Today we’re really pleased to announce that any filmmaker who would like to add their film to OpenIndie to collect demand and enable worldwide user-generated screenings can do so by paying $100 per film per year. The facility is available to any user of OpenIndie and during March there will be approximately a 24 hour turn around from payment to account activation. However, after the beginning of April activation will occur immediately after purchase.

By choosing to add your film to OpenIndie, like the 100 founding filmmakers before you, you’ll get access to the following:

• A film profile page where anyone can request a screening of your film.
• A map of worldwide demand for your film.
• Upload a high quality digital copy of your film for screenings. * Optional
• OpenIndie community can set up revenue share screenings of your film.
• Facility for a screening host to directly pay you your share.
• A one-to-one consultation over skype or the telephone with a social media expert to advise on utilizing the internet to find your films full potential.

We’re also extraordinarily excited to announce that cross-media specialist Christy Dena is coming on board with us to offer our first 200 filmmakers an hours one-to-one consultation. The consultations will take place chiefly via Skype and will allow filmmakers the opportunity to discuss their audience building plans.

Christy has keynoted Power to the Pixel in London and recently spoke at the Filmmaker Summit. She also mentors film, television, literature and new media professionals, and judges cross-media and new media art projects worldwide. As a result she has an amazing grasp of the issues facing indie filmmakers right now and is extremely knowledgeable about OpenIndie.

Consultations will take place over the coming months so please bear with us as I’m sure you can imagine arranging each consultation with busy filmmaker schedules can be a challenge.

Find out more about adding your film to OpenIndie or sign up an account by browsing the films and requesting one you’re interested in seeing. Finally, if you have any questions about how the site works or suggestions please feel free to post them on our help site.

Wow! What a couple of days it has been. This isn’t going to be a long blog post because there’s so much to do but I wanted to give you all a little insight into what it has been like managing the launch over the last few days. At time of writing we have had just shy of 20,000 page views in the three days since the site launched. We have 29 films on the site and have sent out hundreds of invitations. Now, I know that’s no Twitter but I think it’s fairly incredible given we’re just two guys running a little indie film startup.

The experience of launching this site has been like no other. First up, I have been on my own. Of course Arin has been around to help and advise but technically I’m where the buck stops. I’m used to working in teams of anything from 3 to 15 and having people to delegate tasks to or help bug fix or deal with support requests while I deploy the site. Being a one-man development team has been a massive learning curve for me in terms of prioritization, time management and customer service. And, to be honest, I think I haven’t done too badly for one bloke and a Macbook Pro ;)

What went right?

We launched a website that Arin and I are bloody proud of! Filmmakers and users alike seem to be really taken with the site and we’ve had some amazing feedback. Likewise, all core functionality on the site has performed as expected. And, on a very serious note I am prouder of this site than I have ever been of any project I have ever worked on ever. Yes, it’s a little rougher round the edges than I’d like but for three months work by a man on his own in his spare bedroom this site rocks! There’s a long long road ahead of fixes, changes and new features but it’s going to be amazing to see this site evolve and make it better, more usable and more useful for filmmakers, venues and film fans alike.

Design… the way the site looks has been a MASSIVE success. Almost every piece of positive feedback we’ve had starts with “the site looks amazing” or similar. This is totally down to the super-talented James Franklin from Pixeco who has been an absolute legend in this whole process. James lives in New Zealand and has spent many hours at very late times at night for him talking to me on Skype about how best to achieve what we want and I think the brand and site look and feel is a complete success. Thanks James!

Finally, OpenIndie is already a massive success story for the power of the crowd. You showed us you wanted this and we built it! Seriously, we couldn’t have done this without each and every one of you who gave to our Kickstarter campaign way back in November when OpenIndie was just an idea that Arin and I had been talking about for a little under a year. So, for that, thank you!

Oh, and I know that at least three filmmakers have received donations via OpenIndie one within the first few hours of the site being online - so that’s worth smiling about :)

So, what went wrong?

