I attended this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference, and wrote a bunch of articles for Screen Hub. The bold line is the name of the session title. The paragraph that follows is the article I wrote for it.

Riding the Freedom Streams

AIDC 2013: alternative finance and distribution for documentaries. Do you want to be an enterprise ship or an independent scrappy kayaker? Screen Hub’s Andrew Einspruch donned a lifejacket and waded into a watery metaphor of business models.

Future Rights Model

AIDC 2013: from out of the wreckage, a Future Rights Model. If you can control your film’s distribution, you can control its revenues. Distrify is a distribution platform aiming to let filmmakers do just that, reports Screen Hub’s Andrew Einspruch.

Screenrights Lab/Ancillary Rights and How to Start a Franchise

AIDC 2013: ancillary rights, the devil is in the lawyer. So your show has just become a hit, and everyone wants to help you “exploit the opportunity”. That’s where the ancillary rights come in. If you signed a crummy deal, then someone else is going to get that money, reports Screen Hub’s Andrew Einspruch.

Documentary Distribution in a Digitised World

AIDC 2013: Digital Distribution, a Complex Way to Make Money. Digital distribution is the great hope for many filmmakers – a way to get material out into the world, either as a sole strategy, or as part of a hybrid or traditional distribution model. It`s just a hell of a lot more complicated than it looks.

Who Do We Think We Are?

AIDC 2013: Ruth Harley Lauds Australian Documentary. If a documentary represents a kind of picture of the world at a particular time and place, then CEO of Screen Australia, Dr. Ruth Harley, took the opportunity in one of the first sessions at this year’s AIDC to have a look at what kind of snapshots her organisation helped create in 2012.

Screenrights Lab: Keep the Pirates at Bay

AIDC 2013: Keeping the Pirates at Bay. The piracy horse has bolted. The only question that remains is what is to be done about it. The figures are compelling, but finding a solution still seems to be an elusive goal.

Screenrights Lab / Education Rights – Ensuring Profitability and Sustainability

AIDC 2013: Making Money Under the Education Kanopy. When you think profitability, do you think education sales? Kanopy provides the “Netflix of education”, and it’s a damned site more profitable than Quickflix.

Is Your Documentary a Format?

AIDC 2013: Ye Olde Complete Guide to Formats. Formats are a strong theme at this year`s AIDC. And if you have a format, and you want to strike a deal for it, what do you need to keep in mind?

The Australian Television Content Variety Hour With Your Host: The Ghost of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo

AIDC 2013: Australian stories on Australian screens. The screen sector is up in arms about the dilution of Australian content on our TV screens. The title of an AIDC session was the whimsical Welcome to the Australian Television Content Variety Hour With Your Host the Ghost of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. But the content of the session was serious business.

The Never Ending Tail

AIDC 2013: long tail, teaching old docs new tricks. Sustainability can take more than one form in the documentary business. For smaller players, the long tail of distribution is your friend. Sue Maslin gives some useful examples of how you can make money from old catalogue.

Walk Off the Land After the Harvest

AIDC 2013: Walk Off the Land After the Harvest. A discussion of ethics in documentary making is a bi-annual tradition at the Australian International Documentary Conference. Screen Hub’s Andrew Einspruch reports on the session chaired by Screen Hub Editor, David Tiley.

Captain Ahab`s Motorcycle Club

AIDC 2013: Captain Ahab`s Motorcycle Club. Making a film about the embalming and display of American President Abraham Lincoln is a little eccentric. Doubling Estonia for Chicago might come across as just plain nuts.

Warming up for working on Wisdom from the Paddock (our upcoming web series), I put together this video featuring one of our rather astounding baby goats.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Edited in Final Cut. I created the Mexican music using loops in Logic, and the second bit of music was an ensemble piece also found in Logic.

“…but still did Internet Explorer 6 not load The Google” from McSweeny’s.

15 January 2013

My review of James Cooper’s ebook Kickstarter for Filmmakers: Plan and Execute Your Next Crowd Funding Campaign (Amazon) is up at Screen Hub. Have a read!

Screen Hub gave me the chance to write about it for their online newspaper. The article is ScreenACT: In the Realm of Low Budget Features with the Pod People :

Pop quiz: what makes a low budget feature a low budget feature?

If you answered “the budget”, then you are really only part-way there. Yes, low budget movies are known for not having a lot of money. But a successful low budget feature can’t just be one that should have been made for ten (or 100) times more, but has been made for less for whatever reason. A good low budget feature is one where the fact that it is low budget is part of what makes the movie good. It is one where being low budget is an advantage.

That was the message from Stephen Cleary, development professional and founder of Arista, who presented Low Budget Feature Pod, a training and development initiative from ScreenACT. Cleary was joined by distributor John L. Simpson of Titan View and others to present a mountain of information and guide participants from vague concepts to sold, submittable projects.

See the full article on their site.

5 September 2012

American producer Ted Hope was in Australia last week, brought in by Screen Australia to teach a two-day class called Hope for Film. I had the good fortune to interview him, and to attend the class, and to write about it for Screen Hub. The articles were:

• Ted Hope, part one: US Indy hero on true independence
• Ted Hope, part two: Hope on Film Class, the first day
• Ted Hope (3): stuff producers need to learn

Happy reading!

. . . . . .

 Photo credit: NLjubicich

My latest article for Screen Hub is Film and Parliament: The Sapphires Help Sing in Indigenous Media Employment Initiative.

The Sapphires screened successfully to politicians in Parliament House Canberra on Wednesday night. Good news for both the industry and the Indigenous Media Employment Initiative announced at the same time.

The Sapphires, which has already crossed $6M in box office since its cinema release on August 9, was represented in Canberra by two of its lead actresses, Deborah Mailman and Jessica Mauboy, as well as director Wayne Blair, writers Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson and producer Rosemary Blight.

Screen Australia showcased the film for parliamentarians (something that it does six or so times a year). If the enthusiastic reception the film received at Parliament House is any guide, there is still plenty of box office still to come for this year’s break-out Australian film. With the movie picked up by the Weinstein Company, screened out of competition at Cannes, and headed to the Toronto Film Festival, it’s prospects for overseas success are also very strong.

Arts Minister Simon Crean and Indigenous Employment and Economic Development Minister Julie Collins used the occasion to launch the Media RING Indigenous Employment Strategy. This two-year endeavour will spend $1.1M to create 40 new jobs and another 40 training opportunities, targeting newspapers, film, TV and new media. The program addresses concerns raised by the 2010 Review of Australian Government Investment in the Indigenous Broadcasting and Media Sector, which was release by the Government last year.

Follow the link to read the rest.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Update: in his description on YouTube, Gotye directly credits this video for inspiration:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Originally found on Freedom to Dither.