I saw Logorama at Sundance a few years back. Not that short films have much hope of broad distribution anyhow, but this movie was particularly toxic for buyers given its liberal, unauthorized use of corporate logos to hilarious effect.
I'm still surprised to find the movie online anywhere, and every so often I check. It happens to be on Vimeo now, and as always I suggest people give it a viewing in case it gets taken down (maybe at this point if it's still online it's safe?).
This is a short film that was directed by the French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy + Ludovic Houplain. It was presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2009. It opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short. In this film there are two pieces of licensed music, in the beginning and in the end. All the other music and sound design are original. The opening track (Dean Martin "Good Morning Life") and closing track (The Ink Spots "I don't want to send the world on fire") songs are licensed pre-existing tracks. All original music and sound design is by, human (www.humanworldwide.com)
A good look back at how the trailer for Terminator 2 spoiled a twist the movie went to great pains to set up.
Re-watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it’s actually frustrating to see how carefully crafted the first half-hour is, how thoroughly it takes advantage of audience assumptions, all in order to floor them with the big reveal, when Patrick and Schwarzenegger’s Terminators face off over a terrified John Connor, and Schwarzenegger’s is the one who saves John’s life and hustles him to safety. Counting Cameron’s first run at these characters and this basic idea, it took around seven years to build up this fake-out—and just a couple minutes of trailer (and a tagline, “This time he’s back… for good!”) to blow it. It’s one of the dumbest marketing missteps of all time—at least in terms of audience experience.
Nowadays I try to avoid trailers for movies I plan to see, for just this reason. This from someone for whom a half hour spent watching trailers online was once a regular occurrence.
I miss some of the sense of anticipation that comes from a well cut movie trailer, especially for a much anticipated blockbuster, but I've long since learned that any pleasure from the movie will come from the movie itself.
The first generation online courses I've taken are still in a very rudimentary form, perhaps because they are quick and dirty ports of real-world classes. They recall some of the first generation mobile apps which were simply wrapped websites. If you were to build a class from scratch for a MOOC, as an experience, you'd make many different choices than if you were trying to just convert a class that was taught in the traditional sense. Just as native apps have come to dominate the mobile phone experience, the next generation of online courses, built from the bottom up to be an online experience, will make today's online courses look primitive. The issues, of course, is that the tools are limited so far, and building such an experience is a high upfront fixed cost.
Companies like Coursera and Udacity need to arm instructors with the tools to build a great experience at a lower investment of time and money. That will come. The benefits come downstream: once constructed, an online course can be spread to a near infinite number of students at a fractional marginal cost. This has always been the chief appeal of online instruction to me, the ability for great instruction to achieve massive leverage and scale.
That was an excerpt of a post I wrote in May on MOOC's. Chris Dixon cites an MIT professor's lament about the current state of online education and adds:
Online courses are to offline courses as movies are to plays. The marginal cost of delivering online courses is minimal. The potential audience is everyone with a smartphones and an internet connection – about 1.5 billion people today and growing quickly. There is no reason we shouldn’t be investing as much to produce online courses as we do to produce Hollywood movies.
The MIT Professor, Woodie Flowers, is candid about his assessment of MIT's OpenCourseWare.
In the United States, our “education” system is choking to death on a failed training system. Each year, 600,000 first-year college students take calculus; 250,000 fail. At $2000/failed-course, that is half-a-billion dollars. That happens to be the approximate cost of the movie Avatar, a movie that took a thousand people four years to make. Many of those involved in the movie were the best in their field. The present worth of losses of $500 million/year, especially at current discount rates, is an enormous number. I believe even a $100 million investment could cut the calculus failure rate in half.
Why not OpenCourseWare?
I argued that the program that became OpenCourseWare should have focused its original $100 million estimated budget on two topics. I suggested microbiology and electromechanical systems as examples. Had we done that, I believe we would have accelerated changing education. We decided, however, to assume that the world could hardly wait to see our huge pile of PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, classroom locations, teaching assistant lists, and other assorted bits of information about our courses. We now have a large database developing digital rot and becoming increasingly irrelevant. It is unlikely OCW will be systematically Facebooked, or Twittered, or HTML5ed, or deFlashed. It is an expensive and unsustainable “free” system.We have spent about $40 million over 10 years. Powered by MIT’s incredible brand recognition, OCW has made an impact and been celebrated with awards. About seven years after OCW was launched, Salman Khan, our next graduation speaker, started posting a coherent, concise set of tutorials that were inexpensively produced but backed by a pedagogic philosophy. When I last checked Google Trends, the Khan Academy’s search hits exceeded OCW’s by an order of magnitude. Khan designed a product that teachers and students want and need. His modestly-produced presentations are used by millions. Starting with zero brand recognition, he has matched or exceeded OCW’s impact. What might we have done with $40 million, 10 years, and the most powerful technology education brand on the planet?
Recently, a friend said to me, "Hey, George, if a space alien beamed you up to his ship and demanded that you explain what being human is like, what would you say?"
"Well," I said, "I'd advise the alien to spend a few days reading short stories." Short stories are the deep, encoded crystallizations of all human knowledge. They are rarefied, dense meaning machines, shedding light on the most pressing of life's dilemmas. By reading a thoughtfully selected set of them, our alien could, in a few hours, learn everything he needs to know about the way we live. Except how it feels to lose one's car in a parking garage and walk around for like three hours, trying to look as if you know where you're going, so the people driving by—who have easily found their cars, having written the location on their wrists or something—don't think badly of you. I don't think there's a short story about that yet.
