Parallel Posters

If you think that the movies coming out of Hollywood are all alike, take a look at the similarities of the posters that advertise them.

(link via Boing Boing)

Space Chimps

I haven't seen the film, so I have no opinion of it one way or the other. But I have to question the wisdom of opening any film the same weekend as the latest Batman film and the release of Mamma Mia. Batman: The Dark Knight will easily gross more than $100 million and there are predictions that it might go as high as $170 million. Mamma Mia is based on a huge Broadway hit with many successful road companies. There can't be a lot of money left in the pool after those two films suck up their share. The same article predicting the Batman gross is predicting Space Chimps to gross $6-8 million.

While I have no idea when the Space Chimps DVD will be released, it's likely to be for Christmas, where it will be up against Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda and the latest Looney Tunes compilation. A strong theatrical marketing campaign and good box office gross would have helped the Space Chimps DVD release, but it doesn't look like that's in the cards.

My sympathies go out to the crew of this film. A lot of hard work is going to go unnoticed.

Digital Distribution and Marketing

Scott Kirsner of the Cinematech blog hosted a workshop at the Film Arts Foundation in San Francisco on the subject of Digital Distribution and Marketing. Below is a slide show of Kirsner's presentation, including some dollar figures.

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Unique Distribution Idea

Here's a unique way to get your movie out to the public: sell distribution rights to a newspaper and have them insert DVDs of your film into the Sunday paper. You get paid for the local distribution rights, the paper sees a circulation bump because readers get a free movie with the cost of the newspaper, and your film gets seen by lots of people and generates word of mouth.

(courtesy of Mark Evanier.)

Steve Schnier at the Toronto International Film Festival

Steve Schnier, caricatured at left by Peter Emslie, has a long history in the animation industry, including creating the series Freaky Stories. Steve is somebody willing to go out on a limb. Where other people dream, Steve hustles.

Steve's latest project is a feature film made from home movies that he bought on Ebay called Pubic Lice: The Motion Picture. The budget? $4,000. You can read all about it and see some clips here.

Steve is not only attending the Toronto International Film Festival searching for a distributor, he's also writing a daily column for Canada's National Post newspaper all week, detailing his experiences. I believe that this is the first article.

To be honest, I'll probably hate this movie. It's just not what I look for in a film. But having said that, I think that Steve was absolutely right to take a chance on this and push it as far as he can. Steve doesn't give his ideas away. He markets them. He's not afraid to get meetings or to pitch at the slightest opportunity. The future is always going to belong to corporations, but we're living in a time where there are ways to publicize your ideas that didn't exist in the past and because of that, the future is also going to belong to people like Steve. If you've got ideas, great! Now think of ways to market them.

Independent Distribution and Marketing

These two video clips are of Scott Kirsner interviewing Peter Broderick of Paradigm Consulting. The first runs 15 minutes and the second almost 9, but they're full of interesting information about financing, revenue streams, distribution and marketing. Broderick talks about documentaries, which are different than animation in that they automatically have more footage and most likely a lower budget, but his thoughts still point the way the market is evolving and suggest possibilities.

If you can spare the time, these clips are worth watching. If you haven't got the time, bookmark Broderick's site for future reference.

Digital Distribution: Movies and Music

Scott Kirsner has contributed an article to Release Print about the state of digital distribution for movies. He admits that

Digital distribution, circa 2007, resembles a high-concept science fiction script: conceptually intriguing, potentially feasible, but not quite part of the fabric of reality.

The New York Times Magazine has an article called "Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog," which talks about how musicians are using digital distribution to build audiences.

Both these articles deal with creative people attempting to cut out the middle men and go straight to audiences and I'm intrigued with the differences between the two fields. Music has the advantage of being produced faster and cheaper than films, which allow musicians to regularly add new material and build an audience. Musicians are also interacting more heavily with their audiences than filmmakers are. The Times article talks about Jonathan Coulton, who has uploaded a new song weekly and personally answers dozens of emails a day from fans. John K. has developed quite a following through his blog, but based on the posted comments, he's not committed to answering every question that comes his way. If you're aware of anyone in animation or film who has taken this further than John K, let me know.

