One of the toughest thing for online filmmakers to do is get noticed in the sea of content bombarding audiences everyday. Shira Lazar’s Partners Project treats the web not as a niche medium but as a new media frontier, pioneers and all. Her channel feels a bit like MTV in its infancy. Check out her list of the top 5 filmmakers to watch in 2012 on YouTube.

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The list is effects and gimmick heavy, which I suppose is what’s selling on YouTube. While not all of the work mentioned here may be the right fit for all audiences (myself included), the online filmmaking community needs more pieces like this in order to mature. Shira is doing great work.

For a bonus video, check out my interview with Shira from last February.

{% blockquote -Nikki Finke http://www.deadline.com/2012/01/exclusive-hollywood-moguls-stopping-obama-donations-because-of-administrations-piracy-stand/ Deadline.com %} The moguls are reminding Obama et al that, in the words of one studio chief, “God knows how much money we’ve given to Obama and the Democrats and yet they’re not supporting our interests. There’s been no greater supporters of him than we’ve been from the first day and the first fundraisers continuing until he was elected. We all were pleased. And, at its heart institutionally, Hollywood supports the Democrats. Now we need the administration to support us." {% endblockquote %}

Translation: this isn’t the government we paid for.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is…

• …a political advocacy group (aka lobbyists).
• …beholden to the needs of its six members:
  • Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
  • Paramount Pictures Corporation
  • Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.
  • Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
  • Universal City Studios LLC
  • Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
• …a self-stated “champion of intellectual property rights, free and fair trade, innovative consumer choices, freedom of expression and the enduring power of movies to enrich and enhance people’s lives.”
• …run by former US Senator Christopher J. Dodd, who took the job on March 17, 2011 two months after leaving office. Under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (Public Law 110-81) Senators must wait two years before lobbying Congress in an official capacity.
  • It should also be noted that Dodd repeatedly made clear that he would not lobby once he left office.
• …the organization that administers American film ratings.
• …the organization that administered the Hays Code.

The MPAA is not…

• …a government organization.
• …a labor union.
  • Officially it is a trade organization.
• …elected.
• …the voice of the filmmaking community at large.

The driving force behind these bills has been the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Yes, “The Movies” are trying to cripple one of the greatest creative outlets ever created. As a community (filmmakers, critics, cinéphiles, fans, moviegoers, etc.) we have a responsibility to understand how we got here and how to avoid catastrophe.

About Boning Up

You should do your own independent research on these bills. Here’s where you can start:

• Full Text S.968.RS - PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011)
• Full Text H.R.3261.IH - SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act)
• White House Response to SOPA Petition
• A technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP by Reddit’s Jason Harvey. (Cached)
• How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation by Trevor Timm at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Please educate yourself and draw your own conclusions.

“Piracy”

The root of the MPAA’s problems is online piracy, a scourge they claim costs Americans roughly $250 billion a year. Two questions: how do we define piracy and how do we define lost revenue? Last week, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman at Freakonomics did:

There are certainly a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. It’s clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction — for example, a person who would have bought the DVD of the new Kate Beckinsale vampire film (who is that, actually?) but instead downloads it for free on Bit Torrent. In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads.

Do we count this latter category of downloads as “lost sales”? Not if we’re honest.

Then there’s this story at Torrentfreak about Kino.to, a European streaming video site that was raided last year. Prior to the raid, a study was done trying to understand who used the site:

In fact, the study also found that Internet users treat these services as a preview, a kind of “try before you buy.”

This, the survey claims, leads pirate site users to buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more than their ‘honest’ counterparts at the box office.

…

The GfK source says that the study shows “If you download films, you have an increased interest in the cinema”, which only highlights how stupid it would be for the authorities to carry out their implied threat of prosecuting Kino.to users.

The definition of piracy has been warped by the MPAA and the RIAA. The premise of SOPA and PIPA is that the sharing of even a portion of a work that doesn’t go through their storefronts is not just wrong, it’s criminal. We can say, “Well of course piracy is wrong,” but that only feeds the argument that most regular people, who interact with one another through the media they share, are criminals.

