Over the last two years, I have circled the landscape surrounding the art and business of film in this blog. It was my way of thinking through a transition in the future of a medium I had spent nine years of my life learning, pursuing, loving, hating and finally understanding.

I had moved to Los Angeles like many people, to make films. I was living in New York before that, and like most New Yorkers, hated Los Angeles as a point of pride. I admit I grudgingly saw that everyone who wanted to make it in “the biz” worked extraordinarily hard. Sure, you might not consider buttering up an established producer or director hard work but actually it is, take it from me. Humiliation is hard work.

There was a kind of “dream contract” that everyone signed when they arrived in Los Angeles. And it was indeed beautiful to be part of a world of people who worked hard and had a shot at the dream. Dreaming is after all, what we ALL came to do. Some of us did it with a camera lens, or a pen and paper, and others, with their hands and a can of paint, and many countless people with their bodies and faces.

The dream is seductive, and brave in its true American-ness. Everyone knew someone who suddenly went from waiting tables to starring in a movie. Guys like Jon Hamm, who was still working crappy jobs to pay the bills past his prime, until someone invented a show he was born to lead–were more common in the biz than you would think. Sure, there are many more who never get their Mad Men but that promise is the stuff of dreams. And those of us who dream in Technicolor are seduced, and all desperately want a piece of that promise.

The perfume of that desire was strong in the room of students at a prestigious film school in New York where I spoke some months ago. I felt cruel inserting some truth into their hopeful twenty year old minds, but it had to be done. I started by telling them I graduated from film school in 2004 and asked them what important event marked that year. They scratched their heads for a few minutes, and slightly skeptically came up with the correct answer: Facebook. “That was a very unfortunate year to be launching a film career”, I told them. Why? Because once the currency of content hinged on engagement, however casual/social, and film as we knew it died. A raise of hands in that very room revealed that this next generation spent two-thirds less time engaging with film than they did with other media, particularly of the immersive variety.

This generation – the millenials, are not quite social-digital natives who will inherit a world in which trees and ipads are learned as equal inevitabilities of life, but they themselves describe their younger siblings as precisely those people. Given that, we can assume there is roughly a 10-15 year maturity gap before the entire focus of entertainment will shift to serve their needs. Right now, I told my stunned new young friends, we are operating on the cache stored from another era – all those film dreams are artifacts of a bygone era. And as powerful as the facade may feel to them standing on the outside looking in, it is worth considering that even for institutional legends like Louis B. Mayer (once the highest paid man in the US), once the time comes one can be humbled by changing times.

I know, you’re thinking: blah, blah everyone’s been writing film’s epitaph since television was created and it’s still here. Well, it is, and it isn’t. For the first time this year, we saw box office numbers decline despite the best efforts of studio marketers; I myself saw fewer than 10% of the films on most top 10 lists of the year and the ones I did see were filled with audiences of mostly middle-aged people. That, is what I think of as the nostalgia factor – filmgoing is a tradition we love, and there will hopefully always be a place for that good feeling. But I can no longer see what the “future of film” is. In my mind, it is a dream passed, a brilliant and grand one which, like opera has seen its day.

Without making any grand proclamations of what the future holds, I can say I know after the two years of writing this blog that it has a whole lot less to do with film than I could have imagined. I have been watching the zeitgeist – both anecdotally and statistically – and what I see is a future in which the gorgeous seductive artifice once traditionally the domain of film can be anywhere. My dream to make films was only a heightened extension of the audience experience of dreaming in a dark room. But the dreaming space is no longer in one place, whether we like it or not. Our job as professional dreamers, is to keep dreaming for collective enjoyment and though we are still muddling through the forms, visions will emerge, clear as they were when the magic of film materialized through the flickering light of a projector.

Without knowing where on earth the most fertile visions will take hold, I can only say it will be unexpected, and will not follow the rules we all memorized when entering into the well-established world of film art and business. I myself decided to root in New York because the soil here is full of raw promise and the farmers are eager experimenters in the business of the future. For my part, I have planted my company AINA MEDIA, and founded STORYCODE a nonprofit to support immersive/crossmedia storytellers. Needless to say, 2011 has been a rather busy planting season. I look forward to the crop of goodness that the coming years will bring to storytelling, the future of visual entertainment and most importantly to dreaming. In my mind “Hollywood” remains at its purest, a standard of rare openness, possibility and the vastness of mind it takes to dream.

I will soon launch a new blog related to new endeavors. In the time being, you can follow my real time musings at @ainaabiodun.

