from Independent Cinema Office

Producers, distributors and exhibitors are all using digital marketing tools to promote films and get them seen by audiences. Too often, however, they are working in isolation from one another. This pioneering programme will bring together professionals from across the film industry chain to explore a cross-sector, streamlined approach to building audience interest in independent film.

It will be a unique opportunity for film companies to foster partnerships on joint initiatives, at the same time as being inspired by case studies of innovative practice in digital marketing.

Who is it for?

We are seeking around 35 forward-thinking professionals working in production, distribution and exhibition who are interested in exploring new business models and industry partnerships for using digital technologies to engage audiences. Roles of participants may include CEOs, acquisitions, sales, marketing, press, communications, audience development, programming, plus professionals from film industry support agencies. While we would encourage participants to attend the full series of six workshops, a single place on the programme can be shared between colleagues within the same company if appropriate.

How is it structured?

The programme comprises six one-day workshops spread over one year. Each day will offer inspiration from digital experts, case studies of innovative models from within the film industry and other industries (eg. music, TV, advertising…), plus practical group sessions to explore new ways of working together. Between workshops, participants can continue conversations and update each other on projects through an online forum.

What does it cover?

The programme will retain a degree of flexibility, responding to participants’ own business needs, project proposals and emerging ideas. Topics will include:

• What digital marketing techniques are producers, distributors and exhibitors using to build audiences for independent film? How can they combine forces to work together on long-term, strategic promotional campaigns?
• What does each sector know about audiences for independent film and how can we share this information?
• How can crowdsourcing and crowdfunding ensure audience buy-in from the outset?
• What is the potential of on-demand cinema and other flexible programming models?
• What lessons can be learnt from TV, music and advertising industry experiences of cross-platform promotions?
• How can collaboration across the film industry be built into working practice?

The workshops will be hosted by BBC Radio 4 technology journalist Simon Cox and will feature presentations from creative digital thinkers.

So, Digital and Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has backed MP Clare Perry's calls to create a firewall of Britain to support the seemingly reasonable aim of protecting children from pornography (and potentially keeping adults from materials classified under the Obscene Publications Act). With the web now moving further towards the TV, the suggestion is not much of a surprise.

While it's tempting to dismiss it as an attempt for the government to filter the web so it can block a future Wikileaks - especially after Vaizey's Network Neutrality misfire - the discussion of how to deal with the difference between TV, where you can't say certain words before 9pm, and the web, which knows no limits, needs to take place. And as The Register - telling people to calm down - points out, Vaizey has suggested he doesn't want to legislate but wants to act as broker between industry and ISPs.

Indeed Vaizey was cautious when the issue was first raised by Conservative MP Claire Perry in the Commons on November 23rd, afraid of what he called a 'Twitter Storm', but in yesterday's Sunday Times he said he wanted to see the ISP industry introduce measures soon. To recap what Perry was calling for:

"I am asking for a change in regulation that would require all UK-based internet service providers to restrict universal access to pornographic material by implementing a simple opt-in system based on age verification."

Yet - as anyone who understands the web's structure will know - there is no 'simple opt-in system'. So asides from the censorship problems of blocking entire websites - spelt out well by the Guardian today, which points out that sites like Flickr, YouTube, Blogger and Tumblr all have adult channels - is the practical fact that the kind of filtering Perry and Vaizey are calling for just has never been proven to work - indeed research below suggests it could slow down connections by up to 86% while wrongly blocking millions of child-safe websites, and letting millions more child-unsafe websites flood thru.

There are three ways to crudely filter content by age:

• on websites themselves, putting responsibility on publishers; 
• in browsers, putting responsibility on parents and those who control the web connection; 
• and at ISP level, which requires the ISPs to track, review and filter all of their traffic thru some automated process.

Vaizey pointed out to Perry in the commons debate that a UK adult website was recently prosecuted for not providing sufficient adult content warnings on their front page (which in turn alerts browser blockers like CyberNanny). Perry responded that this is no help with foreign websites and suggested that most parents are either too busy to know how to install a filter in the browser - "through technological ignorance, time pressure or inertia or for myriad other reasons, this filtering solution is not working" - so the responsibility should be with the ISP.

