Tip of the Day: Talk Back!!

ITVS programs are made for you, so what you think matters a lot to us. So, tell us! Did you enjoy a particular episode of Independent Lens? Which episode was your favorite from last season?

Good or bad, we are anxious to hear from you. Your feedback helps us know more about you.

Besides, it’s fun to brag, complain, and engage with fellow indie fanatics. Get started here.

Tags: comments, ITVS.org, Talkback

Tip of the Day: Engage Beyond the Broadcast

The internet is completely revolutionizing all kinds of media by freeing creators from linearity and one-way paradigms. Here at ITVS, we’ve been working with filmmakers for more than a decade to create multifaceted and multi-platform projects that liberate the story from dusty old limitations.

It’s easy to get stuck in a familiar way of doing things, but when you begin to think of your audience as a collaborator, and technology as an ally, you break into new dimensions and open up fresh perspectives on your story. We have a large library of the interactive projects we’ve produced in the past 10 year, and encourage you to check them out for ideas and inspiration.

Tags: engagement, film festival, interactive, ITVS, PBS, public media, tips, tips of the day, web-original

Hey Filmmakers – The LINCS Deadline is on June 18th

Hey filmmakers — the LINCS deadline is on June 18, so if you haven’t already contacted a potential station partner, now is the time to do so.

Do you have questions about LINCS funding and how to successfully partner with a public television station? Recently ITVS Director of Programming Erica Deiparine-Sugars and LINCS Production Manager Robby Fahey joined DocuMentors for their ongoing expert interview series Doc Talks. The ITVS team revealed strategies for a successful LINCS application and station partnership.

Also joining the conversation was filmmaker Monika Navarro, whose film Lost Souls (Animas Perdidas) was funded by LINCS and was produced in association with WGBH-Boston. Lost Souls aired this season on Independent Lens.

Listen to the LINCS Doc Talks interview here >>

Tags: documentary, film, financing, funding, independent film, Producer

Lessons from the IndiesLab: Digital Survey in Review

IndiesLab Director Davin Hutchins

This month, IndiesLab is launching a new feature, “Lessons from the Lab,” a regular blog with new marketplace data and observations about what’s working and what’s not in the digital space for indies. This month, we are building on the knowledge gleaned from our 2009 ITVS Digital Survey which polled nearly 1,000 independent filmmakers about their attitudes and strategies towards digital distribution and promotion. Here’s what we found:

Survey Finding: Only one in five respondents generated any revenue from digital distribution, and those who did reported income in the low four figures.

Lab Report: Although it is true that the revenue we are seeing for the average-performing film is very modest. The overall revenue generated by our library is increasing as a result of careful branding under the newly created “PBS Indies” brand, the addition of high-quality titles, and the growing consumer adoption of devices suited for long-form viewing, like iPads.

A few of our films have broken out. These exceptionally good films share another characteristic: filmmakers who thought about digital distribution and promotion from day one. Their production workload included managing a blog, growing a Facebook page, building a Twitter following, and creating digital enhancements as part of production activities. Our survey indicated that nearly 40 percent of producers have a blog, and 35 percent of domestic producers use Twitter, compared to 23 percent of international producers.

Lesson: Keep in mind, the people who follow you during production will be the film’s future marketers and market. If you wait until broadcast to think digital, you lose valuable audience-building time.

› Continue reading

Tags: digital distribution, documentary, independent films, Social Media

More Than a Game

World Without Oil

It’s been reported that the digital game industry is now bigger than the film industry, and dollar for dollar, this has been debated. What can no longer be debated is that, eyeball for eyeball, more people now play games than watch films.

A study released by a marketing research group reported that more Americans play video games than go to the movies. Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell claims that there are more FarmVille players than there are Twitter accounts: 75 million players per month. And with the explosion of mobile games such as Angry Birds and Doodle Jump for iPhone and social games like Mafia Wars on Facebook, games are taking up even more of our time. In a recent presentation at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, game designer and Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, Jane McGonigal said that by the age of 21, a majority of kids will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games. And it’s not only kids playing games anymore. In fact, another recent study by PopCap Games, a popular social gaming company, found that the average player of online social games is a 43-year-old woman. So much for the stereotypical image of a gamer being a kid in his basement mowing down zombies.

› Continue reading

Tags: documentary, Facebook, farmville, gamers, gaming, mafia wars, video games

Youth Activists Step Up in New Orleans

Part of the miraculous story of the neighborhood called Versailles in New Orleans rising from the floodwaters to rebuild itself and sustain its citizens after Hurricane Katrina was the unprecedented leadership role that the younger generation took.

Traditionally, the Vietnamese culture in both Vietnam and in this community’s adopted home in New Orleans reserved moral, ethical, and political leadership to the older generations. In the wake of Katrina, and now in the midst of a cataclysmic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the younger generation is proving to be an indispensible link between the English-speaking establishment and the older generations of Vietnamese immigrants who, because of a language and cultural divide, cannot effectively speak for themselves.

