View the prototype here. It should work in any modern web browser that handles html video (even Internet Explorer 9!). Below, I’ll discuss the challenges and solutions we discovered through the process of building a prototype that tells a story as well as it demonstrates the technology.

The goal of the prototype was to give an overall sense of the subject while giving a viewer the opportunity to “drill down” to additional media for more detail. As powerful as HTML video and Popcorn are, it’s easy to overwhelm the viewer with too much information. So we had to choose the content and design the layout and interaction to tell the story while making it beautiful and avoiding distraction.

Content

Yasmine decided to highlight a conflict at the Qasr al-Nil Bridge, near Tahrir Square in Cairo. To best tell this particular story, we chose to use types of additional media, each implemented as Popcorn plugin. Relevant additional photos and video would give a deeper emotional and expository experience. Since most of our audience might not be familiar with the details of the place, we added pop-up facts, which can be expanded by hovering the mouse. Finally, a simple link appears in the lower left corner crediting the original source of the main video clip.

We considered adding a Google Map, since Popcorn has a plugin that will move the map to specified locations at any point in the video. But the Tahrir Square protests all took place around too small a space to make a moving map useful, and the source videos didn’t contain accurate enough location metadata to pinpoint specific enough locations around the square.

For the main video, Yasmine chose three short video clips, around 30 seconds each. All the clips are from a distance and give a visual overview of the event. The detail video and photos are all either closer shots or much longer, appropriate to the higher level of engagement the viewer will demonstrate by clicking to activate them.

Design

We wanted to focus more on the story than the technology and to preserve the artistic aspects of film, so it was important to make the prototype as artful as possible. Since neither of us are graphic artists, we decided to keep it as simple as possible. Yasmine made things easier by choosing beautifully shot video and photos. I designed the page to so that it’s entirely filled by video and minimized any extra visual flashes that might clash without the help of an additional designer. The videos of the event happened to appear a bit muted, which made them look nice when layered. For a more general and unpredictable set of images, I might consider using CSS opacity to mute certain components when others have focus.

Interaction

Finally, getting the interaction right took a bit of experimentation and problem-solving. There was a lot to explain, so we needed to have multiple pop-up tips. The best way we could think to organize them was to place them within the video, and to balance the level of interruption, we made them semi-transparent and showed only the title unless the mouse hovers over them. It would have been nice to have those move around the video frame as their subjects moved, but that’s quite a lot more work than we had time for in an afternoon.

The additional videos presented a bigger challenge, since they are seven or eight minutes long, while each is applied to a 30-second section of the main video. My initial thought was to pause the main video while a detail video was playing, but Yasmine thought it would be more cinematic to keep the main video playing in the background. The first thing we need to do is drop the volume of the main video to 10%, so it’s still in the background but not distracting. But what would happen if you’re playing through a seven-minute detail video and the main video gets to a new section? Your video would disappear. So now, when a detail video is playing, and the main video gets close to a new section, it skips back to the point when you activated the detail video and loops until you’re done. When you close that video, the main video returns to full volume and continues to play. Hopefully, the result is a cinematic experience that lets you explore the deeper aspects of the story while maintaining context.

Nuts and Bolts

There are a few technical tricks to keep in mind when building an interactive film such as this. At the time we built it, Popcorn only supported HTML video, using the <video> tag, so even though the source videos came from YouTube, we had to splice and re-encode the video for all the different browsers (webm for Chrome and Firefox and H264 for IE9 and Safari). We used Miro Converter, which is free and will easily convert into just about any format one needs, though there are other, more complicated free tools out there if you need to fine-tune your encode. And it’s worth noting that most web servers require a tweak to a .htaccess file to make sure mime types are properly configured to serve up the video files.

Now, Popcorn supports YouTube and Vimeo, but the native HTML video approach allows for tighter feedback and control of the timing. Splicing multiple YouTube videos in a browser could be tricky and unreliable.

Out of the box, Popcorn makes it easy to display timed content in different formats, with pretty basic Javascript skills. I was able to use the existing footnote plugin for the source credits, but I had to build custom plugins to get the positioned pop-ups and the detail videos. With Popcorn, the main video drives the timing of all the other events, so one must be careful when having the events change that main video time. Otherwise, you can end up with a loop that will make a mess of the whole thing.

