Guess what isn't super-sized? Digital distribution revenues for filmmakers, apparently.
AUSTIN, Texas--The Internet and the rise of online video have meant a plethora of new options for independent filmmakers. But, as has been well-publicized, the money just isn't there yet. A panel at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday highlighted that this is an extremely contentious issue.
"Digital distribution is not some magic bullet," said panelist Gary Hustwit on the success of his documentary "Helvetica," in front of a packed room of audience members that came from both SXSWi and its sister festival, SXSW Film. "It's not that because the film is available digitally it does well. It's because you do the work...because of that exposure, it did well."
In spite of widespread blog speculation that DVDs are dying and that digital downloads and streams will replace the physical medium in due time, filmmakers say that from the creative side, relying on these outlets--iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, Joost, and SnagFilms, represented on the panel by CEO Rick Allen--simply is not profitable yet. In fact, in many cases, sales and revenue numbers are kept on the down-low.
Morgan Spurlock, the documentarian behind "Super Size Me" and "Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden?," put it bluntly. "The reason numbers aren't released (for digital distribution revenues) is because the numbers are pathetic," he said. "The numbers are sadly low in comparison to what we expect from film and television."
"If you're looking to pay your rent, not so much, if you're looking to pay your phone bill, you have a great chance," Spurlock continued. "It's getting to a point where it's down the road from being profitable, but we're just not at that point yet."
The panelists disagreed over whether the best digital distribution strategy is to get a film on as many platforms as possible or to be strategic in the hopes of making more money.
Matt Dentler of digital representation group Cinetic Rights Management argued for the be-everywhere model. "We are a direct aggregator to, I would say, about a dozen portals in the U.S., and we just closed our first couple of deals in Europe." Dentler said that Cinetic's films go to YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, SnagFilms, and quite a few others. "We're probably going to have about five to ten more in Europe over the next few months...what this touches on is there are so many freaking options out there for consumers that you kind of have to provide all of them."
But Steve Savage, president of distributor New Video, disagreed. "It's good to be agnostic, and I think it's a good way to put everything out there and see what sticks but there's also other ways to do it," he asserted, "to be really strategic, to find where the money is."
The panelists seemed to agree that, as so many people have said before, digital revenues are on the way. "The money you're going to make as an independent filmmaker right now," Dentler said, "the fact that we can start cutting checks for people today, it might not be huge checks, but at least they're checks."
"They don't approach TV license fees," SnagFilms' Allen said. "We are at the front end of this. However, they are hundredfold, a thousandfold, the size of the checks that most independent documentarians have received from theatrical release."
Gary Hustwit said that filmmakers need to take responsibility for pushing the digital distribution business forward themselves. "Go directly to the audience instead of relying on, with all due respect to the distributors here, other businesses to do it," he suggested. "Why are we building other people's businesses when we could build our own businesses?"
To mark the United Nations' first-ever International Day of Democracy, the U.S. State Department launched a YouTube-based video contest on Monday.
Called the Democracy Video Challenge, the contest encourages the submission of three-minute videos that define the concept of democracy.
"The Democracy Video Challenge asks budding filmmakers, democracy advocates, and the general public to create video shorts that complete the phrase, 'Democracy is...'," the contest's official Web site explains. While they don't require entrants to be professional filmmakers, it's pretty clear that they're looking for something more high-end than sitting in front of your Webcam and waxing philosophical about Barack Obama.
Submissions will be accepted through January 31, and a jury will select semifinalists and then finalists. Seven winners, each one from a different global region, will be chosen by a public vote sometime in June. The winners will receive trips to New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles for screenings and meetings with film industry representatives and "democracy advocates."
There are very few rules: entrants must be 18 or older; the videos must be under three minutes long, "suitable for a general audience," comply with YouTube's terms of use, and either be in English or subtitled in English.
Partners in the contest include NBC Universal, the film schools at New York University and the University of Southern California, and the Directors Guild of America.
This post has been updated to include a statement from YouTube on why the Project Direct contest is only open to Web users in seven countries.
"I demand an explanation for these shenanigans. What do you have to say?" If you're a regular YouTube junkie, you might be hearing that phrase a lot more in the near future.
The massive, Google-owned video-sharing site announced on Monday a new initiative called Project Direct, a contest sponsored by Hewlett-Packard in which aspiring filmmakers are encouraged to submit films between two and seven minutes in length. A total of 20 finalists will be chosen by a panel led by Thank You For Smoking director Jason Reitman; the final winner out of those 20 will be chosen by YouTube voters.
The contest comes with three somewhat quirky guidelines stipulated by Reitman: "a character in the film must face a situation above his or her maturity level," the aforementioned line--"I demand an explanation for these shenanigans. What do you have to say?"--must be included somewhere in the dialogue, and one scene must include one character passing a photograph to another character. (Perhaps that's a nod to HP's imaging and printing group, the division of the tech conglomerate that has been vocally promoting the contest.)
The contest will run from Sunday, October 7 through Friday, November 9 and is open to submissions from Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.--but films must be either in English or subtitled in English. One winner, in addition to a $5,000 prize and a featured spot on YouTube's home page, will earn a trip to an as-yet-unnamed international film festival as a guest of HP and will attend "surprise industry events" and a meeting with production executives from the indie-centric Fox Searchlight Productions, which released Reitman's Thank You For Smoking and his upcoming film Juno.
When asked why the contest is open only to YouTube users from those seven countries, the company issued this statement: "While we wish we could include residents of all countries in Project Direct, many countries have different laws about running contests and we weren't able to devise a contest with rules that are fair and work the same for everyone around the world."
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