Well without wishing to be too negative a couple of things didn’t go as expected. There were bugs with the third party authentication systems. Twitter’s oAuth implementation has been rock solid but Facebook had a massive falling out with our sessions controller on the day of launch and I don’t feel our implementation of OpenID is quite as usable as it could be. I think we need a sightly different approach and we need to communicate better with the user during the sign up process. Likewise, we had some issues with a mail backlog. Our SMTP provider throttled us for exceeding a daily limit and we have had to upgrade to a premium package. This was an oversight and for anyone whose email invite was delayed as a result, apologies. But these are minor issues in what was a very successful launch.

What needs some attention?

To go all geeky on you for a moment, there have been more instance terminations and re-creations than I would have liked. One reason for this, I think, is the stack we’re using. We’re running Unicorn and nginx and while nginx is a known quantity I’m not so sure about Unicorn. Don’t get me wrong up until launch we’ve had great experiences with it but re-deploying our site while using this stack on EYC seems to make the site unstable and it throws intermittent error 500s with the cause being random and bogus undefined method exceptions. I have been playing with other stacks on staging and while the site isn’t so speedy it is completely reliable upon re-deploy… sooooo we may have to think about switching to Passenger unless there’s a determinable cause solution to this problem. I will look into this over the next few days. In the mean time thank you for your patience while we experience a 10minute extended downtime for redeploy.

To sum up, it has been a very long three months of very late nights development but it has all been worth it to see people requesting films on OpenIndie.

Want to bring a film to your part of the world? Want an OpenIndie account? Request a film: http://openindie.com/films

And finally, for all those filmmakers who have expressed an interest in adding your film to the site keep your eyes on the blog for an announcement coming very soon.

Thanks again everyone,

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

Little bit late to the party posting this link to Ted Hope’s fantastic list of 21 thinkers that he posted back at the end of December, but it’s a great resource. Brilliant to see Arin in there and that OpenIndie gets a mention too. Cheers Ted!

OpenIndie Co-Founder Arin Crumley talks to FilmSnobbery’s Nicholas Baisley about OpenIndie, crowdfunding our phase one and current phase two campaign, whether we feel OpenIndie is the solution to the current state of indie film distribution or just part of the picture, and much more!

Great article, thanks for including us Jon.

Jon Reiss is a filmmaker and author of Think Outside the Box Office - check it out!

Also reposted over at Tribeca Film

A couple of months ago I wrote about how we had decided to use Ruby on Rails to build OpenIndie. One of my goals for December was to research and select a hosting provider that had a elastic hosting solution but could also offer us some experience in the world of Rails hosting. Today after more than a month of research and testing we have chosen to host the site with Engine Yard Cloud.

First of all I’d like to thank Tom Mornini for noticing a tweet I put out asking for hosting recommendations and in turn offering me a trial period on the platform. And, thank you to Abheek Anand and Ezra Zygmuntowicz for answering my many many questions over the last few weeks. I don’t think I’ve ever had better customer service.

But why did we choose Engine Yard Cloud (EYC)? Well, first of all you’ve got one of your answers right there in the last paragraph:

Amazing customer service: I’ve never experienced such attentive, fast and thorough customer service in my life. I’m not paying for a support package yet I get near instant replies both on their support site and via Twitter. Impressive!

People who care: I follow Tom, Abheek, Ezra and a few other employees of EY on Twitter and they all seem to genuinely give a damn about Ruby, Rails, the community and their product.

Reliability/Scalability/Flexibility: EYC is built upon Amazon’s elastic hosting solution EC2 providing the reliability, scalability and flexibility OpenIndie needs.

Expertise: The combination of the above reliability and expertise isn’t matched in the market as far as I can see. They are targeting a niche market by making a incredibly powerful platform like EC2 available at the flick of a switch. And, they really know their shit. In my dealings with their staff, especially Ezra, they really know what they’re doing.

Simplicity: Finally, the key, it is simple and headache free. Site’s under load? I can bring up a couple of new instances with the press of a button. Need a new staging environment that mirrors exactly the data and configuration of my production environment? Log into EYC, press a button, I have what I need. Simple.

EYC’s main competitors in my decision making was the choice of going direct to Amazon and managing everything myself or RackSpace Cloud. Obviously EC2 is an amazing platform which EYC is built upon but, frankly, I just can’t afford the time to be messing with server configuration and in the end RackSpace’s product just didn’t compare to EYC.

I’d like to point out that I haven’t received cash in a brown envelope or a kick back in the form of free hosting from Engine Yard - I’ve just received excellent service and thought it was worth blogging about. I’ll write another post about my experience with EYC one month after launch.

