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Sebastian Michael�s film, “the study of bunkers & mounds in a temperate climate (relatively speaking),” pioneered an inventive new way of film funding. Cleverly named, “fund a frame”, this new approach to film financing paved its way to success by basically selling single frames of the film. On its main website, people are invited to fund a single frame, thus making this film “the first ever frame-by-frame funded film”.

The idea is pure ingenuity as it mimics the cool factor of the business of selling land on the moon. The filmmakers send out an email that describes the donor’s funded frame as “handpicked for you” along with the actual image of the frame as a high-resolution (HD) jpeg file with your name and the time code printed on it.

In additional, to add a more Hollywood-like collector’s item flavor to the donation, the frame can also be printed on high quality photographic paper, autographed and framed in a black wooden frame. As an additional incentive to get the program running, when funding for the film began, it was even possible for donors to get their names on the credits.

Check out the film’s website for more information:
http://www.optimistcreations.com/bunkersandmounds/fundaframe/bnm-fundaframe.html

Contributed by Christina Chen,
UC Berkeley student

First in a series of posts that will discuss the extensive process of putting together a grant application.

Part I:
Essentially, the only way to fund a short film from an American independent filmmaker�s perspective is either through grant money or your money.

The key to funding a short film is planning. Poor planning can break the project before it has even begun, while decisive and smart planning can jumpstart it. Therefore when applying for a grant, the application has two key parts: the script and the budget.

Ensure that the script is compelling and that the budget is error-proof and airtight. If anything is questionable at all in the budget, make sure to disclose an appropriate note.

In addition to the script and budget, other items to support your grant application include synopsis, style breakdown, biography and casting information. These topics will be covered in a subsequent post on the Film Funding Blog.

Contributed by Christina Chen,
UC Berkeley student

Photo by Mahalie

The UK Film Council has released a new funding policy for the next three years until March 2010. The policy includes the creation of five new funding projects that are designed to increase public access to films through the increased funding of film festivals and more access to the country’s film history.

For example, the equivalent of $3 million dollars per year will be granted to the UK Film Festivals Fund with the aim to not only increase the number of film festivals, but also improve upon the already existing festivals to provide greater access to a diversity of worldwide cinema.

The UK Digital Film Archives Fund will grant $2 million dollars per year while the Partnership Challenge Fund will also be granted $2 million dollars per year in order to increase funding partnerships to provide more public awareness about film funding. Specifically, the Partnership Challenge Fund targets the promotion of media literacy, film access, cinema capital funding, and London 2012 Olympics film-related initiatives.

In addition, the Digitization and Marketing Fund will receive $4 million dollars per year; this money will go to boosting marketing expenditures in order to increase theatrical and online film distribution.

This new funding policy has the hopes of smoothly transitioning the UK film industry into the Digital Age.

Get more information about these new film promotional policies from the following link:
http://northernfilmnetwork.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/uk-film-council-sets-out-funding-plans-to-2010/

Contributed by Christina Chen,
UC Berkeley student

The Boston Motion Picture Awards (BMPA) is a competition that started three years ago with the goal of helping independent filmmakers jumpstart their film careers. The awards are tied to several means of film funding. Winners of the competition not only receive money and resources, they also benefit from a variety of other perks, ranging from free screenwriting software to free subscriptions to industry magazines.

With categories such as “International Short-Film Competition” and “International Spoof-Writing Competition”, winners can receive up to thousands of dollars in cash and/or a distribution agreement. The application date starts on July 2nd and goes until September 15th.

The competition also includes judges whose industry backgrounds range from actors in Office Space, Gilmore Girls and directors and producers from The Albino Code, and a film critic from “The Boston Globe”.

The idea behind the BMPAs is the acknowledgement of the fundamental issue behind amateur filmmaking: money. While musicians can create hundreds of songs in their garage or authors can write a variety of short stories, filmmaking is an artistic medium that simply cannot exist without a significant amount of funding. Thus after winning a BMPA prize, filmmakers have a foot up in their future film ventures.

