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Let's Make Better Films

Free Reading To Enhance The Art And Business Of Your Film

We move things ahead by sharing what know and learn.  That has been the impetus behind this blog and many others.  The same can be said about case studies. Lately it has also become the impetus behind handbooks and the like.  Here’s a few you must download and read:

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Truly Free Film

The Really Good Things In The Indie Film Biz 2012

Last year I wrote out 15 really good things about the indie film biz (2011). My first instincts at looking at the list, are that the 15 from last year are still in process this year. Maybe I was a bit ahead of the curve.  Maybe I should hold this post until 2013.  But I don’t think so — we have much to celebrate this year too.

So what are the new developments that are now taking hold?  Unfortunately, my mind hasn’t found the answers as quickly as others have (and here too) even if I do consider myself quite the optimist.  Okay, make that a pessmistic optimist, but an optimist nonetheless.  I have struggled to hit the same number as last year, but I did it, and even exceeded it — and hopefully you’ll continue to fill in the list with what I forgot.

  1. Direct distribution is really working.  
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Truly Free Film

How To Defeat 10,000,000 Adorable Kittens

by Emily Best & Liam Brady

EMILY: Recently I was a guest on an awesome show that brings together musicians, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs to talk, play, and pontificate. Here’s the first question we were asked: we all know how much technology has helped music and film, but what about the challenges it poses?

There’s no doubt in my mind that the greatest challenge technology poses to the arts is fragmentation. In a world where the audience’s attention is so divided, how do you make something stand out? 

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Truly Free Film

Without An Audience, It Can’t be Art!

By Emily Best

I hold this apparently really unpopular view that without an audience, it can’t be art. “Art” is a social label, a negotiation between the artist, the object (or performance) and the viewer.

This is history’s fault. Art was reserved for the rich or those with access to the rich. We didn’t see how it was made, conceived, choreographed, or staged until it appeared in front of us. And mostly, everyone liked it that way. Artists got to create with very little interference. Audiences had very little interaction with the artists or processes that created what they saw in museums, theaters, and on stage, so they were happy to pay their hard earned money to witness that “magic.”

But now we live in the age of the digital download.