‘Digital Fur Technology’ can sing and dance

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‘Cats‘ has released a second trailer:

This one aims to do better than the first one:

Does it?

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.

But the biggest change was suppose to be with regards to the “digital fur technology.”

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?

Some SmartTVs to become obsolete

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Catie Keck reports in Gizmodo: Here’s Why Netflix Is Leaving Some Roku and Samsung Devices.

She says,

“Select Roku devices, as well as older Samsung or Vizio TVs, will soon lose support for Netflix beginning in December…. With respect to Roku devices in particular, the issue boils down to older devices running Windows Media DRM. Since 2010, Netflix has been using Microsoft PlayReady. Starting December 2, older devices that aren’t able to upgrade to PlayReady won’t be able to use the service.”

Netflix says,

“If you see an error that says: ‘Due to technical limitations, Netflix will no longer be available on this device after December 1st, 2019. Please visit netflix.com/compatibledevices for a list of available devices.’ It means that, due to technical limitations, your device will no longer be able to stream Netflix after the specified date. To continue streaming, you’ll need to switch to a compatible device prior to that date.”

Antonio Villas-Boas writes on Business Insider:

“This has surfaced one key weakness in Smart TVs — while the picture might still be good, the built-in computers that make these TVs ‘smart’ will become old and outdated, just like a regular computer or smartphone. That was never an issue on ‘dumb’ TVs that are purely screens without built-in computers to run apps and stream content over the internet.”

He concludes, “You should buy a streaming device like a Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, or Apple TV instead of relying on your Smart TV’s smarts.”

My take: does this happen to cars as well?

More celebrities are about to rise from the dead

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Alex Lee, writing in WIRED UK, reveals that the messy legal scrap to bring celebrities back from the dead is only going to get weirder.

Recall that earlier this month Twitter convulsed when it was announced that 55-year dead James Dean had been “cast” in a new Vietnam war movie called Finding Jack.

(Never mind that numerous actors in franchise films have already been resurrected with CGI to continue playing roles into which they once breathed life: Peter Cushing, Carrie Fisher and Paul Walker.)

Here’s where the weird comes in.

As reported by Alex, the estates of dead celebrities hold “rights of publicity” that are typically licensed to companies for exploitation.

But, as soon as 70 years pass after a celebrity’s death, that right expires. Sometimes, it’s just 50 years.

Jennifer Rothman, professor of law at Loyola Marymount University and author of The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World says when the term expires:

“That would make them fair game.”

Of note, a new company has emerged to represent dead celebrities: Worldwide XR.

My take: This was bound to happen in our digital age. It’s just too easy to juggle the bits to create new audio and visuals. I think the backlash speaks to an unspoken feeling that this violates basic privacy and the passage of time. On the other hand — it also has the power to raise the dead and allow us to go on living forever. Or conquer space:

Data usurps Content as King

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Scott Roxborough, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, reports that Indie Execs Say Content Is No Longer King — Data Is.

“Business models on which the industry has relied for decades are breaking apart as studio blockbusters grab an increasingly large share of the domestic box office and streaming platforms splinter the audience for niche and indie fare.”

Speaking at an AFM Financing conference, Erik Feig says the new key is to target a niche audience: “You find a group of people who are passionate about something — and you start with them. You make a movie that will satisfy that niche audience and then you extrapolate beyond that, turn that audience into the proselytizers for your film.”

How do you find that niche audience?

DATA.

I’ve blogged before about the ‘king’ of data: Toronto’s Wattpad who used their data to help create After, a teen romantic thriller.

Back at the conference, Christian Parkes asked, “Is content still king? I’d say data is king. If you aren’t relying heavily on it, you are going to lose.”

For the record, it may have been Bill Gates who coined the term Content is King in 1997.

My take: maybe The Audience is King? With the proliferation of viewing opportunities (plus lots of non-screen activities available) the audience is more valuable than ever. Content and data are both important. But lets not forget that show business/storytelling requires an audience to validate the experience.

Horror Movie Social Media Marketing Case Study

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With Halloween fresh in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to look back at the CMF Trends‘s excellent post Ravenous: Marketing a Horror Movie in the Social Media Era.

Using Ravenous as a case study, we learn the team started with a social media marketing campaign to “develop a community of Quebec horror film fans to generate a significant number of ‘Likes’ as well as followers, tags, shares and retweets on social networks.” They did this by:

  1. A micro-site to collect subscriptions to their newsletter
  2. A contest for 100 zombie extras
  3. Four video demos

Next they watched the reactions of their subscribers and followers to various news items such as casting and distribution announcements.

