Judgement Trumps Experience

Unless you've made a commercially successful film, you have no place in the debate over movie piracy.

This isn't the first time this argument has come up in debates over movie piracy. Truthfully, it must be one of the most ignorant things I've ever heard. Do you have to be designer to spot bad design? Do you have to be a writer to recognize bad writing? Do you have to spend time making and selling horse whips to realize that the horse whip business model is becoming obsolete with the invention of the automobile?

There is no school for presidents, yet new presidents seem to do just fine. You can have tons of experience and still make poor judgement calls, as we have seen with the record industry's gradual nose dive over the last decade.

The whole reason I haven't made a commercially successful feature film is mostly because of circumstance—I have two daughters who monopolize most of my time. But even then, I have had the chance to produce feature movies numerous times and on each occasion, I've chosen not to because all my research pointed at one ugly conclusion: the current business model for making films is intrinsically flawed. A shift has happened in the last five years that has radically changed how films are getting their money recouped, or not. Piracy plays an increasingly larger role in that landscape, and that scares the shit out of me. I absolutely am not going to look an investor in the eye and tell him he's going to make his money back if I haven't done my own due diligence to prove it.

So I vowed to myself that I should make it my life's mission to completely master how film distribution worked before making my own movie. After all, doesn't it make sense that you must know how much your product will sell for before you draw up your budget? If the product doesn't sell for what you expect, then you're saving yourself a whole lot of anguish by not gathering money to create that product. Right?

After two years of research, I finally figured out what was going in the film business. At the root of problem were two key factors:

1. there was a complete misunderstanding of the new economics in play;
   
2. there was an industry-wide denial from anyone with skin in the game.

As for #1, the internet has introduced the concept of abundance into economics. For thousands of years, economics has been dominated by an understanding of how best to allocate scarce resources, but when you can copy things digitally—when each copy is an exact replica of the original—those things aren't scarce at all, but abundant. In the grand scheme of history, the internet is brand new and we're only now starting to get our head around what it is, and what it means. Sure, we try to graft Analog Age concepts onto it like Intellectual Property (as if anyone can own an idea), but the way we consume and share ideas is unlike anything we have known about how we use scarce resources. Once you get that concept (and I was militantly resistant to the idea for almost a decade), you see that business models that have been around for almost a century are becoming obsolete and new business models will inevitably replace them. The artists who have based their business models on an understanding of the new economics in play have done famously well, like Amanda Palmer who got kicked off her label (at her request) and then made $15,000 in only 3 minutes.

As for #2, I can't say I blame people in the film industry for being in denial about how things are changing. Nobody with $15 million riding on the line is seriously willing to contemplate that their business model is becoming, or has become, obsolete. What they want or don't to be true is moot—the car replaced horse & buggy drivers, the printing press replaced manuscript illuminators, and the internet will have similar effects on legacy delivery systems like records, CDs, DVDs, and books. Deny that change if you wish, but it doesn't stop the wave from destroying your sand castle.

The changes in the market are now so clear to me that it would be suicide to enter the marketplace in the traditional way to make a commercially successful movie. And if that is the only price of admission I must pay to get my message through to those in denial, then I pray for their survival as I watch their car tragically head for the cliff.

Ask The Right Questions

Justin Timberlake has over 120 revenue streams—only one of them is selling recorded music.—Matt Mason (link)

Jackie Barbosa wrote an excellent blog post yesterday which kicked off a flurry of Tweets between us about piracy in the entertainment industry. Jackie is smart enough to get that the publishing industry's claim that ebook piracy is costing the publishing industry "as much as $3 billion" is a bunch of hooey. An illegal ebook download is not equal to a lost sale—readers simply downloaded the ebook. Who knows if they would have actually paid for that download if they had been offered no other choice?

While Jackie ultimately concludes that she doesn't get too concerned when she sees her ebooks on a torrent site, she lays a harsh judgment on ebook pirates:

...these people are thieves, plain and simple. And just like a thief won’t buy the diamond bracelet because he can’t knock over the jewelry store, the ebook pirate won’t go and buy a legitimate copy if she can’t get it for free.

I get where she's coming from. It can be frustrating when you put a lot of work into something, put it up online... and then watch it get taken out of your control and given to the world in perpetuity.

And that's exactly where I think Jackie is seeing everything from the wrong perspective. She's seeing the world through a pre-digital lens. In a digital world, things get copied and with P2P networks, nothing can be effectively done to stop it. You can commiserate about it, reproach, bemoan, and even try to legislate... but you cannot enforce laws against it. For every P2P network you shut down, two more rise in its place. It is a losing battle. Do you want to go the rest of your life living in resentment and bitterness? Or do you want to accept that the world is changing around you, that your presumptions about how things ought to be might have to change accordingly, and upgrade your business model to leverage the internet's unique properties of infinite distribution to work for you rather than against you?

Jackie and I had the following conversation over Twitter:

Ross: Piracy is a market force saying, "the price for content is too high." When the price comes down, pirates turn into consumers.

Jackie: So bank robbery says bank fees are too high? Sorry, no.

Ross: The difference is whether piracy adds value—robbing banks removes value, pirating books increases their popularity.

Jackie: I'm sure piracy does increase some book's popularity. But unless that popularity leads to more $ sales, it's not adding value. Even the music industry hasn't given up the notion of charging for music in favor of ONLY other revenue streams.

Ross: ...which begs the question, what are you really selling—books or stories?

Jackie: That's like asking whether you're selling music or songs, in my opinion. The "book" is just how the story is delivered. A novel cannot be delivered by a live reading via the author (or anyone else). At best, only PORTIONS can be delivered that way.
Jackie: What I'm asking is where the viable revenue streams are if not from sales of books themselves? Show me the money.
Jackie: Even in the industry you cite as "proof" sharing is good (music), publishers still put a PRICE on their product. Books are the same as movies: they're entertainment. But I don't see how that relates to the discussion (unrestricted sharing).
Jackie: If all books are free, where is the revenue stream? WHEN/HOW does the author/publisher get paid for creating the entertainment?

Jackie's asking some well-intentioned questions, but they're mostly the wrong ones. She's still focused on the selling of a tangible—her books—rather than the intangible—her stories. When Jackie finally gets that she is a storyteller and not a bookseller, she'll start to mold a more sustainable business model around that concept.

Her question, "WHEN/HOW does the author/publisher get paid for creating the entertainment?" is foremost on the minds of all producers in the entertainment industry. How is what we're doing sustainable? How do we make money at this? How do we survive and thrive?

Counter-intuitively, when content is allowed to be free in the digital realm, it seems to bolster sales. Why? That doesn't make sense, does it? Consider the story of Matt Mason who wanted to release his book online for free alongside the hard copy version, but Matt's publisher denied his request. When Matt saw his ebook was being pirated, he again approached his publisher and said, "Look, it's already out there. At least if we release our own ebook, we can control it a little more. Maybe we can even find out something about our readership." His publisher agreed and released the book as a free PDF. A while later, a music bigwig heard about Matt's book, went to Matt's site and downloaded the PDF... and he was so impressed with the ebook, he went down to a brick and mortar bookseller and not only bought a hard copy for himself, but for everyone he knew. Without the free ebook available, Matt would have missed out on those sales.

So the questions Jackie should be asking herself is, what is she actually providing her readership? Is it the book, or is it the story in the book? What are the infinite goods and scarce goods in her business, and how can she leverage those infinite goods (the ones that can be copied infinitely on the internet) to increase the value of her scarce goods (the ones that cannot be copied on the internet) so that revenue streams flow to her and/or her publisher? How can she employ generatives to her maximum possible advantage?

