As the SXSW music/interactive/film superfest kicks off in Austin this weekend, I was reminded of a comment made by this week’s interviewee Barry Jenkins. His film Medicine for Melancholy originally premiered at SXSW ‘08, and later kicked off Independent Film Week (where I saw it). During the Q&A, Barry was asked where he’d found all the wonderful independent music in the film. His answer (I’m paraphrasing here): “I keep a playlist of songs in iTunes by unsigned bands that I think might work in a film.”
In this vein, SXSW offers a great opportunity even for those filmmakers who aren’t attending the conference. Bands playing at the festival typically release a free MP3 in advance of the show for promotional purposes; every year for the past five years, these MP3s have been collected and released as an unofficial torrent. This is a great opportunity to listen to a lot of music, from bands signed and unsigned. Of course, there’s no guarantee that an unsigned band will agree to let you use their music in your film, but the chances are certainly better in the situation where you can ask them directly, rather than deal with a label.
It’s my understanding that, because all of these songs have been publicly released gratis, this torrent is legal. I may be wrong, but either way no one’s going to get mad at your for downloading this compilation of over 1,000 free and current MP3s. If you need a bittorrent client, for the PC try uTorrent and for the Mac try Transmission.
Start that iTunes playlist in preparation for your next project, or just enjoy the tunes!
Link: SXSW Torrents
I’ll be speaking on a panel titled “Writing for a New Landscape: New Media & Cross-Platform Opportunities” at IFP’s upcoming Script to Screen Conference. The conference explores new opportunities available to independent filmmakers and directly connects aspiring and working filmmakers to the decision-makers of the film, television, and digital media business. Here are some of the presenters:
Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown), Steve Bodow (Head Writer, The Daily Show), Brian Koppelman (Solitary Man, Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen), Peter Hedges (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, About a Boy), Adam Brooks (Definitely Maybe, Wimbledon), Monty Ross (Do The Right Thing), along with representatives from Focus Features International, the Sundance Channel, Filmmaker Magazine, and more! Like Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman, who wrote The West Side two years ago and haven’t been heard from since, thanks to the evil machinations of the film industry!1
The conference takes place Saturday and Sunday, March 20th and 21st at 92Y Tribeca (200 Hudson Street). For IFP members, tickets to the conference are $150; for non-members, $200. However if you use the special nofilmschool code FREE2010 you can get the member rate as a non-member.2
Writing for a New Landscape: New Media & Cross-Platform Opportunities will be an interesting panel, as I suspect most of the helpful information Zack and I can impart comes from our experiences shopping our feature-length, transmedia screenplay for Third Rail, rather than from our experiences producing the DIY The West Side. Regardless, I promise our panel will be interesting, and I might even wear pants.
Barry Jenkins’ terrific DIY feature Medicine for Melancholy won awards at the Sarasota, Woodstock, and San Francisco International film festivals and garnered three Spirit Award nominations. A.O. Scott of the New York times called it an “exciting debut” and made it a NY Times Critic’s Pick. M4M was picked up for distribution by IFC Films and was released theatrically last January (VOD and DVD releases followed).
Barry and I attended the Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium together in 2002 and have run into each other a few times since on the festival circuit. Here we talk about DIY filmmaking, distribution deals, VOD, new media, brand integration, and film school.
I find motion-captured performances (see: Robert Zemeckis’ CGI films) to be comparatively lifeless when measured against hand-animated fare (see: all of Pixar’s movies). The Netherlands-based crew behind Pivot employ a low-poly look not just to give their short style, but to make their characters expressive.
[via Short of the Week]
If you’ll be in New York on April 3rd, I can’t recommend the DIY Days conference highly enough. It’s free, but registration runs out quickly, so head on over to DIY Days and register now.
The WorkBook Project and the New School present DIY DAYS NYC. On Saturday April 3rd DIY DAYS comes to the New School in NYC for a day of talks, workshops and networking focused on creativity in the digital age. The focus of the day will be how those working in film, music, gaming, design, and software can fund, create, distribute and sustain from their creative efforts.
DIY Days is free because it’s run by volunteers, so:
If you live in the NYC area and are interested in lending a hand to help make DIY DAYS NYC possible we’re looking for volunteers. Send email to work [@] workbookproject dot com with the subject “volunteer in NYC.”
I have played one video game in four years; I’m not a gamer per se. But the ongoing revolution in social and casual games has been hard to miss, from watching my little cousins playing Club Penguin to the irrepressible Facebook invites I’m always getting for Mafia Wars. To date social games have been used as part of a feature film’s marketing campaign (most recent example: The Crazies), but they will become increasingly integrated into the core story. I’m already working on a social game as an integral component of my next project.
For the future of (social) gaming in one entertaining 30-minute presentation, here’s Jessie Schell’s invaluable primer from DICE 2010.
Watch it all the way to the end, as his final point is worth the half hour on its own. And if you think it’s just a thrown-in feel-good ending, the success of Nike Plus (sidebar) and more recent entrant Fitbit is living proof of socialization’s effectiveness when it comes to modifying real-world behavior.
MacHeist is a website that sells a lot of Mac applications in a bundle for less than the normal price of one of the individual apps. In the case of the currently running “nanoBundle2″ promotion, it’s seven applications that would retail for $266, on sale together for a total of $19.95. These aren’t trial versions or crippled licenses; they are the full monty.
How can MacHeist do this? Well, the involved app developers get a lot less money for their app, but they’re getting less money from a lot more people. Plus they gain a larger userbase and get broad exposure from the promotion. The current bundle contains a number of handy-looking creative applications and is live until March 9th, so I thought I’d review the software contained therein from the perspective of a writer/designer/filmmaker/blogger. To get your money’s worth you’ve really only gotta find one of the seven applications useful; is the nanoBundle2 worth a Jackson? More »
I’ve been wanting to use tilt-shift interludes as part of a feature film for a while now. These guys put the effect to beautiful use.
Here are some deets on how they did it (hint: they didn’t actually use tilt-shift lenses).
Most shooters don’t put together a camera package all from one source, but for anyone who shoots with a DSLR or video camera, which store have you bought the most equipment from?
Loading ...If you chose one of the last two options, feel free to leave your store of choice in the comments (I wanted to keep the poll brief).
According to the New York Times review, the new Playstation 3 game Heavy Rain offers “a glimpse of the future of interactive entertainment, a future when characterization, writing and emotional connection are more important than combat mechanics.”
Another tidbit from the Times review: the script for Heavy Rain was over 2,000 pages long.
As a storyteller I’m less interested in the skill and coordination aspect of videogames, and more interested in the choices one has to make as a player/participant in interactive movies. The rest of the reviews of the game/movie are also overwhelmingly positive, and I look forward to playing/watching (I guess I should I just say “experiencing”) it.
TWEETS FROM @RYANBKOO
Medicine for Melancholy film | Rebel Cinema: [...] are some quotes from the interview on nofilmschool. You must check o… 6½ questions with: Barry Jenkins
Scott David Martin: Great stuff as usual Ryan. 6½ questions with: Barry Jenkins
Barry Jenkins Interview on NoFilmSchool | 1001 Positively True Stories of An Indie Filmmaker: [...] http://nofilmschool.com/2010/03/questions-with-barry-jenkins/ [...] 6½ questions with: Barry Jenkins
Angelo Bell: This one of the deepest, most informative interviews I've ever read. Barry… 6½ questions with: Barry Jenkins
Toni Dove: Thank you both for posting this terrific interview. I've been thinking a l… 6½ questions with: Barry Jenkins