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jon reiss

06/14/2010 - 08:37

Jon Reiss' Tip of the Day

Today’s tip will be a meta tip. If you go to Twitter and search #totbo you will see the stream of tips, ideas, comments, suggestions etc from everyone who was engaged in the Totbo NY Workshop in the room in NYC or who virtually participated in distant lands! Kudos to all the participants at the NYC Totbo Workshop this weekend who sent out hundreds of tweets about what was being covered in the workshop. And special kudos to @khanb1 who compiled all the posts into a tumblr post – you can check it out at:
06/03/2010 - 20:00

Jon Reiss Tip of the Day – Week 7

This week’s tips concern the re-born “theatrical” movement in the US and around the world for independent film. I’m a firm believer that film should be screened in front of live audiences – which is one form of our millennia old tradition of telling stories in a communal environment – usually in the dark (in the old days in front of a fire). (ps it’s a 4 day week in honor of Memorial Day weekend) Tip 31 Embrace Live Event/Theatrical
05/27/2010 - 18:28

Jon Reiss Tip of the Day – Week 6

Proper Prior Planning Prevents Perplexing Problems or Some Very Practical Tips When Finishing Your Film Tip 26 Start Your Deliveries During Production
05/20/2010 - 17:47

Jon Reiss’ Distribution and Marketing Tips of the Week

This week I will wrap up my tips on crew and budgeting. Next week we’ll get into what I define as Live Event/Theatrical Tip 21 Lawyers A good lawyer who is familiar with split rights scenarios and the vagaries of new distribution models is essential, although hard to find. If you cannot find one, I suggest using a consultant in tandem with a lawyer. The consultant negotiates, the lawyer goes over the language. Find someone who is open to working in new ways. Lawyers will either work on a per-hour fee ($175 and up) or for a percentage of the deal(s) (5 to 7 percent).
05/14/2010 - 09:17

Jon Reiss Tip of the Day – Week 4

Jon Reiss’ TOTBO Tip of the Day 16 Producer’s Reps Pt 1 In honor of the upcoming Cannes Film Festival – I will take this opportunity to explore other crew people that you might want to engage on your film and whether or not they are right for your project. There are several types of sales representatives/sales agents. Today the topic is Producer’s Representatives.
05/07/2010 - 09:21

Jon Reiss Tip of the Day – Week 3

Jon Reiss’ TOTBO Tip of the Day 11 - Developing Organizational Relationships Last week I spoke about connecting with audience, creating a dynamic website and bloggin. Today’s tip is how to create relationships between your film organizations that should be interested in your film. This is an especially useful strategy for documentaries that naturally have a wide range of potential issue-oriented sites to connect to.
04/30/2010 - 09:00

Jon Reiss Tip of the Day – Week 2

Jon Reiss’ TOTBO Tip of the Day 6 – Indentifying and Engaging Your Audience Here is the Jon Reiss TOTBO three step approach to audience development and engagement: 1. Know WHO your audience is. This is not 18-25 year old boys/men. Or 35 – 55 year old women. As an independent filmmaker, if you cross over into a mass audience great – but you need to be much more specific. Tomorrow’s tip will discuss niche vs core audiences. 2. Know WHERE your audience derives information/congregates.
04/22/2010 - 14:00

Jon Reiss Tip of the Day - Week 1

Day 1 – The Next Chapter Many of you might know me from the book that I have written recently, Think Outside the Box Office (TOTBO for short). The primary reason that I wrote it was to share what I had learned while distributing my film Bomb It with other filmmakers so they could learn from my successes and mistakes. In the continuation of that mission I am launching two more initiatives – both in support of how people want to interact with this information. The first is a series of workshops around
04/19/2010 - 13:07

FilmTiki’s online week in review (week 15)

VOD and movie search engine Austrian video-on-demand start-up Flimmit presented a new feature on their website: a movie search engine that combines information to a movie from different platforms like Amazon, IMDb, Wikipedia or YouTube. The engine uses Semantic Entity Detection to match all gathered data from the web and groups it on the website. So the users get all the information (links to DVD-retailers, Streams, Posters, Synopsis etc.) they need with one single search query.
03/24/2010 - 14:58

FilmTiki’s online week in review (week 11)

It's Wednesday and no weekly review published until now! Argh! Here it is: Online TV Audience Reaches 26 Percent Accoding to a new report published by In-Stat, more and more US citizens are watching online TV.