Passage 5 Why Indie Directors Are Releasing Movies Online — For Free 126
独立影片导演为何网上免费发片？ 《时代周刊》

[00:00]When Finnish filmmaker Timo Vuorensola came up with the idea
[00:05]for his movie Star Wreck,
[00:07]he knew that looking for conventional distribution would be futile.
[00:14]An amateur, science-fiction comedy with a miniscule budget and in Finnish,
[00:20]to boot would hardly be attractive to mainstream studios.
[00:25]So Vuorensola took matters into his own hands:
[00:29]he used a Finnish social networking site to build up an online fan base
[00:35]who contributed to the storyline,
[00:37]made props and even offered their acting skills. In return for the help,
[00:44]Vuorensola released Star Wreck online for free.
[00:49]Seven hundred thousand copies were downloaded in the first week alone;
[00:55]to date, the total has now reached 9 million.
[01:01]"Releasing it for free is just good marketing," he says.
[01:06]"Whether it's through piracy or distribution your film
[01:10]is out there on the Internet, so we decided to harness this."
[01:15]And he has managed to make quite a bit of money out of it.
[01:20]Online sales of merchandise including T-shirts
[01:24]and collector's editions of the DVD
[01:27]have generated $430,000 on a film that only cost $21,500 to make,
[01:39]Vuorensola says.
[01:41]Like Vuorensola, American animator Nina Paley ignored
[01:46]traditional distribution methods and released her film.
[01:51]"What I have learned is that the more freely you show the film,
[01:56]the more audiences will buy the DVD and surrounding merchandise," she says.
[02:02]"With a normal theatrical release you have to spend so much money
[02:07]on advertising and promotion that most independent films lose money."
[02:13]In the age of YouTube and viral marketing campaigns,
[02:18]it was only a matter of time before independent filmmakers came to realize
[02:24]that cutting the middleman out of the process
[02:28]is sometimes the best way to guarantee large audiences see their works.
[02:35]This is especially true at a time when funding from studios
[02:40]has been seriously hit by the recession - just as it was on the way up.
[02:46]"The last 10 years has been a renaissance period for independent filmmaking
[02:52]and there has been more money coming into the production for films
[02:57]than in any other decade in the history of film," says Jonathan Wolf,
[03:03]managing director of the American Film Market,
[03:07]an annual event where filmmakers and studio executives converge
[03:12]to sign production and distribution deals. But since the economic downturn,
[03:19]many indie movie distributors, including New Line Cinema, Miramax,
[03:26]the Weinstein Company and Paramount Vantage,
[03:30]have either left the market or slashed their funding.
[03:35]Liz Rosenthal, founder of Power to the Pixel,
[03:39]an organization that devises new models of film distribution,
[03:44]says the reason many indie directors are turning to the web
[03:50]is that it allows them to better engage with their audiences.
[03:55]"The whole film business has no connection with their audience,"
[03:59]she says. "And with any business you have to know your customer.
[04:05]The Internet has become a free distribution machine,
[04:10]so what can you sell that makes money? Things you can't copy.
[04:15]They need to be things that are based around your audience.
[04:19]Directors cuts, merchandise, 35mm prints of your film."