In this vein, SXSW offers a great opportunity even for those filmmakers who aren’t attending the conference. Bands playing at the festival typically release a free MP3 in advance of the show for promotional purposes; every year for the past five years, these MP3s have been collected and released as an unofficial torrent. This is a great opportunity to listen to a lot of music, from bands signed and unsigned. Of course, there’s no guarantee that an unsigned band will agree to let you use their music in your film, but the chances are certainly better in the situation where you can ask them directly, rather than deal with a label.

It’s my understanding that, because all of these songs have been publicly released gratis, this torrent is legal. I may be wrong, but either way no one’s going to get mad at your for downloading this compilation of over 1,000 free and current MP3s. If you need a bittorrent client, for the PC try uTorrent and for the Mac try Transmission.

Start that iTunes playlist in preparation for your next project, or just enjoy the tunes!

Link: SXSW Torrents

I’ll be speaking on a panel titled “Writing for a New Landscape: New Media & Cross-Platform Opportunities” at IFP’s upcoming Script to Screen Conference. The conference explores new opportunities available to independent filmmakers and directly connects aspiring and working filmmakers to the decision-makers of the film, television, and digital media business. Here are some of the presenters:

Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown), Steve Bodow (Head Writer, The Daily Show), Brian Koppelman (Solitary Man, Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen), Peter Hedges (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, About a Boy), Adam Brooks (Definitely Maybe, Wimbledon), Monty Ross (Do The Right Thing), along with representatives from Focus Features International, the Sundance Channel, Filmmaker Magazine, and more! Like Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman, who wrote The West Side two years ago and haven’t been heard from since, thanks to the evil machinations of the film industry!¹

The conference takes place Saturday and Sunday, March 20th and 21st at 92Y Tribeca (200 Hudson Street). For IFP members, tickets to the conference are $150; for non-members, $200. However if you use the special nofilmschool code FREE2010 you can get the member rate as a non-member.²

Writing for a New Landscape: New Media & Cross-Platform Opportunities will be an interesting panel, as I suspect most of the helpful information Zack and I can impart comes from our experiences shopping our feature-length, transmedia screenplay for Third Rail, rather than from our experiences producing the DIY The West Side. Regardless, I promise our panel will be interesting, and I might even wear pants.

1. I added that last sentence.
2. Okay, the code is not specific to nofilmschool. However, it will save you $50.

Barry and I attended the Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium together in 2002 and have run into each other a few times since on the festival circuit. Here we talk about DIY filmmaking, distribution deals, VOD, new media, brand integration, and film school.

Note: This is the first in what will be a series of interviews conducted under the banner “Six and a half questions with.” Six questions seemed like too few and seven seemed like too many, so I’m cutting myself off midway through the seventh question and letting the interviewee take it in whichever direction they please. All answers are Barry’s but I’ve bolded certain passages that I think are particularly insightful, valuable, or relevant to this site; I don’t have the capability to do pull quotes, so the bold button is my substitute (I’ve also added footnotes).

If you haven’t seen Medicine for Melancholy, get yourself a copy or at least Netflix it. I really love this vibrant film; it feels alive and authentic in ways most studio films can only dream of. Here’s the trailer:

1. You were working at Banana Republic during the filming of M4M, working a day job and filming at night. While that makes for a great DIY indie story, what was the trigger in your life that caused your monumental “fuck it, I’m making this” moment?

It’s kinda lame but like a lot of other artists’ beginnings, mine came at the mercy of a girl. I was dumped and said, “fuck it, I’m making this.” At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what “this” was, but I knew I had to make a film. Eventually all those things from the relationship inserted themselves into the film. That Banana Republic job, by the way, was the best job I’ve ever had. I was working around a lot of other artists doing a job that had nothing to do with our passion, a lot of painters, photographers, graphic designers. We shared those thoughts everyday. You’d be amazed at the talent behind the person selling you a pair of slacks sometimes.

