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
Photo “CHINESE FOOD OPEN” rights attributed to mag3737 on Flickr
A few weeks ago, Rupert over at chapterplay.tv blogged about OpenIndie and raised some really interesting questions which at the time I replied to in the comments. However, I think it’s worth answering one of them in particular on here as well.
What does the “open” in OpenIndie mean. You’d be right to be thinking along lines of open source software. I think it’s also important to think in terms of transparency and opening the relationship between filmmaker and audience. A lot of our values, especially mine as a developer, come from admiration and use of open source software. Crowdsourcing is fundamental to what we’re doing. Filmmakers are crowdsourcing audiences and screenings. We are crowdsourcing our startup funding and will be asking users and filmmakers on the site to shape the future of the site. In that way the community contributes to the site in the same way that developers contribute to open source software.
As for actually making our code and data open source, we very much admire the approach that Automattic have taken with Wordpress and I would certainly like to make our entire code base open source one day. This isn’t something that’s going to happen over night, or any time in the near future for that matter. We have some very definite goals for phase one and two and if/when we do open source openindie’s code, it will need to be prepared and planned carefully.
In terms of our data we’re strong proponents of Data Portability and will be making our data available via our API which is planned, at the moment, for development during phase three. During this process we’ll be making as much data available as humanly possible to allow anyone, anywhere in the world to build application using our data. All salient data is geo-locatable, meaning that every piece of data in our database which could potentially be mapped, can be. We hope this will bring with it fantastic opportunities for audiences and filmmakers alike.
I hope that gives you an insight into our thinking behind the name OpenIndie and don’t forget if you’re a filmmaker or film fan there’s still a way you can get involved. Simply, visit our Kickstarter campaign for phase two and donate. $100 gets you a filmmaker account to go live in phase two and $1+ gets you a user account where you can request and screen films.
For all the latest on what’s happening with OpenIndie, follow us on Twitter:
@openindie | @arincrumley | @kieranmasterton
Kieran Masterton
OpenIndie Co-Founder
The Open Video Alliance have written an extremely succinct blog post which lays out what we’re trying to do with OpenIndie, what’s happening right now, and what’s planned for phase two.
