» Archive for the ‘web’ Category
You may notice things look a little different around here today (if everything looks the same, you might have to hold Shift and click your “refresh” button). Note there are no major aesthetic changes — I switched the titling and typography (I was always more of a sans-serif kind of guy, whatever that means), and there are now Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon badges on single posts. I’ve also created a NoFilmSchool Facebook Page, which now has a home in the sidebar. Many of these changes have been driven by a look inside the analytics of this site, so let’s look at NoFilmSchool’s recent stats: More »
NoFilmSchool has been powered by WordPress since launching in 2005, and in that time the CMS (Content Management System) has grown by leaps and bounds — while remaining 100% free. Today parent-company Automattic officially released WordPress 3.0, which adds some key features for moving the publishing platform toward a more full-fledged CMS (viable for, say, filmmakers). Video (and a hosting recommendation!) after the jump: More »
With this weekend’s release of the iPad, Apple has once again proved they know how to design an elegant product and market its simplicity as a virtue. However, there is one big knock against Apple when it comes to their software/hardware ecosystem, and that is enabling independent content creators to sell their product. It’s ironic — so many of us use Apple computers to design, edit, write, program, or otherwise bring our creations to life — but when it comes time to distribute or monetize our work, Apple generally leaves us SOL. Getting an indie movie into iTunes has been notoriously tough; I’ve kept tabs on developments at Tunecore only to have their planned video release options disappear from their site.
Thus, Distribber: recently acquired by crowdfunding site IndieGoGo, Distribber is one of the new “minimalist middlemen”1 that focuses on helping indies get their film into iTunes, Amazon VOD, and Netflix. These three stores lack an “upload” button — they all have walls around their paid content (you can get a podcast into iTunes, but only if it’s free). Distribber steps in as your “distributor” in an attempt to get your film into each store; they make no guarantees that your film will be accepted, but they refund you if your project doesn’t get in. Right now their fee is $1295, which includes a number of formatting issues and other ushering. Considering other indie distributors have charged “digitization fees” of up to $20k, Distribber’s service and price point is disruptive and very enabling for filmmakers planning on going the self-distribution route, even if it’s as Plan B.
Of course, it’d be nice if all three marketplaces would allow independent creators to sell their content without needing a middleman. But a non-exclusive, inexpensive middleman such as Distribber, like health care reform, is a BFD.
- Not an established term, but I’m coining it! [↩]
Daily Dose of Imagery is the online — and ongoing — portolio of candid shots taken by the Iranian-born, Canada-residing photographer Sam Javanrouh. In the same vein as nofilmschool – although a bit more obvious because of its name — Daily Dose of Imagery features a new post every day. If you’re primarily shooting video on your DSLR, Sam’s work is a great example of what you can do if you take the camera out of movie mode. The site is a steady stream of well-shot photos of everyday life, which are also included in the RSS feed, so if you’re an RSS user head on over and subscribe (not to mention to the nofilmschool RSS feed)!
Link: Daily Dose of Imagery
One of the most important things I learned on the job as a Senior Designer at MTV was: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. As a graphic designer, assembling a toolkit of brushes, textures, templates, and other elements is a crucial step to maximizing your design capabilities and efficiency. The other thing I learned was: you don’t really have to know what you’re doing! Thanks to thousands of readily available tutorials on the ‘net, if you’re not sure how to achieve a particular look or effect, all you have to do is google it. My favorite resource at the moment for tutorials and resources (including helpful posts like 50 Free UI and Web Design Wireframing Kits, Adobe Illustrator Tutorials – Best Of, and 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design) is Smashing Magazine. If you’re a graphic designer you probably already know about Smashing, but if you’re a filmmaker who also does some design — and a lot of us do, these days — check out the site (they also have a book).
Link: Smashing Magazine.
Get it? It’s like a “spotlight,” except for… web sites. First up is the site Filmmaker IQ, which I recently discovered… well, actually I don’t remember how I stumbled across it. Regardless, the site compiles a lot of helpful tutorials and resources in one place, with examples like 101 DIY Lighting Tutorials, 588 Free Film Contracts and Forms, and 155 Screenplay Formatting Tutorials. DIY tutorials like these are great for guerilla filmmakers; our dolly on The West Side was built out of rollerblade wheels, a piece of MDF, and PVC pipe from Home Depot. So next time you’re wondering about fair use for documentaries or are looking for a release form, give Filmmaker IQ a shot.
