Roundtable: Giving Away Your Movie For Free - Part I

We're doing a roundtable of essays (500 to 1000 word suggested length) of experiences by people who have given away their movies for free online. Here are the first two by Mike Peter Reid and myself. More coming in the upcoming weeks and this roundtable is open to everyone so just send me a message on twitter @thraveboy if you'd like to do one.  Enjoy!

Giving My Movies Away for Free - By Mike Peter Reed

We live in interesting times. Avatar reportedly is the most expensive film in history and is the culmination of 10 years work. It’s projected to make $1 billion globally. Cameron is advocating 48fps and stereoscopic acquisition. The film is almost three hours long.

How on earth do you get to make films on such a scale?

Let’s start by paraphrasing a piece of Cameron’s advice to filmmakers yet to have made a movie: “Start by making a film. Complete it. From then on you are negotiating budget for your next one”.

But that quote’s probably two decades old or more. From a by-gone era - it’s from the era of scarcity when not everyone had access to the means of making a decent movie. We now live in an era of abundance where punters will accept anything from shakycam smartphone footage to 4K RED, or anything inbetween. Shooting at 1920 x 1080 (the same resolution the Star Wars prequels were acquired at) only requires a modest investment with the huge advantage that you can also go tapeless.

In the era of abundance you need to be able to stand out from the clutter. Cameron largely does this on reputation (“From the director of Titanic, Terminator, Piranha II”, etc). How can you hope to match that reputation? Do you even need to? Zen Buddhism has a good piece of advice, “begin by beginning”, in other words get out there and do it, make a fool of yourself until you’re comfortable with the process. With the technology abundant (therefore affordable), it doesn’t make sense to hold back if all you want to be doing is running around out there making movies. If you want to raise finance and stay warm and dry, study accountancy, wear a suit, go to meetings and act conservative.

It wasn’t really until April 2009 that I’d realised how things had progressed with the technology - and how affordable moviemaking had become to outlaws such as myself. Having just signed up to Twitter I was invited to take part in the first #2wkfilm aka two week film challenge - shoot, edit, finish a feature length movie in a two week window before the end of May ’09. Up to that point I’d basically been spinning in neutral since the completion of my mockudrama ‘Crooked Features’ which was shot standard definition on miniDV tape with the Canon XL1 and a Sennheiser K6/ME66.

Seeing #2wkfilm as a way to get the fire started once more I started looking around for a means of acquisition. I already owned a Panasonic Lumix TZ which could record 848 x 480 and a bunch of professional boom mics with a Sound Devices 702T. All I needed was a script. And crew. And actors. And locations. Etc. I only had about two weeks to sort all this out if I was to meet the deadline of the end of May ’09. Oh, in that time I also upgraded my Lumix to a TZ 3 which shoots 720p (1280 x 720).

Well, we did it. The result was ‘The Original Soundtrack’ which screened on home turf alongside the other completed #2wkfilm entries at the Portobello Film Festival. The intent was never to make money from this particular venture. It was to make connections with local moviemakers, test a cheap SDHC card tapeless workflow, and chalk another one up in the IMDb. Secondary objective was to promote the local musicians without whose work the ‘Soundtrack’ part would not have been possible.

In aggregate the two versions of ‘The Original Soundtrack’ (700MB and 2.5GB version) on mininova have been downloaded 5,500 times. Somewhat predictably, DVD sales have been anemic (though to be fair it’s not like I’ve given the product any marketing push whatsoever). It was never meant to make me a profit though (the DVD is sold at cost), but it has added considerably to my wealth of connections and experiences.

In comparison I’ve had short film work on Archive.org for several years (always the progressive, me) and the most downloaded there is  ‘Adult Contacts’ at 60,000 times. It’s been there so long I can’t remember when I uploaded it. It’s also my directorial debut (well, with real live actors anyway) if you’re interested in my take on “two people talking in a room” from 1995. The final cut is just under seven minutes but funnily enough I remember the original cut was almost 15 minutes long. Yet, now, I can’t remember what I cut out. I do remember cutting between a Video8 deck and a NICAM VHS deck and some crappy Sony LANC protocol which was not frame accurate; being really jealous of my mate who was editing on Media100 NLE. Anyway, I digress.

Part of my “problem” is that I am a part-time moviemaker. Like many outlaw filmmakers I have a day job, a family, and a life. I just don’t have the energy for self-promotion and I don’t have the bravado to go full-time freelance. I like to eat, and so do my kids. Taking part in the first #2wkfilm has enabled me to re-engage locally and led to my enrollment onto the second #2wkfilm. That, however has turned out to be an entirely different kettle of fish.

