Written by Nic Wistreich | 19 June 2010 | in Finance

A few months ago I downloaded an open source add-on for Joomla, the (free) software that powers Netribution. It's a powerful tool which should make a nice addition here at some point - and it was free. So impressed was I after half an hour of using it that I checked out some of the add - available for it. I could buy alternative templates for $19 a time, an iPhone version, integration with other bits of software - or the whole bundle of extensions with a year of updates for $99. Plus there was a discount code of $20 floating around. It took me about five minutes to decide to make the payment.

To reverse this process, psychologically: if at the beginning I had learnt about a good piece of software costing $80 I would probably have ignored it and looked for something cheaper or free. Instead, because I got something very powerful at no cost, that I could try out, I decided to trust the software developers to make something even more incredible at a price.

It reminided me how the film and creative businesses who succeed on the internet will be those that find a way to first offer something incredible for free, and then offer something even better that is worth paying for.

Music is pretty much there. Listen to a song on MySpace or Spotify or wherever, and like it enough to pay £25 to see the artist in concert. Radiohead made more for pay-what-you want In Rainbows than their previous three albums combined, and followed with their largest tour in years. The same with books - Cory Doctorow's and Paulo Coelho's sales famously rose after they began to offer the full texts online for free. For film tho we have a significant challenge. The non-free experiences worth paying for are merchandise, DVDs and going to the cinema. DVD sales are in decline, while merchandise and cinema releases are typically reserved for bigger budget releases.

This is why the news that Franny Armstrong's Age of Stupid made £110,000 (over $160,000) through non-theatrical exhibtion - eg screenings in community groups, schools, town halls and conferences - is worth paying attention to. She not only probably made more money for distributor-free exhibition than anyone in British film history, but also got people to promote her film endlessly for free (the same people who had previously funded it's production, often). At the same time, while Franny didn't offer the full film on the web, she created a huge universe of free content that could be watched and read online, as well as a compelling narrative from the film's inception (and first public mention here on Netribution) through it's record-breaking fundraising through to it's legendary release. GoodScreenings.org - launched last week in partnership with the ever dynamic BritDoc - seeks to bring the system to more films and filmmakers and builds on the famous work of Jim Gilliam and Robert Greenwald in re-conceiving exhibition.

Written by Laura Almellones | 27 May 2010 | in cinema

from Laura at the Media Business School

Multi Platform Business School is a five-day workshop for producers of audiovisual media to enhance their skills in building business models for the development of 360º - content, the financing and marketing of linear and interactive formats and the distribution in more than one market.

Written by Nic Wistreich | 13 May 2010 | in Studio 2.0

While there is some hint that the new British coalition government will follow through on the Lib Dem policy of rescinding the rushed and hated Digital Economy Bill to let it get full and appropriate scrutiny, I would imagine that many new cabinet members are grateful to Ben Bradshaw and Lord Mandelson for pushing through an unpopular piece of legislation as a parting gift and saving them from having to implement it themselves.

However the expected consequences of the Act on the healthy and profitable parts of the digital economy (from coffee shops with wifi to iPhone developers), essential for any kind of economic recovery or new growth, means the new government should at the very least reconsider the last government's approach to the problems of piracy and the promise of the digital economy. It may be that the OFCOM guidelines currently being discussed can exempt public wifi, scrap website blocking and push the three strikes option further into the future. But it may end up being smoother to introduce a new Act in 'DEAct's place, closer to Lord Carter's original recommendations before Mandy yachted with David Geffen and amended the public consultation. For what it's worth, I outline below five points that I think should be held in mind when shaping policy or campaigning in this area.

1. The Sky is not Falling

DVD and Music revenues are currently rising (DVD up 31% Q1, UK music sales up in 09,  digital royalties rise outstrips CD fall). Indeed, file-sharers using the Pirate Bay apparently spend 75% more each year on music and film than non-filesharers (£77 as opposed to £44 pa). 

