Coffee and Celluloid » Exhibition

NASCAR as an Immersive Experience

Joey — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:40:28 +0000

A few weeks ago I went to the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race in Charlotte. I never understood NASCAR and I still don’t get it, but with 140,000 people in attendance (twice as many as the average football stadium), plus the millions that watched on TV, it’s a force to be reckoned with.

But actually going to a NASCAR race I can better understand why 140k people would go too – they make it an event and experience that you can’t replicate by watching it on TV. And that’s why I’m writing about NASCAR – because like a film screening, it’s all about adding something that you can’t get by watching at home.

Merchandise – Outside of the track each driver had their own mobile 18-wheeler gift shop. Everyone’s their own brand.

Follow Your Driver – And not just on Twitter. You can rent or buy a radio scanner and tune in to the radio chat between your driver and the pit crew, to get a more immersive experience while watching the race (I assume they say more than, “Turn left! Go fast! Keep turning left!”). Sprint goes one step further with FanView, which is a scanner and wireless TV, so you can listen in, watch the TV feed, or watch your driver’s in-car camera while pulling up stats.

Visit the Pit Area – This was by far my favorite. With a special ticket, you can go down to the pit area a few hours before the race and check everything out, take some photos, chat it up.

To get to the pit area you walk across the track. It’s pretty cool to be down there and feel the angle of the track and how massive it is.

The pit area.

You can also get a picture in the Winner’s Circle (or have one of the Fan Photographers take one for you, which of course you can purchase later).

Of course nerdy me noticed a RED camera team and this one with a Phantom V2 high-speed camera.

What other event lets you bring your own couch to the sidelines?

For some cross-promotion action, before the race started The A-Team van drove out on the track to bring the starting flag. But once it did start it was pretty much what I expected – cars driving around in circles. I saw a lot of people with scanners, some pointing at their car, telling them to go faster (they can’t hear you, dude). And of course there’s the obvious draw that I kind of left out – an excuse to drink as much as you want.

There is something to be said to feel the intensity of 40 high speed cars driving past you, but that wears off in about five minutes.

Jon Reiss Interview – Think Outside The Box Office [Podcast]

Joey — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:31:05 +0000

Jon Reiss Interview

Jon Reiss (@Jon_Reiss) has become one of the main voices on DIY and alternative distribution (along with Ted Hope). He’s a filmmaker and the author of the book Think Outside the Box Office, an invaluable resource for anyone who’s made or (more preferably) is thinking about making a film.

In the podcast we talk about different distribution options, alternative screening venues, building an audience, the closing of B-Side Entertainment, Tribeca’s VOD announcement, and more.

Check out Jon’s blog at www.jonreiss.com/blog

And get the book at www.thinkoutsidetheboxoffice.com

If you happen to be in Miami on Saturday, Jon will be on a panel on DIY Distribution that’s part of the Miami International Film Festival. More info here.

Remember to subscribe in iTunes.

(Direct M4A File)

This podcast episode has a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Basically you can share and reuse this episode however you like, but all I ask in return is that you also share it and you Coffee and Celluloid by linking back to this page.

45365 – Final Day to Watch it for Free

Joey — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:08:59 +0000

45365 is a documentary that was at Full Frame but I never got a chance to watch it. This week it’s been on Hulu for free, which I’m very excited about (but today is the last day so watch it now). But for the film itself, I thought it was great. It’s very Cinema Verite, so I can understand why some people didn’t like it. There’s no narration, no formal interviews; just an amazing portrait capturing an entire small town (45365 is the zip code of Sydney, OH).

Now for the business side of the film being on Hulu. As I said, this makes me very excited. SnagFilms, a video sharing site designed soley for documentaries, has their watermark on the whole film. I’m glad to see they’re growing, and I’m also glad to see they’ve joined with Hulu. I watched a film on SnagFilms once and their player wanted to make me gouge my eyes out, it was the worst thing ever. The ads would play and then send you to a different point in the movie, and then you couldn’t go back to where you were without watching more ads. So painful. I hope they’ve done some serious changes to it. But at least this is on Hulu, which on the opposite end I think is one of the best online players, even better than Netflix.

