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Truly Free Film

4 industry trends Revealed at AFM 2014

Despite the growing trend towards self-distribution, AFM is still a hugely important event in the industry, and something to which we should all pay attention.  I spoke with AFM’s Managing Director Jonathan Wolf on Wednesday about his opinions about the show and the general state of the industry.  Here’s what you need to know as a producer

1. Asia’s importance as a territory is growing.

This should come as a surprise to precisely no one; at least no one who has been paying attention to industry trends.  However by the numbers, buyers from Asia represented 30.7% of total buyers, and 28.3% of total buyer companies attending AFM. 

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Truly Free Film

Nobody Knows Anything #5: Rethinking Transmedia and Crossmedia

By Charles Peirce  

Nobody5-300As I alluded to in a previous post, Transmedia is in the midst of a debate about its definition and who has the authority to determine that definition. It is one of those discussions I think best observed from the sidelines, but then I have no financial or artistic stake in that debate. However, I do think they’re important terms to understand.

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Truly Free Film

Screen Forever 2013: Google’s Approach to Watching Content Owners’ Backs

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch attended Screen Forever 2013, the conference of Screen Producers Australia, this past year and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s kindly allowing us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

The world of content and culture is moving online. And search giant Google is in the driver’s seat to know what the trends are. But the digital world unfolds in a fraught way for many creators. In the opening session of this year’s Screen Forever conference, Derek Slater, Global Public Policy Manager, Google USA, gave a glimpse into this changing world, as viewed by the advertising behemoth. Andrew Einspruch reports.

100 hours.

That’s how much content currently gets uploaded to YouTube every minute. That`s a week`s worth of viewing in less than two minutes, and a year`s worth in less than two hours. That`s the supply side.

On the demand side, six billion hours get watched every month, or just under an hour per person on the planet, whether they have an Internet connection or not. It is a staggering change to the world, especially when you consider that YouTube did not exist nine years ago.

Google USA`s Derek Slater, a self-confessed fan of the Australian show “Frontline,” discussed this boom in creativity, and put it in the context of creators and money. Put simply, you have more content creators than ever before, and more ways for them to make money from all the connected consumers out there. He cited statistics that said digital music revenue was more than $5.6 billion in 2012, and that digital movies were nearly 30% of revenue in the US in 2012, up from 19% in 2011. Ebooks show a similar jump, with 457 million sold in 2012, up 43% from 2011.

It is still a developing market, but it represents a massive shift from the previous decade.

Slater also described Australia as a huge net exporter of video, with eight times as much Aussie video consumed off-shore than on-shore. Looked at differently, twice as much Australian content is consumed in the US than in Australia. From Slater`s perspective, it shows that local content is thriving, and contributing to a trade surplus in that category.

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Truly Free Film

How Chris Christie and Ira Deutchman made me a SEO Master of the Universe

By Reid Rosefelt 

When you finish reading this post you will possess the key to becoming a mighty internet power user.

For no charge, I’m going to share a huge breakthrough I made. That’s the kind of guy I am.

Chris-Christie-Ira-Deutchman 1It all started just as the Chris Christie Bridge-ghazi scandal was gathering steam. Like many, I googled the besieged Governor to see if there were any new developments.

One day, I saw something that surprised me: on the first page, right under CBS News, MSNBC, Chicago Tribune, the Office of the New Jersey Governor, Christie’s Wikipedia entry, the Chicago Tribune again, and the Washington Post, was a link to something from my friend, celebrated indie film man Ira Deutchman. “Wow,” I thought.  “Ira must have generated something pretty big to generate a search engine smasheroo like that.” As you might imagine, I was on pins and needles to find out what Ira had come up with.

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Truly Free Film

How to Use Pinterest to Get Listed #1 on Google Search

XPinterest-Movie-Actor-Quote420

By Reid Rosefelt

I have a Movie Actor Quotes Pinterest Board with 86 graphics and a Film Director Board with 65 graphics.   The Movie Actor Quotes Board is  #1 out of 40,700,000 other results on Google Search and  the Film Director Board is #3 out of 73,900,000.  I am ranked over the sites where I find my quotes, an irony I doubt they appreciate.  

XGoogle-Search-Result420

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Truly Free Film

Filmmaker Sent To Google Jail For Building THE NEW MODEL

Today’s guest post is from Diary Of  A Bad Lad producer, Jon Williams.  This news was pretty shocking to me.  It is sure to evolve as the year goes on, but Dylan Martin’s ordeal should concern anyone that is striving to produce a Truly Free Film model.  BE SURE TO CLICK IN TO DYLAN’s ARTICLE.  What Jon describes as Dylan’s Kafka-esque nightmare with Google is nothing short of a grand tragedy of a hero learning how it can all work and being profoundly penalized for the knowledge.  This is sure to get a lot of people buzzing.

I want to draw your attention to a recent article, “Adsense, no sense at all –
what it’s like being sacked by a computer…” by Dylan Martin (http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/11/columns/guest/winter/index.htm).
I think it’s particularly relevant when it comes to ‘new distribution models’ (NDMs).

Over the past couple of years or so there’s been a whole slew of books published, and seminars organised, promoting internet-based film marketing and distribution models. Often the author is someone who makes a living as an internet marketing consultant, or someone who made a DIY-distributed documentary with a clear niche-market target who’s found that writing internet marketing manuals and doing speaking engagements is a much better and more reliable way of making a living. But little of this is of any use to indie feature filmmakers.

Often the disconnection results in bafflement. How can you, as the advice goes, build an audience for a film which you haven’t even got into development? If it’s a feature you can’t, unless you happen to be an established auteur, that is.

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How We Evaluate The Now Now?


How do we measure the world around us?  When did “Search” become one of those tools?  I may be a bit slow on the uptake, but it certainly snuck up on me.