Confession 1: The book that I am about to recommend came free (at my request) from Michel Wiese Productions, my publisher who in turn requests that for each free book I write a five star review on Amazon. I only do this if I feel the book warrants it. And most of my publisher’s books do.

Confession 2: After re-writing my first book, Cut by Cut: Editing Your Film or Video, I plan to create my own movie, so this is mostly why I ordered Film & Video Budgets by Deke Simon. Budgets are anathema to me and I need to start thinking beyond the cutting room, like a producer.

Review

I expected this book to be just a bunch of budget forms with boring explanations. Was I off the mark! It’s a 465-page handbook that educates moviemakers on what happens in each stage of a project, explaining how to anticipate a film so that the process runs as smoothly as possible. Veteran producer Simon details preproduction preparation, production challenges, and postproduction processes so that you can plan your film and its budget. For instance, he goes over the issues and solutions for getting a film print from a digital file, tape, or tape.

Don’t know when or how to market your video, how to choose a camera or deal with unions? This book guides you through each step of your film or video, lavishing specific advice and the type of information that only comes from years of experience and up-to-date knowledge.

Use this book if you are setting out on your first or fifth student film, feature, documentary, corporate video, or music video. It contains budgets for each of these as well as links to free, downloadable budget forms.  (Hint: poke around publisher’s site.) The book deciphers what each line item in a budget means. Also, it helps you know what questions to ask when negotiating with facilities, unions, etc, and how to make deals.

I plan to rely on it to make my first film. Combined with previous editions, the book’s sold over 45,000 copies. Have any of you used it? Let us know what you think.

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Today’s post completes my review of the USC event, “An Evening with Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder of YouTube.”

The Future

Here’s how Hurley sees it:

• Money streams
  Consumers will pay by advertising, renting, or purchasing on site. TV and movies may be premium spaces. Hurley readily admitted that YouTube is not making much money now, even though they’ve added ads. He sees the money opportunities in 5-10 years and said that “Google’s in it for the long term.”




• HTML5
  When asked if YouTube will now move to HTML5 Hurley hedged a bit, stating that “it’s easier to deal with video today” and “we’re exploring all upload options.” He assured the crowd that “There will faster connection speeds, faster downloads, and ubiquitous connections.”




• Subscription channels
  An audience member asked about creating a subscription kids’ channel and Hurley responded, “A good idea. Kids will innovate the future of YouTube. But the lawyers are balking.”

Hurley’s predictions

To Hurley’s mind “Everything is connected to the internet. Consumers are going to demand their media everywhere and that’s what we want to support.”

He recognizes that it’s tough for filmmakers to make money. “We’d like to do more to connect the dots between talent and brand. We’d like to reach the demographic for the content they’re creating.”

He also believes that “With unlimited participation and distribution there’ll be smaller pieces of pie but a bigger pie. There still will be blockbusters but the tools will be in the people’s hands.”

And finally he states, “More and more brands are giving up control and trusting the person who’s creating content. That’s a big opportunity that’s just starting.”

Takeaways

What struck me most was:

1) How Hurley (and others in his line of work) are in a constant head turn; keeping their eyes on the hyper speed development of technology while watching what the public – youth driven consumers – is doing.

2) The contradictory nature of his desires for YouTube: He must have said the word “monetize” twenty times, e.g. “We’re not monetizing all these experiences – Music, TV so they’re not available.”  But in the next breath he’d say, “We’d like to do more to connect the dots between talent and brand. We’d like to reach the demographic for the content they’re creating.”

Hurley realizes that “Not all content can be monetized.” Yet he says, “We want to foster opportunities for everyone to create and have their creations seen by world.”

Soooo, big surprise, the beat goes on: Art and commerce have not fully merged in this new world of “I want it free. I want it fast. Why can’t I earn a living from my films?” And do we really want them to?

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Recently I attended a USC event billed as “An Evening with Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder of YouTube.” While the evening amounted to an hour, the time was sufficient to cover the past, present, and future of this frontrunner exhibition site. Hurley, in town for the Streamys, the (second) annual awards ceremony honoring the best web videos, was interviewed by Jimm Wiatt, USC grad and former Chairman and CEO of the William Morris Agency.

Introduction

“Real people don’t watch movies on laptop – only students,” 32 year old Hurley informed the crowd of 100, mostly students. “Hulu has hype but not the views, compared with us.”

Past – A mere five years old
Hurley birthdates YouTube’s invention to February 14, 2005 when he registered the name from his garage. In launching the site, he and co-founder Steve Chen “were looking for a way to make it easy for ourselves to share videos with friends and family.”  Within months, venture capitalists were sniffing around and Google starting inquiring. In October 2006, Google purchased YouTube for 1.65 billion. “We had 67 people,” Hurley shared. “Google brought machines, money, and people but we have freedom and our own office space. At the end of the day you’re only as good as the team you assemble.”

Present

Google acquisition – merging of cultures – slowed us down but now we’re picking up speed. Chad Hurley

Over 100 million people view 62+ videos/month on YouTube. But, Hurley readily admitted, “Our site’s a mess. We’ve been working on tuning algorithms to help people search. We want to give more of a lean back experience. We’re looking at Twitter, FB, and other sites. We may organize by favorites or have sports section.  He added that they are moving toward a feed – like Twitter and FB – and that they want to “figure out ways to best help people organize their experience.”

Competition

Everything is competition to Hurley. “There’s a lot more stuff to do today: FB, TV, iPad, video games, cell phones, etc. Hopefully they choose us to kill their time.”

Net neutrality controversy

I hadn’t heard this term. Found out it means that Internet service providers should be neutral – not speed up or slow down the flow of data from the websites you access, for example make Hulu downloads fast than YouTube. I also didn’t know it is a controversial subject. April 6 a federal appeals courts made a major ruling in a Comcast case that has muddied the waters even more. Hurley’s position? “YouTube would like the Internet to remain free and has pulled for everything.”

Copyrighted content

An audience question prompted this response from Hurley: “It’s difficult to protect copyrighted material. YouTube sets community guidelines and policies and has developed tools to ferret out rule breakers out e.g. porn. Every piece of content that is uploaded is copyrighted. We have created a form that allows people to identify unauthorized content.”

Stay tuned for Part 2, which covers Hurley’s view of the future and my takeaways from the discussion.

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