2. I often feel like too much of the critical discussion about films has to do with the particulars of execution instead of addressing a work thematically or contextually. With that in mind, were you surprised by any of the ways M4M was received or interpreted? Do you feel like there were some elements of your film that theatergoers or critics missed?

Yeah, but that’s going to happen. I realized pretty early in our run that critical analysis of the film was more about what the viewer brings to the table than what I embedded in the film. That’s just the way it goes, and rather than being surprised by some of the interpretations I didn’t anticipate — and there have been a few — the ones that nail it always touch me. And when I say nail, I mean the ones that seem to have crawled into my head and gone back to those first moments when I set out to make the thing. Those always stick out to me… as do the ones that see things I never ever imagined could be seen in the film… usually to its detriment!

3. You did a distribution deal with IFC Films, who released M4M theatrically, on VOD, and on DVD. I know it’s difficult to talk candidly about these experiences, but could you relay some of the things you’ve learned by having a distributor handle your film (after a lengthy festival run)?

I’m finally getting some perspective on this and that perspective basically amounts to distribution being a very tough deal for any film, though particularly tough for something small enough to be labeled DIY. The brush strokes are that there are some levels of intimate, grassroots opportunities to engage an audience that just aren’t feasible for a larger entity like IFC to pull off. Knowing that ahead of time, anticipating it, would go a long ways to making a paring between a DIY flick like ours and a large operation like IFC more fruitful. By the same token there are enormous advantages to having an entity like IFC, with its proven networks and infrastructure behind your film. The NY Times will listen when the same company that released Hunger and Gomorrah calls and asks that a film as small as I mine be seen by one of the lead critics, rather than a freelancer. The trick is, and this is something we know in hindsight, is that if you make a DIY film, whether it sells or not, you better go through its release with the same mentality. Be out there, be hustling your work, be doing it yourself. IFC did what they were gonna do, and for the most part they did great. Perhaps if we’d been out there during our release with the same mania we had running around SF making this thing… maybe then they would have done even more.

The Video on Demand (VOD) game in particular is what everyone’s most concerned with when they ask about the distribution of Medicine. IFC was one of the first companies to get into the day-and-date game so their releases are under the microscope. To be honest though, VOD and its success (or failure) has a lot more to do with the nature of that medium than any one company. For example, people look at the growing success of Netflix streaming as an example of the potential of VOD as a revenue generating anxillary. However, the comparison is thin because of the fundamental differences between the two (streaming online as opposed to watching VOD via satellite or cable). With Netflix streaming, the user’s tastes and preferences are harnassed to curate a selection of material they may want to stream. VOD does not have such advantages, instead mirroring a multiplex where a person decides on a piece of content, then pays to attend a theater and see said content at a specific time. Movies are sorted to some degree on VOD, yet the most used browsing method is good old aphabetical (it’s for this reason filmmakers have joked about placing the obligatory “A” in front of their title do better on VOD). The current VOD interface has little programing capable of analyzing a viewer’s habits the way a web-based entity can. Trust me though, they’re working on it, and they’re working on it because companies like IFC and Magnolia pushed so aggressively into this space.

And now the candid shit: get as much as you can reasonably get upfront. This has always been true of distribution. Even though the numbers are much smaller, it’s especially true of DIY distribution. When you sell your film, keep the back-end on the back end and get as much up front as you reasonably can. I say reasonably because even though your film is a valuable commodity, in today’s world it’s easier to NOT buy a film than it is to buy one, especially a DIY flick. That’s just the reality of a world where there are more and more films being made at such low costs. So know your hand, play your hand, but do so within reason as your ass WILL get left on the doorstep, real shit. Of course, in today’s world, there are many more houses on the block so if you do get left out there just find another door to knock on. Those types of analogies suck but they couch the truth nicely. Look at Children of Invention!¹ Tze and Mynette didn’t wait on anybody, they just got their movie into people’s hands however they could.

4. I’d be remiss for running a site called nofilmschool if I didn’t ask you about your experiences at FSU film school. You produced some great work there, and as far as I know your tuition was very low (which kind of negates my anti-film school bias). Can you talk about your experiences in film school and how they’ve helped you since graduating?

