if we don’t want to get trapped in a future we won’t be part of..

My thought is that we should be able to define a series of issues in which we can put events, ideas, and articles into as they occur, helping each other stay on top of them. 

The first step is to define the issues.  That is what I am doing today . I am taking it from the point of view of American Independent Filmmakers but we certainly can expand beyond that.  They are not in priority order; we could vote on that perhaps.  

1. Access To Films
2. Censorship & Free Speech
3. Copyright Law
   1. Fair Use
   2. Orphan Works
4. Creative Control
5. Distributor Practices
   1. Payments
   2. Licensing Practices
   3. Release Strategies
6. Diversity & Representation
   1. Proportional representation
   2. Expansion beyond the establishment
7. Education
   1. Access To Information
   2. Film School Curriculum
   3. Mentorship
   4. Media Literacy
8. Entrepreneurial Best Practices
   1. new business models
9. Festival Practices + Sustainibility
10. Filmmaker Sustainability
11. Financing Methods + Strategies
    1. Laws
    2. Tax Incentives
    3. Crowdfunding Best Practices
12. Integrity + Corruption
    1. Credits
13. Media Consolidation & Anti-trust
14. Net Neutrality
15. Paradigm Shift (Industry Reboot)
    1. Abundance vs Scarcity
    2. Thinking Beyond Festival Launch to Lifecycle of Film
16. Piracy + Unauthorized File Duplication
17. Preservation
    1. Digital Works
    2. Celluloid Works
    3. Uniform Identification System
18. Responsible Filmmaking
    1. Set Safety
    2. Green Set practices
    3. Cultural Ramifications Of Representation
19. Storytelling Forms & Tools
    1. Transmedia + Cross Platform
20. Technology Advances
21. Transparency Of Data (Data Ownership)

What is surprising is that with so many film schools that these issues are not part of a standard curriculum anywhere to my knowledge — let alone the full gamut.  Film school grads should be prepared for the world and up on the state of the art.

Our film support organizations do not appear ready to comprehensively address these issues in a larger way.  They take on pieces for sure, but where is the overview? They do a good job with the specifics, but could they join together and divvy up the pie so that the community is FULLY served?  Who owns what issues? And why them?

I have always been a believer in organizational systems to address large problems (although they inherently create new issues as a result).  If we can track these issues, inform each other of them, we should be also able to determine appropriate actions to improve them.

So what did I miss?  How would these change from a perspective from another part of the world?