This ist the entry for the first challenge I am entering at least if I still like it in a few days. It seems as it was getting darker through vimeo’s conversion. Maybe I will upload a brighter version if it looks like that on other monitors. It now looks OK regarding the brightness. Commments and critics are very welcome.

Green Soda Challenge Composite from Knut Holst on Vimeo.

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Demoreel in 1K Resolution for download (Quicktime, H.264, ca. 30 MB)

First, in this article I am not talking about big multi-million USD movies, I am talking about the small flick one makes for just a few Dollars or Euros in guerilla or dv rebel style. I think a lot of us would like to get at least their production cost back. I have described earlier, that at the moment there seems no real way available to sell our movies without a professional distributor. I thought about something like the iTunes App-Store for movies. You could upload your videos and sell them for a price you liked.

Now I have listened to the audiobook “Free- the future of a radical price” by Chris Anderson. It is only consequent, that it is downloadable for free at wired.com. Anderson describes various business models and explains, why free is the logical consequence in pricing digital goods. What are the movies we are making today? Right, digital goods. We are facing the same problem like the music industry with one exception: Musicians can earn good money from live gigs, but it is really awkward to do a live performance of a movie because there is an art like that  around now for thousands of years, I think it is called theatre.

The question is, how can we show our movies but still be able to earn money? One way could be the freemium model. You give away a basic version of your product and sell a better version. Examples for this could be Vimeo and Vimeo Plus. For your fee you can upload more, have no ads, unlimited HD uploading and HD embedding. If you are a heavy user of vimeo round 60 USD/year for this additional service sounds fair. Now one can presume, that about 5% of the users pay the service, that is an estimation made by Anderson.

The idea would be a store for movies, where you can watch the whole movie in SD (or even HD) and pay for a download in HD, iPod compatible formats and the like. People who are comfortable with watching a movie in low resolution on their computer screen can watch it for free, but if they want to get more comfort, that can pay for a download and get better quality, too. Now there is one big problem. I am no lawyer, I am a growing filmmaker. Does anyone of my readers have knowledge about international distribution? I think that could be a big problem that needs to be solved.

If you have any thoughts on a freemium model for movies, feel free to comment.

English translation now available!

Now here is that small flick. It is more or less not much more than an action sequence, but I hope you like it. An English translation will come later (approx. next week), first I have to do my paper, but it should not be too hard to understand. Later this evening it will also be available in HD for download.

Download in HD (50 MB)

The film has more or less been made for training purposes and I think it was good training, but I have way to go.

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Zombie Noir will go online on Wednesday afternoon.

Hi guys, I just installed the great plugin qTranslate. It is the best multilingual plugin I could find for wordpress by now. As you could see over the last posts, English has developed to be the main language used in this blog. So I wanted to hae the possibilty to have my navigation in English and to be able to post in both languages or only in one if I am too lazy to translate (and believe me, I will be). So I hope there are a few readers out there and that we will have a lot of fun in the future.

Writing my thesis I recently thought about how to distribute your movie. Sending it to everyone free over the internet is a nice idea, but if you have made a feature film and spent a lot of money doing so, it would be nice to at least earn some bucks. But don’t get me wrong, I still think, that you will never get back all the money you put into your production.

What are the options?

Get it into the cinema. In my opinion this is almost impossible if you don’t have one doing all the logistic for you. If you had a distributor, you wouldn’t have the problem to think about how to distribute your movie, right?

Sell DVDs on your own. It is a good way, I think, as soon as I am ready with my own feature I will do it that way too. It is very common, there are platforms like ebay or amazon that make it a very easy process for you. But still, often you have to do all the logistic and shipping can get very expensive for foreign customers.

My idea would be some kind of store for downloads, just like the iTunes AppStore. You could upload your movie and tag it with the price you think it is worth. When someone buys your movie, he can download it and you get you money minus some for the owner of the website. But if he did his job well and could establish it as a platform for independent movies, people could find and watch your movie who else wouldn’t.

What do you think about a service like that? Would you like to sell your movies as downloads? Feel free to tell me in the comments.

I have the feeling that out there the style how movies are produced is changing. Until recent there would have been only two ways I know for producing:

• Find a producer who gives you the money (hahahaha)
• Spend all you have including your soul and do it all on your own.

But these days you can reach a lot of people and foremost film enthusiastics. If you can find the right people and sell them your idea in a way that they want to see the finished movie, they might be willing to finance your movie with small donations or pre orders. Figure it out, you could have one person or corporation spending a lot of money or a lot of people spending just a bit of money each, without all the hassle a “real” producer would mean, one can focus on his own vision for the movie. Here are two great examples of guys doing exactly that to finance (parts of) their movies:

• Indywood
• Iron Sky

I hope that it will work out for them and think of a way like that to produce my own feature film. BTW: That was one more post in English and I am thinking of writing in English for the Blog instead of German in the future. What do you think? Does it irritate you? Are you more comfortable with it? Aren’t you interested in the language anyway and only here to look at the pictures? Tell me in the comments

You guess what? Once one thougt to be really clever by finding a working workflow to get from Final Cut Pro to After Effects, one naturally finds out that out there are far more clever beings. After doing blog-entries, posting in forums about it and making a video tutorial today I accidentally found FCPToAE. It is a script for After Effects that does the same as my method but without the need to start Premiere Pro just by using a nice javascript within After Effects. A quick test proved, that it worked with the files used in the tutorial.