Brian Chirls just posted a great blog post about web design for indie films and how Flash should really not be the design platform even if it is used for video playback and other embeddable objects.

Four Eyed Monsters was done with Wordpress which is really a much better way to go in today’s world but Brian’s post got me thinking more about whether this is really the best long term answer.

I think the general problem with sites for films is the marketers look at the site as a destination rather then a stream. A stream is a living breathing organic thing that will regularly have new dynamic content flowing through where as a destination is done and won’t evolve in the future. Or at least not with out a bill attached for re-hiring the flash designers as you mentioned.

That said, I’ve thought a little about some dynamic flash possibilities. For example, iilwy.com is a completely dynamic social network built out of flash with most of the needed permalinks and embeddable players that makes taking videos away possible.

But really, I think the semantic web really needs to come through. Spout.com kind of has the idea in some ways in that each film is an RSS feed that has a standardized way of displaying reviews and other social data like tags but really this is just a prototype for whats needed which would be a more complete picture of information about a movia in a machine readable format like RDF which is what RSS is built out of.

I think if a films website hosted the films meta data then everything from social applications to discovery tools to movie ticket sites to even download and DVD-R burning stations could all pull from that films published metadata.

That way the internet will be more like a world wide web of films and less like a closed off Vault that is only accessible when you enter it.

So at that point, the homebase of the movie could get away with being more of an art project and less about simple information. The simple information would however be on a films server so that the owner of the film could update it. Say they re-design the poster or re-think the synopsis. Boom, the entire world wide web is now using the new one.

But until the semantic web is really prime time I agree, we need to focus on movie websites providing the function of providing very clear information about how to be a part of that movie.

So I’d say today a homepage of a film should do all the things that will automatically just happen in the future. We’ve done that with Four Eyed Monsters via the request map, the online store, the screenings page, the feature film page and video podcast.

So my vote for film websites of right now is Wordpress. But here is what I’d like to challenge Brian or anyone else to do. Publish some film 2.0 wordpress plug-ins to enable films to do what they need to do in today’s landscape very easily. And maybe even think about the plug-ins in a semantic way so that if a site or service was so inclined to pull the data off, then they could. We’ve talked about this at length before but the basic step to take is figure out what information should be publicly available for every film. Poster, synopsis, reviews, ratings, request information, cast, crew, credits and other obvious meta data that should be accessible to any tool displaying films.

This would get us past the IMDB centralized database era and into the web 3.0 distributed network era.

And with Flixter and Facebook being centralized domains and hitting bottlenecks, there is more and more evidence that we need to decentralize movie meta data and social networking.

Why can’t local movie theaters look at public lists of films that people want to see and book their theaters based on that information. Especially since digital projection should lower the cost of getting a digital print to zero if peer to peer video distribution technology continues to be adopted and as h.264 continues to evolve into the standard for digital exhibition.

Spout.com provided the below widget that displays all the films I’ve bookmarked as wanting to see and they also make this information available in RSS.

Movies I want to see:

Step 1:

First I need some friends in New York City who would be into coming out to my loft to attend a movie night. What I need you guys to do is look at all of the movies that I want to see and check off “want to see” on any of the ones that you would also like to see. Then browse through spout.com checking off any of the other movies that you want to see. Then post your spout user name in the comments below.

The Contest:

Then I’d like to invite programmers to take a stab at using the RSS feed of the movies that I want to see and the RSS feeds that all of my friends want to see to create a new RSS feed of movies we should watch in my loft at my weekly movie night. The application should make this new RSS feed so it’s sorted with the film the most people want to see at the top and gradually down the list have the rest of the films. Each feed entry should contain the number of people that wanted to see that movie as well as the list of those people. This should be a web based application that can be installed on any server and the administrator can easily plug in 10 or more spout user names (or spout RSS feeds or similarly formated RSS feed). The application should spit out a live RSS feed that changes over time as the the other people remove films from their want-t0-see list. So if they’ve just discovered a new film then their RSS feed changes and the mashed up RSS feed my also change due to the new variable. This way we could wait until 1 day before the screening each week to lock in which movie we’ll be watching. Also the adminstrator should be able to add or remove spout names that are factoring the movie deciding process based on RSVP info. Extra points if you can some how integrate RSVP via email or some kind of iCal solution. But thats a bit more complex so not required.

The Prize:

The prize is a free Four Eyed Monsters DVD, T-shirt and Poster to the first person or group of up to 5 people who can post open source code and provide a working veresion on a server that I can use for my movie nights. But the bigger prize is that we will have created the missing link that will go on to revolutionize theatrical distribution of movies and revitalize the collective movie watching experience. And all it took was a little bit of democracy.

Today your movie preferences are stored in your Netflix Ratings, Your Amazon ratings, maybe a note book or maybe just in your head.

Like most information online, if it’s stored in a way that can be read by humans and by computers the information becomes more valuable.

Movies I love:

spout.com:

The above list can be understood by humans but not by machines and therefore the information isn’t that useful. But fortunately Spout.com also provides an RSS feed of all of the movies I’ve rated. I want to do a little experiment.

Where to Begin:

First of all, I need 10 friends to join spout and rate all of the the movies on this list:

Movies Arin Crumley wants to see.

Then rate all of the movies on this list:

Movie’s Arin Crumley has seen

Then post a comment with your spout user name below.

The Programming Challenge:

Then I’d like to invite any programmer to create an open source web application that takes in my spout user name and lets me enter in my 10 friends spout names and then it spits out a new RSS feed of the movies that I want to see but now the list is in order with the films I’m most likely to really like at the top of the list.

Then have a little tournament tool where i can plug in either 2 movies or 10 movies and it will spit out an ranked RSS feed telling me which movies I’m most likely to enjoy based on my friends data.

The key here is that it’s making these suggestions based on my friends without me having to go and talk to my friends to figure out what they thought. Netflix and Amazon compare you to the entire population of their site. Another difference here is the ability to narrow the pool of films being considered. So for example if there is a film festival with 30 films. This software should be adoptable to help me navigate the festival, especially half way through the festival as many of my friends begin to have seen most of the movies in the festival therefor giving the software more information to help provide me with the suggestions I need.

Extra points if you can write an application that signs into my netflix account and makes the changes to my netflix que so it resembles as close as possible the ranked RSS feed of films I want to see. But thats a lot of works not required for a winner. Contact me privately for the log in info to that if you think you can make it work.

The prize is a free <a href=”http://foureyedmonsters.com/store” title=”Four Eyed Monsters DVD Tshirt Poster”>Four Eyed Monsters DVD, T-shirt and Poster</a> to the first person or group of up to 5 people who can post open source code and provide a working veresion on a server that I can use to make decisions about which movies I’m going to watch during the limited time I have in life to watch movies. But much more important then that is we will have proved a system in which films will be seen because of their true value and not because of their high marketing budget.

Subtitles | YouTube | Blip | .m4v (iPod) | .mp3 | .flv This video was a panel moderated by Liz Rosenthal and included Lance Weiler, Jeremy Nathan and Matt Hanson as we all spoke about our thoughts on the future of distribution. Despite end of the day exhaustion, some good audience questions sparked an interesting dialog that closed Power to the Pixel on a bright vision for the future.One of the topics discussed was festivals. The basic point being made was that they are no different then any other distributor of a film in that they should provide revenue and audience information to the content owner. Lance pointed out with distributing Head Trauma he used the LA Film Festival as a PR platform for to pre-hype a self-distribution theatrical release he had lined up to take place after the film festival. Needless to say he didn’t need to find a distributor at the festival and instead simply focused on putting the film in-front of audiences and reviewers and having a good time at the premiere. He also used the fact that he was giving his film a theatrical release to leverage a DVD retail release with Heretic Films which he structured so it would kick off one month after the theatrical release began.Jeremy Nathan said in south africa he’s made money from festivals and gotten information on audience members. Susan and I explained that hasn’t been our experience and outlined how we wanted to see film festivals evolve.

