A. For us, Purple Violets didn’t have the highest profile. I don’t know how well it did for the financiers. The problem I’ve had the last couple years is, you make these films, you get released in New York and L.A., and then you’re going to platform from there. A lot of times you don’t get beyond the second platform. But I’ve always had the ability to get pretty decent publicity for my films. You have, let’s say, people in St. Louis and Kansas City and Cincinnati who might see Selma Blair on Conan talking about the film, get really excited for it, and then it doesn’t get to that city. And by the time it comes out on DVD, they’ve forgotten about seeing Selma Blair and getting excited. What the iTunes thing enabled, in the moment when you have your greatest heat, publicity-wise, everybody who’s into your film can access your film. For the small movies, that’s probably the model that makes the most sense.
According to a YouTube spokesperson via email, “When we announced YouTube Rentals in January we said we would be creating a destination after more partners joined the program. To date, we have nearly 500 partners that have joined our Rental program.
YouTube’s online rental concept was introduced at the Sundance Film Festival in January and it looks like their model of presenting films currently running the festival circuit will continue. For example, you can rent Metropia (which has played extensively in Europe, at Fantastic Fest, and is now playing at Tribeca) on YouTube for $5.99.
Eric Kohn’s article in indieWIRE explores a new startup concept from Arin Crumley and Kieran Masterton.
OpenIndie.com will allow filmmakers to input their e-mail lists and discover locations with high audience demand. The grassroots strategy allows movies to reach their intended audiences with a community-based approach. Because the site is open-sourced, anyone can enter a location into the site and figure out the level of interest for specific movies.
Since 2007 the South by Southwest Film Festival (and its sister Music and Interactive events) have allowed attendees to suggest panel ideas and then vote on them using a web site called the PanelPicker. It’s not the only method by which the SXSW team selects what panels to present, but it formalizes the process of gauging audience interest in particular topics. They’ve continued to use the PanelPicker since its inception, so I’m guessing it’s a fairly useful tool for the programmers and it certainly makes the target audience feel included.
The PanelPicker for 2010 is currently open for audience voting, and for the first time I’ve submitted a panel idea: Short Film Secrets. I get a lot of questions from the creators of short films asking how the concepts in Film Festival Secrets apply to short films in particular. There are also a ton of questions out there about the distribution potential for short films, how they can be used to give your career a boost, and which festivals are best for short filmmakers. So that’s the panel I think SXSW should host, and I hope you like it well enough to vote for it.
What this is really about is taking advantage of Twitter and other communication tools to play a major part in the global conversation about your work. (If there isn’t one, you need to start it.) Piracy on Canal St. happened before the Internet, and illegal downloading happened before Twitter. As Abraham acknowledged, you can’t stop it. Beyond pointers to free downloads, people are going to be saying lots of things about your film that you don’t like, including bad reviews, off-brand descriptions of your work and possibly even lies or personal attacks. The power of the Internet is that you can be in on it. You can know it’s happening, you can respond to it and you can preempt it.
If you’ve read the book you know about my campaign against paper DVD labels. They are a cheap and easy way to make your burned DVD-Rs look vaguely professional, but they can severely alter video playback to the point of making a screener unwatchable. Google it up if you don’t believe me. The most compelling evidence comes from the Memorex Reference Guide for Optical Media:
Paper labels are not recommended for DVD discs. The expansion and contraction of moisture in the paper and the accumulation of heat in a DVD drive can alter the flatness of a disc enough that it falls out of the tilt specification and may not be able to be read.
This advice still hasn’t quite made it into the conventional wisdom – I still see plenty of paper labels on screeners – but when prompted, festival directors tell me that most of their bad screener copies are adorned with paper labels. There are, however, some alternatives that will get the job done and preserve the integrity of video playback. They are:
Hand labeling with a Sharpie marker. Low-tech and the least professional-looking option, perhaps, but reliable and very inexpensive. So long as you write legibly, don’t worry about a hand-labled disc hurting your chances of acceptance; the quality of your film will determine that, not the surface of the DVD on which it arrives.
The LightScribe labeling system can create good looking “printed” disc surfaces without ink or a printer. You’ll need a LightScribe-enabled DVD burner and DVD discs with LightScribe coating. Here’s how it works:
The laser inside a CD/DVD disc drive with LightScribe technology focuses light energy onto a thin dye coating on the label side of the disc. Only LightScribe media has this special coating. The light from the laser causes a chemical change in the dye coating that shows up on the disc. With laser precision, the drive renders the text and images that you created for the label.
Although the cost of LightScribe discs has come down quite a bit in recent years, they are still somewhat more expensive than regular DVD-Rs, even the ones with white printable surfaces (see below). Perhaps the biggest drawback to Lightscribe is the amount of time it takes to burn an image on the coated surface; I’ve seen estimates of a few minutes for a simple text label to up to half an hour for a complex image.
Printed DVDs, though more time-consuming and expensive than hand-labeled DVDs, can’t be beat for looks. Buying discs with a white printable surface isn’t much more expensive than the plain silver-surfaced media and the printers and ink are widely available. The big drawback here is expense; inkjet cartridges are pricey and notoriously fussy. If you’ve got a good label design and the funds to spend, however, this is definitely the best way to get great looking DVDs.
A cheaper alternative is a thermal transfer printer like the ones made by Casio; they won’t get you four-color printing but they will print on plain silver discs which are inexpensive and get you good-looking results.
Festival directors reading this can steal the idea outright, but filmmakers may need a little more creativity to make it work for them. Either way, it’s a clever and subversive way to boost your Twitter followers – the Atlanta Film Festival withheld the details about one of their parties, releasing the details only on Twitter. (You can find them at twitter.com/atlantafilmfest.)
Below is a quick snap of the party page of the Atlanta Film Festival’s program guide.
Things have been a bit quiet around here lately because it’s been all hands on deck for the launch of Festival Genius, B-Side’s new scheduling tool for film festivals. If you’re attending South by Southwest this year I encourage you to give it a whirl. Fest Genius not only helps you figure out what to see, it can automatically find and fix conflicts so you can see the maximum number of films possible in the allotted time.
Once you’re done tweaking your schedule to perfection, Festival Genius will even export your event calendar to Outlook, your iPhone, or other calendar program. Or go old school and print it out.
The Festival Genius for SXSW 2009 includes film, music, and interactive events (including panels and parties), so if you’re headed to Austin this coming week, please check it out.
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Things have been a bit quiet around here lately because it’s been all hands on deck for the launch of 