Google Wave has announced that come September 30th, regular people like me and you will be able to open an account.  Well, 100,000 of us anyway.

This reminds me of an interesting article that I read at the Candler blog called Google Wave for Filmmakers.  Basically, applying the idea of Google Wave to filmmaking where you have a hub from which everyone can work from.  Whether anyone takes this idea and runs with it or not will be up in the air (I’m very tempted to develop it, but don’t have the time or resources at the moment) for some time to come.

Still, as a production tool, Google Wave is dynamite and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.  Here’s hoping I’m one of the 100,000.

photo credit: nDevilTVx

So goes the gag.  Lately I’ve been concentrating on building an online social soapbox, so to speak.  I have a twitter account, a friendfeed account, facebook etc. but I’m not entirely sure where to take them.  This of course leads to the big question that I’m straining to answer: how do you make a movie utilizing all the new media options available to us?

The answer eludes me.  Are there opporitunities? Sure, but will they work and are they the best way of going about it.

I have several ideas of powering the creative process by utilizing social media, but how do you then turn that into a profitable film.  Micro financing is a great way of going about it and several sites exist that build on that premise but something that’s uterly web 1.0ish it.  It’s not an interactive social conversation, it’s using new ways of finding money other than picking up the yellow pages and calling doctors and dentists to bankroll your film.  Thats great and all but it doesn’t push the envelope far enough for me, it feels like we’re just slapping a new coat of paint on and calling it a brand new way to make films.

I hope to have several conversations in the coming week with people who are much smarter than I about such things.

Just something to chew on for a while.

This is something I’ve been trying to put into words for a while. How and why movies are being made today are starting to radically change, but putting it into a block of text for all to read and understand has been very difficult.

Ted Hope’s Keynote for the Filmmaker’s Forum brilliantly illustrates where we’re heading and the challenges that face us as filmmakers.

When someone says “Indie is dead”, they are talking about the state of the Indie Film Business, as opposed to what are actually the films themselves. They can say “The sky is falling” because for the last fifteen years, the existing power base in the film industry has focused on films fit for the exisiting business model, as opposed to ever truly concentrating on creating a business model for the films that filmmakers want to make.

To read all of Mr. Hope’s excellent keynote, cilck here.