一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day7 passage5
Passage 5 Why Indie Directors Are Releasing Movies Online — For Free 126
独立影片导演为何网上免费发片? 《时代周刊》
When Finnish filmmaker Timo Vuorensola came up with the idea
for his movie Star Wreck,
he knew that looking for conventional distribution would be futile.
An amateur, science-fiction comedy with a miniscule budget and in Finnish,
to boot would hardly be attractive to mainstream studios.
So Vuorensola took matters into his own hands:
he used a Finnish social networking site to build up an online fan base
who contributed to the storyline,
made props and even offered their acting skills. In return for the help,
Vuorensola released Star Wreck online for free.
Seven hundred thousand copies were downloaded in the first week alone;
to date, the total has now reached 9 million.
[01:01]"Releasing it for free is just good marketing," he says.
[01:06]"Whether it's through piracy or distribution your film
[01:10]is out there on the Internet, so we decided to harness this."
[01:15]And he has managed to make quite a bit of money out of it.
[01:20]Online sales of merchandise including T-shirts
[01:24]and collector's editions of the DVD
[01:27]have generated $430,000 on a film that only cost $21,500 to make,
[01:39]Vuorensola says.
[01:41]Like Vuorensola, American animator Nina Paley ignored
[01:46]traditional distribution methods and released her film.
[01:51]"What I have learned is that the more freely you show the film,
[01:56]the more audiences will buy the DVD and surrounding merchandise," she says.
[02:02]"With a normal theatrical release you have to spend so much money
[02:07]on advertising and promotion that most independent films lose money."
[02:13]In the age of YouTube and viral marketing campaigns,
[02:18]it was only a matter of time before independent filmmakers came to realize
[02:24]that cutting the middleman out of the process
[02:28]is sometimes the best way to guarantee large audiences see their works.
[02:35]This is especially true at a time when funding from studios
[02:40]has been seriously hit by the recession - just as it was on the way up.
[02:46]"The last 10 years has been a renaissance period for independent filmmaking
[02:52]and there has been more money coming into the production for films
[02:57]than in any other decade in the history of film," says Jonathan Wolf,
[03:03]managing director of the American Film Market,
[03:07]an annual event where filmmakers and studio executives converge
[03:12]to sign production and distribution deals. But since the economic downturn,
[03:19]many indie movie distributors, including New Line Cinema, Miramax,
[03:26]the Weinstein Company and Paramount Vantage,
[03:30]have either left the market or slashed their funding.
[03:35]Liz Rosenthal, founder of Power to the Pixel,
[03:39]an organization that devises new models of film distribution,
[03:44]says the reason many indie directors are turning to the web
[03:50]is that it allows them to better engage with their audiences.
[03:55]"The whole film business has no connection with their audience,"
[03:59]she says. "And with any business you have to know your customer.
[04:05]The Internet has become a free distribution machine,
[04:10]so what can you sell that makes money? Things you can't copy.
[04:15]They need to be things that are based around your audience.
[04:19]Directors cuts, merchandise, 35mm prints of your film."