Man, my film school experience was a dream, I have no complaints whatsoever. You and I are in the same camp regarding film school: if you’re paying more per year than it would cost to make a feature (and that’s just tuition!), I can’t see that as a justified course of study. FSU was totally the opposite, as an in-state undergraduate kid tuition was about $1500 bucks a semester and the state of Florida paid for everything: equipment, stock (we shot everything on 16/super 16), processing, finishing, everything. I was a guy who did not grow up wanting to be a filmmaker, I found the school after being on campus two full years. I come from a very poor family, the only way I could afford to learn this stuff was through a subsidized system like FSU (the catch being that the state owns the completed films). They basically threw you to the wolves — we shot a roll of reversal film on Bolex the first day of class, I didn’t know you needed light to expose film! — and that was how you learned, by constantly doing, reviewing, critiquing, repeating. It was complete immersion. You would not be interviewing me if I hadn’t stumbled into FSU film school. Period.

Since graduating, the school itself does a good job of tracking graduate’s progress but I wouldn’t say they actively steer or guide graduates one way or the other. The network of graduates is the thing. When I set out to make Medicine, I called all these kids from FSU and none of them told me no. We were comfortable working together. And most importantly, because of the way you go through film school together, everyone cared. Deeply. It wasn’t just a gig, we were invested.

5. We both ascribed to the “DIY, and then “DIFT” (Do It For Them) model wherein an inexpensive, totally independent project theoretically leads to a studio-supported successor. As you’ve dealt with agents, studios, and the industry in general, how have your experiences differed from your expectations? What has surprised you about the process?

DIFT, I like that. My expectations were extremely naive going into this. I think we both came up in the last true age of the crossover American Independent filmmaker, and what I mean by that is simply indie filmmakers who, as you noted, made their first film on their own dime and their second film on a studio’s. The second film was still theirs, still their absolute voice, just paid for by studio money. That’s much harder to do for a DIY filmmaker. I’m not the first to try it, so I’m speaking based on others’ experiences in addition to my own. In the end, it’s simple: studio films are a hell of a lot riskier than they were two decades ago because the money is coming from a very different place than it did back then. The beauty of DIY is that you can make a film for the cost of a Taurus in three weeks with five friends. The drawback of DIY is that it’s a hell of a lot different than raising a couple million dollars over a number of years and shooting with a studio-light crew with a 35mm setup. That old model is just a much more sound vetting process, so making the transition from DIY is a lot harder. DIY is as fine a medium as any to showcase talent. It’s navigating the rigors of a Hollywood production that’s missing. People literally don’t know what to do with you² (if they could make a couple million off you by tossing you another budget along the lines of a Ford Taurus, believe me, they would). But the kind of film you can make at a DIY budget is not going to bring a return large enough to move the needle at a studio,³ and the algorithms used to green-light movies (much akin to the revolution in baseball scouting that occurred during the nineties utilizing metrics rather than visual analysis of a player’s form) places such little weight on a successful DIY film that the prospects of a DIY filmmaker running a DIFT project literally doesn’t add up. In that world, it’s all about math, about metrics. Like they used to say often in 90s hip-hop, I gotta get my weight up. Patience is tantamount!

6. What projects can we expect in the future from Barry Jenkins (you, not the 1960s drummer for The Animals)?

Man, I’m waging a very long battle with that cat, he’s got some pretty good reach on the web for an obscure rock drummer! When we were first trying to push Medicine on the web with our DIY tools, he kept continuously stepping on our searchability!

