Kyle Gilman’s Camera Noise Productions

Last week Jennie Tarr and I did a photo shoot with Jenny Woodward for what I hope will eventually be a very quick photo animation technique. Here’s a preview.

The Two Boots Pioneer Theater on Avenue A and 3rd St. in Manhattan is one hell of a cool theater. For 4 years, Ray Privett has been the man behind the curtain keeping it the weirdest and most experimental of New York’s first run-theaters. I first met Ray when he gave Richard Sylvarnes’s The Cloud of Unknowing a week-long run, guaranteeing a review in the New York Times. At the time I was the brand-new head of distribution at the brand-new company The Possible Films Collection. Only after weeks of emailing him did I learn that he was my friend Randy Bell’s new roommate. We went on to do a sold-out screening of Hal Hartley’s short films, where we sold a ton of DVDs, a two-week run of The Girl From Monday, and most importantly, an evening of my own short films called “Kyle Gilman: Some Success but Mostly Failure” which featured the world premiere of Two Night Stand. I’ve never screened my films together like that at any other time, and it was really gratifying to do it with such a surprising and appreciative audience.

And just to connect me to The Pioneer even closer, The First Sundays Comedy Film Festival moved there a few years ago. They were the first people in NYC to show any of my films. They even showed the Bad Webcam Sex video as part of The Pioneer’s online video series (after some other online video series decided they didn’t want to share their screening slot earlier in the week).

But after 4 years of a job that never seems to take a break, Ray is leaving The Pioneer. He will be missed. I hope he has a great time with his new projects, and I hope The Pioneer doesn’t suck without him.

It turns out I worked on 3 films that are premiering at Sundance this year. I knew that Blind Date and Choke would be there, but I just discovered today that Quid Pro Quo will be there too. I haven’t seen the final versions of Choke or Quid Pro Quo, but I’ve seen Blind Date quite a few times and it’s very good.

So far I don’t have anything lined up that would be eligible for Sundance ‘09, but the year is still young.

Even though it’s New Year’s Day, it’s still 2 For Tuesday. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk. I hate about 25% of classic rock songs and when I listen to the radio in the shower I only have time for 2 or 3 songs. So if Rush comes on 104.3 on Tuesday morning they lose a listener for 8 minutes. But this morning I got two great Zeppelin songs off the back wall, so it was cool.

Happy New Year to my half-dozen readers.

Man oh man do I love new toys. Yesterday I picked up the Behringer Podcastudio Firewire (note the German-style compound word). Now, let me be clear. I have no interest in podcasting. I tried listening to podcasts back when they were all the rage and I didn’t see the appeal. I prefer to read stuff while listening to music. The Podcastudio is just a nice, ridiculously cheap way to start a home recording studio. It comes with a microphone, an adorable little mixer and a firewire interface that brings audio into the computer via a higher quality method than the line level input on my sound card. I’m starting production soon on an animated web series and I need a nice, simple way to record the voices without spending too much money. This is a lot better than my original, misguided plan to use $15 teleconferencing headsets and Skype. I spent a few days researching the available low-end pro audio equipment and I kept coming back to the various components of the Podcastudio. At first I thought I’d just try one or two of them, but the bundle was too good a deal.

My favorite thing so far is the mixer. It has two microphone inputs and two stereo line-level inputs along with tape in and out. It has just slightly more than I need in a mixer at this point. I’m planning to record two voices simultaneously so the inputs are perfect. My main disappointment is the 3-foot XLR cable for the microphone. I want to get that thing as far away from my computer as possible so I’m going to pick up some longer cables, and of course an additional microphone.

So far I’ve only done a little bit of testing but the sound quality is pretty good. There’s a small, but distinct amount of high-frequency noise coming from the mic pre-amps on the mixing board. The microphone seems acceptable without being overwhelmingly great or anything. I’ll probably pick up another one. The headphones are below average, with a tinny, echoey sound, but I appreciate the circumaural design. They will be acceptable for voice monitoring but they’re definitely the weak link in the system.

Michael Moore’s new movie “Sicko” got posted on the Internet before it was released. Why is this news? Because Michael Moore and the Weinstein Company are making it news. I’m sure there was a press release put out by the Weinstein Company, and Moore’s going around claiming it was an inside job. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was made from a DVD screener. I don’t know the specifics of the distribution plans, but I find it hard to believe that there were no DVD screeners available for the film, considering that it’s already played at Cannes and it’s coming out in theaters so soon. Then today there were more articles wondering if the film’s box office would be hurt by all this crazy piracy. The figure mentioned in the articles is 4000 downloads on Piratebay. 4000! And “as many as 600″ saw it on YouTube! Do reporters even stop to think about what they’re writing? That many people watching a movie online before it’s released is a story only because the numbers are so small. Hell, according to mininova, 2,000 people are downloading Fay Grim right now. Fay Grim was pirated 2 weeks before it opened and that’s a movie much lower on the radar than Sicko. Trust me, Sicko will do just fine even with all these dirty pirates around.

Yesterday Chris Anderson over at his Long Tail blog posted some research done by Kalevi Kilkki, Principal Scientist at Nokia Siemens Networks. I don’t really follow the math, but somehow he’s worked out that if there were a lot more movie theaters in the US and an efficient distribution network that didn’t require physically shipping prints to the theater, there would be 60-70% more revenue available to theatrical distributors because they could show a lot more movies with niche appeal. They claim there are 13,000 films shown at film festivals every year and there’s all kinds of untapped theatrical revenue from those films that everyone is just throwing away. Now, you can do a lot of stuff with fancy math that seems reasonable, but this is just ridiculous.

Theatrical distribution is the opposite of niche. The nature of theatrical presentation is that you have to herd a group of people into a particular room at a particular time. You don’t get around that by building more theaters. Have you ever gone to an art house theater on a Tuesday evening? 9 times out of 10 you’ll see 15 people in the audience.