Link: Filmmaker IQ
Your Mac may make you look more like a designer or filmmaker, but beyond the basic functions of iLife, how do you write screenplays, record audio, develop websites, convert video and all the other productive stuff you bought a Mac for? What if you spent all your money on the hardware and don’t have any cash left for software? Luckily, there are plenty of creative applications available for the Mac for the price of free-99. Here are twelve apps worth a lot more than their price tag suggests. More »
UPDATE: It seems I was wrong, but not before others picked up on this idea. As it turns out, the Google Nexus One isn’t nearly as disruptive as a VOIP-driven, ad-supported device could be. I still maintain that the below is possible, and hopefully we’ll see it one day soon.
This isn’t specific to film, but considering mobile devices today are much more than just phones — they’re connected computers that serve as our digital, personal assistants — this has bearing on how all of us will be interacting with each other (and content) in the future. So I thought I’d throw around some unqualified and totally speculative speculation about What’s Next when it comes to mobile platforms. More »
When an online video series claims a hundred million views, but absolutely no one you know has ever even heard of it, something might be off. When an online video claims to have a hundred thousand views and it only has two comments, something might be off. In general, online viewership metrics aren’t standardized, and one of the reasons web video advertising hasn’t taken off is because advertisers don’t know how valuable a “view” really is. More »
Despite the fact that Zack and I have been pitching and developing our transmedia project Third Rail for over a year, it was a mad rush to pull together a trailer and rehearse our presentation for yesterday’s first annual Pixel Pitch here in London. During this process, which we had to conduct virtually — with him in New York, and myself temporarily in North Carolina — we considered a few different approaches to our verbal sell, some more theatrical and some more straightforward. Ultimately we went with the straightforward approach, and, in retrospect, that was probably a mistake. More »
Zack and I are headed to Philly for DIY Days. Head on down, it’s free (register here).
DIY DAYS is a totally FREE conference/unconference for everyone in film, music, design, gaming and software development who wonder how to sustain themselves in challenging economic times. Centering on how to fund, create, distribute and sustain the creative work of media artists, the conference is a diverse day of speakers, panels, case studies, roundtable discussions and workshops that includes an impressive list of innovative thinkers, makers and doers.
WHERE: UArts – 211 S. Board St, Philadelphia, PA
WHEN: Saturday AUGUST 1st from 8:30am to 6:30pm – followed by a social mixer from 6:30 to 8:30pm
UK-based author Russell Evans has a book on web filmmaking coming out in April of next year from Focal Press. I answered via email as best I could his questions about The West Side, and while doing so realized this neglected blog is long overdue for some updates. Why not kill two birds with one keyboard? These excerpts will have to suffice until I step away from the screenplay I’m toiling on (priorities, priorities) to write a proper, hopefully meaningful, update. More »
I affixed a quote from a GQ interview with Philip Roth into my writing notebook before leaving for Costa Rica; it seems especially relevant now that I’m trying to shut out New York City for considerable chunks of every day. More »
Filmmaker Magazine asked a number of Independent Film Week participants to guest blog on their website; I started writing a post but it ballooned into a verbose treatise on the future of digital distribution, so it ended up on their site as a Web Exclusive. It’s cross-posted here for no good reason.
Along with Zachary Lieberman (co-creator of The West Side), I spoke on Monday’s panel “Your Film Online,” and I wanted to expand here on some thoughts I shared during that panel — mostly in response to the prevailing wisdom that “the sky is falling” on independent film.
I’m a New Face of independent film, not an Industry Veteran, so maybe it’s naiveté that leads me to have a very different outlook on distribution than The Film Department CEO Mark Gill, whose comments in June were still on everyone’s lips at IFW. After proclaiming, “as it relates to independent film, the sky really is falling,” Gill’s solution was for the indie film world to make “fewer, better” movies. Unfortunately, that’s not actually a productive piece of advice. After he spoke, did most of the audience pack it up and leave to pursue a different career? No. Everyone’s already trying to make the best film they can, and telling financiers or filmmakers to try harder isn’t going to materially affect the market.
While Gill obviously gave the right speech at the right time and touched nerves across the industry, if we take a step back from the shake-up currently going on, the future is very clearly brighter than ever for independent productions; we just need to embrace a number of fundamental changes in distribution. Ten years ago, to get someone to pay to see your indie film, you had to mobilize a local crowd in dozens of markets in order to get butts into art house seats. Now we’ve got a global interconnected audience of millions of online movie watchers and the answer is to make less movies? No. The audience is larger than ever; we don’t need to make fewer movies. The answer is we need to make it easier to watch movies.
The way independent film distribution currently works is self-defeating. Let’s say I’m reading the current issue of Filmmaker and I find out about a film that opened at Sundance. I want to see it… but I can’t. The film showed at the festival, a distributor bought the rights to it, and now it won’t come to a theater for six to nine months and won’t be on DVD for a full year. Here I am with my interest piqued, the title of the film foremost in my head, but in order for that movie to earn a dime from me — an interested, paying customer — they’re going to have to count on me remembering the film several months later. They have to count on me actually becoming aware of its release through an advertisement or a listing of showtimes during the theatrical window, they have to count on me being in town and having some free time during that brief period, they have to count on me being able to interest someone else in the film as well (like most people I prefer not to go to the theater alone), and on top of all of that, they have to count on me actually remembering the article I read nine months ago and connecting that to the title of the film currently listed on the marquee next to several other titles.
