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Truly Free Film

Why on Earth Would I Give Away My Academy Award Shortlisted Film For Free?

By Rahul Gandotra

A few days ago I shared a sampler that allowed people to watch my film for free with a dear friend. Just to make sure the sampler worked and she could put it on her website, I followed up and got this response from her:

“I got everything and it works. I was just not sure that this [your film] is what you actually want to be giving away for free.” I paused and asked myself, “Yes, why the hell are you doing this?” – momentarily ignoring all the months of research I had done.

I replied, “Long story. For now, just share the sampler and let people see the film for free”. This post is about that “long story”.

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My film “The Road Home” is about a boy who escapes from his boarding school in the Himalayas to get back to his parents in England. As you might imagine, I poured my sweat and soul into making it. And given I didn’t want this film to be seen only by friends and family, I worked equally hard submitting the film to festivals and trumpeting from the rooftops of Facebook about each screening.

But I was left with a sour taste in mouth after my festival run. Why? Because I got invited to some festivals where I saw 30 people in a 500-seat theatre watching my film. All the while I’d continue to get Facebook messages and emails asking, “Hey when can I watch your film?” I’d reply, “Well it was playing in your city on this date.” And the common refrain I would hear is, “Why didn’t you email me?”

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Vimeo Announces Open Platform For Creators To Earn Money From Their Videos

Vimeo to offer Creators Two Flexible Payment Options

Vimeo® today announced two new features that enable creators to earn money from their films and videos. Available now, Tip Jar allows viewers to show their appreciation to creators by voluntarily contributing money to support their work.  Over the next several months, Vimeo will also roll out an open pay-to-view service that allows creators to sell their work behind a paywall.

Vimeo’s focus on quality and creativity has allowed it to become one of the Web’s top 10 distributors of video online [1] with more than 75 million monthly unique visitors [2] and one of the world’s largest creative networks with over 13 million registered members. Vimeo’s introduction of Tip Jar and its upcoming pay-to-view service provide a clear path for video creators to build businesses around the films and videos they create.

“Empowering creators to make money from their videos is a logical next step for Vimeo as a service and an opportunity to expand the overall marketplace for video creators and viewers,” said Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor.  “Established creators and emerging talent alike can connect directly with their audiences without the need to conform to industry standards around video format, price or timing releases.”

Vimeo’s Tip Jar enables video creators to crowdsource funds to support works directly from their viewers. Tip Jar will allow anyone to give tips before, during or after watching a video; Vimeo will pay 85 percent of the gross revenue to the creator. Starting today, Vimeo Plus or Pro members can choose to activate Tip Jar.

Vimeo’s pay-to-view service will be an open platform for video creators to sell access to their films and videos. Expanding on traditional rental and Video On Demand models, Vimeo’s pay-to-view service gives creators customizable options to sell their films and video content directly to their audiences and provide control over pricing, rental duration distribution location and other settings. Vimeo will begin rolling out its pay-to-view service in beta preview this fall with a curated series of films.  Vimeo will make the pay-to-view service available to all Vimeo PRO subscribers in early 2013.

“Creators have asked us for quite some time to help them monetize their work, but we think it needed an approach that put the controls back into the hands of the creators themselves,” said Dae Mellencamp, President of Vimeo. “We designed these tools to allow video creators to be as flexible as possible while providing the ability to financially succeed at various levels of viewership.”

For more information about Vimeo’s new creator monetization tools, please visit https://vimeo.com/blog/post:523 or watch https://vimeo.com/49684456.