So I’m curious as to what the distribution deal is, because it was on Hulu for a week. SnagFilms says it’s part of a series to watch a film a week for free before it goes to TV of Theater (I’m guessing TV). I’m glad Hulu has been embracing documentaries (Crawford premiered on Hulu a few months ago). 45365 has been in the top banner all week. It’s gotten hundreds of comments and I’m sure thousands of views. This is a film that probably wouldn’t have worked too well in a theater, but now it’s online for free and ad supported (most of the ads were for a Honda documentary series) and tons of people are seeing it who probably would have never heard of it had it not been for SnagFilms, Hulu, and of course this new-fangled internet distribution model.

Art & Copy – Minds Behind the Greatest Ads

Joey — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:12:44 +0000

I’m somewhat familiar with the world of advertising, though admittedly most of that knowledge comes from watching Mad Men. Either way I love advertising (well, advertising done well), so I was excited to see that Art & Copy was at Full Frame.

Art & Copy features some of the most influential art directors and copywriters behind some of the most famous ads of all time. These are the ads that have shaped pop culture – Apple’s 1984, Budweiser frogs, Nike’s ‘Just Do It.’

People scoff at advertising. Like, literally – when a factoid popped up in the film that said the average city dweller is exposed to 5000 ads a day, peopled scoffed. But advertising is what makes the entertainment system work; it’s what puts TV on the air and magazines on shelves. This isn’t really a surprise – publications are folding or downsizing all over the place because advertising revenue is down. This is even flooding over into online news media.

People want everything free and uninterrupted. I like free stuff (and I believe news should always be free), so I think giving 30 seconds of my attention is a fair trade off to watching The Daily Show online for free. It’s pretty simple – you don’t watch ads, advertisers stop spending money because no one’s watching them, and then studios don’t have money to make shows.

Of course part of this is to blame on advertisers. If all ads were great and entertaining, we’d be just as excited to watch the ads than the program, like the Super Bowl (though now that the Super Bowl ads are all online I just gained four hours one Sunday a year).

For every car dealership who puts their screaming kid in a commercial, or Billy Mays yelling at me about how my detergent sucks, there’s a fair balance of mediocre commercials as well as those few gems, and I’m okay with that. I’ll put up with it for good, free TV.

If you get one thing from Art & Copy it’s that advertising is hard and good ideas are rare. “Oh, it’s only 30 seconds, how hard is that?” Well, in that 30 seconds you need to cram a beginning, middle, end, send out your message, create a scene, create characters, emotionally connect with the audience and, oh, sell your shit. And after reading this paragraph, your time is up.

And for print ads, as you just read above 5000 ads are competing with each other a day. Talk about trying to stand out.

ART & COPY trailer from Baldwin& on Vimeo.

One very cool story in Art & Copy was the idea of bringing the Art Director and Copywriter into the same room (thus, Art & Copy). The Art Director is mainly responsible for the visuals while the Copywriter handles the copy, or text. Having the two work together is standard practice today, and you’d think that should just be common sense – they’re producing one final product, the visuals and text should work harmoniously together, but no, which is why a lot of old ads are sketches of happy family with big blocks of text under it. The revolutionary firm that did put the two together was new, scoffed at by the old, large firms (lots of scoffing), and, of course, they kicked ass (Think Small).

Art & Copy is on the festival circuit now. Catch it if you can.

Post script – found this behind the scenes footage from Apple’s 1984 commercial:

Art and Copy Still Copyright © 2009 The One Club for Art and Copy

Miami Film Festival

Joey — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:54:43 +0000

So I’m back from Haiti. Amazing trip, photos will be coming (I snapped over 2400).

Sadly most of the Miami International Film Festival was going on during my adventures, but I managed to get a press pass to catch the last few days.

I just got back from a press/filmmaker meet and greet. Felt a little like Hugh Grant when he worked for Horse and Hound, but I ended up meeting Vero Bollow, director of The Wind and The Water.

It’s the first fictional feature to come from Panama, and though the theater is not near where I’m at and I wasn’t planning on going, Vero was really cool and the film sounds really interesting (she pitched it well), so I’m going to make a mad rush after another film and check it out.

Also, I’m very excited that the very, very last film the festival is screening is Tokyo!

Being Hollywood and Fake Interviews

Joey — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:59:57 +0000

First off, Oscars. Slumdog – woo! Though no surprise there. It is sad, though, that for a film that swept the Oscars it hasn’t even broken the $100 million mark, which means most people haven’t seen it.

