Written by: Matthew Forsythe

Keep it Short
250 words is enough. It’s enough for you to write and it’s enough for us to read.

Post Frequently
Make up for your short posts by writing more often. Blog about everything related to production. Interesting connections, things you’ve learned, production tips, successes, failures.

Stay focused
One post for each idea. If you have two topics, then make two posts; don’t try to cram them into one post. Keep your posts focused on one subject, it will make your blog more searchable, better indexed and more usable in the long run.

Blog the whole production cycle
A lot of filmmakers start a blog just to market their film. But blogs take a lot of time to gain any real momentum. In a lull between films? Blog it. Got writer’s block? Blog it. Trying to drum up some funding? Blog it. Other filmmakers may find your tips and tricks useful – or at least appreciate your sharing. And don’t stop once you start work on the next film. Check out Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified) for a great example of how to use blogging throughout the whole production cycle. Hustwit’s blogs create conversation during preproduction and then publicity during festival season.

Make the blog part of your routine
A common complaint from filmmakers is that they just don’t have time to blog. Especially during production, filmmakers work long hours and can’t find the time to write anything down. If time is short, get someone else to write with you. Or use Twitter to make a small update. If you take your blog seriously, your readers are more likely to take it seriously too.

Teach your readers how to make films
People are looking for answers. Our research shows that more people search for the term “How to make documentary films” than the term, “Watch documentary films”. So if you want to create a blog that has value to readers, you need to share your knowledge with them. Teach them something new and useful and they might come back.

Link to everything
Use links everywhere. Link to other filmmakers websites wherever you mention them. If they don’t have a website, link to their IMDB profile. Links add context and network your site with other relevant sites.

Also check out these great resources:

10 Tips for Writing a Blog Post

Written by: David Simpson aka The ‘Maker’

This video is shot on location in Toronto’s infamous Burroughs Building. It is the new video for Kae Sun’s song “On the Lookout” which Miles Jones produced off Kae Sun’s record. Take a look above at the behind the scenes footage from the day. I was very impressed with the finished video.

Miles was a Billboard Word Song Contest winner for his song “Coast to Coast” which he wrote in Kochi, Japan and finished writing in my living room here in Osaka. He also was the Independent Music Award Winner – **Scroll Down List**

In addition, he  just recently released his new, Trust Me video off his newest album, Runaway Jones. He is a great example of an artist who is leveraging video effectively  to help create a following for his music. He is a master at getting the most out of his performances and ablities by teaming up with the right partners to leverage his talents and harness the power of digital distribution.

Miles Jones 5 tips on how to build communities and leverage video on and off the web:

1) Build a Facebook/Twitter following

2) Connect with your fans personally as opposed to always just posting things

3) Collaborate with like minded artists for projects and shows in order to build new fans

4) Get a group of people to help promote you via street and on-line ie/ flyers, posters, stickers

5) Get a GOOD publicist

Illectric Sheep Clothing was lucky to have Miles come to Osaka in 2008 to play at an Illsheep Event. He gave the fans at Club Pure a real show and a night to be remembered. He may be planning on coming to Japan this September to shoot his next video, stay tuned.

See Videos:

ON THE LOOKOUT FINAL VIDEO

TRUST ME VIDIEO

If you find this post interesting you may like to:

Subscribe to Frictionless Lifestyle: Experiments in Story Telling by Email

Director: James Marsh / Starring: Philippe Petit / Studio: Magnolia Pictures

In 1974, high-wire walker Philippe Petit fulfilled a longstanding dream by sneaking into New York’s World Trade Center, stringing a cable between the tops of the two towers, and—with almost unfathomable guts—walking across it without a net. The man is clearly a nut, but he’s also a great storyteller with a heck of a story, and Man on Wire gives him a chance to tell it. Petit’s stunt was both an engineering challenge and a test of, well, a test of something that most of us don’t possess in this much quantity. Filmmaker James Marsh uses standard documentary techniques, combining new interviews with a satisfying pile of footage and photographs, but his film has the suspense of a caper movie. The title comes from the report written by a police officer who was more than a little uncertain about how to respond to the audacity on display. Robert Davis

A friend a mine sent me this list of documentaries. I’m still trying to make my way through it. The  films I  have scene on this list have been great. Man on a Wire and Anvil are my personal favorites so far.