To avoid parents having to take responsibility for what their children has access to (unlike alcohol, cigarettes, DVDs or TV in the home) Perry says the ISP should play a kind of gatekeeper nanny, filtering all content unless someone tells their ISP they are an adult, while presumably auto-filtering anything else that looks like it might be illegal under the Obscene Publications Act. And here is where many online have started to panic - it would surely just be a matter of time before other kinds of content got added - first suicide forums, racist hate sites, terrorism related content, then alleged copyright infringement perhaps. At such a point, the Internet would be a different place, subject to the whims of the government of the day. If a filter was in place it would be a challenge for MPs to avoid using it as a political tool, and it's hard to imagine in the long term during, say, student demonstrations them not blocking sites for protesters who 'may be planning violence', or sites which publish damaging leaked confidential documents.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves - right now, all that's happening is a meeting of ISPs and concerned parties, around a table, some time next month. And whatever the outcome of that, the simple issue is that ISP-level auto filtering doesn't work. As well as slowing down web connections considerably, ISP-level filters fail to block what they’re supposed to, and succeed in blocking what shouldn’t be.

It's a no brainer - how could can anyone other than a human distinguish between, for instance, scenes from Lars von Trier's Antichrist or Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ and material currently banned under the Obscene Publications Act? 

In one of the main studies into the area, ahead of trying to implement a similar Australia-wide firewall, Australia's OFCOM, the ACMA, did research into the accuracy and impact of ISP-level filtering, called “Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering” which showed five big problems with ISP filtering:

1. All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked;
2. All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested;
3. One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was not performing filtering;
4. Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
5. The most accurate filters were often the slowest.

If you were one of the 3 - 18 million inaccurately blocked websites because of ISP filtering (based on 231m websites world), who would you sue for loss of business? The government? The ISP? Meanwhile websites that auto-publish content, like Netribution, as well as web forums, would be at risk of being blocked automatically from the actions of one user - only the web giants who could afford constant 24-7 moderation would be able to survive.

The fact that children and teenageers have access online to images and video beyond my wildest imagination when I was that age has long troubled me, and a serious debate between ISPs, web and browser companies, content producers and end users is a good thing - especially as the web moves to the TV. It also troubled me when working in a primary school last year which had a strict web firewall,that it offered unlimited access to YouTube - which is filled with adult content - but not the website we'd built for the school, or the Vimeo videos embedded in those pages (until we spoke to a filtering help desk for 30 minutes).

So it's an important issue, but what must be avoided - after the chaos of the Digital Economy Act - is for an MP with rudimentary technical understanding to push thru an invented 'solution' to a genuine problem that bears so little relationship with reality they end up creating a heap of new problems - and alienating the people whose support would be needed for a solution to work.

Because the only solution that I can imagine working is the crowd-model, the - gulp - Big Society answer. A huge federated opt-in crowd-built database run by parents, teachers and concerned people ticking off websites and video safe for different ages, based on common guidelines. And then browser and operating system makers could hardwire a very simple way for parents to turn ON a filter for their children not showing anything that isn't on the ever increasing list for that age group. Crude, but more dependable than any of the other controls - and at the same time not absolving the parent from their responsibility over what their child can do at home.

For me television (and the 90’s) really started with Buddha of Suburbia, which had fully developed Indian characters that weren’t stereotypes to cringe at. Yes shopkeepers and arranged marriages were in there but it was done in a funny demented way that wasn’t patronising. I know there was My Beautiful Laundrette before it (from the same writer no less) but this was better. Add My Son the Fanatic which was years ahead of it’s time in terms of it’s subject matter, East is East (not my favourite but popular nonetheless) and then the ground breaking Goodness Gracious Me and after that…. Er that’s it.

