Film's equivalent of the great song?

When comparing the music and film worlds, and how they might react to digital, build fans, etc., people often talk about the differences - one being that film doesn’t have the equivalent of the single track, the one song. Many musicians have been able to do things like give away a free track to get you to sign up with your email for updates from them, or give away a track to entice you to buy the album, etc. I’ve been thinking about this today and think film does have the equivalent - it’s what Peter Dekom calls “moments” or those things that people see and remember, tell their friends about, laugh about over the virtual water cooler. You know, like when Napoleon Dynamite’s uncle hits him in the face with a steak, your favorite line from Monty Python or perhaps the most infamous - “you lookin’ at me?” moments. These are our equivalent to the great single.

This is obvious, of course, and I’m simplifying things a bit, but oddly, I’ve not heard it discussed at all (clue me in to what I missed in the comments). I think the problem for film is that we’ve bastardized our moments, chiefly through trailers. Trailers often include such moments, but they’re mashed up in a hodge podge that actually does disservice to the film (okay, yes, it sells films or Hollywood wouldn’t use them, but watch this to see how bad they are). It would be better to just set those moments free - literally, and hope they go viral (or do more than hope with some strategy, but that’s for another post). I’m amazed that we still don’t have video ringtones - my cell should be able to “ring” to Singin’ In the Rain with a video clip of the performance. Perhaps this would go viral and then some kids would rediscover it and pay to watch it (ok, they’d pirate it...but because they don’t have a credit card). I’d love to be able to share quite a few moments from indie films with my friends, but the trouble is, I can’t easily find them on the filmmaker’s websites unless they are buried in some trailer. I’m not taking the time to tell my friends to forward to timecode of 1:50 for the funny part, or poignant part, because I know they won’t bother. Filmmakers should be releasing these moments online, and early on. Sure, there’s an argument to saving the best ones for the theater (or DVD), but I think most of us can use all the free PR possible. It’s much more likely that these moments will be traded virally than your stupid trailer. If your moments are good enough, people might pay for the film - IF you make that easy for them as well. If you’re lucky, these moments might actually go viral and get seen more often than your film, but that’s not bad either - I’d be happy being the filmmaker with the one moment that hit 3 million views on YouTube - as would my future investors, I imagine.

Anyway, just some quick thoughts - a rarity around these parts (meaning my long winded blog). Whatcha think?

FutureThink - Virtual production

My recent trip to the Edinburgh International Film Festival was grand. As I posted here, I was speaking on several panels for the festival, Shooting People and BAFTA Scotland. I really enjoy these panels, because I almost always learn about new things from the other panelists or we talk about something that really gets my head thinking about new directions in the film/media sphere. This happened once again on the panel called FutureThink, where I was joined by Susan Kemp, Co- Director of Film In the Public Space at the University of Edinburgh, Ted Cawrey of Olswang and the filmmaking team of Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm who had a film called The Red Machine premiering at the film festival.

The panel was about new directions in film and media, and Steph and Alec smartly pushed us to focus more on the future of storytelling than on distribution, etc. The conversation inspired me to launch a new series of columns on this blog, called FutureThink, where I'll pay homage to Edinburgh by trying to write more frequently on emerging trends and how they might impact indie films.My hope is to keep these shorter than my usual (quite lengthy) posts, but that also means I won't be analyzing these things too in depth, just throwing out some ideas in hopes you'll give me more in the comments.

Up first, virtual production and/or virtual performance. Stephanie brought this up as an area of great interest to her, and while I had thought about it before, I hadn't really thought about it as much as she has. So, what is it? Well, I think there's many meanings to the term, and all of them are worth thinking about, but here we're speaking about virtual performance - when actors are playing characters through digital renderings, and entire worlds of characters might be produced with green screens, digital tech and some fancy facial muscle techniques - think Avatar, the Hobbit, etc. We've all seen these great creations where an actor like Andy Serkis gets transformed into Gollum or King Kong. Stephanie pointed out how different it is for an actor, and for the director, when doing such productions. That's a bit obvious, of course, but I found it cool to think about how this changes the nature of acting. Stephanie likened it to having to go back to all your black-box theater skills. While this is all done through technology, it also kinda gets us back to where the director can focus on working with the actor to create a story world - which perhaps can lead not just to new characters, but also new ways of telling stories.

