Category Archives: The Mediascape

Attend platform will allow filmmakers to connect directly to cinemas

Posted on by
Reply

Jeremy Kay reports on Screen Daily that Former top exhibition sector lobbyists unveil digital marketplace to boost theatrical supply.

“The Attend platform will champion mid-range films that have largely disappeared from cinemas, as well as international films seeking release in North America, and films that typically receive limited theatrical release and could reach broader audiences through data-driven theatre selection, scheduling and marketing.”

Some features:

  • Filmmakers will be able to upload details and materials of their films directly
  • Exhibitors will be able to search the database
  • The platform will recommend films to exhibitors based on the preferences of their theatres and audiences
  • The platform will facilitate the logistics of projecting films in cinemas.

The Attend platform is being developed by The Fithian Group of John Fithian, Jackie Brenneman and Patrick Corcoran.

Dozens of filmmakers support the concept, including Ted Hope and Steven Soderbergh.

Read an in-depth interview with The Fithian Group for more.

My take: this solves the “supply to theatres” issue, by cutting out distributors. I’d love to see some Canadian cinemas join — not that I have anything against Canadian distributors — it’s just that Canadian filmmakers have historically been shut out of Canadian cinemas by American distributors. How ironic that this American initiative might solve that for us.

Calls for an indie film marketplace and discoverability

Posted on by
Reply

Brian Welk reports on IndieWire that Study Reveals Untapped Market of 40 Million People Who Will Pay for Indie Films on Streaming.

He sets the context with:

“After a decade of massive growth, the indie film industry hit its peak in 2017 with just over 200 independent films in theatrical release. That’s also when streaming began to make itself known in a very big way, and the number of indie films in theaters began to plummet.

Netflix and the like spent a few years gobbling up indie movies out of festivals, but that’s dramatically slowed since 2021. Viewership for indies on streaming dipped from 30M in 2020 to just 18M by 2022. Indie films — and the audience for them — are being left behind.“

Former Sundance Institute CEO Keri Putnam led the “US Independent Film Audience & Landscape Study” a 118-page report available at indiefilmlandscape.org and believes there’s a massive audience waiting for indie movies because the biggest challenge facing independent films is finding them.

Her key recommendations for the indie film sector are:

  1. Combat market fragmentation with a new, consolidated streaming destination
  2. Invest in Theatrical Exhibition: Build data and marketing capacity at Festivals and Independent Cinemas
  3. Invest in 21st Century Streaming Public Media and Include Scripted Films on PBS
  4. Leverage Free, Mass Market Platforms: Build a field-wide vertical on a mass-market free streaming platform
  5. Expand and Engage Audiences of Color
  6. Thoughtfully enlist Brands and Philanthropy to Fund Production and Marketing
  7. Innovate on Sector-Wide Marketing
  8. Deepen and Enrich Engagement with Younger Audiences and Fan Communities
  9. Conduct More Research and Share Data Across the Field
  10. Build a Trade Organization to Facilitate Field-Wide Research, Innovation, Public Policy Advocacy

Read the full report.

My take: an indie film marketplace and discoverability. Yes, the two things every indie filmmaker wishes for. I know I’ve been searching for the last twenty years however it’s almost impossible to accomplish in this digital age, which is maddening because digitization was supposed to level the playing field — but what happened was that everyone made their own field. “Build it and they will come” is almost never true now.

Telefilm 2023-2024 Annual Report: Talent Fund analysis

Posted on by
Reply

Telefilm Canada has released its 2023-2024 Annual Report. Over the next weeks, I’ll dig deeper. This week: the Talent Fund.

Telefilm links the Talent Fund with Talent to Watch, its first feature program. They report:

  • “Through the generosity of its donors and partners from across Canada, the Talent Fund raised $270,600.”
  • The Talent Fund invested $300,000 towards the $3,600,000 invested in 18 first features in 2023.
  • “In total, the Fund financed 7% of the Talent to Watch program in 2023-2024.”
  • “The Talent Fund has a balance of close to $50,000.”

You can read the full annual report here.