We’ve been thinking about this for a while and have decided that there are three things that can make todays film festival world be more accommodating to filmmakers.

1. Get a cut of what they collect from screenings.

2. Get information about who buys tickets to see our film and if possible who liked the film. (festivals usually poll audience for audience award.)

3. Get them to buy some DVDs to sell after the screenings and they’ll get half the proceeds.

4. Don’t charge us submission fees.

In exchange for this we’ll notify our audience base in the area of the screening and send them all info about the screening. That way if a film comes to a festival they bring their audience with them rather then simply hoping the festival will have the right audience for the film. Indie films are so all over the place that the chance of a festival having the right audience is pretty low anyway

But in the future I think film festivals should be just like any other distributor. There is a license on a film that allows others to monetize the film. So they do what ever curating they want. Maybe have a 1000 people help program the festival, maybe have only 1 person program it all. Whatever they want. Then they make a play list and assign the play list to different theaters and each theater gets essentially a video podcast that pulls down HD versions of the films to say a mac mini or whatever is playing back the digital films. Then they can post an event which phones home to the movies home base online and then anyone in the area who had bookmarked the film saying they want notifications when it’s screening would find out. A film festival could even publish a list of 100 films they’ve narrowed down and let the festival attendees help decide between them or even base the prime time selection slots on this information by having the audience pre-bookmarking the ones they are most interested in seeing on the big screen.

So the idea of a film only being available in film festivals and then going to theaters then DVD then VOD then TV then internet is obviously going to pass. It’s just going to become available when it’s done. But as a film starts to pick up traction film festivals will continue to be a good place to find audiences that can lead to finding more audiences so in the end, festivals can be a good thing. All they have to do is what everyone else has to do, evolve.

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Matt Hanson talks about his project A Swarm of Angles and the general concepts behind collaboration in the digital era. I personally would love to see collaborative editing tools evolve to the point where you could upload raw footage and anyone could add to the meta data like it was a wiki. They could ad captions, comments, notes, languages, time code based tags etc… And in some cases it might be possible for meta data to be automatically added to your footage similar to the way everyzing.com uses computers to transcribe footage. The key in my mind is to have both automatic as well as organic transcribing and then use software to have the automatic transcription basically become time code anchor points to the human transcription.

In a system where raw footage is online rather then trapped on your computer anyone can be involved either as someone simply watching and rating raw footage or by actually selecting clips to add to a timeline they create and then post back online.

The missing link here is a URI for raw footage. URI stands for uniform resource identifier and they are very important to the what comes after web 2.0 which is the Semantic Web. A URI is basically a standardized home base that any other site or software can refer to when it needs that object. If you had that for raw footage then you’d have a place where software could refer to when it needed meta data information or needed to download a portion of the master in high res to compile a final edit.

And of course your final edit would already have all of it’s meta data that it needs thanks to the software being able to refer to the URI. You could choose to flatten or keep the meta data live if it was still a rough cut.

Brett Gaylor from Open Source Cinema and I have spoken about this concept and he says it would be a god sent for his open source collaborative editing film he’s working on called Basement Tapes. Susan Buice and Matt Hanson also had a quick talk about it after power to the pixel and he expressed a lot of interest and we’ll probably be working together in some capacity to continue to brainstorm how this all could work.

After the Power to the Pixel Conference at the drinks reception I also met Michela Ledwidge who has a project called ModFilms that is also exploring URI based video editing stuff and is interested in future development.

While we are all about opening up raw footage other filmmakers I’ve spoken to feel weird about having raw material available to the public. Thats why I think it would be smart for a system like this to allow passwords on custom RSS feeds that are generated for a particular user. That way if you aren’t that user, the RSS feed doesn’t work and you don’t get all of the dailies from the film in your Miro player.

The thing about video editing is you never have enough time with the footage and you never have enough tools to dig through it to find the gems. I hope a system like this can be built in time for our next film which will be very inspired by a Swarm of Angels because it will also be an online collaborative project that I’ll write more about in the future.

