Vo.Do and Distribution

I had the distinct pleasure to moderate a post-screening discussion and Q and A with director Gregory Bayne and screenwriter and actor J. Reuben Appelman after the screening of their film Person of Interest at the Open Video Conference. I highly recommend both the film and the conference (it's over, so check it out next year if you missed it), but what I really liked was all of the news from VoDo - the P2P distribution system for indies.

In the spirit of seeing opportunity where others see a threat, Jamie King and friends have created a pretty spectacular little system for harnessing the power of P2P file sharing, the generosity of the Commons and the apparently ubiquitous human desire to collect meaningless rewards in order to benefit those indies who give their films away for free. On purpose, that is, because all of you give them away for free like it or not. Once a film is shot it will be pirated. If it isn't, you have proof that it sucks because no one bothered to pirate it. With VoDo, however, all hand-wringing over this situation stops.

More on Fair Use and Letterman

Thanks to the comments in my post on Letterman/Phoenix and Fair Use, I found this great blog post from Roger Goff in response. I wrote a pretty lengthy response in his comment section, but Blogger/Google wouldn't allow it as it was too long. It's probably too long for most people, but if you care about this at all, read on:

Roger: I am glad you’ve taken this up to debate - even if we don’t yet agree. The main reason I wrote the post was that I didn’t find much discussion of the argument, even on my favorite blogs related to copyright and culture (a few have now appeared). As I’ve stated, I’m not an attorney, but I still (think) I disagree. Would love to hear more from you and other copyright experts, and will ultimately defer to consensus (if we get that far).

First, I don’t believe that Fair Use was intended to “allow journalists and educators to use small portions of copyrighted material in order to inform and educate the public.”  My layman’s understanding is that fair use is an acknowledgment that we need some leeway in the special considerations granted to creators via copyright to ensure the public good, so to speak. To allow certain creative, educational or other public goods while still respecting a creator’s general rights. I believe there have been many court cases that affirm a fair use right beyond what your above quote considers. Perhaps a small point, but I think it does matter.

Second, I don’t think that commerciality (or not) is a necessary requirement to qualify for fair use. Didn’t the Supreme Court decision in Campbell vs Acuff-Rose (aka the 2 Live Crew decision) specifically argue that it didn’t matter whether a work was commercial or not? My understanding is there are the “four tests” for fair use, but that being non-commercial is just one, and that not all of the tests must be matched to qualify. Granted, I am going by memory aided by Wikipedia, so perhaps I missed some nuance here.

Third, and going back to the 2 Live Crew decision, it seemed the Supreme Court acknowledged some special consideration for parody and some copyright folks generally extend this to social, political or cultural critique (reading here from the Fair Use Best Practices of CSM as well). If the “best practices” are correct, then I would gather that this mock/doc/whatever is pretty clearly falling in the cultural/social critique camp. Further, if these best practices are correct, then this also qualifies as a correct use of “archival material in historical sequences.”

Last, I think, I don’t see how the fact that an archival footage market exists is a problem - again, my reading of the news around the 2 Live Crew case is that the Court acknowledged that a market existed for rap samples, but still agreed that the usage was Fair Use.

I don’t honestly have a dog in this fight. Anyone who reads my blog knows that I am generally pretty “copy-left,” but I am not in favor of granting any fair use rights where they shouldn’t exist. I genuinely want to know whether many legal experts agree or disagree that this should be considered fair use - so feel free to attack these non-expert opinions. I think that one of the problems of fair use for creatives is that you have to defend it to claim it - there aren’t any clear legal guidelines, even with the good work that Pat Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi and Michael Donaldson (among many others) have been doing to try to clear this up.

Glad to continue the discussion.

Shared Film - Panel with Gregory Bayne at Open Video Conf.

This Saturday, I'll be attending the Open Video Conference to moderate an after screening talk with Gregory Bayne about his film Person of Interest. Bayne has been taking an alternative approach to releasing his film - he's toured it garage style, given it away for free, you can buy it in multiple formats on his website now and he's doing a bigger tour of the film beginning next year. You can read more about what he's done in this excellent Filmmaker Magazine post, but I'm most interested in getting his thoughts on how filmmakers (and other artists) can use Peer-to-Peer and other free mechanisms to build an audience and still make a living. I'm sure he'll have a lot to tell us, and I can't wait to finally sit down and talk with Gregory Bayne.  Check out the conference website to learn more about the events - two days of great speakers and some great films. Here's the trailer for Person of Interest:

Fair Use, Mockumentary and Letterman

Wow. It’s not often that pop culture, the latest indie docs and my interest in copyright collide. It happens less often than I watch Letterman, which is just about never. But lo and behold, there I found myself last night watching Joaquin Phoenix return to Letterman and a whole riff about Fair Use comes up! Now that was a truly unexpected turn of events.

