Filed under: media industries 2 | Tags: distribution, marketing, seminar
Whilst this seminar had some great guests and great information about Australian distributing and marketing I felt that the feel was a bit awkward and there wasn’t the same chemistry seen between the guests, that we experienced in the previous seminars. I don’t know if this was because I wasn’t hugely interested in the seminar theme or because the guests just didn’t gel together. I’m really not sure how to explain it, it just felt a bit dull and the questions felt a bit repetitive or misunderstood by the guests. In conjunction I think a lot of the audience were interested in making films and the process of getting their films distributed, whereas the seminar mainly focused on getting into the distribution business, which could have been why it got a bit repetitive.
However, the content of the seminar was really good in terms of understanding how the distribution industry works and what has been the changing trends in terms of distribution from the past to the present and then into the future from the perspective of small and big films. In fact there was a lot of emphasis put on this idea of change and how integral it is for people within the distribution industry to be able to adapt and predict what changes are coming, especially with the rise of digital technologies and online distribution channels. These changes in terms of online distribution are seen as a good thing in terms of smaller budget films in that these films have more opportunities in terms of non-theatrical realises. However, I felt throughout most panel guests there was still a big emphasis on getting your films to the theatres, and that this still has remained dominant despite audience drops. This digitalisation has had the biggest effect on the distribution industry, where due to the costs of camera equipment decreasing there has been a huge influx of content, which has resulted in a diversification of the industry. The tip that the guests gave in terms of this was that not all films are suitable for theatrical distribution and when making a film you really need to think about the best way in which your film will succeed.
It is all about word-of-mouth in the distribution industry, that is what is so important, word-of-mouth within the industry and also with audiences. This is also heavily impacted by digitalisation,which puts word-of-mouth into the public domain and can be both good and bad for the film being released.
KEY ADVICE FROM THE PANEL:
-there are a lot of expenses, you need money behind you when you begin.
-start small.
-watch a lot of films and know where you want to go with it.
-view everything as a commercial product.
-observe and learn from the best.
-know what you’re good and bad at.
Overall, I thought the seminar was very informative if not slightly repetitive, yet I thought the host did a great job in including all guests in the conversation and I felt that every guest said their bit. I also thought the selection of guests was really fabulous. Overall, I think this group did a good job in hosting a great seminar.
I’ve decided to be a bit adventurous in terms of creating my own showreel website and want to craft it from scratch using Dreamweaver. I really want my website to be a reflection of me and I’m really interested in design at the moment and therefore want to have a really well designed page that doesn’t just look like everyone else’s. Whilst looking for people to interview for my personal networking report I took in what their website looked like and decided that in terms of my own preference I really like simple websites that don’t have too much going on and are really accessible in terms of finding information. One of my favourites was Christopher Fulham’s who is an experimental new media artist his website is simple yet distinctive and showcases his work without really giving too much away. His site has images from his key works as a selected works option that you can flick through from the home page and then has specific pages that link to other info such as bio, etc. With our own websites they have to have a lot more info than Christopher’s, but what I don’t want to do is overload people with too much information. Therefore, in conjunction with my website I am going to set up a vimeo page with the full-length versions of all my video works. These will be housed separately with a link on the actual site. I got this idea from Closer Productions website when I was researching doco people for our seminar in which they have little icons in the top corner of their page for their twitter, facebook and vimeo accounts. I will do something similar on mine.
In terms of the design of my website I realised that I needed to figure out how to use Dreamweaver and have been going through quite a dense tutorial. This hasn’t been too difficult as I remember some html from previous studies and Dreamweaver is actually a lot easier. Going through the tutorial is really helpful as it tells you actually how to do things and because I’ve already had a little bit of experience I have been able learn it all quite quickly. I have gone through two sections with a sample website, which I should be able to build the majority of my website from and when I want to do the other details will move onto the next steps. The hardest thing with building a website is making sure the layout is right, adding content is quite easy it’s all about setting up those foundation blocks, such as spacing and how it is all going to look on your screen.
What I am going to do is to start drawing up a paper version of my website, either by hand or using photoshop. I really want to be able to visualise how I want it to look and I think it’s really important to have a really nicely designed website, considering we all are media practitioners.
Today was the television seminar, which was really great. I’m not really into a career in television, and was pleasantly surprised by how informative and insightful this seminar was. I really enjoyed the format of the seminar, which was entertaining in terms of it replicating a typical television hosting show and thought the introduction videos were well made, as well as funny in terms of introducing the guests. Whilst the second section of the seminar was really great and informative with the panel and allowed interaction and discussion between guests I found the individual interviews for the first half didn’t work that well, this was because it dragged out the life of the guest in two much detail and didn’t really draw on things that were relevant for us to know about as media students entering the industry. I think this section should have been a lot quicker in terms of giving a quick background on the guest for no more than really ten minutes each, just for the audience to get a bit of contextualisation before it went into the panel discussion.