What kind of consumer-facing product is intentionally made this elusive? In the above situation, if I do eventually realize I wanted to see the film, I’ll add it to my Netflix queue at position 336, which is not a great value proposition to the distributor or filmmaker. Even worse, after reading the Filmmaker article, I might never hear about the film again, and, like so many other movies I was interested in at one point, it might fall through the cracks and I’ll never see (or pay for) it.
It doesn’t make sense: if your film has someone’s interest piqued, they need to be able to plunk down a few bucks and watch it NOW. Not tomorrow, not next month, certainly not a full year from now.
The way I see it, there are two main problems with distribution as it stands today: one, release windows, and two, online experience.
In terms of release windows, I understand the arguments behind finding an audience and building hype. But the marketing costs that a movie incurs in order to achieve some sort of penetration into the collective cultural conscience is not befitting of an indie film. Besides, in the indie world, advance hype for something that hasn’t come out yet is more expensive and less effective than a simple recommendation from a friend for something that’s currently available. Regardless, if you’re going to spend money building an audience for a film, why not build that audience while the film is actually available for purchase, instead of during an “advertising-only” window?
The supporters of staggered theatrical windows and expensive ad campaigns have a reason to want to stick to their guns: their jobs depend on it. Distributors are the ones whose companies are in trouble, so they’re the ones most likely to cry apocalypse. On Wednesday’s panel “The State of Independent Distribution,” Scott Kirsner of Cinematech asked Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard about the wisdom of continuing to use release windows in the face of piracy. Why not make a film available for paying customers if it’s already available for free via illicit channels? Bernard’s response: “Because people are used to windows.” Well, people were used to snail mail before e-mail came along, and most of us have managed to adapt (with the exception of a certain Presidential candidate). I doubt many of us would want to go back to waiting three days for cross-country written communication, just as one day I doubt any of us will want to go back to waiting for film reels to be shipped across the country for an exclusive theatrical window.
If release windows are completely done away with and we put every film online day-and-date, wouldn’t that put many theaters out of business? Probably, but for most major releases nowadays, the film is already online day-and-date. It’s on Bittorrent, it’s on Kazaa or whatever file-sharing service they use on college campuses these days, it’s available via any number of illicit online distribution channels. These pirated copies are popular for two main reasons: price (free!) and convenience (now!). It’s hard to beat the pirates on the price issue, but as it stands, the illegal option is also more convenient than the legit option, and that’s a problem. Not only is it more convenient, but it’s also often of higher quality: if you look around on Bittorrent, the community cares deeply about the quality of the films they’re downloading; they rip a movie from an HDTV broadcast if possible, they make it available with subtitles in several different languages, and in general a downloader can watch a better quality movie for free than if they actually ponied up the cash to watch it through an authorized download or streaming service. Ultimately, when piracy is offering a more convenient, higher-quality experience in addition to a cheaper one, we’re failing at digital distribution.
There are existing online distribution options — including nascent day-and-date release plans like IFC’s VOD program — but the currently available choices offer limited viewing options and no sense of ownership. Using myself as an example, at home I have several legal means to watch movies online: one is my Netflix subscription, with its Watch Instantly feature, but it offers an extremely limited selection (less than 10% of Netflix’s titles are available to watch online), and it doesn’t work at all on my Mac. So I turn to iTunes, Amazon, or my Playstation, all of which tout online video stores; each has a different catalog, however, so you never know if the content you’re looking for will be available on that particular store. Additionally, each store has a different pricing structure and different viewing limitations thanks to their Digital Rights Management. Only my Playstation is hooked up to my TV, so content bought at Amazon or iTunes is only viewable on my laptop. Whereas if I download a movie illegally I can play it on the screen of my choice, if I “buy” a movie from an online store the DRM often won’t let me transfer the film to other devices. And limited transferability is only part of the problem with DRM; mainly, the issue is the consumer’s ephemeral ownership of a product they paid real money for. I don’t have any faith that a movie I purchase online today will be watchable three years from now; I might have an entirely new computer that it won’t transfer to, or I might forget the password to an account I have to “refresh” my licenses with. Imagine if you bought a DVD at the store and it expired after a few days unless you logged into a server; no one would buy such a disc. They actually tried that with DIVX ten years ago… and no one bought it. Yet DRM today is essentially the same as the failed DIVX experiment.
