#2wkfilm (aka Royal Baronial Theatre)

Roundtable: Giving Away Your Movie For Free - Part II

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 is the second one by Benjamin Arntzen who is responsible for the #2wkfilms reaching a large audience via P2P networks. 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!

What Happened When I Gave Away Reid's Films For Free - By Benjamin Arntzen

As someone growing up in the so-called Napster Generation, I have always had an interest in peer-to-peer and the way that the Internet has fundamentally changed many things, both in music and cinema. As BitTorrent matured, I was able to witness its advantages over other P2P technologies and indeed experience them. Often, today's generation is described as having no respect for the value of content, having gotten everything for free for their whole lives. As someone who is part of that, my experience indicates that has not held true: the respect is still there, fueled by a fascination for content and media that is unprecedented.

Respect no longer comes solely in the simple form of money, as music, movies, and other videos are passed along between friends and strangers. Nearly every piece of music and video created is available in some form on the Internet, freel and easily accessible, and the connections between creators and consumers are getting stronger. Respect for content now comes in many forms; as fans constantly reupload songs and videos to video sites such as YouTube, rebelling against the publishers and copyright owners, remixing and re-releasing content in new forms, and participating in a sort of creative anarchy. BitTorrent sites are thriving as people use them to discover more and more media, fueled by trends like tagging and social networking.

Perhaps most importantly however, most of the people involved in these activities aren't doing it out of hate or malice. Their actions are, in nearly all cases, based on a love for the content that they possess, and a will to share it with other people and build reputation for the creators, artists and content itself. The money element is still very much involved, too. Concert tickets are still a sought-after item, and despite the availability of nearly all purchasable content at no cost, music and video sales are still alive. If the sky is falling, there are no signs that make it apparent. One of the major changes in this new paradigm is perhaps one of the most interesting: the middleman is dead. The music industry's "Big Four" (Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group) and the movie industry's equivalents aren't going anywhere soon, but as artists begin to create and share outside of contractual obligations and restrictions, the major media companies are getting less and less powerful.

I believe that success in media of various forms won't necessarily be measured solely in terms of profit in the future. Creative Commons and similar projects are allowing artists to grant permissions to their fans in an easy, uncomplicated manner, and combined with BitTorrent and other web/P2P technologies, helping to remove the boundaries of distribution. Success will be measured by what consumers do with a creator's content, and the way they support it. Nine Inch Nails have shown that success outside of the labels is possible, although most of their popularity stems from their label days. Perhaps more realistic examples are webcomics like xkcd and Penny Arcade and artists like Jonathan Coulton and Brad Sucks. They are shining, if rare, examples of what can happen with a dedicated fan-base.

Self-sufficiency is the dream of most independent content creators. Various methods of achieving such a goal, with varied success, are being tried and tested at this very moment. Most people, even within the "Napster Generation" are still very much willing to pay for quality content - despite no longer being forced to. Over the last year, I've probably spent more than $160 on various bits of Creative Commons music, and $40 or so on label-music, bought second-hand. All of it was content I already had - but the satisfaction and nostalgia of buying music and video, whether physical or digital, remains regardless. The general consensus among my friends is simple: if content can be purchased at an affordable price, even if it's available for free, most of them will do so if they have the ability.

Within film, the situation is a little different and far more experimental: viable ways of making money in the file-sharing reality are still being sought after. In the meantime, the barriers to both creation and distribution are being lowered, allowing more ambitious projects and drawing in talent that may not have been reachable before. At the same time, some argue, mediocrity is given a chance to thrive, but people will put their passion and support behind the content that they love. Essentially, consumers are becoming the ones who decide what content is worth, both in terms of money and in terms of reputation, rather than a company deciding what will make them money. Those who love content will open their wallets or their Internet connection in the pursuit of supporting or promoting it.

This is mainly what I'm known for today - the pursuit of promoting content. In July of last year, I wanted to share some Creative Commons content with friends, but existing links and downloads for it were either too slow or not packaged in a coherent way, so I decided to remedy this. I simply downloaded the content, renamed some files, added some information and changed it into the format that made sense to me, then released it on The Pirate Bay and Mininova. The main interest in the downloads came from my friends, as that was the original purpose of the releases. I decided to package xkcd comics in a similar fashion and released those, which brought interest to the other torrents.

At the time, Mininova was one of the largest sites on the Internet, and I decided that their Content Distribution service would make releasing things easier, so I applied, using my existing torrents as a reference. Within a couple of days I had a second Mininova account with no CD access, after being accepted for the program. A quick conversation with Erik Dubbelboer later, I had a working account and re-released the existing torrents under Mininova's CD service. Mininova CD was at the time a way of giving privilege to legal content, such as that offered under Creative Commons licenses, and as a result any torrents I posted would be put at the top of the front page for about a day, in the Featured Torrents category. I established a simple rule for content I posted: If I liked it a lot and was legally able to, I would publish it.