But to your other question, I’m working on another short film as part of ITVS’ FutureStates initiative (this will be the fourth since Medicine, never expected I’d get into shorts again) and beginning work on a few DIY screenplays I’ve been neglecting for the past year. At the same time, I’ve been developing a project over at Focus Features for the past seven months (I know, shit takes forever, right?!) and all the time I’m a) looking for new material to bring to Focus and b) meeting with other companies around town to see if there’s anything out there that spins my hat. You know that feeling you get when you walk out of a movie and think, “Damn, I wish I would’ve made that!”? Well, because of the success of Medicine if I move my feet fast enough I can get my hands in that pot and compete for those projects. To rejoin the previous answer, the beauty of being a DIY guy just come to Hollywood is that if you can show you have the chops to pull off a film, you become a viable cog as it costs much less to hire one of us than it does one of the vets. I jokingly refer to myself as an undrafted free agent who beat the odds and made the team. The Duplass Brothers are like the Wayne Chrebets of Hollywood!

7. Okay, let’s try my first “half question” and see if it works. New media, web series, interactive experiences: ultimately they may –

— free us from these very limited means of expression currently available to DIY content creators. You look at a show like The Wire, which, to me, is the single greatest achievement in American motion picture history⁴ (Band of Brothers is a very close second). You look at those two series and essentially what you have are the limitations of the feature film format (for its inherent brevity) expanded into a form more akin to a novel, the depth gained by telling a story in the amount of time it appropriately demands. A feature film is a perfect format for a “moment” and a series is the proper format for a “story.” There are exceptions, sure, and some people are just so damn good they can extend a moment into a series or pack a story into a commercial. Still, as a general course of thought this is how they fall for me. And so if you take that thesis at its word, what’s missing from the DIY filmmakers’ avenues of expression is the series, the space and breadth to tell a story over an extended period of time, beyond and outside the feature film format. You were at the forefront of this sir with The West Side, a piece of content I would argue was ahead of its time. Lena Dunham did something similar with her web series Tight Shots, which was basically a sitcom for our generation done on the cheap (and thus without compromise) that was just begging to get out. Those two shows, yours and Lena’s, are a model for what I think the world is actually ready for now.⁵ Do you remember when MySpace started running episodes of Friday Night Lights? It was amazing, totally worked but they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it. Nerve funded Lena’s show but again, they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it. These are smart people, they’ll figure this out soon; they have to (hello iPad!). And when they do, smaller content creators will deliver projects at such conservative costs that the threshold for profiting from them will be extremely favorable.

And now Netflix is out there helping us all by getting people comfortable with watching streaming content, with watching something on their computer for an extended period of time. The real strength of web content is the simplicity of its duplication, the lack of physical media and the portability of the finished project (at once on Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, etc.). Eventually someone will realize that rather than spend six figures to produce a thirty-second commercial… and countless other figures to air it, they could give Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo a fraction of that (say 250k), from which he’ll produce five hours of The West Side chopped up into a ten episode season… presented by Wrangler Jeans (or whatever other company is Pabst’ing its way back into the 14-34 year old demographic and can be side-saddled into your urban Western theme).⁶

That period is coming and it may be fleeting; eventually the networks and corporate interests will find a way to absorb such vast corners of the web that the online space takes on the same rubric as television (imagine what Google or Microsoft could do if they bought a lagging Fox or NBC). But for now, the user-aggregated (and virtually free) nature of the web space makes it the perfect place to exhibit content that captures an audience while subtly promoting brands. I participated in one such venture with my short film Tall Enough for the Bloomingdales Bflix promotion. They gave five of us “emerging” filmmakers money to make short films under the Bloomingdales brand, then hosted them on the site which basically just drove people back to the brand’s home. I vividly remember thinking how cool the whole thing was, that Bloomingdales was paying me to play with the RED and 5D on the streets of NY… until I came across this quote in a New York Times article that brought the whole thing into focus: The financial commitment from Bloomingdale’s was estimated at about the cost of a full-page advertisement in a metropolitan newspaper. That’s five short films still bouncing around the internet five months later for the cost of one ad, one day in the NY Times. Game. Set. Match.

These things can employ people (folks like you and I) while giving us a means to express ourselves at a reasonable cost. It makes too much sense to go checked for much longer.

