New Dogs, New Tricks from SXSW - BookShorts Conference Report

BookShorts.com -- Moderated by Scott Kirsner of CinemaTech, this was the first session I attended at SXSW and it set the bar high, at least in terms of a successfully moderated session. All too often at these kinds of things, the organizers do their best to get people on the dias who are well-regarded in their respective fields, but the context of the actual presentation, any useful information is either fragmented or has to be forcefully inserted into proceedings, which inevitably makes the person delivering seem like a shill. So, kudos to Scott, he is well-informed, up-to-date, and gave the panellists solid guidance through a cogent session.

A full report is available in this .PDF or at BookShorts.com/news.htm and here are some of the interesting comments from this collective braintrust that really does bare considered attention in the immediate future:

* iTunes made its first acquisition recently, a film whose duration was between 30 and 60 minutes which they priced at a TV-episode fee of 1.99 – watch to see if it leads to an ongoing initiative from the company most feel is in the best position to become the new power-player

* Watch the talent – they’ll develop properties that take more advantage of the attributes of the media they’re playing with, for instance, story-telling in environments like Second Life

* Break-out producers will use the behaviour differences of audiences on different platforms to create new economies, and help monetize content in ways particular to each

* Building strong characters is one of the most exciting aspects across all these modes of delivery; a distinct personality, whether fictional or real, has even greater opportunity to find exactly its niche audience in a multimodal distribution strategy; case study: Four Eyed Monster

* Micro-financing, or cinema shares, where audiences are invited to invest in films at the pre-production stage has an increasing number of precedents; although there are security laws that impact this type of financing, and some dud examples like One Second Film (will it ever actually come out?) in other sessions during SXSW the topic was broached repeatedly which several successful implementations (more on this next post).

Lots of food for thought, and practical tips from those who are walking the walk. I'll break it into blog-like bits and post over the next few days. Hit the feed :)

New Dogs, New Tricks: New Media Goes to the Movies
Conference Session at SXSW
Moderator, Scott Kirsner Editor, CinemaTech
David Gale, Exec. VP, MTV New Media
Rick DeVos, CEO, Spout LLC
Seth Nagel, VP Content & Acquisitions, iKlipz
Scilla Andreen, Co-Founder, IndieFlix