DIY Days: Free Conference for Indies!

DIY Days Logo Image from DIY Days WebsiteThanks to David Tames and Boston Media Makers (woot!), I just learned about DIY Days.

DIY Days, in their own words:

DIY DAYS – fund :: create :: distribute :: sustain
How do we sustain ourselves as filmmakers and storytellers in this day of shifting film distribution systems? How do we monetize our film and get the word out without studio support? Presented by From Here to Awesome and Current TV – DIY DAYS aims to answer these questions with a day of panels, roundtable discussions and workshops: A look at how to fund, create, and distribute and sustain.

TARGET AUDIENCE
Anyone wanting to make creative work – film, music, games, art. Self-Identified Independent filmmakers, Creatives and Tech-philes.

THE EVENT
The day flows through a mix of both structured and free form activities to encourage open discussion and the opportunity to break into groups and get everyone talking to each other. Pack a lunch and network offline with fellow creatives.

Best of all, this shindig is FREE. Looks like they have scheduled DIY Days in NYC, SF, LA and Boston (hurray!). But if you, like the Producer, do not live in one of those places, it looks like you’ll be able to sit in via streaming video sessions. Exciting, no?

Indie Films in Hollywood: Too Much of a Good Thing?

Indie Theater Image from Brandon Cirillo’s PhotostreamBy now you’ve probably already read the Wall Street Journal’s take on the state of independent film in Hollywood. If you haven’t, I’ll sum up: Hollywood studios are finding that lower budget indie flicks are not paying off at the box office. No matter how many movies you make (and it looks like they’re making quite a lot of movies), there aren’t any more screens to show them on than there were before. Small movies, no matter how star-studded, aren’t inspiring people to amble on over to the multiplex.

As someone pointed out at the always fabulous Boston Media Makers session Sunday morning, the movie industry is just catching up to the same issues that have plagued the music industry for years.* I think that’s a pretty fair summary of the situation. The old ways of doing business are not as profitable as they used to be. The WSJ focuses largely on the financial problems this creates, but I’m also wondering how this will change the storytelling landscape.

If funding is drying up for people who want to make small family dramas and slow-paced coming-of-age fables, where else will they go? Are viewers genuinely uninterested in smaller stories, or are they just getting their fill elsewhere? Television seems to be flush with nuanced drama, and fascinating things are happening with graphic novels these days – not to mention the rapidly evolving universe of web-distributed film. Is the feature-length indie film never again coming to a theater near you, or is it just in hibernation?

*I cannot recall who said this at the meeting, please comment if you remember!

Slick or Real?

Gritty VW Bug
Image from iboy_daniel
Seth Godin, with yet another interesting post, talks about the idea of being stuck between gritty realism and hyper-produced slickness. Things that fall in the deadzone tend to fail the appeal test.

This idea is perfectly applicable to films as well. Think about some that you’ve seen recently. Chances are that the independent ones traded well on being real and honest while the large studio films leveraged their budgets to produce something more stylized.

One great film that comes to mind for me when I think about the “real” end of the scale is “Once.” At the other end of the spectrum, think about the last action movie you saw. Chances are, it was glossy, heavily edited, and expensive. What’s the learning for independent filmmakers? If you can’t get all the way to slick and glossy, don’t try for it. Embrace the realism and frankness that come with the territory.

Update: client k has a post on a similar topic today.

Favorite Gaming Moments YouTube Contest

Pirates fighting with swords
Image from thebusybrain
iBUYPOWER is sponsoring a contest where filmmakers can submit a video to YouTube of a real life re-enactment of any event that happened in a computer or console video game to be voted on for a chance to win a $2,000 gift card and a $1,800 iBUYPOWER PC. One submission, any length, must be over 18, and various ‘decency’ rules apply. See http://www.ibuypower.com/WinAPC/WinAPC.asp for the complete rules.

There are plenty of fun possibilities for this contest. Lazy folks could probably get away with something from a sports game. People with a lot of time/money could try for something like the Neill Blomkamp’s live action Halo shorts. Personally, I would vote for anyone who re-enacts the insult sword fighting from Monkey Island.

“You fight like a dairy farmer!”
“How appropriate. You fight like a cow!”

More Steadicam from Garrett Brown

Steadicam
Image by mikefats
B&H has Part 2 of their interview with Garrett Brown, inventor of the Steadicam. We featured Part 1 last month. In this addition, Brown talks about his early experiences using the Steadicam on film sets, the advent of post-production tools for correcting shaky footage, and combo-shots using the Steadicam along with dollys and cranes.

B&H also has a video with Garrett Brown demonstrating the Steadicam Pilot, one of the lightweight and lower-cost alternatives to the full-scale film camera version. If Garrett Brown’s Steadicams are a bit of your price range, take a look at Johnny Chung Lee’s $14 Steadycam.

The State of Independent Film

It seems fitting to write about the state of independent film on Independence Day (here in the US). Indeed, the topic is not only apropos, but fashionable. Much has been said about Mark Gill’s comments at the LA Film Festival last week. Some agree that the sky is falling, while others take comfort in his optimistic closing remarks. I won’t rehash all of that here, but I want to echo my support for John August’s take on the matter. In his postmortem of The Nines he suggests that success for an independent film is measured not in dollars but eyeballs.

You should make an indie film to make a film. Period. Artistic and commercial success don’t correlate well, and at the moment, only the former is remotely within your control.

So, you make the film you want to make. And because film is your passion, you’re not in it for the money. You’re doing what you love, not shooting for an early retirement. You try to break even, maybe gain enough capital or recognition to make another. So, how many people saw your film? Who heard your story? It’s a different way of looking at success.