About Vimeo

Vimeo® is the home for high-quality videos and the people who love them. Vimeo’s mission is to empower and inspire people around the world to create, share and discover videos. As one of the world’s largest creative networks, Vimeo reaches a global audience of more than 75MM each month. Founded in 2004 and based in New York City, Vimeo, LLC is a subsidiary of IAC (NASDAQ: IACI)

[1] June 2012 Comscore

[2] August 2012 Vimeo Internal via Google Analytics

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 3: The Producer’s Dilemma

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 3: The Producer’s Dilemma
By Roger Jackson

Previously: Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 2: Birth of a (Kino)Nation
The Producer’s Dilemma
You probably know the classic movie making conundrum that indie producers struggle with: talent (or rather their agents) won’t commit to a film project until you prove you have funding, and investors won’t write a check until you prove you have talent attached. The producer’s dilemma. And, of course, all successful producers find creative solutions to that thorny issue. KinoNation has a similar challenge: It’s tough to get filmmakers fully committed without video-on-demand distribution outlets in place, and it’s hard to sign VoD outlets without a slate of films.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 2: Birth of a (Kino)Nation

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 2: Birth of a (Kino)Nation
By Roger Jackson
Previously: Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 1: Every Movie Ever Made…
KinoNation
We were determined the site would be a dot com domain — not dot biz or dot US or dot-whatever. But available dot coms are rare and we weren’t going to pay thousands of dollars to some shady cyber-squatter. Klaus found KinoNation.com — it was available, it makes sense, we like it and seems easy to remember. “Kino” is German for cinema. And “Nation” can be defined as a community of persons bound by a shared interest or passion. That seems to work. We’re also excited about the potential for this venture in China, making thousands of Chinese indie films available to the rest of the world. So the name had to sound OK to the Chinese ear (we’re assured it does) and it more or less translates into Mandarin as “Film Kingdom.” But. There’s always a “but.” In this case there’s a site in Russia, kinonation.ru where you can watch Hollywood movies — in Russian — for free. Hard to say whether they’re legit or pirated. Either way, we have the dot-com, they have the dot-ru — there’s no reason we can’t co-exist, right?
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Truly Free Film

Enzo Tedeschi on “Distributing Films via the Ipad” (aka Tool Review: MoPix)

I don’t know about you, but I am pretty astounded by all the opportunities before us for Direct Distribution. If you recall, I have listed 32 different Platforms and Tools that filmmakers can now utilize. One such tool is the MoPix.

I am excited that the Truly Free Film Community is coming together to try inform each other of what works (or doesn’t) in this plethora of riches. Today, one of the producers from the great experiment in both Free & Crowdfunding, The Tunnel, is here to tell you about the mobile & tablet App building tool MoPix. Ladies & Gentlemen, Enzo Tedeschi:

Distributing The Tunnel as an iPad app using MoPix.

In making and distributing The Tunnel, my co-producer Julian Harvey and I have broken a few traditions. In fact we kinda threw out the playbook, from crowdfunding by selling off the frames of the film, to direct-distributing as much as possible, as globally as possible, and as close to a day-and-date release as possible. Our theory was simple – if our audience could find our film simultaneously on as many platforms as we could muster, the film would have its best chance at success. And one global platform that seems to be growing in audience at a rapid rate is the iPad.

Pricing up the development of a custom mobile app in Australia was discouraging. At $10,000 – $20,000 AUD to get it done properly, that was simply not going to happen on our paltry budget.

We were only a few weeks out from release when we heard about MoPix – and we got excited. These guys had built a platform for iPad, iPhone, and Android that would enable us to create an app to distribute The Tunnel directly via the App Store.

Talking to Ryan Stoner at MoPix, we were able to get in during their beta stage, and in a matter of weeks we had a custom-branded app that did everything we needed it to. The Tunnel was now going to be the first Australian film ever to be , and we were going to be able to do it alongside our other release platforms.

The process from our end was actually quite painless, and involved cropping a few images to size and sending those and the video assets over to MoPix. An iPad app came out the other side.

The benefits for us seemed obvious – the film was presented in a very slick way, completely branded so that it felt like OUR product, not theirs, and we could circumvent the pain that just about every indie filmmaker knows – trying to get our film into the iTunes store. The feature set was simple, but had everything it needed to feature an equivalent to our DVD extras. It also let us add a really slick behind-the-scenes photo gallery, which gave us a point of difference from all the other avenues in which the film was available.