Perhaps the hardest question of all: if Jackie can't find a sustainable business model for being an author, what does she do next? This is an extremely volatile question which I hate asking because so few people are willing to examine with unflinching honesty whether their business as it currently exists deserves to survive. Nobody wants to hear their business is slowly dying, but history is littered with businesses who were too stubborn to accept the decline of consumer demand for tangibles that no longer met the market's needs:

1. The need for personal transportation is perennial, but the method shifted from horses and carriages to automobiles.
   
2. The need to watch audiovisual arts is perennial, but the method shifted from film to VHS to DVD to P2P & streaming.
   
3. The need for listening to music is perennial, but the method shifted from live performance to records to eight track tapes to tape cassettes to CDs to MP3s.
   
4. The need to share news is perennial, but the method shifted from town criers to the printing press to desktop publishing to the internet.
   
5. The need to read stories is perennial, but the method shifted from illuminating manuscripts to book printing to ebooks.

If you had built your business on any of those shifting methods, and only provided a tangible product or service ["tangible service" is an oxymoron] to the market, then your business was in danger of extinction (manuscript illuminators, town criers, horse and carriage drivers, typesetters, record makers, tape cassette makers, VHS makers, etc.). Yet if you build your business on a perennial market need and shift with current methods to fulfill the market need, then your business will be around as long as that need is around.

The good news for Jackie is that authors are in the business with the lowest possible fixed costs of any entertainment sector—compared to movies which have to employ up to hundreds of people to create that first unit, authors are the definition of svelte: 1 person, 1 room, 1 laptop. It can't get much easier, or cheaper, than that.

So I do think a sustainable business model for authors in the digital age exists, although those models may be so radically different from the current model that authors may not feel like they are "purely" authors anymore. Authors like Jackie complain that their primary revenue stream is being "stolen" by pirates, but look at Justin Timberlake: the guy is a musician who has secured over a hundred revenue streams which do not involve selling recorded music. Instead of resting his entire livelihood on one revenue stream, Timberlake is almost certainly hoping his fans pirate his music because the increased exposure will only make his other 100+ revenue streams increase in value. Can authors do likewise? More to the point, can they afford to not do likewise?

I've already done the broad sketches for a filmmaking model. I'd like to flesh that out more before speculating on other models so I won't offer my thoughts (yet) on what new revenue streams for authors might be. Nevertheless, I'd like to see somebody take a stab at coming up with new models for authors because the digital age isn't going away—in fact, the next generation will likely make that logical leap which we, fettered to our pre-internet analog childhood, are unable to stomach: that file sharing is easy, unstoppable, and commonplace. As long as artists find ways to thrive in the digital age, will it really matter to their fans how immoral file sharing might be?

The Bling! Button

Filmmakers Jamin and Kiowa Winans posted an insightful update (A 360 View on Internet Piracy) on their experiences so far about having their feature film downloaded 400,000 times for free. This section in particular caught my fancy:

If the download community wants to send a real message and be recognized as an audience, here's how:

• For those out there who download because you want easy access to something you can't otherwise get (i.e., you're outside the US and movies take forever to get to you, which we completely understand), then please do the download community a favor and track down the filmmakers and give them a few bucks.
  
• For those of you who only want to pay for what you like, please find a way to support your favorite artists as best you can. This will also send an extremely strong message to Hollywood to make better films and not just expect everyone to keep digesting a huge cafeteria of re-makes and franchise films.
  
• For those of you who expect things to be free, please consider how flawed that thinking is. Do you expect groceries, clothing and other commodities to be free? Making Ink is the single most difficult thing I've ever done and I can guarantee that every artist who crosses the finish line with a completed project feels the same. If the answer is truly that people expect things for free then the logical conclusion is that no one will take any financial risk in this industry and eventually there will be nothing to pirate. Talk about the law of diminishing returns.

This is a new era and no one knows which end is up right now. If instant file-sharing is truly the next step in film distribution, then there still needs to be a financial model in place that works. All anyone wants to do is to be able to move on and make another movie. That will be impossible if the world expects things for free. Or, all our movies will be paid for by huge corporate sponsors and littered with product placement—is that really a better alternative? Do we really want The Storytellers in Ink to be eating a Big Mac and swilling Coke after every fight? Probably not. I'm not claiming to know any answers here, I just want to put it up for discussion so please share your thoughts below and we'll continue to provide updates.

Everyone is hunting around for a way to monetize file sharing so that indie filmmakers (and studio filmmakers) can continue making movies without having their hard work taken with no hope of any financial recompense. So the Winans' appeal to our better nature to buy legally is, though well-intended, misguided. The actual barrier to consumer donations is not moral in nature—at least not largely moral—but technological. If P2P applications like BitTorrent and various media players like Quicktime, WMP, etc. were improved to make it dead simple to donate directly to producers, money would start flowing. Narrowing the action required to donate from two clicks to only one click is the kind of thing I'm talking about here—it should be stupidly easy and quick to donate money—a child should be able to figure it out. It should be fast, secure, reliable, omnipresent, and probably even anonymous, too.

Let me offer an anecdote. IAlertU is a third party application for my laptop. It uses three of my MacBook’s utilities to provide one kick ass app: the remote control “locks” the laptop so that nobody can use it while you step away (and makes a cool car alert sound when you push the remote’s button), its motion sensor detects if the MacBook has been illicitly moved, and the laptop’s camera snaps a picture of any thieves and emails that photo to you. Really, it’s briliant! Rarely do I find an application with such ingenuity. It is the third party software developers like this whose products are bought and then integrated into Apple's next OS iteration.

Anyway, iAlertU is shareware, so I downloaded it for free to try it out. After seeing just how cool the application was, I felt this sudden wave of gratitude. I said to myself, “If this guy has made it super-easy for me to pay him, I’ll gladly reward him by giving him $5.” Without too much surprise, I did indeed find a Paypal link among the appication's menus and less than 60 seconds later, I had given the programmer my $5 donation. Had it taken longer than 60 seconds—or more accurately, if I had thought it might have taken longer than 60 seconds—I can’t say I would have bothered to donate at all.

Be it a song, a software app, or a movie, consumers are often struck with such overwhelming gratitude as this and are very willing to show that appreciation with their hard-earned money... but that moment can be fleeting. If the coin bucket is always there, I guarantee you coins will be dropped into it. As the Winans have said before, if just $1 were donated from every download they had, they'd be easily put in the black again.

Somebody needs to get the software people behind all media players and P2P apps like BitTorrent in the same room with Paypal and Visa. Gobs of money can be made here if a simple button is added to all media players and P2P applications. The button might say something like, “Reward the Artist”, “Donate”, “Give”, “Help Out”, “Tip”, or even “Bling!”. Whatever its iteration, the gist is the same—the consumer needs to know that when they click that button, their money will go directly to the artist with zero hassle.

Embrace the Future, or Perish

Something extraordinary has been happening this week. The film that Jamin Winans has been working on the last few years, Ink, was released and suddenly exploded all over BitTorrent: 400,000 downloads as of today, and counting. But that's not even the extraordinary bit—the filmmakers, independent filmmakers at that, aren't mad or resentful that hundreds of thousands of people are watching their film without their permission, for free... instead, they're ecstatic so many people are watching their movie.

I've been studying piracy with great interest over the last four years, and I've arrived at a few conclusions...

Counter-intuitively, the filmmakers behind INK have sold way more DVDs and ticket sales as a result of this "piracy". It's worth emphasizing that they haven't sold INK to a distributor and only built word of mouth by four-walling and promoting/selling DVDs through their web site (and from riding the publicity off their amazing short, Spin), so when their film got 150,000 views via BitTorrent in only 72 hours, this increased exposure could only have helped their film and company.

After carefully studying DVD piracy and BitTorrent file sharing, here's my own take on piracy:

1. It's morally wrong to copy or download music, movies, and software for anyone other than the person who purchased that product. I've always thought so and will always continue to think so. Piracy is like forcing a musician to busk against their will, and that's not what he agreed to.
   
