tagged w/ film distribution
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Filmmaker and entrepreneur Arin Crumley incites a crowd at the recent New York DIY Days event. The traveling DIY Days forum brings filmmakers and film industry professionals together in series of seminars and talks aimed at independent film distribution. Arin and then girlfriend, Susan Buice, made the feature film Four Eyed Monsters in 2005. They successfully distributed it themselves using social networks to generate interest and to gather email lists and zip codes, which they in turned used to present to theaters that they cold called.
They ended up with a number of theaters across the country screening their film.
Now Arin has teamed up with web designer, Kieran Masterton, to make a website that will allow filmmakers to do the same thing at http://openindie.com. There filmmakers can post their film and make it available for people to sign up and demand a screening for it. After that, people can hold screenings in areas where people have signed up and even can keep some of the box office profits. I expect with lists of people demanding to see a film, the filmmaker can go to theaters and try to book screenings.
Theaters typically screen a film for a few weeks. But most nights there are only a handful of people in the theater. With this model of people signing up to see a film, the filmmakers can book a theater on just a few nights instead of every night for weeks at a time and can guarantee an audience of however many people have signed up. Arin and Susan booked their film just on four Thursdays in September and had well over a thousand people come to see their film.
With indie films, screenings are rare and people who love them will clamor to get to these screenings. The model is quite genius and has been proven to work.
What do you think? Would you sign up to see my film, Got Healthcare? (http://gothealthcaremovie.com)?Filmmaker and entrepreneur Arin Crumley incites a crowd at the recent New York DIY... more
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http://lafilmonline.com/oitsf/?p=143
I had a thought after listening to Tim Westergen talk about Pandora Radio and The Music Genome Project , and how that should be applied to films. Many filmmakers are frustrated with the rejections they get from film festivals. Arin Crumley and Susan Buice really shed a lot of light on this process with Four Eyed Monsters and the accompanying vlogs where they talk about the festival and marketing processes they went through. So add 2+2 and what you get is this: a gnome film festival.
If you’re not familiar with Genome, listen to Tim on the Workbook Project’s This Conference is being Recorded archives (http://listen.workbookproject.com/songs/pandora.mp3). The Genome project categories music, one track at a time into about 400 attributes with ratings in each one (as I understand it). As Tim says, this translates into a truly democratic form of music promotion based on these categories and based on comparing the music that a listener wants to hear with other music that has the same characteristics.
So there would really be no direct all encompassing human judgment factor on rating an entire film. It’s more on these individual traits. In film you could have categories like acting, actor, directing, director, photography, DP, genre, running time, locations, production company, on and on.
This makes so much sense for film festivals where fairness really is an important issue and one that is now clearly forsaken over branding, theme, diversity and other marketing factors that really are what drive film festivals.
Of course the Genoming [sic] of thousands of films submitted to festivals would be a monumental undertaking. So I think it would have to be something of a universal service for all festivals (like Withoutabox, which in fact already does this on a very small scale of non-merit factors), where you have a company categorize films and then you’d have festivals look at that database and select what they want. But again you could end up with festivals choosing films based more on marketing factors than quality or originality or other more merit type factors, and you’d also have to deal with devising a good objective way to rate acting, writing, directing and artist type performance.
Perhaps there could be a new wave of festivals that would choose film solely on the merit and quality categories, or at least those could be the primary factors with marketing playing a secondary role.
Another important point here is that filmmakers need and even crave objective feedback. This would give them that feedback and could even serve as a marketing information database for the entire industry. Filmmakers, studios, distributors and anyone involved with film production or distribution should be willing to pay at least something for such a service.
I’m both a filmmaker and an experienced data-driven software project developer and I think his would be really not a big deal to make happen. But it would cost. It would take a lot of labor to categorize films, and ongoing labor to maintain it; plus coming up with categorization strategies would also be a major hurdle. But probably Tim and the Gnome Project could help out with some insight on that.
Image: Alexandra Fulton on the set of Eight-ish. My first indie short submitted to festivals.http://lafilmonline.com/oitsf/?p=143
I had a thought after listening to Tim... more
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Arin Crumley's new project to set up a cutting edge film self distribution website has succeeded in getting it's initial round of funding through Kickstarter (http://bit.ly/3jvU0).
A lot of filmmakers spend a lot of money entering festivals in hopes of finding distribution. But the reality is that their chances are very slim. Even at Sundance where a few hundred films are selected from about 6000 entries, only one or two are typically funded for distribution. OpenIndie is designed as an alternative to that crap shoot. One thing you do need though is an audience. If your film has an audience of a few thousand, you'll have a good shot at making out with something like OpenIndie. The idea is that you sign people up on a mailing list and they are notified when enough people in their area create the demand for a screening at a theater.But there's a lot more to it (http://blog.openindie.com/).
The website will have the following up and running by March:
# Import emails/zipcodes of their fans so those people can be messaged about near by screenings
# Have a URL for their film where people that they can spread around allowing people to "request" a screening of their film.
# Allow members of OpenIndie to create screenings of any each film complete with RSVP functionality for each film
# Host of a screening can collect donations at the screening and then transfer online to the filmmaker.
# A URL where films can receive donations from audience directly.
# Information about which cities have the most requests for a given film.
Phase two is now in gear which will raise additional funds for the following objectives:
# Filmmakers can adjust the maximum percentage that hosts are able to withhold as their cut.
# Filmmakers will be able to enable certain regions or provide access for screenings to be booked in any region.
# Filmmaker gains ability to auto approve each screening or chose to manually approve.
# A calculation built into the license that describes what an academic or institutional environment must pay the filmmaker based on an assessment of what that institution is charging.
# Filmmaker will be able to list public speakers available to be booked and adjust the fee each person must be paid by the host as well as provide a percentage split of donations collected at the screening that go to the guest speakers.
# Filmmaker will be able to assign percentages that must be shared by the Host on the selling of digitally reproducible physical goods at screenings. For example the host being able to print posters to sell, burn DVDs to sell, screen print the films logo at screenings or sell a USB drive that contains the film.
Got a film project you want to self distribute? Check it out.Arin Crumley's new project to set up a cutting edge film self distribution... more
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Twitter is an excellent way of getting your updates to the world at large, via cell phone, embedded notifications on myspace profiles, and, of course, the web. Sign up, make friends, and start updating news about your film, stat. Twitter is an excellent way of getting your updates to the world at large, via cell... more
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saskia
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4 years ago
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Workbook Project's goal is to create a free resource for content creators that will become a user contributed repository of information. The concept is part of an ?open source social experiment? called the workbook project. It?s a simple concept, the workbook is meant to be spread and edited. Meaning that content creators can add their own info, war stories, advice etc. We?re hoping that the workbook can grow as a resource. We?re building it with an open source ?client side? wiki called tiddlywiki that can be saved to the desktop, edited and then uploaded again.Workbook Project's goal is to create a free resource for content creators that... more
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saskia
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added this
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4 years ago
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