Beautiful & Broke

One of my favourite sites for video is Vimeo. They offer beautiful HD video presented in a clean, elegant environment. Upload limits are generous and expandable through their Plus and Pro options. Many filmmakers use Vimeo to embed videos onto their own websites. Vimeo is also an awesome community player at festivals and in the filmmaking community.

Vimeo’s site is easy to navigate and features simple, clear icons to navigate to helpful filmmaking tools like a licensed music store and “Video School.” It’s also easy to find videos to watch, with intuitive categories and sortable searches.

Vimeo has run into some trouble as of late due to the question of its value. The site provides exceptional value but so far has not been able to translate their success into significant profits.

The problem with most money-generating plans is that existing users don’t like them. Either a company will start charging for a previously free service or the beautiful, clean experience of using the site will be compromised by cluttery, ugly advertising.

Vimeo needs an approach that would work with its passionate users. Instead of just selling ads all over the site, what if that user could have the choice of which one favourite brand “sponsored” their videos? This gives brands a stronger relationship with the appropriate customers and it also allows there to be just one, small logo on each sponsored page.

All of us as creative people have to find ways to pay the bills and we don’t want to sacrifice our integrity in the process. What does that look like for you?

Crowdfunding has become a viable option for raising money for films as well as start-ups, nonprofits and all kinds of creative projects. Here are a few tips on running a crowdfunding campaign:

1. Plan, and plan some more.  The most successful campaigns have a powerful call to action and often, great rewards.  Spend six months asking for swag, planning the timing of your email blasts and offers, and getting friends and family to come on board to send tweets, facebook messages and emails, and you can take a lot of the agony out of posting your project.
2. Change your video and update your funding page several times throughout the campaign. Updates every 1-5 days double the contribution rate. Add new rewards in the middle and near the end of the campaign.
3. Crowdfunding is about engagement as much as it is about fundraising.  Make sure you thank your supporters, update them on your progress and continue to offer them perks throughout the life of the film.
4. 90% of all projects that reach a third of their funding are successful on Kickstarter. Ask your key supporters to donate at specific milestones, especially near the beginning and at about half of your goal.
5. Do a 30-day campaign and ask for the right goal amount. Pick the right rewards for each funding level. You can gauge this somewhat by looking at other funded projects with similarities to yours. 70% of successful campaigns have between 3 and 8 reward levels.
6. Crowdfunding is an opportunity to do your first marketing campaign. Discover your audience, including blogs, partner organizations and others who might support the film when it is finished and continue your relationship through twitter, Facebook and email.

I would like innovators to come up with a way for creative people to make more money from their work. I do not care all that much if giant conglomerates suffer in the meantime. They should not be permitted to force even more corporate welfare down our throats in the form of legislation that benefits a very narrow group of powerful companies. They have fed someone the line that their protection benefits artists, when that is almost never the case. The vast majority of artists benefit far more from innovative sites like Etsy or Vimeo whose very existence is threatened by this type of legislation.

I have been worried about various threats to innovation on the internet, for example in the broadband monopoly in the US. But that nearly every internet company has come out against this type of legislation has not been able to stop the force of the MPAA and their lobbyists. Even a bipartisan effort in the Judiciary Committee seems to be yielding little return.

I saw a tweet yesterday that said “If SOPA passes, I’m moving to Canada.” It does sound tempting, but if SOPA passes, the internet will be affected everywhere. The U.S. is still leading the way in web innovation. But if you make obvious activity illegal, we’ll all be criminals.

Call your Congressperson today.

The transition has not been seamless for on main reason: shorts still do not command marketing dollars, for the most part, and what people seem to want to watch online has more to do with what they are familiar with in traditional contexts. YouTube has developed a huge audience for shorter content, but few projects make money exclusively from their YouTube success.

Understanding your audience and what kind of projects will play to the digital marketplace is useful, but these aren’t always the same projects that are popular with festival programmers. Shorts are fundamentally an opportunity to explore your own vision with less risk than a feature (but without the possible returns).

There are some excellent short film distribution resources. Scottish Screen has “You’ve Got It Made” a guide to short film distribution, which is U.K.-centric but quite helpful. Apply to festivals specific to your subject, major festivals that play shorts, and short film festivals like Future Shorts. Tribeca FF’s Sharon Badel has written a book called “Swimming Upstream” on traditional distribution for shorts. If you have stars and want to risk losing money, you can take it to markets like Berlin or Cannes with a sales agent. Short Film Central (Australia) and Ouat Media (Canada) are online aggregators. Various companies like Atom Films, Snag Films, Babelgum can be good non-exclusive partners for content. Be careful with contracts- there are a host of companies with bad reputations out there, so do some research before making a deal.