If you didn’t catch it - video is linked below - the general summary is that Letterman talks with Phoenix about his infamous last appearance on the show and how he wasn’t “in on the joke.” The footage from this appearance shows up in the new film “I’m Still Here,” and Letterman jokes that their lawyers wanted CBS to be paid for showing the footage in the film, but that the filmmakers claimed Fair Use. Letterman then quips that it wasn’t really a documentary but a “theatrical ruse” and therefore, Phoenix and Affleck owe him a “million bucks.” Letterman continues joking about this for the remainder of their talk, which by my unofficial tally makes this the single longest time that Fair Use has been talked about in the mainstream media ever, or at least since 2 Live Crew was last in the news for “Pretty Woman.”

I’m no lawyer, but I’d put forth that showing this footage in their film definitely qualifies as Fair Use. On Twitter, Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker Magazine asked if this use qualifies as Fair Use since it was a mockumentary. It doesn’t matter whether your film is a documentary or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mockumentary, experimental film or even a narrative film. What matters is how the work is used. I’ll avoid getting into the nitty gritty of Fair Use here, as there are many other places to read up on the topic, but essentially your creative reuse must pass a few tests to qualify as fair use. One of the components of that test is whether the reuse is “transformative” and in the 2 Live Crew case, the Supreme Court argued that an artist’s parody qualifies as transformative enough to pass muster - even if that work was commercial in nature. They also noted that the parody would likely not cause any “market harm” as the two works (the original and the parody) existed in different market-places.

I think this same argument applies to the Letterman footage as well. Affleck and Phoenix are commenting on the nature of celebrity. They were parodying the obsessions and presumptions of that celebrity culture, including the Letterman routine. The film itself uses the footage to demonstrate or comment upon how people were seeing Phoenix as he mocked the system. To my mind, this is clearly fair use.

I’m sure some copyright experts out there can put together a more nuanced argument about this, but for some strange reason, my brief search of the interwebs today hasn’t brought up much commentary on this issue. If any of you legal folks out there agree - or disagree - I’d love to hear your take on this.

here's the video:

Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry and Muse

Of the many events I'll be participating in this Fall, I'm most looking forward to the Muse Film & Television Gala, focused this year on the film Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry. (note, the website is a "holder" site, with a new one coming soon) directed by Alison Klayman. Big disclaimer: I am on the board of this nonprofit organization, so I am biased, but I can honestly say that I'd attend this Gala even if I wasn't. For those of you who don't know the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, he is one of the more important, and more well-known, living Chinese artists today. He is also a social activist, quite controversial and quite the Twitter user. From the Muse website:

Scholar, dissident, patriot, artist or activist— who is Ai Weiwei?  This much is certain: since his co-design of the Bird’s Nest Stadium for the Beijing Olympics, Ai Weiwei has catapulted to the forefront of the international art landscape, generating almost as much discomfort for his antics as admiration for his courage.


Whether smashing millenia-old Han Dynasty urns, or confronting Chinese police over a beating he received for investigating the Sichuan earthquake deaths, or turning a Twitter-advertised dinner party into a political action event, Ai Weiwei remains fearlessly outspoken, despite considerable danger to himself.  Willfully turning a blind eye to the very eye the Chinese government has relentlessly trained on him, he advocates for freedom of expression and access to information– principles all the more fragile and precious as China undergoes its remarkable internal transformation.