Most of the rest of it can be done with Cascading Style Sheets, which handles positioning and visibility, including fades. Very soon, CSS will handle more advanced animations on all the major browsers.

Going Forward

I’m not sure what Yasmine and Jigar Mehta (her partner on 18 Days in Egypt) plan to do with the project, but we talked a bit about generating these interactive videos dynamically. Fortunately, Popcorn makes it easy to build a scene based on JSON data, which can be generated by a database. Mozilla is working on a tool that should eventually make authoring easier.

But automating the composition process would be a massive challenge, requiring precise and carefully managed metadata, which is as much a social challenge as it is a technical one. I suspect that a wiki-like community approach would work best.

Either way, this kind of interaction around video is going to take a lot of experimentation to make the technology disappear and reach the full potential of more powerful art and information.

Bookmark to:

From the Essex/Delancey station, one can take either the M train or the F train uptown to almost any station in Manhattan along this particular line. However, the trains arrive on different platforms, which are separated by a long stair case. It is impossible to observe both platforms simultaneously, and there is no automated indication of which train will arrive first and therefore reach a given destination fastest.

Commuters have devised a novel solution. Between train arrivals, passengers will cluster around the stairs separating the two platforms. As soon as there is more than one passenger, they will evenly distribute themselves along the stairs, re-calculating in O(1) time whenever a new node is added. When a train arrives on either platform, the nearest passenger, or edge node, signals the next node by glancing slightly in the direction of the rest of the passengers, and the message is similarly propagated throughout the network, allowing everyone to board the first train to arrive.

The result is an optimal, low-latency, low-overhead solution, built on existing hardware, following the primary rule of the subway: never make eye contact or speak to anyone.

And it’s a magical little reminder that New Yorkers, whatever our reputation, are good neighbors. Smart too.

Bookmark to:

With just a few hours advance notice, the Popcornjs crew put together a video/data mash-up of President Obama’s State of the Union speech for PBS, in which text analysis is displayed in time with the video. Among such a long video, with so much data, WMM leader Brett Gaylor asked if I could build in a feature making it easy to Twitter a short URL right to a point in the middle of the video. Sure I could. Unfortunately, an external service we were using to access the Twitter API broke down, so we couldn’t get the feature working in time to go live. I’ve worked around it, and here it is now.

Watch the video from the beginning or start 20 minutes in. Try the button just below the video. Read on to learn how it works.

The process is pretty simple. (I decided to use jQuery, since it was already loaded up for Popcorn.js, but it’s not necessary.) The three main steps are:

1. Check the URL for a time code and advance the video to the appropriate starting point.
2. Update the time code on the button.
3. Set up a “click” handler on the button to generate the link and open a Twitter window.

Here is the code to get the video started at the right place:

/* get the <video> element. Don't use jQuery here because it doesn't expose video properties and methods */
var video = document.getElementById('video');

/* advance video and auto-play */
var startVideo = function() {
    if (targetTime < video.duration) {
        video.currentTime = targetTime;
        video.play();
    }
};

/* parse URL hash after # for a number */
var targetTime = window.location.hash.substr(1);
targetTime = parseFloat(targetTime);
if (!isNaN(targetTime) && targetTime > 0) {
    if (video.readyState >= 3) {
        startVideo();
    } else {
        $('#video').bind('loadedmetadata', startVideo);
    }
}

The information we need here is how far into the video we want to stop. To keep it simple, we’re just looking for a floating point number to represent seconds. Since all this processing is happening in the browser and I don’t have access to the server anyway, we put the number in the “hash”, which is the part after the # symbol.

After checking to make sure we have a positive number, we test if the video is loaded, since we don’t always know the order in which our media and scripts will be loaded. If the video is already loaded, start up the video right away. Otherwise, bind our function to the “loadedmetadata” event so the browser will get back to us when it’s ready to start the video. By using an event handler, we don’t have to set a timeout to keep checking every few milliseconds. (Though I’ve been told “loadmetadata” can be slow to fire, so some people use a timeout, even though it’s ugly.) Once the metadata has loaded, we can find out how long the video is to make sure we’re not fast-forwarding past the end, and then it’s simple to set the time and start playing.

Next, update the time code on our button. (It’s not actually a button, just a div, but it works anyway.)