This helped them understand their best platforms and main influencers.

The article then moves on the review sites. In their case, IMDb and Letterboxd proved to be their most popular.

The article closes with these four recommendations:

  1. Use more visual and video elements (such as gifs, memes, etc.) to feed the social network accounts more systematically and in other than informational contexts (humoristic, based on the news and calendar, etc.)
  2. Develop more promotional content such as the exhibit of storyboards… and format it in such a way as to be able to monetize it with ultra-fans.
  3. Distribute on a larger scale all of the official visual elements and those designed by fan communities throughout the world in accordance with a deployment schedule developed with everyone involved in the film (distributors, sales agents, festivals, influencers) to the greatest extent possible.
  4. Analyze, target and reassess main influencer types and functions at each stage of the film’s operational cycle (festival, local premiere, theatre release, VOD distribution).

My take: fascinating reading! I think almost all of this can be applied to any indie film. Glad I now know about Letterboxd!

The Internet turns 50!

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Last Sunday, October 29, 2019, the Internet turned 50 years old.

We’ve grown from the 1970 topology:

to this in 2019:

internetmap072

Okay, here’s a real representation of the Internet.

What’s next? The Interplanetary Internet of course.

My take: It’s important to note that the World Wide Web is not the same thing as the Internet. (The Web wouldn’t be invented for another 20 years!) The Internet is the all-important backbone for the numerous networking protocols that traverse it, http(s) being only one.

How to film an indie feature

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Ted Sim of Indy Mogul recently interviewed Nigel Bluck, DOP on The Peanut Butter Falcon, to discover How to Film an Indie Feature.

Some takeaways (mostly direct quotes) for me:

  • Shooting single-camera wastes a lot of people’s time.
  • Light for the whole scene, not just one shot. Get yourself into a backlit situation for the master and then you’re going to be fine.
  • The best thing you can do is to take light away and start shaping things that way.
  • Shoot a Master and a Sub-Master. Then shoot two Over-the-Shoulder Medium shots. Those two setups gets you the minimum coverage you need for a scene.
  • Night shooting: go to the street at night and you look at what’s there; look at the colour temperature of the lights that are there and the lights that you put in, make them the same colour temperature so it all belongs in one reality.
  • Choose less gear and make smart solutions.

My take: I have never heard of the French Over, so that’s a new angle for me. Love Nigel’s approach to doing more with less. Although some find two-camera shoots scary, I will say the music video I made with two-cameras was so much easier to edit. His lighting philosophy makes it possible.

Why your first feature should be a horror movie

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Bronson Arcuri has taken NPR‘s Planet Money podcast on The Scariest Thing In Hollywood and turned it into a new genre: the horror movie news story. Watch 8 Reasons Horror Movies Are Scary Good Business:

His central thesis is: Horror movies are cheap to make and insanely popular.

And here are the reasons he says horror films are cheap to make:

  1. Limited Locations
  2. No Talking
  3. Fear is the Unknown
  4. Cheap Costumes, Cheap Props, No CGI
  5. Low Budget is the Right Budget
  6. Profit Sharing
  7. Quantity Over Quality
  8. Sequels

The Numbers bears this thesis out.

My take: I don’t like being scared or afraid and so I’ve never been a big fan of horror movies. Any suggestions on titles for a crash course?

Michael Bay is back — but not on the big screen

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Netflix continues to attract high-profile filmmakers to its streaming platform.

December 13th’s 6 Underground stars Ryan Reynolds, was written by Deadpool duo Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, and is directed by none other than Michael “Mr. Bayhem” Bay.

I know what you’re thinking. Michael Bay? That 1990’s hack?

Well, did you also know that, as a director, his films have grossed over $6 billion?

Then there’s this:

My take: this film looks like a lot of fun! We’ll certainly watch it over the holidays. (btw, that is a really long trailer clocking in at a solid three minutes!)

Distribber, and other aggregators

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As the news of Distribber‘s bankruptcy spreads, Noam Kroll has a great summary: What All Indie Filmmakers Can Learn From Distribber’s Failure.

What is an aggregator? In simplistic terms, film distributors might get your film into theatres whereas aggregators might put your film online. Aggregators have relationships with all major online outlets and know what they want: both for content and for deliverables.

Noam mentions a couple of aggregators to check out:

Stephen Follows has done some excellent analysis of Distribber’s movies. Its most successful client seems to have been Survivor:

What kinds of movies did Distribber attract?

My take: if I had a feature to distribute, I’d probably go with FilmHub because I don’t have the kind of cash other aggregators demand up front.