Clips: IFP Panel on "Big Ideas for the Small Screen"

These are the clips I would've shown in this morning's IFP Filmmaker Conference panel on "Big Ideas for the Small Screen." (Conference venue couldn't show video from the Internet.)

- Thom Woodley's Web series "The All-for-Nots," produced for Michael Eisner's Vuguru.

- "Prank War" video from College Humor

- Animation project, "Animalia," raising money through Kickstarter

- One of the more popular "$99 Music Videos" from Next New Networks

The Numbers I'd Like to See from SnagFilms

One of the big questions on the mind of filmmakers at the IFP Filmmaker Conference this week was, is Internet distribution working for anybody? How much money is there to be made?

Yes, it's still the early days for all things digital -- but given that the traditional distribution marketplace is in such disarray, people are eager to understand their alternatives.

One of the featured speakers, on Wednesday, was Rick Allen, CEO of SnagFilms (which I wrote about here, back in June).

Allen shared some of the numbers from SnagFilms' first two months of operation.

They now have 440 films in the library...and viewers have consumed two million minutes of content online. About 10,000 people have installed the SnagFilms widget, which lets them select movies to "embed" or integrate into their own site. Allen said that by the end of the year, the process of submitting a film will be much easier for individual filmmakers.

There are two numbers that filmmakers probably would like to see from Snag...

1. How much are the most successful filmmakers earning from advertising? (Snag shows short ads during the streaming of movies, and splits revenues 50/50 with filmmakers.) Allen was asked this during his session, but he said they didn't have enough data yet.

Online, video advertisers pay about $25 for every thousand times their ad is shown, or .025 cents a viewing. If people press "Play" on your film 10,000 times on Snag, that's at least $125 for you. (One ad is shown before the movie, and there are other commercial breaks. If someone stops watching before the first commercial break arrives, you at least get credit for that first ad.)

2. ...Which means that the real way filmmakers will make money through Snag is by selling DVDs. I asked Allen after his session whether he could share any stats about the percentage of viewers who decide to buy the DVD. (There, Snag takes an 8.5 percent cut of the transaction, but lets the filmmaker keep the rest.) He said it was too early to tell, but that anecdotally, filmmakers he has spoken to have seen an uptick.

Allen will be on a panel I'm moderating next month, so I'll ask again then...

Digital Downloads Panel at IFP Filmmaker Conference

This afternoon's panel on Digital Downloads was hugely fun for me to moderate.

Joel Heller of Docs That Inspire recorded the panel, and has posted it here.

Some of my impressions and rough notes:

- Digital downloading isn't yet a major revenue-generator for indie filmmakers; Hunter Weeks of '10 MPH' said he has sold about 4000 DVDs of the documentary, and about 700 downloads (both on his own site and on Amazon Unbox)

- Anyone who picks up your movie for distribution in theaters, on home video, or on TV will try to buy the digital rights for it ... even if they don't actually do anything with them; carving out digital rights seems like a good idea

- We all agreed that iTunes is the "hot shop" where digital movie buying happens, but they're not yet open to indies; Peter Broderick of Paradigm Consulting said that iTunes will start selling indie content (handled by aggregators) really soon, but wouldn't say more

- Building a database of your fans' names, e-mail addresses, and ZIP codes is really important, as you sell downloads. Many services won't give you that information, to protect their customers' privacy. But Peter said that getting that information could be as valuable as any profit you earn from selling or renting your movie -- since those are fans you can communicate with and market your future films to. Peter has a great term for that group of people: they are a filmmakers "core personal audience." I like that.

- I predicted, in response to an audience question, that in five years, digital movie consumption will be about equal to consumption on DVD.

- Jaman said they plan to start integrating advertising in short films soon, and sharing the revenue with creators (right now, Jaman's model is simply to sell or rent full-length movies in digital form)

- I brought up Jaman's deal structure: they give filmmakers 30 percent of the rental or download revenues, and pocket 70 percent. That compares to selling movies through Amazon's Unbox / CreateSpace, which split revenues down the middle. Kathleen Powell said that Jaman is more of a concentrated community of cinephiles, and that indie features and docs don't get lost. (She also said that "Black" is the site's most popular film.)

- Then Brian Chris of the 'Four Eyed Monsters' team hammered on Jaman some more, noting that the site requires filmmakers sign a six year non-exclusive agreement ... so if you made another distribution deal, you couldn't remove your movie from Jaman for six years. Kathleen clarified, and said that the length of these deals run anywhere from five to nine years, and said that it's expensive for the site to encode movies (that cost is anywhere from $800 to $2000). So it isn't economical for the site to do that one week, and have a filmmaker pull down the title the next week.

