Archive for June, 2009
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
At last year’s FIND Film Financing Conference in Los Angeles, Mark Gill told us the sky is falling. This year’s keynote speaker, Endgame Entertainment CEO James H. Stern, had a more optimistic message. Referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, Stern reminded the crowd, “We are lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time for great opportunities.” Stern encouraged the crowd of filmmakers to not just make better movies, but smarter ones that keep a film’s audience — and how to reach it — in mind well before the cameras roll, not just after the film is complete. He cited distribution execs Bob Berney and Ira Deutchman as conceptual thinkers on the cutting edge of the new independent film business, and took lessons from football hero Herschel Walker, who infamously turned to ballet for his off-season training so that he could learn to use a completely different set of muscles to improve his game. Stern reminded us that, as producers, it’s time for us to do the same in our business.
The biggest muscle producers need to flex, it was implied in the panel discussions that followed Stern’s keynote, is harnessing the power of the internet. During “Independent Financing Models,” Paradigm Consulting distribution strategist Peter Broderick touted the success of “crowd-funding” films, or raising production money in small donations via Facebook, websites and other social networks. He used documentarian Robert Greenwald’s Iraq for Sale and the filmmakers behind The Age of Stupid as successful examples of films that not only raised six-figure budgets online but built critical relationships with their respective fan bases even before they began shooting. In these cases, Broderick pointed out, the filmmaker’s mailing lists were their most valuable assets.
The discussion continued in the “Digital Distribution” panel, during which SnagFilms’ CEO Rick Allen, Oscilloscope Laboratories’ David Fenkel and New American Vision co-president Orly Ravid helped the audience of producers navigate the tricky waters of online distribution models, and figure out how to make them even modestly profitable. Allen boasted that the producers of the 800 or so films on SnagFilms.com get a … Read the rest
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
I’m still typing up my thoughts on day two of the Open Video Conference, but in the meantime, here is an example of open video in action. At his Mind Flip blog, Jay Cousins writes about “augmented content” as being a potential driver for video monetization on the web. He gives an example of the technology at play by embedding the below video which demonstrates some of the functions of Firefox’s new version 3.5, which supports Ogg video. Check it out.
… Read the rest
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
Tonight our first Filmmaker/Apple “Meet The Filmmaker” event takes place at the Apple Store in SoHo at 8pm (103 Prince St.). Nick Dawson will be interviewing our Spring cover director Kathryn Bigelow about her new film, The Hurt Locker, which opens this weekend.
The event is open to the public.
Following the first 38 days of army bomb expert Sgt. Will James (Jeremy Renner) in Iraq, The Hurt Locker (pictured) is a trademark Kathryn Bigelow film. Like Near Dark, Point Break or Strange Days the action is non-stop and includes a breakout performance by Renner. Check out what we mean below.
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Sunday, June 21st, 2009
The surprise guest at the conclusion of this weekend’s Open Video Conference was Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay, which bills itself as the “world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.” As many of you know Sunde and three of his colleagues were recently convicted in a Swedish court and were sentenced to a year in jail and a $3.6 million fine. They have accused the judge of bias and are now battling the verdict on appeal.
The Open Video Conference organizer introducing Sunde, who appeared via Skype from Sweden, acknowledged the controversial nature of his activities, particularly for the content creators in the room, and noted the group’s political activism as well as its influence on the creation of the Pirate Party, which recently won a seat in the EU Parliament. Also noted was The Pirate Bay’s support of Iranian critics of the country’s election. The site changed its logo to “The Persian Bay” in support of the Iranian protestors and reported that it helped a group of Iranians set up an anonymous internet site allowing users to uncensored and tracked web surfing.
BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin moderated the Q&A. At one point, after a discussion of how Hollywood must change its business model to survive in a post-censorship world, an audience member asked about independents. He described himself as an independent film and videomaker and said he didn’t have an MBA or the business skills to envision a new business model that would allow himself to make a living. Sunde’s response to him is below.
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Sunday, June 21st, 2009
In a “things are tough for everyone” reminder, Peter Bart and Michael Fleming in Variety report that Columbia Pictures’ Amy Pascal has put the new Steven Soderbergh movie, Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, into “limited turnaround” just three days before it was due to begin filming.
From the piece:
The move came after Pascal read the final draft delivered last week by Steven Zaillian and found it very different from the earlier scripts she championed. Pascal was uncomfortable enough with how Soderbergh’s vision had changed that she applied the brakes.
Soderbergh and Pitt’s CAA reps spent the weekend attempting to get another studio to play ball.
If a new financier doesn’t emerge by today, Columbia will re-examine options that include replacing Soderbergh (and hoping Pitt doesn’t ankle), delaying the film until Pascal and the filmmaker find themselves in synch on the script or pulling the plug.