The problem has been (perhaps not a capital P, problem) that such technologies have been and still are very expensive and often proprietary. Like all technology, however, such effects are already getting cheaper and it's not hard to imagine that within a couple of years almost any indie will have the tools on their laptop to create not just amazing CGI but also whatever character they want. This may be with actual actors doing some virtual acting, or it could be completely computer generated. In fact, there's already been many people doing this, creating machinima, or films created in Second Life, where people used their avatars to create an entire Western, for example. That was way back in 2006, by the way, so I'm sure it's come along much further now.

As these costs come down, indies will undoubtedly use them to their advantage, but it's interesting that while this phenomenon is nothing new, this was the first panel I've been on where it ever came up in relation to indie and arthouse films. I attend a lot of festivals and conferences, and while I am sure there's been a few (I know SXSW had at least one), I'm surprised it doesn't come up more often. Sure, the technology is a bit in the future, but I'm also worried that many indies are so focused on the current state of things that this sector is bypassing them altogether. None of my indie friends ever mention machinima, yet some of the most interesting films I've seen have been virtual mash-ups, often created by young folks. I meet a ton of actors, but very few who aspire to learn the skills necessary to be the next Andy Serkis. Some theorize that this trend will mean the death of stars, but I doubt it - if anything I imagine a world of fewer stars, but with the same ones playing multiple virtual roles - kinda like how the voice-over world is dominated by just a handful of stars now. I get in plenty of debates about the future of copyright and piracy, but let me tell you - the fights over piracy of celebrity's images will put them all to shame. Once we have fake digital Bogart's running around in every film, Hollywood (every aspect from the stars to the agents to the home office) is gonna sh-t a virtual brick (performed by which actor I wonder?). What does this mean for documentary, when it becomes even harder to be sure that was really so and so big whig talking, not some avatar? Think that there's been a loss of industry jobs due to runaway production and ever-cheapening costs? Just wait until a farmed-out team of teenagers in China or Mexico is being hired via Amazon's Mechanical Turk to produce entire sets and act out most of the motions for pennies on the dollar....I think you get the point, there's a lot of interesting things to discuss, but very few people seem to be having the discussion (if I'm wrong, please point me to some resources in the comments).

Of course, it's not all bad - as I said, this might also lead to some cool new storytelling as well. I, for one, am excited at the prospect that much of this work can become cheap and digital, leaving storytellers to focus on story, once again.

Future Think Edinburgh

I'm off to Edinburgh for the Edinburgh Film Fest, which remains one of the better fests out there and which is jam-packed with good panels and activities. I'll be speaking at a few events with the film festival. First, this Sat at 1pm is a panel called "Free for all" and you can guess what that's about - free, piracy, etc. I'm really looking forward to this one, as there's a rep from the MPAA there, and while I am sure he is nice and great, I'm also sure we'll disagree on this issue! I can't find a link online for this one, guess it's too hot a ticket.

Then on Sunday, I'll be speaking for Shooting People as part of their Digital Bootcamp. From the website: "For filmmakers, the internet is changing everything. Shooting People presents this half day session designed to help you and your film navigate the rapidly evolving digital and web landscape. The session is aimed at those for whom these tools are somewhat of a mystery, and know they need to understand them. Alongside a presentation from new models in funding and distribution expert Brian Newman, and a thorough case study of The Last rites of Ransom Pride by festival filmmaker Duncan Montgomery, the event is a comprehensive survey of resources, websites, social media, systems, tracking, crowdsourcing, funding, distribution, exhibition, outreach … and more."

Monday the 21st has me with Shooting People, BAFTA and the Fest again for Short-Sighted, where I'll lay out more of my thoughts on how to make a living by incorporating free into your business model. There's a lot of other great speakers as well, and I look forward to learning some new things. Immediately after that is FutureThink (Mon 21st) - a discussion on the future of cinema. From the catalogue online: " a look at the future: Where will our industry be in 10-20 years time? The world will always want visual stories but how will we view them and where? Will the rise of digital technology mean that cinemas become obsolete?" I'm pretty sure they won't, but I think there's lots of other changes in store, so it should be a good discussion. 

Anyway, there's a lot of other great speakers, so if you'll be in Edinburgh check out those links and look me up in town. 