…a movie experience is a passive experience.  The storytelling narrative is something that I think is still a unique and interesting, and valued experience by people around the world.  And whether it’s done in a movie theater or in your home, or on your laptop, or iPad, or whatever the device is, people love that passive experience.  And we see it, again, there’s more and more consumption of it. What all of these devices and social networking things do is they’re going to actually force Hollywood to make better products, because today the thing that is probably most askew in Hollywood is the issue of marketability versus playability.

Katzenberg’s contention is of course, that the stories Hollywood is shilling lately are simply bad art–and that’s why consumption of passive entertainment is declining. Meaning, of course that the root cause of our widespread cultural preference to play around on social networks as opposed to watching movies is simply a content issue, and not a changing habits issue.

For those of you who read my blog, you know I’m a huge proponent of raising the quality of film, and innovating within the medium, so I should be the biggest proponent of the Katzenberg theory on this…but I’m not. Why?  Because I think the ship has sailed. By the time (if ever) the movies come around to being better again, audiences will have developed different habits, and the coming generation of digital natives will not understand the meaning of “passive entertainment”.

Among many arguments for the evolution of consumption behavior changing rapidly is the neurological one posited by writers such as Nicholas Carr, whose book Shallows suggests we are rewiring our neural pathways through digital age behavior. A recent article in the Scientific American concurs, quoting studies that suggest the inevitability of this change.

There’s also the very simple fact of cultural tastes changing with the times, and the introduction of more highly interactive forms of entertainment simply draws people away from the more passive forms. When guys like Katzenberg and his generation who came of age in a kind of golden age of cinema talk about the possibilities of film making a comeback, some part of me feels like I’m hearing my grandfather talk about the days before everyone had a telephone, and people actually talked to each other, face to face. I’m sure it was an awesome experience, and had its merits, but we can’t stop the change from happening. Along with massively world changing inventions like vaccines and and moon travel come these other cultural changes, many of which we are less in control of than we’d like to believe.

So while I applaud Katzenberg for having the balls to say that the emperor has no clothes on (I concur that the sequel nonsense is a dead-end game), I’m not so sure he should be as sanguine about our future willingness to rediscover this elusive LOVE of passive entertainment.

Boy, I sound like such a bummer today! But  really, I have faith in our ability to guide cultural/creative change in a meaningful way into the purely digital era. It’s just that I don’t think it’s ever going to be like the good old days.

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After I wrote my last post about the dearth of innovation in film, I happened to read Anthony Lane’s New Yorker piece on Pixar, “The Fun Factory”. It made me slap my forehead in an “of course!” way. Lane starts out as a skeptic, ready to debunk the myth of Pixar as the den of awesomeness that everyone says it is. After a tour of the mind-blowingly fun facilities that comprise the Pixar campus (including a pool and beach volleyball courts), Lane asks: “Is there not, in short, a dark underbelly to the Pixar state of bliss?” By the end, he has totally drunk the kool aid.  He quotes Pixar head John Lasseter: “The people at Pixar are my best friends. Not only do I want to see them every day–I can’t wait to see them everyday…when my wife, Nancy and I make a list of whom we are going to take on vacation, the top group is Pixar.”

I’m a pretty cynical bastard myself. I don’t believe in workplaces where people hold hands and sing kumbaya because well, mainly I’ve never had one. But as I re-watched Finding Nemo this past weekend, I couldn’t help but think that this utopian multiple hit-making machine is the real deal. The secret sauce? The founders and original artists fought for innovation in the early days of the company. Now they are the standard in animation that thrills children and thoroughly engages adults. Before Pixar, mainstream animation (mostly proffered by pre-Pixar Disney) was the stuff of facile kid fantasies, and not anything I could stand to look at for more than a minute. While the perfection of 3D animation lies at the core of Pixar’s creative approach, there is also an approach to story that soars sometimes sadly, sometimes sweetly but always smartly.

Put simply, these guys are masters of story.

Lane takes a stab at what makes Pixar stories great:

The key to Pixar, I came to realize, is that what it seeks to enact, as corporate policy, and what it strives to dramatize, in its art, spring from a common purpose and a single clarion call: You’ve got a friend in me.

