Surviving the Trifecta Dash, Fake film fests, brain machine interfaces, new branded content and more
Surviving the Mad Dash to the Trifecta
This week’s newsletter opinion piece is shorter than usual because I’ve been participating in the June 14th Trifecta Mad Dash – hitting the deadlines for the Toronto (TIFF), Venice and Telluride Film Festivals, what is known in the film world as the Festival Trifecta.
While this is changing a bit as the three duke it out over premiere status rules, it used to be that you could premiere at all three festivals in September. This is the way it should be forever, and this fight is ridiculous; but in theory, you can still do this pending a few things about timing and type of film. Anyway, every producer with a film that is finishing soon is doing this same hustle this week because they may only get into one of them (or none of them) anyway, but you have to try. Technically, the Telluride deadline is not until July 1, but that’s not too far away, so aside from some last minute polishing, everyone is trying to get their rough cuts good enough for submission by the end of today.
I’m involved with several films that will be submitting – films I produced or from clients and/or friends who wanted feedback, and I have many producer, sales agent and distributor friends who are doing the same thing.
It’s insane. And then we all do it again for Sundance, and Berlin and Cannes and…. a few others. But there’s no getting around it – we can complain about premiere policies, but you gotta have a deadline somewhere and it will always be a mad rush alongside thousands of other films. For all the things that have changed in the film world, the deadline madness won’t go away, unless you decide to forgo festivals and just take your film out there (which some people do, even for big films). But in reality, these top festivals are definitely worth it for those lucky films that get accepted.
So good luck to all of you out there who are submitting to a festival this week, and I hope your real final cuts are even better than the ones you are submitting today. I promise to have something fancier to write about next time, but for now, I have some more films to submit.
WHAT I’M READING:
FILM:
Filmmakers Beware of Fake Film Festivals - and these are just two of many other scams out there.
A team at Stanford has built a pretty simple tool to seamlessly edit what someone says in a video, by just using a text editor, opening the door to both easier editing of flubbed lines/missing dialogue, but also lots of crazy faked videos. While the accompanying video is very academic, it seems to work flawlessly and is pretty fascinating. Meanwhile, we’ve seen other versions of this being used for disinformation already - the fake Pelosi and fake Zuckerberg, but this tech makes it even easier.
BRANDED CONTENT
Branded Content Initiatives Help News Publishers Rake In Revenue, But Some Remain Wary – A new study shows strong profit margins on branded content, especially for smaller, local news brands. It’s part of a new initiative to help save journalism, and that seems like a reason to keep experimenting.
Mailchimp is launching branded content. Mainly around small business and entrepreneurship. Welcome to the party. It’s crowded here. But they did pick some interesting folks to work with, so I am intrigued: director Jason Woliner (What We Do in the Shadows), writer Samin Nosrat (Salt Fat Acid Heat), actor Jay Duplass (Prospect), and actor/composer Big Boi (Someone Great).
Instagram Lets Advertisers Promote Branded Content From Another Channel - Retailers can now create ads using organic posts from other channels that have branded content. So now you can pay an influencer to show your brand, or just find someone promoting you for free, and then create an ad from that content and promote it further. Weird, but interesting. This could be useful for film promotions too.
11 Branded Content Innovators Who Take Marketing to the Next Level – Good list.
Brands like HP and Apple try film to reach young consumers who skip commercials - More and more brands are discovering that it is both cheaper and more effective to create branded content documentaries over commercials. Everyone has posted to this LAT story, but it’s worth a read if you somehow missed it.
Pop Culture Site Powering Through 4 Weeks Of Sponsored Posts For Movie Its Film Critic Called ‘Contemptible Trash’ Most important article of the week.
Twitch is emerging as a favorite new platform for publishers – It’s collaborative, it allows direct links for sales and it seems to be working. Why? The engaged fans.
VR/AR/AI
What Black Mirror Striking Vipers gets wrong about VR - In essence, we’re much further away from the technology in the story than the episode would imply. But hey, it’s the only good episode this season, so let’s give them some credit for that.
DARPA is now investing in brain-machine-interfaces (BMI) that doesn't require surgery - meaning brain control of artificial limbs or allowing "a single soldier to control swarms of AI-enabled drones with his or her mind." Or an actor to control a recreation of a deceased one for a new movie before long.
OTHER
Meeker Internet Report: Too Much Streaming, Not Enough Security - Venture capitalist Mary Meeker has this to say about the internet: the streaming bubble is going to pop. Her 300 slide reports are a must read every year, but this article gives you the ten bullet point takeaways if you’re in a rush.
Apple Arcade is poised to make Apple the ‘art house’ gaming platform - and by doing so its choosing not to compete with the big gaming companies (Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo) and instead carve their own niche within the gaming world. Smart move, Apple.
Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? Let’s hope so, because I for one am done with the current crop. A good analysis of the IndieWeb – per the article: “Proponents of the IndieWeb offer a fairly straightforward analysis of our current social-media crisis. They frame it in terms of a single question: Who owns the servers? The bulk of our online activity takes places on servers owned by a small number of massive companies. Servers cost money to run. If you’re using a company’s servers without paying for the privilege, then that company must be finding other ways to “extract value” from you—and it’s that quest for large-scale value extraction, they argue, that leads directly to the crises of compromised privacy and engineered addictiveness with which we’re currently grappling.”
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