2. Hollywood is stalling on providing legal alternatives

There are very few legitimate, comprehensive and competitive film streaming or download services: iTunes has less films than Tescos and getting your film on there is very hard (plus it costs more than my video shop, which makes little sense). Penalising consumers before the content industry has offered proper download solutions de-incentivises the studios to collaborate on these solutions - indeed shortly after the Bill went through, Hulu.com dropped plans to launch in the UK. Currently there is a lot of delay from the studios over technology as all of them want to control it. Piracy may be the most effective motivator to get them to release a legitimate alternative - ie. without filesharing we probably would never have had music industry agreement on Spotify.

3. The Digital Economy is not the Information Economy

Facebook, Google, Flickr, Twitter, etc (ie the centre of the Digital Economy) build their businesses around the intellectual property of their users; they depend on people sharing their own IP, without limit or compensation, to sell adverts against. They see little or no difference between a content producer who tweets, blogs, shares a link, mashups, photoshops, comments or makes an album or feature film as they're all advert opportunities, and there's nothing to presume that the quality of the content equates to the demographic value of the viewer to advertisers. Few professional web-native content creators - if any - would risk the backlash from trying to sue one of their fans (just as Oasis wouldn't sue someone who jumped the fence at Glastonbury for lost ticket sales).

4. Legitimate free content is just as much a threat to producers

Content creators distributing online must compete with a near-infinite amount of free and legitimate video, growing at an exponential rate. While Hollywood has committed itself to prosecuting and criminalising its potential audience, the British film and video industry may not have the luxury of being able to alienate potential cinema-goers and DVD-buyers. It is unlikely that the competition for attention online will be won by those companies that display the most bullying and aggressive behaviour (unless they have the new Batman or James Cameron film) and the British industry would be sage to study how the Pay-What-You-Want experiments of Radiohead (3 million sales of In Rainbows, avg £4 price) and the Humble Indie Game Bundle (which has just taken over $1m in one week) have done so well from of the 'Buskers Hat' model. 

5. Even if piracy stopped, lots of people will lose their jobs (and need to retrain)

Part of the root of Hollywood's panic is the threat - not from pirates or even free legit content - but of technology replacing the bulk of their jobs. Social media makes marketing departments redundant, getting a trailer cut is less of a priority when dozens of YouTube fans will make one themselves, digital distribution replaces not only buyers and planners, but video rental shops and DVD designers. Filmmaking still needs a large team, but sales, marketing and distribution needs a smaller, more savvy breed of wired, serial networkers fluent in all digital media forms. Avoiding job losses is as unlikely as YouTube videomakers paying union rates. Much of the attitude from legacy Hollywood and the unions is that 'if we get governments to legislate hard enough, the realities of doing business on the Internet in the 21st Century will go away'. While ridiculous, this is an opportunity for British companies to make a head-start in building the future infrastructure and services that support the Digital world we're approaching. One where attention is such a scarcity that few, if any, artists would add barriers such as payment or court summons to stop people 'spending' their time on their work, and instead will build their business models around the slipstream of such activity, once the user is engaged.

I hold little hope that our new government will listen to this and similar arguments from those across Britain's digital economy; personal contact with my local MP, the House of Lords enquiry, lobbyists, a union head and Digital Minister Stephen Timms amounted to nothing during the last parliament. That said, the Liberal Democrats did vote against the Bill, while Tory MPs such as Bill Cash and John Redward were highly critical of it (and surprisingly well informed). If we simply implement it as it is, the new global digital economy will continue to be driven by Sweden and California, unlikely to get similar legislation soon, with the UK - behind only two of the 250 most popular websites in the world - becoming a 'quaint' and frustrated digital backwater.

Written by Alan Denman | 24 April 2010 | in cinema

Ever considered trying to launch your film career from LA? Concerned about the outcome of the next British election and considering your options? Alan Denman was a pivotal part of the London indie film community, notably as Chair of the Screenwriter's Workshop and Head of Development for Euroscript until he left to the US in 2004. Tom Fogg interviewed him here, long ago, and indeed when I started working for Shooting People he offered me free desk space. Now, with his wife Ayesha Walker (pictured below), he runs Stinging Bull Films from Hollywood and has already made his first feature.

