Comedian, Media That Matters presenter and now Senate hopeful Al Franken took some time out from campaigning to answer five questions about renewable energy posed by blogger Maria Surma Manka.

This is further proof that more politicians are opening up to the community of bloggers.

Rose and Nangabire, a feature length documentary film that we are producing at Big Mouth, will be screening a ten minute selection of the film at the IFP Market this Monday, September 17th at 4:30pm at The Angelika in NYC. It is mainly for film industry people who have passes to the Market. If you are around, come by and say hello.

We’ll be blogging more from the Market as the week progresses. Wish us luck!

I had the fortune to watch Sadie Benning’s Play Pause this weekend at the Dia in Chelsea. It was amazingly simple and powerful at the same time. It was a loose animation, or a compilation of her drawings moving to a beautiful electric ambient soundtrack that she produced. The drawing are mostly of city life, and people interacting. Sadie said during her interview at the Dia that post 9/11 she wanted to be outside a lot. She wanted to make more human connections as well as to document it, in her city of Chicago. Unfortunately, Play Pause only played this weekend at the Dia. But Sadie is showing a series of abstract drawings Form of a waterfall at Orchard gallery until October 7th.

As Angela mentioned previously, we here in the office have been stealing away for hours at a time to visit the IFP Market & Filmmaker Conference. On Wednesday I attended a panel called “Digital Download” which hoped to shed some light on some of the new revenue-sharing distribution models for filmmakers. Basically, how filmmakers can put their films online and actually make money.

A good number of filmmakers are building audiences for their work by cutting trailers and putting them on YouTube. While this is useful for getting the word out, YouTube only offers advertising revenue-sharing deals (read: money to poor filmmakers) to a minority of filmmakers — those whose films get millions and millions of hits. If you have a film that does only moderately well, there is really no direct monetary gain to having your film on YouTube.

This panel proposed avenues filmmakers can take to line their pockets, if even just a little bit. One option is to use Amazon.com’s Unbox service. Amazon offers a 50/50 split of the revenue on a film. They have also recently partnered with Re:New Media, also represented at the panel, to create the Reframe collection which will bring more independent film to the service—digitizing films that may be available to the general public for the first time. However, the consensus among panelists and audience members alike was that Amazon does not yet provide the proper context for independent films. Essentially, while it is easier for a user to pay for your film it will be nearly impossible for him/her to find your film. Much like YouTube, there is a struggle to set your film apart — what I like to think of as small-fish-in-a-big-pond syndrome. Also, another major consideration is that Unbox currently only works for PC users; if you have a Mac, it just won’t work. It is arguable that it may stay that way as the PC market is still larger than the Mac market (not to mention that Apple has a bit of a stronghold in that market as iTunes is the default music and video application on every new Mac that is shipped).

Alternatively, there are other services which do not have the name recognition of Amazon but are still gaining popularity and thereby becoming major competitors. Panelist Kathleen Powell of Jaman contends that it is a better choice for independent filmmakers — particularly documentaries which are the best sellers. In Jaman users can buy or rent digital (and often high definition) versions of films for $4.99 or $1.99 respectively. Filmmakers who distribute their films via Jaman receive 30% of the transaction sales. However, Powell was optimistic that the service would soon also offer advertiser and subscription models which could increase what that 30% looks like to the filmmaker (though when asked, Powell declined to give numbers—in terms of dollars—that the top-achieving films on Jaman have made).

Lastly, panelist Peter Broderick contends that the iTunes Music Store (Apple Computer’s popular online music and video store included in the iTunes music player application) is the new marketplace for digital content. Though, in terms of video, it is a marketplace primarily for mainstream media (well, most big media with the exception of NBC Universal). There is only one independent feature film on the iTunes Music Store though Broderick hinted that soon this may change. He declined to give up his source but nonetheless I’ll be keeping an eye on Apple.

