“Warner Bros. recently struck a deal with Cinelytic, which has built an AI-infused project management system. It is focused on the green-lighting process, such as by helping to predict the potential profits on new films.”
Cinelytic says users can:
“Gain critical insights into how key talent will increase the chances of success of your project, and by how much. Our proprietary economic scoring system, Cinelytic’s TalentScores™, ranks talent by their economic impact across the film industry, including by media type, genre, and key territories.”
My take: I’m not sure AI tools will help make better Hollywood films. AI tools analyze past successes and compare new projects against old ones. With this in mind, how can we expect anything but retreads of yesteryear’s blockbusters? More comic book films coming soon.
“Content moderators for YouTube are being ordered to sign a document acknowledging that performing the job can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). ‘I understand the content I will be reviewing may be disturbing,’ reads the document, which is titled ‘Acknowledgement’ and was distributed to employees using DocuSign. ‘It is possible that reviewing such content may impact my mental health, and it could even lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).'”
These moderators work as contractors to companies working for Google or Facebook, for instance, and are charged with keeping Youtube or Facebook, for instance, free from copyright infringement and explicit imagery, be that extremist violence, abuse, porn, hate or harassment.
“We are now two years into a great expansion of the content moderation industry. As governments around the world make more demands of tech companies to police their services, tens of thousands of people have signed up for the job. At the same time, we still lack a basic understanding of how the most difficult aspects of this work — removing graphic and disturbing content — affect the people doing it. We know that a subset of people who work in YouTube’s violent extremism queue and similar roles around the world will develop PTSD and related conditions on the job. We don’t know what a safe level of exposure might be.”
The tech companies know some content moderation can be mentally challenging and are investigating tech solutions. This paper describes displaying the images in grey scale or blurring them.
Unfortunately, the only real solution is for people to stop uploading harmful material. Until then, online content moderators run the risk of being hurt.
My take: these contractors police the Internet to keep us safe from harm. In that sense, they are really no different from the fire, police and military services. They should be paid equivalently and have the same health benefits, especially when their work leads to PTSD.
“You always think you want to watch your favourite shows from 20 years ago, and yet you end up not devoting all that much time to them. When video stores started opening everywhere, I remember thinking: wow, I can catch up with all my favourite old movies. But that feeling doesn’t last. And that’s not a sustainable business model. Eventually, 80 percent of what you found in video stores was less than a month old. Netflix’s move from distribution to a production and distribution model is based on the fact that, once they had demonstrated that there was a business in streaming, they realized they were at the mercy of the studios for content. They anticipated the current trend, where studios want to be their own distributors.”
He concludes, “With the arrival on the market of several new OTT platforms, Netflix’s catalogue has somewhat been depleted. And these new players certainly don’t intend to stick to recycled content. Peacock, HBO Max and Disney+ are all investing massively in the production of original shows.”
My take: The mediascape expands each year, both in terms of content and in terms of outlets for that content. On the other hand are two things that are for the most part finite: individual viewing time and entertainment budgets. This means more content and more outlets will simply be ignored by viewers; the audience must fracture into niches if the smaller outlets are to gain any traction. Nostalgic content may attract an audience to a streaming service but new shows and content will keep them there. So much to see, and so little time! More curation is required.
Give out printed comment cards/sheets at the close of the event.
Ask the viewers to rate the film on IMDb & give them the ability to at the screening.
Capture emails to let the beta viewers know when the film comes out.
Consider inviting local press.”
Your film should be close to picture lock and the test screening invitees should be strangers representative of your target audience.
The survey you hand out to every single viewer must be printed on paper and ask for their demographics (but not their name) as well as answers to specific feedback questions.
Ben suggests you ask the test screening audience to rate your film on IMDb after completing the paper questionnaire and before the Q&A.
He also suggests you collect their email addresses so you can contact them with news about your film in the future.
Finally, he suggests you invite local press to your test screening to start creating a buzz for your project.