2. It's currently impossible to stop the masses from engaging in piracy. If you stop them in the US, they'll do it elsewhere and now anyone can watch movies by going online. For example, right now, I can watch any movie I want—100% free—by going here: watch-movies-online.tv or surfthechannel.com. The quality can be bad sometimes, but if all I want is to see a film, then it's good enough for me.
   
3. Piracy is the market pushing back against too much control. Nobody would accept producers of furniture, automobiles, toys, or confectionaries to tell consumers how to use their product after it was purchased. Can you imagine selling me a car and then telling me not to hang dice from its rear view mirror? Yet that is exactly how producers act when you "share" an MP3 with a friend. In China, only 20 foreign movies are distributed every year—is it any wonder piracy is so rampant there? Wouldn't you resort to piracy if also presented with the same authoritarian control?
   
4. Piracy is usually about convenience, not cost. Consumers simply want to watch the film right now and they resort to piracy to get around any obstacles to that need. The obstacles are not often money, e.g., a movie is not out on DVD yet, or it's released overseas months before it's released domestically, or the duplicated DVDs are being given away for 25 cents, or for free.
   
5. Piracy does not necessarily equate to lost sales. In an information age where content can be infinitely duplicated without degradation, a pirated viewing is probably from a consumer who wasn't going to spend money on your product anyway. However, if they see/play/listen to your product, they might change their mind and buy your product, or tell their friends who might then buy your product.
   
6. For an unknown production company or film, piracy can be fantastic and inexpensive word of mouth. Sure, you can spend time and money trying to stop it, but you will ultimately fail and you just get frustrated and resentful in the process. Instead, it's much better to be happy someone is watching your film and—this is the key part—telling all their friends about it.
   
7. It is still possible to compete with piracy. Tap water is ubiquitous and free and the bottled water industry remains extremely profitable. Musician Trent Reznor gives away all his albums for free and still makes a ton of money around the unique ways he packages his music, e.g., selling a limited edition boxed set for $1500 (he made $1 million in less than 48 hours selling just those boxed sets).
   
8. The emerging business model (thanks to techdirt.com) to counter piracy seems to be:
   

   CwF + RtB = $$$

   
   This stands for Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy. iTunes offers convenience at almost no cost, and that's a great reason to buy instead of resorting to piracy. Reznor goes out of his way to cultivate and reward his fan base... then he offers them options to buy scarce goods like physical merchandise that cannot be pirated.

In 1999, I thought that all music piracy should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However, over time, I've come to see (as have the heads at ABC and Disney) that piracy is an informal business model and, as such, it's a more efficient use of one's resources to simply compete with that model rather than trying to fight against it. Look at hulu.com and abc.com as choice examples of how big Hollywood producers are effectively competing with piracy.

For all these reasons, I'm not so worried about piracy as I once was. Yes, it is a financial risk for producers if not approached properly, but as long as producers keep in close contact with their fans and give them a good reason to buy by making a great product, piracy will just give producers great exposure (like INK) and end up adding more value to their product.

If you want to read one of the most lucid and insightful interview about piracy, check out this interview of Eric Garland, Big Champagne's CEO (thanks to Sheri Candler's tweet.). Garland points out:

I don't want to sound like the armchair pundit. You end up sounding not very empathetic. You sound like some ass who says "This is how it's going to be and if you don't like too bad." I'm not trying to be dismissive. I'm not trying to be glib about this. I understand the implication may well be tens-of-thousands of jobs lost, billions of dollars pouring out of the industry, shutterings, downsizings...I'm not trying to make light of that. I'm just telling you that in the final accounting i think some things we now know. Some of them are very unpopular even in concept and some of them are very hard to incorporate into strategic thinking, but that doesn't make them any less avoidable or inevitable.

Then later:

We'll spend some number of months—I'm just essentially recounting the music industry's journey—filing vast numbers of infringement notifications, letting everybody and their granny know you're infringing our content. They'll take the temperature and they'll do surveys and collect data and they'll try to convince themselves that this is having a real effect in reversing the tide and then after some period it will just not have been convincingly demonstrated to have worked. And they'll realize that by any number of measures the piracy problem has only grown worse. But they will have to exhaust all of those things and more. They will have to chase legal remedies, legislative agendas, all the way to what they view as being the end of the line before they say "OK, so this really is the landscape we're stuck with. As much as we didn't want it, this appears to be it. Now we have to just dive in and make businesses that work here."

As Seth Godin put it, "...how will this new business model support the world as we know it today? Who cares if it does? It is. It's happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I'm sorry if that's inconvenient, but it's true."

Piracy is a Hydra

I went to a workshop on copyright the other night. It was extremely informative, but even the lawyer giving the lecture acknowledged that something major needed to be done to address the current situation of massive pirated downloads. Having worked as counsel for Tower Records, she represented them in that famous lawsuit against Napster because Napster had been dumb enough to specify in their business plan, "We're going to put companies like Tower Records out of business." Well, Napster went under, but then so did Tower Records. Ironically, Napster was reincarnated under a subscription-based model.

One attendee mentioned The Pirate Bay, which is an anti-copyright organization run out of Stockholm, Sweden. The Pirate Bay hosts a server indexing all BitTorrent files currently available, which means that if you go to their web site, you can find an "index" link to any film, movie, or song they have. When you use BitTorrent on that index link, it finds all the people who have a small fraction of that song on their computers and assembles all those parts into a complete file for you to watch or listen to. This is called, "hyperdistribution". As an American, by using BitTorrent, you have almost certainly infringed the copyright of the artists and their producers... but that doesn't seem to stop anyone from doing it. The Pirate Bay has gotten a lot of heat from the MPAA and record companies, and their offices were even raided by Swedish police in 2006. After that raid, however, The Pirate Bay was up and running again only three days later.

A few months ago, I discovered a site that goes a step farther—Watch-Movies.net. You don't even need BitTorrent to use this site. All you do is go to their site, type in the movie you want to see, and find the file that works the best for you. Invariably, these files are made from illegal camcorders in movie theatres, so you can see films still in general release. The quality is not always high, but if you're willing to sacrifice quality, then you can see practically any movie you want, for free, as long as you have access to the internet. Even though watch-movies.net stopped working quite suddenly (due to someone complaining, no doubt), Watch-movies-links.net Watch-Movies-online.tv Watchmovieslinksonline.com was started up not long thereafter.

A Whois lookup on Watch-movies-links.net returned this:

Registrant:
Name: Private Protection Co.LTD
Organization: Private Protection Co.LTD.
Address: NO.1111 Chaoyang Road, Beijing
City: Beijing
Province/state: BJ
Country: CN
Postal Code: 100000

Administrative Contact:
Name: Private Protection Co.LTD. Zhuhai Branch
Organization: Private Protection Co.LTD.
Address: NO.1 Meihua Road
City: Zhuhai
Province/state: GD
Country: CN
Postal Code: 519000
Email: ad9ad10c6983b7ffe00bb2a6fac1fdf4@domain-private.com

Dispute Contact:
Name: Todaynic.com,Inc.
Organization: Todaynic.com,Inc.
Address: 6B XIHAI Building, No.221 Renmin E Road, Xiangzhou District,
City: Zhuhai
Province/state: GD
Country: CN
Postal Code: 519000
Phone: +86.756-2281763
Nameserver Information:
ns3.01isp.com
ns4.01isp.net

As expected, Watch-Movies-Links.net is based in China, one of the largest violators of copyright. In doing research for my movie business plan, I learned China permits only 20 foreign movies to be shown annually in their country. If the tables were turned, and the best movies were always made in China, and the American government said I could only see 20 foreign movies per year—of which only a fraction were Chinese—I'm sure that I, too, would be a pirate without any ethical reservations. Since China is still under the yolk of communism, an ideology which divorces the individual from private property, I'm unsurprised when I hear Chinese citizens (proudly) call their country, "The nation of fake."