In cinema, as in fiction, friendship is a more durable substance that we give credit for, and often more resilient than love. Indeed, it may be the hardiest strain of love that we possess, untroubled by erotic fragrance; once Huck Finn and Jim–to take the most obvious ancestors of Woody and Buzz–meet on Jackson’s Island, they don’t declare their friendship to one another, or let it disturb their sleep. They just get on with it. That practical momentum, conservative in its emotions but radical in its taste for adventure, runs through Westerns, Andy Hardy movies, “The Flinstones,” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” before landing in the land of Pixar.

I would add that because we live in an era of extreme disintermediation as a result technology and other social forces, the narrative of friendship becomes an even more vital mythological pull, one which will be studied for some time to come. And I am sure that when history judges this era in American film,  Pixar films will emerge as the thematic and aesthetic masters of our day.

In the mean time, why aren’t we tinkering away at more models like Pixar?

Most of the younger folks in the biz express frustration that the “system” is resistant to change, particularly the type of change that might render some people’s entire professions obsolete. And I get it – the fear of change is natural in every entrenched industry. No one wants to be faced with the possibility that large amounts of human and cash capital investments might be lost.

But I think what saddened me the most is that the creative people – writers, directors, producers – people shaping the content are so terrified of the forces of the market (and audiences) that they seem to be more conservative than ever in their creative choices. I’m sure the same was true of the artists who worked in silent films, when talkies came along, and of the unrivaled film industry when television came along, and on and on…

When I consider what has driven change in entertainment over the years, I see seismic shifts due to technology or social disruption that the industry then hobbles to catch up to. Very rarely do I see an instance of the business innovating from the inside. And I’m not talking about 3D technology either. I’m talking about creative shifts – experimentation WITHIN the medium of film.

The French New Wave changed film in a very radical way; it was a push within the medium that spoke to the era. And it changed the way in which storytelling in film had functioned until that point. This is an example of artistic innovation within the medium – introducing new ideas into the lexicon and pushing the possibilities of film further. I acknowledge that the movement came from outside the “establishment” and only slowly seeped into the way mainstream films were later made and viewed; BUT the movement was a real, working consideration of film as a process and a form, as art that evolves.

We are in a very different predicament today.  Filmmaking itself as we know it may be approaching obsolescence and there is little happening inside the medium that is a direct response to this issue. The fact that blockbuster movies are looking and sounding a lot more like videogames is a strong indication that without meaning to, the medium will experience inevitable, perhaps accidental change. However, without the minds of artists whose job it is to think these ideas through and experiment with what film *could* be in the future, we will accept a mishmash that is little more than the residue of innovation in other kinds of creative endeavors like gaming and interactive play.

As those who follow me know, I am a huge proponent of platform agnostic storytelling – I am after all, a transmedia storyteller. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and respect the specificity and art of each individual medium. I love reading books and I adamantly believe that the experience is like no other. I don’t read because there’s nothing to watch. I read because I love *to read*. I play games when I want that experience. I go to concerts when I feel like I want to be surrounded by the energy and life of the audience and band.  So while I am fully committed to working with connective storytelling, I am still a filmmaker who would like to find a space in which filmmaking as an art can grow deeper, more meaningful and expansive as a medium.

If film is to survive, we need to aggressively experiment creatively with the medium. That is our job as artists, and for the folks who make money off the work, they too must understand that innovation is not a choice – it’s that, or perish.

Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald has spent the last six months with his team directing and editing the 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries into a contiguous feature that will screen as part of the Premieres section of the fest. All of the contributors whose footage was used are credited as co-directors, and 26 have been invited to attend the premiere (full list below).

The trailer below is the first glimpse we have of the direction the film took in the editing. A single film from a Spanish contributor, the piece suggests a feel-good personalized world-scape as it were…but I will have to withhold further comment until next week. Watch the premiere here share your comments here – I look forward to your opinions!

Thursday, Jan 27th at 9PM EST
youtube.com/lifeinaday

Personally, I think anyone who hasn’t seen the handwriting on the wall that says CHANGE is patently in need of some ocular examination. Crumley presents it as a crisis of distribution, which it is to an extent. But one can argue that the recent proliferation of useful distribution and marketing technologies and online communities to support our film work has presented massive benefits to the DIY filmmaker and as such, the crisis has been halfway resolved. So why are so many still mad as hell? Crumley’s is a call to action for a somewhat demoralized community to rally around alternative (non-studio) solutions like OpenIndie.