One of the major differences between music and film is the personal appearance angle. Concerts and club dates are a major revenue stream for musicians, where personal appearances by actors or directors might goose attendance at a screening but don't generate revenue separately the way music sales and personal appearances do.

Finally, there are the physiological and psychological differences between music and film. Sight is our specie's primary sense, so we're able to use our hearing while engaging in other activities. Music can accompany our activities in a way that films never can. A teacher of mine, Bob Edmonds, once said that there was no visual equivalent to whistling.

Furthermore, there's an emotional difference between music and film. A lot of animation is based on humour, but a joke won't be as funny the 20th time you hear it as it was the first time. By contrast, the 20th time you hear a song, it may be more satisfying than the first. Music grows on us while humour, stories and films tend to go stale.

I'm fascinated with how all of this is developing. I desperately hope that animators figure out a way to make the web work for independent production. The goal shouldn't be to become the next George Lucas and get rich. The goal should be to do the work you want to do and make enough money from it to live. Coulton, the musician, is making a middle class living. Can animators do the same? Maybe the web will never be as friendly to animators as it is to musicians, but the rules are still being written and there's enormous potential to change how animators live and work for the better.

Bill Watterson on School, Work, Art and Commerce

As this is the graduation season, I'd like to point you to a commencement address that Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson made to the students of his alma mater, Kenyon College, in 1990. Included are these thoughts:

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness.

and these:

I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.

Thanks to Jason Kim for posting this.

Marketing Canadian Movies

Steve Schnier, who usually works in animation but is currently in production on a low budget live action feature, has a couple of blog entries about the never ending problem of marketing Canadian movies.

The Web as a Funding Source

Here's an interesting article in Variety by Scott Kirsner about filmmakers who are trying to raise money for their projects on the web.

Clash of the Morons

Viacom is suing YouTube for $1 billion dollars for copyright infringement. This lawsuit demonstrates stupidity on both sides.

YouTube is not funneling any of the revenue it makes back to the people posting videos or the copyright holders. Many other video sites already have functioning payment plans. Scott Kirsner has put together a list available here. It's not like YouTube has to invent things from scratch. They can easily see what's available in the marketplace and craft a plan based on what others have done.

Viacom is trying to hold back the future. The Hollywood studios tried to strangle TV and home video in the cradle. Not only did they fail, they soon turned around and embraced both of them as major revenue streams.

And Viacom is hurting itself. With no Viacom content on YouTube, people watching online video will be satisfied to watch somebody else's content. What kind of business model withholds a product from customers and encourages them to move to the competition?

I support the idea of copyright. I believe that a creator (or the company that finances a creator) has the right to profit from work. No argument there. However, I see copyright in different terms than it currently exists.

In a digital world, you cannot control copying. Why devote time and money to fighting it? Better to acknowledge that copying will occur and figure out a system where every time content is copied or viewed, the copyright holder makes money. That way, rather than fight copying you can encourage it and profit from it at the same time.

The only way to protect a secret is to not tell anyone. Once one other person knows it, you've lost control of the content. You cannot guarantee that the other person won't spread the information around. That's how it is now with digital copying. Once you've made your work available to the public, you cannot stop it from spreading around. You can copy a file with as little effort as whispering to a friend. When the cost to reproduce something is that low, there's no effective barrier to prevent it.

It's not going to be easy to set up a compensation system and I suspect that initially there's going to be disappointment over the amount of money that digital copying generates. Rather than these two giant companies wasting resources fighting over an antiquated law, they should be lobbying the government to adapt the copyright law to unlimited copying for the digital age.

Just like the studios eventually made peace with TV and the VCR, they're going to make peace with online video. Even a moron can see that. Why not skip the lawsuits and just get on with it?

Marketing Tips

Scott Kirsner has a list of marketing tips that have come up at the South By Southwest Film Festival that are worth reading.

Guerilla Marketing

Steve Schnier has a blog entry on how he got coverage for his forthcoming movie, Pubic Lice: The Motion Picture, in the Toronto Star.

Marketing is an area that most studio-based animation artists never get near. There are too many layers of management between artists and marketing departments. However, independents are forced to do it all themselves, so if you have plans to create anything independently, Steve's advice is worth reading.