Barry Jenkins is an award-winning writer/director whose feature film debut Medicine For Melancholy was acquired for distribution and released in theaters by IFC Films. The picture earned Barry a slot on Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 Faces of Independent Film list before embarking on an international festival tour highlighted by screenings at the Vienna and Toronto International Film Festivals, among others. Recent projects include the shorts TALL ENOUGH and A YOUNG COUPLE. He is currently developing a feature film with Focus Features.

Connect with Barry’s Strike Anywhere Films on Facebook and Twitter.

1. Children of Invention is premiering theatrically in NYC and LA on 3/12; get tickets here.
2. I’ve had the same experience with studios; being able to make something cheaply is definitely a marketable skill, but you’re generally pitching to someone aware of their studio’s (and their own) overhead, which devalues your cheapness.
3. Paranormal Activity is the exception to this rule, but even in PA’s case Oren made it on his own and the studio (Paramount) didn’t get involved until it was already finding success in front of audiences.
4. I, too, feel this way about The Wire, and have written about it numerous times.
5. Lena and I will be panelists together at IFP’s upcoming Script to Screen Conference in NYC, March 20-21.
6. You listening, Wrangler? A five star series for your five star denim!

[via Short of the Week]

The WorkBook Project and the New School present DIY DAYS NYC. On Saturday April 3rd DIY DAYS comes to the New School in NYC for a day of talks, workshops and networking focused on creativity in the digital age. The focus of the day will be how those working in film, music, gaming, design, and software can fund, create, distribute and sustain from their creative efforts.

DIY Days is free because it’s run by volunteers, so:

If you live in the NYC area and are interested in lending a hand to help make DIY DAYS NYC possible we’re looking for volunteers. Send email to work [@] workbookproject dot com with the subject “volunteer in NYC.”

For the future of (social) gaming in one entertaining 30-minute presentation, here’s Jessie Schell’s invaluable primer from DICE 2010.

Watch it all the way to the end, as his final point is worth the half hour on its own. And if you think it’s just a thrown-in feel-good ending, the success of Nike Plus (sidebar) and more recent entrant Fitbit is living proof of socialization’s effectiveness when it comes to modifying real-world behavior.

MacHeist is a website that sells a lot of Mac applications in a bundle for less than the normal price of one of the individual apps. In the case of the currently running “nanoBundle2″ promotion, it’s seven applications that would retail for $266, on sale together for a total of $19.95. These aren’t trial versions or crippled licenses; they are the full monty.

How can MacHeist do this? Well, the involved app developers get a lot less money for their app, but they’re getting less money from a lot more people. Plus they gain a larger userbase and get broad exposure from the promotion. The current bundle contains a number of handy-looking creative applications and is live until March 9th, so I thought I’d review the software contained therein from the perspective of a writer/designer/filmmaker/blogger. To get your money’s worth you’ve really only gotta find one of the seven applications useful; is the nanoBundle2 worth a Jackson?

Impressions upon visiting the MacHeist website:

1. Man, this is some nerdy shit.
2. Wait, why wouldn’t I buy this? The entire bundle costs less than the even the cheapest application. As a multi-hyphenate who uses an embarrassing number of Mac apps over the course of an average day, surely I’ll find one of these useful.
3. They’re raising a lot of money for charity; 25% of all purchases go to a worthy cause. At the time I’m posting this, the ticker’s up to $131,000 raised from nanoBundle2 and over $2 million in the site’s history. Cheap apps and you’re helping save the world (you can choose which charity your 25% goes to, or distribute it evenly among the 11 options)!

I pull the trigger.

The seven bundled applications are MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout, Flow, Tales of Monkey Island, and RapidWeaver. The final two apps require a certain number of purchases to be unlocked, so you’re incentivized to tell friends to buy the bundle. I didn’t realize RapidWeaver was included in this “maybe” category — they have a threshold of 50,000 sales to unlock Monkey Island, but don’t explicitly list the number for RapidWeaver, which is either unintentionally bad design or intentional deception. See the image at right — on first glance, is it clear that Flow is included but Rapidweaver isn’t? If you’re going to put a “will be unlocked” dialogue under Monkey Island (which I couldn’t care less about), you should do the same for RapidWeaver. Sorry, but this is Design 101. Anyway, RapidWeaver was the main reasons I was interested (it’s also the most expensive app at $79), but let’s see if any of the first five are useful.