But on the other side of the spectrum it seems some people are angry at precisely this trend towards the social media driven creation and marketing of indie films. Mike S. Ryan for instance, is an established indie producer associated with well-known films Junebug, Palindromes and Choke, to name a few. In his Filmmaker Magazine article, he expresses a fair amount of panic about the swell of “Audience-driven content posing as truly independent film” which he believes “has numbed the audience that is hungry for innovative work.” From my vantage point, Ryan’s fear that the internet will chase away originality or the margins is entirely misguided and unduly panic-inducing. And I look forward to a face-to-face debate with the guy (stay tuned).

But hey, he’s got a right to be mad as hell just like Arin Crumley and all of us who yelled and shook our fists in solidarity at DIY DAYS. So many things to be mad about, and not enough time.

So, in the spirit of the “mad” conversation, please feel free share your indie film gripes: what are you mad as hell about?

Bayne’s openness stuck with me and I made note of the fact that he was working on a film called DRIVEN. But at the time, I wasn’t aware of the details. Then a few weeks ago I wrote a post on Kickstarter and thought it might be useful to talk to a filmmaker on the frontlines of crowdfunding. Glancing through some of the most successful projects on Kickstarter, I noticed Bayne’s project, an ambitious documentary with an equally challenging funding goal of $25,000, which had been funded in a remarkable 20 days.

I was impressed and reached out to Bayne for an interview, which you can read below the trailer of DRIVEN. I hope it will provide a much-needed perspective on the crowdfunding process and also illuminate the journey of an artist with a vision, which Gregory Bayne is handily proving himself to be.

WHAT IS YOUR PROJECT ABOUT?
My film is an intimate look at the life of Jens Pulver. Jens is a legendary Mixed Martial Artists, 3 time World Champion, and the first ever Lightweight World Champion in the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Challenge) who rose from a childhood laced with violence and substance abuse, to become one of the most loved and respected mixed martial arts fighters of all time. The film chronicles Jens’s journey back to the cage for what could be his final bout.

Ultimately, DRIVEN is not about a single fight: It is a film about a universal human struggle, transcending loss, and overcoming hardship through the many fights we all share in our pursuit of greatness. It is, poignantly, a film about one man’s drive, in an increasingly dire American psyche, to overcome the most trenchant of odds, and redefine his fate in a quest to provide a more solid future for self and family than his own meager inheritances would have allowed.

And now, with the fight behind us, and a fairly extensive interview with Jens ahead of me, I’m finding that the film is also about mortality, and transformation. It’s become apparent I believe, to Jens, that in order to thrive as a fighter, in his personal life, and build a future for himself, he must in some ways walk away from the legendary status that was the fighter “Little Evil”, and carve out a new path for Jens Pulver.

DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE ROAD AS A FILMMAKER THAT BROUGHT YOU TO DRIVEN?

I’ve worked as an editor on many feature documentaries, probably most notable was Trudell (Sundance Competition ’05), about legendary Native American activist John Trudell, so approaching this project was definitely in my realm.

I started my road in filmmaking in the early 90′s, and as the years have passed I’ve found myself becoming less and less excited about, or interested in, what I would call the ‘clean’ or ‘perfect’ cinema. The status quo of films that are manufactured within an inch of their life, leaving no room for the spontaneous, or the truly emotional, that are so wrapped up in ‘style’ to let us know how cutting edge they are. I like my cinema imperfect, a little dirty, and open to the journey.

So when I came across Jens, and his story, I knew instantly there was something there. Right off the bat I definitely had, and have, ideas in mind how it would come together, and what the shape would be, but I purposefully didn’t impose a style upon it, because I didn’t want to get in the way of the story.

What I’m trying to say is that my creative road has jumped track from the world of manufacturing experiences, to engaging in the experience, and finding the story within. I don’t do this because I know everything, I do it because I want to learn.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT JENS PULVER AND HIS STORY THAT COMPEL YOU?

I admire people that put themselves out there, and Jens is very much out there. In the last 10 years, in his world he has become a very public figure that has had to weather the ups and downs of wins and defeats while millions of people watch. I find that fascinating, and when that is coupled with the fact of his abusive childhood, his incredibly giving nature, his adoration among his fans, and his deep complexity as a human being that, at this time in his life, is so keenly self aware of where his real battles lie…I just find myself incredibly compelled by all of it, compelled to tell his story, compelled to try and understand him and his journey, and best I can, by viewing life through his lens.

IS THIS THE FIRST TIME YOU’VE ATTEMPTED TO MICROFUND/CROWDFUND A FILM? IF SO, HOW HAVE YOU FUNDED YOUR PAST PROJECTS?