20under40

I mentioned recently at the bottom of a post that I've been posting less frequently because I've been very busy with my "writing time" on editing a chapter that was selected to be part of the new book - 20Under40: Reinventing the Arts and Arts Education for the 21st Century. 20<40, as I'll call it from here on out, is a great project put together by Edward Clapp and you can learn more about the other authors here, and even go ahead and pre-order the book here. My chapter is about "Inventing the future of the arts" and you can see a short summary of my idea in an old post here. Since the time of that post, I consolidated some of the ideas and now have just seven ideas (as opposed to 10) that I will be writing about. I'm in some intense editing now, but should be done soon....if I stop procrastinating by writing other things, like this blog post!

Now this might seem like a shameless plug, because it is, but I'm also plugging this because I think it would be a great project to duplicate in the film and media arts world. I once suggested 20 leaders under 40 in the film world, but I'd really love it if some reader volunteered to help put together a similar project for film. Perhaps an open call for ideas, maybe not a book but a film or robust online and video project...who knows, but it would be great to hear some of the good ideas out there, especially those coming from voices we don't often hear (which aren't always under 40...I know). If anyone is interested in taking this idea up, get in touch. In the meantime, check out the 20<40 site for updates on events, the book, other authors and what not.

ATL-PushPush Distrib/Fundraise 101

Just back from my old stomping grounds of the ATL, where I did a few private consults and one big, long workshop for filmmakers at PushPush Theater. The experience, for me at least, was great. My slides are embedded after the fold, but first a few words of thought on Atlanta. Having been there, I'm not telling anyone who lives there anything new when I say there's some serious talent in that town. Sure, we all know about Tyler Perry, Rainforest Films, Turner and all that, but the ideas I heard from several producers/directors were pretty incredible. I also like the fact that they have great resources in town like GSU's DAEL center, the Atlanta Film Festival, a top-notch new media/gaming sector and with an amazing tax incentive, there's arguably few places better to shoot right now.

They also have innovative thinkers like PushPush Theater. Yes, I am biased as they paid me to consult and to speak, disclaimer enough? That said, I don't know of many other theater companies that are thinking about community and creativity like they are doing. They aren't just a theater company. Sure, lots of people open their doors to improv, to people showing film screenings, to training, to actors who might want to go from stage to screen. PushPush, however, is going further and thinking about how their projects can become multi-platform transmedia productions. This kinda started with a program they did called Dailies, which helped a group of filmmakers workshop a series of short film experimentations into what became Pop Film's The Signal.

Whatever, whenever, yesterday

I had the distinct pleasure of touring the Whitney's Biennial last night from 10:30pm until 12:30am today. I could have stayed as late as I wanted, or come back at 6am before going to work (no, that would never happen to me). I wasn't the only one - hundreds of people were lined half-way around the block to join me, as the Whitney was open for 24 hrs a day from Wed at 12am until tonight, Friday, May 28th at Midnight. Turns out this was part of an artist's work - a proposal from Michael Asher to keep the museum open 24/7 throughout the Biennial. The idea was to challenge how we perceive the museum and who goes to the museum (this is my very short summation) and I thought it was brilliant. Being open those hours, that is, the Biennial is another discussion all to itself for another time!

It was great to see so many different people at the museum at that time. I was naive enough to think we'd be able to see the museum in a less crowded state - it was more packed than at any time I've visited any museum. Young, old, stoned, amped on coffee or other drugs and stone sober - all enjoying art at a distinctly non-art time. Or at least from the perspective of the "official" art institutions. While many of the artists I know produce their art at all hours of the day, and I partake of art, in my own way from magazines, online, on film, on tv, at parties..., at almost hour, the museum and gallery world think we should only see art Tues - Sat from 11-5. Or every day except Tuesday. Or, sorry, yes our website says we're open today, but we just didn't bother to open. Or, I'm sorry, how dare you think you could look at art on a weekend in August? Yes, we advertised our show as having just opened, there was a review in the G-D NYTimes, but we just assumed you'd never want to come look at it this weekend.

That's the usual modus operandi of the art world. It drives me nuts, as you can probably tell. There's no wonder that it struggles to survive and to be relevant to anyone outside a select few. They assume their audience will attend on their schedule, thinking they know who their audience is...or just thinking they can't be bothered to show up so the masses can see their gallery. I've been in NYC long enough not to show up on a Tuesday at MoMA, but how many tourists make that mistake daily? How many upstart galleries have lost my attendance and possible future business, forever, because they weren't open, contrary to their website after I biked from Manhattan to some industrial stretch of Brooklyn to see their latest show?

