links for 2007-11-27
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A brief post, but a great point.
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Brian Chirls
Change the gameArtists as Entrepreneurs
A few bloggers have noticed a post that Netscape founder Marc Andreessen posted last week. He proposes that, given the precarious state of Hollywood’s control over…just about everything, the WGA strike could serve as a tipping point at which the structure of Hollywood changes to one similar to Silicon Valley, where the artists become entrepreneurs and each film is its own independent start-up company. Yet another blockquote:
But here we are, living in a world in which the bottlenecks have suddenly become irrelevant.
I don’t think there’s any question that this is the logical model to pursue in the age of the Internet — the age of free distribution and marketing.
Suppose the writers’ strike continues for months to come — and even beyond that, suppose the actors or the directors also go on strike. In such a scenario, it is hard to see how many companies based on this new model won’t be created extremely quickly — after all, if you really can’t work for the Man, why not start your own company, if you can?
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links for 2007-11-17
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Warner Music admits they screwed up by going to war with customers over p2p. Movie industry, don’t make the same mistake (of screwing up, not of admitting).
“The boss of Warner Music has made a rare public confession that the music industry has to take
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links for 2007-11-16
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It’s not a bad idea to occasionally check in on how well different sites are doing at attracting viewers. This ranking from September ‘07 shows YouTube still way ahead of the rest of the pack, which confirms what we saw when we released Four Eyed Monster
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links for 2007-11-15
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“The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and University of KentuckyUrban have been working on techniques to develop 3D Models direct from video, thus negating the need for a LiDAR rig. Although it is early days, indeed we are at the dawn of this aut
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links for 2007-11-13
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As I’ve said, big media companies have based their businesses on controlling access to distribution. The Internet and new regulations like this FCC proposal will free up access and force them to compete with quality content creation and curation. This i
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“Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan expound on violence, alienation and the electronic envelope. The clash of two great minds. (1968)” [via Karina @ Spout blog]
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then again, maybe not
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Donncha O Caoimh discussing using Litespeed Web Server instead of Apache for Wordpress. He claims it can handle much heavier server loads. But it does appear to have some drawbacks. This article is very technical.
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Speaking on Panel Discussion at Big Apple Film Festival
This Saturday, I’ll be speaking on a panel at the Big Apple Film Festival, called Distribution in the New Age. The others on the panel are:
- Aaron Levine (moderator), Film Division Manager at Gen Art
- Peter Goldwyn, Vice President Acquisitions Samuel Goldwyn Films
- Clémence Taillandier, Head of Theatrical Sales, Zeitgeist Films
- Erik Davis Managing Editor, Cinematical.com
Details
| Date: | Saturday, November 17, 2007 |
| Time: | Saturday, 12:00pm - 1:00pm |
| Location: | Tribeca Cinemas |
| Address: | 54 Varick Street, New York, NY |
| Buy Tickets | |
I’m looking forward to this panel, because it’s a new batch of panelists for me, different from the usual suspects at Vancouver, IFP Market and London. We’ll be discussing some of the same topics as past panels: on-demand theatrical booking, content discovery, the up-scaling of the theatrical experience. But the added perspective of the bigger-budget, older-school Goldwyn and Zeitgeist representatives should be interesting, and if we’re very, very lucky, maybe we’ll see another showdown. Aaron will also ask us about how the writers strike ties into Internet distribution. One of the greatest consequences of Internet distribution is a shift in power, so we should have a lot to talk about.
See Erik’s post, and check out the Facebook Event to RSVP and see who else is attending.
A little help?
Would anybody be willing to volunteer to shoot the panel so we can get it up on the web? Thanks.
Update: I posted the video of the full panel.
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links for 2007-11-12
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MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API.
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Susan Buice Audio Interview
For you die-hards who are still curious to learn more about Four Eyed Monsters, here is yet another audio interview. Director Daniel Schechter interviews Susan on Renart Films. This one is worth noting because it is a semi-rare opportunity to hear Susan’s side of the story alone and because Schechter moderates a compelling discussion covering a wide range of topics in a (relatively) short period of time (51 min).
Susan tells about an email that Arin received from someone who discovered the film as a free, unofficial (and basically illegal) download on Bittorrent. He loved the film so much that he bought a t-shirt and DVD from the website. This is a great follow-up example to the grilling a London filmmaker gave me about whether it’s possible to make money when you’re giving your film away for free.
Renart Films Podcast Episode 28 - Susan Buice
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No More Flash Movie Websites
More and more frequently, filmmakers ask me for feedback on their film websites, and I keep seeing the same thing: heavy, multimedia sites built on Flash. I keep seeing site navigation all in a full-screen image representing some iconic place in the film; animations of design elements flying or fading in on every page; music playing automatically; long loading screens; and the dreaded splash pages. This seems to have become the standard. Hollywood does it. (See: Beowulf, Lions for Lambs, American Gangster.) The indies do it. (e.g. Margot at the Wedding, Eagle vs. Shark, Weirdsville). It’s awful, and it’s so Web 1.0.
We are well beyond denying that a film website is the most effective and often the only entry point to discovery of your film. The audience has to jump an increasingly absurd number of hurdles to see your movie in th