It's dark, so you can hardly see anything, but a German audience member is pretty sure we didn't do the ending of Blanc de Blanc correctly. Who know, maybe he's right.
You, of course, can watch the film for yourself here:
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
Way back in May of 2009 when we embarked on a quest to shoot and edit a feature film in 2 weeks, one of my crazy goals was to screen it in Los Angeles. It was a stupid and unnecessary goal, but a goal nonetheless. Things like that keep me motivated.
No one ever really thought it would happen.
So when David and Karen at Film Courage called me to propose a screening of BLANC DE BLANC as kind of a hybrid event to test out a VOD release, I was all for it. And it didn't hurt that I was heading to Los Angeles anyway.
The original thought was that we might be able to get 5 or 6 people in a room to watch the movie, and we'd live stream that across the internet to interested parties around the world. We never really thought of it as a "Hey, LA. Come see a movie." That's why we were kind of thrown when people none of us knew started asking if they could come.
Around that point, I started to get nervous. It's one thing to show a film to friends, but people you don't know? That's a different story. We had something like 35 people there, which was way beyond our expectations, especially since we didn't really try and get anyone there other than the panelists.
The audience seemed to respond well to the film, which is fantastic. From downstairs I heard some laughter at (I hope) the right places. The consensus was mostly positive. We even had someone figure it out, which makes 8 people total. It wasn't the woman pictured. She had a different theory entirely.
But how did the VOD work? Is it ready for prime time?
Sort of.
I've heard of zero issues from the Dynamo player, which is where most of our rentals have come from over the life of the VOD availability.
But a couple of people who rented via Distrify had some major issues. Twitter peep (and lender of couch) @LordBronco couldn't get it to play. And, he took super helpful notes, which I'll quote below:
I'm on a Lan-Wired, stable DSL connection that up/downloads at 1.5 megs a second-stably tested via repetaed gaming hours. I am on Windows Ultimate 7 using Firefox 5.0 with the newest Adobe Flash plugin installed. Flash does crash the main film courage site-but for most of this timeline I did not have even tweetdeck running in background.
To be quick, there is no pause function in a paid environment, with issues about even a single screening.
*update* I was allowed to compare the download of the same high res material on Vimeo. So to be clear, I will point out that that download took approxinately 3 or 4 hours all told, running in the back ground while I was able to do other stuff.
That's the short version. Basically, he could get it to play in bursts, but without the ability to pause the video and let it fully buffer, there wasn't a whole lot he could do. But, when it worked, it looked fantastic.
Then, I got an email from Peter over at Distrify (who I keep meaning to try and record a Skype call with):
the original video was uploaded at too high a bitrate - this was when we were still allowing user-specified settings for streaming. We recently changed our setup to support full dynamic bitrate switching so streaming is automatically optimised for the user's connection, something not offered by any of our competitors.
However, the Blanc de Blanc video needed to be re-encoded into our 5 quality versions to take advantage of this feature.
I'm not super tech-savvy on bit rates and all that, so I'll just say that the film was compressed in Compressor using the basic YouTube settings, and the same version is in three different places. It's now been re-encoded, and I haven't heard of any more problems, so until I hear differently, I'll assume everything is all good.
If you had problems with the original encoding, it's my understanding that you can just re-start the video in the player below and you should be ok. But, of course, let me know if it isn't.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
Ok, so there seems to be a wee bit of confusion about the Film Courage Event. Or maybe it was just lost in the splendor of my Ed Burns post. So...details:
+ The live component of the event is July 3 at Hot Pixel, Inc. in North Hollywood. I have no idea how many seats there are or anything like that, so stay tuned.
+ As part of the screening, we'll be holding a LIVE on-line Q&A after the film. And maybe some live panels with some LA-based filmmakers of note. More details to come.
+ Obviously, if you want to participate in the Q&A, it'll help if you've seen the film.
+ But the most important thing is the Affiliate component. You can become an Affiliate with the following steps:
1. Get a Distrify account. It's free.
2. Log in.
3. Use the player below (while logged in) to generate either an embed code or a Facebook post or a Tweet.
4. That's it. You are then an Affiliate. 30% of any sales your posts from the player generate will go to you.
It's actually a really, ridiculously simple thing.
The big question: can an Affiliate program actually work for an indie film? And that is really up to people like you.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
As obvious as this sounds, it's something we often miss. Sure, Burns is re-writing all the rules on online self-distribution and it's really exciting and he deserves every tiny bit of accolades he's getting for leading the charge. I respect the hell out of him for it, but listen closely because this is important:
Ed Burns is a movie star. He plays himself on ENTOURAGE. He used to date Heather Graham. He's a big deal. You are not. Neither am I. Very few people beyond our friends and families care about what we're doing. They just don't.
So when someone like Ed Burns is pioneering a new approach to distribution, you should absolutely pay attention. But don't believe that what works for Ed Burns will automatically work for you.
He is famous and you are not.
Practically speaking, what does that mean?