On the digital side, perhaps the most important thing you can do with your short is to make it work for you as a marketing tool. Make sure there is prominent mention of your website and of the title of upcoming projects at the beginning of your credits. For digital you might even want to create a front card with your production company’s name and URL. You can also create extra content available at your website and put a card before the credits to tell people about it. Conventional wisdom suggests that unless you can make a specific and lucrative exclusive deal, it’s best to get your short onto every platform possible: Vimeo, YouTube, sites with audiences interested in your subject, and draw them to your own site. Bottom line- the money you will see is small, so your audience is your biggest return.

Built in HTML5 using a framework that builds on another Harvard product, Zeega, extraMUROS seems to have the potential to be transformative. With this online software, you could pull files from places like the Smithsonian collection or the National Archives via DPLA or through Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo or other media sites. You then could use the tool to edit those files into a new work. It will allow you to apply real time tools like maps, Twitter, or any other number of applications, creating a dynamic, living project.

This has amazing implications for access to creative storytelling and creating interesting connections. There are also exciting intellectual property issues. It’s also worth checking out the DPLA and what’s happening in general in the quest to digitize national assets for free dissemination.

If that’s the case, it may indicate a much more liberal interpretation of copyright on the part of Hulu (who presumably have plentiful legal counsel).

My original point in “At Least Hobbies Are Fun” was that most filmmakers probably make little or no money from their films, and that certainly films very rarely “make money” in the traditional concept of cost vs. return. There are an elite number of filmmakers who make money by being paid and an even more precious few who could say their independently financed film earned more on net than it cost to make. It’s becoming increasingly easier to reduce production costs, somewhat easier to self-distribute, and much more difficult to see massive ancillary returns through DVD sales. That could mean more filmmakers are breaking even. Ideally more people can make films, not lose their shirts, and even make enough to keep making more films.

Independent filmmaking has an industry around it. But that industry is not as important as it thinks it is, and this often accounts for the hysteria around this issue. Filmmaking does not actually need thousands of film festivals, panels, pitch sessions, heads of acquisitions, or parties at which the percentage of actual filmmakers is under 20. At this point, filmmaking needs access to equipment, to learning, to Creative Cow forums, to Vimeo.

Yes, financing and distribution are important, especially for higher-profile or amore ambitious projects. But reasonably speaking, in North America, how many independent projects can command budgets over $5 million? Those that can have to play by different rules, commercial rules, which is reasonable (otherwise just give the money to UNICEF or something).

Is Independent Filmmaking a hobby or a career? If you don’t see it as a hobby first, in my opinion, you are going to be unhappy. If you don’t love it, don’t feel like doing it whether you get paid or not, why not take up hedge fund management? Yes, you should be smart, make good business decisions, ideally you will prosper. But independent films aren’t made in a boardroom; they aren’t just mini studio films. They succeed because we love them, they are superior, and they come from people who could never do anything else.

Some of the more interesting things currently available with PopcornMaker are the ability to layer google maps into a video, to layer video on video based on user’s input, and to create simple green screen effects. Essentially, these tools harness the Web’s interactive properties in new ways for video, in ways that are easy for creators and users to manage.

I agree with the premise that film has been a privileged art throughout its short history and that “independent” film (the kind we crowdfund) has usually been the sport of people who didn’t need to actually work for a living.

However, the crowdfunding campaigns I’ve seen seem to have a more democratic flavour, relying more on a reputational economy than a strictly upper-middle-class paradigm. In general I think it’s good to call this out, but almost everything right now in the indie film world is affluent/white. Crowdfunding has potential to shift that dynamic. Plus, it is just way cheaper to realize a well-executed project now that has the chance to be seen by at least as many people as an old-school “independent film” was at a fraction of the cost. The old rules about film length and format can change when films don’t have to go through funds, festivals and distribution to be made and seen.

I have mixed feelings about subsidized arts. On the one hand, as a filmmaker, I could not realistically hire even a tiny crew without finding outside support. Ideally, that support would come from people who felt I could ultimately turn a profit, not an easy feat for documentaries, shorts or indie films. But what Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and other crowdfunding platforms show is that people are willing to pay/donate for the potential of supporting an experience they will enjoy (and feel a sense of ownership of, even if they don’t receive stock or title). Feeling a direct connection to the work being made is the first step to greater power for the artist, as has happened in music.

I’m about to start crowdfunding for my documentary Acceleration and the idea that the project will be judged on the campaign’s merits does feel scary. On the other hand, from a distribution standpoint, I think the more information filmmakers have about the viability of their projects in the marketplace, the better off they are. Kickstarter does not work like a “popularity contest” in which projects are compared against each other. Projects are weighed against the passion of their own specific audience and fanbase, so a more obscure project can still be important to a fanatical if narrow group.

With more options in social media to become anti-social, it’s useful to make a conscious effort to look for options in blogging, Twitter or Facebook that allow more engagement- not just with us, but with other people interested in our work. In other words, the more we can allow people to find each other through their interest in what we do, the more what we do will be easy and remunerative for us. That was the initial strength of social media. We can continue to build and expand collaboratively rather than get dulled by “Like” buttons.

*Quote by Samuel Goldwyn