There might have been a time when your audience consisted of polite society who can arrange a visit to your gallery or museum at 3pm, but legions of your potential audience today have jobs that keep them there well past 8pm nightly, not at your institution. Sure, you're main donors, or clients, aren't those riff-raff, but you're focusing on one demographic to your peril, and perhaps that of the entire field. Today's art consumer (that's all we are anymore....) has been bred on anytime, anywhere access to their entertainment and culture. They want to consume it when they want, where they want, on what device they want, and they wanted to see it yesterday. While we think of this as mainly true for music and the moving image, this spirit of anytime access is bleeding into other aspects of our lives. This isn't a sense of entitlement, but rather the new way things work - if anything, the entitled view is that of the gallery owner who can't be bothered to wake up and represent his/her clients to potential buyers or new lovers of that work before 11am. Sorry, things don't work that way anymore.

I don't expect every gallery or museum to stay open 24/7. A friend of mine used to work in the upper ranks of a major museum and he pointed out that a fair trade-off would be to just stay open until 10 every night, but that union rules would never allow for it. I do think, however, that arts institutions need to realize that the anywhere/anytime/yesterday phenomenon affects not just music, but the art world as well. We need to re-think our established notions of when we should be open, how our calendars should be organized and who our audiences are (and when they might visit). Programmed smartly, 24 hours for three days could bring new audiences and new revenue to multiple institutions. Perhaps not all of your clients head to the Hamptons for all of August and you're missing a big sale. Perhaps 150 of us would vote to come watch a 2am movie if you gave us a crowd-sourced way to plan this in advance.

Or perhaps I just had too much fun at the Whitney after-hours and am a bit crazy today....


Editors note - for those few of you who actually read this blog often, I'm sorry that my posts have become so infrequent. I've been writing a chapter for an upcoming anthology, more on that soon, and that's taken most of my writing time. I hope to be back more frequently soon.

50,000 films is a great thing, post on The Wrap

My first post for The Wrap just went online. In it, I discuss how the ever increasing flood of films is a good thing. Say what? Aren't they just crowding up the house? I don't think so, and explain why. Let me know your thoughts, either here or at The Wrap (and expect some more zany thoughts there soon).

For those too lazy - here's the article, pasted below:

For a few years now, the topic du jour at panels and conferences has been whether or not the sky is falling on the film business. Most panelists seem to settle on a common culprit contributing to the malaise: Too many films being made.

Case in point: During a recent conversation between Ted Hope and Chris Hyams, hosted by TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman, the panelists bemoaned this fact, and when Waxman commented that more than 3,000 films were submitted to Sundance last year, Chris Hyams quickly interjected that the Sundance submission number grossly underestimates the real numbers. Based on his analysis of unique, individual entries from the thousands of film festivals that used B-Side’s Festival Genius software to run their websites, Hyams estimated that as many as 50,000 films were made in 2009.

Audible gasps were heard in the room, and judging by the questions and comments from the audience, on Twitter and from those watching the streaming feed, it was clear that everyone agreed that 50,000 films might be 49,850 too many.

My thoughts on 1 of Ted's 38 reasons indie film's failing

Ted Hope has a new post up at his truly interesting blog listing 38 ways the independent film industry is failing today. I would be depressed with just these 38 reasons, but I’m sad to report this is the second time he’s posted 38 reasons, as he had already posted 38 equally interesting things before. I’m sure I could post 24 more to get him to 100 total, but instead I’d like to add just a few thoughts on number 25 of his 38 failures, because I think it’s one of the biggest failures we face as an industry:

25. We know incredibly little about our audience or their behavior.  We spend so much money making our films without really knowing who are audiences are, why they want our product, how to reach them, or how they behave, or how they are changing.  Does any other industry think so late about their audience?  Does any other industry do so little research into their audience?  Shouldn't we all be sharing what info we have?

This one has always boggled my mind. I’ve written about it before, and will likely do so again, but I’m continually amazed at how little we think about and how little we know about our audience. Whenever I meet with filmmakers about their script or project, I ask them about their intended audience, and as you can guess, most don’t have much of an answer. Sometimes they’ll say something like “everyone who loves indie films” or perhaps they’ve progressed to “white males 25-34” or something. A few have films that have clear niche audiences - Nascar fans - great, or - Nascar fans who only watch at home, don’t tell their friends and drink fancy beer - even better, a true niche. Very few have built any fan base already, either for their films or themselves, which is mind-boggling in an era of Facebook, Twitter and plain-old email lists. I understand the whole “I’m an artist, not a marketer” thing, actually, but in this day and age, to not think about your audience in advance is not just poor business, it ignores the fundamental changes that have hit every business and every art form - that audiences are more participatory, so you can’t just try to engage them with a product and no conversation.