The ability for companies to brazenly violate copyright reminds me of the Hydra from Ancient Greek mythology. Hercules' Second Labor was to kill the Hydra, but "upon cutting off each of its heads, he found two grew back, an expression of the hopelessness of such a struggle". In this case, the MPAA, music companies, and the world's police are Hercules, and the Hydra is both the Pirates and the consumers who use BitTorrent. Try as they might, authorities can't seem to kill hyperdistribution. Shut down Napster? Here's BitTorrent. Shut down The Pirate Bay? They're up three days later. Shut down Watch-Movies.net? They switch domains. Sue consumers? You get a consumer backlash.

Why does piracy continue to flourish despite the continued assault from authorities? Because piracy at its core isn't a legal or technical matter, and thus cannot be solved with legal or technical tools. Piracy is in its essence a social problem only catalyzed by an unenforceable (and thus unrealistic) legal code and an astonishingly efficient delivery system. Rampant piracy is really just a symptom of users who want to consume content, and who aren't particularly interested in the hassle of paying for it. Sure, if it's easier to find content and pay for it than to download it over BitTorrent, they'll pay (thus the success of iTunes). But here's the bitter pill nobody wants to swallow: if a user goes out of their way to watch a pirated copy, they probably weren't a paying customer to begin with. Far from being a curse, users who watch pirated shows and movies and listen to pirated songs possess one unique benefit—a user who watches or listens to a pirated copy might like it enough to buy it on CD or DVD and/or recommend it to others... which is impossible if they never even watched or listened to it.

Sites like Hulu.com and ABC.com with its own media viewer show how the entertainment industry is evolving to come to viewers. Instead of not showing content online and "forcing" viewers into downloading episodes illegally, they're creating user-friendly parameters to make it easier for people to get the content they want, whenever they want it. The theory goes something like, if they're going to dally about with a mistress, at least we want to control who and where that mistress is... because we can make money off of that.

Lawrence Lessig makes an excellent point about copyright. The way the law is currently set up makes it too hard for providers to let users share, remix or use content. In an internet digital culture where sharing is the norm, copyright law is so restrictive that it's now stifling creativity. That's why I've become a fan of the Lessig's Creative Commons License.

My friend Nik said it best when talking about the pervasiveness of spam: "As long as you have a backwater country that doesn't crack down on spammers, you're always going to have spam. The only way to really fight spam is to manage it." Maybe one day, every country in the world will indeed have a police authority able and willing to protect the rights of every content producer around the world. I fear, though, that such a day will be long after my children have already grown up... and during that time, our culture will have since become accustomed to violating copyright as the norm.

Joining The Conversation

I heard about The Conversation this summer and immediately bought a ticket:

[P]ioneers at the forefront of change in cinema, video, games, media and technology are coming together to share ideas, insights, and innovations. Our focus is on new tools, new distribution channels, and new rules.... The format of the gathering will be experimental: rather than a traditional conference, short talks and demos, "fireside chats," and roundtables will spark a dynamic series of overlapping conversations.

Their guest list is enough to make any independent filmmaker salivate—Peter Broderick, for instance. His recent article in Indiewire about the New World of Distribution for indie filmmakers is germane to how (I think) digital entertainment will be distributed. Hunter Weeks is another gem on the list—he's one of the co-creators of 10 MPH, a documentary about two guys crossing the United States on a segway. Week's movie home page is an exquisite example of how to use the internet to market your own movies. Other notable invitees hail from Netflix, Createspace, Filmbaby, JibJab, Lucasfilm, ILM, The Webby Awards, and YouTube. See the complete list of speakers at the bottom.

One really appealing part of The Conversation—you can throw out your own ideas. I thought about it for awhile and this forum seems ideal to mention some of my own predictions on the future of digital entertainment. Frankly, in one form or another, I've been observing, discussing, and molling over the movie industry for three years and have a pretty well-informed opinion about it. So I decided to make a presentation of my own about license-based entertainment which will be a riff on a recent article I wrote about iTunes' Death Knell. My ardent hope is that my presentation isn't eclipsed by someone else's brilliant 90 minute lecture. I do hate redundancy.

The Conversation takes place all day this Friday and Saturday. Tickets are still on sale, but a little steep now at $150. But if you have nothing to do, come be my own peanut gallery!

COMPLETE LIST OF SPEAKERS

• Alex Afterman, Founder, Heretic Films
  
• Alex Lindsay, Founder, Pixel Corps
  
• Arin Crumley, Director, As the Dust Settles and Four Eyed Monsters
  
• Barbara Robertson, Journalist, CGSociety, Computer Graphics World, Digital Production
  
• Chris Thilk, Director of Marketing, Spout LLC
  
• Cliff Plumer, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Domain
  
• Dan Gregoire, Founder, Halon Entertainment
  
• Dana LoPiccolo-Giles, Co-founder, CreateSpace (formerly CustomFlix)
  
• Danae Ringelmann, Co-Founder, IndieGoGo
  
• Dean Valentine, CEO, Comedy.com and Founder, Symbolic Action; former CEO of UPN and President of Walt Disney Television
  
• Diana Barrett, Founder, The Fledgling Fund
  
• Evan Spiridellis, Head Art Guy, JibJab Media
  
• George Strompolos, Content Partnerships Manager, YouTube
  
• Graham Leggat, Executive Director, San Francisco Film Society (Moderator)
  
• Gregg Spiridellis, CEO Guy, JibJab Media
  
• Hunter Weeks, Director, 10 Yards and 10 MPH
  
• James LeBrecht, Berkeley Sound Artists
  
• Jason Harris, President, Mekanism
  
• Jeremiah Birnbaum, CEO, SF School of Digital Filmmaking
  
• Jesse Keane, Chief Technology Officer, CinemaNow
  
• Jim Sommers, Senior Vice President, ITVS
  
• John Batter, Co-President of Production, DreamWorks Animation SKG; former Group Studio General Manager, Electronic Arts
  
• John Gaeta, Visual Effects Designer, Speed Racer and the Matrix trilogy
  
• John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic
  
• Jonathan Marlow, Executive Director, San Francisco Cinematheque; formerly at Vudu and GreenCine
  
• Josh Wiggins, Senior Director of Global Strategic Sales, Ascent Media
  
• KC Blake, Anywhere/Anytime Content Lab, Entertainment Technology Center@USC
  
• Ken Eklund, Writer & Creative Director, "World Without Oil"
  
• Ken Goldberg, Director, Berkeley Center for New Media
  
• Lance Weiler, Filmmaker & Editor, The Workbook Project
  
• Michael Ferris Gibson, Director, 24 Hours on Craigslist & Producer, Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story
  
• Michealene Cristini Risley, Independent filmmaker, Tapestries of Hope
  
• Mike Curtis, HD for Indies
  
• Mike Shiley, Director, Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories & Dark Water Rising
  
• Nick Braccia, Creative Director, Deep Focus
  
• Peggy Weil, Artist & Game Developer, "Gone Gitmo" and "The Redistricting Game"
  
• Pete Ludé, SVP, Sony Electronics
  
• Peter Broderick, President, Paradigm Consulting
  
• Phil Tippett, Founder, Tippett Studio
  
• Reed Hastings, CEO & Founder, Netflix
  
• Rich Bradway, Associate Dir. of E-Commerce & New Media, Boston Symphony Orchestra
  
• Richard Kerris, Chief Technology Officer, Lucasfilm Ltd.
  
