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MillimeterExperimental Distribution
Jun 2, 2008 11:00 AM, By Eric Melin
Film festivals go from here to awesome.
In the current anything-goes atmosphere of digital content creation, the idea of collective knowledge being shared in an open forum is as important as picking the 10 feature-length films and 10 short films with the most interest. New technologies and programs are being created every day, and there are rewards to be reaped for those who tap into their inherent value first. Filmmakers are encouraged to participate in the online discussion by creating video tutorials or contributing to any number of online panels and keynotes that will all be archived at fromheretoawesome.com. After all, the festival is as much a social experiment as it is a showcase of talent.
“Whatever a filmmaker might be an expert about, we're actually encouraging them to make a tutorial, 'cause that's stuff we've all done in our own filmmaking. Lance has posted instructional information on how to do something. So has Mike Belmont, and so have we. We have a whole tutorial category on our own website for our own film. So the idea is if everybody shares what their area of expertise is, then we're slowly building a really vast resource that's ever-changing and ever-evolving that teaches you whatever it is you don't know,” Crumley says. “Maybe you're trying to get signed up with some new site, or maybe you are trying to get something working when you're building your social community — or maybe it's just how to use a camera properly or even how to do lighting, if you're just brand-new to filmmaking. So all of these things are already creeping up all over the Internet in terms of filmmakers making tutorials about what they know, but that's part of the celebration that will be happening with this festival. We want to bring all that stuff together and encourage all of the participating filmmakers to create tutorials about at least one thing that they feel they're an expert at.”
Audience interaction with the filmmakers, not just the films, is also essential to the goals of FHTA. Besides the large amount of web-based conversation, the festival is also hosting live panels during DIY Days — a series of keynote speeches and filmmaker Q&As that will take place in Los Angeles in July and San Francisco and Boston in August. DIY Days will also host group discussions without any sort of hierarchy, where everyone's voice can be heard.
“We're going to get together for a day of discussion around all different aspects of what it is to self-sustain as a film and let it groom — what it takes to build your audiences, get your work out there, and give an opportunity to network in the offline kind of way,” Weiler says. As many of these workshops as possible, he says, will be streamed live and archived online.
After true interest is gauged and the showcased movies are picked by the online community, the screenings will begin through a variety of outlets. Rather than one or two weeks as is the custom at a traditional festival, From Here to Awesome will screen its featured films over a six-month period. This larger release window will give each film an opportunity to take advantage of virtually every form of distribution currently available — such as theaters, video-on-demand services, mobile devices, web-based TV, cable TV, living rooms, and grassroots guerilla screenings at drive-ins around the world through mobmov.org. Through the festival's partnerships, each featured film will also receive free errors and omissions (E&O) insurance courtesy of Heretic Films, which Weiler values at approximately $12,000 to $14,000.
Whether it is a protected RSS feed or a donation-based theatrical screening, FHTA returns 100 percent of a sale back to the filmmaker rather than acting as a sales rep for its showcased movies and taking a cut of the money. “We're really trying to spread the reach and get it out over as many different outlets as we possibly can, and we want to turn back at the end and say, ‘What worked? What price points worked? What was the best model that we saw? What was the best uptake?’ and just present all that back,” Weiler says.
The filmmakers behind FHTA have proven that concentrating solely on the creative concerns of your movie is not always the final step in today's independent filmmaking process. Innovative marketing and distribution can be just as important, and having a story built up around it could guarantee your film a larger audience — even if the screen that reaches that audience is no bigger than that of a cell phone.
“Digital technology is here, and we should definitely be able to get a film digitally to any platform, any service, any device — portable, large, big, small, whatever. And all this should really be centered around the filmmaker — the one who's created this message that they're releasing to all these platforms, so this is our way of needing to get there, by designing the festival to work that way,” Crumley says.
In the end, From Here to Awesome is a discovery festival in more ways than one. It is not just the films that are being discovered, but as the festival continues through the year, the most effective distribution methods will be discovered as well. The dust will settle, and the experiment can be analyzed as a whole. When asked about what specific avenue of distribution will prove to be the most financially beneficial to a filmmaker, Crumley says, “We don't really know. But what we want to do is say that all of them should be pursued by every filmmaker.”
