How to Get a Free Pass to Distribution U.

The two Distribution U. events that I'm organizing with Peter Broderick are fast approaching... and I've been remiss in telling you how you can get a free pass.

First, the New York edition happens November 13th at NYU's Cantor Film Center, thanks to our friends at the Tisch School of the Arts, and the Los Angeles edition happens a week later, November 20th at UCLA, generously sponsored by the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

Second, here are some of the people who'll be on-hand to share their advice about audience-building, social media, distribution, and crowd-funding:

Richard Abramowitz (who organized the successful theatrical rollout of "Anvil: the Story of Anvil"), Jill Sobule (the singer-songwriter who enlisted her fans to fund her latest album), Marc Schiller (the digital marketing expert who heads Electric Artists), Caitlin Boyle (semi-theatrical maven and head of Film Sprout), transmedia producer Noah Harlan, Internet guru Brian Chirls, Jim Browne (theatrical booker and founder of Argot Pictures), Adam Chapnick (founder of Distribber, the innovative company that works with filmmakers to maximize their digital revenues), Ira Deutchman (producer and Emerging Pictures CEO), Sandi DuBowski (producer/director "Trembling Before G-d" and outreach director for The Good Pitch), Justine Jacob (director of "Ready, Set, Bag!" and an attorney at the law firm Lee & Lawless), marketing consultant and former Variety chief marketing officer Madelyn Hammond, producer and producer's rep Jonathan Dana ("Road to Nowhere"), Amy Dotson of IFP and "Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo," "ZENITH" director Vlad Nikolic, Scott Macaulay (producer and editor of Filmmaker Magazine), Slava Rubin and Danae Ringelmann (co-founders of IndieGoGo), Anne Thompson (journalist and blogger "Thompson on Hollywood"), Robert Bahar (“Made in LA”), Roberta Grossman ("Blessed Is The Match"), Joel Heller ("Winnebago Man"), Skot Leach of Lost Zombies, Cora Olson and Jennifer Dubin of Present Pictures, and Ben Niles ("Note by Note").

So of course we'd love to have you join us in New York on November 13th or Los Angeles on November 20th (and you can use the discount code "friend" at either one to save a little dough.)

And if you would like to try your luck at winning a free pass to the Distribution U. workshop of your choice, just share the link to either one on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, along with the tag "#distribu," and we'll pick a winner by Wednesday next week at 5 p.m.

Distribution U., coming to NY (Nov. 13th) and LA (Nov. 20th)

I'm really excited to be collaborating again with Peter Broderick to put together two new "Distribution U." workshops next month: one at NYU on November 13th, and one at UCLA on November 20th.

We did the first "trial" one of these last November, filling up a ballroom at USC with 200-plus filmmakers and producers. If you know people who were there, they'll tell you about the incredibly positive vibe. The attitude was: if everyone is exclaiming that "the sky is falling" on independent film, how can we survive and thrive and help one another in a world with a slightly lower sky?

The event has a couple objectives:

- Let filmmakers connect, find new ways to collaborate, and help one another succeed.

- Talk about what's changing in terms of funding, distribution, and audience-building, with actual examples and case studies, rather than theoretical predictions.

- Hear directly from filmmakers about what they've done successfully with their most recent films to get them seen by a large audience, and earn a solid return. (We also talk about what didn't work, and wasn't worth the time or investment.)

- Enable participants to sit down with industry experts for small group lunch conversations on very specific topics, like working with the media and bloggers... understanding the way VOD deals work... organizing theatrical screenings that make money... and more.

- Provide ideas and strategies to several filmmakers in the audience, as part of an on-stage brainstorming session.

- Get participants charged up and excited about new possibilities, as opposed to depressed about how things are changing.

New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis was at the first Distribution U. workshop last year, and she used it as the basis for her article "Declaration of Indies: Just Sell It Yourself." Documentary Magazine called the event "casual, participatory, and supportive." One of our industry experts from 2009 told us, "The room felt like the future to me..." (At left is Oscar-nominated producer Adrian Belic leading a lunch discussion at the first Distribution U.)

I hope you can make it November 13th in New York, or November 20th in Los Angeles. And we're so grateful to our friends at New York University and UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television for making these two events possible.

