In less than a week, I’ll be in Austin for SXSW. Sure, there’s tons to do and see with just the city and festival but last year I discovered the party scene and I’m hooked. Yes, I have RSVP fever.
What the best medicine? I follow this Twitter feed and sign up for whatever doesn’t look sketchy.
And this is my Twitter feed, if you were wondering.
I’m sleep deprived, stressed, putting together a pitch with a partner (a first for me), punching up a feature script and still working 2 jobs so I’m leaving the heavy lifting to the fine folk at Mashable.
May I present to you the Twitter Fail Whale constructed entirely from Legos!
Time for me to get back to work. BTW, click here to see the original article.
What is “2.0“? Some would say it started when regular folk could take control of their web experience by adding videos or music or bling to their MySpace page. Other folk would acknowledge social media, like Facebook or Twitter. Still others would point to crowdsourcing as the purest form of “2.0“. For now, let’s work with that vague defintion.
In 2006, The Beastie Boys produced a concert film called AWESOME, I F**KING SHOT THAT.
They crowdsourced the production by giving 50 audience members videocameras and letting them have at it. They later hired professional editors to stitch it all together.
And so I come to Adam & Susannah’s wedding. They asked me to shoot their wedding. A lot of people ask me to shoot their wedding. I always say “no” because they don’t get it. Allow me to explain. Let’s say you’re a tax accountant. Let’s say my birthday is April 14. Let’s say I invite you over to my birthday but instead of letting you enjoy the party I give you a slice of cake, whisk you into my back office, hand you a stack of receipts and say “thanks” as I lock you in. Got it?
So I was ready to say “no” when a notion struck me. I would agree to do this if they were willing to jump into an experiment with me. I wanted to do a 2.0 wedding video. I wanted to empower their guests, let them be a part of the process and therefore take a lot of the wedding day responsibilities off my shoulders. Plus I was sure they’d say “no” because there’s a high probability the wedding video would look terrible.
They said “yes.”
(glup)
Okay, time to embrace the “2.0″ and run with it. Allow me to share my plan of attack.
That there gets me through the event. The edit… well, I’d love a way to crowdsource the edit. Any thoughts on how I could do that?
This past weekend I attended the 2009 Filmmaker Forum, an examination of the ever changing face of independent film hosted by Film Independent. What follows is a fuzzy recounting of my weekend.
Saturday
While Jeremy Thomas has had a successful and varied career, his speech was neither an in-depth examination of the indie film industry nor was it a forecast of the impending doom and the blue skies to follow. it wasn’t terrible but it won’t set the blogosphere afire. Saturday’s highlights were:
1) Linda Lichter. As a panelist, she was frank and honest and always cut through the bulls**t. She also always reminded the other panelist that while their version of indie was a $5 million film with Luke Wilson, most of us were making films for less than a million, often less than a $100k. Linda, if you’re reading this, I want to tell you that you’re a rock star (too bad I already have an awesome lawyer).
2) Peter Broderick. While every other panel should have been titled “why indie film sucks and it’ll only get harder for you” Peter actually brought us hope and inspiration. He told us that we can still make our films and find an audience. Is it harder than ever? Yes, of course, but the tools are there for us to shape out destiny. Thanks, Peter.
3) Lizzie Gillett. First, she crowd-funded a documentary. Second, she had a virtual world premiere where both Moby and Thom Yorke played. Third, she appeared via Skype from the UK. Fourth, I think she’s really cute and she might be single.
4) Richard Klubeck. If he quits the industry, NPR should pick him up. He has a great radio voice.
5) Ron Yerxa. Did a great job moderating a panel plus he was impeccably dressed. As the weekend progressed I realized he wears the same uniform but I still give him points for trying.
Sunday
I was a bit more out of it this day. I’ll get into that in a bit but here were my highlights
1) “Distribution Case Studies”, “Day & Date: Three Years and Counting” and “New Uses for Film Festivals” panels. These were lively panels and I actually knew two of the panelists (Steak House & Jon Reiss). During each discussion, panelists started interrupting each other, correcting each other, throwing down. In short, it was the perfect kick in the ass to a sleepy Sunday.
2) The following quote constitutes a highlight: “international pre-sales for indies aren’t dead. You bring me an action thriller with Jason Statham and I’ll get you a ton of money out of Germany.” BTW, that was said sincerely and with a straight face.
3) Finally using hash tags in Twitter. I still don’t really understand them (Marsha Collier explained them enough to me so that I’m no longer in the dark) but I started using them and suddenly I saw some of the power and scope of Twitter.
4) Seeing my friend Abby and getting to wish her a happy birthday in person.
Meetings
The big difference for me this year versus previous years are the meetings I’d set up. If you read my earlier post, you know I had meetings with a distributor, a CE, an agent and a consultant. So active/charming/fearless was I that I also met with three managers and one more agent. Almost every meeting went well. Sure, not all meetings ended with “send me your stuff”, how could they when, say for example, you only rep directors with Canadian passports, but four of them ended with “send me your stuff.”
Let me repeat: I impressed 4 people enough for them to ask me to send my stuff their way. Will they read/watch my stuff? Probably not; that’ll get farmed out to an assistant or intern, but I got my toe jammed into four doors and I call that a major f**king accomplishment.
Time to rest.
(Ha! Yeah, right. I wish.)
A few posts ago I mentioned that my weekend vlog shoot was part of a multi-medium project, what’s more popularly referred to as transmedia narrative… ugh, I hate that word. It makes me think of transfat or a knife wielding transsexual… but that’s another story.
Where was I?
Oh, the vlog shoot (another word I hate: vlog). You might say we look to Felicia Day and THE GUILD for inspiration… although I’ve never seen an episode of her show so why don’t we?
Felicia was recently interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article and here’s what I gleaned for my own project.
Now, I should mention that at least one of my partners on this project isn’t too keen on social media. He’s always saying, “what is that, I don’t get it, it seems like a waste of time” and such. Is he a crotchety old man like the kind the kids would bust at the end of a SCOOBY DOO episode? Yes, but maybe he just hasn’t seen this:
One more PS, I love this new, evolving definition of “value” but that don’t pay off the student loans.
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