$('#video').bind('timeupdate', function(event) {
    var time = this.currentTime;
    if (time < 0) {
        time = 0;
    }

    var mins = Math.floor(time/60,10);
    var secs = Math.floor(time - mins*60);
    var hours = Math.floor(mins/60,10);
    secs = (secs > 9 ? secs : '0' + secs);

    if (hours > 0) {
        mins = mins % 60;
        mins = (mins > 9 ? mins : '0' + mins);
        $("#tweet-time").html('Tweet to ' + hours + ':' + mins + ':' + secs);
    } else {
        $("#tweet-time").html('Tweet to ' + mins + ':' + secs);
    }
});

This feature is not absolutely necessary to make this work, but it’s helpful to tell the user exactly how far into the video we’re linking and indicate that the button action is time-sensitive. The “timeupdate” event fires a few times a second, whether we’re playing or scrubbing the video, forward or reverse. Javascript doesn’t provide an easy way to make a string showing elapsed time from seconds, so we do it ourselves. jQuery makes it easy to change the text.

One problem with this code is that the button changes width as the time changes. Ideally, you’d probably check the duration of the video once at the beginning to determine whether you’re ever going to need the hours, and pick a fixed-width font.

Finally, set up the “click” event to create the link and pass it to Twitter.

var base = window.location.protocol + '//' + window.location.host + window.location.pathname;
$("#tweet-time").click(function() {
    var time = video.currentTime;
    if (time < 0) {
        time = 0;
    }

    var height = screen.height;
    var width = screen.width;

    window.open('http://twitter.com/share?count=none&counturl=' +
        encodeURIComponent(base) + '&text=&url=' + encodeURIComponent(base + '#' + time),
        'tweet-time-sotu', "left=" + Math.round((width/2)-(550/2)) +
        ",top=" + Math.round((height/2)-(450/2)) +
        ",width=550,height=450,personalbar=0,toolbar=0,scrollbars=1,resizable=1");
});

The most important point here is creating the URL to pass along to Twitter ("base + '#' + time"). One thing we need to be very careful about is that most Twitter clients parse everything after "#" as a hashtag, separate from the URL. The solution is to use a URL shortener, which is handy for hiding the "#" symbol as well as saving us characters out of the allowed 140. Originally, I used the is.gd API for this (we need a different short URL for every timecode someone uses). This worked well enough, but it required an extra call out to the network, which made things crawl on a slow connection.

Fortunately, Twitter provides a nice, clean sharing tool that will create a short URL for us. (This page explains how to use it.) We just have to make sure to wrap our target URL in encodeURIComponent so the "#" gets escaped, otherwise everything after it won't make it to the server. Normally, I hate using pop-up windows, but Twitter was pulling some kind of referrer-checking shenanigans, giving me a "Forbidden" server error when I tried to load this page inside an <iframe> so I didn't have a choice.

That's everything. Hopefully, the next time PBS and Mozilla do another one of these, they'll integrate this feature. Please comment below if you decide to use it or if you want to suggest any improvements.

Bookmark to:

Ok Go made the video for “White Knuckles” all in one shot and by all accounts it wasn’t easy. Thankfully, they also posted an extensive video showing how they did it. The video shows the complex choreography from different angles, edited together in time with the final result. I thought the best way to appreciate the entire process would be to see them side by side.

Try out the real thing or watch the video below.

The new-ish video features of HTML5 allow Javascript code enough control over embedded videos to get two of them playing in sync. Otherwise, they work just like images, so it’s easy enough to stretch and move them around. No plugins (Flash, Silverlight, etc.) are required, and it should work in Firefox, Chrome, Safari(?) and maybe Internet Explorer 9. But no iPhones, iPads or Androids. Your mileage may vary, especially on slow connections where the videos don’t load up quickly.

The approach is not perfect, as seeking around the videos will likely cause synchronization to go off a bit, even on the latest beta versions of both Firefox and Chrome. I’ve written some tricky and maybe even ugly code to try to minimize this problem, but it’s not perfect. The standard event model for the media controllers doesn’t offer quite as much control as I’d like, and the way the browsers load video asynchronously seems to make solving this problem impossible. If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions, please comment.

Bookmark to:

Among my favorite of these is the cluster of technologies around HTML5, including CSS3, WebSockets, faster Javascript and especially WebGL. WebGL is a powerful graphics library (analogous to OpenGL) that will give web developers access to hardware graphics acceleration in the browser, standard and without any plugins. Here is a demo I put together using WebGL to map audience demand data on the web to a 3D representation of the Earth.

