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Truly Free Film

Film Festivals And Digital Platforms Need To Work Together

Fandor Festival PageFilm festivals have done an incredible job aggregating their local film loving communities.  They have invested years into becoming trusted curatorial brands to that local audience. Yet festivals have many challenges — and I witnessed this first hand last year when I ran the San Francisco Film Society.

Most festivals have very limited bandwidth. They are committed to running their successful legacy programs.  Even when they have experienced attendance drops or limited growth, they find it challenging to launch new programs and revenue streams for fear that their historic offerings might suffer.  They can barely do all that currently do, let alone increase their capacity. Every non-profit suffers from financial limits, often operating with next to no cash reserves. How can they change with the times or expand their offerings?

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Issues and Actions

Festival Planning Gets Easier And Easier

Don’t get me wrong, it is still hard. How do you know what festival to play when?  That remains to be answered, but just knowing what festivals are approaching is great gift — and now you can quite easily.

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Truly Free Film

What Issues Do Filmmakers Need To Track?

If filmmakers don't track core issues, they will find their form abandoned in the parking lotA creative life is a precarious thing.  Actions occur that could profoundly effect your ability to earn a living doing what you love.  We get blindsided again and again, sometimes not recognizing things until they are too late to alter them.  It’s one of the reasons I have tried to meticulously track for you what are the good thing and bad things happening in indie film these days.  Yet, it seems to me we all need to do a better job of tracking them if we don’t want to get trapped in a future we won’t be part of..

My thought is that we should be able to define a series of issues in which we can put events, ideas, and articles into as they occur, helping each other stay on top of them. 

The first step is to define the issues.  That is what I am doing today .

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Truly Free Film

Simple Machine To Award Micro-Festival Grants

THE FILM-PROGAMMING NETWORK WILL PRESENT FOUR $1000 GRANTS PER YEAR TO FUND INNOVATIVE MICRO-BUDGET FILM FESTIVALS.

                                                           

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE – Simple Machine launched last spring as an online film marketplace, enabling programmers to find and book quality festival films for events of all kinds. Now, the programming network continues to push the boundaries of film exhibition by offering $1000 to anyone interested in throwing a small, innovative film festival.

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Truly Free Film

10 Must Read Or Watch Film Biz Articles Of 2013

  1. Steven Soderbergh’s “State Of Cinema” Address at SFIFF56: http://vimeo.com/65060864. This served as the framing for AO Scott’s 2013 Cinema overview.
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Issues and Actions The Next Good Idea Truly Free Film

Simple Fix: Tell Us Where Your Film Elements Are

Film preservation is a difficult thing. And it has gotten more difficult. But it could be made easier.  Like many things, although there is not yet an app for that, there is a simple fix.

If you are reading this now, I am going to assume you know about the “digital dilemma” and recognize that we probably are going to lose a great deal of the films that have been created over the last decade.  

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Issues and Actions

Simple Fixes: Music Playlists

Either Filmmakers should give Film Festivals the playlists from music from their film (or that inspired them) or Film Festivals should request them from the filmmakers.

Music playlists are