Let’s imagine that there were enough new screens to show every movie available for theatrical distribution, and also assume there’s a network that instantly delivers HD (or better) versions of the films for playback on fancy digital projectors. In the real world, those screens would be built very small and because of the nature of niche interests, the screenings would be even more sparsely attended than they are now. Eventually as you increase the volume, the screens get even smaller and the audience for each screening dwindles to one or two. Do you know what that sounds like to me? It sounds like home video.

Theatrical presentation and home video are not two different things, they complement each other. In almost every case, theatrical is a money-losing advertisement for home video.

Now, if we could get over the stigma of releasing films directly to video, that would really be something. If respectable media outlets would review niche indie movies released directly to video rather than ignoring them and lumping them in with the fifth American Pie sequel then it would be financially viable to release all those movies that don’t make it through the theatrical bottleneck that exists for very real reasons which aren’t going to be solved by technology.

And if you’ve seen even a fraction of those 13,000 movies that supposedly screen at film festivals every year (where does that number come from?) you know that most of them aren’t really of interest to anyone outside of the friends and family of the cast and crew.

I earn most of my income helping other people make movies. It pays well and most of the time it’s exciting. But like most people, I want to have some control over what I do every day. So I’ve started a number of web-based ventures. I put all my movies online, I sell Obey Saget merchandise, and I manage a TV blog. Today I’m on the cusp of two milestones. First, I’m about to cross the $100 payment threshold for Google Adwords. The money has been accumulating in tiny increments for a little over a year, and in a few weeks I will earn enough to actually have Google transfer that money into my bank account.

Ok, that’s not a lot of money considering the amount of time it took to earn it, but it does nearly cover my actual expenses. It certainly doesn’t pay for all the work that’s gone into these things, especially TiFaux, which accounts for the bulk of the Adwords income and includes three other people writing dozens of posts every month. That sort of thing adds up, and will most likely never earn any of us any money.

Revver paid me for the first time last month, and I’ll earn enough this month to get paid again. That’s all thanks to the 1-year-later surprise success of “Truth @ 15 Frames Per Second.” My older, less web-friendly movies aren’t pulling their weight. This week Today! the Truth@15fps videos will reach 1 million combined views on YouTube, which is totally astounding, but it doesn’t earn me a dime. Granted, most of the traffic on the 15framespersecond.com site comes from YouTube viewers, so it does indirectly earn me money, but it would be nice if YouTube could figure out a way to pay legitimate content creators directly.

And finally, the Obey Saget merchandise provides the most income out of all these ventures, and takes almost no time at all to maintain. It’s a lesson for the kids out there.

In somewhat exciting news, Fay Grim is available for illegal download from the usual places that people get those sorts of things. I’m not going to link to any sites because I don’t want to encourage any more people to take money out of the producers’ pockets, but I am happy to see that there is even enough interest in the film for someone to go through the trouble of ripping it, compressing it, and uploading it; and that there are currently almost 600 people downloading it on Bittorrent. Of course, the picture quality isn’t great, and the audio is half a second out of sync (making it nearly unwatchable) but I wouldn’t want it to be high quality. Maybe some people will get a taste of it and want to see it for real.

When I was distributing Hal’s last movie The Girl From Monday, I got an irate email from a fan in a foreign country who was upset that we had cruelly decided not to release it in his territory. He told me that he would be forced to download it illegally. I told him that we’d love to release it in his country but we hadn’t found a distributor who was interested, and in the meantime, if he could point me in the direction of an actual copy of The Girl From Monday available for download, I would send him a free DVD screener. Well, I never heard back from him, but I’m also fairly certain there were no copies of The Girl From Monday floating around on the Internets because the interest level wasn’t there.

But now there seems to be real interest, and most importantly, real marketing behind this movie. Although it seems like half the country has already had a chance to see it at a film festival, there’s still demand for it on the Internet. It’s a good sign I think.

But please, illegal downloaders, cut it out. With a movie as small as this, a few tickets here or there really do make a difference. Go see the movie in the theater, or rent it on DVD. Or watch it on HDNet Movies. Please.

When I logged into Netflix today I saw a “Watch Now” tab that got me excited. I had heard about their plans to stream movies over the Internet, and I knew that they would have The Girl From Monday available as part of the service. So I decided to check it out while running Firefox in OS X. I was quickly rebuffed. No problem, I rebooted into Windows XP and fired up Firefox. No luck again. I rummaged around in the cobwebby recesses of my hard drive and dug up an old piece of software called Internet Explorer, which allowed me to install the Netflix Instant Watching plugin. I went to The Girl From Monday page and it had a “Play” button below the Queue button. The software checked my connection speed and determined that I could play High Quality video. After about 20 seconds, the movie started.

The picture quality is fairly good, although I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “DVD Quality.” The video resolution might be 720×480 (I’m not sure that it is, but it could be) but the compression leaves a certain softness that you don’t get on a DVD. Since The Girl From Monday was shot at about 12 frames per second on DV, it’s not the best test for this sort of thing, so I tried a comparison with some films I had seen before. The Matrix is available, but for some reason it’s 4:3, which is ridiculous. It looked pretty good, but not great. Zoolander was at the correct aspect ratio, but had the same look of pretty good Internet Video.

I was hoping for something a little better. Give me a longer waiting time up front and double the quality, then you’ve got something really special. If I could get HD over the Internet from Netflix, I’d buy a computer for my living room right now. There’s no way I’d buy an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player, since I don’t want to end up with a Betamax machine, but if Netflix gave me on-demand, high definition playback, that would be incredible. As it is now, it’s just a sideshow. I’d still rather wait a day for the DVD to come in the mail.