Interview with Jasmine Bulin

Last weekend was the 48 Hour Film Project in DC.  This weekend we’re bringing you interviews from several team leaders who participated last weekend.  Our first interview is with first time 48 Hour participant Jasmine Bulin.

Jasmine Bulin
Jasmine Bulin, 48HFP-DC "Hugs Productions" Team Leader

Still Indie: So, how did you get involved in the 48 Hour Film Project?

Jasmine Bulin: I heard about the project about three years ago and have been pining to do it ever since. Finally this year I signed myself up as a team leader and just hoped I could get my friends to help me out in time.

SI: What genre were you hoping for and which one did your team draw?

JB: I was crossing my fingers for “buddy film” or “mockumentary.”  Since our team’s mission was to have a good time during the 48 hours, not to win, we were hoping for a genre we could easily inject our comedic spirit into. I drew “holiday film” out of the hat as our genre, but we still had some great ideas, and it wasn’t hard to incorporate the 3 common elements; Eve or Ivan Pagoda, Coach (the character), ID Card (prop), and “We’re hoping things will change.” (the line of dialogue).

SI: What story did you tell?

JB: After the Kickoff, where we recieved all the elements, my entire group met to brainstorm and vote on the story we felt the strongest about telling. An obscure holiday, Make a Difference Day, won out, so we told the story of a man at a low point in his life trying to do good on that day while incorporating some slapstick moments where his good intentions go wrong.

SI: What was the biggest challenge your team faced?

JB: The biggest challenge was not time. It was definitely maintaining focus. There was plenty of time for drama in the 48 hours and I learned a lot about how I should do it next time. My advice to any 48hfp newbies out there is to set specific jobs/responsibilities for everyone, maintain a simple schedule, and choose the direction you want for the film.  I heard several comments from other team leaders about how they should have been more involved in the writing process.

SI: What was the best moment of the weekend?

JB: The best moment, hands down, was when we got to film the scene we were all anticipating: rolling one of our characters down a big hill in a wheelchair. I think we did 20 takes just because it was so much fun and after finishing the film I think it is the best scene. I still laugh at it.

SI: Will you be participating again next year?

JB:  When I was turning the film in, I wasn’t sure whether I would ever participate again. I had fun, but the drama… oh the drama! With a new strategy I think I will do it again next year and you may see one of my films in another 48hfp city this year.

Thanks Jasmine for giving us a view into your team’s process!  To see photos of Jasmine’s team at work, check out their Facebook photo album.  Be sure to check back with us tomorrow when we’ll hear from a 48HFP veteran. If you’ve got questions for Jasmine or her team, please submit them in the comments section below.

Happy Earth Day 2009

In honor of Earth Day, we’d like to point you to a couple of our previous articles about green film.  If you know of other resources for decreasing your environmental impact as a filmmaker, let us know in the comments.

Green Film

Image from Cayusa
Image from Cayusa
Slow Food, Slow Film?
Media-making requires a lot of resources.  What can you can do to reduce your impact?
ABC’s Earth 2100: You, too, can be Al Gore!
ABC News asks you to submit videos about what our planet could look like over the next hundred years if we don’t act now to save it.
Chris Carter’s Green Set for X Files Sequel
A concrete example of how a major film production reduced its impact on the environment.

More Earth Day Resources

For a great collection of Earth Day related videos, head over to the Earth Day collection at the brand new PBS Video Portal.

Funding an Independent Film

How do you get the money to make a film about dying languages?
How would you convince funders to back your film when it doesn’t have a clear audience?

The Linguists Theatrical Poster
The Linguists Theatrical Poster

The Linguists

Last October, the Independent published an article about funding independent films and examined Ironbound Films‘ documentary, The Linguists, as one case study.

The film’s creator, Seth Kramer, upon facing resistance from foundations and grants, self-funded a $10,000 expedition to Siberia with scientists David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, to film the first 20% of the film. With a reel to show, they were able to attract an additional $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to finish the film.