After all this talk about what filmmakers may want to do, panel moderator Scott Kirsner introduced filmmaker Hunter Weeks to talk about his experience as a case study. His film, 10 MPH, documents his journey (with fellow filmmaker Josh Caldwell) across the country on a Segway — the unusual scooter which has an average speed of roughly 10 miles per hour. With no major distributors interested in the film, Weeks and Caldwell decided to go it alone and found success in the simple things. They offer the film in a variety of different formats (iPod download, Amazon Unbox, Netflix, Blockbuster, etc) but found that simply selling DVDs was the best way to actually make a profit. In their recent 23 city tour with the film, they sold many DVDs simply by talking to people about the film face-to-face. Weeks’ rough estimate is that they have sold approximately 4,000 DVDs and 700 downloads of the film. Perhaps not surprisingly, when it came to downloads of the film Weeks recommended a service none of the panelists mentioned called e-junkie.com which allows him to keep all the revenue from the purchase of his film as a digital download, minus a nominal monthly fee. For me, it was definitely helpful to hear about the digital download marketplace from a filmmaker’s perspective.

Panelist Jana Augsberger brought up what seems to be a potential resource for independent filmmakers called Filmaka, for which she is Vice President of Content & Distribution. Augsberger described it as a short film contest where the winner gets his/her short produced as a feature. Filmaka then distributes the feature film and shares revenue with the filmmaker.

In general, filmmakers should take a second to read the terms before giving up their film to any service (Filmaka, for example, retains exclusive rights of all your submissions). Most of the panelists noted that, if you are willing to bear the responsibility of digital distribution, you should make sure to retain as many of those rights as you can. If you are a filmmaker who is currently self-distributing, please feel free to comment on this post and share your experiences!

Wes Anderson is releasing a short film this week, Hotel Chevalier, the week before his latest feature length film, The Darjeeling Limited. The Wall Street Journal did a piece on it:

“Hotel Chevalier,” meanwhile, is a prequel of sorts that was made a year before “Darjeeling” even began filming. It takes place entirely in the Paris hotel room of Mr. Schwartzman’s character and includes information that later becomes relevant in “Darjeeling.” The short film’s premiere will be Tuesday night at Apple stores in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Santa Monica, Calif. Then, starting Wednesday, it will be available as a free download on Apple Inc.’s iTunes Web site.

I am a big fan of Anderson’s work and think this is a clever way to build his audience. Here’s his process:

“I shot ‘Chevalier’ in 21⁄2 days and edited it in about a week on my computer,” says Mr. Anderson. “I had one copy of ‘Chevalier’ on DVD, and I’d show it to people on my laptop that entire year,” says Mr. Anderson. He says that he financed “Chevalier” entirely out of his own pocket. He considered filming two additional shorts to fill in background on the other main characters and at one point considered opening the movie with the “Chevalier” sequence.

I hope more filmmakers do this.

As an intern here at Arts Engine, I had a chance last week to catch a brief glimpse of the IFP market, a veritable bazaar of screenings, panels, meetings and frenetic networking!

I began the day with a screening of Unfinished Spaces: Cuba’s Architecture of Revolution. The film examines the fate of Cuba’s National Art Schools, a group of buildings commissioned with revolutionary zest by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in 1961, only for construction to be abandoned two years later. The buildings that were never completed today stand empty and overgrown, poignant monuments to a Cuba free from Soviet influence, which shifted focus away from long-term cultural endeavors towards the demands for pre-fabricated social housing. Facing discrimination and professional stagnation, two of the three young architects involved in the project left the country to pursue their careers abroad; only one remained, and in the subsequent forty years has designed nothing but the interior of a pizzeria.

Still a work in process, the film’s narrative so far is woven around beautifully shot images of the decaying buildings, archival footage of their construction and interviews with the architects. With a renovation project set to start next year, the filmmakers plan to follow the architects’ reunion in Cuba, continuing the film’s subtle and focused examination of the country’s political journey.