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

So, the time has come for me to give you a peek at what I’ve been working on for the past month. OpenIndie is starting to look, a little at least, like a website. Which is massively exciting for Arin and I but also we hope for all of you who have helped make this possible.

Before you check out the video walk through below, please keep in mind that the site has not had any design applied to it and there will be bugs and debug code on screen. This isn’t normally a phase of development, in a site of this size, which gets to be seen by the public so understandably, as a Developer, I’m a little nervous about this process.

The site’s core functionality is in place. Meaning all the social features work plus you can add films, request films, and create/attend screenings etc. The process isn’t necessarily pretty or 100% user friendly yet but its functions and thankfully all the geo-location gubbins are working as intended.

NOTE: you might need to crank your sound, my mic is out of commission at the moment so I was using my built in MBP microphone.

As I mentioned in the video, once the screening was created because according to OpenIndie’s database the venue where Zak is screening We Live In Public (my old house) in within 50miles of my new house and I have requested We Live In Public I will receive an email telling me when, where and who is screening the film. I am then given the option to RSVP to that screening.

Likewise, I also promised a sneak peek at some of the design work that’s being produced by James Franklin from Pixeco. Here’s just a taster to whet your appetite. This is the first design James produced, things have evolved a lot from this design but it gives a good idea of what we’re thinking.

Please note you should ignore all logos and branding on this image as those shown are temporary. I should also note that all the films and users featured on this design are not necessarily anything to do with OpenIndie they are simply posters of films that came to mind and user icons taken from random folks I follow on Twitter.

(click image to view full design)

For the code monkeys amongst you, here’s an update on the vitals:

21,524 lines of code

19 models, 87 views, 31 controllers

20 database tables

And finally I’d like to say we very much welcome your feedback and that there is even more design insights to come in our Phase Two campaign video which is coming very soon!

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

Filmmaker Lance Weiler interviews Kieran Masterton about the importance of data and what the real-time web might mean for storytelling.

Hello everyone,

I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas and a fantastic New Year. Here in Bath, I have been working away over the holidays on OpenIndie in preparation of a video walk-through screencast that I am preparing. Right now, I’m in the middle of getting that together and it should post on Tuesday the 5th - so keep your eyes peeled.

Next, I want to address the filmmaker tools which I mentioned in a couple of comments and posts on this blog in the past month. These tools were originally planned to go live around Christmas time and were intended to allow the first 100 filmmakers to upload their lists of people who have expressed an interest in their film. This in turn would allow us to send out invites to those people who would become exclusive users of the OpenIndie private beta which launches on March 1st. This plan has changed somewhat. Filmmakers will still have this functionality available to them, in fact, I’ve already written the code that drives it. However, the functionality won’t be launched as a “filmmaker tools” microsite.

The decision to go this route was threefold, first our deadline of the first of a March launch has always been terrifically ambitious and so time is precious. Secondly, we felt that the time it would take to extract the functionality from the core site and polishing it for public release would be better spent on the core site and finally we felt that it was important that filmmakers also had the chance to add their films to the site before their “fans” were invited because otherwise those people invited by that filmmaker wouldn’t be able to request the film immediately after signing up. We felt that was an important first step for the user and vital to ensure the best possible conversion of invite to request ratio.

As I said earlier, I am planning to post the walk through video on Tuesday which I think will give you all a much better understanding of how the site will work plus a little geeky insight for all you tech-heads out there ;) If you have any questions in the meantime - kieran AT openindie DOT com is always open!

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

It’s Thursday on OpenIndie Phase One week three and, here’s some statistics for you:

12,296 lines of code written

That’s approximately 723 lines of code a day.

For the geeks amongst you, that’s: 18 models, 82 views and 30 controllers

54 cups of tea consumed

83 emails sent back and forth between Arin and I

6 mince pies consumed

26 plays of Jump Back - The Best Of The Rolling Stones, ‘71 - ‘93

311 tweets sent from @kieranmasterton and @openindie

49 commits back to GitHub

11 cups of coffee consumed

236 emails sent out to Phase One backers

And that’s just a taste of what has been happening over the last 17 days at OpenIndie.

Take it easy,

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder