The Digital 25: Visionaries & Innovators, according to the Producers Guild

Check out the interesting list below, released yesterday by the Producers Guild of America.

Some great names on it, but for a list that aims to recognize people who "have made the most significant contributions to the advancement of digital entertainment and storytelling over the past year," I'm not sure I'd still have the founders of YouTube, MySpace, or Second Life on there... (but I did learn about Mass Animation, a cool crowd-sourced animation company, headed by ex-Sony Pictures exec Yair Landau, from the list.)

THE DIGITAL 25:

-- Sandy Climan, Steve Schklair, Jon Shapiro, & Peter Shapiro, Co-founders -- 3ality Digital
-- Jeff Bezos, CEO -- Amazon (Amazon Kindle)
-- Steve Jobs, CEO -- Apple computer (iPhone)
-- Henry Selick, Creator/Director -- CORALINE
-- Alex Albrecht & Kevin Rose, Co-founders -- Diggnation
-- Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO -- DreamWorks Animation Studios
-- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO -- Facebook
-- Seth MacFarlane, founder -- Fuzzy Door Productions
-- Jason Kilar, CEO -- HULU
-- Roger Guyett (Visual Effect supervisor), Mike Sanders (Digital Supervisor) and Steve Sullivan (CTO) -- Industrial Light & Magic
-- Evan Spiridellis & Gregg Spiridellis, Co-founders -- JibJab
-- Jason Goldberg & Ashton Kutcher, Co-founders -- Katalyst Media
-- Yair Landau, Founder -- Mass Animation
-- Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe, Co-founders -- MySpace
-- Fred Seibert, Creative Director -- Next New Networks
-- Shigeru Miyamoto, Video Game Designer -- Nintendo
-- James Cameron, Chairman and CEO -- Lightstorm Entertainment
-- Ed Catmull (President), Pete Docter (Director of UP), John Lasseter (EVP, Creative), Jim Morris (GM & EVP, Production), Andrew Stanton (Director & VP, Creative) -- Pixar Animation Studios
-- Laura Michalchyshyn, President/General Manager -- Planet Green
-- Jonathan Kaplan, Founder -- Pure Digital
-- Jim Jannard, Founder -- RED digital Cinema
-- Sam Houser, founder/director -- Rockstar Games
-- Philip Rosedale, Co-founder -- Second Life
-- Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone & Evan Williams, Co-founders -- Twitter
-- Steve Chen & Chad Hurley, Co-founders -- YouTube

Hulu Passes Yahoo, Takes Aim at MySpace

Interesting change: Hulu is now the third-place video destination, surpassing Yahoo. YouTube and MySpace are #1 and #2. (But there's a huge gap between #1 and #2.)

According to the story:

Viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube and other Google Inc. sites [in March 2009], and News Corp.'s fully owned sites such as MySpace.com provided 437 million viewings in second place.

Hulu served up 380 million videos in March, and Yahoo 335 million.

Assuming Hulu's growth continues, and MySpace keeps fading, Hulu will soon be in the #2 spot.

MySpace has Wes Anderson's interview with Owen Wilson

Cool concept: a video interview of Owen Wilson, conducted by Wes Anderson, his long-time friend, collaborator, and director of 'The Darrjeeling Limited.' It'll go up on MySpace tonight at midnight, as part of their Artist on Artist series.

Of course, everyone wants to know whether Wes and Owen will talk about Owen's recent suicide attempt. (I think probably no.)

(Thanks to Anne Thompson for the link.)

30 Hours in Toronto

Today's panel on social networking at the Toronto International Film Festival was a lot of fun, thanks to five really brilliant panelists and the organizing efforts of Shannon Abel of TIFF. We had a really engaged audience, too -- especially distribution guru Peter Broderick, who heckled from the second row.

The main message, to me, was that we're still in an era when filmmakers are figuring out how all these new online tools can connect them with their audience in a way that makes sense. Some of the points I heard:

- Jason Klein of Special Ops Media said that what works for one film may not work for another. Clients still come into his agency and ask him to duplicate the positive word-of-mouth that spread online when "The Blair Witch Project" was released in 1999.

- Filmmakers Sandi DuBowski and Corey Marr said that they're trying a lot of things on MySpace and Facebook, like reaching out to particular groups (in Sandi's case, gay and lesbian Jews around the world) to introduce them to their movies. It's still hard to tell how much of this effort pays off, in terms of people actually purchasing a DVD or buying a ticket to see a movie in a theater. But both said they'd run into people at festivals who'd heard about their movies via social networks like MySpace.

- There's lots of confusion over how much marketing and commerce you're technically allowed to do on MySpace. I asked Christine Moore from MySpace whether, when a movie is released on DVD, a filmmaker would be allowed to message all his MySpace friends to let them know where they could buy it. She gave that her blessing.

- Sandi said that holding onto as many rights as you can is a great idea; he has a deal with his distributor where he can sell DVDs of "Trembling Before G-D" on his own. (He buys these DVDs at wholesale price from the home video distributor, New Yorker Films.)

- Bill Holsinger-Robinson from Spout talked a bit about the release of "Four Eyed Monsters" on YouTube; the money that Spout supplied to Arin Crumley and Susan Buice helped them eliminate some of the credit card debt they'd accumulated in making the movie. (Crumley and Buice got $1 for every new Spout member who registered at the site after they watched "FEM" on YouTube.)