Keep in mind, when you talk about piracy that there is no proven correlation between a downloaded file and a lost sale. People who do download “pirated” movies tend to be some of the best consumers there are. Need more proof? The top ten most pirated movies in 2011 grossed approximately $4 billion worldwide combined, and that’s only at the box office. Shouldn’t that number be much lower? Are we to believe it could possibly be $250 billion higher?

The Broken Web

Jason Harvey gets right down to it in his aforelinked piece:

SOPA and PROTECT IP contain no provisions to actually remove copyrighted content, but rather focus on the censorship of links to entire domains.

If the Attorney General served Reddit with an order to remove links to a domain, we would be required to scrub every post and comment on the site containing the domain and censor the links out, even if the specific link contained no infringing content. We would also need to implement a system to automatically censor the domain from any future posts or comments. This places a measurable burden upon the site’s technical infrastructure. It also damages one of the most important tenets of Reddit, and the internet as a whole – free and open discussion about whatever the fuck you want.

What these bills come down to is whether or not the Internet can function as a place of free and open expression. It seems crazy to think that the First Amendment could be trampled on in this manner, but there you have it. SOPA and PIPA would make it illegal to share a link to a site that hosts pirated files.

Put another way, it would make it illegal to talk openly about piracy, or maybe even about movies.

Critical Analysis

In the film criticism world, all we want to do is analyze cinema. There is no nefarious end here. In fact movie blogs are a major marketing boon for the industry. If SOPA or PIPA pass it would limit our ability to share stories, observations, clips and experiences. Our hands are already tied in terms of what we are allowed to share. This would cripple us.

A great example of a site that is doing some of the best work in this space that would be severely damaged by these bills is Indiewire’s Press Play. I don’t know anything about the legal process that backs up their collection of video essays, but I do know that under these bills it wouldn’t take much to make their site seem like a criminal enterprise. All it takes is one studio to take issue with their use of film clips and the site could be effectively dismantled.

Their recent VERTIGOED contest, which I think is a brilliant idea, would be impossible to pull off if these new laws went into effect. That’s a real shame because experiments like it are what move us forward as a creative community. The movie studios own the rights to the movies but we own the rights to the conversations surrounding them. The idea that they could shut down these wonderful explorations of the medium is alarming.

The MPAA and Us

As a community we need to take a stance on this issue. It’s difficult for us to speak out because the MPAA and the major movie studios hold the purse strings, which means they hold many of our futures in the balance. We like to think that they have our best interests in mind. The truth is much simpler and less altruistic than that.

The MPAA is a special interest group that represents the six major movie studios.¹ Hollywood made nearly $10 billion last year domestically. All of the MPAA’s members topped $1 billion in US box office grosses except for Twentieth Century Fox (who missed that mark by a hair). It’s important to draw the distinction between who they represent and who represents you.

The MPAA does not speak for all filmmakers, not by a longshot. They are trying to un-ring the bell on the Internet and preserve an outdated distribution model that is buckling under the pressures of widespread innovation.

The Internet may be a threat to the old ways, but for new filmmakers looking to build an audience and find a following, it is a revolutionary tool that circumvents the need for the major studios. The most recent and most publicized proof of the power of new distribution models was the release of Louis C.K.’s Live at the Beacon Theater, which he sold online independently. In his own words: “No DRM, no regional restrictions, no crap. You can download this file, play it as much as you like, burn it to a DVD, whatever.” In a short amount of time he made over $1 million. It’s not as much as studio money, but it’s a great deal more than an independent could hope to make on his or her own with a theatrical release.

Conclusion

The MPAA is scared of having their entire reason for existence upended by changing times. The truth is that if they keep on fighting the future they will be left in the dust. They should be scared.

Filmmakers are finding more direct ways to reach audiences. Sites like Kickstarter, Vimeo and IndieGoGo to name just a few are making the case that artists can reach their audiences directly without the help of the major studios. There is a lot of money to be made in this business from a lot of excited and devoted viewers. The MPAA and the studios it represents should be fighting obsolescence not by trying to revive the days of their monopolistic delivery methods, but by embracing this new frontier.

