Mark Gill's talk at the Los Angeles Film Festival's Financing Conference has been causing a right old kefuffle in the independent film community. It was read nearly 100,000 times on indieWIRE in 4 days. Here's an upbeat nugget to wet your whistle:

Here's how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year-- generally with budgets under $10 million--maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That's one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.

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Just back from Silver Docs, well, actually I've been back for a good two weeks but haven't had a chance to write. I am pleased that after spending one year screening great programs for our new DVD label Alive Mind, building online communitiies, and mastering the tricks of online marketing, it is all starting to take off. It has been a blast launching a company based on the templatization of self- distribution and it is even more fun to see it start to succeed. My favorite new concept: scalable.

But back to Silver Docs. It is a great small festival attended by top notch producers and filmmakers and the panels were great. I moderated a panel on the educational market, 'Old School’ is New Money: Opportunities in the Educational Market, as well as attending several others. My educational panelists included Cynthia Close from Documentary Educational Resources (DER), John Haskyll-Abrahams from Bullfrog Films, Kathy Tan from Films Media Group and Lori Griffin from Schlessinger Media/Library Video Company.

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Words of advice from a film publicist

Web2.0 in plain English

Do you Tweet?

Seeing Red - info on the Red On Camera

Make a living making shorts

Own-it. Advice on Intellectual Property

DarkFibre have release their notorious Amnesty International film on Virgin Shorts. You can see it HERE at Virgin Media Shorts and join in the debate. Let your voice be heard!

DarkFibre is a directing duo formed by Marc Hawker and Ishbel Whitaker. Originally from fine art background, they produced the Oscar Short listed feature RIZE released by Lionsgate.

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Title Tag

First, make sure that you have a Title Tag in your Source Page. The Title Tag is what is displayed in your browser as well. We made a simple experiment and searched for a keyword "untitled" and received an amazing 8,610,000 pages as a result. Most of them had a Title Tag missing. What should one use as a Title Tag? The best choice is to use the name of your business or your web log, particularly if the name matches your URL.

Description Tag

This tag provides a short description of your site. Often this decription is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results.

Keyword Tag

Keyword Tag is generally ignored by the search engines.

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Welcome Nik Sheehan to the My Film Blog community and congratulations on receiving the Best Feature Documentary Award at the Hot Docs International Film festival for your film, FLicKeR. Brion Gyson is a fascinatiing figure who invented the dream machine and an unrecognized artist whose influence continues today. Interviews with Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithful, DJ Spooky and others provides a provocative protrait of an almost forgotten luminary.

I look forward to FLicKeR's New York debut.

Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program
NEW DEADLINES: JULY 7, 2008 and FEBRUARY 5, 2009

Each year, the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program awards more than $1.5 million in grants to support documentary films focused on contemporary social issues. Films supported have included My Country, My Country; Why We Fight; Born Into Brothels; Iraq in Fragments; The Inner Tour; The Devil Came on Horseback; and Everything's Cool.

In a world where truth is stranger than fiction, we can help you tell the stories that must be told. If you believe that creative non-fiction filmmaking is vital to society, and you are an artist with passion for the work of storytelling, we want to hear about your project. Tell us what you see. For the rest of the story or to apply online, visit:

Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program

Lately, all I have been hearing about is how Word Press is "free." Now, the way I do math, anything that takes over ten hours to set-up and still doesn't function without a consultant and/or IT specialist has a cost associated with it: the cost of loss time, lowered employee productivity and no blog at the end of the month. For the last two weeks at my office we have been struggling to set-up a simple blog using WordPress.org that I have come to call the "buteverybodyusesit" software. I understand that developers and programmers love it because it is "free" and allows them to exploit gullible users in search of "free" software.

But I think there is some confusion regarding the defintion of free...

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