I could go on and on about this, but what drives me even crazier is how little we, as an industry, know about our audience(s). Excuse the artistes, but talk to almost anyone else in the business and you frankly won’t get a much savvier answer. Sure, many distributors have been doing this long enough to have some audience research and staff who know a bit about marketing (BTW, this is some, not all, distributors), but very few have done any real, in-depth research into our audiences and their behavior. Those that have done this tend to keep it private - it’s pretty valuable info to have when your competitors have barely thought about looking into it in the first place. As a field, we have very little to work with. How many festivals survey their audiences for real data? How many can break these results on a per-film basis? B-Side collected a fair amount of data on film-going habits, but their database is now part of another company (Slated), so do any of those fests have their portion of that data (I honestly don’t know)? Why aren’t film schools, business schools or all these nonprofits that supposedly represent us doing some data analysis? I have lots of questions like these, but I think you get the point - we need much better research into the audiences for indie films and for our individual films. I can think of a few quick, partial solutions to this problem -

1. Filmmakers - collect data on your audiences, from everywhere you can, and share it with others. Anonymize it, of course, but share it whenever possible.
2. Savvy computer geek film people - build open source platforms for the sharing of this data.
3. Nonprofit service orgs - partner with researchers to study indie audiences. I suggest using these folks, but I’m sure with a grant you could study this with just about anyone - and share it with your members (a reason for them to join!).
4. Festivals - survey your audiences and share this data with filmmakers. It will also help you when speaking to sponsors.

I’m sure there’s better ideas out there, so share them in the comments.

Some things I'd like to know

To my mind, the biggest problem facing the indie film field is the lack of transparency around the numbers. Which numbers? All of them. Until we know a few basic things, it's really hard to say what's wrong, what might work, what has worked and whether anything really is wrong at all. Everyone talks about box office, but we all (should) know that those are really the least important numbers. If we had better data available, publicly, on VOD, deal points, DVD sales, etc., then we could build a more robust indie film sector. We don't know these numbers for a lot of reasons - many people make their living off keeping these things confidential, but some of them we just don't know because no one who should be asking them has bothered - ahem, that would be you, lackadaisical film industry trades (all of you). So here's twenty things I'd like to know, in no particular order.

The Chicago Producers Series Slides

As promised, here's the slides from my presentation at the IFP Chicago Producer's series.

Chicago inventing Future Speech

View more presentations from Brian Newman.

Inventing the Future in Chicago

I'm headed to one of my favorite US cities this weekend - Chicago - to give a speech for the IFP Chicago Producer's Series. It looks like a great line-up. Lance Weiler will be joining me, as well as some great speakers like Pat Aufderheide, Gordon Quinn and many others, including quite a few I've never met, which is great because I'll likely learn a lot of new things. My personal favorite is the panel with the one speaker I'll be positively gushing about - Mike Stoklasa on his near-perfect reviews of Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, which I've been raving about.  While there, I'll be speaking about innovation in media - something I just spoke about at DIY Days (the video is now up and embedded below), but I don't plan to recycle the entire speech. Instead, I will speak a bit about the current state of the film business - showing some examples of what is working well for filmmakers and other DIY artists, and then speculate a bit about the possible future of the field (cribbing a bit from my last talk).  I'll be speaking a fair bit about participatory culture, crowd-sourced production, funding and distribution and transmedia practice. You know, all those fun, trendy things to speak about these days.

So, if you live in Chicago, or anywhere nearby in the Midwest, stop by and say hello - or at least watch Mike's talk, if not mine. Hope to see you there.

Here's the video from DIY Days:


Brain Newman - DIY Days from ZAFFI Pictures on Vimeo.

Storming the gates, or can't we all just get along

Let’s all storm the fences. I’m mad as hell and I just can’t take it anymore. The tyranny of the gatekeepers has stifled all creativity and I can’t find any innovative or creative films. A secret cabal of festival programmers, distributors, IndieWire editors, producers reps, broadcasters, Apple employees, NYTimes reporters and theater owners is holding back the flood of original, amazing content.

Ok, anyone who’s worked in this business for more than say, a year, will laugh hysterically at the cat-herding thought of corralling that many movie geeks towards doing anything other than watching cinema. They can’t agree on what’s good and what sucks, much less what to suppress and what is genius. They seem to all agree on avoiding sunlight, but beyond that, no such cabal of gatekeepers exists folks.