After years of hemorrhaging money, the music industry is finally offering decent options for online music consumption: iTunes and Amazon (and Rhapsody, I should note, since I currently work there) are finally selling MP3s, which are DRM-free and thus work on any device. That sounds like actual ownership. That sounds like an experience finally equal to that of… what’s already available online via pirated means, for free.
And that’s where watching movies online becomes viable. If I want to buy something, give it to me free of restrictions and I’ll gladly pay money for it and start building a library. Indeed, if people are buying millions of unprotected MP3s from online stores — instead of just one person on the planet buying the album and emailing the files to everyone — I’m pretty sure consumers will buy a DRM-free movie, load it onto any device they own, and enjoy it however they want. They’re much less likely to email around a 2GB movie file than a 4MB music file anyway. As a final point, does anyone think that selling a protected file to the paying customer is going to prevent piracy when there are a million unprotected, pirated copies of that same song or movie already available online? All DRM does is screw the person who actually paid for it.
Consumers don’t expect to pay as much for a digital file as they would for a physical product that was manufactured and shipped across the country, and rightfully so. But as filmmakers we’ll sell a whole lot more copies of our movie at a lower price point, and we’ll end up making more money this way anyway (the same thing happened with DVD when it undercut the price point of rental tapes — the drastic increase in number of units sold more than outweighed the drop in per-unit revenue). Today, a $20 DVD nets the filmmaker how much after the physical production, distribution, and company overhead? $2? Environmentally it’s not a great time to be shrinkwrapping a disc and freighting it all around the country, anyway. If we sell it through an online store for $10 we’ll keep significantly more than $2 of that sale; if we sell it on our own site, we’ll keep the whole $10.
And that’s another point about the bright future of indie film: direct sales. Gary Hustwit (dir., Helvetica) talked on Wednesday’s panel “The Digital Download” about the revenue streams he was able to generate directly from fans; when asked how much they added up to, he tellingly responded, “a lot.” And thus ended the panel. Some of these revenue streams were just rounded up by Peter Broderick in a two-part post at IndieWire, “Welcome to the New World of distribution” (part 1, part 2). As with countless business innovations over the years, cutting out the middleman, or at least reducing his role, is of paramount importance for independent productions. Getting back to Gill’s speech, he predicted, “it will feel like we just survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming.” He’s right, but the carcasses he speaks of will be the bodies of distribution companies and theater owners, not filmmakers.
The future of independent film is instant, digital gratification. As filmmakers, we’ve already brought down production costs down by shooting digitally; now we need distribution costs brought down by distributing digitally as well. Cut out the P&A — the 35mm blowup, the trucks across the country, the bloated ad campaign — and put our films in digital theaters and online, simultaneously. Make our films available anytime, anywhere: on our computers, on our iPhones, iPods, Playstations, TVs, etc. — all with the guarantee that if you buy it, it’s DRM-free. People will pay for something if they actually own what they’re paying for. In addition to hundreds of digital theater screens, we also now have hundreds of millions of computers with internet connections as our venues. That’s a lot of screens. I’m pretty sure the sky is not falling.
–Episode Four of The West Side went live a month ago. Sorry for the lack of updates; we hustled hard to get the episode done before the Webby Awards, and then we hustled hard to the open bars at the Webby Awards.
–At the Film & Video Webbys, we were the assholes. Maybe gracious and humble was the way to go, but everyone was saying those things and our speech was at the end of the show, so we went for something more memorable. Sorry, girl.
–The Webby Awards are at an interesting crossroads; they’ve been around for 12 years but are only now on the cusp of becoming well-known. Considering most of us spend more time surfing the web than we do watching TV, viewing movies, reading books, or going to plays, you’d think the web would have an awards show as prestigious as the Oscars, Emmys, etc. The Webbys are certainly the foremost Internet award, but they still have a ways to go.
–To further distinguish the award, the show-runners could axe many of their hundred or so categories, such as “Best Rich Media Advertising: Business-to-Business.” Maybe there really were hundreds of entries in that category. Or maybe there were more like nine entries, five of which were in turn nominated, two of which were then winners (the Webbys add a popular-vote “People’s Voice” award in addition to the judge-determined Webby Award). Add on the Official Honorees distinction and the show starts to feel like “everyone gets a star.” As a nominee (for Best Drama–certainly not a category that would be dropped, I should note), I tried to watch as many as possible of the other nominees, but I couldn’t make it through the 25+ Film and Video categories, not to mention the hundred other Website, Mobile, and Interactive Advertising awards.
