Today we continue our series of bite-sized features highlighting a group of our founding filmmakers that we think are really storming this new world of indie film. This week our subject is filmmaker, educator, speaker, and author Jon Reiss.

Like all our founding filmmakers Jon not only gave to our Kickstarter campaign but has also been hugely supportive of what we’re trying to achieve. Jon’s latest film BOMB IT is a feature documentary covering the explosion of graffiti culture throughout the world. As a result of his experience distributing BOMB IT Jon has now written his book Think Outside The Box Office. In TOTBO Jon imparts his considerable wisdom on the subject of marketing and distribution in the world of indie film.

Now, he’s running a series of workshops both in Europe and stateside to impart his knowledge to filmmakers face-to-face. After the success of his day long courses in London and Amsterdam he now has two two-day sessions scheduled for New York City this weekend and Vancouver on the 12th of June. So, if you’re an indie filmmaker and you’re keen to learn more about what Jon has to say about marketing and distribution and you’re free this weekend you can still enroll for his NYC session. And, if you’re in Vancouver on the 12th you can enroll here.

OpenIndie would like to thank Jon for his support and if you’re about to face the daunting task of distributing your film we would encourage you to check out Jon’s book, think about attending one of his workshops and follow him on Twitter.

OpenIndie is currently in the midsts of a redesign, so watch this space for a new homepage and more in the coming weeks.

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

Afternoon folks, just over a week ago we changed the heat map functionality to make it far more shiny for you. The heat map now gives you detailed information about the quantity of requests in each area and zones are colour coded based on demand.

This version of the map is now available as a widget. So head along to any film’s promote page, here’s an example, take the embed code and add it to your blog. We know the iFrame version isn’t ideal for everyone so we’re working on a Facebook version amongst others.

We also have a sign up form embed option coming very soon so that people will be able to request your film directly from your site just by filling in a couple of their details. Watch this space!

Any questions, feel free to shoot me an email (kieran AT openindie DOT com) or ask on our help site.

A couple of weeks ago, we started our weekly bite-sized feature highlighting a number of our founding filmmakers that we think are really storming this new world of indie film. Yes, that was a few weeks ago, wow, 2010 is racing away from us. Anyway, the purpose of these blogs are A) to bring attention to people we think you should be taking notice of but also to introduce (or re-introduce) you to their work.

The subject of this weeks filmmaker focus is critically acclaimed filmmaker and all round nice guy Zak Forsman. Zak’s short film I FUCKING HATE YOU received several international audience, jury and festival awards on the circuit. Likewise, his feature HEART OF NOW has been called “Beautiful” and “Absolutely Gorgeous” by, amongst others, Ain’t It Cool News.

Zak is currently working on his next feature ELOQUENT GRAFFITI (2011) and has released a 6 minute prelude to this film entitled MODEL/PHOTOGRAPHER which is available to watch on the Sabi Pictures site. Sabi Pictures was co-founded by Zak and Kevin K. Shah and between them they have made at least six beautiful and engaging films, more information about which can, again, be found on the Sabi Pictures site.

Of those films, Zak and Kevin have chosen to put HEART OF NOW and Kevin’s feature WHITE KNUCKLES on OpenIndie. Zak was not only the first filmmaker to make it to 100 requests on the site but Sabi are also the first production company to have more than one film on the site.

Here at OpenIndie we hope that Sabi will be the first of many micro-studios to start distributing their work via the site and it’s a pleasure working with Zak and Kevin to build a site that works for them, and others like them.

You should check out the trailer for HEART OF NOW and WHITE KNUCKLES on OpenIndie and request both!!! You should also follow Zak and Kevin on Twitter.

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

This Saturday the 8th of May 2010, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, you have the opportunity to see both founders of OpenIndie in the flesh. Arin and I will be speaking to filmmakers this Saturday about how OpenIndie can help them distribute their film. Arin is speaking at the Connecticut Film Festival and presenting his vision of “A Model That Can Work” including crowdfunding, profit sharing, community driven distribution and building an audience that you can take from one film to the next. 

