So I started this blogger account as a requirement for an old film course which made us link up our posts as journal entries to be graded. Needless to say it was utter bullpies. Every week I would spend half my time slaving over each entry like it was a graduate thesis essay so that my TA would mark my grades high. It was a waste of time, and when I was done with it I threw all my blogs out the window. Well, today I'm blowing off some of the old dust and making a new beginning for this thing. The main reason is because I've been inspired by a string of advice coming from some very successful business people at the SXSW Film and Interactive Fest.
"The Industry is dead," as it says up above is from the documentary PressPausePlay, and everywhere I went during SXSW I heard it from keynote speakers, to marketing directors, to successful media entrepreneurs, again and again and again. What the phrase means is simple. Film festival critiques are dead (at least for short films and even more so for student short films). The days in which filmmakers had to wait for their films to make into festivals in order to gauge the first valid response are over. Now I'm not saying that film festivals aren't opportunities to get noticed, nor that they don't give independent filmmakers big breaks. But we don't have to rely on them anymore to show our work to a massive group of people and provide us with an honest critique. Today we have a swarm of people bursting on the internet with comments about your work, YouTube and Vimeo especially. The views, however, don't come on their own.
That's where this blog comes in. Another big piece of advice floating around the internet was the idea of freeing up content. Don't hold back your products, but instead let them go around the net. Let them become popular. Let people watch them. Teach them something they didn't know already. Show them that you have something to say. The new direction of Raise the Roof Productions was modeled after that idea. We don't just want to make films. We want to share our experience with other people, especially other filmmakers, so that they can learn from us. That was also the main reason why we USTREAMed Soliloquy. Instead of just watching a plain old Vimeo clip, you got to see us, the cast and the crew, goofing off eating pizza and drinking champagne while we took questions from the viewers and provided answers on the spot. It was like a Q & A but better. The blog here is another method of that interaction. First, if you're reading this, I'd love to hear any comments about my thoughts in the previous paragraph. Second, I'll also be posting updates about our soon arriving Behind the Scenes videos for Soliloquy, future products, and any other ideas that squirm into my head. I'll also try to encourage the other members of the crew to write blogs as well. And third, this page also acts as marketing. I know it looks a little bit plain in here right now, but we'll be working to revamp this page with our own trademark soon enough. Until then peeps, have a good day.