If you think about the marketing and distribution of your film in the long term – which we always try to – App updates also create a way for you to keep your audience active. Soon, we’ll be updating the Tunnel app to include in-app purchases. This feature is great for two reasons. First, it enables us to keep selling content to our audience who have already purchased the app. Someone who has already put money on the table for your film is far more likely to keep buying, than someone who hasn’t invested at all. Secondly, when we push out the update, the act of downloading it to see what features have been added creates another interaction with our audience. It’s another small part of the ongoing conversation we’ve been having with our fans since the beginning – even before we had a film.

And while we’re on the subject of marketing – another thing that an app can do for you brilliantly is combine your marketing and distribution into one.

For our next project, we’ll be going back to MoPix to create an app that, unlike The Tunnel, is free to download. The audience will still need to buy the film in order to watch it, but we will create a free app with compelling media-rich content which basically serves as marketing material for the film, which will then be accessible via the in-app purchasing mechanism. Once again, if you can get your audience engaging with your ‘brand’ – your film – they are much more likely to part with their hard-earned.

I will say though, that being in the beta stage, it’s not a perfect solution just yet. It would be cool to see some more platforms integrated, like logging into GetGlue while they are watching The Tunnel on their iPad. But knowing how switched on the guys over at MoPix are, I’m sure they’re working on it. For now the ability to tweet a photo from the gallery, for example, or post it on Facebook directly from the app works great.

MoPix are currently still looking for films for their beta slate – and even though we haven’t set the world on fire with sales of our app just yet, we’ve sold more than enough units for the endeavour to have paid for itself. All in all it has been very worthwhile.

You can learn more about The Tunnel at www.thetunnelmovie.net
The Tunnel App Store link – itunes.apple.com
Facebook – www.facebook.com/thetunnelmovie
Twitter – @thetunnelmovie

Enzo Tedeschi is co-founder of Distracted Media along with Julian Harvey. Together they wrote, produced and edited The Tunnel – a project whose innovative approach has seen it hit international cinema screens despite being crowdfunded and given away for free online.

Before Distracted Media, Enzo co-produced and edited the controversial independent feature documentary Food Matters in 2008, a film which is still enjoying success around the globe, having now sold over 200,000 DVDs. He produced and cut the epic World War 1 period film Ghosts of War, and the award-winning short The Last One with director Carlo Ledesma.

As an ASE Award nominated editor, Enzo has worked on numerous television series, documentaries and award-winning short films. Recently he edited and oversaw the post-production path on Channel Nine’s observational documentary series AFP for Zapruder’s Other Films.

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Truly Free Film

Blake Whitman on “How To Find Music To Use Legally In Videos (Announcing Vimeo’s New Music Store)”

The world keeps getting better and better — at least in terms how we can create better work and get it seen. Today, has brought some more good news.

Blake Whitman, Vimeo’s VP of Creative Development, announces Vimeo’s New Music Store:

In addition to being Vimeo’s VP of Creative Development, I also make videos. Something that I’ve been struggling with for a while now, is how to find music that I can legally use in my videos. I search and search and search every music related site on the net and it ends up taking WAY too much of my time. And even when I find that needle in the haystack, figuring out how to actually use the song (legally that is) is a whole other story. Do I contact the musician? The label? Do I need an attorney and who’s going to pay for that?!

So we had an idea. Wouldn’t it be great to create a place on Vimeo to easily discover, license and download music? Well, the obvious answer is OF COURSE, but we wanted to make sure it would be easy and intuitive to use. So we decided to create Music Store, a music library powered by two great curated music providers, Audiosocket and the Free Music Archive. The library allows anyone to search tracks by lots of different criteria and provides license agreements right there on the site. You can purchase and/or download music easily and then throw it in an editor and start editing!