This is just a prototype, and there’s a lot of room for improvement in performance, aesthetics and interactivity, but I think it shows the potential of what’s possible. The graphics are beyond what we’ve generally seen on the web before, and it’s combined with the kind of portable data that has been spreading around the web for the last few years. I’ll try to clean up the code and get a live demo online soon.

For now, WebGL is only available in Beta versions of Firefox and Chrome (and maybe Safari?). They’re worth downloading early if you’ve got the guts for the occasional bug, and they’ll hopefully be released in the next few months. If you want to take a shot at developing with WebGL yourself, there are great lessons at Learning WebGL and at Mozilla.

I’ve got lots more demos coming, and they’re cooler than this one, so check back for more in the next week or so. I’ll be posting them on YouTube and on Twitter.

Bookmark to:

Abraham writes:

Twitter in particular has proven to be a great device for communication amongst our followers. It has also become a tool for evil, I’ve discovered. On Saturday, August 8th, one month after our official release date, there was a spike in tweets related to LBS. We wondered why and took a look. It appeared that people were tweeting and re-tweeting a URL that linked to a pirated version of the film.

Remember the pink slime from “Ghostbusters II”? For most of the film, it was also a “tool for evil.” But Dr. Spengler et al. sprayed it all over the inside of the Statue of Liberty, and then it made everybody hug. (Ok, it represents a slightly different kind of “free,” but I think the analogy holds.)

I don’t need to spend a lot of time on how to compete with free, since it’s a well-covered topic. Kevin Kelly’s essay “Better Than Free” lists a number of factors that you can build into your film/story/product to give it value that make it worth paying for, even when it’s available for free. Brian Newman has a blog post and video on it, which is worth watching.

What this is really about is taking advantage of Twitter and other communication tools to play a major part in the global conversation about your work. (If there isn’t one, you need to start it.) Piracy on Canal St. happened before the Internet, and illegal downloading happened before Twitter. As Abraham acknowledged, you can’t stop it. Beyond pointers to free downloads, people are going to be saying lots of things about your film that you don’t like, including bad reviews, off-brand descriptions of your work and possibly even lies or personal attacks. The power of the Internet is that you can be in on it. You can know it’s happening, you can respond to it and you can preempt it.

As a filmmaker, you are at a tremendous advantage in owning your brand’s online story. Presumably, you know all about your film before anyone else does, so you can start putting your message out there before anyone else gets to it. You own the domain name, twitter account, etc. for the name of your film. (You don’t? Get on it!) And the people who love the film are probably the most vocal about it, and they’ll link back to you. You have to work real hard to piss people off enough that the haters will shout more loudly than the fans. If you keep the conversation going, those tweets and blog posts about torrent links and other nastiness will drift off the front pages and into obscurity. There are a few tiny things about me personally from way back that I’d rather not have out there (nothing too juicy, sorry), but you have to dig pretty deep to find it, because I’ve put myself out there with Twitter, an open Facebook account, my blog, etc.. But if you keep quiet, the nasties will fill the void for you.

Of course, it’s much harder to take advantage of this when you’ve got $1 million or more at stake and you address the matter after your film is already out. I think it’s wise to keep budgets low for now, as the details are still being worked out, but they will be worked out, since these are not entirely new business principles. Mercedes-Benz doesn’t go out of business just because it’s cheaper to get to work in a Hyundai. And Coach is still profitable, even though their belts are being knocked off everywhere. That’s because Mercedes and Coach are premium brands, and it’s not about a cheap ride to the office or keeping your pants from falling down. Their advertising messages reflect that, which is why Mercedes ads have Janis Joplin and vintage cars instead of some announcer shouting about seasonal discounts.

Most independent films are also premium brands. Your film is probably not about killing 90 minutes. It’s not about catching a glimpse of Megan Fox bent over, and it’s not about keeping the kids quiet in the back of the minivan. You can’t compete with “free” on price any more than Mercedes can compete on price with Hyundai. So don’t. Your film is about a deeper story, and the ability to create that is your sustainable competitive advantage. Twitter and other digital media are your opportunity to demonstrate that.

