This edition of TCIBR is brought to you by IndieFlix and Breakthrough Distribution – Inventing the Movies is a new book by Scott Kirsner that details Hollywood’s epic battle between innovation and the status quo. Scott joins us for a discussion about cinema’s past, present and future. Of particular note for filmmakers is a discussion around the pull economy / attention economy and how building and maintaining audiences is going to be the future of independent filmmaking.

For more on Scott visit www.cinematech.blogspot.com


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Paperback edition
PDF/E-book edition

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This edition of TCIBR is brought to you by IndieFlix and Breakthrough Distribution – Jeff Gomez turned his childhood passion for role playing into a successful transmedia venture. His company Starlight Runner Entertainment has expanded the intellectual property of brands (Hot Wheels, Magic: The Gathering , Pirates of the Caribbean) by developing cross-platform storyworlds that engage audiences in new and interesting ways. The design and builds of these worlds have included comics, video games, animated films, toys, and web sites.

For more on Jeff Gomez and Starlight Runner click here

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RELATED:
Henry Jenkins interview with Jeff Gomez

Futures of Entertainment 2 – Cult Media

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Timo Vuorensola is a filmmaker who has fully embraced the concept of crowdsourcing. After the success of his last feature film Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning which has been downloaded over 8 million times, Timo and his team created a platform to help others crowdsource their movies.

WB: Can you explain Space Wreck and how the audience played a role in the film?

TV: Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning was a huge collaborative effort made by a core group of 5 people, and a community of about 3000 volunteers from around the world, during the years 1998-2005, in a small country of Finland, with the help of Internet.

We started working on a film with only a little knowledge in how to actually make a feature-length film. Luckily we had a small base of a community, thanks to our earlier Star Wreck -episodes (mainly short animations), who were very eager to help us out. Without thinking too much, we started to ask for help from the community, which proved pretty soon to be a very good resource base, whatever was our need – when we wanted people to help us out with the script, when we needed actors, when we needed 3d-models, and later when we needed publicity, subtitles & all that type of things.

WB: What is the concept behind Wreck a Movie and what lead to its creation?

TV: The idea was when we started working on our next film, Iron Sky, that we wanted to do the film in many ways the same way as Star Wreck – by having the community joining the production. We realized, that what we did with Star Wreck, communicating via email, forums, ICQ, MSN, IRC and other stuff like that was OK, but pretty inefficient. So we wanted to build a platform that would support what we called ‘collaborative film production’ for Iron Sky, and started to design one.

Obviously none of us knew anything about coding or anything, but we had a good understanding on how the community works, and what makes it tick – we’ve always had this kind of intuition. So we gathered some money, hired some coders and started to build the platform.

Few years later we now have a good Alpha of the system up and running, and it’s already working the way I’ve always wanted it to work: it activates people, gets a lot of good input, and strengthens the community around the film.

WB: Looking forward what type of role do audiences play in the process of creating and distributing films?

TV: I would say there’s a lot of roles that the community can either fill or be helping with. Personally, I wouldn’t think about writing the script collaboratively, or trying to find some solutions on collaborative directing, but I think on pre-production and post production the community can be a very effective help, and later on on getting the message across the Internet, it’s most valuable.

WB: Do you think audiences are looking for a richer experience with their entertainement and if so what have you personally seen that shows this?

TV: I’d say that the media consuming habits are changing and adjusting to the fact that Internet is around, and the people want to have a more personal experience with the media. Thus, the most personal experience with media is actually to create or join the creation of the media itself.

WB: What is next for you?

TV: Right now we are working on a film production called Iron Sky, which tells a story about Nazis that went to the Moon in 1945, and now, it’s 2018, and they are returning to earth. It’s the first film on WreckAMovie, with another finnish film, a horror flick called Sauna. We are opening Wreck A Movie for outside productions slowly during this year. I’m also working on few very early ideas for some films, and going around the world to talk about WAM and our stuff etc.

Iron Sky trailer:

This edition of TCIBR is brought to you by IndieFlix and Breakthrough Distribution – Karin Chien is an independent film producer based in New York City. She’s produced a number of independent films such as Robot Stories, The Motel, and Undoing. For films such as Robot Stories and Undoing, Karin and her team applied a hybrid DIY approach to the theatrical release of each that created additional value in other domestic and foreign markets. When Karin is not producing films she is working to bring them to audiences. One of her newest projects is introducing films from Mainland China to US audiences.

For more info on Karin click

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Scott Kirsner of CinemaTech sits down with Dolby EVP Tim Partridge as he lays out his vision for how digital 3-D moviemaking will take over the world.

Partridge says that in the early days of Dolby’s audio noise reduction (and later, Dolby’s digital sound), industry insiders predicted that the new technology would only be used for big action pictures. These days, 3-D is regarded as something for action pictures and cartoons, but Partridge says that since humans see in 3-D, it’s natural for all movies to have that third dimension. (Here’s more on Dolby’s 3-D offering.)