Meanwhile on the other side of the pond at the world famous Ealing Studios I will be talking to the attendees of Film Distribution In 2010 a two-day event designed to empower filmmakers with the knowledge and tools they need to distribute their work. I’ll be talking about the origins of OpenIndie, how we enable community driven distribution, how the platform brings filmmakers, fans and exhibitors together in one space and I’ll also be touching on our plans for the future. 

Other highlights of the two-day distribution event include Jon Reiss, filmmaker and author of Think Outside the Box Office, leading film marketer Sheri Candler, and Sarah Mosses of Good Screenings the platform recently used by Franny Armstrong to distribute her climate change film Age of Stupid. It looks like it’s going to be a great couple of days and I’m sad I can’t stick around for the Sunday. Anyone about to be faced with the challenge of distributing their film or currently in the process of doing so should definitely come along and learn how distribution is working in this new world of indie film. 

Passes are still available for both events so if you’re up for a weekend of distribution antics check out the Distribution in 2010 site or if you’re already attending the Connecticut Film Festival or live within striking distance of Danbury, CT check out their site for more details about how and when to attend Arin’s presentation.

In the words of @FilmStew come join the “transatlantic twosome” for a weekend of open distribution goodness :)

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

Photo credit: Stephanie Wu

Last week we started our weekly bite-sized feature highlighting a number of our founding filmmakers that we think are really storming this new world of indie film. The purpose of these blogs are A) to bring attention to people we think you should be taking notice of but also to introduce (or re-introduce) you to their work.

This week indie film Producer Mynette Louie is the subject of OpenIndie Filmmaker Focus. Mynette was one of the first filmmakers to add her film, CHILDREN OF INVENTION, directed by Tze Chun and which premiered at Sundance ‘09, to OpenIndie. Like all our founding filmmakers, she was also one of the first folks to put her hand in her pocket and donate $100 to our Kickstarter campaign back in November. So, for that, thank you Mynette!

Mynette is a New York based producer who co-produced Andrew Bujalski’s MUTUAL APPRECIATION, a film named one of the top-ten films of 2006 by Entertainment Weekly and the Village Voice, amongst others. She is currently in post-production on, winner of the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Lab, P. Benoit’s UNTITLED HAITI PROJECT and she is in development on another project with CHILDREN OF INVENTION director Tze Chun entitled YOU’RE A BIG GIRL NOW for which the log line reads:

“A Singaporean orphan is bought by a brothel, escapes to Hong Kong with an older prostitute, then returns to Singapore to uncover the mysteries of her childhood.  Based on a true story.”

Mynette is also on the Selection Advisory Committee of the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program. In short Mynette’s work is exactly the kind of filmmaking that excites us at OpenIndie. She’s producing beautiful, surprising and truly independent films and we’re proud she’s one of our founding filmmakers.

For more about Mynette Louie and her films check out this recent IndieWire article and the CHILDREN OF INVENTION site. Oh, and don’t forget to follow her on Twitter.

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

OpenIndie’s search story

Photo credit: grking.com

Back in November ‘09 we were lucky enough to receive financial backing and tremendous support from some seriously talented indie filmmakers. In this new series of bite-sized blogs we plan to introduce (or re-introduce) you to a number of our founding filmmakers that we feel are seriously storming this new world of indie filmmaking.

This week the subject of OpenIndie Filmmaker Focus is American DIY filmmaker Gary King. We chose Gary to feature this week because he has just successfully completed the colossal task of crowdfunding his next feature to the tune of a staggering $31,101!!! Like OpenIndie, Gary used Kickstarter.com to fund his film HOW DO YOU WRITE A JOE SCHERMANN SONG which he plans to shoot in the summer of 2010. 

