This January at Slamdance, I covered this discussion on alternative funding methods for Filmmaker Magazine. After a month and a half of wrestling with video formats on YouTube, here is the entire panel. Notes and short excerpts clips are on the original post on Filmmaker.
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 the theater. The website is an opportunity to introduce the film as quickly as possible, provide the detailed information your audience and the media are looking for, to engage your audience repeatedly, and to make it ridiculously easy for fans to promote your film for you.
Below, I’m going to explain why this ancient model fails and suggest a few starting points for an alternative approach. Read the rest of this entry »
“We hear it all the time, so it must be true: Launching a startup in NYC is harder than anywhere else: You can’t find good people, there’s no space for fledgling companies, everything’s too expensive and there’s no money to be found. But SAI contributor a