Ai Wei Wei was recently featured in an excellent New Yorker article, and I highly recommend you get to know his work. Actually, if you saw the Olympics, you already do - he was the co-designer of the Bird's Nest auditorium. This video ran with the article, and gives a good intro:



Ai Wei Wei will be attending the Gala, along with many other outstanding artists and art/film world folks. The tickets are expensive - it is a fundraiser after all, but they are tax deductible and benefit a great organization. Muse Film & Television is one of the only organizations dedicated to making films about art and artists. While this film has a "social issue" and technology bent to it, many of their films are less overtly political, but equally important. Muse is a producer of this film, and they have a great track record, so the film should be pretty incredible. The Gala will feature an auction of many great artworks, dinners, vacations and more. There will be an online auction at Charity Buzz, but I don't have that link yet. If you have time, join me at the Gala, and if not - follow the film from their website. Or, just follow Muse on Twitter - they send out some great news and info about art, artists and culture.

Forget print, it's Journalism that is dead

As people continue to debate the possible futures for journalism and newspapers a common refrain is heard - it’s not newspapers that matter, it’s the quality journalism that goes into them. Everywhere one turns, it seems someone is bemoaning the future of this quality journalism. Where will poor Mrs. Journalism go? Consensus seems to be that we can lose the print, and maybe some respected daily newspapers won’t make the transition online due to the current small returns from online advertising, but we need to salvage quality journalism. Some have even suggested that the government get involved with some Pulitzerian Buyout scheme. This is all pretty curious stuff, however, considering just how low the public pegs their respect for journalists (and the media generally) in nearly every poll. Where did all this journalism love suddenly come from?

Whenever lots of people quickly agree on something that seems so evident, they are usually not only wrong, but also denying something painfully obvious that’s staring them right in the face. I think here it’s this whole notion of quality journalism existing at the major daily newspapers around the country. Now this is a tall order, and I’ll concede in advance that there are exceptions, but I think we need to call BS on this nonsense and focus our energies on creating something better.

I read two newspapers every day of the week. I read both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, in print, before I do anything else. I also read dozens of blogs, trade-journals, Tweets and other web media daily. I read a lot, mostly about film, old and new media, the arts and the nonprofit sector as my career has been focused in these areas. I care a lot about certain issues, like copyright, piracy, arts policy, technology, open source software, open education, film delivery systems and the general state of the film industry. On many of these issues, I would say that I am relatively well-versed in the arguments both for and against my position (when I even have one) and could easily tell you where to go if you want to hear the other side of whatever issue is being debated. I mention all this because whenever I read an article about ANY of these issues in the mainstream press (NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc.) the journalist usually has the story completely wrong. Not sometimes, but usually, as in more often than not. They are either completely writing the press release of some special interest group, haven’t researched the issue well enough and missed the most important parts, have generalized it to the point of silliness either because they don’t trust their reader’s intelligence or want to not offend or done all of the above and worse. Out of all of the writers I read on these subjects, I can think of only one who doesn’t do this consistently, and that’s Walt Mossberg of the WSJ. But he is usually writing product reviews and answering tech questions, which doesn’t fall in the camp I am complaining about. When he does consider some larger issue in the industries he covers (like net neutrality), he usually gets it right, or at least intelligently writes about the different arguments so you can decide. That’s one reporter out of hundreds that I read consistently.

The problem is, if you start to talk to anyone in any field that is quite knowledgeable about a subject, they’ll usually agree with this complaint. My wife is in the healthcare field and whenever I point out an article I think is interesting about a subject, she can point out all the flaws and missing information in thirty seconds. I have friends in the business and banking worlds who say the same thing. Same with real estate, law and just about any profession I have informally surveyed. It appears that the journalism in the newspaper only seems good to those who don’t know much about a subject. I don’t know much about gold pricing, so am I to trust what the New York Times said about it this weekend? Not unless someone can tell me they know that better than they know copyright issues. I shudder to think about what is wrong with the political and war coverage, or anything else that really matters. Oh, wait, I do know about that quality - journalism’s incompetence in those arenas was proven pretty handily in the run-up to Iraq and again in the reporting of the lead-up to the last election.

