Spent some time cleaning up my movie lists today and thought I’d share the ten movies I’ve seen in the past decade that made me scratch my head. Ever since Rotten Tomatoes came out, I’ve had better judgement. In no particular order:
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Bitch Slap
Atlas Shrugged: Part I
Jennifer’s Body
Crank: High Voltage
You Don’t Mess With the Zohan
The Brothers Grimm
Hannibal
The Mexican
Wild Things
Image via CrunchBase
Marvel’s The Avengers raking in a $200M+ opening weekend leaves little room to tell Hollywood that they are doing it wrong. The 40-year old blockbuster model continues to pay for the movie business. In the early days, the cinema experience was not far removed from attending a Broadway show: dressing up and cozying into ornate movie palaces staffed by ushers and orchestras. To expand the experience, multiplexes cropped up everywhere. To augment the experience further, Hollywood learned to tentpole a film, merchandise it and open theme park rides. The cinema experience is larger than life.
While all of that may work for three or four titles, hundreds of motion pictures barely scrape by each year. The internet and a proliferation of choice in the new millennium continues to threaten the sustainability of the movie business. The entertainment industry as a whole keeps falling behind the times. They still depend on Nielsen‘s myopic ratings and surveys to make strategic market decisions. They collect little to no data on their viewers to leverage repeat conversions. They build no intimate relationships with their customers and create few opportunities outside the theater to communitize their content. They embrace an antiquated scarcity model by rolling content out onto different platforms across rigid windows weeks and months apart, thereby eliciting content access demand and piracy. Merchandise still sits on retail shelves or on random websites online, far from the experience of seeing the movie itself. Without update, these practices may be fatal. While box office may be up (due largely to increased ticket prices and 3D or IMAX premiums), attendance is down – even more painful when considering population growth.
All of these issues could be solved by incorporating a thicker web layer into and consolidating the filmgoing experience under one roof – literally and figuratively. By converging merchandise, community and content into a digital or real world platform, Hollywood could make all facets of their business more accessible and leverage entire catalogs toward a more scalable, niche-friendly or cost-effective practice. Loved the movie you just saw? The theaters should make it as easy as possible to leave the theater and impulse buy a plush or action figure of your favorite character. Imagine if you could buy merchandise from and connect with other fans on a movie’s page in Netflix? Organize public screenings or petition for a sequel with the masses online? The community layer would add to the consumer experience and give filmmakers a platform to understand how people engage with their work.
I love the movies. I love the theater. I want the industry to succeed. These issues are reparable. If the industry can recruit key talent from the web tech sector, surrender a century’s worth of logic around brick and mortar business practices, build relationships with consumers online and put storytelling first, there may be a glimmer of stability and hope for film professionals and moviegoers alike. We’ve got work to do. There’s plenty of stories to tell and opportunities to make a living by producing great content.
We’re hiring right now and I’ve spent more than half my life watching film reels. Mildly put, I’ve seen a lot of donkey crap. For those of you looking to solicit work in the film or media industry, here are 12 tips to consider when editing your reel:
1. Make it short. Like one to two minutes short. I don’t have 8 minutes in my day for a hundred different people I don’t know. Convince me in less than two minutes to beg you for more. A reel 15 minutes or longer is borderline insulting.
2. Cut everything together. I will only watch one video per person (unless you impress me). A list of separate clips does not count as a reel. If you are interviewing as a director or editor, I will specifically request longer clips to see how you structure scenes.
3. Use your own voice. Do not imitate or parody movie trailers or other popular videos. No matter how flashy or technically proficient the reel may be, a ripoff reel proves only one thing to me: you are a ripoff.
4. Focus the viewer. Title your reel with the skill you wish to highlight (e.g. “camera operating,” “hair styling,” “lighting,” “visual effects,” etc.). I may enjoy qualities of the production you had nothing to do with – a recipe for awkwardness in interviews. Tell me what to pay attention to in advance.
5. No repetition. Don’t show me the same shot over and over. Don’t even show it to me twice. I will start thinking that’s all you’ve done.
6. Not overly dramatic. You don’t have time to be taken seriously in two minutes. Watching a grown man cry or woman getting raped while I drink tea and check my morning office email is simply uncomfortable.
7. Keep it current. If your reel is from a VHS transfer, unlit basement production or freehand miniDV, I will assume you failed film school or predate colored television. Show me only the latest and greatest. Your sentimental first film means nothing to me.
8. No movie scores. I don’t care how obscure you think the piece of music is. I am a film score connoisseur by trade (and so are most producers in the business); misusing a recognizable piece of music may distract or offend me. If I hear Clint Mansell in a reel one more time, I will adopt heroin and blame you.
9. No popular songs. Unless you worked with Led Zeppelin or Coldplay personally, your reel does not deserve to be tracked with their music. If you try to get away with it, viewers may stop paying attention when your music selection brings them back to high school slumber parties or the junior prom.
