Cape Winelands Film Festival Call for Entires

Since the first edition the Cape Winelands Film Festival (CWFF) has significantly grown in size and international participation. More than 70 features, documentaries and short films from over 35 countries were in competition during 2009. More than130 productions formed part of the festival programme, in total 62 featues, 27 documentaries and 44 shorts from more than 35 countries. The 2nd edition of the festival had 32 international guests. The festival had more than 300 screenings in March 2009.



Now the 3rd edition of what's become one of South Africa's largest film festivals has announced its call for entries. Entry forms are available on the official website of the festival: http://films-for-africa.co.za/ The festival will take place from 17 - 27 March 2010 in Cape Town and Stellenbosch.

And incidentally, if you want to see Facebook in action as a marketing and promotional tool, then join the festival's Facebook group; these guys are really leading the way in profiling their films and their festival using this totally free medium.

SATV CHANNEL LAUNCHES IN DURBAN

In case you missed this in the press, Durban is now the proud host to an online tv station all of its own. Welcome to the future, and congratulations to everyone involved: now it's your turn to get on board: visit SATV Channel and upload your projects for free.

Two Seas SA TV

Two Seas TV, a production company in Cape Town, has set up an online social network dedicated to film and TV production in South Africa.



It offers a number of tools to help you to stay in touch with other members and increase your online presence:

· Advertise your company
· Promote your film
· Drive traffic to your site
· Share ideas
· Brainstorm concepts
· Meet potential partners
· Read news & reviews
· Watch clips

It’s also FREE and easy to sign up, so go to: http://twoseas.socialgo.com/ and try it out, see if this kind of thing can work for us in KZN.

Audience Development

YouTube has begun testing a new social feature that lets users see what which videos their friends are watching, rating and commenting on in real-time.



DMW reports that the company has offered a limited number of invites to test the new YouTube RealTime feature, which aims to supplement the current widespread trading of YouTube videos via email, IM, blogs and social networks.

The feature functions as a toolbar at the bottom of the browser window, and provides updates of a user's friends' activities on YouTube in a news feed-type format.

A Tale of Two Cities

How about this for a commissioning trend to watch? Time Magazine has a story on Gaza - Sderot: Life Inspite of Everything, the French-made multimedia documentary about everyday life on either side of the Gaza-Israeli border.

Though funded by the French-German television channel Arte, Gaza-Sderot was created for the internet, reversing the typical order in which films are shown on television and then posted online. While filming the two crews uploaded daily stories of about five minutes each on the production's website..... The 52 minute documentary was edited from these hours of video postings.

Obama Online

Yesterday marked in a first-of-its-kind event - an online townhall meeting where the President of the United States sought, accepted and answered through the internet, questions on the economy from members of the public.

The event, dubbed "Open for Questions," was streamed live on WhiteHouse.gov, and included an array of hand-picked questions submitted through video or text on the Internet. Nearly 93,000 people submitted about 104,000 questions, 3.6 million votes were cast either for or against questions submitted by others.



Imagine the role of the KZN film industry in creating such a platform for democracy in South Africa? The film sector providing video boothes operated by trained and in-training operators, the ICT sector providing the platform..... Obama, who relied heavily on the Internet during his campaign, called the experiment "an exciting opportunity for me to look at a computer and get a snapshot of what Americans across the country care about." South Africans care too; this could be an interesting way to express it.

Spotify

Another music distribution example with possible relevance for film? - Spotify is a music distribution service that some people believe could spell doom for iTunes (www.apple.com/ itunes) or even for the CD. It launched last October and already has a million users.

Spotify works like this: users download a small application, which allows them to listen to any track from a total of thousands of albums at any time. The key difference between this and iTunes is that customers never actually own the music.



Spotify is the most talked-about start-up of the last year, not just because it provides a service that is much in demand, but also because of its interesting model for financing itself. Premium users, who pay £9.99 a month, do not see advertisements served up to them every 20 minutes. But you can enjoy the music for free if you are willing to watch the commercials.

In other words, the service is funded by both advertisements and subscription, which doesn't leave it solely dependent on one or the other method......

Slow Down and Fast

The Slow Down and Fast blog highlights the personal journey of a couple of filmmakers attempting self distribution for their film Slow Down and Fast. The goal is to get 1,000,000 views of the short documenterary, but the blog is also for anyone who wants to discover the powerful marketing potential of Social Networking....

Bridging the Digital Divide

At the Digital Music East conference currently unfolding in the USA, Ron Berry, e-Commerce Advisor to the Isle of Man outlined how the government of that little island is trying to be a pioneer in a field where many larger nations are struggling, namely finding a way to compensate musicians in a digital age.



The basic idea is to charge Internet users a flat fee for access to music online through their Internet Service Provider and then pass that money on to the collection societies, record labels and other interest groups.

Could that work for KZN film??

First on Mars

First On Mars styles itself as "your personal guide to network tv on the web" What that really means is a website where you can find and download all your favourite US tv shows for free streaming / download. You build a "playlist" that matches your moods, or simply select your favourite networks and shows. And of course you can share your selections with friends.....



