Discussion Leader: Mark Stolaroff – panelists Arin Crumley, Ondi Timoner, Hunter Weeks and M dot Strange.

Susan and I were a part of this panel moderated by Liz Rosenthal and including Lance Weiler, Jeremy Nathan and Matt Hanson as we all spoke about our thoughts on the future of distribution. Some good audience questions sparked an interesting dialog that closed out the day. People were pretty exhausted as I’m sure you are too if you’ve just gone through all of this material and watched the entire full day conference.

One of the topics discussed was festivals. The point we basically make is that if film festivals need to help filmmakers more.

So our plan is this. There are three things I’m going to try to do when dealing with Film Festivals. Get a cut of what they collect from screenings. Get information about who buys tickets to see our film. Get them to buy some DVDs to sell after the screenings and they’ll get half the proceeds. And wave any submission fees. In exchange for this we’ll notify our audience base in their area of the screening and link to their film festival which expands the reach their film festival would otherwise have and insures a successful screening. And if a film festival wants, they can just look at their city on our heart map to see how much demand their is for our film.

But in the future I think film festivals should be just like any other distributor. There is a license on a film that allows others to monetize the film. So they do what ever curating they want. Maybe have a 1000 people help program the festival, maybe have only 1 person program it all. Whatever they want. Then they make a play list and assign the play list to different theaters and each theater gets essentially a video podcast that pulls down HD versions of the films to say a mac mini or whatever is playing back the digital films. Then they can post an event which phones home to the movies home base online and then anyone in the area who had bookmarked the film saying they want notifications when it’s screening would find out. A film festival could even publish a list of 100 films they’ve narrowed down and let the festival attendees help decide between them by bookmarking the ones they are most interested in seeing on the big screen.

So the idea of a film only being available in film festivals and then going to theaters then DVD then VOD then TV then internet is obviously going to pass. It’s just going to become available when it’s done. But as a film starts to pick up traction film festivals will continue to be a good place to find audiences that can lead to finding more audiences which in some ways is possible today but not nearly to the degree it should be.