‘The Fix’ is my second #2wkfilm effort although currently I disqualified it: although we shot the rushes over just five days, the remaining time was not enough to complete the movie to fine cut (though I did get it to a very rough cut and survive a bout of the ‘flu). The big difference here was bringing a production designer on-board and having access to Rennie Pilgrem’s back catalogue as well as a commitment for some scoring. The production locations were also more ambitious, everywhere from an autumn forest to a small studio space at Ealing. I also shot using a Xacti at 720p and recorded sound single-system (poorly but mostly adequately, the horror) with my recently acquired used Neumann RSM-191 M-S mic. Lesson: my next movie really must be shot double-system and that pretty much precludes it from being a #2wkfilm. It’s expected that ‘The Fix’ will be completed by June ’10 (some way off from the #2wkfilm target of October ’09) but that’s the great thing about being an outlaw - no rules, no deadlines, all my own terms.

To conclude, Hollywood finds itself at a juncture, similar to that when the printing press arrived in Europe in the 15th century. The printing press was a revolution for many reasons, and it put many scribes out of work. The advantages of the printing press were obvious to almost everyone and production costs were 700% less than employing scribes. I guess the scribes weren’t too happy about that.

In the 21st century is it a necessity to spend $300 million to tell a story on celluloid? Will outlaws become organised and create a parallel industry leaving Hollywood to wither on it’s own sick vine. Or perhaps efforts like Paramount’s to keep a slate of $100,000 movies will appease the masses and put the outlaws out of a job. One thing’s for sure. No one can predict the future. Everyone can sidestep the little bits of history repeating. Me? I really enjoy home cinema.

Mike Peter Reed is an independent British moviemaker creating content for home cinema. You can get his #2wkfilm "The Original Soundtrack" for free here.

What Happened When I Gave My Films Away For Free - By Reid Gershbein

Here's the answer that everyone wants: $82.58

Roughly that's how much money "Here. My Explosion..." and "The Dabbler.." have generated since I've released them both for free online. 60% of the revenue has been through online ads through blip.tv, 39% through donations, and $.25 has been through selling a DVD.

Here's the statistic that is more interesting to me: 35,000 views/downloads

This is how many people have at least started watching the film or downloaded it. This is significant to me because only about 300 people saw my very first film "Broken Arrows" through private screenings because contractually I wasn't able to release the film widely, so my first goal for my future films was to at least get a lot more people to see them.  The first thing that releasing my movies online for free did was increase the audience of the films by 100x. Needless to say I am a zillion times happier that 35,000 instead of only 300 people have seen my new films so far. I say "so far" because you never know when your film will get a surge of viewers. Case in point, "Here. My Explosion..." and "The Dabbler..." were released about six months ago and in the last month alone 15,000 people have downloaded them. Another reason this is really interesting to me is that this means that over 35,000 have seen the work of the cast and crew, and the film footage has been put into many of their reels which is helping build their careers and exposure.

Here's the fact that is most interesting as far as film production: I learned a ton by making "Here. My Explosion.." and "The Dabbler".

The processes, personal discovery, and tools that I've learned making these feature films are helping tremendously in the new film(s) I'm making now. The process of shooting, editing, composing, directing, rehearsing, writing, etc and seeing how they all come together in a final film help dictate what I will do, not do, and alter in the future. In "Here. My Explosion..." and "The Dabbler" I was explicitly trying to shoot in a very naturalistic style and wanted to focus on getting natural performances, in order to achieve this I wanted a super light crew and shot everything handheld so that the acting flow wasn't hindered by camera/lighting setups. Also, I wanted to come up with a unique visual style on top of that. The unique style point was validated by "Here. My Explosion..." being written up on BoingBoing which brought in about 15,000 views alone.

Here's the fact that is most important to me personally: I have found some amazing new friends with similar artistic aspirations

Honestly, I find that making film and art can be an extremely lonely endeavor filled with craters of self-doubt and existential crises. But, actually making and releasing the films online for free  has allowed me to find amazingly kind, thoughtful, inspiring, and talented people that understand what I am doing and going through because they are going through the same things themselves.

So, the takeaway is that really that releasing films online for free has made me feel a little bit less alone in the world by letting me find kindred spirits, and sometimes I need that more than anything else.

Reid Gershbein, oh wait, this is my blog/site. Take a gander and look around. You can find links to the free films and clips to my upcoming films too. :)

Comments

[Sujewa]

Happy New Year Reid!

(so hopefully in 2010 we'll actually get to see my "2 weeks to shoot & edit some but like it's 3 months plus late now 2 Week Film Project" in 2010 :)
(( when the film does come out I am going to call it the -- Month Film Project - like if it comes out in late Jan it will be called Unlimited Dreamtime - A 5 Month Film Project - since I shot & edited most of the film in September I believe))

[Mike Peter Reed]

As an aside to my mention of "Adult Contacts", this year (2011) I discovered my original (1995) cut on an old VHS and got it digitised. So, here, is the non-committee version of that flick for posterity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zEwRXDDNo0