According to the piece, either Warner Bros., the studio of the Oceans movies, or Paramount, which just saw the departure of John Lesher and Brad Weston from the executive suites, is hoped to provide a home for the film.
Soderbergh discussed Moneyball briefly in our interview about The Girlfriend Experience:
I remember hearing that you had been working on The Girlfriend Experience for a while, but, nonetheless, it did strike me as a kind of “zeitgeist film.” I thought of your K Street HBO series. Both that project and this one seemed to have a certain kind of elasticity in terms of being able to quickly absorb things going on in the broader culture. How do you create something that has that kind of space within it, or that is able to absorb things from the outside during shooting and postproduction?
It’s kind of a continuation of an idea that I started being enamored of around the time of Traffic actually, which was this fusion of real people and real stories with a fictional story. K Street was another attempt to smash these two ideas together, Bubble was a continuation of it and The Girlfriend Experience is another attempt. And Moneyball, the
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Saturday, June 20th, 2009
Artistic director, Sky Sitney, and team put together a very sophisticated program this year with lots of challenging and cinematically beautiful nonfiction work on exhibit for local audiences, visiting artists and industry guests in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland.
Late last night, the hardworking juries finished their deliberations and in an intimate and very emotional ceremony this afernoon, the winners of the 7th Annual AFI Discovery SILVERDOCS Documentary Festival Sterling Awards, with a total of $70,000 in combined cash and in-kind prizes, were announced:
The Cinematic Vision Award given to a feature film that exhibits excellence and innovation in storytelling presented by sponsor, Alphacine, went to Lee Chung-ryoul’s Old Partner.
The Writers Guild Screenplay Award presented to the writers of a feature-length film demonstrating excellence in screenwriting went to Nicole Opper and her subject, Avery Klein-Cloud, for Off and Running.
The Witness Award (in memory of Joey R.B. Lozano), awarded to a theatrical doc about human rights violations or social justice issues went to director, Landon Van Soest and producer, Jeremy Levine for Good Fortune. This was also the film’s world premiere.
The Music Documentary Award presented to a nonfiction feature that incorporates music most effectively went to an exuberant Luciano Blotta for festival fave Riseup. He posed in ferociously proud rock-star fashion with his brand-new guitar donated by Gibson as part of his prize. Even though it was a hard struggle to complete the film–five years shooting in Jamaica–Blotta said that he’s now dedicated to making nonfiction: “The best characters and the best stories are already out there.” The music jury also awarded an Honorable Mention to Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s Soul Power for outstanding use of archival footage.
The Sterling Short Film Award also gave an Honorable Mention to Michael Angus’ and Murray Fredericks’ 28-minute Salt from Australia, and the first prize went to Danish filmmaker Andreas Koefoed’s 12 Notes Down. He’s just graduated from film school–a fine start to a promising career.
Jurors Geoffrey Smith, Esther Robinson and Karina Rotenstein bestowed the Sterling World Feature Award to Mugabe and the White African by Lucy … Read the rest
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
Yesterday wrapped up the first day of the Open Video Conference, a two-day event being held at New York University Law School featuring speakers, screenings and events all centering around the topic of Open Video. The conference, which can be livestreamed on its website, is produced by the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Yale Internet Society Project, the open source video platform Kaltura, iCommons, and the Open Video Alliance.
What is Open Video? Quoting from the website:
Open Video is a broad-based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s much more to Open Video. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.
YouTube and other online video applications are rightly celebrated for empowering end-users; however, online video lacks some of the essential qualities that make text and images on the web such powerful tools for free speech and technical innovation. Email, blogs, and other staples of the open web rely on ubiquitous and interoperable technologies that have low barriers to entry; they are massively decentralized and resistant to censorship or regulation. Video, meanwhile, relies on centralized distribution and proprietary technologies which can threaten cultural discourse and innovation.
Open Video is about the legal and social norms surrounding online video. It’s the ability to attach the license of your choice to videos you publish. It’s about media consolidation, aggregation, and decentralization. It’s about fair use. In short, it’s about a lot of things, and that’s why this conference is going to be so exciting!
At its simplest level, then, this conference draws together technology folk, artists, filmmakers, legal scholars and cultural theorists who all believe in the desirability of an open source culture and non-proprietary standards when it comes to the publishing and dissemination of video on the web. But at the next level, there are diverse … Read the rest
Friday, June 19th, 2009
ALBERT (VOICED BY BARRY OTTO) AND THE ANGEL (VOICED BY GEOFFREY RUSH) IN DIRECTOR TATIA ROSENTHAL’S $9.99. COURTESY STRAND RELEASING.Being an independent filmmaker is difficult enough without adding the further challenges of animation, so it’s always a pleasure to see the emergence of a visionary talent like Tatia Rosenthal. The Israeli writer-director and stop motion animator was born in Tel Aviv in 1971 and explored some very diverse avenues before deciding on her current profession: Rosenthal was in the Israeli Defense Force for two years, spent a period of time at medical school and then studied photography in Paris for a year. She finally found her niche while studying for a BFA in Film & Television at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts when she discovered an aptitude for stop motion, and particularly for claymation. During her time as a student she made Breaking the Pig, based on the short story of the same name by Etgar Keret, and in 1998 she directed Crazy Glue, also based on a Keret short story. Between 2000 and 2005, she worked as an animator for Nickleodeon on shows such as Blue’s Clues, Wonder Pets and Piper O’Possum. In 2005, she made A Buck’s Worth, a 6-minute animation voiced by Philip Baker Hall and Tom Noonan.
A Buck’s Worth was, in fact, made as a proof of concept short for Rosenthal’s now completed first feature, $9.99. The claymation stop motion film is, like all of Rosenthal’s previous work, derived from tales by Etgar Keret, with this production synthesizing six of the short story specialist’s literary thumbnails into a cohesive panoramic narrative. The title comes from the price of a book promising the secret of happiness which is bought by Dave Peck, a man in Sydney, Australia, who feels that his neighbors – including an elderly man with an angel as a house guest, a man who neglects his fiancée in favor of two-inch-tall party animals, and a dent-ridden magician plagued by repo men – could benefit from the volume’s wisdom. The first Israeli-Australian co-production, Rosenthal’s film … Read the rest
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Now in its 15th year, the Los Angeles Film Festival has grown quite a bit since its days sharing the 2nd floor of a Hollywood mall with a Crunch Gym and a Virgin Megastore. Now settled into its relatively new Westwood digs, flanked on all sides by an impressive array of theaters (the Majestic Crest, the Mann Village and Mann Festival, and the Regent, to name but a few), and boasting enough star-studded galas and red-carpet events to jazz up even the most Gawker-fueled Angeleno, the festival begins its newest edition tonight with the screening of the indie comedy Paper Man, starring Jeff Daniels as a creative writer caught between deadlines, middle-aged frustration, a wife’s expectations, and oh yes, a spandex-clad imaginary “super hero” who pops up now and again to offer advice.
If Paper Man finds the festival safely in Sundance-approved American indie-comedy mode, its Gala events promise a slightly more, well, Hollywood approach to cinema. The phrase “film festival” and “Michael Bay” are rarely seen in the same sentence together, but this year LAFF continues its partnership with the mega-millioned director by snagging the premiere of his newest popcorn-moving blockbuster, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Tuesday night’s Centerpiece Gala continues the summertime throwdown, with the world premiere of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as gangster John Dillinger and Christian Bale as the FBI man hot on his trail.
There could easily be criticism levelled at the festival for the inclusion of such mega-watted works, who don’t exactly need a festival launching-pad to help either the films or their directors succeed. On the other hand, there’s no “Independent” in the Los Angeles Film Festival; just like Cannes, Toronto, Berlin and others, LAFF relies (or hopes to rely on) such higher-profiled works to bring out more audiences (and press), and hopefully triggering a spillover effect for other films. This year’s LAFF offers plenty of newer, more intriguing works as well, including the Narrative and Documentary Features Competitions, a spotlight on the innovative independent Mexican festival Ambulante (championed by Mexican stars Gael … Read the rest
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
It’s June, so that means it’s time for the Sundance Labs, where emerging writers, directors and composers hone their skills in preparation for their next films. This year, we’ll be featuring a number of Lab participants blogging from the Sundance Institute, and to launch the series we’re really happy to have actor and writer/director Keith Gordon (A Midnight Clear, Mother Night, Waking the Dead) conveying his experiences as an advisor to the Directing Fellows. In this first post, penned in the middle of his drive from L.A. to Utah, he writes about the reasons he goes back to Sundance year after year. Check back regularly this month for more reports.
I’m writing this from a Comfort Inn motel in St. George Utah. This will be my ninth or tenth summer at the lab (I can’t remember which!), and part of my personal tradition is driving from L.A. instead of flying. The road trip allows me to slow my brain, and shed my preoccupations with my own work. I love driving through the California desert, and southern Utah’s red rocks, before arriving at the verdant beauty of the northern Utah mountains where the Sundance lab takes place. I stop in St, George as a halfway point.
Before I heading up to the lab, I do my prep work; basically reading the eight scripts for the summer’s projects, and looking at the earlier short films or features made by the directors. I try to take careful notes on both; what I liked in the scripts and shorts, and what seem like potential problem areas. For example, if a script relies heavily on naturalistic acting, and the short is weak in that area, or just isn’t applicable, like a documentary, I make note to keep an eye on that area with that project.
Obviously I’ll personally respond to some scripts more than others, but I try hard to separate personal taste from recognizing the quality of the work. Sundance chooses very carefully from hundreds of submissions, so it’s very, very rare that I ever think a project is truly mediocre (maybe … Read the rest