SOPA and PIPA represent the worst of the movie business. This isn’t why we love cinema and surely isn’t why we make films. The creative community is much smarter and more agile than this; we can grow and adapt to the changing landscape. These bills would make it so we no longer have the freedom to do so.

For information on how you can help stop SOPA and PIPA, please visit americancensorship.org or consider these suggestions from MacDrifter on how you can make a difference.

{% blockquote -Douglas Adams, Letter to David Vogel, April 14, 1999 http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/we-both-share-same-goal.html Letters of Note %} We seem to have gotten to a place where the problems appear to loom larger than the opportunities. I don’t know if I’m right in thinking this, but I only have silence to go on, which is always a poor source of information. It seems to me that we can either slip into the traditional stereotypes — you’re the studio executive who has a million real-world problems to worry about, and I’m the writer who only cares about seeing his vision realised and hang the cost and consequences — or we can recognise that we both share the same goal, which is to make the most successful movie we possibly can. The fact that we may have different perspectives on how this can best be achieved should be a fertile source of debate and iterative problem solving. It’s not clear to me that a one-way traffic of written “notes” interspersed with long, dreadful silences is a good substitute for this. {% endblockquote %}

Douglas Adams is one of my favorite authors. He had a way of saying just what was needed and nothing more. This letter only confirms my adoration of his style.

Bonus: he concludes with an exhaustive list of how to reach him, including restaurants and a supermarket he might be at. Classic.

{% blockquote -Marine Cole http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20120115/REAL_ESTATE/301159997 Crain’s New York Business %} “It’s just not fair because businesses are temporarily being shut down to accommodate filming,” said Joseph Conley, chairman of Community Board 2 in Queens, which represents Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside and a portion of Maspeth. Contrary to what City Hall says, Mr. Conley sees little evidence of an upside.

“Production crews don’t localize, so there’s no benefit to the community,” he said, pointing out that when it comes to meals, for example, the crews bring in their own outside catering companies. {% endblockquote %}

I see this issue from both sides. New York City is lucky to have as many productions as it has and could use a lot more. On the other it can be extremely annoying to have a film production on your block for even a day.

Every once in a while I get a film shooting near my apartment. The last one had its camera village camped out near my stoop. The crew couldn’t have cared less that I was trying to get in and out of my building. I gave them a pass because I know how gruelling a day on a film set can be. Other residents didn’t seem so pleased.¹

The gist of this Crains article is actually quite positive. People tend to view New York City as monolithic and overpowering, worth putting up with only so long as you need to. In reality it’s a place like any other and the locals need to be wooed and taken care of like anywhere else. It looks like efforts are coalescing to help make this relationship better for everyone. That can only be a good thing.

{% blockquote Scott Aukerman http://scottaukerman.tumblr.com/post/16008637005/rocky-vs-rambo Tumblr %} Around a year ago, a few friends and I watched all four Rambo movies in one day. We got to talking about how much fun it would be if John Rambo were to meet Rocky Balboa. So we wrote a movie about it.

We wrote the outline on one page of paper (in gold ink), split it up into six sections, and each wrote around 15-20 pages, without looking at each others’ work. I got the last section, and it was also my job to clean the script up, join the sections together, and try to get it to make sense.

Then we had a reading of it to hear what the others came up with. And then we never did anything else with it.

…UNTIL TODAY! {% endblockquote %}

I love it when a fun, collaborative project like this pops up online.

Grab the full script as a PDF from Google Docs. Leisure reading tonight.

(via Lee likes the internet.)

{% blockquote Melena Ryzik http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/going-by-twitter-globes-were-a-big-hit/ NYT - The Carpetbagger %} The ratings for the Globes may have dipped slightly, but it was a robust presence on Twitter, where the Tweets-per-second (TPS) count reached 6,162 at its highest point, more than last year’s Super Bowl (4,064 TPS) or the royal wedding (3,966), though still less than the MTV Video Music Awards (8,868 TPS, which had the advantage of the Beyonce bump). {% endblockquote %}

Oh Hollywood and their metrics. I suppose if this is a decent measurement of audience interest it’s only a matter of time before Twitter is entirely overrun by ads, publicists and spam-bots. I said completely, we’re about 90% there.