Gary only started his feature filmmaking career in 2009 with drama NEW YORK LATELY for which he garnered some serious critical acclaim. Since, he has directed horror film DISMAL (2009) and has also been hired to direct action/comedy zombie flick DEATH OF THE DEAD (2010). As if that wasn’t enough he has also just wrapped post-production on his latest feature film WHAT’S UP LOVELY (2010) which is the film Gary has chosen to build an audience for using OpenIndie. 

So, if you’re unfamiliar with Gary’s work check out his website to keep up-to-date with his prolific output and from the guys at OpenIndie: Gary - congratulations on such an amazing crowdfunding achievement and we look forward to working with you to get as many eyeballs on your work as possible!

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

Photo credit: notsogoodphotography on Flickr - “hey son, get out of the clouds”

Way back at the end of February I blogged about the fantastic experience that I’d had launching (or preparing to launch) OpenIndie on the Engine Yard Cloud platform. That post received fantastic feedback from both other developers and Engine Yard staff and resulted in me being asked to give a testimonial for the Engine Yard site, which was very flattering.

In that post I promised to reflect upon the experience of deploying the site into the cloud with EY and also my feelings about the platform one month on. Sadly I wasn’t able to post this exactly one month after launch (on April 1st) as I promised. Development of OpenIndie and other business commitments such as preparing for DIY DAYS NYC have taken up my time. However, I did want to return to the subject and give you my thoughts after using the product for a reasonable amount of time.

Launch went incredibly smoothly. There wasn’t a single hosting issue to be resolved on the day. We launched the site, had to make some adjustments, specifically to our smtp settings, and then redeployed without a hitch. The interface is so simple, again not something that you normal hear a developer praise, however, in this instance I am the only developer on the project and I need to abstract my hosting concerns in the simplest way possible. This, I believe, is vital to a business with such a small team. If Rails sped up development of our site by 1.5x then Engine Yard Cloud has to have saved us the same, if not more, time in terms of hosting infrastructure.

That isn’t to say that we haven’t encountered any problems. Times where we did come up against issues were in no way attributable to Engine Yard. The key issue we came across was when using their experimental stack in order to utilise Unicorn. This was obviously our choice and a known, but measured, risk. In our testing Unicorn had performed very well but in the production environment we had some issues. Whenever we redeployed after pushing changes back to Github the site would start throwing Method Not Found errors.

This error then required a complete termination and restart of the instance in order to resolve the problem. As a relative newbie in the Rails world I began exploring issues with my own code but eventually tried the codebase on a different stack and discovered that using Passenger or Mongrel the site redeployed without a hitch. Hrm… time to start using a more stable stack. We switched to Passenger a week after launch and then after some further testing (after an Engine Yard deploy) we have now actually moved back to Unicorn, all inside one month. That’s how easy it is to test, diagnose problems and make decisions on EYC.

In line with their pre-launch service EY staff have been absolute rockstars, these include but are not limited to @ezmobius, @tmornini and @abheek. With any query we’ve had their team has replied instantly with clear concise advice. There have been a few frustrations with having to delay a deployment of our software because Engine Yard have been deploying theirs, but this is extremely minor. Likewise, we’ve been keen for a long time to use Ruby 1.8.7 and this was something that wasn’t previously available on EYC. However, two weeks after asking, low and behold a beta program with 1.8.7 became available to enable on your environment. Perfect!

I genuinely don’t have a bad word to say about Engine Yard, they have successfully created a product that is to hosting what Rails is the development. It makes our life easier, pure and simple. It’s developer friendly and takes a huge weight off my shoulders by managing our hosting infrastructure for us, brilliant!

Once again, OpenIndie hasn’t had a big fat cheque or any free hosting from Engine Yard in return for this praise, we just think they’re kicking ass and we’re extremely pleased with our choice of host!

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder

Kieran Masterton wireframes OpenIndie over tea and biscuits - April 2009

Photo credit: @markmapstone