–On the other hand, there should be awards for websites in a broad array of categories, given the Internet is such a broad and varied community. I’m not trying to bite the hand that feeds us; we couldn’t be happier about the award itself, or the accompanying shows and events. The boost in interest we’ve gotten because of winning the award will hopefully be career-launching. But it’s also in our best interest to hope the award continues to gain prestige; at the very least, the Webbys need to start prodding their sponsors for a higher percentage of their operating expenses to reduce their reliance on fees from participants (which is the most immediately obvious explanation for why there are so many categories).
–The first act of WALL-E is entrancing. It’s one of the greatest first acts ever committed to digital screens or celluloid film, for children or adults. But (minor spoiler alert) I was jarred by the appearance of actual live human beings in a Pixar film, in the form of Fred Willard no less; I’m still grappling with Stanton, et al’s decision to portray the Earthbound human civilization as a live-action digital video relic, but then 3D-animate the masses of human beings who appear on the spaceship. I get why they did it, but I’m not sure I like it. (That specific decision, I mean; while I think the second half of the film is a bit disjointed, as a whole it nevertheless ranks up there with Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles as Pixar’s best… and that’s saying a lot).
–At-home high definition is anathema to the movie theater industry; since I bought a cheap HD projector for my apartment, I’ve seldom set foot in a theater. This isn’t a new observation, but I’ll add to the chorus of voices: for $12 a ticket–$35 if you go with a friend and buy popcorn–the theater had better be a vastly superior experience than home, and it’s not. At the very least, the sound and visuals should be unbeatable, but when I eventually get a Blu-ray player, WALL-E will be brighter, sharper, and more colorful on my own wall than it was at the theater. And WALL-E will cost the same to own on disc (digital, re-watchable, with behind-the scenes interviews, commentaries, deleted scenes) as it did to see the analog film reproduction of it projected once in the company of strangers. I hope theaters find a way to right the ship, but at this point it’s simple economics as to why attendance is down (and yes, box office records are still being broken, but that’s due to increased ticket prices and more screens, not increased attendance).
–In other world news, “Mission Accomplished.” We got that oil–oho! And not only mission accomplished for Mr. Bush, in light of gaining control over Iraqi oil through no-bid contracts for American companies worth up to 75% of the country’s profits; also for Mr. Bin Laden, who stated in 2001 after 9/11 that his goal was to get oil to $144/barrel. Last week, it hit $145.85. Congratulations, oil barons/religious zealots! Somehow, you both won.
–On the other hand, neither of them can be blamed for the direction our auto industry took–or, more accurately, didn’t take–in the ’90s. Between 1974 and 1989, fuel efficiency doubled; since then, how much more efficient do you think our cars have gotten? Actually, the question is, how much less efficient have our cars gotten? The average car in 1989 got 27.5 MPG and today the average car gets right around 25. One could point to the fact that a higher percentage of hulking SUVs on the road today lowers the MPG average across the board, but the 1989 Toyota Camry got 27 MPG, while the 2008 Toyota Camry gets… 22. Surely that doesn’t represent 20 years of scientific progress? Granted, there is a hybrid Camry, which gets 34 MPG, but even that only represents a 25% improvement on a 20 year-old relic. As the New York Times points out, this mileage crunch was entirely preventable, and it’s our politicians who are largely to blame–on both sides of the aisle–although it was Republicans who passed a six-year bill in 1995 that expressly forbade the highway administration from spending any money to elevate fuel efficiency. Justify your existence!
–Speaking of which, I’m still waiting for an Obama-Edwards ticket. Pretty crazy: when I wrote that here two years ago, not only was I convinced Clinton was certain to get the nomination and anyone else even having a chance was wishful thinking, but I also had Obama penciled in as a Vice nominee because I didn’t think anyone’s star could rise that fast. Yes We Can!
–I’m excited to announce I’ll be doing television commercials for the McCain campaign.
–Kidding…
–Sorry, this temporarily became the so-not-film-school-that-it’s-politics-school; back to movies.
–The Dark Knight is going to make a metric ton of money, but how much of its opening weekend gross will be inflated by Heath Ledger’s baffling, sobering, premature death? Over the course of its theatrical run, domestically, internationally, including cable TV airings, adding in DVD and Blu-ray sales and all the other ancillaries, how much will the increased interest in the film because of his death end up being “worth?” No one wants to profit from an event like that, and no one wanted it to happen… but it did happen, and people are going to end up being richer because of it. Unsettling.
–As parts of The Dark Knight were actually shot on IMAX film stock–and scanned in at 8k for the DI–this is the film to see in an IMAX theater. So much so, in fact, that I had to buy tickets two weeks ahead of time; even the 2AM, 4AM and 6AM showings that I thought were listing errors on Fandango.com (“they must mean PM, right?”) for opening weekend were sold out. If you’ve been wanting to see a grown man run around in a glorified Halloween costume on an 80-foot screen at 6AM Monday morning on your way to work, now’s your chance.