Success?

The Linguists recently aired on PBS after showing at Sundance last year. A DVD is available directly from Ironbound Films, and the film has been well reviewed by Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, the LA Times and even Noam Chomsky.

The Independent’s article also includes case studies of two lower budget films, the $60,000 USC student short, The Abattoir, and the $100,000 feature A Good Day To Be Black and Sexy.

48 Hour Film Project, 2009: Washington, DC

Early bird registration for the 48 Hour Film Project has closed in DC, but regular registration is still open.

Team Gefilte Fish Eye shoots Damned Love in Tel Aviv in 2008.
Team Gefilte Fish Eye shoots 'Damned Love' in Tel Aviv in 2008.

This year, 48 Hour Film DC, takes place on the weekend on May 1st.  Yet again, I have a conflict that weekend, but I know of several people with teams in the mix this year and I might still find some way to get involved.  (Of note, 48 Hour Film Boston, is the same weekend and has already filled up, but you can get on the waiting list.)

Your Mission

For the uninitiated, 48 Hour Film Project is competition where you a write, shoot, edit and score a short film in 48 hours.

  • On the Friday evening at the beginning of the 48 hours you are given a genre for your film as well as a character, a prop, and a line to include in your movie.
  • On Sunday, the film is due, in completed form, to be screened in a local theater in the following week.
  • According to the 48 Hour Film Project site, last year there were 30,000 participants in 70 cities.  The Project has been around since 2001, and looks to be going strong.

This all makes for a crazy weekend of filmmaking fun and I highly recommend it to anyone with a weekend to spare.  Oh, right, and there are prizes for those of you who go for that.

Other Cities

If you’re not in the DC or Boston areas, other upcoming cities in May are all open for early bird registration now:

How Much Would You Pay for an E-Book?

“While Amazon might be able to find a market for $9.99 books on the Kindle, the iPhone-iPod Touch world is a very different place. Very few people are willing to pay that kind of money for any sort of application, let alone an e-book.”

via Why people won’t pay for e-books on the iPhone | Fully Equipped – CNET Reviews.

With the lower cost of production and distribution, you might expect publishers to pass some of the savings from e-books on to the readers, but the trend seems to be a strategy of maintaining prices and simply expanding the profit margin, and you can’t really blame a company for looking at it that way, as long as readers are still buying.

Amazon Kindle E-Book Reader
Amazon Kindle E-Book Reader

There are two considerations that come to mind here. The first is that if readers won’t pay the increased prices, then the market will correct itself and the price of goods will drop to reflect the lower cost of production. The other is that the majority of these increased margins are likely going to the publishing houses, not the authors (similar to the relationship between record labels and musical artists). This means that there is an opportunity for independent authors to self-publish and cut out the middleman.

This possibility has existed before, and e-books have been distributed online for on-screen viewing, but the mainstream market’s push to popularize the portable e-book devices, similar to the explosion of MP3 players (notably, the iPod), has opened up a new market for self-published e-book authors to tap into, who are already primed for the delivery method.

Moreover, the idea that users pay more for content when they have a convenient way of viewing it means that more e-book readers may signal higher prices for the e-books themselves.  For consumers, the questions still remain: How much would you pay for an e-book and does the platform you read it on make a difference?

Ask Terry Lickona Your Burning Questions

PBS Engage is inviting users to ask questions of Terry Lickona, renowned producer of the long running music program Austin City Limits, Monday at 4pm. Lickona will answer user submitted questions in an hour-long chat from SXSW.

PBS Banner at SXSW 2009 by fragility_v2
PBS Banner at SXSW 2009.
Photo by fragility_v2

Submit questions by 4pm or join the discussion live. If you are in Austin for SXSW, you can stop by the PBS events in person. Tell them Teague sent you.

