ITVS: Case Studies of Indie Filmmakers Working with New Technologies

One of my big projects for 2008 was collaborating with ITVS on a series of case studies focused on indie filmmakers who are pioneering new ways to:

- Open up the production process to more audience participation

- Find and connect with new audiences for their work

- Distribute their finished film in new ways.

The first seven case studies are up on the ITVS site now, along with a list of the "Top Five Connection-Creating Strategies" and "Top Five Marketing and Promotion Strategies" for social issue filmmakers. (Many of these would work for any kind of filmmaker, but the whole project has a social issue doc focus.)

The filmmakers I interviewed include Byron Hurt ('Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes'); Katy Chevigny ('Election Day'); Curt Ellis ('King Corn'); David Iverson and Michael Schwarz ('My Father, My Brother and Me'); Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell ('10 MPH'); Tiffany Shlain ('The Tribe'); and Brad Lichtenstein ('What We Got'). One last case study, with Patrick Creadon (director of 'Wordplay' and 'I.O.U.S.A.'), should be up soon.

Here's part of the intro to the project:

...Chasing every new opportunity can be a waste of a filmmaker’s energy and resources. Which ones will generate the biggest return, in terms of attracting viewers, making change in the world and producing positive financial results?

The ITVS Digital Initiative: Report from the Field, a series of case studies published on the ITVS website, aims to answer that question. By sharing the stories of filmmakers who are experimenting with new technologies, and trying whenever possible to quantify the results, we’ll seek to inspire other filmmakers to innovate—while trying to avoid raising unrealistic expectations.

The Report from the Field will focus on three main changes, or pillars: opening up production, finding new audiences and taking advantage of new distribution opportunities:

Opening Up Production to Participation
During pre-production and production, how are filmmakers communicating with audiences, widely dispersed teams, funders and prospective subjects in new ways? What new opportunities for involvement and participation are they exploring?

Finding New Audiences
Once a project is completed and ready for release/broadcast, how are filmmakers using blogs, social networks, games and other technologies to reach audiences that will care about their project?

New Distribution Opportunities
How are filmmakers presenting their work on websites, cell phones, iPods and the new generation of Internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes? Do these distribution avenues create conflict with more traditional outlets? Are there substantial economic benefits or simply promotional positives?

Thanks to Sally Jo Fifer, Matthew Meschery, Cathy Fischer, Jim Sommers, and the rest of the team at ITVS for supporting this work!

New Business Models for Digital Distribution

Any idea what the weekend box office numbers were for April 14-15, 1894?

Or how much home video raked in, the first few days that you could purchase movies on VHS or Betamax tapes?

Cinema was a tiny business at the outset. The Holland Bros. Kinetoscope Parlor in Manhattan took in $120 on its first day of business, a Saturday. When the entrepreneur Andre Blay started selling Hollywood titles on cassette in the 1970s, he made $140,000 during his first weekend.

Those are pretty unimpressive figures.

But by the mid-1920s, movies were generating $1 billion a year (adjusted for inflation). By 1990, home video had grown into a $6 billion business.

Those two examples may be instructive when studios and filmmakers look at digital distribution today. It’s small. It’s tempting to ignore it, and focus instead on selling DVDs. That’s where the money is. But digital, I believe, will gain a lot of steam over the next five years.

This shift from the business of selling physical DVDs to the business of selling digital bits was the focus of two panel discussions earlier this week; they were sponsored by ITVS and the Paley Center for Media. One took place Monday in Beverly Hills, and the other was held Tuesday in San Francisco.

The panel included Rick Allen, CEO of Snag Films; Tami Yeager, a filmmaker who is also working with the Tribeca Film Institute’s Reframe Project; and Jesse Patel of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain participated in the SF panel, and Brian Terwilliger was the filmmaker on the Beverly Hills panel.