• Scilla Andreen, CEO, IndieFlix
  
• Scott Kirsner, Editor, CinemaTech
  
• Ted Hope, Co-Founder, This is That
  
• Tiffany Shlain, Filmmaker & Founder, The Webby Awards
  
• Tim Napoleon, Chief Strategist for Digital Media, Akamai
  
• Wendy Levy, Director of Creative Programming, Bay Area Video Coalition
  
• Woody Benson, Managing Partner, Prism VentureWorks

Cheating is part of the game

I just finished listening to an NPR about cheating in baseball. The scope was broad, covering things like a man in a skyscraper with binoculars relaying a catcher's signals to the batter's team, to things like moving the back fence further back to make it harder to hit a home run, and even things like painting greater numbers on the back fence to make it seem harder to hit a home run.

The gist was that cheating is part of the game, and while steroid use is explicitly illegal, most baseball players probably view sterioids as simply another way to gain an advantage over the other team given the pervasive attitude towards cheating.

The tacit implication is that the honest team, the one which refuses to cheat in any way, is destined to lose.

I'm reminded of a story Hans told me once about a bank owner. This bank was quite small and could barely make ends meet but they were installing a brand new ATM. This happened back when ATMs were still a new contraption, and new means expensive. "How can you afford to install one of those? Aren't ATMs really expensive?" they were asked. "Our competition already has ATMs. We can't afford to not install an ATM. If we don't, we'll be out of business within the month."

I'm not equating ATMs with cheating, but ATMs were a new technology to gain advantage over the competition in the same way cheating is used to gain advantage. If your competition is using a tool or technology you aren't using because you think it's "unfair" or "immoral", and your competition is winning because of it, you might want to reconsider your business strategy to take back your advantage. For example, Disney has already conceded that movie piracy is a successful business model to compete against... and in China, Microsoft doesn't sell MS Office for $150, but for $3.

Cheating is part of the game. Get used to it... or you should pre-pay your funeral costs.

Iron Man: 94% Tomatometer!

Thanks to Josh for bringing the Rotten Tomatoes review to my attention:


I credit Downey and Favreau. Can't wait to see it!!

And while we're on the topic, here's a look at the real Iron Man:

To compete or not to compete?

Here is Matt Mason's keynote speech at The Medici Summit last month in Scottsdale, Arizona, and one of the best videos I've ever seen on piracy. It's a good primer on his book, The Pirate's Dilemma, which deals with how to compete with and/or fight a swiftly emerging business model.

Highlights:

• If the average person were sued for the maximum amount they were liable every day for copyright infringment—meaning photocopying, backing up CDs to your computer, remixing tapes, etc.—they would be liable for $12.4 million. Every day.


• American foreign policy during the Industrial Revolution was to completely ignore international copyright and patent laws... which allowed America to industrialize quickly and cheaply.
  
• Initially, innovators are branded pirates by their peers—Thomas Edison created the phonograph, which musicians hated because they thought it jeopardized their income. Since then, musicians have made more money off the record industry they could have ever made by only playing live.
  
• When Thomas Edison first created his film projector, he charged a license fee to use it. Many filmmakers thought Edison's licence fee was too high, so they ignored the law and set up their own film community far away from Edison's lawyers on the West Coast... that film community we now know as Hollywood. (The leader of these rogue filmmakers was William Fox, of 20th Century Fox.)
  
• To compete with Chinese software pirates, Microsoft offers their software for only $3.
  
• When pirates encroach on your market, the question is: do they add value? If they do, then you must then ask yourself, what business are you really in? What is your product? For example, Apple doesn't sell music or movies—they sell convenience.

Producers suing consumers

I've been having an on-again, off-again discussion with Dave about J. K. Rowling's lawsuit against a fan who is publishing his own Harry Potter encyclopedia. The fan runs a Harry Potter fan web site with over a million visitors, and the site includes an online encyclopedia detailing everything in the Harry Potter Universe—an encyclopedia which Rowling herself has admitted using—but the moment the fan converts that encyclopedia into a book format, Rowling sues him over copyright infringement.

Surely the fan had already been making money from his web site's advertisers... so why didn't Rowling sue him then? When the same content hops from one format to another, suddenly the content is a financial threat to Rowling?

Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney conceded in 2006 that "piracy is a business model", not a war on its own customers: “We understand now that piracy is a business model. It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do—through quality, price and availability. We don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.”

Tomorrow, I'll be posting a superb video on piracy which really shows how current copyright laws are no longer applicable to the modern world. For now, here's the full article on the Rowling lawsuit:

Rowling suing fan over new Potter book
NEW YORK (AP) -- Best-selling author J.K. Rowling said Monday that her efforts to halt a publisher's "Harry Potter" encyclopedia have been crushing her creativity.

Rowling told a New York court that she had stopped work on a new novel because the federal lawsuit had "decimated my creative work over the last month."

Rowling is suing RDR Books to stop publication of Steven Vander Ark's "Harry Potter Lexicon" on the grounds that her copyrights are being violated.

"This book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work," she testified Monday.

RDR's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, has defended the lexicon as a reference guide. Falzone called it a legal effort "to organize and discuss the complicated and very elaborate world of Harry Potter."

When Rowling's lawyer asked how she felt about Harry, she replied: "I really don't want to cry." But she looked like she was about to do just that.

A smiling Rowling, who brought the lawsuit last year, earlier arrived at the lower Manhattan courthouse wearing a gray pinstriped jacket and a gray knee-length skirt, but did not speak as she entered the building.

She says her copyrights are being violated by a fan who plans to publish a "Harry Potter" encyclopedia.

The showdown between Rowling and Vander Ark is scheduled to last most of the week in U.S. District Court. The writer will spend her breaks in the seclusion of a jury room -- away from any die-hard Potter fans.

The trial comes eight months after Rowling published her seventh and final book in the series. The books have been published in 64 languages, sold more than 400 million copies and spawned a film franchise that has pulled in $4.5 billion at the worldwide box office.

Rowling is a fan of the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site that Vander Ark runs. But she draws the line when it comes to publishing the book and charging $24.95. She also says it fails to include any of the commentary and discussion that enrich the Web site and calls it "nothing more than a rearrangement" of her own material.

One of her lawyers, Dan Shallman, on Friday told Judge Robert P. Patterson, who is hearing the trial without a jury, that Rowling "feels like her words were stolen."

He said the author felt so personally violated that she made her own comparisons among her seven best-selling novels and the lexicon and was ready to testify about the similarities in dozens of instances.

David Saul Hammer, a lawyer for RDR Books, said the publisher would not challenge the claim by Rowling that much of the material in the lexicon infringed her copyrights.

But the judge will decide whether the use of the material by the small Muskegon, Michigan, publisher was legal because it was used for some greater purpose, such as a scholarly pursuit.

In court papers filed prior to the trial, Rowling said she was "deeply troubled" by the book.

"If RDR's position is accepted, it will undoubtedly have a significant, negative impact on the freedoms enjoyed by genuine fans on the Internet," she said. "Authors everywhere will be forced to protect their creations much more rigorously, which could mean denying well-meaning fans permission to pursue legitimate creative activities."

In court papers, Vander Ark, 50, said he was a teacher and school librarian in Byron Center, Mich., before recently moving to London to begin a career as a writer.

He said he joined an adult online discussion group devoted to the Harry Potter books in 1999 before launching his own Web site as a hobby a year later. Since then, neither Rowling nor her publisher had ever complained about anything on it, he said.

In May 2004, he said, Rowling mentioned his Web site on her own, writing, "This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an Internet cafe while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing). A Web site for the dangerously obsessive; my natural home."

The Web site attracts about 1.5 million page views per month and contributions from people all over the world, Vander Ark said.

He said he initially declined proposals to convert the Web site into an encyclopedia, in part because he believed until last August that in book form, it would represent a copyright violation.

After Rowling released the final chapter in the Harry Potter series that same month, Vander Ark was contacted by an RDR Books employee, who told him that publication of the lexicon would not violate copyright law, he said.

