Category Archives: Coming Soon

More proof content is king

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More proof this week that we’ve moved beyond the infrastructure and the hardware to the point where content is indeed king.

Chris Welch of The Verge reports that Roku’s CEO Anthony Wood reveals:

“We don’t really make money… we certainly don’t make enough money to support our engineering organization and our operations and the cost of money to run the Roku service. That’s not paid for by the hardware. That’s paid for by our ad and content business.”

Earlier this year Roku admitted to earning more money on advertising than on the sales of its streaming boxes.

Little-known Roku may be positioning itself to replace television networks, as more and more viewers cut their cords.

As it flexes its muscles, Roku is toying with its UI, developing the Roku Channel that curates content from its suppliers. Wood again:

“The Roku Channel is our sort of sandbox for building a next-generation, content-first user interface. And someday, when we think it’s ready and good enough and has enough content in it, it’ll probably become the home screen. But that’s not going to happen right away.”

My take: with more and more Smart TVs coming with the Roku OS baked in, I think Roku might just come up the middle and best AppleTV, Amazon’s FireTV and Google’s Chromecast. Even though Netflix is king today, once Roku perfects their curation algorithm, it has a chance of becoming everyone’s home screen. The two problems this solves: there are too many apps to manage and there is too much content to wade through. One caveat: will viewers stomach the ads?

Greenlight Essentials harnesses big data for indies

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Okay. You got the money. But you want your script to be the best possible — so that it connects with your audience. Wait, who are they again, and what do they want to watch? A crystal ball would come in handy right now.

That’s the promise from Jack Zhang and his company Greenlight Essentials.

Jack has combined his two loves, math and movies, to bring big data to indie filmmakers. He’s been collecting data for the last seven years and the insights are amazing. Jack can tell you how your plot stacks up, who your audience is and where they live.

With this information, you can improve your script and spend your marketing budget with confidence.

After ingesting your script and comparing over 40,000 plot elements with over 3,700 films and millions of box office records, Jack’s AI will plot the likely performance of your film. Change an element here and there, and see what happens.

Next, he’ll give you the demographics of the audience that responds best to your movie: their ages, occupations, incomes, purchase patterns and social media profiles.

Jack can also tell you where your audience lives in the US and Canada.

I recently asked Jack if creatives get upset when his algorithm undervalues their ideas.

“We are just funnelling audiences’ tastes to creatives.  It does upset people sometimes for sure, but it is just showing creatives that audiences want something else, and showing them the ways they can better shape their content to fit the audiences’ tastes.”

My take: this really is a crystal ball. If you ever felt that coverage is inherently skimpy and too much is left to gut decisions, this is worth checking out. Imagine only spending your ad dollars in the cities and on the social media platforms where your audience hangs out. Savings galore!

Telefilm green lights 45 first features and web series

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Telefilm Canada has just released the list of 45 projects it will fund to the tune of up to $125,000 each.

Film schools and media co-ops across Canada nominated approximately 100 projects for Telefilm’s consideration.

Big ups to these projects from CineVic and the National Screen Institute with Victoria connections:

  • All-in Madonna (Arnold Lim, Ana de Lara, Susie Winters)
  • Esluna: The World Beyond (Denver Jackson, Daniel Hogg)
  • Q (Benjamin Musgrave, Dawn Bird, Dustin Griffin)

Arnold Lim says,

“Telefilm has proven to be a world leader in their support for filmmakers and this is just one more reason I am so proud to be Canadian. Thank you to the Talent to Watch program; we haven’t shot yet but I already feel l am a better filmmaker today than when we started this program — and it never would have been possible without Telefilm’s support.”

(For background on the Talent to Watch program, Telefilm’s upgrade of its Micro-budget program, see Barry Hertz‘s article in the Globe and Mail.)

My take: I’ve mentioned before that this is the best way for Canadian filmmakers to get their first features funded. Kudos to Telefilm for having the vision to nurture new storytellers and work on balancing the gender ratio in film at the same time. And congratulations to all the Victoria teams getting the nod this year!

The Rise of the Robots

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As reported by Jason Torchinsky on Jalopnik, Marci Robin was buying a car when the dealership passed her a piece of paper that gave her pause:

She explains to him:

“The sales guy was handing me paper after paper with a brief explanation of what each one was for, and then he handed me that page — with literally nothing else on it — and just mater-of-factly said, ‘And this one is just to ensure you’re not a robot.’ We both said, ‘Really?’ And I don’t know if he’s just done it so long that it was normal to him now or what, but he was just like, ‘Yep.’“

In an another story, Johnny Lieu writing on Mashable asserts that Donald Trump does not write all of those wacky tweets.