I thought the actual Oscars program was well done. Hugh Jackman was great and it was nice that he played to his talents. My favorite moment had to be the little bit of Cloverfield that was snuck in. I forgot which award it was but instead of playing the movie’s theme (probably didn’t have one) they played Roar!, that awesome (and only composed song) during the end credits of Cloverfield. Yes, I know, I’m a film geek.

And here’s a video that explains what Ben Stiller was up to (via Leo Laporte on Twitter).

But back to what I originally intended to blog about.

So two weeks ago I did the Hollywood thing. I flew from Miami to LA in the morning, went to a screening, then hoped on a plane the next day and went right back.

Each year the Film School puts on a screening in LA of some of the best films that came out of the school the previous year. I happened to produce one of those films, so I thought it would be worth it to go.

That and it was a good excuse to see all my friends who are now out in LA. It was a lot of fun and great to see everyone, but at the same time it was a hard dose of reality. All of my friends are interning at production companies 8-10 hours a day. Even if I did stay longer we couldn’t really have done anything since they had to go to work.

So basically I came, I saw, I went. But before I went, I stopped at the Starbucks near my friends’ place (they live in Burbank). As I was walking in this cute girl asks if she could interview me for Extras. Sure.

They wanted to get my thoughts on the octomom. Oh, and just to clear something up – by ‘interview’ I mean they told me everything to say.

“So what do you think about the mother with the octuplets? You’re outraged, right? That’s going to cost a lot of tax dollars to raise those kids. So just say how it’s going to cost a lot of our money to support those kids.”

I give the best performance I can muster, but if you want to imagine my acting style think of Patrick Warburton.

“Great, great. Let’s do that again, but with more energy.”

I was on Extras that night, two Wednesdays ago. They also had me read for a Valentine’s Day segment they were producing, which was by far my favorite.

“Okay, I need you to look in the camera and ask, ‘I’ve been in a relationship for a long time. What can I do with my girlfriend to mix things up?’ (BTW, I have no girlfriend).

Unfortunately this didn’t air, but at least it made my favorite story of the week. I went and got my Espresso Truffle, and when I came back out they were interviewing two women from Idaho. I guess they rely on tourists to be suckered into doing this.

Once their interview was done we all ended up talking afterwards. Then I left, saying I had to go see my fake girlfriend.

To cap off the trip, I finally got to use a Dyson AirBlade at LAX. It’s the coolest hand-dryer ever, ranking (in my hand-dryer rating system) just above the Xlerator. What can I say, I like dry hands.

Geoffrey Gilmore is Switching Coasts

Joey — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:54:23 +0000

Geoffrey Gilmore Leaves Sundance For Tribeca | /Film

This makes me really happy, and gives me hope for the NY film scene. Geoffrey Gilmore (whom you’ll remember from our numerous adventures) is leaving Sundance to become the Chief Creative Officer of Tribeca.

This is exciting news. He’s helped make Sundance what it is today, and now he can bring that magic to the East Coast.

Here’s to new beginnings and the continuation of film festivals being an important part in film culture.

Did the Digital Revolution Screw Over Cinema?

Joey — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:14:14 +0000

Two articles from indieWIRE got me thinking this morning. The first is from the all too familiar Geoffrey Gilmore in ‘Evolution v. Revolution, The State of Independent Film & Festivals.’

A lot of it echoes Mark Gill’s much buzzed ‘The Sky is Falling‘ essay from last year. Basically independent film is in a slump for a few reasons. The main two are the economy sucks so the distribution companies that didn’t get shut down are not buying much¹, and using submissions to Sundance as a gauge of how many independent films are produced a year, that number has gone up fourfold in the past 10 years.

What does this mean? Compared to 10 years ago, there are four times as many movies with less money to buy and distribute them. The pipes are clogged. Why? Because it’s so cheap and easy to make a movie.

Before I go on, there are two separate issues here: lots of crappy movies and no money to buy and distribute. We’ll start with the crap.

Is Your Idea Worth a Million Dollars?

Film is very expensive. No surprise there. Not only do you have to pay for the film stock, but you have to pay just as much to have it processed and then even more if you want it scanned so you can edit on the computer.

Yet this cost prohibition formed a filter. Crap wouldn’t be made. Because a film is so expensive to make, you’d need people to finance and believe in your project. You’d have to pitch them your idea, which means your idea and story would have to be somewhat decent for them to give you their money. If there was no story, or if you wanted to just film 2 hours of crap, you wouldn’t have the money to do it, and thus the crap would never exist.