Still, to protect himself, Vander Ark said he insisted that RDR Books include a clause in his contract that the publisher would defend and pay any damages that might result from claims against him.

He said it was decided that the lexicon would include sections from the Lexicon Web site that give descriptions and commentary on individual names, places, spells and creatures from Harry Potter stories.

In his court statement, Vander Ark still sounds like a fan, saying the lexicon "enhances the pleasure of readers of the Potter novels, and deepens their appreciation of Ms. Rowling's achievement."

But the affection no longer seems a shared experience.

In court Friday, Hammer said Rowling's lawyers did not want Vander Ark in the courtroom while Rowling testified.

Equal & Opposite. And boring.

There's a trend I've noticed with three recent Superhero movies/TV series:

* Iron Man fights... a more powerful Iron Man.
* The Incredible Hulk fights... a more powerful Incredible Hulk.
* The Bionic Woman fights... a more powerful Bionic Woman.

Booooooooooooooooooooo-ring!

Give me Ang Lee's Hulk (yes, I liked it so stop rolling your eyes), or Steve Austin vs. Sasquatch, or Batman and any of his villians!

The book's the thing

While looking over my the two and a half years of blogging about the film industry, it occurred to me that I write a lot about the form of digital entertainment, i.e., how digital content is delivered to consumers. For example, I was early to note how Netflix was developing downloadable movies through their site, how Universal was offering download-to-own DVDs, and how Steven Soderbergh tried to combat piracy by releasing his film Bubble in theatres and DVDs simulatenously.

A number of my readers have been after me to do a book, citing that many of my posts are entertaining and informative about the film business. Between my own projects and other work, I've thought about it. Indeed, a man cannot live on blog alone. Given my inordinate fascination about The Shape Of Things To Come for digital entertainment, a book about piracy in the entertainment industry seemed like the next natural step.

However, I've been testing the winds to see which direction I should set sail. Filmmakers in the mini DV world live in perpetual anxst, one foot in each camp: I'd like to get a sweet studio distribution deal, but will I fare better if I offer up my film for a $1 download? If I'm going to write a book on music and movie piracy, I have to figure out exactly how I feel about it, and why.

Over the last two months, I've started to see the entertainment industry in a different light. I used to get violently angry when I saw movies getting copied. "It's immoral and illegal!" I used to say. "Why does everyone keep doing it? Don't they know they're destroying the entertainment industry?"

However, after hearing about how pervasive piracy is in India, China, Brazil and Eastern Europe, I changed my mind about it... a lot.

The world has changed. People treat digital content much more differently than they would a car or a house. And digital content is different. You can't duplicate a car 1,000 times and give those duplicates away for free. So why are we applying the rules of car ownership to something so inherently different? The fact is, the world is deciding on its own how it wants to pay money for this new kind of object—we can steadfastly enforce our car ownership rules on it and watch people steal anyway, or we can listen to what the world is telling us and find a way to work within that framework.

Anyway, here's a section of the book I started writing, which will probably end up in the introduction somewhere:

Let's say you owned a shop selling pastries in a small town somewhere. Every morning at 8:00 sharp, you unlock the front door, turn off the alarm, get ready for business. Your doors open at 9:00 and you serve your customers as they come in. One pastry costs you $1 to make, and $5 to sell, leaving you with a nice revenue of $4. Kids in the neighborhood stare longingly at your yummy pastries through your shopfront window, and while you're busy serving customers, they might try palm a pastry or two without you seeing, but you almost always catch them. Once you've caught them, you might call the cops and have them prosecuted, or you might dismiss it as a harmless nuisance. At 5:00 that evening, you close your doors, turn on your alarm, and go home. This is perfectly sensible approach to doing business and making a living. In fact, you could do this your whole life, and even teach your children to do it, if they wanted to. There is enough profit in it to allow your business to continue well into the future.

Now let's say your shop selling pastries suddenly had some alterations to it, some real and some magical. Let's imagine that anyone could buy one of your pastries and duplicate it perfectly... which they gleefully do, and pass along these duplications to everyone they know. Additionally, your shop now has no windows so anyone can lean in and take a pastry from your storefront before you even know what's happened. Your business still has an alarm, but now it has a 24 hour delay before going off so by the time the cops come, the thieves would be long gone. On top of that, everyone in this small town is constantly awake so you can't possibly stand guard all day long to ward off thieves. Even if you could successfully jail all the offenders, the local jail is nowhere near large enough to hold all the offenders. Worst of all, many of the thieves don't think what they're doing is fundamentally wrong; for years, they've been grumbling that $5 per pastry is really too high a price to pay, and they're finally "balancing the scales" by taking back what is owed them. Your revenues plummet, and you shout at anyone who will listen, how could everything have become so unfair to your once idyllic lifestyle?

This is the state of the movie industry now. Where once a small town business thrived under the buying and selling of the commodity business model, it now exists in a different game with different rules. The Old Pastry Shop existed under a capitalist framework derived from an Industrial Age, and the New Pastry Shop functions within a new economic model forged from the Information Age.

As with all evolutionary processes, only the animals who adapt to their new environment will thrive, while the others clinging to their old traditions will starve over time and, with venomous hissing, eventually self-extinguish. When DVDs are priced at $35 and CDs are priced at $20, movie and music producers have only themselves to blame for seeing their customers rationalize pastry theft.

Our world is smack in the middle of a war over how to most effectively monetize the distribution of digital content. We've already seen some successful business models emerge, but only time will tell if these new approaches have any stamina. In a global market of the Information Age where digital content is no longer bought and sold under the old storefront paradigm, piracy is the genie that won't go back in the bottle. Thus, the question movie and music producers—and even software developers—must ask themselves now is, how do we make money off this new model?

Because the alternative is death by a thousand cuts.

Iron Mac

I tell you, I'm a man obsessed.

The Pursuit of Superhappiness

Recently, I've been a little obsessed about Iron Man.

The trailer for the Iron Man movie got me really stoked to see it... and it took some weeks to figure out why. Finally, I got it: Iron Man is the perfect superhero.

Iron Man's alter ego, Tony Stark, is an hideously wealthy and unscrupulous weapons dealer... and he's an alcoholic. Hardly superhero material, wouldn't you agree? That is, until he's kidnapped and has a life-changing epiphany to right the wrongs he's spent a lifetime building a career on.

Superheroes are appealing to modern audiences because superheroes emulate god-like powers, but also because they typify the epic struggle of one vs. many. As mere individuals in an increasingly globalized society, we all yearn to be the one person fighting against overwhelming odds to make a substantial difference in the world. We all want to be a superhero, and that doesn't always mean wearing a cape—perhaps it means being a gifted young wizard, or jedi, or an average guy who can bend the Matrix... or maybe it can mean being an exceptionally observant detective, or even a teenager with a funny name and a yapping dog.

Superman has dominated American pop culture, and it's easy to see why. He's got all the tricks in his bag, right? He can fly, he's got X-ray vision, freezing breath, he's incredibly strong... who can deny him the best table in the house?

The problem with Superman is that he's royalty—he was born with all his powers. Sure, maybe not on his home planet, but he's thrust onto our planet (bearing a striking resemblance to humans!) where he's suddenly this mega-being. If we're talking about swallowing a Convenient Plot Development pill, that's about the biggest one there is. And also, almost nothing ever kills this guy! It's a little ridiculous.

And then there's Batman, exactly the opposite from Superman in that he's a self-made hero. Which is like saying that with enough money and muscle tone, anyone could be Batman. Obviously, that's far more democratic than Superman's coronated noble blood, but Batman also has some noteworthy flaws...

