One of the crushing problems of independent film making is distribution. Unlike any of the production steps, distribution is in no way creative or fun. The best verb to describe it is “begging”. Basically you find people who control what people see and beg them to give you money for your piece of creativity. Then they say no, and you move to the next powerful person. To be fair, distributors have to only buy things they can sell. You think the quality of available entertainment is terrible? You should look at what they rejected.

When I first started playing with YouTube I realized that independent film making had finally found the 21st century distribution tool. Film makers could now go straight to the viewer and see what they thought. Sure it is unfiltered and ugly, but you only watch things you get forwarded to you as “the hilarious link”. Just as iTunes had re-invented the single, YouTube reinvented the short film.

Of course, there’s that whole “not making money” thing, which I admit is an issue. YouTube and other video sites allow you to be seen but not compensated. However as web hosting costs have come down dependence of film makers on services like YouTube have come down – now you can put video on your own websites and skip YouTube all together. With the ability to self host content, film makers have a whole new opportunity to create not films but rich media websites and make money at it. It took Joss Wheedon to figure out how!

http://www.drhorrible.com/

I know you probably have heard of Dr. Horrible by now and quite probably have already watched the first two episodes of “Xander as a Supervillian.” News about it has exploded across the internet due to Joss Whedon’s involvement and it’s already selling briskly on iTunes despite being able to be seen for free. Why do people love Whedon so much? Well, he writes characters they can relate to (nerds), characters they want to hang out with (pre-teen girls who can kick ass), and he communicates with his fans, regularly posting on message boards about what he is working on. He’s created a rapport with fans of his work, and they love him for it.

In some ways, Dr. Horrible represents a new film distribution approach – film makers as rock bands. Whedon is not just a person but a band, and people want to see his shows when he’s on tour. Likewise, new film makers need to not focus on trying to find distribution through regular channels, but build their own audience on the strength of their name and the quality of their work. Once they do that, they can skip the distributors and talk to their audience directly.

The tricky part of course is building up an audience in the first place. That is left as an exercise for the reader.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Movies, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.