He says:

“Some are penned by White House staffers, and according to a Boston Globe report, these tweets are composed with grammatical errors and irregularities, intentionally included to sound like they’re written by Trump. This comes from two sources at the White House who spoke to the newspaper, both of whom said staffers would copy Trump’s expression. That includes the overuse of exclamation points, the capitalization of words for emphasis, fragments, and loosely connected ideas. While grammatical errors are present, staffers reportedly didn’t intentionally misspell words or names.”

So is “The Real Donald Trump” fact or fiction? How can we tell if Trump is truly tweeting?

Luckily Andrew McGill of The Atlantic can tell us which tweets are real and which are “fake tweets.”

In part, he reveals:

“It’s fun to see the words the algorithm found were most helpful in attributing a tweet to Trump or a staffer. Most of them aren’t words at all, but quirks of spelling or punctuation.

“@realDonaldTrump” (Trump/staff ratio = 14 : 1)
Trump was 14 times more likely than a staffer to mention his own Twitter handle, probably because he frequently quotes tweets about himself.

“#” (Trump/staff ratio = 1 : 5)
Staffer Trump uses hashtags all the time, something Android Trump doesn’t bother with much.

“Media” (Trump/staff ratio = 5 : 1)
With a president who is obsessed with news coverage and the “dishonest media,” does this surprise you?

“@foxnews” (Trump/staff ratio = 3:1)
Trump’s preferred cable channel gets a bump in his own tweets.

” “  (Trump/staff ratio = 8 : 1)
The president is also far more likely to include extra spaces in his tweets.”

Follow Trump or Not on Twitter.

My take: I think we’ve crossed a line if humans can’t vouch for humans anymore. Of course, you could also claim humanity crossed that line on November 8, 2016.

NSFW: The Happytime Murders trailer

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First reported last month by Bloody Disgusting, an R-rated puppet/live action movie will screen at the end of summer.

‘The Happytime Murders‘ stars Melissa McCarthy.

(You may need to log into Youtube to watch the trailer.)

From STX, the distributor:

“No Sesame. All Street. THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS is a filthy comedy set in the underbelly of Los Angeles where puppets and humans coexist. Two clashing detectives with a shared secret, one human (Melissa McCarthy) and one puppet, are forced to work together again to solve the brutal murders of the former cast of a beloved classic puppet television show.”

My take: folks in Canada may remember ‘Puppets Who Kill‘ from 15 years ago, which might be the first show with multiple murderous puppets. With the success of R-rated comic book movies, it’s not surprising that puppets also get the adult treatment.

Projection error traumatizes children

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As reported by David Allan-Petale in The Sydney Morning Herald, a trailer for a horror film was shown to a cinema full of families and their children waiting to see Peter Rabbit.

An eyewitness said:

“Very quickly you could tell this was not a kid’s film. Parents were yelling at the projectionist to stop, covering their kids’ eyes and ears. It was dreadful. A few went out to get a staff member but she was overwhelmed and didn’t really know what to do. Some parents fled the cinema with their kids in tow. Eventually a senior staff member came in with a walkie talkie and he shut the screen off. To his credit he apologized and offered us complimentary movie passes to make up for it.”

Watch the trailer:

My take: back in the day, when I was a repertory cinema manager I used to order trailers for upcoming films and play them sight unseen before the nightly films. However, I think all the trailers were made for general audiences. Of course, who can forget The Tale of Peter Rabbit has Mr. McGregor who chases the rabbits with murderous intent, so maybe the horror film trailer is not so far off the mark after all.

del Toro and Besson make deals

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Two interesting developments in the realm of auteur filmmaking to report today.

Firstly, Adam Epstein writes on Quartzy that Guillermo del Toro is “getting his own film label at Fox Searchlight, the studio where he directed this year’s best picture winner, The Shape of Water.”

As quoted by The Hollywood Reporter, del Toro says:

“For the longest time, I’ve hoped to find an environment in which I can distribute, nurture and produce new voices in smart, inventive genre films and channel my own. In Fox Searchlight, I’ve found a real home for live action production — a partnership based on hard work, understanding of each other and, above all, faith.”

