Demand.film launches cinema-on-demand service

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The cinema-on-demand space is about to expand.

Joining Tugg and Gathr is new-comer Demand.film.

According to Forbes:

“The three Australian entrepreneurs who created the platform say their dual aims are to enable filmmakers from around the world to reach audiences who would not otherwise get the chance to see their works, and to supplement traditional theatrical distribution.”

They are also disrupting film exhibition accounting and reporting:

“Demand.film is the first crowdfunding cinema service to use blockchain technology to create databases which record high-level, scalable sales information that can’t be changed. ‘The advantages that gives us are transparency and trust with producers, distributors and exhibitors, which will be transformational in the accounting side of the business,’ says David Doepel, the firm’s managing director.”

According to Startup Daily:

“The platform uses blockchain technology to enable independent filmmakers to negotiate a multi-country release in one single deal. While the Demand.film team are being tight lipped on the features of the new platform, Doepel said that the upgraded functionality has been specifically designed with audiences and cinema in mind. Vice president of operations and development for Demand.film Barbara Connell further explained, ‘We’re incorporating some fantastic fintech, which includes Blockchain technology. This will be complemented by new dashboards that can be married to social media campaigns and other social media activity. While this all seems very complicated, the platform has been designed to be very easy to use and to be nimble.'”

Demand.film also operates in New Zealand and the United Kingdom and plans to expand to other countries and North America in 2017.

My take: come to Canada, please! There is so much under-utilized capacity in movie theatres, particularly outside of busy Friday and Saturday nights. How many times have you gone to a matinee only to find merely a dozen or so  fellow patrons sitting in the dark? I would definitely become an impresario once again because the cinema-on-demand model assures a win-win-win-win screening for the filmmaker, the audience, the theatre and the organizer.

Smart contracts come to film financing

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I’ve written about the blockchain and smart contracts before. Now we have a breakthrough: the first film using both!

The film is called The Pitts Circus and promises to be a “feature length-horror-comedy movie incorporating the skills, comic talent and uniqueness of a real Australia circus family”.

Investors who buy some of the 666 shares with cash or Ethereum are guaranteed to share in 50% of the profits until 2036. Single shares are $150 USD or 10 Ether.

Caveat emptor:

‘As always with indie movies, there is only a small chance for a huge success — but in case it does take off, it is a journey to the moon.”

Use a wallet you know you’ll control until then because the smart contract will distribute the proceeds, if any, to that account.

My take: I know this sounds a bit weird, but it represents a radically different way to raise financing and settle contracts by using crypto-currency and smart contracts, both made possible by the blockchain. This illustrates the power of the blockchain — it does away with the friction of intermediaries, in this case bankers, advisers, lawyers and accountants. (For kicks, work out how much the 2007 million dollar coin is worth today!)

CMF releases Discoverability report

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Trends by the Canada Media Fund has released the second part of its research into Discoverability and discovered that Canadian viewers are both aspirational and inspirational:

“All they are looking for is to be happy, have the best day possible and — ultimately — be validated and inspire their friends. In a nutshell, they are seeking to live a fulfilling experience.”

Other takeaways, quoting liberally:

  • The more audiences are offered the convenience of on-demand content and a varied range of content to choose, the more they watch content online. [Duh.]
  • 59% of Canadian TV viewers aged 18+ say they discover new TV content through recommendations from friends. [Witness the Rise of Social Media.]
  • It’s the X, Y and Z generations (the 18 to 49-year-olds) that not surprisingly rely on their friends for discovery, whereas boomers rely more on TV and radio commercials. [True, but keep in mind the oldest Gen-X’ers are 56 now and the youngest Gen-Z’ers are not yet teenagers.]
  • Being a viewer, or a consumer of content, is much more multifaceted than sitting back and having content just ‘wash’ over you. The state of ‘audience-ness’ is now dynamic, participatory, cross-channel, and both synchronous (in real time) and asynchronous. [Welcome to the Matrix.]

Read the complete PDF.

My take: Word-of-mouth still rules! Only now, you might ‘hear’ it online first — and your friend might live on another continent rather than around the corner.

The quickest way to identify your film audience

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I see indie filmmakers make their movies and then begin figuring out how to monetize them, i.e. finding a paying audience. (Mea culpa; that’s what we did with Recorded: Live!)

Or, better, they put together a project and at the planning stage, devise a marketing strategy. Part of this will be determining their ideal audience. Too many say ‘Everyone’ will want to see their movie. (Yeah, I’ve thought this too.)

Now, an indie filmmaker half-way around the world enlightens me.