The apps

Clips

This looked pretty handy. I’ve been using Jumpcut as a clipboard manager, which allows you to keep track of dozens of bits of cut/copied text, instead of the default system clipboard, which only allows you to paste the most recently copied item. I was hoping Clips would be a more advanced version of Jumpcut, as right now I only use Jumpcut for temporary copying and pasting; for frequently-used snippets of text like URLs, html code, and canned email responses I use Apple’s built-in Stickies. Clips seemed to offer a unifying solution, but I’m sorry to say: upon initial use, it just didn’t work. It would only remember the most recent thing I copied, which defeats the entire purpose of using it; perhaps I’ll figure Clips out in the future, since I officially own the software now, but first impressions are not good. Plus, Clips tries to do too much — there are three different ways of displaying your clips, two different hotkey options, and two different display options (dock or menu bar) — honestly, guys, the hallmark of Mac is simplicity. I want you to figure out what works best for 90% of your users, and present that to us as the default functionality; don’t make me choose from eight options the first time I start it up. It should “just work,” and it didn’t for me. On its own, Clips retails for $27.

MacJournal

For the past four years I’ve been using Mori to keep track of ideas, organize initial outlines, brainstorm, and keep a journal. It’s not a great program, but its simplicity is its virtue, and I’m used to it. However, Mori hasn’t been updated in ages and it seems development is at a dead-end. Thus my interest in MacJournal; it’s a similar program, but more fully-featured, and has a long history of development and support. First impressions of MacJournal are very good; it has a great full-screen writing mode (up until now I’ve been using an old freeware version of Writeroom for this functionality), it plugs into a number of blog services for posting to the web, and for keeping a journal it really seems like the app to beat on the Mac. If you’re looking for a journaling program — meaning, jotting down your thoughts, making them searchable, and keeping track of when you wrote what — MacJournal makes the nanoBundle worth it alone. However, I’m looking for more of a brainstorming/outlining program, so my search for a Mori replacement continues — more on this another time. Normally $40.

RipIt

RipIt bills itself as “effortless DVD importing.” It does what it says — you pop in a DVD, hit “Rip,” and it takes care of the job for you, automatically ripping the main feature and excising the menus and extras. For a lot of people, this fits the bill and will be a valuable cog in the MacHeist machine. However, by default RipIt generates .dvdmedia files, which play fine in Apple’s built-in DVD Player software but don’t afford you the greatest flexibility (in preferences, you can switch it to generate VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders). I prefer the free and open-source Handbrake, which allows you to customize file format, compression, and subtitling options; I pretty much knew going in that I wasn’t going to use RipIt because of the Handbrake elephant in the room. For grandma, however, RipIt might find a home. Normally $20, although it looks like the free version lets your rip 58 DVDs before you’d have to register.

Coverscout

Coverscout is an application that, uh, scouts covers. Covers for your albums, that is — its goal is to get rid of as many of those blank placeholder images you see when that “totally legitimate album you paid money for” shows up in iTunes without any pretty artwork. The registration is kind of a pain — you have to create a login and jump through some other hoops, which wasn’t the case with any of the other apps. While the program works — it correctly pulls your library from iTunes, logs into various online databases to find missing album art and assigns them automatically — as you’d expect with multiple sources, album art sizes tend to vary and the accuracy isn’t anywhere near 100%. This can make for comical discrepancies between genre of music and the resulting album cover (“Ain’t no Half Steppin” by Big Daddy Kane pulled a cover for “Christ is Come” by a Christian band named Big Daddy Weave). If you want to go through your albums one by one — my library yielded over 1,000 coverless albums — you have a chance at ending up with accurate covers… but do you really care enough to do that? Either way, don’t expect to “select all” and hit the “magic” button (you’ll probably break your internet connection if you do, as Coverscout doesn’t seem to have a queuing system, instead hitting the servers for all of your selected albums all at once). I got tired of waiting and quit the program, resigned to my placeholder-filled music library. Coverscout is normally $40, which seems overpriced given iTunes is free and includes basic “Get Album Artwork” functionality. SongGenie, a different program from the same company that fills in missing metadata like album title, year, and track number — which would probably ensure more accurate covers — is another $30. Seriously guys, you want someone to spend $70 on software that does nothing more than dress up already-existing music files? Bundle the two together for $30 and then we can talk.

