Month: July 2010

Categories
Item of Interest The Business of Production

“Our Footloose Remake” Beats Paramount

Our Footloose Remake Beats Paramount to the Punch http://bit.ly/bx1VvU

More an exploration of what can be done, than a serious approach for all production, they did manage to get a Footloose remake done before Paramount can.

Each team was assigned one scene from the film to recreate however they saw fit, leading to the following tally: 33 different Rens (played by Bacon in the original), 15 different Reverend Shaw Moores (played by John Lithgow in the original) and 27 different Ariels (played by Lori Singer originally). The result is an insane but delightful mashup of styles and approaches — parody, animation, puppets, Dance Dance Revolution homage, reverse motion, video remix, stop-motion — with instances of both male and female drag, puppets, puppies and amazingly bad wigs.

And yes, they knew it wouldn’t make money. In my database of production funding methods, this will go in “Gimmicks”.

Categories
Item of Interest

TV Show Released On BitTorrent raises $20K fast.

TV Show Released On BitTorrent Raises $20,000 Pretty Damn Fast http://bit.ly/cbvbcl

Zubin Madon alerts us to the news that in just about a week, the producers of the show have hit their goal of raising $20,000 to produce the next batch of episodes. This isn’t a “give it away and pray” sort of deal. It’s a recognition that the first episode is the “pilot” and the scarcities that are being sold are the creation of more episodes. This is one of the more complicated scarcities for people to understand: content, once created and released to the world, is infinite. However, content not yet created is scarce. So it’s a perfectly reasonable business model to try to sell the creation of new content, which is exactly what the producers here have done successfully.

Torrent Freak has a longer article about the same project.

With traditional methods of funding drying up, producers will need to be creative in the future. Growing and Monetizing an Audience is one of my most popular presentations.

On the other hand, this shows the difficulty of funding in the digital age: The regular quality version has been downloaded over 1 million times, and the HD version 300,000 times, to raise $20,000. We’re not there yet, are we?