- Someone from the audience asked about collaborative online efforts to make documentaries, and all of us on stage whiffed. Moira Keicher from the National Film Board of Canada, who was in the audience, pointed us to OpenSourceCinema.org.

TIFF recorded the panel, and I'm hoping they'll make it available online soon.

During my 30 hour stay in Toronto, I got to go to a couple parties, but mostly camped out at the Varsity Cinemas. I saw four really wonderful movies: "The Secrets," an Israeli/French production about an unlikely friendship between two girls in a seminary, and an ex-prisoner they try to guide toward redemption; "The Last Time I Saw My Father," about a tempestuous father/son relationship, starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent; "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," an exceptional Western photographed by Roger Deakins and starring Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt; and Helen Hunt's impressive directorial debut, "Then She Found Me," a deep and thoughtful romantic comedy co-starring Firth and Bette Midler. I caught about an hour of "Into the Wild," the Sean Penn adaptation of Jon Krakauer's book, which didn't really appeal to me. (I haven't read the book, though I'm a fan of Krakauer's magazine work and "Into Thin Air," his best-seller about climbing Everest.)

I wish I could've stayed for the rest of the festival, especially to see some documentaries (tops on my list were "A Jihad for Love," which Sandi DuBowski produced, and the documentary about The Who, the title of which escapes me.)

Two articles on new approaches to monetizing content

- The NY Times writes about a new ad-sharing deal that Trey Parker of Matt Stone, creators of 'South Park', have cut with Viacom. From David Halbfinger's piece:

...Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker and their bosses at Comedy Central, a unit of Viacom’s MTV Networks, are attempting to leapfrog to the vanguard of Hollywood’s transition into Web. In a joint venture that involves millions in up-front cash and a 50-50 split of ad revenues, the network and the two creative partners have agreed to create a hub to spread “South Park”-related material across the Net, mobile platforms, and video games.

The deal, signed Friday, begins with a three-year extension of the show and its creators’ contracts through a 15th season, in the year 2011, and gives Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker sizable raises, both in their salaries and in their guaranteed advances against back-end profits from DVDs, merchandising, syndication and international sales.

It also creates an entity called SouthParkStudios.com, to be housed in the show’s animation studio in Culver City, Calif., that is intended to be an incubator not only for new applications for characters the likes of Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny, but for new comedy concepts that could one day mature into TV series of their own.

All told, people involved in the deal confirm that it is worth some $75 million to Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone over the next four years.

For me, the interesting lesson here is that properties that don't figure out how to become a big presence on the Web -- easy to watch for free, or to purchase -- are in danger of lapsing into irrelevance. I hadn't realized how little 'South Park' I'd been watching online (and how much other animated stuff, like 'Red vs. Blue' or 'Homestar Runner') until I read this piece.

- The LA Times says that MySpace may soon lift its ban on commerce, allowing musicians and filmmakers, for instance, to sell CDs or DVDs from their MySpace pages. Joseph Menn writes:

By officially barring most commerce, MySpace is leaving a lot of money on the table. The company talked to Google Inc. and EBay Inc. about teaming up to organize user-to-user sales, but nothing has emerged.

Executives hint that something big is in the offing. [Co-founder Chris] DeWolfe said peer-to-peer transactions have to be "fun, safe and secure." Selling only to your friends, for instance, might be both fun and safer than bidding on EBay, MySpace employees said. One person said MySpace could be on the verge of a sweeping deal to give it tools to better monetize and monitor the commerce activities of its members.

Of course, the current "ban" on commerce is not consistently enforced -- many filmmakers already have links from their pages to Amazon.com, where their DVDs can be bought.

And musicians can use MySpace to sell downloads.

But this could make MySpace much more of a bustling content marketplace...

Two from the LA Times: Net Video

The LA Times has two pieces worth reading today:

- Tips to create a YouTube phenomenon, from the guy who did "Shoes.

- A piece about "Afterworld," a new animated series on MySpace. There will be 130 episodes, two to three minutes each. Total budget of $3 million. That makes it the most expensive series to appear on MySpace. If it attracts a decent audience online, I won't be surprised to see it released on DVD or TV -- or maybe in theaters?

From Variety: 'Indie Films Crave Great Reviews'

Anne Thompson shares some juicy insights for indies from the recent Seattle Film Festival. From the piece:

The Web has affected the film biz in many subtle ways, but it hasn't yet replaced the branding that occurs via theatrical booking and critical reviews. A local movie critic with a following drives people to see indie movies in a way that nothing else does -- at least so far.

Those points were brought up during two panel sessions at the recent Seattle Film Festival.

The most heated debate at the indie digital distribution panel was between Amazon Unbox exec Roy Price and two filmmakers in the audience who argued that "Who Killed the Electric Car?" was only an Unbox hit because it had already played in theaters.

Price insisted it would have been just as big a hit without a theatrical release. He believes passionately in the future of Internet DVD sales and downloads and early believers building a movie into an Internet hit via social networking, viral marketing on sites like MySpace, and an ardent fanbase. "Movies don't need theaters to succeed on the Internet," he declared.

The example of a success so far that they cite: 'Four Eyed Monsters,' of course.