Posted from: pastemagazine.com

Post written by Leo Babauta. Photo by Alex Bollhorn

How much of your day is spent doing administrative tasks, and not creating or doing other important work?

How much time do you spend responding to emails and IMs and social networks, making payments, doing paperwork, filing, sitting in meetings, driving, doing errands, and so on? How much of that could be cleared up for more important work?

Imagine this for a moment: you have no administrative tasks, only the core work that you love doing. Your day has been cleared for creating, building, doing high-impact projects. Isn’t it lovely?

Is this a pipe dream? Perhaps for some, who have little control over their work. But if you have a larger degree of control, let’s explore the idea of “frictionless work” or even “frictionless living”.

If you have little control, consider a change.

My Frictionless Business

I know I don’t have a typical job, but that didn’t happen overnight and I did this on purpose. Today, I have a few successful blogs and a handful of successful books.

Only a year ago, that required a lot of administrative work — so much so that I hired an admin assistant to help out, and outsourced other work.

But assistants, employees, delegating, and outsourcing are not hassle-free … each comes with work of its own: email or phone calls, following up, checking the quality of work, doing contracts, reviewing terms, clarifying, firing, searching for a better employee/contract company, paying, filling out tax info, and on and on.

The better solution is to simplify. Eliminate non-essential tasks. And so I did, slowly:

• I eliminated comments from Zen Habits, cutting back on a huge amount of work for me. Comments turn a major blog into a forum, where the blogger is the moderator. It takes hours to moderate a major blog, and while I outsourced that for months, it was always a major headache that required a lot of work. Eliminating comments, which only a tiny minority of readers used, eliminated my need for that admin work or for hiring a moderator.
• I stopped doing work that required me to do paperwork or admin work. That meant losing some income from consulting and other business, but it also meant a lot more free time for what I love doing.
• When a guest writer submits a guest post, I no longer format the post but require the writer to format it and submit for my review. Mostly now I just need to read over the post and hit publish.
• I got out of a bunch of ad networks that were always asking me to do admin work. That was a loss of income, but it also simplified my website. Now I sell one ad a month (which I’m also eliminating), and do almost no work — the advertiser presses a Paypal button to reserve the ad, and emails me the ad image and link code.
• I eliminated email, for the most part, except for collaborative projects (which are few and far between). My email time went from half my day to a few minutes a day.
• I sell ebooks automatically through e-junkie, and affiliate payments are also computed automatically.

I now have almost no admin work to run my blogs: I write, and publish. Once a month I log into my Paypal account, send out affiliate payments, and transfer money to my bank account (and from there, my bills are automatically paid and money is automatically transferred to savings).

This is not to brag. I know I have it easy compared to most, but this has all been done gradually and on purpose. I created this frictionless work.

What Are Your Admin Tasks?

Take inventory of your work: what admin tasks take up your time? Add to this list over the course of the next couple of days, because you’re probably forgetting some.

Now ask yourself: which of these can be eliminated? Many of you will probably answer, “Very few”, because you’re used to the way things are done. “This is how things are done.” But that’s an artificial limitation — instead, ask yourself how it can be changed. How might it be possible? Think radically different.

To eliminate tasks, you might have to make major changes over time, but the beauty is that you’ll also be freeing up time. Consider some examples:

• If you do a lot of paperwork, can you require forms to be filled out digitally, perhaps online? This will eliminate a lot of work, and if the database is set up right, eliminate filing.
• If you spend a lot of time on calls or email, can you provide other ways for people to get info or get things done? Perhaps put up an FAQ online, so common questions are answered (like Google does for its product support), or provide web pages where people can automatically download products or get other things done without you as the bottleneck? Or can you route those requests to someone else?
• Also unsubscribe from newsletters and notifications and so forth, so you don’t have to spend time processing them in your inbox. Consider each email that comes in and ask yourself: “How could this be eliminated?”
• Can you eliminate meetings, or at least get out of them? How can you get the info without meetings? How can projects get done without the meetings?
• If you worked at home, you wouldn’t have to commute, or do a lot of other tasks associated with working in an office. It’s not always possible, but often you can work towards that goal.
• Can you drop clients or parts of your business, losing a little income but eliminating all the admin work that goes with it? The free time could be spent creating something that would more than make up for the loss of income.
• Can you eliminate features that aren’t completely essential, so you don’t have to do all the work to support those features (similar to how I eliminated comments)?
• Can you stop worrying so much about growth, customers, competitors, statistics, and so forth — and focus instead on what you love doing? A great quote by web designer and developer Sam Brown: “I used to stress a lot about my business, my clients, the amount of work I was doing and my competitors – but the minute I stopped worrying about all of that and focussed on just doing great work that I was happy with it really made a big difference, to me and my business.”
• If you think a task is necessary under the current conditions, consider changing the current conditions.

These are just a few ideas and questions to get you started, but you can see that by radically rethinking your work, you might be able to eliminate a lot of admin tasks.

And free up time for what truly matters.

Frictionless Life

This concept of eliminating admin work can apply to your personal life as well. Imagine your personal time with as few chores, errands, paperwork, and commitments as possible. You’d be free to … well, do what you love most.

I can’t claim to have done this completely, but I have made huge progress towards a frictionless life. Of course, I still have chores to do (washing dishes, laundry, etc.), but I’ve eliminated a lot of personal tasks:

• I don’t pay bills anymore. I either pay them in advance if I get a big lump payment, or I set up automatic payments each month. In fact, because all my transactions are electronic, I never go to the bank.
• I don’t file personal paperwork anymore. I’ve gone paperless, so all documents that I needed to keep are scanned, and everything else is already digital. Even contracts are done digitally.
• Housework is minimal. Admittedly, my wife does the laundry, but we share in cooking and cleaning duties, and most of it is painless as we have a pretty sparse home. It’s fairly clean all the time.
• Errands are minimal too. Mostly it’s going to the grocery store or post office, and we moved last year so those are within walking distance. So we often walk to those errands, getting a nice workout and enjoying the outdoors in the process.

There isn’t much else we have to do, except things with our kids and each other. The fun stuff. Much of the friction of living has been eliminated.

A Warning

It’s not always easy to change your work and your life to get rid of the friction of admin tasks, but once you do, it’s simply lovely.

However, there will likely be a temptation to fill up your freed time with more email, social networking, blog reading, and so on. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this, but before you do, consider how you really want to spend your time. Do you want to remove the friction just to fritter it away with distractions?

I’m a big fan of doing nothing, of solitude and relaxing and playing. So if that’s how you use your freed time, I’m jumping with joy. You might, however, spend this time creating, and that’s one of the true wonders of creating frictionless work and a frictionless life. Spend your time doing what you love, living your passion, making something new and beautiful. You’ll be glad you did.

“The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.” ~Frances E. Willard

I think filmmakers look for three opportunities that truly define them as filmmakers.

They are:

1. The ability to tell a visual story from beginning to end, without any interruption, as a complete, continuous experience. This is what separates them from people who create stories for TV as most TV series are produced with commercial interruptions or different viewings (episodes) in mind.

2. The chance to have an audience gather in a theater and watch this visual story together, as a shared experience in time and space. In the course of a film’s distribution it may be seen in a lot of different settings, public or private, but the filmmaker is making the film with this key audience in mind. This is the primary target of all his/her imaginings.

3. The opportunity to see his/her film with an audience. Filmmakers want to physically experience the film with an audience. The filmmaker wants to see if they laugh or cry when he/she intended, if the audience got the point–to see if their film really succeeded at reaching another human being. As every filmmaker knows who has done this–a genuinely scary moment.

So each of these opportunities really goes to the heart of what is most essential about calling yourself a filmmaker.

Think of them as a set of principles about the relationship between the creator of a film and the audience for which it is intended.

And here is what is most surprising as we move from the analogue past to the digital future.These opportunities are not disappearing into the analogue past.

In fact, they are just beginning to open up.

Chris Dorr has been a movie producer, studio executive and creator of online and mobile services. He consults on digital strategy and business development.

Find Chris at www.digitaldorr.com

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Japanese Edition of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

Photo: Posted from Philip K. Dick Works

Written by The Maker

Illectric Sheep originally started off as an event-organizing start-up during 2006 in Osaka, Japan and has evolved into it’s own brand that produces hope for everyone who wants to engineer a unique lifestyle. From its beginning, the Illectric Sheep brand has taken it’s roots from the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep  by Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott’s classic movie Blade Runner.

Illectric Sheep produces limited edition collectible apparel and goods with their infamous Illsheep trademark logo, and also does collaborations with other select innovative initiatives.

Only a small numbers will be made per design and then the model will be RETIRED.

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