My take: this is all good advice. The test screening vlog by Darious above is great too. I must admit I have never heard of asking your test screening audience to rate your film on IMDb before it has been released. The main takeaway from all this is that you don’t want your premiere to be a de facto test screening because it will then be too late to incorporate anything you learn into the finished film. Well, you can, but it will just be much more expensive to make any changes at that point.
Her thesis is that to guarantee getting your film made, more often now, you have to produce it yourself:
“Being inspired by film actors, directors and writers is easy. It’s all there on the big screen, in the finished project. But fewer aspirational filmmakers first think, “What I really wanna do is produce.” That particular job, which can cover an enormous range of organizational, financial and generally unsexy duties, is frequently invisible and thankless. But without producers, films wouldn’t get made. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we’re seeing so many writer-directors also putting on producer hats this season. Films including “Marriage Story,” “The Report,” “Knives Out” and “Parasite” have all been made by filmmakers wearing three hats, while “Jojo Rabbit” and “Motherless Brooklyn” feature writer-director-actors who took on a producing role.”
On producing, Norton evokes the legend of Sisyphus:
“Writing is lonely; directing and acting, if you’re overlapping them, is challenging but fun. But producing is just pushing a rock up a hill. And sometimes it rolls over you on the way back down.”
He goes on to explain why he produced his own indie:
“It’s the film business equivalent of if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. It’s a necessary grind to get to the fun part. And if you believe in your story, it’s what you have to do to put it all together.”
My take: I love DIY filmmaking! More often than not, no-budget filmmakers like me wear many, many hats, including the producer’s. But finding someone who only wants to produce is a challenge. Everyone wants to direct, or shoot. If you want to produce, let’s talk. I’ve often said, “If you can balance your chequebook AND throw a fantastic party, you can produce.”
As 2019 turns into 2020, the Cineplex Board of Directors has given Canada a present, one that has the potential to change the mediascape into something never seen before: the option to have control over our country’s movie screens.
Recall that Cineplex accepted an offer from the United Kingdom’s Cineworld to buy it for $2.8-billion on December 16, 2019.
It then entered a 7-week “go shop” period in which it can accept better offers until February 2, 2020.
My modest proposal: let’s add a movie theatre chain to the pipeline the people of Canada already own!
Why control the movie screens in our country? To enforce screen quotas, of course. The reason Canadians don’t see Canadian movies at the local mutiplex is because those theatres would rather show American movies. Embarrassingly, we had to give up our national policy target of a measly 5% of the box office because we missed the mark so badly year after year.
It worked for Canadian music on Canadian radio, and it’s called CanCon.
My take: as much as I would love to see this happen, I’m afraid it won’t, if only because the remaining movie theatre operators in Canada will complain that Cineplex CanCon would have the unfair advantage of unlimited (taxpayer) funding. Fine, I say, we’ll buy you out too! Imagine if the people of Canada owned every movie screen in Canada!
“I ranked all the storylines while considering many factors, including: if the storyline holds up in 2019, if the story would make a good standalone movie, and if Love Actually would be Love Actually if the story was not in the movie.”
Here they are, from the bottom to the top:
Jamie (Colin Firth) and Aurélia (Sienna Guillory)
Sarah (Laura Linney), Karl (Rodrigo Santoro), and her brother (Michael Fitzgerald)
Colin (Kris Marshall), Tony (Abdul Salis), and America
Julia (Keira Knightley), Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Mark (Andrew Lincoln)
Harry (Alan Rickman), Karen (Emma Thompson), and Mia (Heike Makatsch)
Karen and Joni Mitchell
Rufus (Rowan Atkinson) and wrapping
John (Martin Freeman) and Judy (Joanna Page)
David (Hugh Grant) and Natalie (Martine McCutcheon)
Daniel (Liam Neeson), Sam (Thomas Sangster), and Joanna (Olivia Olson)
Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) and His Manager (Gregor Fisher)
My take: I’ve just finished watching Love Actually (my favourite holiday movie) for another year. (Die Hard is my second favourite.) In retrospect, it’s very interesting how much music is in the film. If this script is genuine, Richard Curtis did write it with the music very much in mind. Supposedly, that’s a cardinal sin. (btw, here’s another take on the rankings. And another. OMG, it’s a trope, acutally!)
