Ninja vs Penguin

Penguin August 29th, 2008

People are starting to realize that, when it comes to distribution, the internet changes the game.

“If you’re a business whose content is easily distributed and stolen digitally, you have to figure out ways to engage your [audience] on a deeper level — figure out how to get them to your site, offer them extras on a DVD, or benefits that are only available through purchase,” says Aaron Dignan, founding partner of Undercurrent, a new media consultancy.

- Wired

I’ve talked about how the game changes when distribution is free.

If you’re going to distribute, I would say host torrents. Most of the major sites (aside from Google Video) have caps on length or file size which makes viewing kind of tough. Watching a few minutes is not a big deal, but 1.5-2 hours, I want to kind of sit back. This is not to say you shouldn’t split it up and put it out there though.

If you want to monetize the net, you need to look at something like Dr. Horrible by Joss Whedon. He didn’t take TV and cram it into the internet. He looked at internet and came up with something that fit the medium. If TV barely fits online, film will be even harder.

Whedon invested about $300k and after an initial free run on the internet, charged for it on iTunes. The free buzz that was generated piqued people’s interest. Even now, you can still find it oh Hulu.

The lesson to be learned here is that he fit the product to the medium. But what’s important, is that Whedon controls and owns all the intellectual property rights. And that’s worth a whole lot. He make soundtrack CDs, a DVD sequels, or just continue to expand the storyline. He can do whatever he wants with it.

I can already here you say, “But it’s Joss Whedon! He already has a legion of rabid fans!” Fair enough. Let’s talk about Head Trauma.

Lance Weiler took Head Trauma his film and built events around them. He had the film scored live during the showing. He had the actors engage the audience. And a whole bunch of other crazy game type stuff.

Does it take a lot of work? Was it a huge gamble? Heck yeah. But he took the existing technologies and leveraged them to make some money.

Then there’s the traditional film festival route. But even that’s drying up. At Toronto, there’s reports that Steven Soderbergh had trouble moving Che with Benicio Del Toro in the titular role. And he’s not the only one.

“Filmmakers have to take a lot more ownership of their projects,” said Cynthia Swartz, a partner in the publicity firm 42West, which represents more than a dozen films showing at Toronto. She spoke of a growing need for even the most established filmmakers to baby their works through a festival apparatus that can keep a film alive when commercial distribution is slow to materialize.

- NYTimes

The game is changing and the good news is everyone’s trying to figure out the new rules as we go along. The key is to keep pressing on and taking those risks.

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Tags: Benicio Del Toro, Business, Che, Distribution, Dr Horrible, Filmmaking, Free, Head Trauma, Joss Whedon, Lance Weiler, NYT, Steven Soderbergh, Wired

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Penguin June 27th, 2008

Mark Gill, the CEO of The Film Department and former President of Miramax Films, declared provocatively, “Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling.” Speaking at the L.A. Film Festival’s Financing Conference, he starts with the bad news.

[O]f the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year– generally with budgets under $10 million–maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That’s one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.

He continues on to offer a harsh solution, the one that we know deep in our gut, but wish there was an easier path.

A good title should have many of the attributes that a movie needs to embody now:

*Succinct & Descriptive: the film has to lend itself to brief encapsulation. A high concept is no longer the thing that studio movies do and independent films shun. In this age of info overload, it’s crucial for every picture to have this. Without it, your odds shoot through the floor.

*Distinctive: not the same story we’ve heard five times before; something that at least takes the cliche and twists it; not something we get too much of somewhere else in our lives (Exhibit A: Iraq movies; who wants to see more of that mess? We already get too much of it every day in the news media).

*Provocative: something that cuts through the clutter, stands out, gets attention; not “So then Phoebe sat by her mother’s bedside, suffering in silence for eight weeks.” Give us incident, conflict, excitement, ideally something that hits a cultural nerve.

*Memorable: this is essentially an accumulation of the other traits, or sometimes altogether separate. It’s the avoidance of cotton candy. The possibility of resonance. Something sticky.