Alright, there’s some truth to the whole gate-keeper argument. There is someone (many someone’s, actually) who has to weed through those 3000+ submissions to Sundance, and someone else who has to weed through the accepted films to figure out which ones might find an audience in New York City, much less in Topeka. You can choose to call them gate-keepers, but I like to think of them as shit-strainers - a big industry protecting me from all the crap out there. These poor souls watch more than 500 films a year on average, only ten or twenty of which might be worth me ever seeing, and for all that thank-less work, all they get is a bunch of name-calling in the blog-o-spheres (I could link to ten articles in the last week that are somehow related to this, but you’ve probably read them already).

We should be giving them a medal.

Possible attack on Attack of the Clones reviewer

Mike Stoklasa of Red Letter Media just recently released his new review of Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. If you haven’t already seen his Phantom Menace review, you’re missing one of the best things to come out of the interweb pipes. Seriously, don’t click these links unless you are ready to spend a good three hours of your day watching both reviews back to back (each review consists of about 10 episodes of 10 minutes each). I’ve written about him before - how I truly think he’s single-handedly created one of the more innovative new art forms online; I hope it changes film criticism as we know it and I think watching it gives the average creative viewer about a hundred new ideas for and/or about story-telling, criticism and new directions for remix, mash-up, copyright and creative practice to name just a few things. But I’m not writing this to help you discover the latest viral video sensation - the web does that fine without my help - but to point out that we’re in danger of missing out on more of these genius pieces because of fear. As both TechDirt and MTV have mentioned in the past few days, Mike is terrified to death that Lucas will sue him (to death) and is contemplating an end to his creative practice.

As reported in the MTV interview:
"...not 48 hours after its initial posting Saturday night, the first segment of the review was taken down by the popular video sharing service, "ostensibly" after a copyright claim by Cartoon Network.
"Was it really Cartoon Network or not? I don't know," Stoklasa sighed. "There was someone who started a rumor that it was a specific YouTube user who had copied the first part over to his channel and then put a link to his Web site in the description. But YouTube doesn't tell you who flagged it."

He goes on to say:

“The thing is, I'm no lawyer. But I had someone actually talk to a copyright lawyer, and they didn't know what to make of the reviews. It's a new thing, You can get away with using a clip from a movie for the purpose of review or commentary, but can you dissect an entire film like that? There's commentary and it's part satire [because of the character, Mr. Plinkett] and part review and part educational as well because there's elements of filmmaking insights."

This is how our copyright system works against creativity - because the rules aren’t always clear and fair use can only be defended if sued, the mere fear of a lawsuit stops people from innovating. Now, I think he has a clearly winnable case, and it’s far from clear that he’s received even the slightest legitimate threat of a suit, but the point is - this is clearly creative work that should be encouraged, not stopped (I can see why Lucas might not like it, but that’s tough luck, kid). Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi have done some great work clarifying fair use, as has Michael Donaldson and many others. I’m sure if needed, some team that includes them and probably the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) can step up to his defense - and they will likely win. In the comments section to the TechDirt post, Nina Paley weighed in saying we should start a legal defense fund to support Red Letter Films if he is sued. So I, like Nina the filmmaker and Mike Masnick the writer am just chiming in to say - yo, Stoklasa - keep making review films, don’t worry about lawsuits - if they come, I’ll join the Kickstarter campaign to fund your defense. A few other things - yo, filmmakers and critics - follow his lead and make more creative reviews like this - a flood of them might help  - a tsunami of remix reviews is a hard thing to stop. Yo- film festivals - program his reviews in their entirety as midnight screenings. The audience reaction will likely be amazing - and it will prove you can program something that's available completely for free everywhere, and still make money!

Here's part one of the new review:

My advice to the new DocNYC Fest

The best news of the last couple of weeks was the launch of the new documentary film festival in NYC - DOC NYC. The child of Thom Powers, Raphaela Neihausen, John Vanco and Harris Dew, this festival promises to be a great new addition to the fest scene. This isn't news - Indiewire and thousands of others reported it, but I received an email invite to give feedback on the festival at a meeting this week, and because I’m in Orlando on the Shorts jury for the Florida Film Festival, I'll miss the opportunity. The founders asked for feedback anyway, and while I think they meant privately via email, I figure it can't hurt to tell everyone what I think - because it's all positive and because it’s really advice for all film festivals.