Cameraman Image by Elsie esq.
August also writes some about the impact of BitTorrent on the success (financial and otherwise) of The Nines. In the end, he says he would have made the same movie but distributed it differently. This is emblematic of the changing tide in the indie film world. Despite the ever increasing availability of filmmaking tools, the artist’s ability to create an emotional connection with the viewer is as crucial as ever. The arena where technology is truly changing the game is in the methods for putting that story in front of an audience.

Digital distribution opens up avenues of connecting with an audience that weren’t available to independent artists ten, or even five, years ago. So make your film and do it cheaply enough that you don’t have to worry about the money. Then, see how many people you can share your story with. And throughout the process, revel in your independence.

Sex and the City: Women v. Girls

Sex and the City
Image by Lots Of Sprinkles
I usually enjoy picking up the New York Times arts section, but this article struck me as odd, right from the title. Michael Cieply, who writes about the entertainment industry, tries to make a twisted little connection between the new Kit Kittredge film, a G-rated American Girl Doll spin-off, and the blockbuster Sex and the City movie. Cieply crows:

But this G-rated movie adventure is shaping up as Hollywood’s next serious bid for female viewers, some of whom showed their power by pushing the R-rated comedy “Sex and the City” to surprisingly strong first-weekend ticket sales of more than $57 million two weeks ago.

Unless the depression-era Kit Kittredge starts making bathtub cosmopolitans, I sincerely doubt this film has anything to do with the highly commercialized, Prada-encrusted Manhattanites that populate the SATC universe. Except of course, gender.

Why would anyone be surprised that women want to watch movies about women? Courting a female audience is hardly newsworthy, and reducing a kids’ picture to Sex and the City minus the sex seems tawdry and arbitrary. “Women’s pictures” have been around since Kit Kittredge was in diapers. In fact, Ann Hornaday wrote a great article for the Washington Post that looks at the girls-in-the-city formula at the heart of the Sex and the City brand.

Sex in the City, however fabulous it may be, still relies on materialism, stereotypes about women’s bodies and relationships, and an often celebrated ignorance of life outside of wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods. Don’t get me wrong, I love the show, but if I had a daughter old enough to understand the phrase “bikini wax” I wouldn’t let her anywhere near it.

Of course, most of the offerings for young girls aren’t much better. There are the films marketed to girls under the guise of the “Princess” and “Bratz” brands. Then there’s Gossip Girl, which is akin to Sex and the City with more sporadic female camaraderie. What would be newsworthy is a film that wasn’t based on a doll, or an established brand, but on actual girls doing actual girl-like things.

Royalties for Digital Goods

Amazon Kindle
Image by jblyberg

Seth Godin recently posted on his blog about the Kindle ($359 from Amazon). He mentions publisher resistance to lowering prices on digital books, similar to studio or label’s resistance to lower prices on film, tv, or music. They all claim that lower prices would mean less revenue for the artists, authors, actors, etc.

If you eliminate the cost of physical products, you should be able to lower the total cost, raise the percentage that is paid to the content creator, and still make a profit. Unless the reason to keep prices high is to maintain the bloated physical distribution arm of a studio/publisher/label.

Maybe the idea is just to keep milking the connections that keep traditional distributors on top of the promotional game before an agile content aggregator/digital distributor/promoter comes along who doesn’t have to keep supporting the whole physical production and distribution department and can afford to simultaneously pay the creators more and charge the consumers less. Imagine what that would be like.

Planning ahead. . .

Steadicam Operator
Photo by Reinis Traidas

One of the things I’ve learned in two years of production is that no two shoots are ever, ever, ever the same.

Before you go into production, it helps to not only visualize the scene you’re trying to create inside your camera, but also the scene on set. Who will play what role? What “props” do you need? (A table is really helpful for snacks, a couple chairs are awesome for tired actors and directors). Does it really make sense for a sound guy to be there if the whole set-up for the day is a single actor and a boom? Can you dismiss your costumer halfway through the day, or will that mean that someone’s bowtie gets droopy?

On our shoots, everyone is expected to be “helpful.” This means that if you’re standing next to the extension cord, you can be the one to hand it to the director (whether you are sound, costumes, an AP or an actor). Nobody is anybody’s “assistant.” The Associate Producer is expected to do 99% of the administrative tasks (the three M’s: Money, Meals, Mistakes – Mapquest would make four). When I was an intern for a small production house, I made up a “shoot kit” for the AP’s. Basically, I bought a plastic tool box, and filled it with all the things you might need on a shoot:

– office supplies (envelopes, pens, scissors)
– first aid supplies
– gaffers tape
– clipboards
– a slate
– white paper (for white balance)
– extra tape stock

Most importantly, I stuck in a list of what belongs in there so that it can be restocked as needed. I would always rather be freakishly organized than lose shoot hours to a pointless pen hunt.

Steadicam for Indies

Steadicam Operator
Photo by Reinis Traidas

B&H has an video interview with the inventor of the Steadicam, Garrett Brown. The Steadicam, for those who don’t know, is a stabilizing mount for a camera that isolates the camera’s movement from the camera operator’s movement. On terrain that is too rough, or other situations where a track and dolly are not practical, Steadicam allows smooth, moving shots.

Interestingly, Brown focused specifically on the drive to bring the Steadicam to smaller scale productions:

“The things that the Hollywood guys with their $50,000 rigs have, someone wants with a little HDV camera,” says Brown. “It’s our job not only to supply the gear, but also to help educate people to use it with the same degree of freedom and panache that the big boys have.

Brown’s mission to bring the Steadicam to the masses fits within the general trend of democratization of technology and it is particularly exciting, if not altogether unexpected, that stabilized camera mounts are becoming more widely available. Guerrilla filmmakers in particular may find great value in being able to get stable, smooth shots without the burden and setup of a dolly.