*Not too dark: these are very dark times, for audiences the world over. Audience enthusiasm for dark films is as low as I’ve ever seen it. There are a lot of reasons for this, of course. But the one I hear almost nobody articulating and everyone feeling is this: in the western industrialized world, wages haven’t even remotely kept up with productivity demands, and that stresses us out.
[...]
If you want to survive in this brutal climate, you’re going to have to work a lot harder, be a lot smarter, know a lot more, move a lot faster, sell a lot better, pay attention to the data, be a little nicer (ok, a lot nicer), trust your gut, read everything and never, ever give up.

- IndieWire

It’s stark sobering news and just a little discouraging. But just like everything else, if you’re in it for the money, you’re in it for the wrong reasons. My hope is that I’ll be able to continue learning and honing my craft so I can get the budget to make something worth seeing. That may take years, but like JFK said, “We don’t do it because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.”

-Penguin

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Tags: Business, Distribution, Filmmaking, Indie, Mark Gill, Money

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Penguin June 26th, 2008

From Wired: Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web:

[Android] is the re-creation of the Internet.
- Eric Schmidt

The internet is huge, powerful, awesome, useful; it’s been a boon for all content creators: filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers. Imagine where it would be if we understood this internet thing early on? The internet is still growing, it hasn’t even really come into it’s own yet. But as we try to capitalize on the internet, specifically through PCs, are we missing out on something bigger?

The mobile market is growing, adding 3 million users a year. When you leave your home, you bring 3 things: keys, wallet, cellphone. The iPhone, Blackberry, and other smart phones have made it so you can carry the internet with you. By extension, phones will eventually eclipse PCs in usage. I’m not saying they’ll replace PCs, but there are millions of people in the 3rd world who can’t afford a PC, but have a phone.

David Lynch said that as the screen size reduces, so does the experience. When I watch Youtube or any other online video, I have very little patience for the short or video to hook me. If there’s nothing compelling in the first 30-60 seconds, I move on. Cell phones are even smaller, so the attention span will be even faster. The fact that it’s mobile also changes the way things are utilized.

I love my Nintendo DS. I use it more than my Playstation 2. But the only game that I really play is Tetris. Tetris is a great game because each time I play is localized. There’s no ending, so I can stop playing at any time. I don’t have to worry about a story or where I need to go or do after a week or two of inactivity. I don’t have to worry about saving, so I can play while I wait for people and just close it when they come.

The mobile market will teach us new things about filmmaking. Video will be there, but we may not be able to tell the same sort of stories or tell them in the same way. But we can’t miss this opportunity.

Newspapers are dead. Magazines are dead. DVDs and CDs are dead. All have been replaced by the internet. And when information is free, we need to figure out another way to make money.

Google’s model is to build a killer app, then monetize it later
- Andy Rubin

Our killer app is our content. With so many content producers out there, it’s increasingly harder and harder to differentiate our product (our films) from the noise. It’s not just the stories that we tell, but how we tell them. When I’m browsing videos, I can instantly tell by the editing, titles, shot composition, or even color-correction if the video will be any good. As important as the story is, the presentation of that story has to be just as good, if not better. This requires resources in the form of money and talent. These are either financed, or we get that little break to begin to monetize our content.

How do we monetize content? I wish I knew. The MPAA doesn’t know, that’s why they’re holding on to DVD. The TV studios are starting to understand with things like Hulu, but the ad placeholders are annoying enough to force me back to bit torrent. My gut says the solution is to take it offline.

• Connect with your audience and provide them with an experience they can’t get online. It would be an extension of your film, bringing characters to real life or bringing set pieces for the audience to participate in.
• Make the DVD special, include things that can’t be copied for free.
• Other merchandise that ties into your film. Sometimes it’s t-shirts, sometimes it’s something else.

As indie filmmakers, we need to be pioneers. We need to understand where technology is bringing us and learn from what business and other content creators are doing with it. Yes we’ll make mistakes, but we make plenty already with our films.

-Penguin

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Tags: Android, Business, David Lynch, Distribution, Filmmaking, Free, Google, Internet, Mobile, NDS, Phones, Technology, TV, Wired

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Penguin March 5th, 2008

Even though he doesn’t come right out and say it, Lessig makes a great argument for Creative Commons License. In a world where distribution is implicit, copyright law seems like such an incredible failure.

As budding filmmakers, artists, musicians, you will need to understand the dimensional shift that has happened. You can try all you want to hold on to the past, but you will eventually die. Change is coming and the only hope is to embrace it.