Today it’s still just as hard to make a movie well, but because it’s so cheap and easy to make a movie, the crap gets made. When Sundance gets 4000 submissions you know some gems will be overlooked. About 6 years ago I could get my short films (once they were legitimately qualified) to IMDb without an issue. Today my films keep getting wait-listed, and I suspect that’s because anyone who’s made a little film and thrown it on YouTube has submitted it to IMDb, and now they have to sort through thousands of submissions to figure out what’s legit and what’s Charlie biting on fingers.

While it may sound like I want to set off some world-wide EMP and bring us all back to the dark ages (or at least go back to celluloid), I do think overall the digital revolution is great. We just have to have more self control and ask “Is this film worth spending months of my life on?” Or more importantly, “Is this worth two hours of someone’s time?”

Is a Movie a Movie if it’s not in the Movies?

The second problem – no money to buy and distribute films. Here’s the fictional lead from the other article that caught my attention today, ‘Not Picked Up in Park City? Filmmakers Look Forward to DIY Release Options.’

The year is 2014. Joe the Filmmaker just found out he’s going to Sundance with his debut film. His trailer is online the next day. He’s got posters at the printer, and a marketing consultant on the phone. In the days leading up to the festival, he hits up bloggers for press, notifies all his Facebook friends and buys ads both online and in print. After winning a special jury prize for innovation during the final day of the festival, he plugs his movie into the IDN (Indie Distribution Network), selling it directly to indie-minded audiences around the country for viewing on their Internet TVs and iPhones, while a percentage of the proceeds feed directly into his bank account. Done.

This is an echo of what I keep reading – Being picked up by a distributor and getting a theatrical release should not be the only goal. Here’s the standard distribution chain a film follows: it gets theatrically released, goes to DVD, gets on Pay-per-view, then a premium channel (HBO, Starz), cable channel, broadcast.

The internet has shaken that up and challenged that model. When do you put the film on iTunes? Hulu? Do you need a theatrical release? What if you release on DVD and On Demand at the same time? What if it’s available online, ad supported?

The internet has opened a lot of doors. It’s possible to screen, sell, and market your film all by yourself.

But you have to ask yourself, should the goal be “I want people to see my movie” or “I want people to see my movie properly?” There isn’t a single filmmaker who got into directing because they want to premiere their films on someone’s iPhone. If I was Danny Boyle and I saw someone watching Slumdog Millionaire for the first time on their iPhone, I’d shit a brick.

While this argument may sound pretentious, the plain fact is if you’re watching a film on a 3 inch screen in an environment open to distractions you’re missing part of the film.

Again, I don’t want my EMP to wipe out all iPods and iPhones from playing video. Being able to watch anything, anytime, where ever you want is great. I just think some types of media, such as shorts and some docs, work on a computer or iPhone, while others require a theater to get the full experience.

I have my share of movies I love on my phone, and I think it’s the greatest thing that I can watch Jizz in My Pants when I’m stuck in JFK. What’s important to me is first viewing, that magical experience when you pop your cherry with a film.

It goes back thousands of years to the caveman days, sitting around the campfire at night, telling stories. There’s something embedded in us that draws us to this communal experience.

You’re in a dark theater with people you don’t know, experiencing this one story together, going through the same emotions. For two hours you can shut out the world, escape from your problems and share in this experience. You can home theater your house up all you want but you’ll never be able to match the theater experience. Wedding Crashers will never be as funny as the first time I saw it in a packed theater.

Here’s my hope with theaters, and it’s helped in large part with the digital revolution. It’s digital projectors.

Right now most films are still screened from a 35mm print, even if it’s shot digitally. They’re bulky and heavy (expensive to ship) and one print, for one theater, costs thousands of dollars. That’s why it’s expensive and risky to release a movie. Even if you’re doing a very limited release in a few cities, you’re still looking at least $100k to transfer the film, make enough prints and ship them to theaters.

Now here’s the scenario with a digital projector. The film is either sent on a hard drive or over the internet. It’s loaded into the projector and screened. Fast, cheap, and easy.

