glitterfish.com

It’s awesome trailer week at Glitterfish! Movie was rescued from Sundance oblivion by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. It’ is out in LA and NY. Playing at the Archlight in LA. All the cool kids are talking about it!

Hugh Mcleod of Gapingvoid.com is posting his email exchange with Scottish director Dave Mackenzie about the marketing of his upcoming feature film Hallam Foe.

Dave asks:

So, we don’t have big budget hi-con studio material and we don’t have hip lo-fi hi-con from the myspace crowd, we have a rather special classy little teen movie that can’t be easily classified. So what do we have to offer in terms of marketing that is going to get us our must-see tag?

I get the impression that Hugh doesn’t really know yet but that he’s working on it.

Link: word of mouth is not created, word of mouth is co-created

There is a counter-point over at Movie Marketing Madness to Steve Rubel’s post about the marketing campaign for Snakes on a Plane.

I don’t think SoaP will come close to being an all out blockbuster like Pirates was this weekend. Even though the unofficial community marketing has much deeper penetration into online community that community is starting to grow weary. It’s simply a case of this going on too long. Where Pirates coverage was largely confined to official news and mainstream coverage, Snakes has been spreading around the internets for months. That level of interest simply can’t be maintained.

This Google Trends chart has Chris all in a huff.

He has a good point, that social marketing can’t be sustained indefinitely, but I don’t think Rubel was really asserting that Snakes on a Plane was going to as successful as Pirates of the Caribbean. Rubel’s just saying that New Line facilitated the movies fanbase to do all the marketing for them speding next to nothing doing it whereas Disney spent millions plastering Captain Jack on drink cups, bill boards, and other vertical surfaces. If we trust the Goggle Trends chart as a good measure of interest, even accounting for the recent drop in interest, Soap still beats Pirates.

Like Chris says, the ultimate success of the film will depend on all sorts of other variables (like how good it is). However, the Google Trends chart doesn’t project success or even interest in the film. It just measures the level of “conversation” out there and in terms of that, generation of awareness; New Line has something to smile about it. I ultimately don’t think SoaP will do anything near what Pirates does but the take home point is that it is amazing what social marketing can do for a movie about snakes on a motherfucking plane.

In college I majored in “Media Arts” but I studied film.

I had one 200 level class that included some of that egalatarian Donna Haraway cyborg nonsense but other than that it was all production, criticism, and industry studies.

It used to bother me that the name of my degree wasn’t “film” but the more I think about it the more it might someday pay off. What I’m getting at is that if art schools, business colleges, or journalism departments knew a damn thing about how the Internet is changing everything, they would be teaching this book.

Here are some of my favorite passages from Exposure, a collection of essays and transcripts borne out of the 2003 meeting influencers of media and technology in Helsinki.

Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain. Only a very few people are aware of the enormity of this shift and fewer of them are lawyers or public officials.

Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology in its stateliness. Technology advances in the lunging jerks, like the punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely accelerated. Real world con-
ditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will get further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch is permanent.

The MPAA needs to read this book but then again, so do artists:

…digitised information has no “final cut”. As we return to continuous information, we can expect the importance of authorship to diminish. Creative people may have to renew their acquaintance with humility.

I wouldn’t get too comfortable with your perfect, unalterable, and totally individual vision because these days there is always going to be some 15 year old kid with iMovie ready to bastardize it.

Last weekend GlitterFish attended the CineVegas film festival. The fest ran all week and will end today. Here’s some pictures and my thoughts on the on the festival.

CineVegas is held at the Palms Casino and Resort. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a Vegas Casino that lacked plastic monuments, novelty buildings, and a fake sky painted on the ceiling. It’s a little far away from the Strip but that’s a positive in my book. The Palms is also affiliated with Playboy which assures attractive cocktail waitresses as opposed to the aging ex-stripper/chubby single mom that describes your average Vegas cocktail waitress.

One cool thing was the swanky CineVegasHQ press center. Decked out with free Vitamin Water, Red Bull, and Stella Artois, you could check your email at the bank of iMacs available and pick up as many free sharpies as you wanted. If you were really ballsy you could chat up the celebrities and filmmakers walking around but mainly I just scooped up free swag.

Speaking of celebrities we spotted Bobcat Goldthwait, Dennis Hopper, Marguerite Moreau, Ben Foster, and that dude from road trip.