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: mat, hanson, swarm, of, angels, case, study, power, to, the, pixel, london, bfi, presentation, collaboration, editing, film, production, 2.0, cinem, filmmaking, semantic, web, uri

This presentation was by Jeremy Nathan from DV8 which is a production company trying to deviate from the normal production approach. The most interesting thing about South Africa is that there seems to be the chance to have that area of the world leap ahead embracing new technologies that the already modern world will have a harder time with because of the difficulty of transitioning from an old system. So because their old system really wasn’t that established and because success there requires so much hard work anyway, it’s not a big leap to build a system of distribution that puts that burden on the production companies rather then third party middle men. The other cool thing about Africa is that audiences seem eager for non-mainstream content and are starting to have more and more access to the internet.

Getting a small taste of how media exists in south Africa has made me think that the democratic playing field is really important to maintain world wide. No point in Africa building a system that isn’t compatible with the rest of the world just because they are more nimble and can act faster then we can.

Here is a scenario. A film comes out in Africa and does well there and therefor starts to catch on else where. Bi-lingual fans transcribe the film into hundreds of languages and professional transcribers give it a final edit. It’s then release in theaters and burned to DVD on demand stations across the world wherever people would like to see it. The creator of that project now has a budget form the proceeds that went directly to them to turn around and make another film. There would be no delay in payment or waiting for a market to buy the film. It would all be scaled by the audience depending on how it was catching on. So it’s the youtube viral video model scaled to an international film industry that allows creators to make money will staying true to the integrity of free culture.

And the amount of time it takes a movie to scale to it’s full potential will increasingly become quicker and quicker as social discovery tools improve and eventually it will only take a few days or even one day and maybe eventually half a day. Could you imagine a film posted by a kid in a third world country making it to theaters by that evening?

king it to theaters by that evening?

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: jeremy, nathan, power, to, the, pixel, dv8, 2007, cheap, filmmaking, pioneer, media, revolution, international, south, africa

Translations | YouTube | .m4v (iPod) | .Mp3 | .flv | SubscribeThis talk has been evolving over the last year since we began to give it and during that time more things have happened including releasing the film on YouTube for free with our spout.com/foureyedmonsters 1 dollar per sign up campaign. This talk details the creation of our film through the audience building phase of releasing the video podcast and then the theatrical release, DVD release and free YouTube release. We then talk about the doors this process has opened up including an unannounced 100K distribution deal to get our film and video podcast on TV and get the DVD re-released and this time be available in retail. Stay tuned at www.foureyedmonsters.com in the publicity category of our blog for further developments around that.The audience had some good questions when we were done and everyone we met that night at the reception seemed very interested in what we had accomplished and wanted may wanted us to get involved in their projects. Unfortunately we can’t watch everyones film and give everyone advice and distribute other peoples work. People have to look at what we’ve done and what we’ve posted online and deduce from all of that what they can do on their own. Us posting so much info online is our way of helping as many people as we can so one on one special attention doesn’t take us away from our own filmmaking.

So thats also why we’ve released the above video in the public domain so their is no copyright on it and so that anyone can show our Four Eyed Monsters Case Study Presentation at any film school or workshop. You can also download our keynote file or power point file of our presentation which includes most of the little videos between slides and present our talk to film students.

And if you are putting together a conference or workshop we’ve prepared a 12 minute distribution story video that has most of the same information as the above 30 minute video. And of course, feel free to re-edit or do whatever you’d like with the raw footage of this talk or any of the other power to the pixel talks posted on my site.

And feel free to check out and utlize in any capacity the expansive set of Tutorials we posted on Four Eyed Monsters Tutorial which also has an RSS feed.

And finally, if you are a filmmaker trying to build out your team to get help doing similar things to what we’ve done, you should watch the power to the pixel break out discussion with Brian Chirls for more insight into the nuts and bolts of what kind of help you need to get this stuff going.

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)