First - congrats to the team - you've assembled a great group, have central locations and an amazing board/advisory board. The overall response seems positive and the goals of the organization look great. While I am the first to say the last thing the world needs is another film festival, we do need a good showcase of documentaries in NYC - something devoted just to the form, unlike the other (great) fests in town. I also really like that you are saying it won’t just be film, but also other formats, which is great. So, here’s my thoughts on the fest and what I think you need to do to have great success and impact on the field.

Premieres - In your press release and in the early articles on the festival you mention that not every film in competition must be a premiere - stay true to your word. The very last thing we need is any new fest demanding premieres. This will be tough - mainly with the press - who are probably more responsible for premiere-itis than any single group - but it’s always tempting to let premiere status decide what gets in when you have a lot of good things to choose from. Film A is a premiere, Film B isn’t....so you program Film A. Don’t fall into this trap. Furthermore, be prepared to go an extra step - be willing to show a film even if it played somewhere else in NYC already. I know, this one is tough to swallow, but I promise you, if it’s a good film and there’s a good conversation around it, you’ll sell it out.

Ken Price, Bukowski, Curation and Film

This post is a little off-topic, but I think it ultimately relates to film - in terms of curation and one idea that might work for some films. Over the past few weeks, I've been enjoying what is probably one of the best curated shows in New York right now - Josef Albers/Ken Price. The main show is at Brooke Alexander in SoHo, Manhattan, and it arguably gets the curation award (photo at left is from their site). In short, the curator Brooke Alexander once heard that the only piece of art that Ken Price kept in his home was a piece by Josef Albers. This led to a wonderful pairing of the works of the two at his gallery and in a stroke of genius, he was able to convince 4 other galleries to display additional works by either Price or Albers at the same time. The pairing is incredible and allows you to think about each artist, their work and art history in ways you hadn't expected before. Roberta Smith, writing in the NYTimes, said of the show "As far as I’m concerned this superb show could be maintained in perpetuity, courtesy of the Dia Art Foundation or some such. It should be required viewing for anyone hailing from the fraught curatorial profession (and its over soon, so catch it now). Its overarching theme is that abstraction is reality-based, distilled from lived experience, and actualized through highly personal approaches to process and materials. It’s a lesson in life as much as art." I think it should be required viewing for any curator, not just fine art curators, and that includes film programmers and curators as well.

The trifecta that broke the internet as we know it

That deafening applause you hear is not from Durham, NC post NCAA, but rather from the MPAA and the representatives of other major content providers on both sides of the Atlantic cheering on what may be looked back upon as the trifecta week that broke the internet as we know it. Three momentous things took place simultaneously this week that combined are more important than most people realize - the Ipad was released, the UK looks poised to pass Debill and a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC doesn’t have the right to regulate broadband, thus possibly ending its ability to enforce network neutrality.

Nail number one. Lots of people went and got themselves an Ipad yesterday, and many in the film industry are debating whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for independent creatives. Big media is rejoicing, as they think this will be their savior - allowing them to put the genie in the bottle and start selling their content to huge profits again. Old world computer geeks can’t seem to stand the closed, one-way nature of the Ipad (consumption), but their grandma’s seem to love it. Indie lovers think that wow, now they can make an application and actually make money for their content, or get their films seen by more people on the Netflix API. I have serious doubts that indies will be served well by these developments. Sure, a lucky few will make cool applications off the API to serve up and charge for their content, but most of us will be stuck where we’ve always been  - begging some gatekeeper to get our content onto the most used platforms. More importantly, this is a consumption machine - no USB drive, so you can’t even bring in your own content easily, no camera in front, sanction needed from on-high in Apple HQ, yadda yadda. My personal hope - this is like AOL in the early days. Everyone will flock to the ease of use of the walled garden for awhile and then realize they can do much more outside of it. That’s probably a best-case scenario, because this thing is popular and it’s hard to convince a public looking at something cool that there could be something even cooler than what they have. I can’t blame them, and we’ll see if perhaps this becomes the consumption machine for those things created on laptops, etc., including those creations of independents. In the meantime, the main reason I’m not playing with one is less philosophical - price.

DIY Days - Reinventing Innovation Speech

I just wrapped my DIY Days speech (ok, hrs ago) and people have asked for the text and slides. So here they are. I am kinda commenting on the slides, and some slides are counter-points to what I am saying so the video will  be much easier to follow, once it is up.
Slides:

Diy Days Speech on Innovation

View more presentations from Brian Newman.

