How to sell your film online

Selling your film online has now became easy, although it wasn't always like this till even a couple of years back. You had websites like Revver and Turnhere, which later became redundant.

However, there is something even better now, and its completely free. The best part is that its promoted by Amazon.com, which with its vast resources has helped many self publishers of ebooks to become millionaires.

I am talking about CreateSpace.

CreateSpace provides free tools to help you self-publish and distribute your books, DVDs, CDs, video downloads and MP3s on-demand. So whether you're a filmmaker, a musician or an author, createspace is one service you should definitely try to sell your films, music and books.

Let us talk about filmmaking here. What does Createspace offer for filmmakers? Quite a bit if you ask me. For starters, here's what their DVD publishing section says:

Bring your film to market with retail-ready DVDs. We faithfully reproduce your artwork in full-color and package your discs in Amaray-style cases.
Setting up your title with us ensures your DVD remains in stock, made on-demand when customers order.

Here's some more benefits they claim:

• Your movie becomes eligible for listing on IMDb
• Printed with full-color, full-bleed, customizable disc and cover artwork
• Create custom DVD menu artwork
• Free UPC is assigned if you do not already own one

The best part is that you can sell your DVD on Amazon.com and have your eStore on it. Set the list price and start earning royalties. You can also choose Amazon Video On Demand™ as a sales channel when setting up your title to turn your film into a download. Definitely worth a try for short film makers who find it difficult to find a distribution channel.

Click here to setup a free Createspace account and start selling your film

Short Film: Damn Your Eyes

David Guglielmo, an alumni of School of Visual Arts, New York emailed me his short film titled Damn Your Eyes.


Damn Your Eyes a Spaghetti Western-influenced revenge film shot on the Sony EX1 digital camera in the NY Metropolitan area for $5,000. It has been successful at film festivals and recently won two awards.


WINNER: "Best Student Film" at Royal Flush Festival '09
WINNER: "Best More Than Horror Short" at Buffalo Screams Horror Festival '10

I liked the visual quality of the film: the lighting, the locations, set, framing, composition etc. The DoP used the Sony EXI camcorder given to him pretty well. Most of the actors did a really professional job and that took the movie experience a notch higher. The screenplay could have been written better. Some of the moments in the movie were clichéd and boring but on the whole it is a decent production. What do you think of the movie? Please watch and comment (feed subscribers will need to visit the blog to watch it).

David Guglielmo must be congratulated for doing his excellent direction. Considering he is relatively new to this profession, he has done a laudable job that commands appreciation.
 Digital filmmaking is indeed growing from strength to strength.

Taiwan's Tsai Liang is Asian Filmmaker of the Year

South Korea's most prestigious film festival said Wednesday it has chosen Taiwanese director Tsai Ming Liang as its Asian Filmmaker of the Year.

The Pusan International Film Festival praised Tsai's work over the past three decades for pioneering unexplored areas that overcome the limitations of the art film industry.

"His 30-year-long devotion to filmmaking has greatly influenced Asian cinema and made considerable contributions to enhance the global status of Asian cinema," it said in a statement.

"He is renowned for seeking fresh ways of communicating with his audience... We can find the root of his endless spirit of challenging himself and the borderlines of art in his earlier works in the 1990s."

Malaysian-born Tsai is best known for "Vive L'Amour" that won the Golden Lion (best picture) award at the Venice Film Festival in 1994, and "The River" that won the Silver Bear/Special Jury Prize at the 1997 Berlin International Film Festival.


The 52-year-old has also won numerous awards with other films.

He is considered a leading exponent of the "Second New Wave" -- a group of Taiwanese directors in the 1990s who produced films with realistic and sympathetic portrayals of life rather than melodramas or action pictures.


The festival, held in the southern port city of Busan since 1996, will be staged from October 7-15 this year.

Advice for young filmmakers

Sam Raimi, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Guillermo del Toro offer advice to young filmmakers.

Ingnmar Bergman - A Filmmaker Lost

Legendary film-maker Ingmar Bergman, one of the key figures in modern cinema, has died at the age of 89.

His 60-year career spanned intense classics like Cries & Whispers, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. He was personally nominated for nine Oscars between 1960 and 1984, while three of his productions won Oscars for best foreign film. Bergman died at his home in Faro, Sweden. No details about the cause of death have been released.