The panel discussion after the break was really well done and the questions really hit the spot in terms of gauging the television industry in Australia from guests that have worked in quite different areas being music, comedy and childrens, therefore they really painted the picture of how the industry functions. What I learnt in this section was:
a) there is a really big tension between creative and network, where in Australia the role of creative is greatly over-powered by executive producers and networks. Australia sees creative as a interchangeable role and not overly important, especially in consideration to HBO, which has an extremely high creative aspect. Therefore in order for television to be a lot better in Australia there needs to be more respect and time given to production quality from a creative perspective. The industry seems to care too much on not hurting anyones feelings and being internationally successful that creative dies due to this.
b) the television media landscape has considerably changed, where the emphasis has switched from BIG comedy shows to BIG reality shows. This means that all the money goes to those reality shows and has a massive impact on other types of shows, which shrink. Therefore a lot of outsourcing takes place in order to make small budget productions that the television stations don’t really care about as they make the majority of their money from these BIGGER shows.
c) the future of Australian television will require hybrid products, with a massive emphasis on digital culture. The Australian television industry is not seen as big innovators and therefore it is up to us to bring innovation in terms of hybrid products to the industry.
d) multi-channeling is not really a good thing as it means less money into individual shows, where the production values of the television shows drop and don’t stand out distinctively. This is especially the case with ABC3 where there is a lot of same-same children’s programming that doesn’t break anything in terms of innovation.
Overall, the seminar was quite shattering for people that would want to enter the industry, where it seemed the overall mood was that it’s a very difficult industry that is not overly rewarding as you have to do a lot of not-so-pleasant jobs in-between. The future seems to lie in the form of digital hybrid television programs and there was a lot of emphasis on not specialising yourself to one distinct role as it is more important to know a little bit about everything so you can adapt to different roles.
As for the seminar itself I thought there was not enough food and hydration. I think the group should have put more thought and provided more for the audience. Yet, I think they did an excellent job in terms of keeping the seminar entertaining, having insightful guests and just putting on a good show in terms of their audiovisual work. The first section of the seminar should have been shorter, but the panel and Q&A section at the end was great and extremely informative.
Filed under: media industries 2 | Tags: editing, overview, post-production, seminar
Eric and my job as post-production team was to edit the footage from the seminar into a short (under 10 minute) highlight video. This ended up being a lot more difficult than expected because it is hard to make short snippets of good words of wisdom into something that has structure and makes sense, especially since our guests rambled quite a bit and their stories were long. Our approach to editing was to go through all the footage pick the best bits and then form the structure from there. What we regarded as the best bits were moments that we could apply ourselves, so in a way tangible tips, advice or stories that were new, innovative and interesting, and also things that we could apply ourselves to our own practice.
When we had all our bits and pieces of highlights what we realised was that whilst Dennis and Steve fed off each other with things generally on documentary a lot of Natalie’s stuff was particularly related to her Tote documentary, therefore we realised that we could structure it around Dennis and Steve’s advice with Natalie’s words as examples of that advice or general documentary information.
This still didn’t quite work, because whilst we mapped out some key theoretical groups such as: the ideas, subject and filmmaker relationships and funding they all didn’t quite join together, and it seemed very disjointed. Therefore what we decided to do was to form the content around 10 tips to documentary filmmaking in which we would introduce text and voiceover to give the footage some shape. The tips were quite easy to come by because all guests had something to give in terms of advice for budding documentary filmmakers and therefore we used to text to form a tip in short term and then for them to elaborate vocally on that tip. In which we would add some more text to re-phrase the tip after they had elaborated.
We used voice-over to tie the seminar together into a narrative and to introduce new themes as the occured through the piece. We kept the voice-over to a minimum, yet we wanted to provide context in terms of what the seminar was about and also to give the video some rounding with a beginning and concluding voice just to make it a bit more circular for whoever is viewing it.
I forgot how much I enjoyed editing, because I find it a really creative time, where your footage can turn as you find more threads and themes in the words given to you. Therefore, even though we weren’t editing anything spectacular you can make it better and more thought provoking in terms of how you place things together and then by adding small things such as text, voice0ver and also some of the clips from the trailers of our guests to add a new visual dimension and give the viewing something stimulating to view whilst hearing words that relate to those words.
Overall, I enjoyed this role as part of the seminar team and even though I’m not really keen on the super technical elements of editing I like thinking about editing and how everything relates and then how it could all work together to create something sensical.