As far as the films go they all screened at the Brenden Theater at the Palms. The first show we saw was the Shorts Program #1. I was really impressed and a little intimated by how good the films were. I could be nit picky (a lot of the films ran a little long) but the fact was they were all well done and entertaining. Interestingly enough, and something that should be encouraging to poor young filmmakers, between the four of us our two favorites also featured the lowest production value. My top pick was What the Captive Ate directed by Matt Lemche, a hilarious video diary about an image-conscious man trapped in his bedroom when his roommate’s guests stay longer than expected. Our other favorite was The Smoking Section directed by Chris Pozzebon. We also saw Shorts Program #2 and you can read Nate’s review of that here.

I want to quickly mention one of the features we saw, The Puffy Chair. This movie showed up on the blogosphere last year after it got some great press at Sundance. Since then it’s been all over the festival circuit and just started playing in select markets. The movie has no stars, was shot for $20,000, and its written and directed by two brothers you’ve never heard of. All it has going for it is terrific acting, a great script, and the enthusiasm of everybody who has ever seen it. I briefly talked with director Jay Duplass who explained their unfortunate lack of marketing money. They do have a MySpace page but I asked him if had done anything to engage bloggers directly and he said they hadn’t! If your going write, direct, and star in a guerrilla feature you might as well do some guerrilla marketing. It’s a great film so do yourself a favor and see if its playing in your area (it opens in LA July 7th).

As good—and bad—as the films were its cineVEGAS. Any fest that bills itself as the most dangerous film festival has got to be all about the parties. We managed to hit up the Foundation Room at the Mandalay Bay and had a really good time. There were playmates, a snotty director, and lots of suits pecking at their Crackberries. There was as also a view.

You can check more pictures over at Flickr.

GlitterFish attended the CineVegas film festival last weekend. Celebrities, Playmates, and Hollywood parties…it was almost enough to make me forget I’m unemployed and sleeping on a floor right now.

I’m waiting on some pictures before I give you guys the full report; however, I wanted to point out quickly that I saw exactly half of all the short films playing and only one has a website. If your short film played at CineVegas and I was going to review the shorts program One Rat Short is the only one I would have press materials for.

UPDATE: Bugcrush also has a website.

Jette, who is a Cinematical contributor, posts this open letter to indie filmmakers on her site celluloideyes.com.

I write about movies for Cinematical. Maybe yours is one of three films I’ll see in a single day of a film festival. Or maybe it’s one of the films screening in a couple of weeks at a local theater and I’d like to include it in my weekly News from Slackerwood listing.

Only … I search the Web and I can’t find the information I need on your movie. You don’t have a listing on IMDb, or maybe it’s a bare-bones listing that includes only the director’s name. I search Google and can’t find a Web site for the film. I finally find your Web site and it is a single page that includes no stills and no information about the cast and crew. It’s frustrating and unhelpful to me, and a missed opportunity for extra publicity for your film.

In the article she explains how Cinematical ran a big image from V for Vendetta for their SXSW article not because they wanted to, but because it was the only film that had any pictures on google images. If stills had been available from one of the smaller independent films they probably would have ran those instead.

Besides making it a lot easier for journalists to write about your movie, there is another reason to make or budget for the website. I was at a panel featuring Edward Noeltner, president of international distribution company, Cinema Management Group. He explained how the low-budget horror flick, Reeker, secured distribution based off its website. Writer/Producer Dave Payne understood how he could use the web to present distributors a clear picture of the films market potential. Good images that looked like a box cover, along with a really good trailer available on the website, convinced Ed that Reeker was a slam dunk before he ever even saw the movie.

Even if your film is just a short you should still think about how your going to market it. Last year my friend Tom Dunlap made an excellent short documentary about Bird Watchers called Life List. His website provides a place for agents or producers to look him up and also is place to purchase Life List. However, unless your making X-Men 3 skip the flash!

Paramount Classics has made a deal with Blog tracking and search engine site Technorati to promote their upcoming films. The first film to benifit from the deal is Al Gore’s new global warming doc An Inconvient Truth.

Here’s a link to the official press release and here is a link to a blog post with more details.

“Paramount Classics is changing the way movies are marketed — by joining the market’s conversation and providing a central place for fans’ and bloggers’ voices to be found, thus deepening their relationship with this community,” said Peter Hirshberg, Chairman and Chief Marketing Officer of Technorati.

Basically Technorati puts up a page on a films official website with up to the moment blog posts about the film. In the case of An Inconvienent Truth, any blogosphere discussion about the movie or global warming is featured on the web page.

This is a brilliant idea and one of the first instances where a movie studio has really realized how to use blogs to leverage their movies. Here is the An Inconvienent Truths Technorati page.