Even the filmmakers who have been pioneers of digital distribution haven’t yet come close to earning online what they earn from selling DVDs. Terwilliger said that while his movie One Six Right is for sale on iTunes, it isn’t easy to find unless you specifically search for the title. (For some reason, Apple doesn’t list it under “Documentaries” or any other category, and he hasn’t been able to rectify that.) Shlain told me that while her short “The Tribe” was the top-selling short film on iTunes for a while last year, and while she has offered it through other sites, the digital revenues have been only about 1/10th what DVD sales have achieved. (Shlain has also had trouble getting paid by the aggregator that helped funnel the movie to iTunes.)

But everyone on the panel agreed that DVDs will not last forever.

What was most useful at both panels was exploring some of the different business models that are emerging for earning digital dollars from movie releases:

- Paid downloads, a la iTunes.

- Paid rentals (limited period for viewing)

- Free rental or download (to reach broad audience); what’s free may be only a portion of the film, and “extras” or bonus material or a "comprehensive" version of the film may be for sale, digitally or on DVD

- Subscription (a project is released in installments, and interested viewers pay a small monthly subscription to receive them – or receive them first, a week or a month before they’re released for free)

- Slicing and dicing. Educators or institutions may pay a fee for the right to edit or excerpt a full-length film in a way that suits their needs. Instead of the old, “Buy this DVD for $300,” you might say, “Pay $300 for the right to customize this material to fit your course, or to work in the context of a group meeting.”

- Bounty fee/referral fee. A film becomes a tool for generating new members for a Web site or other organization. With the YouTube release of Four Eyed Monsters, for instance, the filmmakers received $1 for every new user they directed to the Web site Spout.com

- Advertising/sponsorship/underwriting. A film will be peppered with short ads (they’re 15 seconds long on SnagFilms), or sponsorship/underwriter messages.

- Live speaking gigs via videochat. One interesting new idea that emerged from the panels is that filmmakers might earn “speaking fees” without having to travel. Instead of asking a non-profit or educational institution to pay $2500 or $5000 to fly you out to address their group, ask them to pay $250 or $500 to have you do a short live talk/Q&A (using software like Skype or iChat) after they’ve watched your film. More groups would be able to afford that kind of filmmaker interaction than the pricier one, and fewer filmmakers would be spending time stuck in airports or jammed into center seats.

No doubt there are other models that will work, or are at least worth trying. Post your thoughts below…

How to Get Your Indie Film on iTunes (...It's Not Easy)

If you are a filmmaker who wants to self-distribute your work in digital form, there’s probably nothing more frustrating to you than Apple’s indifference to helping you do that.

You may own a Mac. You may use Final Cut Pro for editing. You may carry an iPhone or iPod in your pocket. You may have a MobileMe or .Mac account.

But Apple doesn’t seem to want to help you do business online.

I’ve harped on this issue since 2005, the year that Apple first started selling movies and TV shows on iTunes. Since then, iTunes has become the dominant marketplace for legal movie sales and rentals; in June, Apple said iTunes users were renting or purchasing 50,000 movies a day. (Apple’s rivals, like Amazon Unbox, Movielink, and CinemaNow, have never disclosed how many movies they sell and rent – but my belief is that they’re bit players.)

So how do you get your movie sold on iTunes?

It’s not easy, and Apple doesn’t make things any easier by supplying absolutely no official information to filmmakers who’d like to sell their work on iTunes. (By contrast, here’s CreateSpace’s crystal clear explanation of how to sell your work on Amazon Unbox – the best non-iTunes option that exists today.)

Here’s the scoop: Apple’s strategy thus far has been to only work with aggregators, or services that will collect a number of indie films and then deliver them to iTunes. They don’t want to work directly with filmmakers. But there is no aggregator yet that will take just any finished film and deliver it to iTunes, in the same way CreateSpace (which is owned by Amazon) will take any finished film and sell it on Amazon Unbox.

So, who (aside from indie-majors like Lionsgate and The Weinstein Company) is working with iTunes today? Here's my list. (If you know of others that would be interesting to indie filmmakers, mention them in the comments below.)