Perhaps it’s time we start to acknowledge that it’s not just print that’s dead, but perhaps good journalism as well? Perhaps we should stop wringing our hands over the future of newspapers and magazines, and start thinking about how we can revive the best of earlier journalistic practices and nurture the few good examples we have out there from the new media. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about how this could begin, but this is a long post already - what do you think? Am I reading all the wrong things and missing all the great journalism out there? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Sponsorship Blues

There’s a lot of talk out there about how the future of film’s financing lies in branding and sponsorship, but I very rarely hear much about the possible negative consequences. First, let me say up front - I’ve done a lot of sponsorship deals in the arts world and I’m actually in favor of such things. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it - some people make that argument and I respect it, but this isn’t a trash capitalism critique. Rather, I think that I keep going to conferences about the future of media and people are speaking a lot about advertising deals, leveraging brands, selling sponsorships, etc and no one seems to be thinking about the consequences of this - especially the potential downsides. There are many.
The first potential downside is that there’s probably no upside. It is highly unlikely that you will get any major brand to sponsor your film. Yes, there are examples and I can show them too, but “sponsorship” is the new elusive lottery prize for filmmakers that was once getting into Sundance or scoring a distribution deal - it’s always been the lucky few and this will hold true with sponsorship. As a friend of mine who is very high up in the marketing department of a major company told me - “if a filmmaker asks me for sponsorship, I would say they should pay me instead because they are gaining much more from my logo than I am gaining from them.” She doesn’t take meetings with filmmakers, this is hypothetical, but you get the point - good luck sister.

Reinventing the Film Festival - Webinar

This Wednesday, September 15, 2010 from 1-2pm EDT, I am giving an online presentation, or Webinar, on how film festivals might use technology to better engage with audiences. The webinar is for the International Film Festival Summit (IFFS) a trade organization for international film festivals. We chose a somewhat provocative title - "Reinventing the Film Festival," but it's more about how film festivals can learn from filmmakers and other artists to improve their online communications with their audiences. You can register online free and join us from anywhere this Wednesday. Here's the description from the website:

We hear a lot today about how filmmakers can use new technology - things like crowdfunding, social media or even transmedia - to build and engage with their audience. But what about film festivals? How can festivals use these same tools to build their audience (for each film and for their organization), raise money and develop innovative, new models for the field? This workshop will detail some of the the key directions of online behavior and offer some suggestions as to how film festivals might think about adapting these to our business practices, and possibly invent new ones.

Why attend?:

• Learn the basics of the changes in audience behavior and expectations online.
• Go beyond thinking of Facebook and Twitter as just marketing tools.
• Learn how we might collaborate to build better tools for ourselves, filmmakers and audiences.
• Learn how crowd-funding can be used for your fundraising and possibly to help filmmakers do the same.
• Get thoughts on how your curatorial expertise can translate to online success.
• Confirm your belief that local festivals still matter in a DIY world.

My DIY Days Innovation Speech edited into an actual video!

For a long time my friends in the media world have been razzing me about how I present my talks online. I always post the slides to Slideshare and on this blog, and whenever someone videotapes the speech, I’ll link to their video. The problem is, none of these combine the two - it’s difficult to know what I’m talking about because I often use the slides more as a visual counterpoint than for explication. Unfortunately, while I often talk about new technology, I don’t use it when it comes to video. While I could edit in college - quite well IMHO - that was way back with linear editing and I never learned any of the current nonlinear systems. My 8 year old nephew can do it, but I haven’t even tried to use iMovie. So, I asked my good friend Jen Fineran, a professional editor, to edit one of speeches together with the slides. She’s a great editor and can be reached here. She too had a vacation recently, and was then able to catch up and help me with this. Many thanks to her, and to the person who captured this for DIY Days - Raffi Asdourian - a filmmaker himself who can be found here.

Here’s the new edit of the presentation:

DIY Days - Reinventing Innovation Speech from Brian Newman on Vimeo.

Back from vacation(s)

Well, I’m back from my vacations - plural, because there was a real, physical vacation (to Cape Ann, MA) and a social media vacation as well, where I took a break from all social media for an entire month. I didn’t leave email for the whole month, just the blogging, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, etc. I left email for almost a solid ten days, only answering two “emergency” emails that were brought to my attention via cell phone messages. I survived. In fact, I thrived.

Why did I do this? I don’t believe any of the crap out there about the negative effects of social media, or any other new technology thing, on our brains, our attention spans, our ability to think deeply, or any of the other nonsense people are selling these days. It seems like I read some ridiculous article about this every other day now, and if anything it just convinces me that in spite of this wondrous web, reporters still don’t have enough real news to report about, or enough ways to find counter-arguments to these bogus claims. All in all, I get a lot out of some of my social media. I get more useful info and news from the people I follow on Twitter - in a timelier fashion - than I get from the New York Times now. But the problem is that “some” in the equation - not all of my social media gives me much of any use. More importantly, I could see that I was using my time on social media as a way to avoid doing things I really needed to do - like my own creative projects. I’m not saying that everyone does this, nor am I saying that it’s not possible to read all the news on Twitter and still write a screenplay or paint a picture. But if you’re anything like me, you have very limited time each day for personal projects, and every minute I was spending on social media was a minute I wasn’t spending on things that were frankly much more important to me. So, I took a break.