–This late-night ticket phenomenon was also reported in the pesky New York Times; they somehow manage to beat nofilmschool.com to every story!
–Because I apparently write a lot about Christopher Nolan projects, I’ll keep going on The Dark Knight: my West Side co-director Zack is predicting a $114 million opening weekend, which I initially filed under “just another example of Zack’s boundless and unreasonable optimism,” but I’ve slowly come around to believing he’s on the money. Despite the movie’s dark subject matter, it’s both a sequel and a comic book movie, which collectively dominate the top of the all-time box office charts. At Media Predict, where “trading” ends 30 days before the film opens, the over/under finished at $101.5. We’ll see.
–The Brothers Nolan (Christopher and Jonathan), who have worked together in some form on Memento, The Prestige (one of my favorite films in recent memory, which I attempted to explain as a polemic on the price of religion), and now The Dark Knight, are at the top of their game. (Batman Begins was directed by Christopher, but penned by Blade scribe David S. Goyer, and Christopher’s other studio picture, Insomnia, was adapted from the Norwegian original by Hillary Seitz, an apparently prolific script doctor). So, yes, I’m really looking forward to this massive Hollywood blockbuster; I’ll get off the Nolans’ collective jock now.
–Wait a second, Bush is “pushing” for an average of 31 MPG by 2015?! We were getting 27 MPG in 19-fucking-89 and a mandated 12% improvement over 26 years is being called “aggressive”!?
–Sorry. I don’t own a car and I live in a city where mass transportation is readily available, so I’m allowed to be incredulous. If you’re in the market for a car and care about these things, however, you may be wondering which is better for the planet: a new Prius or a used compact sedan.
–Our screening and panel at IFC Center was a great experience and is covered a bit here and here. It was great to meet and chat with the other participants, and I was surprised at how well The West Side’s visuals held up on the big screen. As for the panel, I learned for the hundredth time that I’m much more coherent in writing, with or without editing, than I am when talking. Good thing this isn’t a podcast.
–If the most common approach for an aspiring filmmaker to break into the industry in the ’50s and ’60s was to get a studio apprenticeship, if the path in the ’70s and ’80s was to go to film school, if the path in the ’90s and ’00s was to direct music videos and commercials, the ’10s and ’20s will see the internet become the most prolific source of new talent. And not just for people who can film a video of their cat mowing their lawn; legitimate directors at the highest echelons of the industry will be most commonly discovered via their hitting the “Upload” button.
–That’s about as self-interested a statement as you’ll find. But you are, after all, at nofilmschool.com.
–On the other hand, reading about The Wire’s Ed Burns and how much of the greatest television show in history was informed by his personal life, one gets to thinking about how much more important real-world experiences are than anything they can teach you in a school, much less a film school. I’ve successfully avoided paying a lot of money to incubate in a film classroom, but on the other hand I’ve been stuck in a cubicle day in and out and haven’t traveled outside the country in two years. Day jobs are a bitch.
–Thus the name of our nascent production company: Exit Strategy.
Here, the nitty-gritty from our press release:
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MAY 6, 2008 – The 12th Annual Webby Awards today named The West Side as Best Drama Series of 2008. The show is self-produced by co-creators Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman.
Described as an “Urban Western,” The West Side transforms contemporary New York City into a unique, alternate universe by melding together elements from two disparate film genres: the grit of an urban setting with the tradition of the American Western. Presented in episodic form on the Internet at http://thewestside.tv, the show is written, directed, produced, shot, edited, and designed by Bilsborrow-Koo and Lieberman.
“This award is a perfect example of the opportunity the Internet represents for truly independent filmmakers to showcase their abilities,” said Bilsborrow-Koo. Added Lieberman, “for the judges to recognize the quality and ambition of our show is a great honor.”
Bilsborrow-Koo and Lieberman will be honored at the star-studded Webby Film & Video Awards in New York City on June 9th.
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More here.
The digital video blog I used to write for, DVguru, has been axed by its corporate overlords, which, in my (obviously less than objective) opinion, was a shortsighted mistake. I will now write about why this is the case, I will take some time to further inflate my own ego, and I will come up with an angle that could’ve undoubtedly saved the site.
Given the ongoing explosion of video content online (YouTube = $1.65 billion), given the ongoing DV revolution (take you pick of any number of digitally-shot films, the first that pops into my mind is 28 Days Later), and given DVguru’s relation to the digital video news market–that is, being the foremost oft-updated video site that caters to content-creators–it would seem that DVguru had a bright future. Say what you will about its less-than-stellar name, say what you will about its limited appeal, the site was a valuable resource for many filmmakers, especially of the aspiring sort.