Also: there's an early bird registration rate that will last until next Wednesday, October 13th at midnight. Grab a seat soon...and come with your enthusiasm, questions, awesome projects, and ideas.

From Sunday's NY Times: "Declaration of Indies: Just Sell It Yourself!"

NY Times film critic Manohla Dargis was at Distribution U. last November at USC, working on a piece about the revolution in indie film distribution.

Her piece appears in Sunday's paper, giving prominent play to the revolutionary ideas and efforts of people like Peter Broderick, Jon Reiss, Sacha Gervasi, Andrew Bujalski, and David Lynch. The opening:

LAST November inside a conference room at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, a film consultant named Peter Broderick was doing his best to foment a revolution. Mr. Broderick, who helps filmmakers find their way into the marketplace, was spreading the word on an Internet-era approach to releasing movies that he believes empowers filmmakers without impoverishing them economically or emotionally. Mr. Broderick divides distribution into the Old World and New, infusing his PowerPoint presentation with insurgent rhetoric. He has written a “declaration of independence” for filmmakers that — as he did that afternoon — he reads while wearing a tricorn hat.

In the Old World of distribution, filmmakers hand over all the rights to their work, ceding control to companies that might soon lose interest in their new purchase for various reasons, including a weak opening weekend. (“After the first show,” Mr. Broderick said, repeating an Old World maxim, “we know.”) In the New World, filmmakers maintain full control over their work from beginning to end: they hold on to their rights and, as important, find people who are interested in their projects and can become patrons, even mentors. The Old World has ticket buyers. The New World has ticket buyers who are also Facebook friends. The Old World has commercials, newspapers ads and the mass audience. The New World has social media, YouTube, iTunes and niche audiences...

Well worth a read. And here (again) is the video interview that Peter and I shot at Sundance 2009, talking about the future of indie film distribution. (We also hope to do at least one other edition of Distribution U. in 2010, so stay tuned.)

The Future of Indie Film Distribution: Peter Broderick from Scott Kirsner on Vimeo.

The Distribution U. Wrap-Up

Wow: two hundred filmmakers made their way to USC on Saturday (braving a walkathon that encircled the campus) to talk about the future of film marketing and distribution.

Amidst the continual caterwauling about the indie film “crisis,” Distribution U. was remarkably optimistic, as Peter Broderick and I had hoped it would be. Rather than organizing a panel where various experts would wring their hands about how it’s impossible to turn a profit making indie films anymore, our objective was to focus the day solely on strategies and tactics for finding an audience and earning a return.

I began the day by looking back at the history of cinema, briefly. Thomas Edison thought that movies projected for a communal audience would spell the end of his lucrative Kinetoscope business: the movie industry’s first existential crisis. In the late 1920s, most of Hollywood was convinced that sound technology was too expensive and complicated, and probably a passing fad anyway. TV was seen as a threat to the studios’ box office take, and a few decades later, once a big TV licensing business had emerged for movie studios, they were certain that the VCR and home taping would mean the end of that gravy train. Now, studio honchos and indies alike worry about declining DVD sales and digital revenues that, of course, will never be sufficient to support high-quality content creation.

But the bulk of my talk consisted of examples of how filmmakers (and musicians, artists, and writers) are engaging with their audience in new ways, and generating substantial revenues. (This was a one-hour version of a three-hour Fans, Friends & Followers workshop I’ll be giving in San Francisco on the evening of December 1st, at BAVC.)

Peter’s presentation was split into two hour-long parts, and though I’ve seen him speak several times before, each time there are new examples and clips that make me excited about the future. You can certainly keep hoping for the lottery ticket distribution deal, where someone hands you $10 or $20 million and turns your film into a great hit. Or you can be as creative with marketing and distribution as you were with your film, and take matters into your own hands.

One tidbit from Peter’s talk: he emphasized the need for filmmakers to create a persona – to be a human representation of their film, the “character” responsible for its creation. You might call this personal branding, and I know it doesn’t come as second-nature to every producer or director, some of whom prefer to operate behind-the-scenes. One of the filmmakers who was present at Distribution U. to lead a lunchtime discussion group, Adrian Belic (“Beyond the Call,” “Genghis Blues”), is a near-perfect example of someone who has cultivated a larger-than-life filmmaker persona. Belic is so enthusiastic about his movies, and bursts forth with stories about them, that you feel like the absolute next thing you must do is go see them.