We seem to have gone backwards again with Curry urchins on Eastenders, corner shop owners on Corrie (aka Currie?) and an ITV Call Centre comedy that seems to evoke Mind Your Language seeing as the latter had an LWT weekend slot. All this slow progress and progressive work has suddenly gone into reverse. Granted, we have Gurinder Chadha flying the flag but she is all alone out there and not much is being done to pan out the television schedules to reflect the diversity of the United Kingdom and when they do it’s with a resounding commercial and critical thump. I would estimate that we are 20 years behind American television we need to close the gap.

We need characters like the ones written for the screen by Hanif Kureishi rather than the caricatures in Eastenders and Coronation street. This can only be done by true talent spotting rather than diversity nights that the channels seem to be doing to ‘feel clean’.

Actors of colour like Dev Patel and Adrian Lester have already disappeared to America where characters are stronger, can we afford to lose more like them?

Some very important occasions in your life only comes ones and that's all. Such happening like your wedding, high school graduation party, a trip to a far country or an abnormal happening that you happen to witness are things you will never love to forget. One important thing that is of great important to help you record such occasions is a camera.

Now, with a camera in hand, the next thing that you should never compromise is the quality of the picture shot during these wonderful moments. To guarantee quality shots, pause a bit and relax as I take you through some tips to snapping brighter picture.

It's taken me a while to gather my thoughts about the Second Open Video Conference which took place at the start of October in New York. It featured a vast mix of people and organisations interested in the future of video online - from tech and web shapers to creatives and lawmakers - there's not many places where you can end up round the table with implementers from the W3C, the Firefox and Safari developer teams, the inventor of VLC and someone whose mashup has just been retweeted by John Cussack and got half a million views.

Some background

The first event in June 2009, came against the backdrop of the mass Iranian 'green wave' uprising. As the conference continued we could see first hand the importance of a free, open and impartial media space, as well as the importance of social media tools such as Twitter to share information and connect people. There was also buzz around the hopes for a royalty free video codec, Ogg Theora (just as web image formats jpg, png and gif are royalty free), while filesharing seemed certain to have changed the media landscape forever with filmmakers like Nina Paley explaining how she was staying afloat with a near-copyright-free model for her film Sita Sings the Blues.

15 months later and there's been some troubling moves. Britain has adopted the Digital Economy Act, France is already implementing HADOPI - both are 'three strikes and you're out' internet laws that will push the serious pirates into hidden and untracable proxy networks, while penalising with digital excommunication the casual or accidental downloader (or indeed anyone who shares a wifi connection with them), alienating and disconnecting the very audience indie filmmakers are desperate to engage with. The way such massive legislation was pushed through Parliament angered many of the copyright industry's former supporters and has been met with widespread condemnation through the tech, web and telecoms sector. While the LibDems said they would rescind the bill, it's been added to the many election pledges they've backtracked on. Google, meanwhile, appear to have also broken their word over network neutrality, at least on mobiles - breaking the internet's golden rule of 'all data is equal' by saying some data is more equal than others - if you're rich enough. Meanwhile the ACSLaw debacle shone some light on dirty world of copyright blackmailing, a 21st century 'get rich' scheme where consumers get bullied and frightened into paying a fine for an infringement that may or may not have happened. 

But it's not all bad - Google has also released the WebM video codec royalty free and claim that they will be better placed than Xiph, who develop Ogg, to defend patent claims - while Ogg still has widespread use through Firefox. Platforms such as Vodo are opening more of the film community's eyes to the benefits of P2P, while the P2PNext project has finally blossomed with a torrent streaming protocol (aka bandwidth-free streaming) implemented in the last few weeks with Wikimedia and a Firefox plugin. HTML5 is a browser reality and the next generation Javascript and WebGL languages are offering some truly dazzling glimpses of the future of video online (people are even saying nice things about IE9), while the Universal Subtitles project (and sister Drumbeats lab newling Popcorn.js) offer practical solutions for attaching meaningful metadata to online video, right now.