My take: as a Certified Independent Production Fund, the majority of the Talent Fund‘s past funding came from “CRTC tangible benefits” from major Canadian media companies and other media funds; private donations continue to be minimal and fund perhaps two documentaries a year, or one+ narrative feature films. The allocation of some of the new online streaming tax to the Talent Fund will be critical for its continued existence. See The Path Forward.

Drama is not selling

Posted on by
Reply

Naman Ramachandran reports on Variety that Sales Agents Shift Away From Drama Films Amid Market Challenges: ‘It’s Led Us to Diversify Our Slate’.

“The global appetite for drama films has significantly diminished, according to a panel of international sales agents at the BFI London Film Festival.”

He quotes Sophie Green, head of acquisitions and development at Bankside Films, as saying: “The big sort of takeaway at the moment from the market is anything but drama. That really is kind of like double underlined everywhere that we go.”

Drama has become increasingly difficult to finance and sell, leading to a shift toward genre films and comedies.

My take: the pendulum swings this way and then that way. Dramas will be back, but perhaps they demand too much empathy from audiences just right now.

The numbers behind Telefilm’s Talent to Watch 2024-25 projects

Posted on by
Reply

Telefilm Canada has selected 17 Talent to Watch projects to share $3.45 million from 150 submissions.

It’s quite revealing to look at the numbers in detail.

Let’s start with Genre.

Documentary 8
Drama 4
Science Fiction/Fantasy 3
Drama-Comedy 1
Thriller 1

Province?

Quebec 7
Ontario 7
British Columbia 1
Alberta 1
Manitoba 1

Let’s look at Language next.

English 9
French 3
English/Sudanese Arabic 1
Portuguese (Azorean dialect)/French/English 1
French/English/Algonquin 1
French/English 1
French/Creole 1

And let’s finish up with Stream.

Filmmaker Apply-Direct 11
Industry Partner 3
Festival 2
Indigenous 1

In addition, if Gender is assumed from names and excluding Executive Producers:

Female approx. 25
Male approx. 15

Some observations:

  • The number of submissions rose almost 20% from last year.
  • Non-fiction continues to be almost as successful as Fiction.
  • Almost all of the successful projects are from Quebec and Ontario.
  • Almost one third of the successful projects include world languages in addition to English and/or French.
  • The vast majority of successful projects continue to be Filmmaker Apply-Direct.
  • Less than 20% of the successful projects are from Industry Partners.
  • Women far outnumber men and other expressions of gender.
  • No projects are selected from Atlantic Canada.

The cynical might posit that Telefilm’s Talent to Watch program continues to compensate for the broader industry.

My take: this is the third year that filmmakers could apply directly and Telefilm has rewarded them well! Therefore, if you can apply direct, bypass your local industry partner, for odds of approximately one in nine.

FaceFusion 3: the best free face swapper

Posted on by
Reply

Tim of Theoretically Media has a great review of FaceFusion 3.0.0 on YouTube:

In it he discusses:

  1. How to install FaceFusion 3 using Pinokio
  2. How to face swap for video
  3. The limitations of FaceFusion
  4. Face swapping with AI-generated characters
  5. Lipsync
  6. Expression controls
  7. Aging controls

A huge bonus to this pipeline is face_editor. See 14:02 for tools to alter the many elements on faces, such as smiles, frowns and eye lines. Even age.

My take: we are way beyond deep fakes now. The ability to change expression is extremely powerful! Every performance can be altered.

Kling is redefining CGI, with Grading up next

Posted on by
Reply

Tim Simmons from Theoretically Media just released a new look at Kling AI’s new 1.5 model:

In it he relates what’s new:

“1080p Professional Mode: Kling 1.5 now generates videos at 1080p resolution when using Professional Mode. While it costs more credits, the output quality is significantly better and sets a new standard for AI video generation.

Motion Brush: Kling has introduced Motion Brush, a long-awaited tool in the AI video generation space. Currently, it’s only supported in the 1.0 model but will be available in 1.5 soon. Stay tuned!