I did suffer some serious withdrawal for a couple of days. Sometimes I would find myself just staring at the computer screen doing nothing - I wasn’t checking Twitter, but what was I doing? To some extent, this is just natural. When I managed a large staff of people, I never cracked down on use of social media or the web generally during office hours. I believe that people are going to waste a certain amount of time daily, and it will either be on Facebook, on the street corner with a cigarette or just staring at your screen, so I don’t see this as a problem. Our minds just need a break. Luckily, I got over this pretty soon, and would use these bits of down time for my own projects. If I couldn’t focus on these various projects and really needed to procrastinate, I would read. The old fashioned way - a book, magazine or print newspapers. I read a lot, and I got a lot done. Hopefully, you’ll be seeing some of the fruits of this project soon - in new blog posts, articles and some other things before too long.

I also confirmed what I had suspected all along - that I was getting value from only some of my social media, and that those will be the only ones I return to now. What won out? Just Twitter, really. While this can be a time sink, I do get very valuable information and news in a timely fashion from it, and I think it’s worth the time spent. I’ll likely check in less often - at least for a little while - but it has real value. Facebook, FourSquare, Linked-In and all the others....not so much. Unfortunately, I get a lot of work-related inquiries on Facebook. If I could I would leave it, because beyond that I find it worthless and annoying. I’ll continue to cross-post my tweets and stuff there, and answer any friend requests and messages, but I won’t really be there anymore. I’m not deleting my profile from it, but I am not going back to FourSquare. I’ve only found it useful once - when I was visiting a city, hadn’t bothered to look online for restaurant reviews and was able to read mini-reviews on Four-Square and quickly find the best item on a menu near my location. I may use it for that again, but only if I am visiting unprepared again. I believe there’s a strong future for location based apps, and for checking in not just to locations but also to movies, music, etc but for now, I get nothing out of it. I’ll still read some blogs, but I’ll be thinning out my RSS reader a fair bit. I’d love to get rid of LinkedIn, as it is utterly useless to me, but again some people (they tend to be older and/or less tech savvy) still contact me on it, so I’m stuck there a bit longer.

Will I do this again? Yes. I don’t think anyone needs an entire month off from social media, but let’s face it - August is a slow news month and as good a time as any to redirect one’s energies to their own pet projects. I can’t afford to jitney off to the Hamptons for the month, but I can easily afford missing a few tweets for awhile.

Photo: Gloucester Fisherman

Social Media Vacation

If you're looking for me on the interwebs you might have trouble for awhile. I am taking a much needed vacation from all social media for the entire month of August, and probably up until Labor Day. I'll probably still read some blogs and I'll check email until August 19, when my vacation goes into overdrive (because I'll be on a real vacation) and I don't check the web, email or phone at all for two weeks. There's nothing religious about this - if I get a real hankerin' for some twitter action, I might check in, but I think it's time to resist the urge to be connected and spend that time on my own creative projects. I have a feeling I'll leave FourSquare and LinkedIn for good - neither brings me anything valuable anymore, but I'm quite sure I'll be back to the others soon enough. Why am I bothering to post about this? Because I'm hoping you won't think I've disappeared forever and will come back when I do in a month, and because a few people contact me through social media for work or important personal business and I thought you should know I haven't disappeared, just gone on vacation. Until then....

Wirewax and Interactive Docs

This week I have contributed a guest post to the In Media Res blog about transmedia and documentary filmmaking. You can read my entire blog post over there, but I wanted to expand a bit about one item on my blog, as I was limited to under 400 words for the In Media Res post. This meant I couldn’t speak much about the technology on display - WireWax.

I wrote about the film Awra Amba: Virtual Village by director Paulina Tervo and how she is using a new technology, called WireWax as one aspect of her transmedia campaign. As I said in that post:

“The website will feature short documentaries expanding the story by focusing on other aspects of the community, chosen by the villagers themselves. By using WireWax technology, these videos will be made interactive for online audiences. In the example shown, the user can click on character’s faces for more background media, or perhaps click on a person weaving and be linked to purchase that person’s fabrics. This last act being not just a consumer purchase, but also an action that can help make the village’s production sustainable.”