Rihaan Patel slashes the ’10 steps to your audience’, etc., to one simple principle. Writing in a learned language, he offers in
This one is for Innocent Independent Filmmaker who make awesome film but don’t know what happens next!:

“But how to find your potential audience? Just look at the protagonist of your film. And Your protagonist is personification of your audience.”

Simple! He continues:

“Find people who shares quality of your protagonist and share your marketing message. It will connect them.”

Of course! This is a solid strategy that should allow any film to earn its production budget. Ron Mann did this with the DVD Tales of the Rat Fink, which he targeted to hot-rodders. All word of mouth, media coverage and critical reviews just expand the audience beyond the core, and generate your profit.

My take: this is brilliant! ‘Your protagonist is the personification of your audience’ is a great place to start when defining your audience. Literally, then figuratively, and finally metaphorically. (On a recent project, we came close to this, using setting to determine that our audience was small-town Canada — but perhaps we needed to focus in on our heroine and the women and people she represented.) When the ‘Patel Postulate’ really becomes powerful is when you flip it on its head, writing your movie using its audience to personify the protagonist. For instance, it makes no sense for the homeless guy to be the protagonist in my rom-com; homeless guys don’t buy many movie tickets. Rather, a better protagonist would be the earnest woman who befriends him.

 

CanCon-sultations

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The Department of Canadian Heritage has launched consultations on how to strengthen the creation, discovery and export of Canadian content in a digital world.

Minister Mélanie Joly proclaims:

“As a government, we are proud to support Canadian culture. But we want to do it well. We’re launching a national dialogue on Canadian content; one that will help us adapt our cultural policies to today’s digital realities. Tell us what’s important to you. Share your ideas to help Canada thrive in a digital world. And to allow people across the country and around the world to keep discovering what makes our culture and creators so great.”

At stake is billions dollars that Heritage Canada uses to fund culture in Canada. Its portfolio includes things like the CBC, the NFB, Telefilm Canada, the Canada Council and the CRTC, among many others.

The consultations stem from an April announcement when Joly told The Globe and Mail: “Everything is on the table.”

There are many ways to take part:

  1. You can post your idea.
  2. You can post your public event.
  3. You can upload a submission.
  4. You can host your own event.

See the results of the pre-consultations and the expert advisory group.

My take: kudos to Minister Joly for showing some leadership on media, arts and culture in a digital age. Discoverability and monetization are the two biggest issues facing all artists, Canadian or otherwise, on the web. Time will tell if this consultation results in mere ripples in the pond or a massive tidal wave of change. (I used to be a part-owner of Tidal Wave Productions.) My advice: get involved if you want to see the status quo challenged!

Zapruder Films seeks Canadian female feature writer for dev deal

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Because they don’t feel the Canadian feature film industry is doing enough to bridge the gender gap, Matthew Miller and Matt Johnson of Toronto’s Zapruder Films have launched a program to help support the development of one emerging female screenwriter.

They will be giving all of their $12,000 Telefilm development funds to one woman to develop a treatment into a first draft narrative feature script.

The rules:

“The contest opens September 8, 2016 and closes September 18, 2016.
The winner will be announced on Friday, September 30.
Applicants must not have written a produced feature length screenplay.
Scripts must be the original work of a female writer and must be written originally in English. Adaptations and translated scripts are not eligible.
The writer must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
The writer must agree to option the material to Zapruder Films for a 24 month period.
The writer must not be a member of any screenwriting unions or guilds.”

Your single PDF application must be at least seven pages:

“One page synopsis of the film
A short treatment of the film (5-10 pages)
A short brief addressing what your film means to you (300 word maximum)”

I asked Matthew and Matt what sort of response their program has received:

“The response has been really encouraging. There have already been several submissions and dozens of inquiries as to the specifics of the rules and regulations. For the most part, it is very hard for young writers without an agent to get their foot in the door. Most companies don’t accept unsolicited works so we think that alone has provided a breath of fresh air. And it is trying to help address the issue of gender disparity in our industry and that has helped to spawn a healthy and spirited debate on social media. We couldn’t be happier with where things are at this early in the program.”

My take: I applaud Zapruder Films for this program. It’s smart on two counts: firstly, they’re addressing the gender imbalance in the Canadian feature film industry. Hey, it’s 2016 already. Secondly, these guys want to encourage new, as-yet-unheard voices, with new, interesting stories to tell. As we all know, story is king, or in this case, queen.

So bad, it’s good — vindicated!

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Keyvan Sarkhosh and Winfried Menninghaus of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics have legitimized your cinematic guilty pleasures.

