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by Andrew Einspruch
Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.
“You learn the most when you have a success,” said Marcus Gillezeau of Firelight Productions. That’s because you find out what exactly you signed away and what you held onto in your contracts back in the beginning. He also said that there are only two times that people read their contracts – when something fails (so they can get out of it) or when something does well (so they can figure out how to get some of the money).
Gillezeau should know. His company is riding the success of Storm Surfers 3D, a feature film that follows on from their previous Storm Surfers TV series. As the award statues cluster on the mantle, more and more people want to get in on the action. He has become something of a self-made expert on ancillary rights, and shared some of that knowledge in a session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference.
Gillezeau started by putting this clause up on the screen:
All rights in all media now known or that may be invented in the future in all territories including the universe… and it’s territories and colonies… in-perpetuity. [...]
By Reid Rosefelt
Today many marketers are making twice as much money on Pinterest as they are on Facebook. Does that mean that for you–my filmmaker and artist readers–Pinterest is worth twice as much of your precious time? Yes, and there’s a simple reason.
All the big social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram have struggled to translate their large numbers into revenue. Eventually, the costs to simply keep in operation get so astronomical that they throw up their hands in despair–and the only answer they can come up with is advertising.
On the other hand, the ability to market and promote is built into Pinterest’s DNA. Pinterest is a colossally effective store that is as fun and addictive as “Angry Birds.” Like that thing you’re looking at? Click. Buy. It’s Google search on steroids. [...]
By Felicity Price
I remember reading someplace that a good story often just falls into your lap fully formed. Now I don’t want to speculate over whether my story is a good one or not, that conjecture is now in the capable hands of film going audiences everywhere, so you can make your own decision, but that’s how it came to me – fully formed. However it still took four years to shape into a script that anyone was willing to finance.
I was stretched out on my couch testing a new theory that perhaps sitting with hunched shoulders and bleeding eyeballs in front of my computer was what was stopping that elusive story from falling… and there it was… I remembered a vaguely told story about a man who went missing in South East Asia while holidaying with his partner and another couple. Tragically, in that true-life story the man was never found again. I was horribly fascinated by the loss and responsibility those left behind might feel and the mystery of what had happened to him. I linked that with a story I already had in my mind about a couple who would fight to keep their relationship together even after the worst kind of betrayal and suddenly I knew I had the skeleton of a feature film. [...]
By Roger Jackson
Previously: Dough Ray Me
Crystal Ball
I thought I’d use this post to think about the future and some of the trends that will affect films & filmmakers, particularly in the video-on-demand space. I don’t want to sound like the pompous visionary. I’m not a visionary and I have no crystal ball — merely informed opinion. This is not what WILL happen, but what I think may happen. And much of what follows may be stating the obvious.
Languages & Territories
The part of the future that gets me most excited is the global market. And I don’t mean just Europe and Asia. There are 7+ billion people on the planet. Right now most don’t have access to movies. Or at least not your movies. Early last year — just before we started KinoNation — I was working in a poor, village in a remote part of Africa, on the border of Mauritania and Mali. Despite extreme poverty and isolation, most of these rural subsistence farmers and their families had cellphones. [...]
by Andrew Einspruch
Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.
Film distribution is broken. Ask any producer who has ever felt that the amount they get for their work seems paltry compared to what others are making. For that matter, Peter Broderick has been saying this for years at SPAA Fringe.
There are lots of online film distribution platforms duking it out in the nascent VoD space. From the behemoths like iTunes and Amazon Instant to YouTube and Vimeo, to any number of small players trying to carve out a spot in the world. Andy Green’s Distrify is one of the ones actually making it work.
Green held an intimate session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference called Future Rights Model, and talked about how they built the platform. He’d been a filmmaker and experienced first-hand the frustration of getting stuff out into the world. For example, one distributor, when asked about making DVDs available for one of his titles, told Green, “It’s a small film. I’m busy.” [...]
We’ve got another excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood. Subtitled “Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream”, its an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. This time Sherry looks at issues of sexism and Feminism’s current standing in the film world.
By Sherry B. OrtnerIt is a major point of the post-feminism literature that younger women find second-wave feminism irrelevant to today’s world, a world in which virtually all occupations are open to women, in which women—like the studio heads noted earlier—have been very visibly successful in many endeavors, and in which many men have been sensitized to the need for egalitarian relations between the sexes. Moreover, in this view, younger women see second-wave feminists as having more or less abandoned an interest in attractive femininity in the pursuit of gender equality; younger women reject this de-feminization and refuse to identify with the older feminist generation and often with the very term feminism.
[...]
by Andrew Einspruch
Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.
Cathy Henkel is a producer, director, academic and researcher. She brings all of those skills to bear on her documentary projects, and recently has been looking into what it takes to navigate an independent path as a filmmaker. In a session called Riding the Freedom Streams at this year`s Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC), she invited documentary makers to brave the waters of a freer path.
Starting off with her nautical theme, Henkel said that you have to decide what kind of vessel you want your business to be.
One option is to wade into the main stream, the province of vessels she called the Good Ship Enterprise. The AIDC is primarily devoted to established and wannabe Enterprise ships. These businesses get their money from three main sources: broadcast pre-sales and distribution advances, government (grants or investments), and the Producer Offset. They are larger businesses with larger staff and larger overheads, and they have worked out how to get deals with the broadcasters and distributors, whose pre-sales and advances are needed to trigger government money. [...]
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