Jon Reiss

10 Ways in Which I Would Release Bomb It Today

Chris Horton asked me to write this post for the new Artist Services website that Sundance has set up. However, many filmmakers don’t have access to that site, and so I am posting it here on my blog for anyone to be able to read. Here is the post:

In 2005 I started a documentary project that became Bomb It which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007, was released on DVD, iTunes and Netflix via New Video and has had an extended life on VOD (Gravitas), Web series (Babelgum), various foreign sales (PAL DVD this month on Dogwoof) etc. As many of you know, my experience releasing Bomb It inspired me to write a manual for other filmmakers to release their films in this new distribution landscape: Think Outside the Box Office. Chris Horton approached me to write a post on how I would release Bomb It in today’s distribution landscape (and knowing what I know now). I’ve actually thought about this a lot (mostly kicking my self for what I could have done better!)
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This Week on Babelgum Bomb It 2 – South East Asia

For this week’s Bomb It 2 installment on Babelgum we went back to Asia to look at Jakarta, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Jakarta has a vibrant graffiti and street art scene and was my first stop after Bangkok (covered in week 1 of Bomb It 2). I was there for only six hours – but I had a chance to film and interview Darbotz who paints a giant monster squid and freely talks about street art and its relationship to semiotics!

Finding graffiti writers in Singapore was perhaps the most startling since I was familiar with the very strict laws and caning used against graffiti writers there. I was headed to Singapore to teach at the NYU campus there and planned to use that as a base to film graffiti and street art elsewhere in Asia, but I didn’t think that I was going to meet any there. But I was pleasantly surprised to be able to talk to both Killer Gerbil as well as Zero, two street artists who were very aware of the odd relationship that their country has with illegal painting on walls and how the country while clamping down on graffiti also tries to co-opt it.

Finally this week are two pieces on the Hong Kong artists Mic and Xeme. Xeme is also responsible for Invasion Magazine – about all things street and graff in Asia. In Hong Kong as with much of the rest of Asia – there are many walls to paint – and not that many artists – or anti graffiti sentiment – eg it is pretty easy to paint in Asia. Xeme finds himself bringing graffiti tourists around to the best spots. But I particularly liked that he spoke about writing in Chinese – and the difficulty communicating with an international scene when he uses his local language.

Mic talks not only about the irony of being arrested by the Chinese government for doing graffiti – while at the same time being commissioned to do murals for the same government (even the police). He also speaks eloquently about his works relationship to the public space in Hong Kong and the plethora of advertising that they are assaulted with every day.

I hope you like the pieces – and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Jon

Bomb It 2 Graffiti in the West Bank

No guest post today – instead I wanted to write about the Bomb It 2 episodes that we uploaded to Babelgum this week.

The attitudes and motivations of graffiti and street artists in the Palestinian refugee camps on the West Bank is quite different than those of most writer’s I have spoken to around the world. Their work is much more politicized – it centers around the struggle that they face every day. I had the pleasure of meeting and filmming four current and former graffiti artists and street artists in the Muhnned Alazzh, Ayed Arafah, Aysar Daward and Khaled Ajainia. The results of those interviews now comprise three Bomb It 2 Webisodes on our Babelgum channel. Let me know what you think!

The key difference of West Bank writers was the subject matter that they wrote about – how they used graffiti as a means of expression. Traditionally in the camps, graffiti has been a method of communication between the Palestinian leaders and the people. Also as a means of communication between people in the camps.

From those early uses a number of artists moved into more creative uses of graffiti and street art. Muhnned and Aysar both are heavily influenced by slain Palestinian caricaturist Naji Alali – painting his work throughout the camps.

The original work painted for my by Ayed Arafah deals with the tragedy that he is so close to the sea, but because of his status, he has never been allowed to see the sea.

One of the most interesting discussions was how the artists felt about painting on the “Apartheid Wall” the gigantic separation between Israel and the West Bank. The dominant position was that by beautifying the wall with art – you make it acceptable, that instead of talking about how horrible it is, you devolve into discussions about the art. They want to retain the brutal nature of the wall, and not beautify it with art. An interesting counterpoint by Khaled Ajainia was that while life in the camps is brutal, it is important to embrace art and celebrate life.