The site's not terribly user friendly, but just imagine this kind of thing as a repository for African product? With a pay-per-play button? Like iTunes for African films.....

Elance

As research for this blog, and for this project, I've been looking at the IT and Music (and other) sectors to try and identify a whole range of programmes that could be adapted for the KZN Film Sector.


Here's one that caught my eye that might work for us - it's called E-lance...... (like freelance, geddit?) As the blurb says:

Elance is an online workplace where businesses hire and work with qualified professionals to get work done. Elance facilitates the entire work process from hiring to collaboration to payment.

Businesses and hiring managers use Elance to find, hire and work with qualified professionals with specialized skills. Service professionals ("providers") use Elance to meet customers, produce quality work and get paid for doing what they do best.

In other words, not only could KZN producers crew up for their productions using local crew who've posted their resumes on the site, it also offers the potential for clients could seek proposals from local producers via the site......

New Media - Cellphones

In case you weren't completely convinced of the impact that cellphones will have in our lives - and in the way we promote and distribute KZN films in the not-too-distant future: according to a report from the GSMA, worldwide mobile phone connections have topped 4 billion, and are expected to reach 6 billion by 2013.Nearly 100 million of these connections are mobile broadband accounts.



The GSMA credited the integration of mobile into previously unconnected devices, and subscriber additions in emerging markets for the growth rate. And remember, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Global Entertainment Media Outlook: 2008 - 2012.

“those that will see the most significant growth are those segments who take advantage of the opportunities in digital and mobile.”

People's Music Store

I like to hope that one day the opportunities becoming available for music distribution will be adapted and adopted for distribution of film content.

Take People's Music Store as an example; it's an online site that lets music fans create and operate their own digital music stores.

Music fans design their storefronts, choose tracks from a library of over 250,000 songs, write their own reviews, and market their stores online. Storekeepers pay nothing to join and earn 10% of every product they sell as "reward points" that they may then spend on music. Imagine something like that for African films! KZN's large population gives us great opportunities for this kind of relationshiop marketing.

Online Video Viewership

DMW notes a report from market research company comScore, that U.S. Internet users watched a record 14.3 billion online videos during December, an increase of 13% from the previous year. YouTube again leading the way with nearly 6 billion streams, or 41% of all U.S. video traffic. A record nearly 150 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 96 videos per viewer in December, with YouTube attracting 100 million viewers -- or two out of every three Internet users who watched video.

Behind YouTube, Fox Interactive Media(which includes MySpace) took second place with 445 million videos viewed (3.1%), followed by Yahoo sites with 330 million (2.3%), and Viacom Digital with 291 million (2%). Hulu - which served 241 million streams - claimed the top session length of the top video sites, with viewers watching an average of 10.1 minutes of video on the site.

Incidentally, Battle at Kruger - a wildlife clip of a battle between lions and crocodiles over a buffalo calf - has had more than 41 million views.....

Yes You Can (Too)

Tomorrow, the eyes of the world will be on Washington DC, where Barack Obama will be sworn in as the first black president of the United States of America. Tony Shapshak in the Times notes:

More than any other politician, he (Obama) has grasped how the internet has changed the nature of communication. He famously used email, SMSs, text messages and social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter - the default communication methods of the youth - to appeal to young voters.

He also raised more than $325 million of his $650 million campaign fund via the internet, from donations of just $200 or less. Obama has 3.7 million Facebook friends - South Africa has 4.5 million internet users, period.

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of online Social Network giant Facebook yesterday announced that the site attracts more that 150 million active users, almost half of who visit the site daily. Zuckerberg said:

If Facebook were a country it would be the eighth most populated in the
world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria

There are Facebook users on every continent, even Antarctica, and the site that is accessible in 170 countries and territories functions in 35 different languages. And the beauty of this tool that opens access to information, education, training, markets and networks with 150 million other people? It's free.



There are already a couple of SA film sites online - Does South Africa Have a Viable Motion Picture Industry? may be one topic you'd be interested in following. Perhaps a similar discussion group should be created for the discussions taking place about Durban?

Music Video

I have a little theory that South African Music wil be the single major "left-field" beneficiary of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Remember all those incessant "highlights" clips from the Germany 2006 tournament? They were all edited to music. So now imagine them done to a thumping kwaito beat instead and broadcast round the world to a gazillion homes. And once the music is familiar, audiences are going to search for it on-line and download both the song and the funky video that accompanies it.



To reiterate the sheer opportunity ahead, record label Universal Music Group announced that it too is generating "tens of millions of dollars" from Google's YouTube. Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of the label's eLabs digital division, said:

"YouTube is not like radio, where it's just promotional, it's a revenue stream, a commercial business. It's growing tremendously. It's up almost 80 percent for us year-over-year in the U.S. in terms of our revenue from this category."

While Caraeff gave no specifics on Universal's revenue from YouTube, a source close to the label told News.com that the label will likely book nearly $100 million in revenue from video streaming this year -- which includes placements on other sites like MySpace and MTV.