Film is a collaborative, multi-level process. Sure, there’s the auteur theory where the director has pure control over the final product, but film uses a lot of people to do a lot of different things making it necessary to network in order to accomplish everything you want to accomplish. Some people know a lot about a little and a little about a lot, and it is important to know where the issues are, and where things are headed.
This year’s Seattle Film Summit, still ongoing this week at the Northwest Film Forum, explores where the independent film scene is and where it is going, with a special focus on Seattle’s indie film community and our presence in the world. Seattle has a reputation for being a tight-knit film community that is currently waiting to bust out of its bubble. It’s also a little bit of an insider scene, like all film scenes, and requires a little bit of finesse to work your way around.
As usual, the two main topics up for discussion are Funding and the search for that Next Big Thing.
FUNDING
The funding discussion comes in the form of tax incentives that Washington State gives out to productions that film in the state of Washington and spend a certain percentage of dollars in the state using labor contracts. The state has allocated $3.5m for tax incentives, making WA the state with the fifth lowest budget for film incentives. Unlike Michigan, however, dollars must be spent in state and paying in state people instead of bringing out of state people to spend money while in state.
One of the summits was about the political pressures to get this tax incentive renewed in the state. This being a film summit with filmmakers trying to get their films funded, of course, everybody is in support of it. Nevada just gutted theirs so that they could give Tesla $1.25b in tax breaks (yes, that’s Billion), and they have $5m left (still bigger than our $3.5m). California recently approved $330m a year in tax breaks. North Carolina just gutted theirs, with many productions likely moving to Georgia or Louisiana.
Of course, there was a huge elephant in the room that nobody addressed: who gets what money. In all of the stories, the people getting the majority of the benefits are the big budget productions. For instance, the majority of 2012’s tax incentives for the state of Massachusetts went to 3 big budget films: R.I.P.D., Grown Ups 2, and The Heat accounting for $60.1m of the tax incentives (which accounted for about half of the total targeted tax credits for the state). Sure, the same article said that there were 118 other productions that got tax credits, but none like those. In the majority of the instances, the tax credits are meant to attract the big budget productions to hire in state people. But, it still looks a lot like corporate welfare to the outside public. This is a major concern, especially when WA state government are being criticized for giving away $8.7b in tax breaks to Boeing last year, and the WA State Supreme Court has come down hard on the state government demanding they take action to rectify their budgetary woes with regard to education spending. Thus, all the other social programs will probably be gutted because WA State also has the most regressive tax structure in the US, and the government doesn’t seem intent on fixing that any time soon.
It’s hard pushing for tax incentives, when you know that the biggest benefactors are major companies who can afford to make the movies without the incentives. On the other hand, they’re extremely helpful for getting small films made. So, it’s a dance with the devil in order to get independent films produced.
However, they did address the other big elephant, which was how effective the tax break was and how it affected WA State as a whole. According to the studies, for every $1 we spent in tax breaks, filmmakers spent ~$2 in state employing people or buying local goods. This is a positive return on investment, even if it still is giving corporate welfare. And, because we have it worked into our incentives that the productions must hire union, the wages created with the money are sustainable.
To help with the fight, the Seattle Film Community created the WAFilmPAC, a lobbying advocacy PAC to help drum up interest in the fight as well as drive politicians to vote in favor of supporting the incentives and other legal issues that matter to the film industry. This dances with the devil again because many people are against PACs on a general principle as they seem to be the driving force for negative change in politics. But, if they’re the way the game is played already, you might as well go all in? It’s really a double-edged sword for some people. But, then, politics and money always are in the modern era.
THE NEXT BIG THING
Seattle is also one of the forefronts of the current tech bubble. We have many of the big companies here. Microsoft is across the water. We have Google, Adobe, and Amazon. Many tech startups are here. Penny Arcade Expo and Popcap got their start here. Part of this is because of the tax structure that Microsoft fought for (which is also regressive for small businesses).
A big part of the conference has been trying to figure out what the next big thing is. Whether it is a transmedia intersection between games, apps, web, and video, or how to integrate your project into the real world. Many of the foci has been on trying to involve the gaming community in the panels because the gaming community shares many of the same traits as the film community. See: Heavy Rain. But, also trying to figure out if there is room for film and technology to intersect.
Many of the ideas have had sparks of ideas, but nothing really concrete as far as what that next big thing is. Part of the reason behind that is most of the audience has been made up of film geeks who don’t seem to have started thinking in transmedia ways. However, in the social media structure, they started pointing out how teasers help lead up to trailers lead up to the final product.
However, the transmedia implications of everything really caught my ear, as they did when The Dissolve reported on a couple of interactive films out of Tribeca earlier this year. Possibilia, in particular, reminded me of the PAX 10 game, Framed, in that each scene had different ways of escaping and the viewer had to choose the way to go. The potential for interaction and viewership is intriguing, but there’s also the way to interact with film while you’re actually in the movie theater. Much like Noel Murray’s disinterest with the second-screen enabled horror movie App, I think this may be something that might not appeal to the older generations, but it is an avenue that’s at least interesting to explore for now.
SEATTLE FILM SUMMIT
Seattle Film Summit continues tonight and tomorrow at the Northwest Film Forum, with a conclusive Town Hall Caucus on Thursday preceding the closing night film, In Country. The remaining panels are open to the public for $6 ($5 for members).
Tonight’s panels include multi-platform storytelling and a Gamer focused panel. Tuesday’s panel is all about DIY distribution.