Basically, it means that you have to do things a little differently. The fact that you've made a film for $10,000 isn't newsworthy. The fact that you're putting it on VOD isn't newsworthy. Because you aren't newsworthy. None of us are.
So we have to take Ed Burn's success and run it through a filter--call it the Jon Reiss filter if you want. Audiences aren't going to find us (because they don't know who we are), so we have to go find them. We have to turn our films into events.
But how do you turn an internet video into an event?
Maybe you combine it with an actual, real world event? And if you don't have one? You create one.
One advantage that we do have over Ed Burns is that of lower expectations. We can try things. There's little to no risk in our failures. Because no one cares.
We can experiment. And what better way to experiment than on a film that cost almost nothing, has some level of acclaim, and has already turned a profit for the investors?
So that's why I'm teaming up with my good friends at Film Courage on a VOD experiment, with help from the good people at Distrify.
We'll have more details very soon, but essentially what we're going to do is screen my film BLANC DE BLANC July 3rd in Los Angeles next month at the facilities of Hot Pixel, Inc., the good people who worked on Sean Hackett's HOMECOMING. At the same time, we'll be pushing the VOD through Distrify with a crazy high affiliate rate of 30%. In addition to the live component of the screening, we'll be doing an online event, where people from around the world can interact. We're working on an online Q&A, maybe some panels, some guests, all sorts of fun stuff.
Basically, we want to take the opportunity to put the Distrify player through the paces, to see how it holds up, how the Affiliate stuff pans out. We want to know what works and what doesn't work so that when other films in the community are ready to screen (I'm looking at you TILT, GOODBYE PROMISE, CRAWL, HOW DO YOU WRITE A JOE SCHERMANN SONG, and others), we'll have worked out some of the kinks and made life easier on those films that have a little bit more to play for.
Think of BLANC DE BLANC as your guinea pig.
The big plus of Distrify is their Affiliate model, which not only gives you a cut of the sales that your publicity generates through embedding the player, but also through sales you generate on places like Facebook and Twitter. Or, to quote Peter from Distrify (in response to my email question):
"Yes, we track tweets and sharing from the player, as long as the user is logged in. The affiliate share goes to the last person in the chain who told the buyer about the film. Of course, if the buyer clicks affiliate links from several different users, we give the affiliate share to the first user who attracted the buyer's attention…We are currently doing sales reports manually, while we build an automated system that will allow any user to log in at any time, see their earnings and withdraw when they want."
I'm going to try and coordinate a Skype interview with them if people have more questions.
In the meantime, play around with the Distrify player and it's multitude of embed options. Let's find out what works and what doesn't. None of us can do what Ed Burns does, but together maybe we can get close.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
I kind of figured the issue of VOD would be settled for a bit. Dynamo makes a good, clean player. Now all that was left to do was sit back and let the money roll in (right, Sheri Candler?). But it seemed like as soon as I hit "publish", the game changed.
Basically, Distrify is pretty similar to Dynamo, but with a couple of key features. Namely, you can up-sell DVDs, Merch, etc, inside the player.
Obviously, this is a great help, as you can get someone to embed the player on their site and the audience doesn't have to find their way back to your site just to buy something. It's all in one easy-to-manage embed code. It's one of those things that really should have been standard a year ago. But, better late than never.
It's also really, really easy to embed on Facebook.
That's not even the important part. Distrify lets you set up people (or, rather, let's them set up themselves) as affiliates. Basically, if you host the embed code of my film on your site, you get a cut of the money when someone rents via that player. The implications are obvious. What's a better motivator than money? (Answer: almost nothing).
If I'm understanding it correctly, you can even get paid on Twitter/Facebook referrals, which is pretty awesome.
The minimum affiliate fee is 5%. Distrify does a 70%/30% split overall (which is pretty much standard now), and they'll actually 50/50 split the affiliate fee with you, which is nice.
I set my Affiliate cut at 30%, which is really high, mostly because our goal is to see what does and doesn't work in advance of UP COUNTRY. So if you got your audience motivated, you could make some beer money with not much work.
Players
Thing is, your average audience member doesn't care about all that. For them, the experience is key. What does the player look like? What does it do? Let's see.
Here's the Distrify player.
And here, for comparison, is the Dynamo player:
Basically, what you've got here is form vs. function. The Dynamo player looks a hell of a lot better, but the Distrify player does a hell of a lot more. So right now, my guess is it'll come down to what your priority is.
Or, one of them could adopt from the other. That'd be nice.
Stats
As promised, let's look at some stats. The Distrify player has just gone live, so we don't have anything substantial there, but Dynamo has been up since May 25th. Not a lot of time, for sure, but it's something to look at.
Obviously, we're not going to be buying any sports cars just yet. The player loads kind of make things hard to read, so let's zoom in.
Again, not good numbers. Then again, is anyone really sure what good numbers are? Honestly, I haven't got a clue if we're doing well or not, compared to what our expectations should be. And that's kind of the point of this.
We'll keep you updated. In the meantime, it'd be really great if you checked out the movie. It's a hell of a bargain. And the more rentals we get, the more motivated I'll be to post more updates (hint, hint).