We ended the day by inviting five filmmakers up to the stage to tell us a bit about their current project. (People were chosen at random.) Then, several of our guest experts – as well as other filmmakers in the audience -- offered constructive ideas and advice about marketing, sales, and distribution. (Among the folks who chimed in were Belic, Thomas Mai of Festival Darlings, filmmaker and marketing guru Marc Rosenbush, producer Cora Olsen, and Madelyn Hammond, most recently a top marketing exec at Variety and Landmark Theatres.)

The five films we talked about were:

- ”Two Spirits”

- ”Tricks”

- ”In My Sleep”

- “While Time Stands Still”

- ”Becoming Bert Stern”

It was a nice mix of narrative features and docs from some really driven, creative filmmakers.

We closed the day by asking the participants to boo if they were feeling more depressed and pessimistic than they had been in the morning. The room was quiet. Then we asked for applause if people were feeling more energized and enthusiastic, and it seemed like just about everyone was clapping.

Were you at Distribution U.? If so, what was the idea or tactic that struck you as most useful? What did you get out of the lunch discussion you were part of? Was there any advice you had for the five filmmakers who were part of the brainstorming session, but didn’t get a chance to impart? Do post a comment….

And here are some more pics from the event...



Madelyn Hammond leads a lunch discussion group.



Cora Olsen talks with the audience after her case study session.



Sacha Gervasi shares some advice with the audience.



Thomas Mai leads a lunchtime discussion on foreign sales.



Adrian Belic leads a lunchtime discussion group on theatrical bookings and working the festival circuit.



View from the back of the room. (Yes, we're hoping to release a DVD of the course at some point...)

Catching Up: Peter Broderick Video, DVD Data, 'Inbound Marketing' book, SMPTE Talk

- Filmmaker Magazine this week published an interview I conducted with Peter Broderick at Sundance this year, talking about new approaches to indie film distribution. (You can tell I have the usual Park-City-in-January cold.) I'm planning to post the full 30-minute interview here soon. This video is part of a series I'm doing on the future of entertainment, underwritten by the nice folks at Akamai. The idea was to take some of the topics we discussed at The Conversation last fall in Berkeley and make them more accessible to people anywhere in the world. I invite you to embed the video wherever you like, link to it, or comment on it.

The Future of Indie Film Distribution: Peter Broderick from Scott Kirsner on Vimeo.

This video, of course, is also a nice little appetizer for the Distribution U. workshop Peter and I are doing next Saturday, November 7th, at USC.

- This NY Times piece from Monday is really worth a read: "Studios' Quest for Life After DVDs." Here's just one juicy passage from Brooks Barnes' story:

In the first six months of 2009, revenue from disc sales declined 13.5 percent, to $5.4 billion, according to Mr. Morris’s evaluation of Digital Entertainment Group data. A $200 million uptick in Blu-ray sales partly offset a $1 billion decline in DVD sales. Over all, home video revenue declined just 4 percent, helped by a spike in rental revenue.

That bleak picture has studios now openly discussing what they have known privately for a long time: DVDs will continue to play a role, but it may be a supporting one to digital.

“DVD is going to remain very viable, but you’ve also got a strong base of interest in digital consumption,” Mr. Chapek of Disney said. “I see a peaceful coexistence.”

- The best book I've read about marketing and social media in a long while was just published this month. It's called Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. This is the kind of book I guarantee you'll find useful if you work in marketing or are trying to sell DVDs or downloads of a film (or other creative work.) It was written by two of the founders of a marketing firm in Boston called HubSpot, and the company also runs this weekly video podcast about Internet marketing, which you can subscribe to (for free) in iTunes. (That, by the way, was not a paid promotion...just an honest endorsement of something worthwhile!)

- Variety was kind enough to run some coverage of my keynote talk last Wednesday for the annual SMPTE Tech Conference in Hollywood. (This was a version of my talk about Inventing the Movies, with lots of movie clips. It was fun to have a few digital cinema pioneers in the audience whom I'd interviewed for the book back in 2006 and 2007.)

