Life Without Wires

I thought I’d take a moment.

The 4 day movie starts at 12.01 am tonight (technically tomorrow).

Everyone is very excited and the artists involved are looking like they’re up to making something beautiful. I have great hopes for what will come out of this. We’re blogging the whole thing on the 4 day movie blog.

I just looked at the original mindmap i did for the movie. Its a method i was trying out using Novamind to organise my thoughts. Its funny how things have turned out, most of what was there has been very important so far: distribution, legalities of an ‘open source’ collectively made movie, technical guidelines and specifications, who we get to do it in the first place, how to make it beautiful…

So, here are a few links and resources I’ve been using to solve those problems. I’m just throwing them down here for now, i have a feature film to produce, so you’ll understand if i’m brief!

- Creative Commons: this is generally what we’re using as a template for our agreement with filmmakers and artists involved in the project. Unfortunately, we discovered that Creative Commons doesn’t apply in Ireland as it hasn’t been worked out here yet. So we’re doing our best to do something along the lines of the licenses available here.

- Music: we’ve found out a lot about music distribution rights and how to source open or free music for movies. Also how licensing of music works for movies and how to make an agreement with independent artists. Here are the main resources we’re using:

• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC license
• http://ccmixter.org/
• 8 Bit Peoples
• Moby!
• Penny Distribution: Nick Fitzsimons from Penny Distribution has been amazingly helpful in this area and has a lot of great artists on the site.

The gist of music in movies is that its not complicated if you play fair, give credit where its due and work with artists to find solutions. Which is the way it should be in all things to do with this movie, so it makes me very happy.

- Movie making: our tech guidelines are available here.

- People: here’s the list of confirmed artists taking part.

- the narrative flow: the story of this movie is how its made as much as what’s produced. So the blog, the updates, the myspace, the basecamp headquarters, the facebook group- all are as important as the movie itself. I aim to publish everything i can and document as much as i can over the following four days.

1. All movies are to be shot between 12.01am to 11.59pm on Thursday, June 26th 2008 within the M50.
2. Participants are asked to hand in a complete 3-5 minute movie in digital format before 7 p.m. Friday, June 27th.
3. Deliver your media on a hard- drive please.
4. Our preference is for finished work to be handed in as a Final Cut Pro project with associated uncompressed media. However, this is not mandatory.
5. Deadline for completed submissions is 7 p.m. Friday June 27th. Turn your submissions in to FilmBase on Curved Street, Temple Bar between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.
6. All submitted work will be used as the source material for a feature film mixed/edited by Lenny Abrahamson and Declan Lynch.
7. In addition to complete video pieces, we are also asking that participants hand in up to 15 minutes of their raw, uncut footage. If this footage needs to be captured, please also submit the camera you used to record it along with the tape.
8. Make your movie in digital format- please go for the highest specifications possible. We realise that not everyone has access to the best equipment, cameras etc. Be creative and make do with what you have. If it moves we may use it. We are open to everything, from a cameraphone to the latest HD camera.
9. If you must submit WMV/AVI or other formats (MP4, MPG etc) feel free to do so. But please- no weird ones. And please don’t compress your video if you can avoid it. We will do our best to play out anything you give us, but please make it easy on us.
10. All movies submitted for the feature film will be available for use in the remix. This means we will be at liberty to recut, remix and remaster both your completed movie and your source footage. We don’t guarantee that all submitted work will be used in the feature film, however we will use as much as we can.
11. Movie submissions will be returned at the request of the participants. Movies will be held for no more than 4 weeks. Generally speaking, we operate under Creative Commons license for the purposes of this project- you own your movie/digital footage, and we ask your permission before distributing anywhere at all other than the festival. We’d like to have all the movies on the website for example, but only with filmmakers consent. If anyone has a problem with this approach please contact us directly.
12. Try to source original music for your movie. We are looking for creativity and originality. Do not use material that you don’t have rights to in your movie, it is less likely we will be able to use your movie in the final version of the remixed feature.
13. Technical Advice: expect all sorts of equipment failures, sleep deprivation errors, running out of time for your edit to be completed - don’t expect a polished, professional product. Enjoy the process. Submit whatever you have, everyone is in the same boat.