My next stop was the keynote panel with Diane Weyermann, from Participant Productions, responsible for the documentary giant An Inconvenient Truth. She’s currently working on a number of projects, including Errol Morris’ exposé of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and Brett Morgen’s new film Chicago 10, which I was going to be hearing more about later. The discussion centered around how to get your film noticed, with advice about soundtracks, marketing budgets, token celebrities and distribution dates –- particularly in regards to the new rules for Academy Awards submission, which has led to a totally over-saturated market in the fall. One juicy topic that came up was product placement in documentaries, a practice Weyermann vehemently denied even after an audience member claimed that Apple not only featured prominently throughout An Inconvenient Truth, but also appeared in the credits…

Hybrid “docudrama” was the topic for the next panel, with Brett Morgen center stage in the discussion. He came up with some great sound bites, most memorably, “Verité is bull****!” His argument was that since the introduction of a camera in any situation will inevitably alter the subject’s behavior, scenarios presented as a reality in documentaries are really only versions of the truth – and not necessarily any truer than a staged re-enactment. Perhaps, but I felt the conversation was focusing far too much on authentic footage v. re-staging, rather than dealing with whether or not the claims being made by the film are accurate. If, to quote Morgen again, performances can be “sculpted in the edit room,” then even the most genuine footage can be deceitful.

Which brings us on to the topic of the last two panels of the day — documentary ethics. The first, chaired by our very own Katy Chevigny, focused on the filmmaker’s relationship to the subject and the significantly unequal power balance between the two. St. Clair Bourne described his films as tools through which the characters could tell their stories themselves – alleging that many other documentarians are dangerously patronizing, adopting an almost imperialist attitude to their often poorer, less empowered subjects. Jennifer Venditti discussed the way she asserted her directorial authority over the boy in her latest film Billy the Kid, who had a very strong sense of how he wanted to be portrayed and Macky Alston described his unease with the deception of interviewing a group of teenagers who were going to unwittingly reveal their racism. Whether or not to explain the film’s real intention to interviewees, pay them for their contributions and how to help the subject recognize that their lives won’t necessarily change or follow the life of the film were all energetically thrashed out!

The final panel, as the moderator Nancy Abraham pointed out, looked less at the filmmaker’s responsibility to the subject and more at his or her duties to the audience — how to determine guidelines when using explicit or painful footage. Steven Okazaki’s experiences filming a drug addict for Black Tar Heroin highlighted the struggle between the human urge to intervene and the filmmaker’s desire to get a “great shot.” Jon Alpert described his recognition during the editing of Baghdad ER that footage of one amputated arm could stand for the many others he had witnessed in his first two days in the hospital. One interesting tendency that came up was audiences’ intense empathy for animals (often disproportionate to their concern for humans), exemplified there and then by our responses to a graphic clip from a film by Matthew Galkin. The choice to show this fragment, and extracts from the other contributors’ films, was I think slightly misguided; removed from the original context, the footage was reduced to voyeuristic, shock-value clips — a perfect example of the ‘unethical’ decisions the panel was trying to discuss.

So, apologies for ending on that slightly morose note, but I think it’s time to wrap up this entry! All that was left for the day was to have a few much needed drinks courtesy of HBO…

— Clem

The DVDs for the Seventh Annual Media That Matters Film Festival are now available to purchase. You can get them on the Arts Engine Store and share them with friends, colleagues, students and other people interested in innovative shorts by independent and youth filmmakers from across the country and around the world.

Also, you can now download the Media That Matters Film Festival podcast on iTunes by using this link. Please keep in mind that the iTunes application will launch when clicking the link above. You can watch all of the films or your all time favorites.

If you prefer yet another way to get the Media That Matters Festival films, you can download it on Miro by using this link. You will have to download the free Miro video player to watch the the films using the link above.

For more information on Miro and how to access Media That Matters Festival films you can read Jen’s blog entry Finding the Media That Matters Film Festival.