Flow

Flow is a file-transfer program which works with FTP/SFTP as well as other protocols like Amazon S3 and MobileMe. This had appeal to me, as I’ve used the free FTP program Cyberduck for years — encountering a host of bugs along the way — and eventually paid $30 for Transmit when Cyberduck became unreliable. Flow intergrates with the Mac OS much more nicely than either of the aforementioned apps and promises URL copying (meaning, you can upload a file to an FTP server and automatically copy the file’s URL for sharing). This is handy for sending clients links to files — but as soon as I got Flow’s URL copying working, I realized Transmit offers the same feature. I will say this — Flow has a chance at becoming my default FTP program, and I would use it over Cyberduck if I hadn’t already bought Transmit.

As for the “unlockable” apps — Tales of Monkey Island and RapidWeaver — the former is an adventure game and the latter is a template-based website construction tool. I don’t have much to say about the former as I’m not much of a gamer, and I was a Senior Designer at MTV for three years so you wouldn’t think RapidWeaver would be of any interest to me, but it’s the “rapid” part of the latter that is appealing — I have some upcoming transmedia projects for which I’ll need to launch a lot of sites very quickly, and in the quantity-over-quality department I’m interested in comparing one-off RapidWeaver sites to those based on Wordpress themes. If MacHeist makes their goal — whatever it is — and RapidWeaver is unlocked, I’ll put it to use and add a review later.

Conclusion

Overall, I had no problems getting the apps installed or registering them; they are indeed what they promise, 100% full and legal applications for a fraction of the price. MacHeist is on their A-game with this stuff; they’ve done a great job offering appealing applications at a very enticing price, and the concept of “unlocking” apps at a certain number of sales is brilliant marketing — free Tweets all around! Not to mention, in a world of so much pirated software, it’s nice to support smaller application developer. Additionally, MacHeist raises a lot of money for charity with each promotion, which is the icing on the cake.

Normally I consider $30 to be the reasonable price point for a single desktop Mac application — I’ve paid $30 for several useful apps in the past couple of years — so $20 for seven apps is a no-brainer. For my own needs, however, I’m not sure that I’ll regularly use any of the first five (I do hope to find RapidWeaver useful, though). Clips is a nice idea, but it’s not there yet. RipIt would make a nice gift for the computer illiterate in your family, but if you’re reading this you’ll probably be happier with Handbrake. Coverscout is only handy if you’re a constant iTunes gardener. However, I do feel MacJournal and Flow are solid apps worth the price of admission on their own if you’re looking for a journal or FTP program. After all, you’ve only got to use one app to make the bundle worth your while; I hope this review was helpful in determining whether you’ll find use for one — or more — of the nanBundle2 apps.

The deal is live until March 9 at MacHeist, and now features three more throw-in apps if you tweet.

Here are some deets on how they did it (hint: they didn’t actually use tilt-shift lenses).

If you chose one of the last two options, feel free to leave your store of choice in the comments (I wanted to keep the poll brief).

Another tidbit from the Times review: the script for Heavy Rain was over 2,000 pages long.

As a storyteller I’m less interested in the skill and coordination aspect of videogames, and more interested in the choices one has to make as a player/participant in interactive movies. The rest of the reviews of the game/movie are also overwhelmingly positive, and I look forward to playing/watching (I guess I should I just say “experiencing”) it.