Here's the text, after the fold:

FFF - What we can learn from social issue docs

All this doom and gloom in the film business is getting to me...

Nah, just kidding. I actually think that all of my posts lately have been pretty upbeat, even though some people have said otherwise - the underlying message is to figure out ways to make the film business work better. I also don’t hear as much negativity out there in the media business as I used to, in fact, most of that talk is getting pretty old and stale. When I meet with serious filmmakers, and by this I mean whether emerging or established, they have their heads on their shoulders and know the various games you have to play to make films and get them seen, they are pretty upbeat. They are generally excited about all of the changes, they can’t wait to experiment more and they can now at least try around with some new ideas since the old ones didn’t work well for many of them. Okay, quick aside, I do still meet serious filmmakers who are depressed, but I’ve posted enough about them for now and this is a happy post. So I’m now initiating a new category of post here, one devoted to nothing but the good news, the things that are working amazingly f-in well, things I love about film or the film world today or people I want to champion. I hope to keep up the good spirits at least once a week, but given my general grouchiness, and how many projects that pay me are on my plate that week, it may slip (unless I find some happy guest-bloggers, hint hint). I need a name for this feature, but I’m going to try and crowd-source that work - suggest away in the comments or via DM or email. For now, in the spirit of Twitter’s Follow Friday or #FF, I’ll call it FFF for Fun F***in Friday, which also let’s me celebrate cursing, my favorite hobby after film.

This week’s FFF - social issue documentary film. Yes, this sector is not usually associated with fun, but if you’re raising money, looking for help, looking for partners and strategies, looking for a community, building an audience, searching for new strategies, thinking about how curation helps content at festivals or pretty much any other activity in film, this is the Fun sector for you! I’m not kidding. The doc sector in general, but especially the social issue doc sector is thriving, has built some semblance of an infrastructure and is connecting with audiences, which isn’t easy for tough subject matter. It’s doing so well, in fact, that lots of filmmakers get upset that unless they are making a social issue doc there’s no chance for grant support, etc. But this is FFF, no complaining allowed - instead, we should look at what they are doing right and try to replicate some of it in the rest of the film world. So what water are they drinking? Well, someone who actually works in it daily can probably chime in with more than this list, but here’s a start (not in order of importance, just the order in which I think of them):

Who’s not wearing swim trunks, or: Film is a bad business

You can spend a lot of time online and off keeping up with all the changes being wrought by all things digital. You know, it has pretty much ruined the business models for print, music and now film and all that (I’m going to refer to digital as an it for the sake of this post). It’s also been responsible for new production methods, new distribution methods and is likely changing a bit about how we can tell stories. That’s cool and all (or horrific, depending on your vantage point), but to me the single biggest effect of digital has been the transparency it has brought to everything. Warren Buffett has said, regarding the economic collapse, that one doesn’t see who’s really wearing the swim trunks until the tide goes out.

Well folks, digital has behaved like the Moon and brought out the tide in the film world and we can now see that pretty much the entire business is naked as a jaybird. More importantly, however, it always has been this way, especially for indies. As a noted filmmaker once said to me in regards to all of this - well, yes, it’s always been rape and pillage, but now it’s much more apparent.

Selling your film - when is the best time?

The Conversation took place this week in NYC, and while the entire event was great (kudos to the organizers) and I learned a bit, had some great conversations and even found some inspiration, I was also left scratching my head. How can we, as a field, get something so collectively wrong as the notion of film festival premieres and audience awareness? Thomas Woodrow, a producer who I admire, stated on one panel that you needed to sell your film at the point of its maximal awareness, and that for Bass Ackwards, that was clearly at Sundance (paraphrasing). Joe Swanberg said something to this effect regarding his decision to do a simultaneous premiere at SXSW and on IFC. We’ve seen these experiments at multiple festivals now, and will continue to see more. As currently conceived, all of them will fail.

Let me be clear - I am not critiquing IFC, the filmmakers or the festivals for experimenting - we need more of that. I also like all of them. I’m also sure that some of them would argue with me over what constitutes a failure, and I’m sure some of them will make some money, possibly even good money. That said, we’ll never know how much they might have made with a different strategy. My argument here is really with the notion that a premiere at a major festival is your point of maximal awareness. It’s not, never has been and never will be, unless such festivals do a lot of re-visioning of what they are and how they operate.