Check the key features:

     • Over 45,000 songs

     •Three types of licenses: 1) Creative Commons licenses which are free (yes free), 2) Personal use, Non-commercial, web-use licenses for the casual user which are $1.99 per track; and 3) Commercial, web-use licenses for professional users which are $98 per track.

     •Searchable by over 100 features like tempo, mood, theme, genre and instrumentation

Vimeo’s mission is to inspire and empower video creators. Vimeo Music Store is just another step in our effort to help people make better videos! Check it out here:

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Truly Free Film

Prescreen Debuts as a Social Movie Discovery Platform

Prescreen was featured on our MUST READ list of the New Platforms. Sheri Candler also did an overview for the community on this site. Now they are launching. Their press release is below, but to understand just what they are doing, watch this short video before.

Are you excited? I’m excited.

Prescreen Debuts as a Social Movie Discovery Platform

Prescreen will embrace a curated daily email service to leverage the social web to give movies blockbuster exposure on an indie budget

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – September 14th, 2011 — Prescreen, an innovative movie marketing and distribution platform, will officially launch today to give filmmakers and distributors an alternative to traditional advertising and distribution channels – through the mass marketing of curated content that is then shared by users through social media.

Prescreen offers users the ability to subscribe to a daily email alert, view trailers and rent movies to stream on demand, as well as earn rewards and discounts for sharing movie information on their social networks. Their daily email service highlights one movie per day, enabling their featured films to reach a wide audience.

Prescreen also delivers a Prescreen Performance Report to each filmmaker and distributor whose movie is featured on Prescreen. The report offers aggregated analytics and demographics about the audience for each featured film.

How it Works:
• Consumer subscribers receive an email alert featuring one new movie each day.
• Users watch the movie trailer for free and can purchase a rental to view the entire movie to stream on demand for up to 60 days.
• Users can earn discounts and rewards by sharing the film through their social networks using Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Prescreen aggregates the purchasing data, protecting the privacy of each user, and delivers valuable demographic and analytic information back to filmmakers and distributors for future marketing and distribution efforts.

Prescreen’s intuitive marketing report includes all of the relevant information from the purchasers, allowing the content owner to use the detailed information to make informed decisions about continued distribution and marketing efforts. Prescreen allows content owners to maximize profits by marketing and selling via the Prescreen platform.

“Movie goers are increasingly consuming premium content through new digital channels including downloads, streaming, and video on demand (VOD), generating new revenue streams for the movie industry,” said Shawn Bercuson, CEO and Founder of Prescreen. “Prescreen will help movies of all shapes and sizes receive the love they deserve by leveraging the social tools that exist today to market and distribute movies more efficiently.”
One of Prescreen’s first films will be Kino Lorber’s “The Robber;” a story of a champion marathoner who leads a double life as a serial bank robber, sprinting between heists and escaping from police in epic chase sequences. The film was directed by Austrian director Benjamin Heisenberg and features a riveting central performance by Andreas Lust (Revanche).

“Prescreen has developed an exciting and innovative digital platform for film distribution, and we are happy to be one of their first content providers,” said Richard Lorber, CEO of Kino Lorber. “We have one of the largest, most essential libraries in the United States and with Prescreen’s curatorial team so committed to high quality cinema it was a natural fit. In this rapidly changing digital distribution landscape, increasing market penetration means thinking outside the box –which is exactly why we’re working with them.”

Prescreen is now accepting full-length feature film applications on a variety of topics and genres. To submit, visit: prescreen.com/submit. To sign up for the daily email service, visit: prescreen.com

About Prescreen
Prescreen is a movie marketing and distribution platform that helps filmmakers and distributors efficiently reach audiences they otherwise would not have the ability to reach, and identify which audiences would provide maximum opportunity for continued growth and revenue. Prescreen offers users the ability to subscribe to email alerts, view trailers and stream movies on demand, as well as earn rewards for sharing movie information on their social networks. Visit prescreen.com for more information.