In this web-exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, watch how the youth in Versailles stepped into a void and organized their community to rebuild its demolished infrastructure, and then fight off a cynical political ploy to locate a toxic waste dump next to their neighborhood:

Watch A Village Called Versailles tonight on Independent Lens on PBS (check local listings).

Tags: Gulf Coast, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, oil spill, Vietnamese, youth

Use Films to Organize and Engage Your Community

Can a film change the world if everyone just sits on their sofas and watches it, and then goes to bed? OK, sure, films can change minds and inform, but at ITVS, our goal is to leverage great films to engage and activate communities. The whole idea is to create a conversation — from the local town hall to the halls of justice around the world.

If you work for a community organization, a non-profit, or dedicate your free energy to volunteer for a cause you feel passionately about, ITVS.org is an amazing and easy-to-use resource to help you to foster dialog and move the conversation forward.

There are many ways you can use our new website to access films that address the issues you’re interested in:

• Attend a Community Cinema or theatrical screening: Type in your zip code and find out when you can attend a screening in your area, often with spirited panel discussions and additional resources to delve into the subject presented.

• Search by topic: Right from our new front page, you can search our nearly 800 films to find the ones that speak directly to your cause.

• Drill down into our catalog: Narrow your search by region, genre, or television series to find the film that most accurately suits your needs.

And check out our new engagement section, where you can learn more about Community Cinema as well as our engagement campaigns that include discussion guides, printable posters and postcards, and more.

Dive in and let us help you get your community talking about the issues that matter where you live. And share your success stories with us!

Tags: community, engagement, non profit, volunteer

Looking for Film Funding? The New ITVS.org is for You!

If you’re a filmmaker, we’d like to thank you — you’re the reason we exist.

After all, ITVS was created by indie filmmakers.

The biggest hurdle for any independent filmmaker, as you well know, is financing your project. If you’re looking for funding, the current state of the world can seem bleak and confusing.

But fear not! The funding section on our new ITVS.org site is designed make it easier to understand our application process, and is designed to demonstrate more clearly what kinds of projects we’re looking for. We’ve made the process more transparent, and have made it much easier to find the right person to contact to discuss your application. We’re also improving and enhancing our online resources to help you construct a more successful proposal.

Also, we’ve made it simpler to discover where you can find ITVS’s Programming staff in person. Right next to the funding information you will now be able to see upcoming events, conferences, festivals, and workshops that we will be attending or hosting. You will find it here first. What better way to get the edge you need for a successful application?

Tags: documentary, film financing, film funding, filmmakers, independent film

Kashmir: An Explosive Eden

The ever-embattled territory of Kashmir in the Himalayas is again in the news, as representatives from Amnesty International arrived there this week to investigate reports of human rights abuses lodged against both Indian and Pakistani combatants. In the 21 years since the Muslim insurgency against Indian rule in the region erupted, between 50,000 and 100,000 people have been killed.

Coincidentally, Project Kashmir premieres on Independent Lens tonight (check local listings). In this beautiful and cogent new show, producers Geeta Patel and Senain Kheshgi sneak their cameras into Kashmir to observe the secretive and anxious lives of the region’s inhabitants, and to look for clues to what started the conflict — which could become nuclear at any time — and how religious and national allegiances can seemingly immunize people to their own most human instincts for survival.

The filmmakers’ journey is especially moving when they find themselves pulled in separate directions by their own divergent ethnicities. Patel — an Indian American Hindu, and Kheshgi — a Pakistani American Muslim find their own friendship eroding as they begin personally identifying with opposite sides of the struggle.

Catch the film tonight on PBS, and watch this exclusive behind-the-scenes footage for a glimpse into this beautiful and deadly region >>

Tags: hindu, India, kashmir, Muslim, Pakistan

Hey Teachers! You’ll Dig This

If you’re a teacher, we know times are tough. You are struggling to enrich your classroom, but beset on all sides by budget cuts, growing class sizes, and a dearth of basic supplies. Fear not – the new ITVS.org will help you find free (yes free) standards-based resources for your classroom that will engage and inform your students in new and innovative ways.

Our newly redesigned website is now a content destination for educators and youth-serving organizations. It now hosts our complete collections of lesson plans, activities, learning games, and film modules drawn from the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens and ITVS’s Global Perspectives Project. You asked for it, and we listened: While we’ve been producing these resources for years now, the new ITVS.org website makes them more accessible and easier to use than ever.

The search and sort function in our section for educators will allow you to find the appropriate resources that align with the subject matter in your syllabus right from the landing page. And our crisp new online video player will allow you to stream film modules in your classroom right from our site.

Now you have even more options — our lesson plans are available on the site as HTML pages, you can still download them as PDFs, or get them on a DVD you can order online.

So what are you waiting for? Get your hands on our free resources and watch your students respond when they make connections between the facts in their textbooks and the films, games, and exercises we’re offering 24 hours a day.

Tags: classroom, education, Free, lesson plans, students, teachers