Loving the Webseries Form – An Intro to the Why and How of Bomb It 2

As some of you might know – Bomb It 2 launched last week on Babelgum. What is Bomb It 2? As I mentioned in the intro to Simon Pulman’s post last week on this blog, its not another feature – it’s a web series – part of a growing – dare I say – transmedia extension of the Bomb It experience.

The idea originated simply. I started travelling to a number of foreign locales introducing Think Outside the Box Office and holding workshops on the topic of distribution and marketing. Many of these places were cities that I had not travelled to for Bomb It, but still had vibrant graffiti and street art communities. Some cities were places where I had no idea what kind of graffiti culture to expect (Singapore especially). I approached Babelgum to see if they would be interested in sponsoring a new series of episodes to expand Bomb It further out into the world – and they agreed. (With the extra footage of the original Bomb It we had created a similar series of episodes for Babelgum.)
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Bomb It 2 on Babelgum To Watch List for Fast Company Magazine

Babelgum Actually — gasps — Pays for Users to Create Videos
By PATRICK J. SAUER

So far as I know, Babelgum is the only company paying Web-video creators money up front,” says chief revenue officer Douglas Dicconson. And not for low-brow stuff, but ambitious professional works such as British documentarian Daniel Edelstyn’s Vodka Empire, the unlikely 25-part saga of his discovery that he’s heir to a Ukrainian vodka factory, and his attempt to bring Zorokovich 1917 to the modern spirits world. […]

Dicconson says that he closed more revenue in the first quarter of 2010 than in the past three years combined. And momentum continued this past spring as Babelgum’s traffic spiked to 5.7 million visitors a month, when Vamped Out and Vodka Empire first aired. Na zdorovye!

3 to Watch

Dirty Oil
Babelgum’s first fully financed feature film, helmed by Academy Award-nominee Leslie Iwerks, will get its U.S. debut as an episodic series. Dirty Oil examines the economic and ecological impact of the oil sands in Alberta.

Vamped Out
When we last saw our vampiric out-of-work-actor hero Alowisus Hewson (Jason Antoon) in season one, he was sucking a young Hollywood starlet’s blood while formerly skeptical documentary filmmaker Elliot Finke (series writer and director Kevin Pollak) wigged out. Will the 172-year-old thespian find work in a Twilight world?

Bomb It 2
Babelgum produced the original street art/graffiti documentary, and the sequel will profile artists from locations such as Singapore (third offense is a caning!) and the Middle East. “In Israel, there’s a blossoming street-art culture with percolations of ideas,” says director Jon Reiss, “but in the Palestinian refugee camps, everything is political.”

Read more here or on the September issue of Fast Company magazine.

10 Solutions to Ted Hopes 38 More Ways The Film Industry Is Failing Today

On Truly Free Film today Ted Hope writes about 38 More Ways The Film Industry Is Failing Today.

My response is to propose 10 Solutions that Filmmakers Can engage in to work against these failings:

1. Consider marketing and distribution of your films as part of the entire filmmaking process. If you do this it will be easier and more organic.

2. Hire a distribution and marketing crew – just as you would a production crew. Hire a Producer of Marketing and Distribution or PMD to run this crew. As a producer/line producer run production crew.

3. If you are interested in film, business, marketing, social media – train to become a PMD so that you can be hired by filmmakers. This is a growth field – if you want a new career.

4. Budget for and raise money for distribution and marketing at the initial raise. That way you can promise your investors a release of the film. This way there will be some assured path to monetization and all share the risk in the costs of that monetization.

5. Put the money for marketing and distribution in escrow – you know what I mean.

6. Consider the audience for your film, the specific audinece(s) that exist for your film. Reach out to them as early as possible. They will help you.

7. Think of how and what that audience consumes. Make products that they want related to your film. Eg Shepard Fairey designed posters printed on linen paper signed by the director of the film Bomb It – 🙂

8. Think of interesting Live Events that you can create that appeal to your audience and are relevent to your film. Steinway brought pianos and pianists to the screenings of Ben Nile’s “Note by Note”

9. Think of interesting ways to reach out to audiences that might engage with the content of your film, but don’t want to watch a feature film (yes transmedia). Check out “The Way We Get By” and their Returning Home community site. Check out Bomb It’s Babelgum webisode site.

10. Remember that you are creating a film or media project for an audience. Creation is one part of the whole, connecting with the audience is the other part to that whole.

Jon