BAWIFT event

Last night Charles and I attended a BAWIFT (Bay Area Women in Film & Television) panel. I was on the panel, along with Tiffany Shlain (of "The Tribe", "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" and the "Webby Awards" fame), and representatives from Atom Films and Jaman. It lasted about two hours but based on the engaged Q&A, it could have lasted another two. Some of discussion points I recall that may or may not be noteworthy (depending how Internet saavy you are as a filmmaker):

• some indie filmmakers are not that familiar with the opportunities of online distribution and the Internet appears daunting to them (which tells me that Caachi has to do a better job of making it easy to understand)
• continually aggregating emails as your personal fan base to use for the lifetime of your filmmaking career should be done by every filmmaker
• filmmakers should start their marketing campaigns with friends and family and have those people contact their friends to shill films (and don't forget to use those aggregated emails)
• streaming sites that specialize in user generated content (e.g., YouTube) is very different from distributing independent films for video downloading (that would be us). One is basically for showing short, grainy clips for the MTV crowd and the other is for professional filmmakers.
  
• both the filmmaker and the online distributor should be marketing your film to niche audiences that would have a likely interest in your film
• You don't need to stagger your film release unless there's a compelling reason (e.g., your TV deal prohibits you from distributing online until after the TV airing). The traditional window release process is meant for studio films to generate revenue for all the "middlemen" involved in the distribution process; indie films are a very different animal and the goal should be to create as much buzz/sales as possible.
  
• the future for indie filmmakers will be online and the opportunities to self-distribute is a tectonic shift from the days of being at the mercy of a traditional distributor. With these new opportunities, the filmmaker's role will morph where marketing and distribution will be just as important as making the film.
• some Internet distributors do not openly share their revenue split with filmmakers. This seems to be counter-productive since online distributors are supposed to be a mechanism to provide filmmakers improved terms and transparency compared to the old world of traditional distributors.