The present and future of post production business and technology

“It’s almost as good as 3D” say a precocious 7 yo at Hollywood Bowl 4 July FireWorks Spectacular.

Seriously, it’s come to this: real life and in 3D, fireworks are “almost” as good as 3D… cinema? It was said repeatedly.

3D might have a much better future than I have been thinking.

But kid, it’s real life, it is real 3D. Fireworks is one time when I don’t want the “3D” coming toward me. Thank ou.

Otherwise, Great Show Hollywood Bowl. Should be great on Sunday with another “rehearsal” tomorrow night. 🙂

Why iAd Won’t Meet Steve Jobs’ Expectations http://bit.ly/cVQdTO

GigOm writer Colin Gibbs gives five reasons why iAds won’t be the success Steve Jobs predicts them to be:

1. They’re Expensive;
2. You don’t have to use an iAd to advertise on the iPhone or iPad
3. Big publishers want to sell their own inventory
4. Apple’s insistence on being involved is slowing deployment
5. There is competition in the form of Android phones.

I’m not sure if any are compelling. Personally iAds are some of the least offensive ad insertions (remembering that I’m basically against all irrelevant advertising, and since it’s all irrelevant…). I’m not really qualified to comment on whether or not they’ll be a success – personally I prefer other methods of funding than Ads.

Except I did write that piece a couple of days ago on “How to Get Disney to fund your next production“, which was basically about aggregating all communication on a project into an App and using in-app commerce and iAds to fund the production. (Disney only got the reference because their Pixar ads kept appearing in Jobs’ keynote.)

 

Story is free http://bit.ly/948TJP

Writer John August suggests that the lack of real plot in many indie productions is a consequence of the “small and independent” focus: story is perceived as too expensive to produce (and it can be if you go too big).

A lot of story can happen even when you’re constrained to a few locations. Hamlet takes place in a few rooms. So does The Usual Suspects. Both Go and The Nines pack a lot into each of their three-part sections. And while Sex, Lies and Videotape might seem low-plot, the story keeps forcing characters to make choices and face the consequences.

In meeting with the screenwriters at Sundance, I challenged them to look for scenes in which characters were talking about things and show them doing those things. Often, the omitted scenes weren’t more expensive than what they would replace — but they were more difficult to write. The beginning of an affair is trickier than showing it mid-course. A trapped child is uncomfortable to write, but compelling to watch.

The writing is always going to be the least expensive but most challenging part of the process. Making a low-budget movie is a study in compromises. Story shouldn’t be one of them.

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?

The sugar cane machine http://bit.ly/diSQKv

A short analogy that explains, simply, the evolution of differential marketing from monopoly to competition to open competition to product differentiation. Only the latter truly survives in an open marketplace.

It’s a great lesson for anyone in business (or freelance) or trying to promote an independent video/film project. You can’t compete on price alone:

And then! And then one cane processor starts creating a series of collectible containers, starts interacting with his customers and providing them with custom blends, starts offering long-term contracts and benefits to his biggest customers, and yes, even begins to pay his growers more if they’re willing to bring him particularly sweet and organic materials, on time. In short, he becomes a master of the art of processing and marketing cane. He earns permission, he treats different customers differently and he refuses to act like a faceless factory…

Who are you?

Seth Godin is always worth reading and this is short, to the point and valuable. It’s how we evolve when media can be distributed free, whether we authorize it or not.

If The Public Library Was Invented Today, Would The Gov’t Call It Organized Crime And Shut It Down? http://bit.ly/beIS8N

The story is about a website in Bulgaria has people upload book scans and they’re OCR’d to text. That’s probably a copyright violation, except the site is “open to the public” and in Bulgarian law apparently that makes it a library. Although the law isn’t clear on the matter.

But as Mike Masnick writes:

Either way, all of this makes you wonder: if traditional public libraries were just being founded today, how much effort do you think publishers would go through to shut them down by claiming they were illegal and violations of copyright law?

Every innovative business model bought to the incumbents is made so ridiculous that I can believe they’d go after public libraries if they were started now.

 

The Successor to HDMI: All Your Video Through CAT6 http://bit.ly/9OWPLD

It’s all based on a new A/V cable standard dubbed HDBaseT announced yesterday by Samsung and LG.

Not only is it based on standard CAT5e/6 networking cables, which is going to make networking your home theater much cheaper than HDMI, the new standard also supports cable lengths of up to 328 feet. In other words: There’s really no more excuses for not connecting your PC to your TV, even if the two devices are located in different rooms of your house.

The excuse could well be the difficulty of running Cat 6 Ethernet cable throughout the house, so if you’re building new, put it in everywhere!

Jib Jab does 1 mill transactions year – http://bit.ly/aqsbTy “

Jib Jab – the incredibly creative guys responsible for “Our Land” during the Bush/Kerry campaign, have long discovered that:

JibJab created its direct-to-consumer model, which it rolled out in the fourth quarter of 2007, after the ad market failed to be as robust as it needed to support its business. In a video interview with CinemaTech blogger Scott Kirsner earlier this year, the co-founders said that advertising doesn’t work for online video. Instead, over the past several years JibJab has shifted to selling annual subscriptions that give its user unlimited access to its e-cards and “Starring You” products, while also accepting micropayments for individual digital downloads on iPhone and other devices.

It’s been my assertion for years that advertising isn’t going to support online media the way it did broadcast.