Making short films and getting them noticed
By: Hazimin Sulaiman
full article: http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/techNu/Monday/Notebook/20080310123933/Article/index_html
IF you love films, surf to blamesociety.net and fromheretoawesome.com (FHTA for short). Similarly, you can also go to Youtube.com and search for both. They serve as examples that filmmaking has been democratised: as long as you have a video camera and some software on a computer to do some editing, shooting a short film is not a problem. The problem is getting your short film distributed to make money.
This is where FHTA’s idea of getting noticed by harnessing the power of the Internet comes in.
Blamesociety.net’s claim to fame was through its Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager episodes; a hilarious parody series of Star Wars’ Darth Vader’s supposed brother working at a supermarket (on present day Earth, it seems).
Founders Matt Sloan and Aaron Yonda, who not only write, produce and star in their many other short films since 1993, have garnered a lot of attention. The success story, Chad Vader received over 15 million views online, broadcasted on Good Morning America, Spike TV and G4 and was selected by George Lucas himself as Best Star Wars Fan Film of 2007!
Getting noticed means opportunities in this business. In fact, both Sloan and Yonda now make films for a living. They owe it to public access stations which they describe as being video-business incubators which teach the young about skills and all aspects of broadcast communications.
They feel public access to television is important to local communities, hence their efforts to save a Wisconsin public access station (www.saveaccesswisconsin.org).
The FHTA is another avenue for indie movie-makers. Think of FHTA as a virtual film festival as it’s unlikely for most independent movie-makers to get noticed and go to an actual film festival in the first place.
In August 2007, Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters) and Mike Belmont (We Are the Strange), both indie movie-makers, came up with a concept to create a virtual conference film festival. On their Web site, they say that they “decided that the virtual event would be an experiment to connect filmmakers with audiences and the event could become a model for open content distribution, which allows filmmakers to have a say in how their films were reaching audiences.”
FHTA claims that their experiment is off to a great start. From the looks of the corporate logos and icons on their site, it has garnered an amazing list of partners. These partnerships will be leveraged to distribute across mutiple platforms such as mobile, online, theatrical and direct into living rooms. The main idea? To design the fest in such a fashion that the revenue goes directly into the filmmakers’ pockets.
Filmmakers will get to set their own price, retain rights to their work and be able to reach global audiences directly. All that with no submission fees and let the audience judge the works. A three-minute submission will be determined by the judges on whether it should be expanded into a longer film and the prize is a worldwide distribution via FHTA.
How FHTA works is described on their Web site. It seems like a plausible method to get around distributors who often want a great portion of whatever profits a film can rake in these days.
Will such an idea take off here? Who would fund this? Local independent filmmakers should band together because they will then have a bigger pool of talent and resources to tap into.
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