OVERVIEW

FUN NEW WAYS TO GET YOUR FILM FUNDING

The audience is forever hungry, an all-consuming unstoppable machine that swallows down media faster than it eats popcorn at the cinema. The internet, YouTube, iPods and Piracy are making a world of not only easy to consume but also free media. Whilst the business world scratches its head wondering how it is going to make money out of this new system the filmmakers are wondering how they can use it to get into the industry.

With all the distractions of the Internet, cinema has to try very hard to attract an audience, culminating in studios tending towards the safer product and producing only what they hope will pull in a wide audience. The endless sequels and comic book movies show this perfectly and this is putting new or innovative creators into an isolated position.

However the Internet is providing a new trend in the world of filmmaking, making and distributing content yourself. Robert Greenwald made the short film "Fox Attacks: The Environment", which garnered 380,000 YouTube views in its first three weeks and was then used as part of a campaign to get funding for his next project Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers. When YouTube first launched in 2006 47% of films were user-generated, now that has risen to 55%, clearly the mass appeal of YouTube is an excellent way to gain a new audience.

Hit web show Red Vs. Blue is another great example of a free to watch series. The brilliantly written comedy on the life of the videogame characters from the Halo series has gained its writer and actors great acclaim and an estimated annual income of £100,000. The show and its reported million weekly viewers has brought it interest from the business world who are now commissioning them to produce Machinima parodies for other games such as Electronic Art's The Sims 2.

Another innovative route and perhaps the most exciting is collaborative production. This technique, masterminded by the people behind the short animation Elephant's Dream, concerns the more collective aspects of the internet, an open source project that anyone can get involved with and be part of. Not only did they get animators from across the globe to work together, they also secured a budget by developing a pre-sale DVD deal. People could invest in buying a DVD for their name on the credit sequence.

Overall, in this new millennium of quantity there are two clear ways to win through. The first is determination, all these projects succeeded through their tenacity and ingenuity; clearly these filmmakers will do anything to get their work out there. The second is quality, above all these projects had a quality that worked, and it is this quality that is going to separate the makers from the other 250,000 videos in the free-to-download world.