Film Futurist

DIY filmmakers have always inherently understood the idea of microfunding, because in some sense or another, raising a few hundred or thousand from friends and family IS essentially the same idea. And now, with social media providing the kind of community reach that would have been impossible even ten years ago, this model has become [...]

No one can argue that some of the most socially and even politically transformative ideas to come out of the technology boom of the last ten years were a) social media and b) the attendant proliferation of user generated content.
There was MySpace, then YouTube, then Facebook, Twitter followed by every other niched and slightly varied [...]

I’m tired of talking about art. I want to talk about money. Can we just have an art-free conversation today? Ok, here it goes. Aah, I think I smell the faint aroma of the Sundance acquisition. It’s crisp, like fresh money. Like your payout on a roulette win in Las Vegas. That sweet stash of cash sitting there [...]

I recently saw Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis – a masterwork of the German Expressionist period summarized here by Kino Video after its recent full-length re-release: ”Metropolis takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of [...]

I should say first that I have NOT seen Paranormal Activity, chiefly because, well…I’m a scaredy-cat and probably wouldn’t sleep for days afterwards. BUT, that never stopped me from a big picture analysis. Of course the hype everyone is hanging on to right now is the parallel between Paranormal and Blair Witch. And I get [...]

This is the moment when everything changes. Here and now. This IS the future. Technology and social media has suddenly shifted the ground we filmmakers have been standing on for years. We can sit around and lament the loss of a golden era…or we can figure out how to reinvent film and media art in [...]