End Frames: End frames have been introduced in the 1.0 model and are coming soon to the 1.5 model, allowing for smoother transitions and more control over your videos.

Using Negative Prompts: Improve your outputs by adding negative prompts to filter out undesired elements. Copy and paste the following negative prompts into your settings:

ARTIFACTS, SLOW, UGLY, BLURRY, DEFORMED, MULTIPLE LIMBS, CARTOON, ANIME, PIXELATED, STATIC, FOG, FLAT, UNCLEAR, DISTORTED, ERROR, STILL, LOW RESOLUTION, OVERSATURATED, GRAIN, BLUR, MORPHING, WARPING”

Of particular note is the emotion it’s able to generate.

Plus, Tim signals that Kling is about to add a full-featured Video Editor. Stay tuned indeed!

My take: of course, some will lament these advances. Yes, tasks that workers once spent their lives performing are now accomplished immediately. Looking at you, Medieval scribe, hot metal typesetter, telephone exchange operator. More job transformation is sure to come. We are well into the Digital Age and its promise is bearing increasingly wondrous fruit.

You can now star in generated video

Posted on by
Reply

Last week we explored the latest Generated Video (GV) pipeline. This week Seattle’s Yutao Han, aka Tao Prompts, goes further and illustrates How to Create Ai Videos of Yourself!

The goal here is to consistently end up with the same real person in multiple generated video clips.

“In this tutorial we’ll learn how to use the Flux image generator to train a custom AI model specifically for your own face and generate AI photos of yourself. Then we’ll animate those photos with the Kling AI video generator, which in my opinion generates the best AI videos right now.”

In a nutshell, the process is:

  1. Create an archive of at least ten photos of your star
  2. Upload this to the Ostris flux-dev-lora-trainer model on Replicate
  3. Train the LORA custom image model and use it to generate key frames
  4. Upscale these images on Magnific, optionally
  5. Generate six second clips in Kling AI with these images

My take: it seems week by week we’re getting closer to truly usable generated video that rivals (or even surpasses) Hollywood’s CGI/VFX. Imagine being able to train more than one LORA model into Flux for Kling. I have it on good authority that that is just around the corner.

New Generated Video pipeline?

Posted on by
Reply

A couple of very recent videos point to a potential new Generated Video, or GV, pipeline.

The first is “Create Cinematic Ai Videos with Kling Ai! – Ultra Realistic Results” by Seattle’s Yutao Han, aka Tao Prompts.

The second is “How-To Create Uncensored Images Of Anyone (Free)” by Lisbon’s Igor Pogany, aka The AI Advantage.

Imagine combining both into a new GV pipeline:

  1. Train custom character models
  2. Create key frames utilizing these custom models
  3. Animate clips with these key frames
  4. Upscale these clips
  5. Edit together.

My take: a lot of people will immediately claim this is heresy, and threatens the very foundations of cinema as we’ve come to know it over the last one hundred years. And they would be right. And yet, time marches on. I believe some variation of this is the future of ultra-low budget production. Very soon the quality will surpass the shoddy CGI that many multi-million dollar Hollywood productions have been foisting on us lately.

August 2024 AI Video Pipeline

Posted on by
Reply

Love it or hate it, as of August 2024, AI Video still has a long way to go.

In this video, AI Samson lays out the current AI Video Pipeline. Although there are a few fledgling story-building tools in development, full-featured “story mode” is not yet available in AI video generators. The current pipeline is:

  1. Create the first and last frames of your clips
  2. Animate the clips between these frames
  3. Create audio and lip-sync the clips
  4. Upscale the clips
  5. Create music and SFX
  6. Edit everything together offline.

It seems new platforms emerge weekly but AI Samson makes these recommendations:

00:23 AI Art Image Generators
09:19 AI Video Generators
16:28 Voice Generators
18:02 Music Generators
20:44 Lip-Syncing
21:52 Upscaling

Keep an eye open for LTX Studio though.

My take: You know, the current pipeline makes me think of an animation pipeline. It’s eerily similar to the Machinima pipeline I used to create films in the sandbox mode of the video game The Movies over ten years ago: