Bunny Blog

Okay.

Blah, blah, blah, iTunes, digital music, DRM, RIAA, vinyl/warm/anaolog, joy of owning a record, convenience, can-tell-the-difference-between-MP3-and-CD- shut up.

So we love paradigm shifts here at Psychic Bunny and I fucking love rock and roll. I love music of all kinds, actually, but I wanted to swear in the blog post and rock makes that easy and feel cool. No matter what side of any of those bullshit debates or buzzwords you’re on, there’s no denying that music is an industry in a crisis of delivery. It is a HARBINGER, say I for the crisis games and movies will be going through soon soon SOON, so we should all pay attention, especially when indies are involved and trying desperately to break onto a scene that is now literally flooded with too many choices for consumers to ever find the good stuff.

So let me tell you about this awesome band KILLOLA.

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Is the iPad business model a way to survive and thrive as a creative?  Or is it an evil trap?  The impetus for this post was a couple of unrelated articles I’ve read recently, so… this might be rambly.

First up is Clay Shirky’s eloquent appraisal of the global condition (and specifically the entertainment industry), The Collapse of Complex Business Models.  He manages to take a lot of threads I’ve heard before and tie them together neatly and sensibly.  One sentence summary?  People and organizations become hard-wired into a way of doing things, and when the ecosystem no longer supports that way of life, they are not only unwilling but actually incapable of changing.  As a business owner and filmmaker, this article is striking and frankly a little apocalyptic.  After all, what I do for a living is expensive – and all I really want is to be able to afford to keep doing it!  New technologies that allow us to cut costs still aren’t moving as fast as the market is bottoming out.

Enter article two, Cory Doctorow’s Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either).  The premise of this one is pretty clear.  Primarily he is calling Apple (and the long trail of followers accumulating around their magic device/big iPhone) to task for creating a “walled garden” of content.  Yes, it is a path for revenue.  For people like me it’s a feasible path to that Holy Grail of actually getting paid for the work we do, but at the same time Cory’s right: it smells a lot like serfdom.  You work the fields, they dictate the terms of your existence.  The Apple bet is that if you like working the fields, you won’t notice you’ve made yourself a subject.  Evidence of this: the EFF’s analysis of the App Store Developer Agreement.

Section 14 states that, no matter what, Apple will never be liable to any developer for more than $50 in damages … So if Apple botches an update, accidentally kills your app, or leaks your entire customer list to a competitor, the Agreement tries to cap you at the cost of a nice dinner for one in Cupertino.

That’s just one of many draconian edicts.  But guess what?  In a world with no competition, you’re stuck with it!  So what’s the way forward for creators?  Should we deal with it and line up at Apple’s teat?  Join a commune of Kickstarter creatives?  Or just start gathering canned goods and ammunition?

Last Friday the American Cinematheque screened another installment in its “Blows Up the Internet” series, this time featuring STRIKE TV. (The first was apparently Dr. Horrible and the third will be Crackle.)

photo credit by Genevieve Webster

Our web series, Coma, Period. was featured second, and I got to join a panel together with Steven de Souza (writer of Die Hard and Unknown Sender) and Timothy Dalton (played James Bond in License to Kill). Susan Miller (writer on the L Word and Anyone But Me), Matt Enlow (director of Mountain Man) and Andrew Miller (creator of Imaginary Bitches).

It was a fun night with some good episodes, notably Joe & Kate and Speedie Date. It was real neat to see Coma, Period. on the big screen. Dan’s coma is so amazingly, blindingly white!

I have an unabashed love of movie titles.  A good title sequence is a work of art all on its own, and can bring incredible value to a film - in mood, story, and production value.  Nobody knows this, or analyzes it, better than The Art of the Title, a site/blog that features great movie titles, detiled analysis, and interviews with some of the biggest title designers out there.  If you’re interested in the thught process behind some of your favorite title sequences, this is the place, and f you just want to watch some incredible titles, everything is available in SD, HD, and even for iPhone.

Some of my favorites:

Alien Quadrilogy analysis

Dexter

Freaked

The Impostors

Tension in Title Sequences

The numbers are in, and the Wall Street Journal put together a graph of consumer movie spending in 2009, compared to 2008.