- New Video seems to be getting a lot of full-length features onto iTunes, including “King Corn” and “Bomb It,” both recently-released docs, and Henry Jaglom’s “Eating,” from 2004. They also connected Ed Burns with iTunes for his latest film, "Purple Violets." One filmmaker who got his doc onto iTunes via New Video told me the split is 70/30, with 70 percent going to the filmmaker; he’d initially contacted Apple about selling his movie on iTunes (he has been self-distributing DVDs, and selling tens of thousands), and was told to get in touch with New Video. Here’s their contact info. And here's a recent story from Video Business about their relationship with iTunes.

- Shorts International in the UK has distributed a few dozen short films through iTunes, including the recent Oscar-winner “West Bank Story.” Here’s the page that explains how to submit your film.

- The Independent Film Channel (IFC) has a handful of features on iTunes, including “Four Eyed Monsters,” “Does Your Soul Have a Cold?” and “Before the Music Dies.” Oddly, all of them are priced at $3.99 instead of the usual feature film price of $9.99. Contact info here, here, and here.

- Mediastile is the company that offered Sundance short films earlier this year on iTunes. One of these films, “Sick Sex,” is currently #2 on iTunes’ list of best-selling shorts, sandwiched in between two Pixar shorts. Mediastile also handled “The Tribe,” a short film that played at Sundance in 2006, and was briefly an iTunes best-seller last year. I’m not aware of any feature-length films that the company has handled, and no one at the company’s Lake Tahoe headquarters answers the phones, returns messages, or answers e-mail. (I happened to have the e-mail address of their president, and he did e-mai me to insist that the company is still in business, but didn’t return my phone calls.) I wonder what would happen if you wanted to call them to ask about getting paid? Their Web site, for the bold and courageous, is here.

So this is the best that Apple can offer indie filmmakers? Apparently so.

I’ve been told for the past year that other aggregators will soon, any day now, begin working with iTunes. Some of them may be more open to submissions than the four I’ve listed above. (By open, what I’d like to see is an aggregator accepting any finished film where the filmmaker can guarantee that there are no rights issues that will result in lawsuits… or at the very least any finished film that has played at least one festival.)

Here’s who else could soon be delivering films to iTunes:

- The Independent Online Digital Alliance. Already distributes music to iTunes. Their online application is here. IODA chief Kevin Arnold says via e-mail that they are "working on initial deliveries and ingestion now. No solid ETA yet though."

- Film Baby. Film Baby’s sister company, CD Baby, already distributes music to iTunes.

- IndieFlix. Co-founder Scilla Andreen told me this week that she expects a few IndieFlix titles to show up on iTunes in the fourth quarter of 2008, at the earliest.

- The guys at Cinetic Rights Management say they're close to a deal to work directly with iTunes.

Again, Amazon.com's CreateSpace is the best option today for selling your film in digital form, in my opinion. But you'll have to drive customers to your work -- unlike iTunes, where the customers are already buying movies in big numbers.

And if you know of other routes to getting onto iTunes, or have opinions about the ones I've listed, post them here!

EchoStar Buys Sling Media ... Blu-ray Sells More Discs, HD DVD More Players ... 'The Tribe,' Available Soon on iTunes

- EchoStar, the parent of the Dish Network, is paying $380 million for Sling Media. Sling makes the Slingbox, which can send live TV broadcasts and DVR content from your home to any Internet-connected computer (and even to many cell phones).

- In an update on the high-def disc wars, the Wall Street Journal says HD DVD has about 58 percent of hardware sales, but Blu-ray discs are outselling HD discs by 2-to-1 this year. What does that mean? I guess Blu-ray player owners are just buying more discs than their HD DVD neighbors.

Sarah McBride writes:

The upshot: Both formats remain viable. And even though consumers can get free movies when they purchase a player, millions of people are sitting on the sidelines, their wallets untouched.

- "The Tribe," a short film on the connection between Barbie dolls and Judaism, will start selling on iTunes next week, according to filmmaker Tiffany Shlain's Web site. (It played at Sundance in 2006.) That makes it one of the first indie films to show up on iTunes without going through an aggregator like Shorts International. It'll sell for $1.99. Shlain worked directly with Apple on the arrangement.