You can watch the video and play around with clicking on characters, on items in the frame, etc. The site is currently in Beta, but I think you can get a good sense of what the technology allows. Paulina discovered the technology at the Power to the Pixel Cross-Media Lab, which I attended. During the week, she and her partner in the lab put together the short mock-up you see on the blog. What’s amazing is that when they premiered the clip to the group at the end of the week, we all learned that WireWax had been created by the camera crew who had been filming the panels all week. Amazingly small world! Turns out that in addition to filming panels, Dan and Steve had created WireWax. It’s a great tool to add interactivity to your video. You can try it out for free at their website, and they have a premium model for more extended use. While I’ve seen a few similar projects from other tech companies, this one seems to work great and they have some cool new features launching soon. They’ll be adding things like email integration, live discussion, Facebook integration (where you could see the Facebook profile for any face in a video, great for weddings and maybe for fiction eventually(?)) and more.

Check them out on their website and let me know what you think here or at In Media Res.

Transmedia Discussions

I just finished off a week of guest posts on the ArtsJournal blog, speaking about arts and culture policy concerns, and now I'm joining a group of writers for a week on the In Media Res blog to discuss transmedia. Boy, I'm bouncing from one exciting topic to another! Well, actually, I think both of these topics are important to filmmakers and all artists, even though they are both a bit academic. But, perhaps this week won't be too serious minded - In Media Res is a scholarly online publication, but this week's writers aren't just an academic bunch. Ok, Christy Dena was one, but she's left that world behind to launch new genius endeavors. Her post kicks off the week, and it's a great look back at Stan Vanderbeek speaking from the dusty old days of 1972 (I was a whopping one year old) about how artists can use the computer to create new types of art. Next up is Marc Ruppel (Ok, he's an academic too), then Robert Pratten, myself and Ted Hope closes out the week. While I'm sure the posts will all be interesting, they'll be much more so if you contribute to the conversation by adding comments - it does take a log-in, but it's pretty painless.

The Pixel Market and Arte Pixel Prize

A post for and from my friends at Power to the Pixel:

Power to the Pixel is delighted to announce its groundbreaking Pixel Market which will take place on 13 and 14 October 2010 in London.
 
Applications are now open to find 20 of the world’s best cross-media projects.

Each project will be based on stories that can span any combination of film, TV, online, mobile, interactive, publishing, live events and gaming.

On 13 October up to 10 of the teams will compete for the £6,000 ARTE PIXEL PITCH PRIZE at Power to the Pixel’s public event, The Pixel Pitch at BFI Southbank. 
Producers will present their cross-media project to a handpicked roundtable of international judges made up of decision-makers, commissioning executives and financiers working in film, broadcast, publishing, online, advertising, gaming, the arts and interactive media.

On 14 October The Pixel Meetings will allow all 20 project teams to take part in one-to-one business meetings with potential investors and partners from across the tech, online, interactive, film, broadcast, arts, publishing and gaming industries. 
 
Entries are invited from producer-led teams with projects at an advanced stage of development. Producers should have a strong track record in film, broadcast, interactive media or other relevant creative industries. Projects must include the use of new tools, platforms, services and devices, and can span any combination of film, TV, online, mobile, interactive, publishing, live events and gaming.

The Pixel Market is part of Power to the Pixel’s Cross-Media Forum, which this year will be held 12 - 15 October 2010 in association with The BFI London Film Festival. The annual event has helped develop an agenda for digital change for creatives and businesses, gathering together some of the smartest and most pioneering media professionals and digital experts in the world.

Deadline for applications is 6 August.
Further information can be found at Power to the Pixel’s website.

