Archive for September, 2007
You can pick your friends…and your panels?
For the second year in a row, the SXSW Interactive Festival is working the panel picker to help determine what panels and content get programmed into the festival. The deadline for voting on panels is tonight at 11:59pm…and there are over 730 panels to pick from. So, get picking fast.
Toronto International Film Festival Panel: Social Networking – Connecting Filmmakers to Audiences
As I mentioned in a past post, I spent this past weekend in Toronto at the Toronto International Film Festival. First, I have to say…wow…first time being in Toronto and I think it is a really great city – very diverse, culturally attuned and smart. My confession for the day though is that this was my first time in Canada too. That fact serves as a little piece of embarrassment to me, which is only magnified when you come to know that I have lived in Michigan since 1976…it is a roughly 6 hour drive from my house to downtown Toronto. Anyway…back to some comments about the panel.
The panel was held at the Royal Ontario Museum, a building whose most recent expansion (designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and Bregman + Hamann Architects) draws more than a little attention when you turn the corner. The other panelists and myself sat on stage in front of a few hundred people in the underground theater (which was a real testament to their dedication to the festival considering the gorgeous weather that day) and had a very informal conversation.
Scott Kirsner, our moderator and the author of Cinematech and The Future of Web Video, kept the discussion moving by having us focus on three main topics:
- What is social networking? (posed to Christine, Jason and myself)
- What is the potential of the internet for filmmakers? (mostly posed to Sandi and Corey)
- What digital tools are their to use? (posed to the entire group)
Certainly a good way to get the conversation kicked off (and Scott did a great job as moderator). What really got my interest piqued as a panelist though, were two specific questions we got from the audience. Paraphrased, they were:
- What is the formula/set of best practices you use when promoting your film online?
- What is the return on all of this investment in time to the filmmaker?…does it directly result in more sales?
I guess what kinda surprised me is that all of the panelists basically agreed that…1) there is no formula and 2) we’re not sure it can be measured in dollars today…but we are all betting that it soon will.
Temporary Sculpture: The Work of Martin Klimas
“I wonder, when you look at your own finished work, do you see what you’ve just destroyed, or what you’ve made from the transformation?”
“The aspect of destroying is not the most important one in my work. Let’s say it is a catalyst to unleash and study this transformation. The hardest part of my work is to smash so many figurines until I find one that truly is showing me something new. I am in that sense a sculptor, but I have only a 5000th of a second to build my sculpture.”
Interview between Rosecrans Baldwin and Martin Klimas in The Morning News.