Also, did you see the memo about this?

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Terribly sad piece about how far Kodak has fallen.

{% blockquote “The last Kodak moment?” http://www.economist.com/node/21542796?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/thelastkodakmoment The Economist %} While Kodak suffers, its long-time rival Fujifilm is doing rather well. The two firms have much in common. Both enjoyed lucrative near-monopolies of their home markets: Kodak selling film in America, Fujifilm in Japan. A good deal of the trade friction during the 1990s between America and Japan sprang from Kodak’s desire to keep cheap Japanese film off its patch.

Both firms saw their traditional business rendered obsolete. But whereas Kodak has so far failed to adapt adequately, Fujifilm has transformed itself into a solidly profitable business, with a market capitalisation, even after a rough year, of some $12.6 billion to Kodak’s $220m. Why did these two firms fare so differently? {% endblockquote %}

The article talks about Kodak’s complacency as a market leader. In hindsight it seems like their cavalier attitude was beyond irresponsible, but the belief that they were the number one producer of film products ran deep for generations.

When I was in college, not so long ago, and the time came to choose a film stock for my thesis project, none of the professors I spoke with could offer any guidance on Fujifilm’s motion picture product line. In fact, some even fed me misinformation regarding whether or not it could be processed in local laboratories. They did this not out of malice, but because they honestly didn’t know otherwise. This is what happens when you have a near monopoly: your story gets to be gospel.

I contacted Fujifilm myself and found them to be warm and welcoming. I had people there I could talk to on the phone for a small order while Kodak would give me a terse message after I’d punch numbers on their automated phone menus. Their line of film stocks even felt more innovative and cutting edge than Kodak’s. 500 ASA Daylight? Why would such a thing exist and, better, how could I make use of it creatively?

In the end Fujifilm cut me a deal on film stock that was far better than what Kodak could was offering. I shot two films with it and absolutely loved the stuff. And guess what? My friends loved it and they started ordering from Fujifilm as well.

Kodak never stopped acting like a behemoth even when it was clear the tables were turning. Much of their story is woven into the American moviemaking narrative, and it is disheartening to watch them tumble out of relevance. The truth is they had every opportunity to not only turn things around but completely own the markets they already had experience in. They basically invented digital photography and even brought the first digital camera that mattered to market. Yet they still lost their way. Hubris, I guess, got the better of them.

Today Marco Arment linked this Ars Technica article about video pros moving away from Apple products. He supplemented it with a few comments on the release cycle of the Mac Pro. I’d like to add my own commentary.

{% blockquote -Jacqui Cheng http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/video-pros-apple-needs-to-acknowledge-the-pro-industry-and-fast.ars Why the video pros are moving away from Apple %} “Many folks in the industry have the perspective that Apple is willing to cut out the legs from under professionals without warning. And that can make project leads weary of putting full faith into a entire workflow, which goes well beyond the actual editing software,” Poirier told Ars. “The simple question of the survival of the features a Mac Pro provides can push workflow managers to migrate over to Windows, where Avid and Adobe can be installed. Professionals must be able count on lasting support for a few years at a time. If there are any doubts, about where the roadmap leads, it’s simply not worth the risk of taking that leap of faith. Post-production houses simply can’t afford to be caught off guard.” {% endblockquote %}

Windows. Where Avid and Adobe can be installed. You know where else they can be installed?

Pound for pound, the Mac Pro is the better production box for the money regardless of which editing software you use. It’s fast, reliable and yes, “supported.” This talk of the Mac Pro being discontinued, as Marco points out, is nonsense. We’ve been hearing this same chatter for a decade that Apple doesn’t want to be in the computer business anymore, but it never turns into anything but rumor-mongering and/or link bait.

How do I know that Apple isn’t dropping this community? Because they released Final Cut Pro X. Would everyone have been happier if they just let Final Cut wither on the vine in 32-bit land?

I usually love Ars but this article is just a bunch of worry-warts bitching and moaning about Apple’s secrecy. Fair enough; they can switch to Avid or whatever. But for my money, I’d rather run any video editing software on a Mac.