Creative Rights & Artists

I'm spending this week over at the ArtsJournal Blog Network, taking part in a conversation with 20 other bloggers on artists, culture and policy.  The idea is for us to discuss the following topic for an entire week:

"Arts and culture are a cornerstone of American society. But arts and culture workers are often left out of important policy conversations concerning technology and creative rights even though the outcomes will have a profound impact on our world. Is it benign neglect? Or did we miss an essential call to action and engagement? With a new administration moving full speed ahead on technology and copyright issues, do artists even know what the priorities are? Can they recognize opportunities to make a case for what their work needs to thrive, and how it impacts society? Join us as we examine what exactly does it take to bring arts and culture to the table, and how our field can become more proactive to carve out a more powerful place for the arts in 21st century America"

There's already a fair amount of conversation on today, day one of the topic. I've posted my first thoughts here, and I hope you can join us on the blog and contribute your thoughts. Too lazy to link over? My basic argument, thus far, is that we're not interesting artists in the policy debate because it isn't positioned artfully. Perhaps if we gave artists the tools to create (and some dough), they might create a more powerful message about the importance of arts to policy and vice versa.

Happy Birthday, now move so I can see this film!

I'm pissed. Not in the British way... but angry, because I keep missing some great events at Rooftop Films this Summer, and this Thursday I am missing their 3-Way B-Day party with IndieWire and Snag Films. I'll be down in Philadelphia (ok, I love Philly, so that part makes me happy) for a consulting gig (one I hope to be able to speak about positively in the future), so I'll miss this great event. They'll be showing the film Aardvark by Kitao Sakurai.

The film's description from the website:

AARDVARK (Kitao Sakurai | New York, NY | 90 min.)
AARDVARK is perhaps the first narrative film to star a man blind since birth. In a role inspired by his own life, Larry Lewis plays a solitary man recovering from alcoholism and working towards stability. When he joins a Jiu Jitsu academy he finds a close friend in his young hard-partying instructor, Darren. But, as disturbing aspects of Darren's life are revealed Larry soon finds himself alone and faced with the consequences of a horrific act of violence.

Sounds great, but ahem, 3 amigos, I had to scroll through all your boilerplate descriptions to find this....

Ok, enough critique - here's three great companies helping indie filmmakers, and what a great idea - as Dan Nuxoll of Rooftop put it to me in an email, it's not just a birthday party, but a great way to sneak preview a film for the industry:

"since (we'll) be getting together a group of great industry people together for the celebration, it will also be a great opportunity to highlight a new film and give it a chance to break through to our audience and also to some of the important distributors, press and other industry. The idea was that, with all of us pushing the screening and getting behind a new film that we believed in, a quality film that might possibly get overlooked (elsewhere) could get an evening to itself and get in front of a big and influential audience." (my edits)





I think this is a great way to celebrate indie films. I'm completely behind new models for building buzz, and I am sooo supportive of anything Rooftop does - can someone give them a grant to expand across the whole darn country, already?

Check out the info here, buy tickets and tweet about it all night long so I really feel rotten for missing another great event.


Oh...did I mention there's an after-party with free beer?! (Thus my angst)

Thoughts on the Power to the Pixel Lab

I’ve just returned from the very first Pixel Lab, held in Cardiff, Wales for a full week. What an experience it was! I wish an organization in the U.S. was doing this as well, and more were doing it globally, as the information was timely, in-depth and very needed by the field. For seven days, 17 producers with projects in development, and another 17 without current projects, met with leading experts in the field, learned from one another and generally transformed their projects in the realms of story-telling, audience engagement, technology and business models. At the end of the week, the producers with projects pitched their now refined ideas, and we were all impressed. Each of them will stay in touch, receive some further expert mentoring and meet up again at the Pixel Pitch and Market in October at the London Film Festival. I am scheduled to attend and can’t wait.

It’s nearly impossible to summate all the things I/we learned. I think the biggest lesson was that collaboration remains key. Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner kicked us off on this note in his opening keynote - stating that we’re all in this together and can help one another realize their projects - even pledging to give help to each producer as they needed it. But the real sense of collaboration could be seen in the way each group helped one another work through the challenges and opportunities for their projects. We were divided into four groups, and I led one, with Michel Reilhac of Arte France leading another, Ben Grass of Pure Grass Films another and Ian Ginn of Hubbub Films taking the fourth group. Each of us spoke daily with the organizers, the fab Liz Rosenthal and Tishna Molla, and we collectively watched each project go through a transformative process - some more dramatically changing their projects than others, but all improving mightily.