You, Me & Peter Broderick: Distribution U., Nov. 7th @ USC

Here is the scary thing about talking about the new landscape of marketing and distribution at a film festival:

The panels and presentations are often too short (and sometimes too superficial) to really make much of a dent. Ask the audience at the end whether they're feeling more confident and in control of their destiny, or more anxious and confused, and they're likely to say the latter.

I've been talking for the last couple months with Peter Broderick about taking a different approach. We wanted to create a full-day workshop that'd dive into some of the marketing and audience-building strategies I explore in Fans, Friends & Followers, and would get into the nitty gritty of distribution and savvy deal-making, which Peter works on every day with his clients. We also wanted to bring in some guest filmmakers to talk in detail about how they've gotten attention for their work -- and made money from it.

Finally, we wanted to make this a great opportunity to meet other filmmakers and writers and producers who're working on this "bleeding edge" of new marketing and distribution strategy -- to create lunch discussion groups around topics you're interested in -- and, if you'd like, to get some ideas from Peter, me, and the rest of the group about actual, tactical things you might do with your film, online and off.

We're calling it "Distribution U.: A One-Day Crash Course on the New Rules of Marketing and Distribution." We're doing it on Saturday, November 7th in LA, on the campus of USC. If you register before noon on October 18th, you can take advantage of the early bird discount.

Our goal is to cram in as many examples, case studies, data points, and proven strategies into eight hours as is humanly possible. The complete schedule is here.

Right now, we're planning on doing this just once.

Hope you can make it, and if not, perhaps you'll spread the word to friends who are in LA.

(And if you'd be interested in a DVD of the proceedings, which we're considering, send me an e-mail.)

Weekend Reading: Making $19,000 on Twitter, Broderick's Distribution Bulletin, Finding Your Built-In Audience, Gigantic Goof

Some stuff worth reading this weekend...

- Mike King's blog on the music business has this incredible post about how Amanda Palmer, a member of the band Dresden Dolls, earned $19,000 on Twitter in ten hours.

- Peter Broderick's latest distribution bulletin focuses on Timo Vuorensola, the Finnish filmmaker and crowd-sourcing pioneer, now working on 'Iron Sky.' It also includes a link to the complete Vuorensola interview from 'Fans, Friends & Followers.' You can subscribe to Peter's distribution bulletin via e-mail right here.

- Chris Thilk at Movie Marketing Madness riffs on and adds to a post I wrote earlier this month about how filmmakers should approach the challenge of building an online audience. It's great stuff...

- There is apparently some new online marketplace for indie films called Gigantic, according to Variety. The geniuses behind this service, unfortunately, don't own the domain Gigantic.com and also don't show up when you search for Gigantic. I'm sure it will be an astounding success. Go check it out (if you can find it, put a link in the comments.)

'Panic Button' Panel on Indie Film, and Post-Sundance Analyses

IndieWire offers up a summary of one of the Sundance panels I was sad to miss last week, 'Panic Button: Push or Ponder?', which looked at the future of the independent film business.

Producer Ted Hope, who was on the panel, offers his perspective, and links to the YouTube videos of the session.

(Sundance has also just posted video of my panel on new distribution strategies, along with most of the other panels from the 2009 fest.)

Here's the NY Times assessment of film acquisitions at Sundance this year. Total sales seem like they'll hit about $15 million, essentially the same as 2008.

And the Boston Globe's Ty Burr has a piece today headlined, 'The Magic Fades Away at Sundance.'

Interesting tidbit from Burr's piece:

Everyone agrees that the standard models of indie theatrical distribution and exhibition are broken; everyone at Sundance and in the industry is grappling with how best to replace them.

Some are even sure they have answers. Consultant and panelist Peter Broderick touted a brave new world of "hybrid distribution," controlled directly by the filmmaker that combines website direct sales, video on demand, Internet and TV deals, cellphone distribution - and, yes, a theatrical release when and if necessary. Much of this is already in place, Broderick pointed out, and, in some cases, has proven successful. What look like microprofits to a studio can be extremely macro to an independent director.

The most unsettling thought, though - the real game-changer - is that the movie theater audience may have gone away for good. Said panelist Mark Gill, head of the independent production company the Film Department, "My son doesn't care what format [a movie] comes in. He cares how fast he can get it and if it can come to where he is."

