As I write this I’m on my way from Bath in the south west of England up to Leeds in the North to sit on the Open Cinema panel at the Leeds International Film Festival. Having planned to spend the next four hours doing OpenIndie development I find myself on the train without a particularly important Gem installed (Paperclip for all you geeks out there). Anyway, this Gem is vital to the next stage of development so hopefully I’ll be able to grab some connectivity at the venue and install what I require for the return journey.

Unable to code, I thought it would be a good opportunity to write a blog post to help demystify some of what’s happening next with OpenIndie, but also to tell our 100 OpenIndie filmmakers how they can prepare for the site launch.

Thanks to the 226 people who donated, as of November 30th 2009 I will be commencing full time development of OpenIndie.com. Having said that I have been developing an OpenIndie prototype in my evenings and weekends for about eight months. However, as I’m sure many of you will appreciate, it is extremely hard to create a consistent product in a few hours here and there. It is time to re-write the code I have already written in Rails and start 12/14 hour coding days for the next three months.

In the next few weeks, fulfillment will begin for all types of rewards we offered, $1 user accounts, $15 Four Eyed Monsters CDs, and $100 filmmaker accounts. A simple Google form will be sent to everyone who donated and claimed a reward, these forms will differ depending upon the reward you’re eligible to receive. For $1+ rewards it will be as simple as name and postcode, while filmmakers will need to give more information like address and film details. You will also be given the opportunity at this point to nominate someone to take the filmmaker account in your stead.

So, with that said, how should you prepare for OpenIndie.com filmmaker membership? Obviously, we will need things like a poster image, a link to a trailer for your film on either Vimeo or YouTube. Likewise, any feed URLs from social media sites, for example Twitter accounts etc. will also aid OpenIndie in pulling in the maximum amount of content about your film. But these are things you are likely to already have to hand.

You will also be given the opportunity, around Chistmas time, to upload any existing lists of fan names, email addresses and postcodes you may have. These people will then become part of our private beta invitation list for the March 1st launch. So you may want to set up your own Google form to collect this kind of information from your fans. One of the keys to OpenIndie is its geo-centric abilities and in order to maximise the chances of your film being a success on OpenIndie it is extremely useful to have an email address and an associated postcode. While it isn’t vital to have postcodes - all we really need is a list of email addresses and we’ll ask the users for their locale - it makes the process smoother for the user and they are therefore more likely to stick around and use OpenIndie.

Note: if you do not have permission to pass user’s details on to a third party we can not endorse you uploading this kind of information to OpenIndie. However, if you are in this position you will be given a unique OpenIndie URL that you can email to your fan base explaining how OpenIndie will help them see your film.

Finally, please if you have any questions at all about the process, or about the progress of development or about how your $100 is being spent, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me. I can be contacted via Twitter @kieranmasterton, email kieran AT openindie DOT com or Goole Wave kieran DOT masterton AT googlewave DOT com