This echoes a lot of Hollywood whining about slumping DVD sales, but as usual I find it hard to have much sympathy for their plight.  In every other category (including DVD rental!) sales are up versus the year before.  Growth in theatrical spending, in fact, nearly compensates for the loss in DVD sales alone.  So I would like to offer the world’s tiniest violin as a concession to those who thought DVD was going to be a cash cow forever.  Maybe I should offer a history book as well.

(image blatantly stolen)

Online transactions are still a tiny slice of the pie, but nearly doubled over the past year.  If that trend continues then digital delivery will be a viable mechanism within a couple of years, which bodes particularly well for indie filmmakers with direct access to the means of distribution.  Despite a lot of big talk, it didn’t happen last year.  Will 2010 be the year when someone steps up with a substantial platform for online film?

Remember back in the heady days of 2005, when Lost was a huge hit and there was a sudden flurry of longform serialized sci-fi dramas on network television?  Ha ha, yeah, those all got cancelled in a season or less.  But at least one of them was well worth watching, and while it’s a shame it only lasted one season, I am here to highly recommend “Surface.”

The show follows a disparate cast of characters as they uncover the secrets behind a strange new aquatic life form (giant sea monsters!).  The creature FX leave a little to be desired, but the characters and stories are engrossing, and continually paying off in new ways.  What begins as a mystery centered around these sea creatures and where they came from swiftly opens the door to a much larger mystery, with much more radical implications.  There are several moments of “whoah! Awesome!” and a few “I can’t believe they did that!”s.  The series ends on something like a cliffhanger, they’ve resolved enough mysteries that you still feel satisfied.  It’s just a good solid sci-fi mystery/action show, and at 15 episodes, it’s easy to watch the whole thing.

12 of the 15 episodes (for some strange reason) are on Hulu, and you can get the whole thing on Netflix Instant Streaming.  Do yourself a favor and enjoy the ride.

I’ve noticed recently that all the movies I don’t want to see all have the same basic design for their poster, which looks like this:

The main characteristics, I think, are the white background, the red type, and a bold sans serif font.  Let’s take a look, shall we, at a few similar posters which should prove my theory true:

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We are a hurricane of doing things over here at Psychic Bunny. As you can see below, we just completely finished a horror feature, and have now also completely finished our first web series, “Coma, Period.” It’s an existential comedy starring Rob Delaney, who we don’t know if you’ve noticed, has been blowing up all over the internet, starring in “Warner Bros Responds to Christian Bale” and this Mad Men parody from Funny or Die.

We have just completed 10 episodes comprising the first season, and are distributing them through Strike TV. They’ve been getting great writeups from Tubefilter, Markee Magazine, and NewTeeVee. Jill Weinberger, the reviewer at NewTeeVee Station, actually said that the result of all our work “fueled by Delaney’s pitch-perfect and exuberant performance, is a satisfying blend of dark humor and goofy whimsy - a fusion often attempted in web video that’s rarely done as well as it is here.”

Please watch a few of the episodes over at www.comaperiod.com! We’re very proud

Much thanks to Lawrence Everson (Sound Designer), Jeff Waldron (Cinematographer), Ringleader Stages, The Maybe Happening, and everybody else (and there are tons) who made this production possible. I think you’ll be hearing a lot more about Coma, Period. in the future, so stay tuned!

You might not know this about me (which means we’ve probably never met) but I am a sucker for pulp fiction of all sorts.  Here at Psychic Bunny we’re big on short form content and freewheeling creative expression, so it’s no surprise that I’ve fallen a bit in love with Popcorn Fiction, a website created by Hollywood writers as “a place where new popular short fiction could flourish.”  The stories range from macabre to humorous to action-packed, as any good pulp compilation should, and who knows, this is meant as a lab for new ideas, so you might just be seeing the seeds of the next hit TV show or blockbuster film.

Their latest story is from Patton Oswalt, and it’s a delight.  Check it out.

Just when we thought it was totally dead, The Golden Egg was invited to screen at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Friday, October 2nd.  It will be screening at Midnight, which I think is about the time of day I first had the idea for the film.

I will be on hand at the screening as well, so if you’ve got folks or family in Milwaukee, tell them to come on out! It’s going to be a rip-roaring good time. If you ARE going to the screening, email me at rick (at) psychicbunny (dot) com and let me know. It’d be great to meet you.

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