These guidelines are subject to change, which is why they’re published here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=d2wq658_25dt4gjdff

Things are moving along quite quickly now on the Darklight 4 Day Movie. I am producing a feature film in 4 days, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and edited by Declan Lynch.

i’m trying to breathe. last week was challenging. I realised that while people were into the whole idea of making a 4 day movie, actually doing it is another thing altogether. So i decided I needed to push a little harder and now things are moving again. This is a risky process as well as an enjoyable one for all of the filmmakers. I needed to adjust the way we communicated our ideas so people taking part would know that everyone is in the same boat. That this is an experiment and that it requires risk and a little bit of faith.
things are going really well now. people are starting to get excited, the filmmakers list is almost full and we’re even getting people to reconsider what they FEEL about movies, which is nice.

Lenny Abrahamson did an interview about the movie recently on the Irish Film and Television Network website: click here to read it.

Putting a movie together in such a short period of time compresses everything into short bursts. So one minute everything might be going along smoothly, the next minute world war 3 has broken out and the whole thing has gone to shit. The skill is in picking out what’s important and shedding any extra weight. And keeping it simple.

I came across a couple of things going on at the moment that were quite interesting and relate to this project in a way…

The first is the announcement that Myspace are almost ready to release their collaboratively made movie to the public: Myspace announce the world’s first publicly generated movie.

Now, strictly speaking, unless they get their movie out before June 29th, they won’t have made the world’s first publicly generated movie, as we will have beaten them to the post. The race is on- come on Myspace, catch up.

I met the Myspace movie’s producer Arvind Ethan David, (who Variety called a “True Entrepreneur in London”) at a digital distribution event recently in Dublin. Arvind is the head of Slingshot Productions, based in London. He was definitely an impressive speaker and had a lot of interesting ideas about long tail distribution of movies and rapid deployment of multiple movies instead of the usual blockbuster approach of the major studios. I got the impression that this guy will either be running the entire film industry in five years or will have been locked up with Nick Leeson for irregular accounting practices. Which is what a good producer should be like in the big time, I suppose.

Arvind is the producer of Myspace’s so-called user generated movie. Now, between you and I, and everyone else who might like to look beneath the hood, the selection of Arvind as producer and the director he had worked with before might have been bending the rules slightly when it comes to a completely user-generated movie. The assumption for this one was that, well, you can’t expect the masses to take complete control, can you? Just let them take part in some of it. Let the pros do the hard stuff. I mean, you need to have a professional team at the top, right? Its very different from Matt Hanson’s “A Swarm of Angels”

“A Swarm of Angels” is a more honest approach to a crowdsourced movie, with a director at the top asking in the open for people to help him make his movie. There is no pretension that the movie is democratically made. An movie made completely through consensus and collective methods has yet to happen, and it still remains to be seen if a popular feature film can actually be made with no director, with all of the editorial and creative decisions being made collectively as well as all of the participants being equal players at all stages of production. The new Myspace movie won’t answer that question, whatever the hype says.

As for the Darklight 4 Day Movie, it looks like it will be the unacknowledged but true first feature film comprised of “user-generated” content, whatever that means. All I hope is that it will be an interesting process, that everyone taking part can put something of themselves into it for prosperity and art, and that we’ll have something beautiful to look at on the 29th of June 2008.

As for what’s next, I’m thinking I might try exploring these ideas by doing something like this- Nokia Productions making a collaborative movie with Spike Lee.

MAKE ART BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I’ve reached an impasse.

I asked for a chance to change things, now I have an opportunity, and its hard. Its really hard. I wonder sometimes if I’m up to it.

For the past few years I’ve been involved in promotion and production of collectively made movies. Some people call this User Generated Content. I’ve been calling it various things, from creative anarchy to art.

The collective approach has manifested itself in my life in a few key projects: Fast Forward Film Festival, Octopussy, Chicago Independent Television & Grassroots Media Festival and most recently, Death to the Octopussies & Cavallo and The Birds…

So far, much as they appear to be haphazard and misplaced, these projects define any art I’ve produced until now. As they’re collective, I can’t claim credit completely for their success or failure. All I can say is that there’s a piece of me in all of these projects. I put my heart into all of them. I know what they look like, quit telling me they look cheap and weird. They’re supposed to.

Now as I look at these projects, as low-fi as they are, I’m proud of them and what they have to say. I like the fact that they have been original, that they didn’t conform to expectations and that they brought people somewhere they wouldn’t otherwise have reached. Energy. Human energy is harnessed when you give people a context to express themselves.