Freedom of expression vs privacy

If there was one news story that - like Iran last time - backdropped the discussions at the conference, for me it was the tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi, a student at Rutgers university whose roommate had filmed him having sex on a webcam and uploaded it to the internet. As a generation we're only just beginning to understand what having our data carved in stone into the Internet for the rest of human history really means, and our free and open video space comes with huge privacy issues.

So for a major theme running throughout the conference, for me it was the tension between freedom of expression and privacy in the digital age. Take Arin Crumley, for instance, who's spent the last three years filming a docu-drama at Burning Man, his follow up feature to Four Eyed Monsters which he plans again to offer for free download. The preview trailer he showed at the Future of Exhibition panel we were both on looked incredible - visually stunning and unique. Anyway, arriving at Burning Man this year, with a changed production team and evolved project description, he was told that he couldn't film any more, and that he couldn't release his film without being sued. Burning Man - bastion of free spirited, well managed anarchy - was challenged about this new tough 'no photos, no cameras' policy by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organisation who curiously had the current head of Burning Man as their first legal counsel. It was an interesting debate with no simple answers, and when challenged by Arin, Burning Man's legal counsel Lightning Clearwater III (seriously) floundered and talked about BM videos being used in porn, a troll-like flame which Arin challenged him on as being irrelevant to his situation, ultimately to applause from the audience.

Interestingly although it was easy to support the freedom of expression argument within the limits of respect (don't film someone who doesn't want to be filmed) - the conference party that night with Eclectic Method sought to break the record for the most videos uploaded at a party, and as a result everything was being filmed. As the other panelists Jon Reiss and Eric Dunlap and myself remarked - what better way to discourage people from dancing and relaxing than having a hundred cameras threatening to render you to the internet for eternity! So even in the first night party, the issue of privacy vs freedom was present and intentionally or not the ever present Flip Cams gave a good moment for reflection - just as the constantly appearing logo for www.tv throughout the VJ sets was an implicit suggestion - to me at least - that ad supported was not the most elegant solution for funding content.

During the hack day on the Sunday after the conference, the talented folks from Witness - who use video to open the world's eyes to human rights abuses - created and demo'd a facial recognition and obfuscation filter, nicknamed Auto Blur the News. In short it's a prototype Android phone ap that can take the camera input and apply a blurred box around the head of someone in the shot. The potential is great, especially in realtime news situations, with phones now capable to IP stream video live from camera to website. Imagine someone at a demonstration filming an act of brutality, unable to get permission from the other protesters - being on video could endanger them or their family. An automated blur filter would offer protection, tho at present the technology is far from dependable. Perhaps the developers could work with the UnLogo logo blocking filter for video which launched around the same time and is also open source (and currently on a Kickstarter campaign).

Remix comes of age, at last

Another great things that happened at the conference was the world premiere, and subsequent explosion, of Jonathan McIntosh's Right Wing Radio Duck (Glenn Beck meets Donald Duck). Created over three months, McIntosh pulled together countless Donald Duck cartoons and far right ramblings from ShockJockFox Glenn Beck. So Friday, Jonathan (creator of the brilliant Buffy vs Edward Twilight shit-rip) was still putting the finishing touches to the film. Saturday midday he showed it at the conference, wherupon it got its Twitter explosion. By the end of the day it had been tweeted by Roger Ebert and John Cusack, and by the end of the weekend a quarter of million people had seen it. Over the following week, Glenn Beck responded, complementing it on being the best made propaganda he'd ever seen, suggesting McIntosh must be funded by the Democrats. Beck's response was then turned into a Mickey Mouse cartoon by YouTube user iKat381, and by the time the news channels picked it up, they were declaring this the moment that someone could make a big widely seen political statement through the web without any funding. It was also, perhaps, the first time many in the mainstream media saw the power of remix and mashup as an art-form and message-maker in its own right.