This is George Saunders' list of recommended short stories, and it's worth perusing as it isn't inundated with the same classics you see on every such list.
It feels like short stories are read even less frequently today than when I was younger, if that's possible. Yet when I was an English major taking creative writing classes, fancying myself a budding artist, all we read and wrote were short stories. I remember stumbling upon a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff at Green Library at Stanford one afternoon while checking out books for another class. I brought it back to my dorm room and ended up devouring the entire collection over a single fevered day of reading.
The demand in a short story for an economy of words brings out the best in most writers. I have not read many short stories the past few years. That's something I plan to rectify the year ahead.
Over the past few years, some indie films have been experimenting with day-and-date release in theaters and on VOD services like iTunes. It has always made a lot of sense to me: you capitalize on your theatrical marketing spend when you put movies out on multiple platforms at once, instead of having to spend multiple times to market the theatrical release and then the VOD and DVD releases.
Studios had always been hesitant to go too far with this strategy because of blowback from the theater owner cartel and because studios are just generally a bunch of conservative folks who need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. It didn't help that the only movies that typically received this type of treatment ended up being some of the most obscure movies out there; it led to the self-fulfilling prophecy that this was a dumping strategy for movies with little or no market.
Some forces are finally converging to make this strategy more attractive, though. For one thing, the DVD release window continues to shrink in value as the DVD purchase market fades away. As with CDs, so go DVDs. Secondly, the theatrical film business is flat, and for indies it is likely declining as more share of theatrical spend is for blockbuster movies. The competition for moviegoing as a form of entertainment is increasing, and most of it comes from a computer people carry with them all the time and that turns on with a tap of a button. Other competition comes from a larger but also more accessible screen, the giant LCD TV in people's living rooms. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Here comes the poster child for the revolution. Snowpiercer is the widest multi-platform release ever. It wasn't quite day-and-date, but two weeks after it was released in theaters, it was available on most VOD services like iTunes and cable operators like Comcast and DirecTV.
Some interesting tidbits:
But RADiUS-TWC is taking steps to create a new language around digital platform revenues, with Snowpiercer earning an estimated $1.1 million from VOD this past weekend, nearly twice as much as the $635,000 it earned in theaters. “From a layman’s perspective these numbers are possibly not that interesting,” admits RADiUS-TWC co-president Tom Quinn. “But from an industry perspective, it’s a game changer.”
Why? For a distributor, VOD is both cheaper and more profitable. “That $1.1 million gross is actually worth almost double to me in terms of how it nets out in our bottom line,” says Quinn, who claims that the film’s real-value weekend gross is thus about $2.6 million, enough to land in the box-office top-10.
This strategy also didn’t require a traditional TV spend. “We are being promoted on TV, but we are being promoted on TV to consume,” he explains. “We have a TV campaign, but it’s in service of actually selling the movie to be purchased. That’s very different.”
Also, VOD—with access to 85 million homes—doesn’t have the same drastic theatrical drop-offs from week to week.
More from Variety:
The picture has racked up an impressive $3.8 million over its first two weeks on VOD, while pulling in a respectable $3.9 million over five weeks of in theaters.
The lowered marketing cost is huge here, it's difficult to overstate just how deep a hole a studio digs for an independent film when the studio takes out a broad ad campaign, including television ads, to promote its theatrical release. The irony is that it's not clear that an expensive TV campaign ever made sense for all but the biggest indie films, and the increased competition for the theatergoing experience makes that even less logical.
Perhaps the total potential audience for your movie is not massive, and frankly, for many indie movies it won't be. In this age of increased competition for attention, being able to keep your marketing costs at a minimum gives your movie more opportunity to make a profit at whatever percentage of your potential audience you manage to convert.
The internet does not increase the total user attention in the universe, it only makes it easier to tap into it. There are still only 24 hours a day in the lives of each of the people in the world, and that finite resource is being subdivided more and more. It's one reason Hollywood is so eager to please the Chinese market with plots that are China-safe; it's one of the few ways to grow the base of paying customers by a magnitude of order.
Liam Boluk writes about some strategies for indie filmmakers:
As a result, VOD and digital distribution should represent the indie priority – not just another non-theatrical channel. However, this means far more than pursuing a common release date across all mediums, penetrating a wide variety of different providers (Netflix, Amazon, Apple etc.) or standing up a direct-to-consumer distribution portal. Indie studios will still need to find a way to stand out among the 500+ other indie titles per year (not to mention thousands of pre-existing major and indie catalogue titles). What’s more, revenues will still be too slight to fund elaborate marketing campaigns nationally. As such, studios will need to establish and cultivate direct-to-consumer relationships through which they can inform individual consumers of any new releases that might be of interest and help guide them to the appropriate distributor (e.g. Netflix, iTunes etc.). If this is done well, indies may even be able to use consumption and interaction data to guide future film investment decisions (as the major studios, as well as OTT video providers do).
With RADiUS-TWC sharing this data on its VOD success, perhaps the stigma of having your movie released on multiple platforms simultaneously will diminish. The next generation doesn't see it as a black mark if your movie is released on multiple platforms, they see it as outdated and absurd that more movies and TV shows aren't available on all the screens all the time. While your movie opens to largely empty theaters in an exclusive theatrical window, they sit at home watching videos on YouTube.
While I personally still love and prefer to go to the theater to sit in a darkened theater with other people to see movies projected on a giant screen, I support whatever release strategies continue to finance filmmaking. The windowing strategy isn't going away anytime soon, but it makes less and less sense as we transition from the age of artificial scarcity to one of uncontrollable abundance.