So there’s a current in the mainstream, a feeling that there might be something to this collective approach. That the crowds might have something to say, and there might be benefits in letting them say it- in providing a context and an incitement to produce. Some people like the ‘coolness’ of it. And everyone loves the idea of allowing people to make movies. And I confess, my motives are selfish- I want to make movies too.

Two projects have landed on my doorstep:

1. DUBLIN- THE MOVIE (title to be determined)- a feature film made in 4 days for the Darklight Film Festival. June 26th-29th 2008.

2. Fast Forward Ireland, a national event in association with RTE, The Digital Hub and Culture Night Ireland 2008. September 19th/20th 2008.

I’m the producer on both. Neither were my idea. I’m honoured to be involved. Think what I could do with these! I feel bold.

These projects deserve my attention, they could be great. I’ve got a limited amount of time.

But they’re not mine. They’re not mine.

The motives are all over the place. I watch as the 4 day feature film pulls itself into familiar territory. Its risky, but not too risky. We’re already cutting people out of the process, and bringing the usual suspects in. The ones in the bottle of the bottleneck.

I listen to the reasons I’m being asked to run the Fast Forward this time around. Reasons that are not mine. Experiential Marketing, associated cool, new audiences…

These are creative people I’m working with. People I respect and admire. But they have their own approach and I have to either conform or find a way through.

I realise that the fight is harder where it matters most. It can be personal. And I wonder if I have the chops to make it matter. If I can back up what I’ve been talking about all these years. If there’s substance to the approach.

Should I cash in?

The alternative is scaring the crap out of me. Blowing it all open, trying to make something out of it by being up front. Running with it and doing it my way. Blasting and banging through the normal things to create something different. The likelihood is I’ll get eaten up. What do I know? I should just go with the flow and see where we end up…

What’s the harm? It feels wrong.

Right now it would be easier to give up on the collective idea, readjust, and do my own thing. For myself. Is it the end of the road?

Can anyone help? Or am I on my own this time?

Digital movie making makes it easier than ever to produce movies. Its affecting the film industry in fundamental ways. There is a lot of discussion around how to produce movies in a sustainable way, get them seen, and maybe even profit from them. Its fun for an artist to figure this stuff out. Its driving the movie industry nuts. At a recent seminar I attended around digital distribution, David Collins of Samson Films, who produced Once, suggested that the film board and other financiers of movies might consider a new funding model. This would allow a film’s producers to spend half of their funding on marketing. Marketing a movie does not enter discussion in typical funding applications. Like anywhere else, most people get a gut reaction to puke and run when they think about marketing. This is a natural reaction, so don’t hold back.

But what Once showed was that with good marketing a good movie gets seen by more people. And this can’t be a bad thing for a movie. “Once” was lucky in a way that it was able to tie into a huge music fanbase, who actively marketed the movie online and spread the word. The producers could watch this happen and figure out ways to push it along- for example, they stuck the stars (Glen Hansard of The Frames and Marketa Irglova) on a bus and took them on tour around the cinemas to generate more interest in the film.

So the benefits of marketing a movie well are obvious. But what’s new?

What’s new is that there’s something in there that is unique to our time. Its a new approach to filmmaking: 50% production/50% distribution.

Don’t take my word for it. Arin Crumley and Susan Buice are preaching this approach and they should know, following the successful and groundbreaking distribution of their feature “foureyedmonsters”. If you have 15 minutes to spare, you can find out how movies are going to be made and distributed in the future in their presentation on new forms of distribution:

Four Eyed Monsters DIY Distribution Case Study

Arin is now one of the founding members of a new movie distribution festival, which aims to promote filmmakers and this kind of approach to a new future in movies: FROM HERE TO AWESOME

What does 50% production/50% distribution mean?

It means that whatever you do on producing your masterpiece, do an equal amount of work on distributing that masterpiece. In the olden days of yore, your workflow for a movie or documentary would be preproduction (scripts, storyboards, funding etc.), production (shooting), postproduction (editing etc.) and finally distribution. Nowadays in the age of hovercrafts, laser beams and meal pills, we do it digital, like. So, you do everything in production- shoot,edit, record, script, everything, all at once. Typically for a filmmaker who’s used to doing it the old way, they do this all the way to the end of their energy or money reserves. And then they spend very little energy on distribution, maybe posting on youtube, sending to a couple of festivals or whatever. So roughly that means they’re doing 80-90% production, 10-20% distribution.