Another panel presented by Jonathan, with help from wunderblogger Anita Sarkeesian, aka Feminist Frequency, was Remixing Gendered Advertisements: A New Kind of Media Literacy Education. Here he talked about giving kids the tools to remix toy adverts to help understand the gender stereotypes enforced thru them. The more 'Boys are competitive aggressive battlers and Girls are nurturing fashion lovers' videos we saw the more I got quite upset. I'm not a fan of the myths perpetuated by advertising to begin with, proud to have written for Adbusters, but the blatant sexism and psychological manipulation targeted at children left quite a few of us in the audience in stunned silence. If our children were to follow the messages presented in advertisement alone (as opposed to, say, Sesame Street or Pixar) then there would really be no hope. The idea took hold and on the hack day one of the Kaltura developers created a tool to let people remix toy adverts in realtime, putting the tools in the hands of anyone.

But what about the art (and its sustainability)?

A big wow quote from the conference for me was from Saskia Wilson Brown, talking about the Curatorial Paradox - people benefit from curation (galleries, festivals, TV schedules), but nobody wants to deal with exclusionary practices online. It is another version of the old 'wisdom of crowds' argument, but at a time where BoingBoing goes from strength to strength and Digg is losing viewers, the importance of curators should perhaps be reassessed. Indeed what is a popular tweeter but a curator? For me, the smart money in the future is on the expert curators who will have sufficient followers and influence to be able to make (or break) the career of an independent creative, in turn helping raise money by promoting everything from handmade packaging to T-shirts and events.

Laurence Boyce, regular Netribution contributor and former director of GLIMMER: The Hull International Short Film Festival, give his opinion on the worrying trend to ignore exhibition and distribution in the UKFC debate.

(EDIT: Since being published, this article has also appeared on the Encounters International Film Festival website at www.encounters-festival.org)

 A recent letter to Sight And Sound from the British Federation of Film Societies pointed out a crucial omission in many of the discussions surrounding the demise of the UK Film Council. Whilst its importance in the production of UK films has been justifiably analysed, it’s significance in the exhibition and distribution within the UK cannot be understated. Either directly or through Regional Screen Agencies, the UKFC has part funded almost all of the film festivals in the UK from the likes of the London Film Festival to dozens of regional festivals bringing movies and events to local communities. The aforementioned British Federation of Film Societies has received UKFC funding for a decade to help bring cinema to rural areas and give people access to film that they otherwise may be denied. It’s P&A fund has helped small films increase the number of screens they’ve been able to book whilst magazines such as Little White Lies have received funding from the UKFC’s New Publications Fund. With support such as this in danger, there is a huge chance that – in the UK at least – audiences are going to be denied the opportunity to experience a wide ranging choice of films from the UK and beyond.

It is no exageration to say this has been perhaps the toughest year I can remember. I lost my sister to cancer in April and a dear friend to depression a few weeks ago. In some ways it seems peverse to continue a normal my life of writing, social media updates and so on - indeed galivanting off to New York for conferences next week - but in some ways my only way to keep going personally is to focus on my work and my long area of passion, media reform.

Sitting with my sister in front of the TV which was normally on 24 hours a day, I was reminded how the majority of the content that people consume each day involves one of two messages: that you are inadequate, and that by buying certain products you can become less inadequate. Come Dine With Me is a great example (and a fun programme to watch) - the presenter laughs at the clumsy pretensions of someone trying to throw a good dinner party, while the ad breaks tell you all the things you can buy - good wine, butter, magazines, etc - so you can be better than them.

Worse still, the depiction of people with mental health problems is typically wrapped with fear. Despite a third of our population being affected in some way, the mentally unwell are at best ignored and at worst demonised as dangerous and violent, despite there being no greater percentage of violence amongst the mentally ill than the rest of the population. The five hours a day of TV watched on average (or whatever the number) could provide comfort and advice for the pursuit of happiness and support for those unwell or in need. Instead it seems to best serve the advertisers who fund most of it, by creating fairy tale fantasies that encourage the buying of more stuff. If you could only have this car, razer, lip gloss, shampoo or gadget you too could be as happy as the hero of your TV show, with the beautiful partner and (typically) wealthy lifestyle.

This was why when @DanneeRoy told me last night about a radically simple proposal to cut carbon emissions that my jaw hit my lap and I started exclaiming wildly.

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