Secondly, Charles Barfield writes on The Playlist that Luc Besson‘s company is in talks to be bought:

“According to French media outlet Capital.fr , EuropaCorp is in advanced talks to be purchased by none other than Netflix. There’s no terms to the agreement, and honestly, the report is very heavily leaning on unnamed sources, but the structure of the deal is clear. EuropaCorp, founded in 2000 by filmmaker Luc Besson and Pierre-Ange Le Pogam, would be purchased by Netflix, with Besson to stay on to oversee the creative side of the company. The goal is to have the deal worked out by the summer.”

My take: once upon a time, this might be considered selling out. Now it’s monetizing your celebrity in exchange for a promise to keep moving in the same direction. It shows just how much money mini-majors and Netflix have to invest in building up their artistic credibility and aligning with like-minded creatives. That’s the short play — the long play is betting on which streaming service will rule them all.

Blackmagic 4K Pocket Cinema Camera Announced

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As reported by No Film School in their NAB 2018 coverage, Blackmagic Design has just announced the next iteration of their Pocket Cinema Camera: 4K for under $1300 USD.

Shipping in September, according to Jacob Kastrenakes of The Verge:

“The new Pocket Cinema Camera 4K has a ton of features that’ll appeal to that market — like a mini XLR connector, LUT support, and 4K recording at 60 fps — but it still has limitations that’ll keep the camera confined to a niche audience (which, to be fair, is kind of true of every camera). Basically, unless you’re a filmmaker who’s typically in control of lighting and the overall environment they’ll be filming in, this camera probably isn’t for you. It doesn’t have in-body stabilization, and the small sensor will struggle in low light and require adaptors to get the depth of field you’d get from full frame or even Super 35 cameras. That might not matter to some filmmakers, but it could be an issue for people on fast shoots or traveling to unfamiliar locations.”

Here are the specs:

  • Full size 4/3 sized sensor
  • Native 4096 x 2160 resolution
  • 13 stops of dynamic range
  • Up to 25600 ISO
  • Carbon fiber polycarbonate composite body
  • Built in SD, UHS-II and CFast card recorders
  • USB-C expansion port for external SSD or flash disk
  • Features full size HDMI output
  • Professional mini XLR
  • 3.5mm audio jack
  • Built in 5” LCD touchscreen a
  • 3D LUTs
  • 4th generation Blackmagic color science
  • Supports remote camera control via Bluetooth

My take: Wow! There are so many great high-resolution video cameras available right now or in the near future.

Industry Veteran Brings Blockchain to Hollywood

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Dawn C. Chmielewski, writing on Deadline Hollywood, reports that a Blockchain Network is coming to Hollywood.

“Veteran entertainment industry marketer Amorette Jones joined with technologist Matej Boda to build a blockchain-based platform for the film industry. Their new venture, Treeti, would seek to harness the disruptive power of blockchain to create a new way for filmmakers to distribute and monetize their creative projects.”

Amorette Jones has a long history in Hollywood and can claim to have made the first big splash online with marketing for The Blair Witch Project.

Treeti.com is short on details right now. Their promise to creators is:

“Our platform is designed to make it easier to distribute, market, and monetize your content with an engaged global audience. Sophisticated data connects you to fans who are most eager to discover and promote your content.”

My take: I so want this to take off. There is tons of potential in the blockchain. Unfortunately crypto-currencies are giving it a bad name right now.

Really Big Rollable 4K OLED Screen Announced

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LG Display showed off the world’s first and largest rollable 4K OLED screen at CES this year.

As reported by David Pierce in Wired:

“The 65-inch display sits flat and sturdy on your wall, like a normal television, until you’re done with it. With one push of a button, the display descends down into its stand, rolling around a coil like wrapping paper. The screen can roll up completely for safe storage and easy transportation, or you can leave a small section of it sticking up, at which point the screen automatically shifts into a widgetized, information-providing display with weather and sports scores. LG’s device has almost nothing in common with most TVs, other than its size. Functionally, it’s more like a really big tablet.”

Fully unrolled, the aspect ration is 16:9.

But wait, there’s more! It can roll down to 21:9, eliminating the black bars above and below widescreen movies.

My take: I want one! I would hang it upside down from the ceiling, so it would mimic a cinema screen of yore.