Their study, “Enjoying trash films: Underlying features, viewing stances, and experiential response dimensions”, published in Poetics 57, is the first scholarly study of otherwise unredeemable movies.

For instance, in discussing Sharknado, they say:

“Apart from flying sharks, blood and guts are the main ingredients of this surprise trash hit. At first glance it seems paradoxical that someone should deliberately watch badly made, embarrassing and sometimes even disturbing films, and take pleasure in them. To such viewers, trash films appear as an interesting and welcome deviation from the mainstream fare. We are dealing here with an audience with above-average education, which one could describe as ‘cultural omnivores’. Such viewers are interested in a broad spectrum of art and media across the traditional boundaries of high and popular culture.”

My take: Sometimes you just have to see a bad movie to put the better ones into perspective.

CRTC rewrites the rules for indie funds!

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In a surprise move that comes into effect this Thursday, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is rewriting the rules when it comes to indie producers accessing Certified Independent Production Funds.

Among the changes, the CRTC is:

  • Eliminating the requirement that producers obtain a broadcast licence or development agreement to receive CIPF funding.
  • Allowing and encouraging CIPFs to allocate funding for script and concept development.
  • Allowing and encouraging CIPFs to allocate funding for promotion and discoverability.
  • Allowing CIPFs to fund productions achieving at least six Canadian certification points (down from eight), and include the pilot projects recognized by the Commission.
  • Including co-ventures in productions eligible to receive CIPF funding.

Responding to the new policy framework, Andra Sheffer, CEO of the Independent Production Fund, states:

“The Independent Production Fund has long been an advocate for the support of Canadian content for platforms other than television and because of its endowment, has been able to fund scripted series designed for the web. Therefore, the IPF is encouraged by the CRTC decision to allow other certified Funds which receive their funding from BDUs, to potentially finance projects with no broadcast licence. This will provide the flexibility that our system needs to keep up with evolving production and business opportunities and the demands of modern audiences. Web content allows for innovation and experimentation in story-telling – we have seen it in the web series we have funded over the past 6 years. With few gatekeepers and risk-adverse broadcasters, it encourages new talents to explore and create new forms of story-telling and content that do not typically work on the traditional television platform.”

There are over a dozen Certified Independent Production Funds in Canada.

My take: I think this is a clear signal that the CRTC and Heritage Canada (see ‘by ministerial portfolio’) want to diversify media production and divorce it from television. We shall have to wait and see how the CIPFs respond and how they change their programs.

 

Locarno Film Festival finds future in small and local

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Variety reports on two interesting independent film developments: community and content from Step-In at the Locarno Film Festival.

While lamenting the state of indie film today on one hand, some art houses claim to be  doing great business on the other.

“‘We’re making a profit,’ said Jon Barrenechea, at the U.K.’s Picturehouse Cinemas, which aim to become hubs of community activity all day long and run their own cafes and bars. ‘One thing programmers don’t like to hear is that it isn’t about films but venues,’ he insisted. Last year at Step-In, Barrenechea cited the case of a 243-seat three-screen in Dulwich, a more affluent part of south London, which was doing ‘incredible business,’ with 90% of audiences living within 10 minutes’ walk of the cinema.”

On the content side, Telefilm Canada crowed about its Micro-Budget Production Program.

“Targeting first-time directors, its Talent Fund – a private donation fund whose partners include Bell Media, Corus Ent and Technicolor – finances movies or TV/web narrative content capped at $250,000 per budget and specifically created for digital distribution. 15% or more of Telefilm financing contribution must be dedicated to promotion and distribution. A pioneering experiment, money is raised not by Telefilm but influential local equity investors backing the Fund, and decision-making on projects is left with film schools or fund partners.”

Eurimages’ Roberto Olla posits that the creative freedom this affords allows filmmakers to try new things and expand the definition of cinema.

My take: Interesting to me that we’re back at the local cinema watching engaging small-scale movies.

BitTorrent launches the Discovery Fund

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BitTorrent Inc. wants to promote emerging content producers on the net this year — to the tune of $2,500 to $100K per project.

The Discovery Fund aims to “incubate the world’s next wave of awesome, straight-up brave storytellers and outside voices.”

“Over the next year, BitTorrent aims to partner with 25 creators by providing cash grants and promotional support to build impactful releases and discover new fans. We are looking for artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers and other creators working on uncompromised projects representing a diverse, original perspective seeking global distribution.”

There is no deadline or application fee.

My take: Kudos to BitTorrent for launching this initiative. To their credit, they surveyed artists and learned that “getting their work discovered is the biggest challenge they face.” Amen!