INGMAR BERGMAN: PROFILE
For most cinemagoers, Ingmar Bergman is Swedish cinema. Certainly, few other directors have assumed Bergman's burden of representing an entire nation for international audiences. His austere appraisals of familial strife and spiritual angst may have worked against the grain of the Swedish Tourist Board, but Bergman has nevertheless single-handedly put his homeland on the cinematic map. His sombre canon, encompassing more than 40 feature films shot with complete artistic control, has earned him auteurship and helped raise cinema's stature to that enjoyed by other art forms.

As a director, Bergman favored intuition over intellect, and chose to be unaggressive in dealing with actors. Bergman saw himself as having a great responsibility toward them, viewing them as collaborators often in a psychologically vulnerable position. He stated that a director must be both honest and supportive in order to allow others their best work.

His films usually deal with existential questions of mortality, loneliness, and faith; they also tend to be direct and not overtly stylized. Persona, one of Bergman's most famous films, is unusual among Bergman's work in being both existentialist and avant-garde.

While his themes could be cerebral, sexual desire found its way to the foreground of most of his movies, whether the setting was the era of the plague ("The Seventh Seal"), upper-class family life in early 20th century Uppsala ("Fanny and Alexander") or contemporary times in a strange city ("The Silence"). The female characters were usually more in touch with their sexuality than their men. In an interview with Playboy magazine in 1964, he said: "...the manifestation of sex is very important, and particularly to me, for above all, I don't want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them." Film, Bergman said, was his demanding mistress. Some of his major actresses became his real-life mistresses.

Bergman usually wrote his own scripts, thinking about them for months or years before starting the actual process of writing, which he viewed as somewhat tedious. His earlier films are carefully structured, and are either based on his plays or written in collabortion with other authors. Bergman stated that in his later works, when on occasion his actors would want to do things differently from his own intentions, he would let them, noting that the results were often "disastrous" when he did not do so. As his career progressed, Bergman increasingly let his actors improvise their dialogue. In his latest films, he wrote just the ideas informing the scene and allowed his actors to determine exact dialogue.

Bergman died at his home in Sweden. No details about the cause of death have been released.

According to the TT news agency, Bergman died peacefully on Faro Island - or Sheep Island - in the Baltic Sea. The director had settled there after using it as a location for several films.

Source: BBC, Wikipedia

Shots, Scenes, Sequences

A shot is an uninterrupted strip of exposed motion-picture film or videotape made up of at least one frame, an individual image on the strip of film or videotape. A shot presents a subject, perhaps even a blank screen, during an uninterrupted segment of time. Typically, a feature film consists of hundreds of shots, sometimes more than a thousand. The original, uncensored version of Battleship Potemkin (1925) owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York—which runs seventy-two minutes when projected at the silent speed of eighteen frames per second-has 1,346 shots. Toy Story (1995), which is 77_1/2 minutes long, has 1,623 shots (Grignon). At the opposite extreme, some experimental films consist of a single, often very lengthy shot. Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), which is seemingly a single shot of a view of the Empire State Building and runs for hours, is an example of this sort of film.

Battleship Potemkin

A scene is a section or a narrative film that gives the impression of continuous action taking place during continuous time and in continuous space. A scene seems to have unity, but editors often delete tedious or unnecessary footage in such a way that viewers will not notice. For example, we may not see every step a character presumably takes in moving within a scene. A scene may consist of one shot and usually consists of two or more related shots, but on rare occasions a shot is used to convey multiple scenes, as in the more than eight minute opening shot of The Player (1992). At various times during that shot, the camera moves closer to certain groups of characters so we can see them interact and then moves to different characters elsewhere nearby. In the opening of The Player, as in the famous opening of Touch of Evil(1958), there is not the usual scene consisting of a shot or shots but a shot consisting of scenes.

Sequence lacks a universal meaning: filmmakers, critics, and scholars often assign it different meanings. And comparison of several published outlines of sequences for the same film reveals different “sequences”. It is most useful to think of a sequence as a group of related consecutive scenes, although what unifies the scenes is not universally agreed on.

PS: You guys must be wondering why the hell I've put up celluloid in a digital filmmaking blog! Well to put it simply - I had to. Especially when talking abut shots, scenes and sequences - the best references could have only been got from celluloid films - the traditional medium. Digital filmmaking; being relatively new, did not have much to offer on this subject. Plus, I think too much limitation is not much of a good thing! On that note,dear readers, ciao and take care.