But it gets better. When a theater books a film it’s a big commitment. They’re saying that you’re film will occupy one of their theaters (they only have 5-24 of them), for the entire week. One, maybe two movies can occupy a theater, because it’s a big hassle to have to switch that huge print to play something different. What if it bombs the first day and then they have six days of an empty theater when they could have put The Dark Knight in there and be bringing in the cash.

Now here’s the digital world. There’s no cost for a print, you just have to get a digital copy to the theater. But they don’t have to play just one movie a day, they can play five different movies throughout the day in the same theater, and stretch them over the week, adopting more of a TV schedule. If a movie does well, they can screen it more. If not, well at least it had a shot that wasn’t an option before.

And what if theaters adopt the technology that powers YouTube and viral videos. Movies are rated, commented on. The more popular movies get more showtimes. Same technology from the web, better viewing experience.

Here’s one of the more thought provoking paragraphs from Geoffrey:

The “long tail” of availability, the keeping of films in the market for longer periods of time is especially important for independent film. And that a film’s release is ordered by an antiquated theatrical universe is one of the fundamental obstacles facing the independent arena. Indeed why are films “seasonal” instead of “evergreen?” The practice of dating films, i.e. assigning a year of release, strikes me as a holdover from the marketing past. How and where films will be made available depends on the establishment of new outlets and new strategies. It simply makes no sense that most of the year’s quality films are all released against each other in a cutthroat fall campaign. In the future perhaps festival platforms could further serve to give films long-term visibility. At the very least new web venues, transformed marketing strategies and dynamic new concepts for consumption are at the core of making films available.

There’s no denying the internet and new media is the future. I think we’re seeing all this hoopla surrounding it because the William Goldman quote still holds true. Nobody knows anything. But it’ll be exciting when someone finally does.

Agree? Disagree? Please share your thoughts below?

For a very quick primer on the traditional distribution model, you’d make a film, hope it gets into a prestigious festival such as Sundance, a buyer from a distribution company sees it and loves it, buys the film from you and distributes it making money mainly for them, and if you’re lucky for you as well. Possibly more importantly, you’re film would have had a theatrical release, be known and seen, garnered critical acclaim and awards, and start your career. ↩

Toronto Film Festival in 120 Seconds

Joey — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:11:00 +0000

This is a little montage of the video clips I shot while at TIFF.

The people we’re having dinner with at the end (divided by the drinking straw) are Cherie Saulter and Justin Barber, both Film School alumni who produced “Medicine for Melancholy,” directed by another Film School alum, Barry Jenkins, and nominated for a Gotham Award.

And yes, I did screw up in setting a meeting place with an industry person. Apparently The International Intercontinental is a very popular hotel name.

Hollywood Parties and Last Stop 174

Joey — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:07:21 +0000

Last Stop 174 aims to tell the human side of the bus hijacking in 2000 in Rio de Janeiro. The film felt very real and was like a portrait of a world. It reminded me of City of God, something that was brought up a lot (the main actor was even in City of God).

It was inspired by a documentary, Bus 174. Bruno Barreto, the director, wanted it to be realistic but not naturalistic, an interesting approach to a film based on real events.

I definitely learned a bit about Brazil, especially how racism is still a problem, but it’s more racism based on class than skin color. There’s a Brazilian quote, “equals are treated equally in front of the law,” and Last Stop touches on that a lot.

Paul had released one of Bruno’s earlier films, so we were invited to a premiere party. This would be one of those ‘Hollywood’ parties I keep hearing about, the place where you meet people, wheel-and-deal, and say, “oh yeah, we met at that Bruno Barreto party,” during the Q&A of the film you and your party buddy made.

Just one problem – I’m terrible at mingling. Fortunately the drinking age is not 21 here, so I was able to use the free drink ticket and get a mojito that challenges Miami. After latching onto my fellow classmates, we eventually started talking to one of the producers of Last Stop.

Not helping my cause, he said parties were great because you get to talk to people in a relaxed environment. I think our definitions of a relaxing environment differ greatly.

We did talk about film festivals and how certain films are right for certain festivals. He knew Last Stop was a TIFF film and not a Cannes or Sundance film, even though they’re all great and prestigious festivals. He brought up a good point – you don’t want to be the film that applies and doesn’t get in. Create a festival plan and apply to what’s right for the film, not because it’s popular.

The group got invited to another party, but I skipped out to go see a film I had really been looking forward to – Blood Trail.