My technique uses a view that builds a JS/CSS file with Django. The CSS/JS files that are compiled like this should be stored in your templates directory instead of your static media folder so they are accessible to the view…

…This allows you to used [sic] Django template language in your CSS files.

And I had an ah-HA! moment.  Could this be the way to use variables in your CSS files?  Having a view that defines a bunch of colors:

def buildcss(request):
…snip…
linkColor = ‘#999′
linkHoverColor = ‘blue’
…

and passing that into the template that generates your CSS

a {
color: {{ linkColor }};
}

a:hover {
color: {{ linkHoverColor }};
}

Now, you probably don’t want have Django performing doing this kind of work for every request, so you might want to cache the URL that generates your CSS.  And I’m not sure if there are other downsides to this I haven’t considered, but it’s interesting to think about.

find . -exec grep -l "search term" {} \;

My boss showed me this nifty little one-liner a while ago.  I thought I’d better post it before it dissapeared off my white board.


MOD_PYTHON ERROR
...snip a whole buncha stuff...
ImportError: No module named django.core.handlers.modpython


I’d installed Django into my home directory, but the user that the webserver runs as didn’t have read access to that location.  Problem was solved by putting Django into a place where apache could get at it.

But I realized before the holidays that it’d been a while since I’d really sat down and looked at the screenplay as a whole.

It’s bad.

Really bad. I like the direction things are going generally, but its amazing what a little break from your work will surface. Problems abound. Continuity problems, lousy character introductions, plot holes. That sort of thing.

See, the thing is, in the last few months I’ve been reading screenplays, and listening to screenwriting specific podcasts. The Creative Sceenwriting Magazine podcast (iTunes link, highly recommended), and Pilar Allesandra’s On The Page (iTunes link) podcast. Of course, John August’s blog is a must read. A trip through his archives is definitely worth your while. These sorts of helps are what make the internet so great. You can learn on your own time at your own pace.

And I’ve learned that a lot of what I’ve already written is pretty bad. Which is OK. I’m willing to work at it to get better. After taking the holidays to fix a lot of stuff, and add new stuff, I’m pretty happy. I’ve got 40 OK pages down, and they’re definitely going to get better.

Also, I started running numbers on making this movie and selling it online. For my projected budget (which, of course, is me just making numbers up, but still) I’d need around 20,000 people to pay $12 in order to break even. Odds are pretty small, but what’s encouraging, is that Internet distribution is possible for an independent. Things are looking up.

The music labels are in a bit a quandary. Prince is giving away his music. Nine Inch Nails tells their fans to steal. Radiohead wants you to pick your own price for their new independently produced album, In Rainbows. Madonna is ditching her record label for a concert promoter. The music labels derive their income from representing talent. Apparently, big name musical talent no longer requires representation. Like I said, quandary.

John Coulton (or JoCo, as folks on teh neterwebs like to call him; typing is hard) isn’t big name talent, at least, not in the way the artists I mentioned above are. The rich and famous can afford to take the risk of cutting out the middle man because, well, they’re already rich and famous. If they try something that flops, no big deal. And the odds of flopping are lower because folks already know their names. But Coulton, an erstwhile software developer has successfully done what few others in the music industry have, namely he’s made a name for himself in music with nothing more than wild creativity and an Internet connection.

From September 05 to September 06, Coulton’s thing a week podcast released one new free song per week. On his site he states that the project was:

[A]n attempt to keep the creative juices flowing as freely as possible, and a way for me to push myself to take risks, work quickly and trust in the creative process. It was also a stunt designed to get people to notice me.

He got noticed. Once, on a trip to Seattle, Coulton unexpectedly found his Saturday night open. He mentioned the opening on his blog, and told his fans that if they could find him a venue, he’d play a show.

Before I’d done that (podcast), when I’d do a show — and it was almost always a New York show — it’d be four friends who’d come out and a couple people who had seen me from other work that I’d done and maybe a couple strangers. But never big crowds. And certainly it would have been impossible for me to go to another city and draw an audience.

The impromptu Seattle show drew 80 people, and Coulton had never been there before. Things had changed.

JoCo releases all his tunes (not just the free ones; he offers many for sale through his site) under a creative commons license that allows fans to share and remix his stuff, as long as it’s for non-commercial use, and they attribute him. The resulting fan creations run the gamut from music videos, to card games. With his name still attached. I don’t know what the marketing geniuses at the record labels call that sort of thing (actually, I think piracy is the term), but ‘free publicity’ doesn’t seem too far off the mark.

Coulton uses eventful.com to decide where he should perform. Eventful users can ‘demand’ a Coulton performance, that is, request that he come to town and play a set. Once demand somewhere reaches a critical mass, he books a venue there and lets his fans know when and where he’ll be playing. This way, he doesn’t have to play empty houses. His fans have already told him they’d be there.