10. Easily accessible. Broken links are dead ends. Always make your reel available and never make me ask for it (“upon request” is not considerate, it’s lazy). Make sure your link is easy to find in your email and at the top of your résumé.
11. Stream it. Do not ask me to download a file. That will add at least two unnecessary steps and pollute my hard drive.
12. Vimeo. A poorly designed personal website will distract me and hurt you. Unless your site is a work of art, let Vimeo or YouTube make the first impression. If you feel compelled to host your work on your own site, enable the compression setting “fast start” or “compressed header” so I do not have to wait for the entire clip to buffer before playing (this is one of my biggest and most repairable pet peeves).
2011 was an embarrassing year for movies. Fortunately, 2012’s lineup promises to recover from the wake of the writer’s strike and trump the decade with a vengeance. I had a difficult time narrowing down over two dozen movies I am eager to see. Without further adieu, my twelve most anticipated films of 2012:
If you want your brand or product to have a presence in your audience’s lives, you must find a way to remind them you exist. You must continuously roll out useful content to keep things fresh. And you must go out of your way to deliver it to them directly as soon as it becomes available. From here on out, most people will prefer services that bring to them what other services would expect them to hunt. If you want to stay alive in this feeding frenzy of a world, you must become your own paper boy.
My friends, the ticket stub is dying. Most of my favorite theaters, including the ArcLight and Landmark chains, have largely surrendered ticket-grade stock in favor of cheaper receipt paper. Like normal cashier receipts, the ink fades quickly. I can’t read half the stubs collected last year. As if to crush my heart further, ArcLight’s new stubs don’t even have perforated edges: the takers rip the paper down the middle, leaving you with a half-torn memento and broken dreams.
Look, I appreciate the cost of quality stock and the financial decision to downgrade. Selling thousands of tickets a day, that novelty expense hurts the bottom line. And I’m sure someone can even make an environmental case for lighter paper. But it makes me sad.
Before long, theaters may not print stubs at all. There is a huge push for mobile ticketing. Near field communication technology and supporting software like Google Wallet are looking to turn your smartphone into your wallet, credit cards, gift cards, loyalty cards, and ticket stubs. While I find this trend very exciting (and very much look forward to having an app document every movie I see so I do not have to anymore), I mourn the death of the ticket stub. I will have less than a decade of stubs to share with my children before ticketing moves into the cloud. After that, who else cares? There’s nothing novel about a digital list.
2. Anticipate. Production is like doing a jigsaw puzzle on a waterbed – plan for the worst. Identify at least five things that could go wrong during each scene and plan for them. No shoot is impregnable.
3. Name. A person’s name is the sweetest sound to them in the world. Know everyone’s name. Say it to him or her often and always embed it in every request.
4. Smile. From the bottom of your heart. It’s contagious. A happy set is an efficient set.
5. Listen. Let each person do the talking. Collect as much information as possible. Know everything.
6. Forgive. Never criticize, condemn or complain. If someone made a mistake, he or she already knows and should not have to hear it again. If he or she doesn’t know or makes the mistake a second time, call attention to it indirectly.
7. Assure. Encourage crew by making every fault or mishap seem easy to correct. Be confident. If you are not confident, be confident about not being confident. Get people to feel confident about you.
8. Request. Ask questions instead of directly giving orders. Let the other person feel like the idea is his or hers. Nobody likes being told what to do. And nobody likes being yelled at. Do you?
9. Pacify. Avoid arguments. Never tell someone he or she is wrong. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. If you cannot avoid an argument (or cannot resolve other people’s arguments), do not let the crew see it – move ugly out of the way.
10. Praise. Make each person feel important and necessary. Reward good work with honest and sincere appreciation. Acknowledge what each person is doing right. Commend every improvement.
I find it a useful writing exercise to note the question at the end of every scene. With the dramatic tension clearly identified, you can revise your characters and action within the scene to serve the question as dramatically as possible.
On the next Film Friday post, I have big news to announce. What will it be? Tune in next week to find out! How’s that for a cliffhanger?
Afraid that feeding your team may be too expensive? Think instead about the productivity costs associated with sending your team outside for an hour lunch break. It will take an individual between 10 and 20 minutes to reach a destination for lunch, between 20 and 35 to eat, 10 to 20 to return, and as much as 30 minutes to get motivated again. On average, the hour lunch break could cost you as much as one and a half man-hours per employee per day. For a ten-person team with $60,000 salaries each, that’s $430 a day – over $2,000 per week! You could more than cover the costs of a caterer for the same price.
Find a way to pay for it. Feeding your team may be an added expense unaccounted for in your overhead and payroll costs, but the work output benefits are tenfold. Yum.
Craig Ormiston 