Monday, December 8th
by Zak Forsman
Just got off the phone with Lance Weiler, founder of the Workbook Project. He’s asked me to curate the new subsection there called “NEW BREED” – where filmmakers who embrace and experiment with the evolving realities of DIY filmmaking can give voice to their strategies, processes, successes and failures. I will be seeking out filmmakers making compelling and unique work in a very participatory and transparent way, and inviting them to share their experiences.
As I told Lance, I’m very proud to be a part of The Workbook Project. It is a unique resource in the indie filmmaking community and I look forward to helping expand its reach.
If you have a project, the motivation to blog about it and embrace all things DIY, send me an email.
Tuesday, November 18th
by Zak Forsman
The next DVXFest has been announced with the theme of “loss” and Sabi Pictures will be producing an entry. More info about the fest can be found at the official site or by clicking the poster below to go to our individual film’s thread on the DVXUser site.
DVXFEST - official site
Sunday, November 2nd
by Zak Forsman
Below, is a BREITBART article with WIKIPEDIA founder, Jimmy Wales. Some interesting points made, but the assertion that no one is doing it yet, is wrong, wrong, wrong. LOST ZOMBIES comes to mind. As does STAR WRECK and the WRECK A MOVIE project, and Matt Hanson’s A SWARM OF ANGELS. The emergence of interdependent filmmaking is underway, but what this article shows is a lack of global penetration on the scale of Wikipedia or YouTube.
SABI PICTURES plans to incorporate an elevated level of collaboration on its upcoming WANDERLUST feature-length motion picture by enlisting the talents of its audience/community and creative partnerships with other filmmakers.
Here’s the article…
The age of public collaboration over the Internet is still only in its infancy, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told AFP in an interview.
The 42-year-old web guru, in an effort to show Wikipedia’s impact thus far, referenced a recent trip to a slum in India where he “met this young man on the street who told me that he had used Wikipedia to pass his 11th grade exams.”
“Wow, that’s really cool, right? We’ve had some impact, even in such a place where I’m talking to this guy, and there’s mud streets, and cows, and it’s really quite a different environment from London.”
Wales’s popular online encyclopedia allows anyone with an Internet connection to make entries and edit content.
Speaking on the sidelines of an awards ceremony in London, Wales said: “We’re really just at the beginning, still, of collaborative efforts.”
“In video, right now, we’re still back in many ways in the Web 1.0 era,” he said, referring to the age before so-called Web 2.0, the peer-sharing model of the Internet of which Wikipedia is almost the definitive example.
“If you look at almost everything on YouTube, it’s individuals doing videos, either funny cat videos, or drunk girl videos seem to be quite popular there,” he said with a smile.
“What we haven’t seen yet in video is large-scale collaborative projects.”
Off the top of his head Wales suggested a 90-minute collaborative web video created by interviewing people from all around the world, giving their views on the war in Iraq.
He joked: “This isn’t going to be that popular, frankly, a 90-minute movie with people talking about Iraq — it’s going to have a small audience. This can’t be produced in the old-fashioned way. It’s totally possible now.
“That’s just one dumb idea of mine, right? Imagine what we could get if we could get 100,000 people thinking about collaborative video efforts to create documentary films, or comedy, or art, or who knows what.
“So, I think we’ve still got a long way to go.”
Continue reading »
Tuesday, October 28th
by Zak Forsman
PRESS RELEASE :: WEB SITE
PlaceVine today announced the conclusion of its successful beta and the general availability of The Brand Integration Service, a web-based information service connecting marketers to product placement, sponsorship, and branded entertainment opportunities in film, tv, and new media.
Monday, October 27th
by Zak Forsman
I believe we are on the brink of a new indie filmmaking movement. And i don’t mean the emergence of a new sub-genre. Currently filmmakers are focused on the monetary value of their films. And selling it to a distributor as a monetary reward. but say you were to aggregate your film using bit torrent, giving it away for free as Jamie King did with Steal This Movie. his film has been downloaded 6 million times. if he were able to track who and where those people were, he would have something very valuable – a list he could take to advertisers and brands and say, this is my audience. this is the demographic i can offer, lets negotiate and strategize.
And so I come to this… METADATA. At the recent Power to the Pixel conference, this topic was on everyone’s mind. A special think tank I sat in on and observed was put together to address this and other challenges the DIY filmmaking community faces.
How to collect it, what info could be useful to collect, is anybody out there already doing it — these are the questions they asked and we will be asking as this movement evolves. For lack of a better term, I’m using From Here To Awesome to describe this movement from now on. forget the first incarnation of FHTA as an online festival of sorts. It is evolving into something bigger, more inclusive. this new wave is what I will continue to blog about so everything will go under my “from here to awesome” category if you wish to follow these articles.
Would a universal form be ideal? Like what Without A Box did for film festival submissions – fill it out with all your film’s info then open it up to your audience like a Wiki? obviously the tech for something like this is not in place, but I imagine there are ways to do it. perhaps by embedding the metadata into the files of the film, like that which is done with mp3s.
Thinking about this, I pose the question to you… what metadata could be useful for filmmakers who want to sell DVDs, hold screenings, use brand integration, solicit advertisers? And how do we collect it?