I’m writing a film right now, and even before the script is finished, I’m planning some cool stuff for screenings, merchandise and other payment points to add value along the lines of Kevin Kelly’s article. When I release the film, I will probably put it online for free. By putting it out there myself, I can beat the pirates to it and make sure free copies are burned with a URL to my online store, and I can track how many people are watching it. But it also tells the story that my film is a full experience and more than just a few hundred megabytes of pixels. After all, as a filmmaker, I should know how to tell a story, right?

Sure the Internet is a double-edged sword. But if you know where to swing it, you don’t have to cut your face off.

Bookmark to:

For the past year or so, I’ve been hearing bits of the film industry slowly wake up to the fact that the state of media metadata is a mess. The complete lack of open, common data formats leaves media producers struggling to conform their data to a variety of proprietary formats, only to result in outdated and inaccurate information left under the control of others. Worse, existing processes discriminate against independent producers by limiting what counts as a “real” movie, album or other work.

I have been working on a project called Open Media Object Format, which is a free (both as in beer and as in speech) protocol and file format for publishing rich metadata on a range of media. The protocol creates a distributed network of information on media and its participants, allowing the information to spread while every creator maintains authority over their own work. And the format is designed to store semantic data in more detail than we’ve seen before. The Open Media Object Format is an effort to address the above problems while bringing metadata away from the mere administrative, opening up possibilities for pretty cool stuff we haven’t seen before.

Details for the roundtable and the demo are below.

Open Video Conference Roundtable

Metadata Roundtable II: Best Practices
When: Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Where: Vanderbilt Hall, NYU
Conference registration required (it’s pretty cheap)
The participants are:

• Devon Copley (session leader) – Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University
• Brian Chirls – You know it.
• Ben Dean-Kawamura – Developer, Participatory Culture Foundation
• Mario Pena – SafeCreative
• David Rice – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

Hack Day Demo

On Sunday June 21, 2009, I will talk through the details of Open Media Object Format and demo the first implementation of it, a major WordPress plugin (still in early beta) that any creator can use to bring media in from almost any source (YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) and republish it as a blog post with OpenMOFo XML metadata output.

It will be a great opportunity to participate in shaping the metadata standard and to get a first look at a new blog publishing platform. I’d appreciate the feedback. Hack Day is at Vanderbilt Hall, NYU, the same location as the conference, and it’s open to the public for free. I’m still figuring out the rest of the details, so check back here or follow me on twitter for the exact time. Contact me if you want to suggest a time or let me know you’re coming.

Bookmark to:

It’s been a few years since I submitted a film to a festival, but I remember it being a miserable process. It’s hard enough to deal with deadlines, trips to the post office (do people do that anymore?) and all those fees (a nasty debate in itself), but I found the premiere requirements practically crippling. Since then, I’ve attended many festivals and have even helped program one, so I have a different understanding of how these things work.

Below, I examine the issue from the perspective of different groups involved and see how each is affected by premiere requirements. I encourage anyone with more experience or a different take to post a comment.

Filmmakers

At a minimum, premiere requirements limit the number of times and places you can have your film exhibited. If you include restrictions on other media, it also eliminates opportunities to build an audience or earn money by having a film available online with advertising revenue or for sale as a download or DVD. But it can stop a filmmaker even before getting to festivals. Filmmakers often have to adjust their post-production and release schedules to the annual cycle of festivals and their deadlines. Premiere requirements can force a producer to pass on one festival in favor of a later, more prestigious festival. If they don’t get accepted to that first choice, they’re forced to wait a whole year to try again at that second choice. By that point, they’ve lost time, audience, relevance and money, and they’re submitting year-old film.

It could be good for filmmakers in that it keeps more screening slots open for more films, but I’m afraid this is not always the spirit in which these rules are in place. And it doesn’t help at all in the case of platform exclusivity.

Festivals

In a short-term way that doesn’t involve too much thinking, premiere requirements are great for festivals, which is presumably why they are still in effect. It can help attract press and industry to a festival, assuming these people are already convinced that the films in question are worth the trip. More simply, the requirements give festivals a lot of power over filmmakers. Lots of other companies use exclusivity as well to raise their negotiating power. (More on that here.) When a filmmaker is forced to put all their eggs in your basket, you can make them beg, and it’s harder for them to ask for concessions like a screening fee or help with a flight and hotel room. The top festivals can use this as a tactic to affect a first-look right for themselves.

Having been a programmer, however, I’ve observed first-hand that great films are precious, so it seems silly to turn away a good film because it’s playing a thousand miles away the week before.