First, Batman is too provincial. His stomping ground is Metropolis Gotham City. What about all the other thousands of cities without their own mega-rich and mega-powerful concerned citizens? Sucks to be them! Second, Batman is too vulnerable—one well-timed bomb and Pfttt!—game over. Thirdly, like Superman, you can tell Batman is a cracker. Meaning, with some good guesswork, you could figure out his secret identity, especially in this world of DNA testing. Finally, Batman's drive to fight crime is motivated by a vendetta, which can end rather abruptly once he vanquishes his parents' killer.

Iron Man, though, carries many Superman attributes: he's strong, he can fly, he's impervious, has a global reach. Unlike Superman, his identity is 100% protected (i.e., no part of his face is shown)... and he's a guy just like any of us. A guy with flaws. Sure, he has some innate talents, like intelligence and insight, so he's not totally equal to everyone else, but that's as close as you're likely to get for a superhero. Furthermore, he has derived enormous wealth from his talents, and because his wealth was generated by designing weaponry, that initiated a sequence of events leading to his own epiphany...

This last bit is particularly interesting. Most superheroes are victims of unfortunate circumstance, like Spiderman (bit by a radioactive spider), Batman (parents were murdered), Daredevil (doused by a truck's radioactive spill), The Fantastic Four (caught in a weird space radioactivity), The Incredible Hulk (an unintentional overdose of Gamma rays), etc. It's refreshing, then, to see Iron Man change that pattern: Stark is kidnapped and forced to make a weapon... which causes him to re-evaluate his life. So his epiphany is the result of his kidnapping, and the kidnapping is the result of his talents as an arms-builder. Thus, his own talents and life's earlier achievements set in motion a series of events leading to his revelations later in life. Stark then chooses to become Iron Man not because he was coincidentally in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because his talents led to his own incarceration. If character is plot, or who you are determines what happens to you, then Stark was always destined to become Iron Man. It was only a matter of time.

So now we see Stark as a man forever guilt-stricken, eternally repentant. Unlike Batman, he will never succeed in definitively righting the wrongs he's made and his quest to fight evil-doers will have no end in sight. On top of all that, he must struggle with his own alcoholic demons. Bruce Wayne, this guy is not—and we relate to him for it.

A final note... the difference between a fantasy genre and sci-fi genre involves the "Black Box": in a fantasy genre, the Black Box does something amazing—e.g., levitation, teleportation, telepathy, whatever—and nobody can open it up to see how or why it does what it does; its abilities are called "magic" and that's that. Yet in a sci-fi genre, you can open up the Black Box at any moment and list the scientific reasons why it does what it does. For this reason, the X-Men are closer cousins to the fantasy genre than sci-fi, as is Superman (hell, Superman is closer to supernatural!), while Iron Man and Batman are closer to the sci-fi genre.

And Iron Man could kick Batman's ass any day of the week, yo!

Am I bad, sick, and wrong...

...for laughing at this?

Iron Man!

I haven't been as excited to see a superhero film since Batman Begins!!

Iron Man Exclusive Trailer

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Title Credits, Part 1

Most indie filmmakers make some common mistakes... maybe they don't spend money to color correct, or pay for a good soundtrack, or tweak the sound enough. Maybe they don't even spend money getting good sound to begin with.

Yet the most common misstep for indies is treating credits like an afterthought. Most indies resort to printing credits in 30 point white courier font on a black background. Oh no no no no no no no. Credits are a wonderful and special opportunity to set the stage for whatever shall follow, and all low-budget indie filmmakers should try hard to take advantage of that opportunity.

I suppose indie filmmakers see title credits as "merely" the ribbon one ties on a gift, and thus not as important as the gift itself. The truth of it is that the ribbon, the wrapping, even the fluffy bow... all of it is part of the gift. One might even argue that, because the ribbon and gift-wrap and fluffy bows all happen before the gift, they are as important, or even more important, than the gift itself. First impressions last.

In my mind, opening and closing credit sequences are like an appetizer and digestive at a sit down dinner: at the start, a credit sequence whets the palate by setting the tone and pace of the story, by introducing the setting—and in a best case, also sets up the characters and sketches out the backstory—and at the end of the film, a closing title sequence leaves the viewer with an lasting aftertaste.

How do you make good credits? What consists of a "good" credit? The answer is simple: integration. Find the core element of your film, whether it be comedy or horror or sci-fi, and use that to make your credits so unique that the title credits could only introduce your film. Look to the story's subject for inspiration. For example, if you're making a movie about a cleaning lady, draw title credits on a wall with crayons and have them get "cleaned away". I'm merely thinking off the top of my head, but if you think long enough, you will probably find something so unique for your story that's it's probably not been done yet.

Here are some of my favorite title credit sequences, with a few comments about each.

Delicatessen

Delicatessen -movie titles from DoYouReadMe?! on Vimeo.

Jeunet and Caro do some great titles with all their movies, but this is perhaps their best. If you're a fan of Delicatessen, check out the simple credits for their brilliant short film Foutaises.


Se7en

David Fincher hired Kyle Cooper to do these credits as a "mini-film", and the results speak for themselves. Following Se7en, Cooper went on to do over 150 movie credits sequences.


Thank You For Smoking

These are not my favorite, but they do capture the spirit of the film.


Dawn of The Dead

By splicing real news, fake news, and chaotic shots of zombies, these credits set a perfect tone for the film. Not to mention that the title sequence bridges the time gap from when the lead character goes to sleep and wakes up the following morning. Credits again by Kyle Cooper.


Serenity

Serenity's first 15 minutes are more than just title credits—they deftly outline a complicated backstory, introduce you to the Firefly ship, all of the Firefly's passengers, the story's villain, and finally hint at where the story is headed. This part of the title sequence starts with the main title and ends halfway through the credits. I challenge you to remember how many names you see on the screen.


Firefly

I put these in not because they're my favorite credits, but because they contrast so much with Serenity's credits, the movie version of the Firefly TV series; these credits introduce the series' characters and clearly set the tone of the series as half sci-fi and half Western.


Six Feet Under

Genius imagry set to music by Thomas Newman. If you knew nothing about this series, you'd get a pretty damned good idea after watching these credits.


Drive

From a cancelled series, but still fun to watch. You get a sense of the kinetic when watching these credits.


Battlestar Galactica

This is a clever 3 part mix: 1st part tells you what you need to know about the Cylons, 2nd part sketches out the backstory of how they Cylons are chasing humans, and the 3rd part shows lightning flash clips of the show for that episode.


Mission Impossible
(TV show, 60s)

Battlestar: Galactica got their 3rd part technique from an old 1960s show. Sure, this dates a lot now, but it still captures a feel for the action spy genre. And remember that these kinds of clips were done on film, not video, so you can just imagine how hard it was to do each opening sequence.


Mission: Impossible
(TV show, 1988)

A little more slick than the 60s, but the format is generally the same.


Tomorrow I'll show how I'm doing credits for a low-budget film... for less than one dollar.

CLOVERFIELD: Marketing the American Godzilla

Last week, I spent 2 hours of my life learning about Slusho drinks and Tagruato's deep sea drilling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, first go watch the trailers for Cloverfield (first the teaser, then the full trailer).

Now, in one sense, Cloverfield isn't unique at all—it looks like a retelling of a tired genre, the Japanese monster movie. In another sense, however, it's innovative because it tells that story from the point of view of a small group of people. Unlike Godzilla, a monster which also attacks New York (why New York? Why not Charleston, West Virginia [thanks for the correction, Joe!] or Flagstaff, Arizona?), the viewer will probably have more invested in what happens to the main characters. It's like Blair Witch meets 9/11 and Godzilla. It's not surprising J. J. Abrams is behind this project—Cloverfield is a close cousin of Lost: put people you care about in an insane situation and see how they react.

Lost's popularity lays in the "peeling of the onion"—the more layers you peel back, the more layers you find. Each answer only gives you more questions. Of course, foreplay only lasts so long and some viewers have become frustrated with Lost's serpentine plotlines, while others are drawn to the story's emotional core: its characters. As in real life, Lost's story comes to you in scattered pieces of information. Like Ian Fassburg used to say, "A woman who's almost naked is far sexier than a woman who's totally naked." Viewers like to be given a challenge, a puzzle to figure out.

