From ArsonPlus Entertainment:
Every day, in a steady never-ending trickle, cities from Chicago to Hong Kong lose bits of their native creative community to the lure of New York and Los Angeles. It’s been going on for years. Fortunately, thanks to its uniquely deep and diverse talent pool, Chicago, like many other most cities is in an ideal position to take advantage of booming markets hungry for American made short films. These include international television, web-based and cell cinema—and in all honesty, that list is just for starters.
All three are starved for short-short films, ranging in length from under two minutes to half an hour, are designed to play on cell phones, over the Internet and on TV. They’re especially popular throughout Asia and across Eastern Europe, and scores of companies have cropped up and are dropping some serious coin on acquisitions. Atom Films, probably the best known of these companies, is just the tip of the iceberg. The market is an opportunity for ambitious filmmakers everywhere looking for profits to go along with the attention a smart and sharp short film can accrue.
The market is already huge, and it’s growing. The films that feed it will be produced somewhere. If it’s Chicago, it will definitely bring much needed revenue and film financing dollars into the city while helping to put a cork in that trickle.
Best of all, thanks to the online nature of this new marketplace, Chicago’s filmmakers will be able to get in on the action without having to deal with any of the hassles typically associated dragging their short films around to traditional festivals. The international market still does a certain amount of business in-person, but it’s definitely accessible via the Internet; the web-based market’s accessibility is self-explanatory and the cell cinema market is likewise setup to accept submissions online.
Just as Chicago became a Mecca of storefront theatres and improv comedy troupes, your home town and mine can get in on this bandwagon while the getting’s good. Filmmakers just need to be made aware of it. We have so much talent here, and the way to keep them is to create a viable market outlet.
To that end, the founders of Chicago's ArsonPlus Entertainment have decided to launch "Third Wave Central a meager, but hopefully informative that can help point us all in the right direction. We'll start with postings sketching out the market’s general lay of the land, follow up with updates and regular series profiles featuring short-film distribution and production companies, and of course the same futurist ramblings that coaxed this Blog out of us in the first place.
4 comments:
Which revenue models are working these days?
Right now it's advertising, streaming media advertising to be precise, companies like MediaTrip have done deals with Microsoft, which basically works like this . . . You go to any of their film sections and see Microsoft streaming media ads based on cpm, (cost per thousand views), a certain dollar figure, banner ads are generating revenue as well. In intellectual property is also a comer, which basically means that you create a short, have ownership of the property and then monetize it online and offline, through television or traditional film venues film. And then there's licensing, merchandising and those sorts of things.
Syndicating content throughout a network different sites, that's one; and more importantly—developing a library of characters and media properties that can be leveraged across different platforms–online and offline. Offline is the big grand slam, that's developing a character that's a breakout hit. And doing it in a cost-effective manner.
Banner ads, streaming video ads preceding shorts. That's the basic revenue model from atom films – well, that, and syndicating content and taking shows and shorts offline.
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