Whether it was collaborators kicking in a few hundred dollars, someone giving me an unexpected check after seeing some of my work, or making the direct plea, in one way or another everything I’ve worked on has depended on a level of crowdfunding, DRIVEN is just the first time it’s expanded way outside the realm of friends, family & acquaintance.

My other film I am currently finishing, Person of Interest, garnered most of it’s budget via crowdfunding, on a much smaller scale than DRIVEN, but still largely fan supported from day one.

HOW DID YOU FIND KICKSTARTER? WERE YOU A CONTRIBUTOR/FUNDER BEFORE YOU LISTED YOUR PROJECT?

I became acquainted with Kickstarter when I backed the launch of OpenIndie. Since then I’ve backed, and supported several other projects on the site. I basically view it is another level of social networking, as it were. I’ve met, albeit electronically, some incredible people on Kickstarter, I think their staff is amazing, and I want to be part of helping the site, and this style of launching creative endeavor, grow. So, I think it’s important to participate, and at risk of sounding cheesy…pay it forward.

ONCE YOU SETUP DRIVEN FOR FUNDING, HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT DRIVING PEOPLE TO THE SITE?

By leaving no stone unturned.

About a week before launching the campaign I put up the first teaser trailer on YouTube. Within a week it had been viewed 10,000 times, and I began receiving several emails a day from people that were moved by it. So, seeing the writing on the wall that ‘the time was now’ I just jumped in the campaign, and never looked back.

I responded to everyone that was emailing me, began sending out to my own modest email list, set up google alerts for search terms like “Jens Pulver Documentary” so I could find out where the film was being talked about, and used YouTube’s insight tools to find out where the trailer was being watched. Then, I simply ventured out into the world wide web and engaged with whomever I could. MMA Forums, blogs, journalists writing about MMA, and so on.

After about a week there were 10 pages of relevant links on google about the film, discussions were springing up everywhere and the trailer shot up to 30,000 views. Long story short, I spent all day, every day in MMA discussion forums, responding to blogs, and emails, sending new emails, keeping in constant contact with backers via Kickstarter updates, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, I used YouTube annotations to update the two trailers I had online there to both explain and help guide people to the campaign, did a couple of MMA Radio shows with Jens…it was basically an all on the table approach.

There is additional detail on this, and the ebb and flow of funding at the Kickstarter.com blog.

WHO FUNDED YOUR FILM? FRIENDS? FANS? CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR SUPPORTER BASE?

All of the above, but with an emphasis on fans, or those who became fans through connecting to the initial trailer that was released. Now it’s up to me to deliver for them, and to continue to engage with them, so they make that very important transition to ‘true fan’.

I IMAGINE MANY OF JENS PULVERS’ FANS ARE SUPPORTERS OF THE FILM. DID THE NICHE NATURE OF THE SUBJECT IMPACT THE DONATIONS IN ANY WAY?

Yes, Jens is incredibly well thought of in the MMA community. He’s a legend in the sport, and probably the most approachable person in the world of Mixed Martial Arts. I think the niche nature of the film definitely opened the campaign to a wider audience quicker, for sure, but I also think it was the transparency of my approach, and willingness to engage that helped drive the campaign contributions.

YOU ARE 100% FUNDED WITH A VERY AMBITIOUS GOAL OF $25,000 IN 20 DAYS. ARE YOU SURPRISED?

I don’t know if I would say surprised, I mean yes, on just the sheer magnitude of the goal, I’m amazed it all came together. But from day one, I just had in mind “I’m doing this”, so I’m more grateful than anything that the work paid off, that people connected with the project, and that I’m making a film that I really believe in.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN IN THE PROCESS ABOUT THIS KIND OF FUNDRAISING?

A lot! Most of which I outline in this blog.

YOU ARE FILMING LEADING UP TO JEN’S BIG COMEBACK IN MARCH. WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE FIGHT?

Well, the fight has now ended, and I am about to sit down with Jens for an extensive 4 day interview, in an effort to really get inside the world, and mind of Jens Pulver. We will be discussing every aspect of his life, his career in and out of the ring, key fights, the sport and artistry of mixed martial arts, and his road from here. This interview will provide a road map for the film as we begin to put the picture together.

Post production starts in April.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE WILL HAPPEN WITH THE PROJECT WHEN IT IS FINISHED?

I will be releasing the film myself (at least initially), and my greatest hope is that it’s a successful film, in terms of storytelling and artistry, that people enjoy, take something away from, and feel compelled to tell others about.