Do we want to treat that as a problem, or an opportunity?

Podcast Conversation with Me & Peter Broderick

To help SXSW launch a new podcast series, Studio SX Online, distribution consultant Peter Broderick and I recorded a conversation last month... focusing mainly on my book Inventing the Movies, but also discussing the broader topic of technological change in the movies -- and the opportunities it creates for filmmakers.

The SXSW site has a 17-minute version of the chat. I've also posted the full, 28-minute conversation (in MP3 form).

Here's the description:

In our first podcast Indie film guru Peter Broderick interviews Scott Kirsner about Scott's new book, "Inventing the Movies," which tells the story of Hollywood's love-hate relationship with new ideas and new technologies, from the days of Thomas Edison to the era of YouTube and the iPod. Peter and Scott also discuss digital projection and cinematography, emerging opportunities for indie filmmakers today, the initial reaction to Dogma 95, experiments by filmmakers like Jonathan Caouette and Robert Greenwald, and how festivals are changing.

Peter Broderick on Old World vs. New World Distribution

Peter Broderick has written a great piece called "Welcome to the New World of Distribution."

What's important is that it urges filmmakers who believe that traditional distribution is broken -- and are finding it hard to figure out how they'll earn a return -- to try something different. The new world can be dangerous, and there aren't safe routes to success. "But for all the obstacles and dangers," Broderick writes, "there are unparalleled opportunities." One of the best: controlling your own destiny.

The chart at right is from Broderick's piece.

Indie Documentarians Take Control of Their Own Destiny

BusinessWeek Online has a nifty piece about documentary filmmakers taking control of their own distribution. The lead example is a film called 'What's Your Point, Honey?', which I hadn't heard of...but apparently has been doing well in New York.

John Tozzi writes:

...[L]ike musicians who shun record labels to sell their music themselves, anecdotal evidence suggests documentary filmmakers—already an entrepreneurial bunch—are foregoing the conventional path of shopping their films to a distributor. They're skipping such deals and using the Internet to get their stories in front of people who want to hear them.

"Indie filmmakers are getting a little bit less afraid to say no to somebody with all that power, because other new channels are opening up," says Amy Sewell, co-director of What's Your Point, Honey? Sewell, who wrote the popular 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom, has opted out of the festival circuit for her latest film. She and co-director Susan Toffler walked away from a "low six-figure" offer from a distributor so they could hold on to the rights, organize their own screenings, and sell DVDs directly through their Web site.

Few people get rich making documentaries, and that's unlikely to change. But filmmakers who take control of their marketing and distribution can expand their audience and increase their chances of turning a profit, says Peter Broderick, a Sanata Monica (Calif.) consultant to independent filmmakers. "Filmmakers need to be as creative about their distribution as they are about their production," he says.

Article also includes some examples from 'King Corn' and 'Note by Note.'

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.

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.)

Advice for Indie Filmmakers: Peter Broderick Video Q&A

If you've been to a film festival or two, you've likely seen Paradigm Consulting founder Peter Broderick speaking or moderating a panel; often, his focus is on digital filmmaking and do-it-yourself distribution. (This month, he'll be at the LA Film Festival and next month at Outfest.) Peter was formerly president of Next Wave Films, which in 1999 launched the first initiative to finance digital features.

This interview is in three segments. I've tried to indicate the topics we cover in each one.

Part 1 (8:00 running time)



Topics: The Cannes Film Festival, and whether attendees in 2007 were thinking about digital distribution channels. Broderick's favorite film at the festival. IFC's First Take multi-channel releasing strategy, and their acquisitions at the festival. Also: iTunes, Jaman, and Joost.

Part 2 (15:10 running time)



Topics: Film financing, including Internet-based efforts by documentarian Robert Greenwald, DrinkMePictures.com, and IndieGoGo.com. Also: Peter's recommendations about the best way for filmmakers to sell DVDs online.

Part 3 (8:50 running time)



Topics: How to market indie films online. Creating various versions of a film for distribution. The shift from selling DVDs to digital downloads. Also: 'The Secret,' Breakthrough Distribution, Joost, AppleTV, and affiliate programs.