Not to criticize Weblogs, Inc. or its sugar daddy AOL, but let’s briefly look at the other blogs they closed at the same time as DVG, according to Valleywag:
PVR Wire was a blog specifically focused on TiVo/PVR/DVR technology. It’s since been folded into TV Squad, which makes sense (as ex-WIN honcho Jason Calacanis points out), but if the topic of time-shifting television technology isn’t considered too small a niche, I don’t know what is (also, the opportunities for growth shrink as the technology becomes more and more commonplace, and/or integrated into other systems like Media Center). While PVR Wire was, in fact, garnering more traffic than DVG, I’m not surprised they shut it down. Another victim, Divester, was a blog on SCUBA diving: not a terrible idea but I’m not sure that anyone but the most passionate of divers would want to visit such a site on a daily basis. Though I’m a PADI Advanced diver (“advanced” not “Advanced“), I had visited Divester maybe twice in my life. So that one’s understandable too. The last one, BBHub… I have no idea what that even means.
Digital Video, on the other hand, is a rapidly-expanding field. NewTeeVee, part of the GigaOM network, launched a mere month before DVguru shut down, so clearly Om Malik and co. recognize a opportunity in the burgeoning video field (though they are more focused on the consumption and distribution of video than they are on its creation). Still, DVG could and should have covered all three areas, and to a certain extent it was starting to, by the time it was shuttered.
DVG also compared favorably to some other video sites I visit frequently: HD For Indies, Cinematech, DV.com, and Studio Daily. According to the traffic stats on all these sites, DVG was the leader.
Anyway, enough on the axing of a niche blog, and onto my own ego-building!
Here are the exact traffic numbers for DVG at the time of its closing (I don’t think I’m doing anything unauthorized here, as the site has always had a public Sitemeter available):
Looks like growth to me: 20k page views/month at the beginning of the year, 120k by the end. What is that, 600% growth? The curve would be much steeper, in fact, if it weren’t for those spikes–and what might those be, you ask?
They’re feature articles pulling in outside readers, above and beyond the usual daily audience. So pray tell, who was responsible for those? Moi.
First off, a disclaimer: if you think this is about the size of my ego, you’re terribly wrong. Someone with an ego the size of mine, in fact, scoffs at even writing about mere video technology. Instead, Ryan refers to himself in the third person, writes the next great American screenplay left-handed, pours champagne on strippers (working pro-bono, no doubt), and snorts lines off the deck of a yacht.
Kidding aside, let’s talk about me some more.
Above is a graph of the month in which I wrote my first feature, Ten video sharing services compared. Not a piece of literary genius, but perfectly timed. The piece garnered 830 Diggs (Digg is a social news service where readers vote (or “digg”) stories to the front page), which resulted in a boost of 30k page views for the one article alone.
Okay, you say, you’re a genius, but that was the small spike, what was responsible for the much larger one in October? I can’t claim sole credit for that one, as Russell Heimlich’s post on a spoof device, the DVD Rewinder, became DVguru’s most-trafficked post of all time, thanks also to Digg. Full credit to Russell, but there is of course a difference between writing a post pointing out the mere existence of a product (his) and a post made up of original content (mine!!! me!). I don’t know how much traffic the DVD Rewinder pulled in but it was certainly 6 figures of page views; I can’t speculate as to how much that was worth to Weblogs Inc. in advertising dollars but they probably made their payout to Russell times 500.
Two features I wrote that same month contributed to half of that spike, however. First I hit the readers with Ten reasons to not go to film school (wonder where I got the idea for that from?), and then, just as they were tossing their NYU Film prospectuses in the trash, I blew their minds with Ten reasons to go. Both also made Digg’s front page, totaling 1300 Diggs, and inspiring a lot of discussion, both on DVG and on Digg. Here is a link to the comments on reasons to go, here is a link to the comments on reasons not to, and here is a link to a commenter calling me a douchebag.
Lest you think Digg was solely responsible for all this traffic–and no business model reliant on someone else’s unaffiliated business is ever a very good one–the same features also made the front page of Slashdot, Techmeme (neither of which I read myself), and probably others. These articles were probably worth around 100k additional page views, and were also translated into Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, and Croatian. I had to do some digging (no pun intended… really) to find out which language the Croatian site was in.
If you’re looking at these traffic numbers–and if you weren’t already convinced, for whatever reason–you’re thinking I’m the man.
Unfortunately, manliness is not judged by blogging ability. In fact, it was recently proven that manliness is inversely proportionate to blogging ability. Damn.
On top of this detraction is the fact that the current Netiverse (or whatever you call it) is quite unrepresentative of the real world. Similarly to how The Real World (every season since the San Francisco original) is filled with far more air-headed but attractive young men and women than the real world, so too is the Internet filled with far more technologically-minded young males than the real world. Most of the articles on Digg, even the most trafficked, would never make the mainstream news, so just because a bunch of young gadgety guys find your writing topically interesting, does not mean that anyone else does. Personally, I find Reddit‘s news more interesting, as it is more focused on news related to politics, religion, science, or the intersection of all three.