A smart filmmaker these days does 50/50. This is because the distribution side can be just as creative as the production side. It also takes into account that there are way too many people out there producing, but not enough people looking at distribution.This creates a glut of stuff to see, so your movie ends up in a huge pile of digital stuff. So as well relying on your movie being great making you stand out, your superior distribution methods will mean more people see your movie.

Distribution of movies can be done any way you can think of: myspace, microcinema, projecting from cars in a lot, youtube, social networks, sending to friends by mail, festivals, anything you can come up with.

You can also involve the people producing in distribution. Make connections during production with people who are going to see your movie.

My favourite French man, Michel Gondry, is curating the Youtube homepage. He’s posting all his favourite Youtube clips and they are definitely worth checking out. This one is hilarious- its a viewer response to Michel solving a rubiks cube with his nose: JOHNNYTV responds...

Michel Gondry is a genius.

I attended a seminar organised by Screen Training Ireland today that focused on Digital Distribution in Ireland for movies. The departure point for the discussion was: “Imminent changes in the delivery of film for cinema exhibition are likely to change not only the structure and economy of film distribution but also the experience of going to the cinema. ”

There was a lot covered in the two panel discussions, which I need to think about a bit before posting any conclusions. It was good to see all the major players in the Irish film industry in a room scratching their heads trying to work this stuff. 10 years ago the approach was a little more ‘ignore it and it might go away.’ In Ireland at least, there is a hint of a tipping point towards digital formats, new production methods and entirely new distribution and business models on the horizon. A filmmaker could really do well if they could get their head around an end to end way of making and distributing a movie, involving producers and distributors but trying to develop a new way of doing things. The question is being asked- creative people are needed to at least offer some possibilities. Until then it will be business as usual until the pressure becomes too much to withstand and we look elsewhere for answers. It was strange to see the traditional film producers and distributors discussing digital rights, web distribution, social media, content promotion tie ins and other geekworld stuff as part of the package in a movie production. It wasn’t always this way, and it really doesn’t look like its been worked out fully yet. This is an opportunity.

I’m attending an introductory session on Virtual Cinema this afternoon. This is a joint initiative between the Irish Film Board and Wildwave to get filmmakers into thinking about new forms of cinema and the new distribution models that are out there. They’re also handing out cash for people to make digital type movies- so i’ll be hoping to get my hands on a bit of the moola to make a project I’ve been thinking about for a while…. Here’s more about the fund: http://www.myspace.com/virtualcinema

Applications deadline is February 14th.

David Lynch hates the idea of you watching his movies on your iPhone. It really pisses him off. This is a good place to start the discussion around what video works on phones, since David Lynch is a great artist and knows exactly what he’s talking about.He’s not blind to the possibilities either- he’s ahead of most people in terms of using the internet and technology in context:1. He’s running a video mashup competition on Jumpcut.

2. He’s had a kick-ass multimedia website to create art and do new things for years: http://www.davidlynch.com/

So why does he hate the idea of movies on your phone so much?Movies on your phone, repurposed from the cinema version, corrupt the original vision of the director to see these things on a big screen. It cheapens the film and takes away a lot of what the director had to consider to put the whole thing together. When the director makes a movie for the cinema, he’s thinking in that context. Squeezing it into the little box on your mobile screen takes out all the fun, scrapes the surface of the director’s work and can damage and even violate the original intention of the artists that put it together.

David Lynch is reacting to today’s approach to putting video on phones: Take the ones that have been made already, throw away the “fat” (i.e. sound, video quality, scale, movement, context…) and stick them on a phone. This is convenient for the studios, since they have a new channel to sell their movies on, and its convenient for the technology geeks, since they can demonstrate that video can indeed be put on a mobile device. But this is only the beginning. The greater problem to solve is how to produce specifically for this new medium, and for the context in which this video will be viewed.

I’d be very interested in seeing what David Lynch would produce for someone to watch on their phone. It wouldn’t be Blue Velvet, or anything “cinematic” but I bet it would be cool, and weird. Mobilatic?

This is my first post!

Andrew