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Truly Free Film

How to Make Money in the Age of Abundance, Part 1

Part One: The Stuggles You Are Facing and How You Can Cope

By Jon Reiss

Since the collapse of the traditional distribution for filmmakers in 2007 we as a community have been struggling to figure out new solutions of how to monetize our work – in other words:  how to make money from our content and create a sustainable living.  In this two part series I will reformulate and address some of the problems we are facing – but also present some potential solutions for independent filmmakers.   These thoughts come from a creating a series of new presentations on Artistic Entrepreneurship over the past year that I presented at the recent SFFS A2E Workshop (http://www.sffs.org/Filmmaker360/A2E-Artist-to-Entrepreneur.aspx) and this spring’s IFP Filmmaker Labs (http://www.ifp.org/programs/labs/).   I welcome your comments!

While there were a number of factors that caused an upheaval of the distribution landscape in 2007 and while there have been many positive signs of improvement, filmmakers and all artists still face an enormously changed market for content.

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Truly Free Film

INFLUENCING CHANGE: RELEASING PERSON OF INTEREST FOR FREE ON VODO

Guest post by Gregory Bayne

On Saturday, October 2nd, PERSON OF INTEREST screened at the 2010 Open Video Conference as part of the Shared Film Festival. This event was sponsored by BitTorrent, and curated by our partners at VODO (http://vodo.net). The screening was well attended for an obscure film playing on a Saturday night in the heart of Manhattan, drawing in just over 60 filmgoers to a mid sized auditorium at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In many respects, the screening went off like any other. A short intro, the film, then the Q&A, which was moderated by the very adept and prepared, Brian Newman, distribution consultant and former CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute. We were quite happy with how the entire event went off, but it was what was happening beyond the screening, out there on the interwebs, that kept my collaborator, J. Reuben Appelman, and I brimming with excitement. As the film played for the 60+ attendees generous enough to lend us a couple of hours that evening, PERSON OF INTEREST was being released worldwide as a free to share P2P download via VODO to a potential audience of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

I originally heard of VODO in late 2009, and was very intrigued by this idea of using P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing networks as a means to distribute, and gain potentially massive exposure for, independent film. After I witnessed Jamie King’s (one of the ring leaders of VODO) presentation at the 2010 Slamdance Film Festival, I was convinced it was the way to go for PERSON OF INTEREST.

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Truly Free Film

What’s The Future Of Film Look Like?

I don’t have that answer and I will leave it to the others (at least for today) as so many are offering options:

Each day I have been experiencing and encountering new ideas and new practices; All of it is pretty damn thrilling. So what if we are racing forward even if we don’t know where we are going. I am loving it.

Like I said, I don’t know, but I do believe that some of these tools will change some things significantly.

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing from Carsonified on Vimeo.

That’s Aza Raskin from Mozilla. And this is an attempt to explain Google Wave:

What are the other five tools that will make sure tomorrow does not look like today that I should be posting about?

Categories
Truly Free Film

What is VODO?

Jamie King’s VODO has launched. You should definitely check it out and participate.

VODO is trying to help solve three problems:

(1) How do we get works (texts, films, music) distributed efficiently and widely using current Peer to Peer technologies?

(2) How do we market these works that can rival mainstream media?

(3) How can we help creators distributing through P2P systems with developing a sustainable, or even profitable, practice?

Read more here.

I hope a lot of filmmakers give this a try.