“New viewing habits brought on by the rise of streaming have hastened the demise of the mid-budget American indie, changed the very definition of arthouse cinema, and shaken the indie distribution business. But theatrical is still here to stay, attendees of the Macao International Film Festival’s closed-door industry panels concluded Saturday.”
Some takeaways:
“Prestige” films by streamers are more about awards and PR than a threat to theatrical.
Mid-budget indie films have all but disappeared and the theatrical box office is blockbuster movies on one hand and local fare on the other (in the massive India and China markets at least.)
Audiences are more inclined to search out indie films at home on their streaming services than at the multiplex.
“Arthouse used to mean a Korean film that was award-winning. Now, an arthouse film is not a comedy, not ‘Star Wars,’ and everything else. Even mid-budget, $10 million movies are all arthouse.”
“Producers are happier and distributors are miserable. There’s more production work for hire and less of an opportunity to nurture talent as there once was.”
My take: as the decade closes, streaming has truly conquered both TV and theatrical to become the undisputed source for the majority of viewing. The technology has matured so that bandwidth and resolution are no longer issues. However, access and discoverability, as well as curation and choice are increasingly becoming problematic for indie filmmakers and their supporters.
“Perhaps solely due to the horror genre’s loyalty to this form of home media, independent film-makers are releasing their flicks on VHS with limited and special editions, or as perks on fundraising campaigns.”
It’s a documentary about the career of Jeff Baker who worked as a leading figure in the home entertainment business from the 1970s until 2015. His career, in many ways, mirrors the arc of home video, from Betamax to VHS to DVD, from the rise of Blockbuster to its fall, and from boxed sets to streaming.
This is a long but fascinating read about access to films, technology, video stores and unapologetic nostalgia. For instance, did you know the world’s largest video store has over 130 thousand titles but Netflix has less than four thousand? For comparison, the average Blockbuster had around 10,000 movies.
After outlining some of the issues with digitizing classic movies, Kate tours some great video stores, maps them on the world and concludes:
“As technology continues isolating us and pushing more of our daily interactions into the digital space, I have to believe there’s going to be a bounce-back moment for video stores just as there’s been for independent booksellers and record stores.”
Well, it is shorter, at 99 seconds, versus 142 seconds.
It outlines more of a story for the audience to expect. And the cats spend almost all of their time on two feet, rather than on all fours. It’s brighter.
Director Tom Hooper, quoted in Empire Magazine in his first interview anywhere about the movie, claims that the explosive response caught him off guard:
“I was just so fascinated because I didn’t think it was controversial at all. So it was quite entertaining. Cats was apparently the number-one trending topic in the world, for a good few hours at least. We’d only finished shooting in March, so all the visual effects were at quite an early stage. Possibly there were, in the extremity in some of the responses, some clues in how to keep evolving it. When you watch the finished film, you’ll see that some of the designs of the cats have moved on since then, and certainly our understanding of how to use the technology to make them work has gone up, too.”
O-kay.
Me, I hardly see a difference. Maybe, when you compare Jennifer Hudson in #2 at 1:08 with her slightly furrier self in #1 at 2:04. But the others seem virtually the same. See 1:50 (#1) and 0:40 (#2.)
My take: what I think is fascinating about this is that the audience has had an impact on the final film. An early trailer caused the blog-o-shpere to gag. And the filmmakers listened and subsequently modified the film. This is a purr-fect (sorry) example of the filmmakers giving their audience what they want. Should more films do that?
.jpg)
_Interconnections.svg)