How? Find something that’s better than free.

- Penguin

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Tags: Copyright, Creative Commons, Development, Distribution, Free, Larry Lessig, Presentations, TED

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Penguin March 3rd, 2008

Edge

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Immediacy — Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative asset.

Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room — as if it were preformed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot.

Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke.
Authenticity — You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don’t need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted.
Accessibility — Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up.

Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen?
Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect.

Findability — Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless.

- Penguin

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Tags: Business, Distribution, Free, Marketing

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Penguin December 8th, 2007

I was reading a post by Seth Godin about monopolies and it got me thinking about distributing your short film or indie movie in the current digital age.

First he talks about how the media companies got their monopolies in the first place.

There are three things that led to the monopolies we now enjoy:
1. The FCC limited the number of TV and radio stations in every market, allowing three networks to dominate TV and the record companies to dominate radio.
2. Copyright ensures that we can charge a lot for a book or a record… way more than it costs to make it.
3. The limited number of physical distribution outlets (record stores, movie theatres) guarantees that distributors with clout get more shelf space.

In the age of the internet, all three of these are gone.

1. Channels - We no longer have a limited set of channels that our media can go out on. Even though YouTube is the big daddy in video distribution, there are plenty of other sites that offer essentially the same features. Sure, they may not have the same number of views or hits, but have you seen how much garbage there is on YouTube? Your masterpiece will be lost amongst the chaff.

As important as YouTube is, I think all these services are just that, a service. You still need your own blog to act as the channel. Once customers know a consistent place to get their information or their entertainment, they’ll keep coming back. YouTube and all these other video sharing services are just the platform that enables you to create your own channel.

2. Copyright - Copyright is dead. It lost to Napster (which also died), BitTorrent, and all the other P2P applications out there. Although the media companies try and say that copying digital material is “stealing”, it’s technically only copyright infringement which is a civil law. But what does that mean for you? It means that the value of your work is the work, not the media it goes out on.

People are so used to getting free music or movies or TV that the idea of paying for it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Yet, people do. Look at Radiohead’s latest release, set your own price. And people paid for it when they didn’t HAVE TO. Those are the key words, “have to”. Radiohead can do this because their “channel” is consistent, we’ll talk more about this later.

3. Distribution - Copying 700mb, 4gb, is almost trivial today. The same reasons that make copyright dead enable distribution to cost essentially nothing: P2P. This isn’t to say that as an indie filmmaker you shouldn’t be pressing DVDs, but don’t make that the only option to get your movie into people’s hands. Especially if it’s your first movie. No one knows how good it’s going to be so no one’s going to invest the time in it without some sort of referral.

Have you heard the new album from Bill Frisell? Read Descarte’s Error? Seen Croupier? Didn’t think so. No time. Of course, if someone you trusted insisted that you spend the time to try them out, you might. Of course, if they were created by people you’d liked in the past, you’d be more likely to try them out. If you could try them out for free, you’d be more likely to try them out as well.

Conclusions

So, what does that mean to you, as an indie filmmaker? Stop trying to fit into the old model. It’s obvious that the old model is dying. Why jump on a dying boat? The new model is all about relationships. Your relationship with the customer.

Seth sums it up with these 5 points

1. Make it easy for your happy users to tell as many of their friends as possible.
2. Give away free samples early and often.
3. Get permission from anyone who likes what you do to follow up with anticipated, personal and relevant messages that benefit both of you.
4. If this requires changing what you make and what you charge for, fine.
5. If steps 1,2, 3 and 4 mess up your current business model, fine.

So here’s my little secret idea. Give away all your work until you’ve built up a fan base. That fan base could be 5, it could be 5000 people, but it’s a start. Prove to them that your product is worth consuming. Let them consume it on their time. Offer different options for the way they consume your product: YouTube or Veoh, BitTorrent in HQ, BitTorrent for iPod, DVD. And then price them accordingly.

For the physical product, differentiate it from the digital offerings. How can you make it different? How can you add value? Maybe a poster or an action figure. Maybe you get two DVDs so you can give one to a friend.

Even when you’re successful, I would say, give the first quarter of your movie away. Enough with the trailers that are a poor indication of story structure and what the film is actually about. Set them up so they will be interested in the product and people will eat it up.

- Penguin

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