Alan has written for Netribution a fascinating and in-depth account of his experience as a Brit in LA, learning to speak 'American', getting a Visa, writing a sellable script, as well as ten tips for making it in a very different film environment. It's 4,000 words of insider gold-dust, and worth bookmarking and reading fully when you have the time.

Six thousand feet up in the San Bernadino Mountains of Southern California. Day One of Principal Photography: a long shot of our young lead actress walking along a deserted forest road. She goes ahead on her own – and suddenly screams. That wasn’t in the script, I think to myself. I look past her to observe a large brown bear crossing the set. Principal photography is suspended as she runs back to join the main party. Fortunately she hasn’t been mauled or eaten. Indeed, the bear seems not even to have noticed her. Nervously we all creep forward to watch the creature happily snuffling around in a neighbour’s garden before moving off. Such are the dangers, thrills and indelible memories of filmmaking. 

I was there in California, a British director, shooting my first feature, which I had also written. The crew worked like Trojans, and the young American cast had so much energy it was impossible to persuade them to get to bed at night. Then in the morning they’d be up early to go through their lines with me and help rewrite my very British dialogue.

This was my first experience of how different filmmaking in America is.  Though obvious to me now, coming then from the only culture I knew – Britain – it was a big surprise to realize how differently people spoke on the other side of the Pond. You think Americans speak English? Think again – they speak American, and I needed to learn their language. The first read-through of the script was a comedy of confusion. We might as well have been speaking French and Greek, for all we understood each other. In a combination of wisdom and desperation I gave them free rein to improvise. It worked. What resulted was dialogue that was vibrant and fascinating, something I could never have dreamed up in my drafty North London flat. It was, to quote my American cast, “awesome”.

I had been writing screenplays and making short films for ten years and had reached a sort of glass ceiling: I could have gone on making shorts in Britain, but what I really wanted to do was shoot a feature. So I wrote a micro budget, small-scale sci-fi thriller, a sort of “UFO Blair Witch” about young people in a remote place looking for aliens and disappearing one by one. My original plan – a very rough one – was to take a bunch of young actors to Cheshunt Marshes, a strange area outside North London with murky lakes and towering pylons, and, hoping for the best, shoot a semi-improvised script. Not a great plan, maybe. But then I sent the script to a good friend of mine who was studying screenwriting at UCLA, one of the big universities, in Los Angeles. There he passed on the script to a producer, who loved it and was himself looking for a project of that scale and budget to produce. The timing was perfect. Serendipity. Click.

And so, four months later, in the summer of 2003 I flew to LA and then drove out in convoy with the producer, cast and crew to the San Bernadino Mountains to direct my feature film, which, after much discussion and development, was now called Alien Game. The shoot was immensely hard work and at the same time hugely rewarding, a practical degree course in filmmaking compressed into four weeks. The skies were high, blue and empty, and the mountains epically spectacular. I loved being there. Thus in innocence and hope began my journey cross the Pond.

With growing self-belief and a magnetic curiosity towards Los Angeles, the heart of the global film industry, and the vast opportunities available it offers, my wife and I relocated there in the summer of 2004 and have been living there ever since....

Written by sandip mahal | 14 April 2010 | in cinema

There was a time up until the late 90’s where late night television cult oddities were shown to fill out the schedules. To most people this was just fodder but for some people this was THE place where b-movie fanatics discovered cult classics like Race with the Devil, or The Keep and the now forgotten classic Night of the Eagle with Peter Wyngarde. Appearing in the graveyard slots, these films were in their element for those who stayed up in the ungodly hour and are 200 percent better and scarier than anything released in recent memory.

In America there has been more of a foundation for cult movies like the Golden Turkey Awards and Joe Bob Briggs getting airtime. In the UK some took a masterly appreciation of the art form such as Alex Cox’s Moviedrome which started its movie night in 1988 on a Sunday evening with a great incisive intro. Previously tossed to the side classics were brought centre stage such as The Parallax View and various Robert Aldrich films with full appreciation but nowadays these films are rarely shown in these slots that are now filled with reality TV and cheap TV repeats.