Regardless, when you’re writing features for 5 cents a word and the shit is blowing up, I suppose you’d expect some sort of remuneration beyond what is given to the rank and file. But I wasn’t invested in the idea of being a prominent technology writer, and as such, I left most of my feature ideas sitting in a folder, untouched.
Still, I did learn while looking over internet traffic stats that if you want to become profitable through the monetization of internet traffic, you should immediately start posting upskirt photos of female celebrities. In response to the proliferation of such photos, I have to ask: where do you go from here? It used to be that tabloids and gossip rags would sell copies by capturing a bit of thigh when the wind blew aside a starlet’s dress, then it was taking photos of celebrities vacationing on faraway islands in bathing suits, which was one-upped by snapshotting their nipples (which, shockingly, look very much like regular people’s nipples) slipping out of strapless dresses, and now we’ve finally arrived at sticking a flash camera between the legs of coked-up socialites as they step out of luxury automobiles. Simultaneously, body grooming has advanced to the point where it’s marginally normal in society for men to do it, so many of these crotch-shots are unencumbered by any hair, clothing, or any other such concealment device, and thus become gynecological by nature.
So, let me ask again: now that we’ve reached a new low for paparazzi photography, where do we go from here?
I have the answer:
Sex tapes.
Not only do millions of people now have the privilege of knowing, topographically, what the nether region of dozens of celebrities are like, we can also (finally!) experience what it’s like for them to have sex–what they look like, sound like, talk about, and how well-endowed their boyfriends are. I have a couple questions in response to this:
1) What did they think was going to happen when they taped it in the first place?
2) How did a post about the closing of a blog I used to write for arrive at expounding upon the sexual habits of celebrities?
Again, I have the answer: they’re both about the proliferation of Digital Video.
And thus I know what would have stratospherically boosted DVguru’s traffic numbers, and thus saved it from extinction: making it the authority (nay, guru) on celebrity sex tapes. Bring it back, AOL–if traffic is what you’re looking for, we’ll do you right.
Internet searches that resulted in a visit to this site:
“filmschool or no filmschool”
“without film school”
“film school complaint”
“evaluation of the movie the 40 year old virgin”
“crash was a bad movie”
“paul haggis sucks”
“short shorts”
“really short shorts”
“andre iguodala computer background”
“freakonomics shithead”
“does your chain hang low”
“1191″
“ass shaking for money”
“screen sex”
“people having sex in school”
“is there any porn websites that show people actual having sex”
“what does human resources mean”
“i love it when you call me big pappa”
Of course, now that I’ve specifically written about the above phrases, I’ll get even more searches for them. Perhaps I can become the internet authority on “ass shaking for money.” Ass shaking for money. Ass shaking for money. Ass shaking for money.
I’m starting my own internet company.
Blah blah blah, Web 2.0, blah blah blah.
More news soon.
I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t help myself. And neither could the mainstream media.
I still haven’t written up the story of how I finally got a job and moved to New York, which is kind of the point of this site. Regardless, the project that I’m doing graphic design for, MTV’s digital music service URGE, launches today. URGE is a combination a la carte music store, ala iTunes, and subscription service, ala Napster–but it’s much more editorially-driven. There are a lot of passionate music fans at MTV programming the various channels, feeds, blogs, and playlists in URGE–all of which are ways of helping users explore its very, very deep catalog. iTunes operates under the assumption that you pretty much know what you want when you head to its store; URGE is designed to be a place you can go to discover new music. And I’m not just talking about the teenyboppers screaming outside my office window; whatever your niche may be, it’s likely well-represented in the service (one of the first things I did at MTV was to make a Klezmer playlist image, if that gives you any idea). And while my taste in music was pretty indie by North Carolina standards, I’ve got nothing on the folks I sit next to.
Don’t just take my word for it; initial reviews of the service have been very favorable. Head on over to URGE.com, or download Windows Media Player 11 (also released today) and click on the URGE button. You’ll see my dirty work scattered about.
UPDATE: For everyone who’s complained to me about URGE costing money, I’d like to point out the big “14-Day Free Trial” button on the site (no credit card required). If your trial period runs out and you decide not to subscribe, head on over to Pandora or Last.fm. I actually wrote a review of both services once upon a time (I liked Pandora more), but I forgot to post it–essentially they’re both music recommendation engines similar to URGE’s Auto-Mix feature, without the portability. It’s the new millennium–there are no excuses for not having your musical tastes extend deep into the Long Tail.
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