How do we do anything in life? How do we walk? How do we digest food? How the hell did we develop language and story telling?

The answer? I don’t have a clue. All I can tell is that we look around us at the objects and landscape and other creatures before us and we take a step into it all. Then another step, and then another step. And pretty soon, we are surviving as a product of our environment and doing so with out even much thought. Each next step is just the impulsive step we want to take.

This has been my experience in the film industry. Everything changes when you least expect it and suddenly there are a new set of objects, landscapes and creatures. All I can do is try to stay in touch with what is before me, and take the step my involuntary impulses tell me that I should take.

This video is my presentation at power to the pixel back in Oct of 2008 and gives you a pretty good snapshot of the steps I’ve recently been taking.

I met up with Michael Morlan out at SXSW 2008 to talk about the RED camera.

Thanks to Mike Hedge for filming.

DIYDays Boston

Originally uploaded by stevegarfield

Great attendance, great vibe and a really cool conversation. Todd Dagres really grabbed my attention and woke me up and gave me that feeling of, “oh my god guys, this is a DIY DAYS event!”

I loved hearing lance break down all of the traditional deal land mines and how to navigate them and then how to just ultimately say forget all that and just go direct to audience.

And there was an amazing session at the end of the day brainstorming distribution ideas for David Tames film “Smile Boston Project“. Every body in that room was really smart!

And it was great to see an honest discussion by the filmmakers in From Here to Awesome about what it was like to deliver their films to all these digital portals as well as what they’ve learned from this process.  The whole experience they reported supports directly the future direction we’ve been planning to take From Here to Awesome.

And scott kirsner stole my thunder!  He was leaning over my shoulder as I was preparing my notes for my presentation, literally, and then he went up and hit everything I was about to talk about but in a much more well researched way.  But I didn’t let that stop me and talked about the same concepts but in my own kind of different way.  But seriously, this is a guy that really gets it all and I saw a copy of his new book Inventing The Movies as he sold it to an eager filmmaker.

When it was all over I had the same feeling I have at the end of each DIY DAYS event. My brain is fried, huge head ache, but totally jacked up and high off of all the good ideas that get thrown around. Truly an altered state of mind. I think I like it.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the event, volunteered, bought DIY DAYS DVDS and be on the look out for high quality videos online of all the talks and soon a DVD with our NYC, Boston and London DIY DAYS presentations all mashed up into volume 2 of the workbook project DIYDAYS DVD.

3 DVD set with over 10 hours of keynotes, panels and case studies. To see a list of speakers and topics visit www.diydays.com

To get a DVD make a donation to the project and receive your copy of DIY DAYS LA & SF. Pick the donation you’d like to make and receive the 3 DVD set today.

Pick your donation amount:

$40 donation
$20 donation
$10 donation

The effort is called MovieMobz and is being spear headed by a friend of mine named Fabio Lima.

The cool thing about this is that we hung out at the Guadalajara Film Festival in 2007 a year and a half ago and I recommended he do something like this with his RAIN cinema network. And he took the suggestion! Amazing! The world of cinema is changing before our very eyes.

Variety has picked up on their effort and so has one of our Partners indiegogo who actually references the connection back to what we had done with Four Eyed Monsters theatrical release. But eventually this will be as simple as the idea of bookmarking a website that you want to visit later. Except you’ll be bookmarking films you’d like to see once that film crosses your path.

So lets say you’ve bookmarked a film. The next thing that would ideally happen is that a theater ends up noticing a reasonable size demand for a screening of that film and books it in an area you are in. Then your little personal digital assistant will let you know about the screening and you could imediately RSVP and lock it into your schedule. Then your friends see you are coming and decide to jump on board as well. Then of course at the screening, everyone has a blast because you and all your friends and like minded strangers get to share an experience together. It could all be much more social then the current movie going experience. And if it’s not going to be social and fun, then there is no point in seeing it with other people.

At that point this would step out from being a novelty and become just part of the back bone for how things work. And thats the goal. Which is why it’s on the agenda for the distribution and discovery research and development project I co-founded known as From Here to Awesome.

So if you want to join the growing team help program or get involved in creating grant proposals for our effort, please get in touch or at the very least, subscribe to my blog and stay tuned.

Thoughts? Would love a comment…

Also we are doing this cool thing where people get to decide what gets screened in the theater using their cell phones.

submit films | watch films | learn to make films | fest news | fest streamGet the special Embed code or quicktime download links here. This is a video about how film festivals are suppose to function as a filter to decide which films are seen by distributors and therefor end up getting in front of audiences. It details some examples of how filmmakers have become empowered to side step that system and find audiences directly.

We want to share with other filmmakers the opportunities we’ve had with our own films so we’ve banded together a growing team of filmmakers, web developers and distribution partners to create From Here to Awesome.

If you have a film you want the world to see or if you want to see films outside of the standard hollywood status quo then Subscribe to From here to Awesome’s Video Channel.

Formats: .mov | .flv | YouTube

Last week a film festival I co-founded called From Here to Awesome was introduced and got a lot of blogosphere attention. This is an interview that NewTeeVee conducted with Lance and I. After the interview they posted a raw .mp3 of the full conversation and wrote up a blog post on NewTeeVee.

I’ve you’ve made a film you think the world should there is a good chance you should really be a part of From Here to Awesome. Read the details on how to submit here.

You can also see photos documenting the creation of this film festival in this flickr set.

Please spread the word!!!!

FromHereToAwesome.com