Most of the content I posted at first came from sites like FrostClick, through which I discovered some of the most played music in my collection. It is also how I discovered the #2wkfilm project and got dragged kicking and screaming into the strange world of Twitter. As the preferred method of communication for #2wkfilm participants was Twitter, I used it to contact them and discuss the torrents and films. I also used it to mention newly uploaded torrents, so that people who particularly liked my releases could easily stay up to date with what I published, either through Twitter or RSS.

Soon after republishing the old torrents, I contacted one of the artists, Adam McHeffey, and told him about the download count which was at the time about 250. As a thanks, he sent me two pressed CDs of the album and a personal note. The album was at the time only available as a set of highly compressed MP3s, so I ripped the CD into lossless files and made multiple releases in various formats which all got a similar reception on Mininova, quickly bringing the count to 1000. I also helped him set up LetsKickFire.com, which has served as the home of the album since, as well as, occasionally, a blog. By the end of the year it had been downloaded just over 11,000 times.

Since what I was doing didn't cost me anything but small amounts of time and effort, and it was making people happy, I sought out more Creative Commons content. This is how I discovered the Intercontinental Music Lab, right after they had released their third album. I released all three albums in four formats simultaneously on Mininova, gathering a decent number of downloads in a couple of weeks, but (at the time) more importantly allowing the albums to be downloaded and shared in a coherent, easy manner, rather than as single files or large slow downloads. Eventually things got to a stage where seeking content has been much easier and some content creators would even contact me when they wanted to put out some large content. As of Oct 1st there was 25,000 downloads, and by the end of things, everything was sitting at around 750 downloads, and there was a total of 36,000 downloads.

Towards the end of November, Mininova deleted all non-Content Distribution torrents from their servers in order to comply with a court order. Whilst the traffic to the site dropped significantly, the demand for the remaining content went way up, as seen in this picture (http://twitpic.com/rk34r), taken on December 1st during the aftermath. Downloads have remained at a constant 4000-per-day average, and on December 8th total downloads had reached 100,000. As a result, interest in the #2wkfilm projects, as well as the music of Adam McHeffey, the Intercontinental Music Lab and nearly everything on my Mininova account increased significantly. Total downloads for the IML have recently broken 100,000 and the total downloads for the #2wkfilm projects on Mininova recently reached 25,000.

The overall impact of my actions as a simple fan of content has been much larger than I expected. I would love to say that I am responsible for the content creators being rich and prosperous, but this is not the case, mainly because most of the content was not originally intended to be a way of making money, so there was not much information within the releases about where to purchase merchandise or donate money. My personal goals for my actions were simple: to spread the word about content I loved and wanted to share with others, as well as gain exposure for those who I believed deserved it. In both of those respects, in my opinion, I've been successful.

As of 11:25am PST on December 31st, 2009, content I'd published had been responsible for a total of over 59,685 gigabytes of Internet traffic, nearly 60 terabytes. This bandwidth has mainly been provided by the people who downloaded the content and cared enough about it to contribute to the distribution of it, as well as Mininova Content Distribution's "seedbox" servers. The phrase "ZORLiN-CC" on Google now returns 37,200 Google results, and the torrents I created ended up on hundreds of different torrent sites and mirrors. The power that fans have to influence the popularity of content that they like is real, and will change the way things are both created and distributed, and the way profit is made on content. There is no longer a monopoly on distribution, and for better or worse, there is no longer control over the free availability of content.

The old business model will continue to exist and be profitable for at least the next 4-5 years, but today, consumers and creators alike are working together to carve out a new one.

Welcome to the new creative age.

Benjamin Arntzen is a self-proclaimed expert in digital culture who distributes content via BitTorrent. You can visit his profile on Mininova here.

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. :)

Royal Baronial Theatre - Episode 5 - First Pre-Production Meeting

The first pre-production meeting between Reid (Writer/Director/Producer) and Mattison (Producer) where we talk about casting and the script. For the record, Mattison as never been to Iraq or Vietnam. :)

Royal Baronial Theatre - Episode 2 - Movie Description

We discuss the concept for the first movie we are producing, a horror movie, and the inspiration for it.

Royal Baronial Theatre - Episode 1 - Introduction

The Royal Baronial Theatre makes live-action feature films and documents the whole process online and gets their audience involved throughout the films' productions.

Masterworks Planning

We are beginning the planning of our Masterworks series.