Zellner Brothers Fill Idiosyncratic Niche at Sundance
Christopher Kelly for the New York Times:
Then there’s the story of David and Nathan Zellner, filmmaker siblings from Austin, who prove that starry-eyed Sundance still embraces deeply idiosyncratic work made on a shoestring budget. After screening some of their short films at the festival, the filmmakers introduced their eccentric debut feature, “Goliath,” there in 2008. A comedy about an aimless thirtysomething (played by David) whose life begins to come unglued after his cat goes missing, “Goliath” received encouraging reviews and eventually secured a video-on-demand and DVD release through IFC Films.
But the brothers didn’t immediately book one-way tickets to Los Angeles. Instead, they chose to remain in Austin, where they continued to make shorts and direct music videos for their favorite local bands.
Sundance offers distribution “safety net” for its alumni
John Anderson at the New York Times:
a wormhole has opened up between Sundance Past and the Online Present. Through it, films seemingly lost in time — or swallowed up by the gaping maw of bad distribution deals, or no distribution deals — might find commercial redemption.
Thanks to a recent arrangement between the Sundance Institute, which operates the festival, and the Manhattan distributor New Video, six Web homes — Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, YouTube and SundanceNOW — are making Mr. Noonan’s movie, and any other eligible Sundance film, available for streaming online. The option is open to every film ever shown at the festival, or brought to a Sundance lab, or given a Sundance grant. Filmmakers don’t surrender their rights. They (17 so far, with thousands of potential participants) can opt to go with any or all of the half-dozen sites. They have, in essence, a guaranteed means of distribution.
Read Sundance Offer New Video Streaming for Films – NYTimes.com.
Navigating The Film Festival Maze
Angela Tucker at IFP’s Resources Blog:
In this new era of digital downloads, film festivals are one of the few ways that you can see your film with an audience. Film festivals are like colleges – you need to apply to a wide range. And if you find that you need to have that icky conversation where you have to turn a festival down because another one offers you a premiere that is more ideal for you film, there are worse problems to have.
Watch This: Sugar Rush Hour
Sugar rush hour from Bianca Consunji on Vimeo.
This is admirable filmmaking: a documentary exactly as long as it needs to be, and not a second more. There are filmmakers out there who would try to make a feature-length doc out of this but documentarian Bianca Consunji sums up a man’s life in two exquisite minutes. I don’t know if this was submitted to film festivals but it could play a ton of them.
Louis C.K. self-distributes standup special
Peter Kafka at AllThingsD covers the recent release of Louis C.K.’s standup concert directly from the comedian’s web site.
The new twist here is the way his experiment changes video “windows” — which determine when shows and movies show up on different outlets. By going direct-to-fanfirst, C.K. doesn’t shut off his chance to end up working the Big Media Companies he says he doesn’t want to work with. He’s just making them wait. So the people who really love him can get it right away, and he can capture almost all of that value in the transaction.
Kafka points out that there’s plenty of room for traditional distributors to get in on the action after the first “fan-only” release:
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a million people pony up for the concert — basically, that is, everyone who watches his (great) show on News Corp.’s FX channel. (News Corp. owns this site, too.)
That’s a wildly optimistic estimate, and it will still be a fraction of the people that HBO, which has some 28 million subscribers, can reach. You can fault Big Media for a lot of things, but it remains pretty good at rounding up Big Audiences.
Filmmakers looking for validation in the DIY distribution model need look no further – the more experiments like this that we see, the more likely it is that distributors will look seriously at filmmakers who prove their worth by finding their own audience first and building a platform for bigger things later. While distributors have traditionally viewed DIY distributed films as damaged goods (perceiving the sales already out the door as missed opportunities for them), the model of building on previous success may become more common. Let’s hope so.
Film Festivals: Sex, Booze, & Networking
At some point in the near future I may write up a semi-serious response to this video, but for now – just watch.
2 New Dates for “Top Ten Tips” Seminar
The feedback I got from the previous seminar date was that there needed to be evening and weekend options. Ask and ye shall receive: now you can attend the “Top Ten Tips for the Film Festival Circuit” seminar on Wednesday December 14th at 9pm and on Saturday December 17th at 3pm.
Check out the full description of this 90 minute seminar with live Q&A on the seminars page.
The Sundance Slotting Wall
A rare glance behind the scenes at the Sundance Film Festival from Roger Tinch. If this wall works anything like the scheduling walls I’ve seen at other festivals, each sticky note represents a film in a particular venue at a particular time. Unsurprisingly, this one is a bit more complicated than most of the others I’ve seen.
