Many do of course and that’s fantastic, but that’s where it usually ends. What about those films whose content isn’t suitable for this kind of cross-platform approach? Where’s the value in those films? What most people do is publish them on Vimeo, hoping to connect with a broad audience. And of course it’s a whole different piece of work with a whole new set of challenges. The material in my story would work well in that medium, but that isn’t the same for every film. One idea I’ve had is to retell the story as a graphic novel, sell it to a publisher and package the film with it. After tip-toeing gently round the festival circuit, keeping it carefully out of sight, by the time I’m able to release it online I’ll inevitably be off doing other things. It is, in many ways, a much purer expression of who I am as a filmmaker - dare I say it - as an artist, than the feature film. It was a stupid film to make yet make it I did, because, yeah - okay, I was passionate about it, that’s fine, but most of all, because I was having so much fun making it, it kept paying back all that effort in what was being created. No one’s going to watch it online, I can’t sell it to television stations and its worth as a calling card would have been undiminished had it merely been ten minutes long. Nobody makes shorts of that length because it’s just stupid. Were it 20 minutes longer it would qualify as a feature. That film became a repository for all the creative ideas that couldn’t be put into the feature film. So I wrote a short martial arts love story that I managed to partly fund with a record label, making up the rest myself. We shot the film for a low budget on a tight schedule and while it’s entirely possible to shoot ten pages in one day, it does seriously limit how complex you can be with your shot design and coverage. I’m an independent filmmaker and shot my first feature film, AfterDeath, earlier in the year with long time co-director, Gez Medinger. So what’s to be done? Well, let me tell you about myself for a moment.
That’s a shame.Īs I see it, shorts must overcome three significant hurdles: curatorship, a lack of interest from the general public, and massive competition from all other media. There are some absolutely phenomenal shorts, but very few see them and they’re lost in the back catalogue of careers that reach for something greater. Should it not be more of a gentle hop? Shorts are a terribly undervalued and often scorned satellite of the filmmaking universe: just a stepping stone, a calling card, a 48-hour challenge.
That’s not to say it couldn’t work for features but why not start small and build up? I often hear people talk about making the ‘jump’ to features. What I’m proposing is a new model for short form content because that’s where I see the biggest opportunity. Instead of relying on the charity of our end consumer, could we motivate them in ways that actively encouraged their selfishness? By doing so it seemed we might create a fascinating dynamic between filmmaker and audience, a partnership based on mutual self-interest. My own view is distinctly colored by the perception of man as fundamentally selfish – What’s in it for me? Much direct distribution these days depends on altruism, generosity and other acts of selflessness, so I wondered if perhaps we were looking at things the wrong way. One of the skills required of any director is an acute point of view on human nature. Could we perhaps investigate a model of distribution that redrew that relationship? It also struck me that these new methods of distribution were more often than not just different ways of presenting the same mechanic: the audience as consumer (albeit invested and interested,) the filmmaker as supplier. Apathy.ĭirect distribution is fantastic when it works, but it often feels as if we have to shout like deranged evangelical nuts just to be heard. I kept coming up against the same problem though. Over the past few years I’ve been following people like Ted Hope, Sheri Candler and Jon Reiss whose staunch advocacy of the power of direct distribution fired my imagination and got me thinking about innovative ways to promote and distribute my own work.
This letter is an attempt to understand the shape of the market right now and offer up one possible way to create a system that benefits everyone: the money man, the audience, the filmmaker and a new category that we’ve never seen before in our industry, the collector. But I’ve recently been wondering whether we can support and underpin the efforts of those at that level by rethinking the short form landscape. It will take some giant efforts to change it. The feature film industry is a giant behemoth.
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