In giving away music, letting fans ‘play’ with it, and having them determine his showtimes, Coulton has forged an entirely new business model for musicians. One that’s not dependent on a label to promote him. His fans do it for him. By many measures, he’s successful. He’s not a super-star like Prince or Madonna (he still has to use two names), but Coulton has carved out a comfortable niche on the music industry success scale somewhere between the Billboard Top 40 and starving artist.

No one is doing this in the movie business

It may be that the cost of entry is still too high. Putting together a camera kit, lighting kit, audio kit, hard drives/backup and editing suite can cost as much as $60,000¹. That’s orders of magnitude cheaper than what large productions use, but still beyond the reach of your average Joe with the next Big Idea™. That figure doesn’t include fees paid to crew or actors. Nor does it cover a plan for marketing and distribution. Let’s not forget that the movie business is, in fact, a business. I can make a movie for WAAAAY cheaper than the studios, but the margin between what it costs to make and profitability is rather large without marketing and distribution; in other words, without the help of the studios. Even if you have noble artistic flimmaking motives, you’re in it to make money, or you’re not in it for long.
Say you and I actually make a movie. We’ve sunk the negative cost². Hopefully we can get our Spice Girls Spy Movie into hot festivals which, in turn, will get it in front of the people who can spend the money on marketing and distribution. Odds are low. Film festivals like Sundance or Toronto receive thousands of entries a year, and show only and handful. And even if you get accepted, there’re no guarantees anyone’ll buy your film.

On the Internet, no one can hear you scream

Do we turn to the webernets? Bandwidth is expensive when we’re talking gigabytes per flick. We could host the thing on YouTube, but there goes the picture quality (why did we spend all that money on a RED ONE?), and how do you make a profit? We could host it for free, and hope that folks would click on the ads surrounding it, but you and I both know that clickthrough rates on web ads aren’t enough to cover our bandwidth costs. We could set up an online store and charge people $x to download it, where x would cover the cost of hosting and bandwidth, but we still haven’t figured out how to recover the negative cost.

And forget about actually getting people to your site. On the Internet you’re virtual needle in a Mount Everest-sized haystack. Or, as Seth Godin said, “No one cares about you. Almost no one knows you exist.”³ Why in the world is someone going to even pay you $x when they’ve never even heard of you? A bet on getting DiggDotted is as good as one on the festivals. And in the meantime, you slowly leak money to your host.

In short, we still haven’t come up with a workable business model that doesn’t rely on the crapshoot of getting into a big film festival or bleeding yourself to death on the internet.

So, great blog brain, what’s the solution? Will there be any JoCo’s of the film industry? Are there already, and I just don’t know about it?

Notes:

1. This number came together when I investigated actually buying all that hardware. The reason being, that I’d to think I could start a small production company to make my own films, ala Robert Rodriguez. I’m not sure what it would cost to rent this stuff.
2. Negative cost is an industry term to describe the cost of actually making a movie. In other words, the cost to the producers from blank slate to master negative. Other costs are marketing and distributing, either of which costs a very not-insignificant pile of moolah.
3. Who’s There, p.5

Someone oughta be getting this data. Who better than the venerable A List Apart? The more data on the profession, the better. Especially if we want to buck for raises.

The first Annual Web Design Survey

Now, having said that I’m not a programmer doesn’t preclude at least some facilty for writing code on my part. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve done some. I feel like I should be able to get at least a basic CMS up and running, but for the most part I’ve been pretty frustrated. Then this designer guy, Jeff Croft, keeps talking about Django like it’s the best thing since sliced images. So I decide to give it a second look.

I’d tried installing Django before, but couldn’t get it up and running. Adrian (who’s Django’s DHH) even commented on that post, asking what the problem was (I couldn’t remember, it’d been long enough since I’d tried when I wrote that post). In the interim, either my subconcious worked out the installation problem I was having, or the Django folks made it clearer how to install on windows because I followed the instructions, and *poof* a working Django installation.

So I start working on the Poll tutorial on the Django site. I’m following along, making a nifty one-question poll when *whack* I get smacked in the face with this really elegant admin site for creating and managing polls that just came out of left field. I was all like “holyfreakingfritos that’s amazing!”

And then I realized part of what was so dang frustrating about my previous CMS development efforts: I didn’t want to have to code the administive interface. I just wanted to say “this is how a blog post works, this is how I want to show my flicks, this is how I want to integrate Flickr, etc.” The Django admin creates a really nicely designed back end to do all your CRUD, and it Just Works™. I think I might just be learning Python in the future.

I decided that once I’m done writing, I’m just going to try and make the thing myself. Forget about selling. In this day and age, trying to do that will get you about as much attention as a rhino gives to a fly. He might notice the fly. Probably not. And if he does, he certainly doesn’t care. If Hollywood isn’t going to make my move, I might as well. They might even want it when I’m done. Stranger things have happened. And if not, we’ll see if I can’t just try and sell in online on my own. It’s a brave new world with this interweb thing.

I discovered a website by a couple screenwriters that I like. Wordplayer has a whole bunch of screenwriting tips and other inspiration.