This is why Cloverfield looks to be such a great film. By framing the story from the point of view of strangers, without the benefit of any omniscient "meanwhile..." cutaways, the viewer is immediately handicapped and must struggle along with the characters to make sense of the impossible. A monster attack? What monster? How big is it? Where did it come from? What damage is it doing? What does it look like? Can it even be beaten? What will happen to us? What will happen to the city? What will happen to the world? These questions are visceral, emotional, atavistic. The trailer exploits that by piggybacking on the fears of another cataclysmic attack like 9/11... it's not by coincidence the characters witness a huge explosion from a Manhattan rooftop.

Some other simple tricks to hook the viewer into the story—the release date synchs up to the story's time, so photos taken in the film (and posted on the official web site, pictured at left) are datestamped to when the film is set for release... so the viewer will be able to easily imagine they're watching a live telecast. The first trailers didn't even list a movie title, just 1-18-08, the release date of the film. Even after the title was released, Abrams said the only official web site for the movie is www.1-18-08.com, but as of today there's nothing much on that site except for a few photographs. Flipping the photographs on 1-18-08.com (it's a Flash site) gives you more information about the characters, which leads—with some detective work—to their Myspace profiles:

myspace.com/robbyhawkins
myspace.com/jamielascano
myspace.com/robbyhawkins
myspace.com/hudsonplatt
myspace.com/jj_hawkins
myspace.com/lily_ford
myspace.com/marlenadiamond
myspace.com/beth_mcintyre

Look at each profile carefully—each person has each other person's profile in their top 8 friends list. Clever!

Rumors were also circulated that the film's title was to be called Slusho. Slusho? What the hell is that? A Google search for "Slusho" yields Slusho.jp as the top result, which appears to have nothing to do with Cloverfield... at first glance.

But look closer: the site has a commercial contest where the public can submit their own commercial for Slusho. The address for contest submission is Bold Futura, LLC, 1223 Wilshire Boulevard, No. 1422, Santa Monica, CA 90403. Huh? What's a Japanese company doing with a Santa Monica address?

Researching Bold Futura, LLC took me to boldfutura.org, which was live when I saw it, but is now defunct. From that site, I first heard about their affiliate company, Tagruato, a deep sea drilling company. A glance at Tagruato's web site, tagruato.jp, shows an interactive map of deep sea drilling; their most recent, and biggest, drilling rig is in the Atlantic Ocean, not far from New York City... Googling Tagruato led me to an intriguing blog at tagruato.blogspot.com, which appears to be run by a Greenpeace-like group blaming Tagruato for destroying our oceans. On that blog, they claim to have received notes from whistle-blowers inside the deep sea drilling company that "bad things are happening."

ALL these sites have been created to promote Cloverfield and, without realizing it, you can easily get pulled into this alternate reality and start to care about the characters listed on Myspace. This kind of marketing isn't new—it's called "immersive entertainment" and it's been used for films before. The goal is to create a world where easter eggs are sprinkled across multiple web sites for those curious enough to seek them out. When someone finds a new piece of the puzzle, they discuss its meaning and import with others and the end result is a phenomenal word of mouth about the movie. I mean, look at me... I'm practically a walking advertisement for a movie I haven't even seen yet.

I had so much fun learning about this marketing campaign that I just had to buy my own Slusho T-shirt and baseball hat... I'm told the box it arrives in includes newspaper stuffing offering even more clues about the movie!



If you want to know the complete lowdown about the ad campagin, here's a real site which lays out everything currently known about each of the sites listed above:
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20546

And don't forget to see Cloverfield on January 18th!

Credits to The Kingdom

Today's shout out goes to the opening credits for Peter Berg's new film The Kingdom, thanks to John August.

Most filmmakers consider credits as an afterthought, which is a missed opportunity: opening credits set the mood, pace, and context of a story, as in The Kingdom, where the viewer is given over 70 years of Saudi history in under 4 minutes. Unlike films from the 1940s, no screen time is wasted from pimping ego—we are immediately thrown into the fray to review crucial, and visually sugar-coated, information. By the time our story has begun, the viewer already has a clear sense for what's at stake and whose interests are in play.

Design-wise, those credits remind me of What Barry Says, an animated short which turns a boring diatribe into an entertaining monologue:

And while we're talking about amazing credit design, check out my all-time favorite, from David Fincher's Se7en, done by Kyle Cooper's company, Imaginary Forces:

My Shortest Apposition, Part 1

If you want to spend more time with your friends, do a project with them. —Josh Mehler

I've been quiet about this next film project I'm working on because there hasn't really been a need to talk about it, but I'm in the final stages of preparation for a short I'm directing a week from today. My old friend Hans, a highly talented still photographer, was finding himself spending an alarmingly disproportionate amount of time listening to DVD director commentaries. Finally, earlier this year, he emailed me with this singular resolute sentence: "Dude, we've got to make a film together."

Of all the people I know, Hans is certainly the most meticulous and I know he'd take the studying of, and the craft of, cinematography very seriously. Naturally, I was stoked he wanted to shoot something for real. The plan is one day to do features, and hopefully many of them.

Instead of horsing around with random shooting experiments, we decided to do a short film and learn about each stage of the filmmaking process. I strongly believe in the power of experiential learning: you can read a million books, take hundreds of lectures, even do correspondence clsses, whatever—in the end, the only way to gather and retain life lessons is to go out and make actual mistakes. Some schools embrace this philosophy by offering hands-on experience before you make expensive mistakes in the real world, but too often schools teach children to avoid making mistakes. Thus, Hans and I decided to use an experimental short film to make a bunch of mistakes and not feel too guilty about them. (NB: Depending on the goal of a short film, i.e., whether it's a souped up home movie vs. striving to win an Academy Award or some other prestigious award, I have firm opinions about how much money should be invested on short films.)

Initially, we were going to do this whole short in miniDV to let our hair down and really experiment, but then Hans bought a 16mm camera and we starting thinking of ways to experiment shooting with film, too. The problem is, film is expensive. It's expensive to develop, it's expensive to transfer to a digital format, and—if you go that route—it's expensive to transfer an edited digital version back onto film. Plus, adding sound into the equation is another financial headache. Video is an infinitely better medium to get your feet wet in filmmaking without completely jumping in. Nevertheless, Hans and I were moving in the direction of shooting a feature on celluloid, so why not learn sooner rather than later?

Great! I thought. This short will look beautiful if we shoot it on film. After all, shooting a film with celluloid is how Vin Deisel made his superb breakthrough short Multi-Facial (which Steven Spielberg saw and instantly hired him for Saving Private Ryan). But shooting in film would also skyrocket our budget... could we combine the financial advantages of video with the sublime beauty of film? More importantly, how could we shoot in 16mm without blowing so much money that we'd start to get gunshy? If our goal were to be experimental, we couldn't constantly be worried about burning film; it would kill any desire to embrace our mistakes and thus stifle our ability to learn.

As many of you know, I'm a huge fan of integration—if something doesn't belong in the story, it's gratuitous. If the bulk of your film is shot in video, you don't just shoot film because you can. It's weird and distracting and isn't true to the nature of weaving a compelling narrative spell. If you put something in, it needs to serve a purpose.

My next thought: shooting in film is expensive. That's its weakness. Film is also troublesome when doing synch sound, especially since the 16mm camera Hans bought was quite noisy. So if we shot anything in 16mm, it would have to be MOS (silent), or the camera would have to be so far away that the mic wouldn't pick any of the noisy reel clatter. How could we turn this weakness into a strength? And how could we integrate these two formats seamlessly?

Tune in tomorrow to find out...