Luv Luv Luv: Preview The Trailer For Spike Jonze's New Short Film Scenes From The Suburbs | The Creators Project

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Director Spike Jonze teams up with Arcade Fire to create a thirty-minute short film inspired by their critically acclaimed album, The Suburbs, and its themes of war and coming of age in suburbia. Co-written by Jonze & Arcade Fire’s Win Butler & Will Butler, this companion piece to the album follows the narrator, living in a suburban dystopia, trying to piece together fragmented memories from when he was a teenager, and his experiences with his friends as they grow apart.

'Conan O'Brien' Doc Closes Unique Multi-Platform Distribution Deal - indieWIRE

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"by Peter Knegt

Conan O'Brien on the red carpet at the SXSW premiere of "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop." Photo by Eric Kohn.
Rodman Flender’s documentary “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop,” which had its world premiere on Sunday afternoon at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival, has closed a unique multi-platform distribution deal for U.S. release with AT&T, Abramorama and Magnolia Home Entertainment. In the deal, AT&T will come onboard as a P&A and multi-platform distribution and marketing partner, and will sneak the film to their AT&T U-verse TV subscribers on the eve of the film’s theatrical release. Abramorama has come onboard to handle theatrical distribution of the film. Magnolia Home Entertainment has acquired the remaining Video-on-Demand (VOD) and home entertainment rights...."

read the full post on indiewire.com

Does Digital Mean Free For All? Cory Doctorow: How free translates to business survival- BBC News #infdist

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Excerpt from the BBC:

"...Mr Doctorow has summed up his beliefs into three rules for digital survival. The first deals with DRM.

"Anytime that someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you but won't give you the key, that lock's not there for you."

Locking your content away behind a vendor's proprietory DRM technology can leave you trapped, as the vendor - be it iTunes, Amazon, or the like - has control.

Radiohead asked fans to pay what the felt their album, In Rainbows, was worth
"When another company comes along with a better distribution offer, if you want to go there you've got to trust your audience to throw away all the media they've bought from you, and buy it again on the new platform.

"You can't authorise them to take off the anti-copying stuff and convert it."

He mentions the inventor of the spreadsheet, Dan Bricklin, who included anti-copyright technology in his software. After selling the company he found that he couldn't read his own spreadsheets.

"People who've found themselves locked into these distribution channels not by contract but by technology often wish they'd make a better decision some time ago."

Bigger audience

His second rule deals with finding a customer base.

"It's very hard to monetise fame, but it's impossible to monetise obscurity."

Mr Doctorow says that by giving away his books for free he has managed to build a bigger audience, many of whom subsequently buy books.

"Obscurity means that no one will pay you anything. No one's figured out how to become a successful artist that no ones ever heard."

He uses the musician Jonathan Coulton as an example. All of the artist's music is released under a Creative Commons licence. Projects like "Thing a week", where he recorded and released a song a week on Youtube, built a fanbase.

"He's now a very successful touring musician, whose audience is built on the back of freely sharing his work."

Finally, he says, DRM technology has the potential to be abused.

"Designing phones, for example, that can run software in the background that's supposed to stop you from copying music also allows repressive governments to run software that monitors how you use the phone.

"So what we really need is to embrace open technology not just because it's good for the creative arts, but because the alternative is building an information society that has woven into it's fabric control technology that turns the promise of technology as liberator, to a real threat of technology as an enslaver."

Continue reading the article

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12701664

Frank Rose on Legacy of Tron: Theme Parks, ARGs and the Ever-Shifting Art of Immersion | Underwire

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Decades before anyone thought to create an alternate reality game, Walt Disney invented the theme park. Disneyland and its successors — Walt Disney World, Universal Studios Hollywood and their clones — were conceived as narrative architecture, purpose-built to provide an immersive entertainment experience....

Most Beautiful: The Tale of the Cripple - Must Watch Short Film by John Frame

The 12 minute "In Medias Res" is a compilation of short vignettes drawn from all of the completed footage (as of March 2011) for "The Tale of the Crippled Boy". It is our goal to build a feature length set of these vignettes over the coming months. Taken individually, each segment is a self-contained miniature film with its own special content. As we begin to link these pieces together, the implied narrative of the larger project should begin to emerge.

Sculpture, Animation, and Music: John Frame

Editing and Animation Assistance: Johnny Coffeen

 

Movie piracy: We need a hi-tech solution to illegal downloads | Editorial | Comment is free | The Observer

The movie industry needs to fundamentally reassess it's entire business model if it is to see off the pirates. First up, they need to drop their regionalism - here in France it's a roughly 50/50 chance that an English-language film download from iTunes will be available in both English and French, rather than merely overdubbed. The Internet is an instant global marketplace; impose petty restrictions such as this and people around the world will instantly be directed into the hands of the pirates. They want to see the film now, not in six months time, and they want to be able to pick the language version they want, not the one imposed on them by the distributors.

Secondly, and perhaps far more fundamentally - but building on my first point, is immediate global availability. Every movie should be available as a download from the studio from the day it is released, and that availability needs to be universal and global. Most movie downloads happen at least in part because that is the only way of seeing a film which is of the moment for the vast majority of people around the world. Why would anyone wait months to find out if The King's Speech will ever make it to a cinema in Mumbai if they can download a review copy of it from The Pirate Bay a few days after the premiere?

There is a huge demand for films around the world and a channel to make them instantly available. If instead of relying on staggered and unpredictable releases every movie was immediately available to buy as a high quality, HD widescreen download from the day of release, I suspect the film industry's revenues would multiply overnight - and I don't believe it would have the slightest impact on cinema attendances either.

The cat has been out of the bag for a long time. It is time the film industry realised this and gave their global audience - an unbelievably massive one - what they have actively demonstrated they want. Current distribution models are built on pre-broadband Internet models - it's time someone woke up and realised that the Internet is only going to get faster and easier for those who wish to use it for entertainment consumption, and that the artificial barriers they were previously able to erect have been demolished by it. Time to think again...

Guardian editorial weighs in....