More from the IFP Filmmaker Conference

Lance Weiler moderated a great panel yesterday afternoon that was supposed to be about "Consumer Viewing Habits" but wound up being more about the economics of supporting one's creative work, whether it involves full-length features (Arin and Susan from 'Four Eyed Monsters' were there), short-form funny videos (Andrew Baron from Rocketboom), or documentary (Brett Gaylor of Open Source Cinema).

Some very random notes:

Arin mentioned to Brett how important it is to collect ZIP codes from people interested in your project. That way, when you're doing theatrical screenings or events (or trying to figure out where you should do these events), you have a sense of the geography of your fan base: do people love you in Madison, Wisconsin, while they couldn't care less in Portland, Oregon?

Brett showed the trailer for his doc, which garnered applause -- a good sign. It should be finished next year, he says.

Andrew said that Rocketboom is one of YouTube's advertising partners, and that YouTube will share revenue from the ads it places on Rocketboom. But none of the ads have started showing up yet. Lance suggested that one reason why is that someone created a hack for Firefox that allows you to strip the ads off YouTube's videos. I suspect there may be other reasons, too. Afterward, Baron told me that the ad payments are based on impressions (not click-throughs), and that YouTube would be splitting the revenue roughly down the middle with its creators.

Arin and Susan shared a lot of financial info about 'Four Eyed Monsters.' They've grossed about $135,000 from the movie so far (but are still trying to erase some credit card debt.) About 69 percent of that has come from selling DVDs, movie tickets, and downloads, and 31 percent has come from selling t-shirts, posters, and other merch.

Afterward, Hunter Weeks (director of the doc '10 MPH') came up and we talked about distribution a bit. He said he hasn't really been selling many downloads on Amazon Unbox, even though an Amazon PR rep told me recently that his films was among the best-selling indie downloads on that site. (They had 12 downloads in the month of August through Unbox...and yet a representative for Amazon's CreateSpace division, which handles the indie content on Unbox, told me that month that they were "in the top 20 Unbox titles." What does that say about how well Unbox is doing?) Hunter said he also sells digital versions of the movie on his own site using a service called E-Junkie, which charges $80 a month to host the movie -- and nothing per transaction.

Then there was some hanging around in the lobby...I spoke with a couple knowledgeable folks about when, if ever, indie movies will appear on iTunes. The smart money is on 2008 -- not this year. iTunes is supposedly still more focused on trying to get more studio content. (It is now almost two years since I wrote this opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle arguing that Apple is being hypocritical by not allowing independent creators to sell their film and video on iTunes.)

Then there was a dinner that Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo organized....which brought together the 'Four Eyed Monsters' team, Lance, Brett, and M dot Strange...basically, an incredible about of DIY filmmaking smarts gathered around one long table.

What If You Had an Unproduced Screenplay?

This morning's panel at the IFP Filmmaker Conference, 'Turning Your Viewers On,' was a lot of fun. Laurie Racine sat in for David Dudas of Eyespot, and she was great (in addition to working for Eyespot, Laurie is also involved with Creative Commons and dotSub, which added a lot to the panel.)

Here's a question I posed to the audience, which sent the discussion off on a really interesting trajectory. My goal was to talk about how creative people think about the collaborative potential of the Internet.

What if you had an unproduced screenplay in your desk drawer? Would you put that screenplay up on the Net, where an aspiring filmmaker could take it and turn it into a movie -- with full credit to you as the screenwriter? What if you could be assured that if they made a movie (maybe they'd film the entire script, or condense it into a short), and they made money, you'd be guaranteed a percentage of any revenues? But let's assume the more likely scenario is that your movie would only show at a film school, or online, but wouldn't generate much of a return for the filmmaker...

(Afterward, Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker Magazine mentioned that Jonathan Lethem, a bona fide famous writer, has done this with some of his short stories.)

Here were some of the responses from the audience:

- If the screenplay is in my desk drawer, it probably isn't very good, and I wouldn't want my name attached to it if a film was made.

- I'd worry that someone would take it and make a lot of money from my work.

- What if I become famous, and someday a studio wants to make a "real" movie from that old script that I wrote in college?

- What if they changed my script while they were making the movie?

Have a look at The Jonathan Coulton Project, where a very good singer/songwriter allows anyone to produce music videos using his songs. Why wouldn't screenwriters want the same kind of thing to happen with their unproduced work?

I'd love to hear your feedback below... but one last quote from the novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow to get you thinking: "The greatest threat to an artist is obscurity, not piracy."