Or, better yet, why not trying out the player on your blog and see if you can't rake in some affiliate cash?
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
If I'm going to be accused of being nothing but a self-promotional whore, I figure I might as well do it right. Kind of like the idea that if you get in trouble for something, you might as well go ahead and do it, you know?
Of course, the flip side is 98% of people think I'm not a self-promotional whore, so let's see if we can't find some value here while we're at it.
Pretty much every filmmaker I know these days is pondering the idea of digital distribution. The festival model is dead. Theatrical distribution is dead. The old world is crumbling all around us and if you're waiting for some studio executive to swoop in and give you a three-picture deal, you're out of your mind.
This is pretty much old news.
It's one thing to know the system is fucked. Any anarchist can tell you that. But it's something else entirely to figure out what to do about it. We're all still trying to find audiences and we're all still trying to figure out how to pay the rent (well, not all of us). And for every Ross Pruden who seems to have figured something out, the rest of us are just pretty much guessing, and very few people want to be the guinea pig.
Thing is, I've got a feature film that was pretty much designed to be a guinea pig, so I have no problem using it to try things out.
BLANC DE BLANC
Shot and edited in two weeks (on a budget of $970) as part of Reid Gershbein's #2wkfilm project, BLANC DE BLANC is best described as "a mystery born out of a dare--a jigsaw puzzle of a film that has confounded and delighted audiences around the world." At least, that's what we say about it.
Like most indie films, some people like it and some people don't.
VOD
There's a bunch of different places you can put your film. You can do Distribber, which lots of people I respect speak very highly of. However, when your film's budget is under $1,000, you become kind of wary of throwing $1,300 at distribution. Might we, going forward? Maybe, but I just don't see it happening. However, if you're budgeting a "proper" micro-budget film, I think it makes a lot of sense to work Distribber into your budget, if at all possible.
With the plan being to use a service that only took a cut, without any up-front money, we looked at a bunch of sites. Some of them looked good. Some of them looked like shit. You can probably guess which ones. The ones we seriously considered (and/or are considering) are:
YouTube
Personally, I think YouTube rentals are a pretty good option. They let you upload a 20GB file, which is convenient in terms of compression. Thing is, you have to be part of their partner program to get involved (as of now). I'm not in their partner program as of yet, although I'm working on it.
Open Film
I have an Open Film Pro account. It hasn't really been working, which is bad. However, last week their CEO took the time to reach out and talk to me personally about my issues, which he is now attempting to resolve. I'll post an update to that here when I get one.
I do know that they're working on a few very interesting things that I don't think are public yet.
On the tech side, they have a nice-looking player (see above) that's tweak-able in a couple of different directions. The website has a built-in donation button and you can set up your videos with buy/rent options.
Uploads via the web can be up to 2GB in size and works pretty seamlessly and has the benefit of giving you specs. You can upload a 5GB file via FTP (which never works for me) or send in a DVD (which strikes me as kind of a 2005 option). They will split ad revenue with you 50/50, but that's one of the other things I've never been able to get to work.
Dynamo
Used by Edward Burns and recently written up over at Ted Hope's blog, Dynamo seems to be the hip new thing. It's still in Beta, so you have to submit your project for acceptance. They say that takes 24 hours. It took maybe 1.
The uploader is pretty self-explanatory. I haven't seen a limit on the file size, but it let me upload a 4.78GB file without any trouble (other than how long something like that takes).
The access period ranges from 6 hours to 30 days. Down below you're asked for a description, some basic tagging info, and some basic credits. Once uploaded, you'll get this:
Not a lot of surprises here. You can bundle a couple of videos, in case you wanted to rent a full season of a serialized program. You can add a preview that viewers can watch before they rent. GeoBlocking let's you select who can and cannot watch your film, based on DVD Region, Continent, or Country. Ours says "yes" because I went in and actually selected yes on everything, just to be safe. There isn't really an explanation of what "Viewer Emails" does, but I'm guessing it's an automated email you can send to your viewers. I wrote a really basic one, so hopefully someone will rent it and report back on if they got an automated email.
From there, you can embed your video pretty much anywhere, kind of like this:
If the size isn't a good match for what you need, you can change it manually, which is kind of a hassle and the Facebook integration could be a lot smoother, but the video player looks nice and, above all, looks professional. For a Beta release, those strike me as pretty small issues.
As for stats, we haven't been live for long enough to get a pretty graph or anything, but the reports pretty much break down like this and seems to update more or less in real-time, unlike some other sites like Amazon, where I'm told it can take weeks for a content creator to get any data.
Obviously, it's way too soon to see any real numbers from this. It'd be nice if the share options were more robust and one could see, for example, what sort of success rate Facebook posts get vs. Twitter updates. Stuff like that.
We'll see how it works. For now, myself and the rest of the BLANC DE BLANC team will see if we can't get some traction on these rentals. Because, you know, it'd be nice to figure out ways to make this work.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