Norway’s public broadcaster launches BitTorrent tracker

NRK Tyholt Tower by Fredrik Thommesen
NRK Tyholt Tower by Fredrik Thommesen

“NRK, Norway’s public broadcaster, has decided that its BitTorrent distribution experiment has gone so well that the company will launch its own tracker in order to distribute its programming. Norway’s commitment to openness means that the files are DRM-free and even available for fansubbing.” –  Norway’s public broadcaster launches BitTorrent tracker.

Several public broadcasters have experimented with BitTorrent as a distribution platform.  The example that comes to mind for me is the CBC distributing Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister on BitTorrent around this time last year.

NRK has taken this a step further and started their own tracker to distribute programming and get some sense of the analytics.  Granted, one of the main reasons NRK can do this is because 94% of their revenue comes from a licensing fee paid by television owners, similar to the system in the UK.

I imagine this is an exciting development for Norwegian ex-patriates, but I wonder how the owners of televisions feel about their fee supporting viewing on computers.  It will be interesting to see if Norway adopts a broadband or computer licensing fee to replace the television licensing fee, or if revenues simply drop as viewers switch from TVs to computers.

Validation in Short Film

Here’s another inspirational short film.  Films of this quality are easily produced in a technical sense, though not easily written, and a perfect example of how an engaging story and good acting trumps the cost of your camera.  I find this kind of film both uplifting as a viewer and encouraging as a producer.

Validation

If you’re trying to figure out who the lead is, that’s T.J. Thyne, most well known as Dr. Jack Hodgins from the TV show Bones.

Web Comics Under Fire

Neil Swaab posted last week about the viability of webcomic business models in the current economy.

“I know there are plenty of web comic artists who are able to subsist on the income they make from their website, but they aren’t making money from their comics; they’re making money from merchandise. Not to belittle web-only comic artists, but when their income is derived from t-shirts, it makes them salesmen first, artists second.”

As a print comic artist, Swaab’s assesments about the webcomic world were questioned and challenged by several webcomic artists, most notably, Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content. Jacques’s post contains a point-by-point rebuttal of Swaab’s assertions and the back and forth illustrates most of the key differences in perspective between those working primarily in traditional media and those more comfortable with online and new media outlets.

On merchandising:

Swaab:

The t-shirt sales method is unacceptable for the reasons that an artist is not intrinsically making money off his or her comic, but is instead making money off merchandise sales and using the comic as a form of advertising for their merchandise.

Jacques:

I don’t know what country accepts BULLSHIT ARTISTIC CREDIBILITY DOLLARS as valid currency but I’m sure glad I don’t live there! Money is money.

On subscriptions models:

Swaab:

If enough artists decided to lock up their archives at the same time so readers had no choice but to subscribe, and the technology existed to prevent illegal copying and distributing on the Web, this could be a very wonderful solution.

Jacques:

If “the technology existed to prevent illegal copying and distributing on the web” we would be living IN MAGICAL FAIRY PONY FANTASY LAND. Maybe that’s also where those BULLSHIT ARTISTIC CREDIBILITY DOLLARS are legal tender!

On viability:

Swaab:

“Whatever business models alternative comic artists can come up with, the one thing that I firmly believe is that the current paradigm is dead… Artists must figure out a way to monetize their work online and readers must be willing to take this journey with them.”

Jacques:

Webcomics readers are the best readers in the entire fucking world. We are all incredibly, incredibly fortunate to have you guys supporting us, either monetarily or simply by looking at our websites and enjoying them.  But artists already have figured out how to monetize their work online, and readers have already made that journey with them.

It will be interesting to see other responses to this debate as the decline of traditional print comics and the viability of webcomics are likely to be echoed in other creative mediums. Jacques also briefly mentions an important point at the end of this response: that some comic would only work online, and other would only work in print.

Jacques is alluding to the fact that the long tail effect makes it possible for webcomic artists to sustain interest within a niche audience that is reachable by using the web as a distribution platform. Conversely, some print comics that have enough broad appeal to survive in a print world would not attract enough loyal fans if those readers were presented with a host of other options that may be more tailored to their individual tastes.