Not everyone wants to add an ARG or a video-game platform to their project, but everyone learned something about new models. We also learned practical advice on the current state of co-productions (once again becoming important to film productions as they find different partners more or less willing to fund transmedia components); methods to best implement story worlds; new fundraising and business models; a keen look at how brands are utilizing transmedia; how the gaming industry is responding; the reaction (or not) of public funding sectors and broadcasters in Europe; implementation strategies; and a hefty dose of thinking about story (for those of you skeptical of all this business talk). For me, while theorizing about changes in story-telling are most interesting, the best speeches were on the new business model aspects, especially regarding brands. There’s a healthy argument to be had about consumerism and the move towards branding in the indie and art-house world. That’s for another post, but it is very clear that in today’s tough financial climate many artists are having to embrace such models. Doing so isn’t easy - in fact, for many indies this will remain impossible, but if you want to incorporate these strategies you can do a lot worse than learning from excellent thinkers in this space like Ben Grass of Pure Grass Films, Mel Exon of BBH Labs and Nuno Bernardo of BeActive. Each of them had very practical examples, strategies for maintaining artistic control and even lessons learned from failures (so rare to see honestly presented on stage).

Many of my take-aways will inform my writing here over the next few months. Videos and presentations of many of the talks should be online soon - although some sections will be cut as the presenters were nice enough to share things with the group that they are barred by contracts from sharing publicly (I’m sure that knowledge will slowly filter out soon as well). For now, let me just end by saying that anyone - filmmaker or industry - thinking about the future of the art should be paying attention to Power to the Pixel. Don’t dismiss transmedia (you can call if cross-platform, etc, but the term as poor as it is, has become the accepted nomenclature). Good old films on the screen with no transmedia will continue to exist, but as an artist the possibilities for new ways to tell stories are amazing; the chance to better engage with your audience should be inspiring (as opposed to scary); and this is not just a fad. Michel Reilhac of Arte France spoke eloquently, as always, about how he and his organization are facing transmedia. In short, they are not just embracing it, but they are changing entire business models internally, in reaction -in healthy, meaningful ways. You could tell that he is allowing himself to just let the changes wash through him - to accept that change is happening and be open to what comes next. This spirit imbued the entire event, and I hope many more embrace it in their own practice soon.

New business models for film & transmedia

I'm here at the Power to the Pixel - Pixel Transmedia Lab in Cardiff, Wales. Thank goodness, because it's only 70 degrees here and NYC is apparently in a heat wave. I'm also sitting on a hotel balcony looking over a beautiful bay (of which I would provide a photo if I only had a camera (!!!) on my Blackberry). I've been learning a lot from the excellent experts they've assembled, as well as from the project participants and other attendees. I'll post more on that soon, but for now, here's the slides I'll be presenting tomorrow at my speech on developing new business and financial models for transmedia production. While this group is made up of largely transmedia producers, many are starting with a relatively traditional film, and I think the slides are relevant to anyone thinking about new business models for the production of any media. As with most of my talks, there's not a ton of detail in the slides - most of it is what I say, so I hope to have video to post or link to soon. I think these are easy enough to understand, however, and you can always contact me directly (in comments here or on Facebook) if you have questions. I should be clear  - I'm not presenting anything here as clear, hard facts - the business models are being invented (here at the Lab, for one), but these are some thoughts and observations:

Transmedia Biz Models, Pixel Lab

View more presentations from Brian Newman.

Let me know what you think.

The Pixel Transmedia Lab

I'm off to Cardiff, Wales to join many good friends and even more new people (to me) at the Power to the Pixel Transmedia Lab. There's a great group of "group leaders" and tutors, which you can see here, and here's the participants. To my knowledge, this is the first lab of it's type - essentially a Sundance Lab (warning, that links to the worst website ever made) but for transmedia projects. Here's a description of what's going on from the website:
"Topics of learning will include:

• How to develop stories and create a story universe across multiple platforms
• New marketing & distribution models: an exploration of a variety of new platforms, revenue models and direct-to-consumer models
• Audience building and engagement using social media tools
• Online tools and services
• Project case studies by leading international filmmakers / practitioners
• Legal and digital rights issues across development, production and financing
• The new skills needed for producers and other media professionals in a multi-platform world
• Project packaging, planning and presentation"

I am speaking there about new business and finance models for cross-media/transmedia production. Or rather, I'm speaking about what I hope to see as new models and what is currently going on in the space. While this particular lab is closed to new participants, the organizers have announced a new Pixel Market, with pitching sessions, education and a cash prize. That looks pretty cool, so check it out.

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?