Get more general information about this competition from its main website:
http://www.bostonawards.com/

Contributed by Christina Chen,
UC Berkeley student

The Annual Film Florida Meeting took place June 6th through June 8th at the Italian Club in Tampa, Florida. Film Florida is an organization based in Florida that acts as the prominent hub of the entertainment industry in Florida.

The first day of the event included Funding 101, a panel that discussed how feature films are funded. The panelists scheduled to appear included representatives from Ring Productions, Fresh Produce Films, Fingerman and Macke, and Skyway Capital Investments. Other sessions that day included events discussing the ways to pitch film plans and how to gain the resources needed to fund film projects.

The host of the event, the Film Florida organization, is a non profit that supports local film production in the state. They work closely with the Florida Film Office, a branch of the state government. The Florida Film Office’s website is www.filminflorida.com. That site offers a number of great resources such as information on Florida state production incentives and shooting locations.

Get more information on Florida’s film industry:
http://tampafilmfan.com/blog/2007/05/22/film-florida-annual-meeting-and-more-june-6-8/
http://www.filmflorida.org
http://www.filminflorida.com

Contributed by Christina Chen,
UC Berkeley student

The film Dark Floors is a horror film being produced by Lordi, Finnish rockers that won the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest. The film is not only being shot in Finland, but also contains a cast that is largely Finnish. The government there has contributed 300,000 euros (over $400,000) towards the overall production cost of 4.2 million euros (over $5.6 million).

This contribution is more than a symbolic gesture, it shows the government’s intent to support local film ventures in Finland. The recent buzz on the film at the Cannes Film Festival only adds to the potential success of the project and growth of the Finnish film industry. Now only if the U.S. government was willing to do the same here!

Get the full story from the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6718257.stm

Contributed by Christina Chen,
UC Berkeley student

As reported in The Independent:

City financiers have begun a European film-funding drive in an attempt to imitate Hollywood’s global blockbuster machine.

…

Early next month Stewart Till, the current chairman of the UK Film Council and former head of United International Pictures and PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, will hold talks with bankers from Dresdner Kleinwort. They will discuss the formation of a £100m investment fund, which he would lead, to back the distribution and marketing of UK and European films.

…

“This is not about transplanting the US model. There should be a balance between these culturally significant movies and those that can be globally appealing. We need to be able to match those ideas with the appropriate financing.”

Have foreign films, user-generated content, and the video game industry sent the major U.S. film studios into a death spiral?

Kirstin Thompson, writing from her homebase at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, nicely summarizes and critiques two recent articles that explore the demise of Hollywood.

Read her article on David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema. The full post is here.

Photo from davidbordwell.net

Pirates (not the Caribbean ones) are sending shockwaves through the motion picture industry. Hacker sites are reporting cracking the encryption on both formats of high definition DVD. This is a tremendously negative development for consumers. Already skittish about making high definition programming available due to piracy concerns, this news confirms the entertainment industry’s worst fears. I think we can look forward to even more stringent digital rights management (DRM) that limits available content and decreases consumer enjoyment of the latest movies and entertainment programming.

Here is a summary of the hack:

HD DVD and Blu-ray Now Completely Hacked, Cracked, Sacked

Gizmodo , February 13, 2007 Tuesday 11:15 AM EST

Feb. 13, 2007 ( delivered by Newstex) –

The guys at the Doom 9 forum are marking February 11, 2007 as the day when digital rights management was defeated on Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. It turns out that cracking the high definition disc formats was much easier than was originally thought. The processing key that can unravel the DRM on all HD DVD and Blu-ray discs has been found by a clever encryption fighter named arnezami.

It gets better:

The first-reported and Blu-ray discs were not completely effective, because each individual title had secret codes that were needed to unravel the rest of the encryption on that disc. But now this newly-found processing key is apparently the holy grail that unlocks the DRM on all HD DVD and Blu-ray discs released so far. The guy found it by simply watching his computer memory, where the secret code–which we won’t publish here for fear of doing jail time–simply appeared. Incredible. Let the free downloads begin! — Charlie White

[Doom9 Forum]

http://www.contentagenda.com/articleXml/LN570885857.html?industryid=45180

You can also check out this post on Boing Boing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/13/bluray_and_hddvd_bro.html