In the midst of the collapse of the independent film market, I'm quite hopeful really, there IS a light at the end of the tunnel. I do believe there IS an emergent model.
Sure, year after year continue to be banner years for the major studios. When you have a hit nowadays, there are so many ways to exploit it. And that's great and I look forward to making more movies on that side of the line.
For small independents however, they're being increasingly fractured and crushed.
It's just that the overhead required nowadays to finance and sell a million dollar film is about as much as the movie itself. And the market is massively overcrowded.
Lose the overhead.
There's another model emerging, that of the independent filmmaker, truly independent, truly an auteur. The filmmaker who makes the movie and sells it off a web site.
Maybe you license it to itunes, or netflix, people can watch your movie instantly, an impulse buy. Or stream it directly from your own site (as bandwidth issues get relaxed over the next decade this will become more feasible).
The filmmaker needs a web 2.0 (3.0?) apparatus, you need to blog, facebook, twitter, get screeners out for reviews, work it work it baby.
Then maybe a new species of filmmaker can emerge. Truly auteur and unconstrained by the need to be able to entertain the mainstream. Free to address all sorts of niche markets. Free to be self-expressed, finally.
When we make movies in the 'biz', we hardly ever make the movie we want to make. We make the movie 'they' want us to make. The marketing people. The numbers. Because we need the millions.
But if you're willing to work with a much smaller audience, in a distribution chain that has far fewer middlemen, if you're willing to massively cut the overhead, you will find a market for the movie YOU want to make.
Massively cutting the overhead means more to me than just less money and fewer people. It actually means a whole other approach to filmmaking. A whole other approach to the craft itself. A model has emerged there too.
Basically it looks like this:
a tiny team. One, two, maybe three filmmakers. There's no point calling them anything else because everyone wears multiple hats and everyone will be making sandwiches and picking up the trash in addition to weighing in on the drafts, budgets, cast, and cuts.
and that's it. Really. I call it Naked Filmmaking.
More on this later.
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Agreed.... Trying this route myself, although as a second job which kills my scheduling!!!
ReplyDeleteNaked filmmaking? Sounds like low-no budget filmmaking. Hasn't this been happening for a long time?
ReplyDelete---Naked filmmaking? Sounds like low-no budget filmmaking. Hasn't this been happening for a long time?
ReplyDeleteYes absolutely, guerilla filmmaking has been around since the dawn of the camera.
Now however, technology has radically altered what's possible [viz streaming movies for instance], this actually opens up a whole other way to go about low-no budget moviemaking.
That's what I want to talk about. What that is.
Foresight is half of everything, Kudos Jeffery
ReplyDeleteI'm confused, is this a solution to the independent film issues or just a new way to market yourself? You mentioned an overcrowded market, is this not just increasing that over crowded market? If not now, then a few years down the road?
ReplyDeleteTo me it also encourages everyone to make a movie, and most people who get money for making movies have to prove, more often than not, that they can actually build an audience. And, let's be honest the audience is king when it comes to paying off credit card bills for a movie you just made out of pocket.
I fear this will have an inverse effect, breading mediocrity, where the audience no longer trusts the quality of movies being created, and refuses to give donations, or pay a cover charge to see the movies. I also believe the word auteur should be used very sparingly, because it's one of the few words left that true artists can call their own.
And please don't mistake, I'm no auteur, I'm just concerned that auteur may go the way of the filmmaker... watered down by an over crowded market where quality is an issue.
Foresight is half of everything. Thoughts?
One more. Vancouver employs thousands if not tens of thousands of people in the film industry, including you and I, and encouraging free/cheap movies, can, and is, becoming quite devastating for all involved. I've seen quite a few discussions on giving away content for free, and am getting worried about creating a precedent for the future.
ReplyDeleteI know I work for Biracy right now, but crowdfunding is taking serious leaps toward a solution. Having an audience pre-order a product, to finance something they want to see? It's another way to lose the over head, and self distribute.
Scooter, I think you bring up lots of good points.
ReplyDeleteYou're absolutely right, the new technological capacities and market directions have bred mediocrity as well as endangered the entire industry (we're not talking massive studio pics here, but made for tv fare and small movies).
Things are changing and it does seem like we're living through a slo-mo collapse sometimes.
The possibilities however are still there for anyone who knows what they're doing. There is a business model there, an available niche for the independent (yes auteur) filmmaker.
Avoiding it won't save anyone's job.