Also, if festivals are to stay relevant, and I believe they can, they need to improve upon and emphasize the value they add as social events. Relying on exclusivity is decreasingly effective and distracts from that.

Audiences

I’m hard pressed to think how premiere requirements are anything but bad for audiences. In my experience, most non-industry festival attendees are local. Very few people can afford to take a week off and spend money on travel for a film festival if it’s not for work. Even locally, film fans don’t have time to run out of films to see. While it is nice to know you’re seeing something before everybody else, you can retain most of that experience knowing that you’re seeing a film in advance of a wide release (if it even happens at all) and with the director and actors in attendance.

Gen Art is an example of a festival that consistently fills theaters with a local, non-industry audience without a strict premiere requirement. They even host year-round screenings of films the week before wide release, adding the value of an after-party and a post-screening discussion with the director and actors.

Newman speaks about the importance of curation. People have more entertainment options than ever. Acceptance into a prestigious (or not) festival is no guarantee that you’ll love a film, and even if it were, many festivals keep attendees too busy to see everything. Prior festival screenings give films time to build a track record of reviews, buzz and community that can help audiences do their own curation and even heighten the experience.

Press and Industry

For the most part, I think premiere requirements are pretty good for press and industry. I assume they were mostly put in place to attract these people. Distributors, festival programmers, journalists and bloggers go to a lot of festivals, so they don’t need to see the same films over and over again. But many of these people have access to screener copies of all these films anyway. While it does make a difference to see a film with an audience, that is not the way most people will see these films.

It appears that premiere requirements hurt more than they help, and they are helping the wrong people. Distributors are not acquiring many films right now, at least not for enough money to cover a production budget. Professional reviews are great, but they are not the best way to reach audiences. And industry professionals have other reasons to attend festivals – networking, panel discussions and free drinks. Film festivals are great at creating social experiences, and they are best suited to serving audiences first, filmmakers second and everybody else after that.

Premiere requirements seem to be based on the idea that a film starts with a certain value and then shrinks from there on out. This is the same idea that holds up the old model of windows, where a film starts with a big opening weekend, followed by decreasing box office and a chain of platforms, each offering lower cost and lower quality. I believe this model is obsolete, and that producers, audiences and the industry can benefit from giving films a chance to grow.

To see the relevant part of Brian Newman’s talk, go here, click on the “menu” button in the upper-right corner of the video player, and select the fourth section, titled “Conversation.”

Bookmark to:

You can listen with the embedded player below or download the full mp3.

The other panelists were:

1. Scott Kirsner (moderator) is a journalist and all-around smart guy. He’s the author of two books, Inventing the Movies, which I frequently cite as a defining analysis of how the film industry falls behind on innovation, and Fans, Friends & Followers, an excellent collection of interviews with artists who build their own audiences and distribute their own work. He also writes the blog Cinematech.
2. Chris Holland Director of Festival Operations at B-Side and author of Film Festival Secrets.
3. Sean Flynn producer and cinematographer at Principle Pictures.

We discussed a range of topics, including:

1. Benefits and pitfalls of social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.)
2. Strategies for reaching audiences before, during and after production
3. Crowdsourcing to build audiences as well as help production
4. How much of your content to post online for free
5. Ad revenue models
6. Distribution formats (DVD, download, streaming, theatrical, etc.)
7. Applying all the above to other media such as music and art

Bookmark to:

I’m looking forward to attending IFFB for the first time. I’ve heard great things about the festival, since Four Eyed Monsters played there in 2005, and the festival’s Program Director Adam Roffman managed the very successful Boston release of the film in 2006.

Here are the Details:
Sunday, April 26, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
Somerville Theatre
55 Davis Sq
Somerville, MA 02144
(617) 625-5700
map

The other panelists are:

1. Scott Kirsner (moderator) is a journalist and all-around smart guy. He’s the author of two books, Inventing the Movies, which I frequently cite as a defining analysis of how the film industry falls behind on innovation, and Fans, Friends & Followers, an excellent collection of interviews with artists who build their own audiences and distribute their own work. He also writes the blog Cinematech.
2. Chris Holland Director of Festival Operations at B-Side and author of Film Festival Secrets.
3. Sean Flynn producer and cinematographer at Principle Pictures.

Update: I recorded and posted the entire panel here.

Bookmark to: