KarmaCritic Illegal Trailers

FableForge — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:33:30 +0000

People, I need your feedback on a wild idea I just had.

Its called "KarmaCritic Illegal Trailers".

What it is, is trailers for popular movies made with popular music, neither of which we own. Granted, this is not by far a new idea, or even an ground-shaking idea, but we can nail the implementation and institutionalize it. More after the jump:

So, the concept goes like this: copyright law dictates we may not use materials we don't own for profit, or in a way in which "dillutes" the non-owned brand, where "dillution" means people may look at it and be confused as to whether our product is official or not. The first qualm is easily dismissed, no one makes a dime. The second, we take care of by simply putting our "Illegal Trailers" brand logo at the beginning, that clearly states this is not "official".

I'm not a lawyer, but if those two premises stand, we might be in for some fun before we get the first C&D letter.

So here's how it would work:

Every week we'd start the contest by picking some popular movie. (Oh yeah, we would make this a contest. Pirates are competitive like that). Then each contestant would have a whole week to create a trailer for that movie, using popular music. We put them in youtube all on the same day. One week later, the one with the most views in YouTube wins, honors are earned, cred is gained, and youtubers take notice. The "KarmaCritic Illegal Trailers" brand grows.

Of course, we would have a section here in the site holding all contests and their respective winners, and we'd give special honors to the winners, maybe 100 karma points, etc etc.

You don't really need budget for this, just a good editing software, creativity, editing skills and some time to waste. The potential is some notoriety for yourself and for the site. I wager we'd get some fresh new blood too to join us.

What say you? Anyone interested so far? Is this a good idea?

Sad News

EternalSkyChaz — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 03:10:34 +0000

I am sure that quite a few of you have seen the picture of a beautiful Goth girl that I posted with the title Behold ... Demonica! Perhaps you've read the photoblog I created with some stills of a fictitious argument we had on set. This was all part of a pair of short films set in a strange, metaphysical donut shoppe called Tragic Donut. I was the Co-Executive Producer, Director DP and Pre-Editor for these films. I got a lot of very nice feedback and I know members have been wanting to see the finished product.

These films were to be part of the 2007 EdWood People's Film Fest. This year, though, things were going to be very different in that the festival organizers were going to produce the films that would be in the festival. Unfortunately, they failed on every promise they made to the filmmakers and most of the funds that were raised seemd to be channelled into making films that were headed up by the girlfriend of the President/Chairman of the Festival Association. Those teams that got shorted on production funds and equipment had to come up with those items on their own. (Lesson learned: don't make films for a film festival that wants to make its own films or where the contestants can use a pseudonym like "The Unknown Filmmaker.")

Also, unfortunately, all of us that worked on these films seemed to have signed away any rights we might have had to show the films outside the festival, including the right to sue the Festival Association for breach of contract. That can't be an industry standard clause and nowhere in this release is there any medntion of this being a Work For Hire project. I may get a lawyer because now there is talk of the festival films being released on DVD and the filmmakers will get nothing from that. There are other issues, but they are rather complex to explain here succinctly.

The bottom line is that I don't think I can show the films here, or even on my own website, which means that I will have nothing to show for all my work.

Sorry, folks.