However unlikely it may seem, this all started in the living room of my parents’ house in the late ’80s. Sitting crosslegged on the floor I watched Back to the Future on VHS for the first time. It was Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 blockbuster that made me fall head over heals in love with film. As I grew up I went through phases watching huge quantities of 40s noir admiring directors like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston and later getting into more alternative directors like Jim Jarmusch and Harmony Korine.

At school I was obsessed with two things, film and computers. A belief that film only had a place in my life as a hobby, I began a career in programming very early in my life at 16. This was the late ninties, and the industry which I entered was at the height of dot com bubble fever. I cut my teeth working for one of the first Internet Service Providers in Britain, UK Online. As a frontend HTML developer I quickly became interested in what could be done with server side technologies and moved to work with CGI and Perl.

About a year into working for UK Online folks started talking about a relatively new “cutting edge” language called PHP. I spent the next five years working with PHP, MySQL, Apache and Unix based webservers. My role during this time was as developer for the brand’s consumer web portal which gave me a breadth of experience everything from e-commerce, to webmail systems, to account management tools, and work with (what were at the time) revolutionary technologies like XML/RSS.

The Crumley Connection.

At this point, I got restless. My desire to experience something beyond the area where I grew up and to do more than just sit in front of a screen full of code all day lead me to apply to go to University to study film. At University I discovered mumblecore and films like Todd Rohal’s The Guatamalan Handshake, Jay Duplass’ The Puffy Chair and In Search of a Midnight Kiss by Alex Holdridge. These films lead me to explore the independent film scene and make my own films while spending a semester in the USA.

Meanwhile, I have been paying my way through University by contracting as a developer for BSkyB and freelancing for various small businesses. At this time the Web 2.0 revolution was emerging and I became interested in blogging, video podcasting and the ways in which this technologies can be used by filmmakers. This is when I discovered Arin Crumley and Susan Buice and their film Four Eyed Monsters. After following the video podcasts and requesting Four Eyed Monsters in my area I became increasingly impressed by the way Arin and Susan were harnessing these new technologies. Somewhere along the line Arin I and I got talking on AIM about subjects like data portability, net nutrality and open source platforms.

Our communication was fairly intermittent from our first brief conversations until January 2008 when we first started discussing the project that would become OpenIndie. Then in March 2009 I emailed Arin to tell him I’d registered openindie.com and the planning for the site began. Our goal is to automate the process that Arin and Susan perfected in the process of self-distributing Four Eyed Monsters.

Why now?

So why now? Why build this site at this point in time, at this point in my career and this period in the history of filmmaking? Filmmaking has been democratized. With the advent of digital technologies you can make a high quality feature film with a computer, a digital video camera and some basic sound equipment. However, how do you take your film from Dillsburgh, Pennsylvania to a global audience. Festivals right? Wrong! Festivals are broken. Of the tens of thousands of independent films made every year worldwide and entered into a literney of film festivals only a rediculously tiny fraction of these films actually get distribution and get seen by audiences. An even small percentage makes it out their native territories and as a Brit I am sick of hearing about the next big film at Slamdance or SXSW and waiting years to order the film on Region 1 DVD because it never came close to a British cinema.

OpenIndie will change all this by harnessing the power of the crowd. Filmmakers can build social capital for their film and through user-generated screenings provide themselves with a reliable revenue stream. Filmmakers can harness fantastic amounts of human capital, they inspire teams of people to collaborate on an artistic project often with no financial gain whatsoever. Likewise, access to physical capital like cameras, sound equipment, lighting and computers is relatively widespread these days. A few thousand dollars and you’ve either hired yourself or bought yourself equipment that will give you theatrical quality results. And again, filmmakers do, in some cases, have the ability to build extraordinary amounts of social capital for their film. This can be seen with the likes of Arin and Susan, but it is clearly excruciatingly hard to turn that social capital (i.e. an audience) into a customer and make your filmmaking career sustainable.

OpenIndie in a nutshell

So what is OpenIndie? OpenIndie, in the first instance, is a user generated film screening site with the aim of democratizing distribution. Development will take place over a number of phases but ultimately using the site users can discover and bookmark films they’re interested in, request a screening in their area and put on a screening of any film on the site. Likewise, filmmakers can add their film to OpenIndie, and upload and promote their film via social media. Plus, in terms of exhibition anyone, from an individual or a group of friends, to theatres, venues, film clubs and festivals will be able to measure demand for a film in their area, screen a film and share their revenue with the filmmaker. We’ve developed this model with Arin’s experience of self distribution in mind and believe that this site can not only change the way that filmmakers distribute their films but also help make independent film production a sustainable enterprise. The key to OpenIndie is that anyone can screen any film!

The science bit

From a development perspective the site is essentially, part social network, part twitter, part booking system, part calendar, part invitation / notification system. There are a lot of facets to this beast and we’re planning on collecting an astronomical amount of meta-data about each film. This makes building a site like this from the ground up a massively daunting process. Arin and I discussed using open source platforms like Wordpress MU coupled with Buddy Press to build this thing but ultimately nothing gave us the control we need. Obviously as I’m building this thing from scratch I want it to be as maintainable as possible so the obvious way to go is a MVC framework. But what language. Now, I’ve got almost 11 years experience bashing the keys in the name of PHP and all things MySQL so that was again the obvious choice. However, the decision wasn’t that simple. I did consider other languages. I’m by no means a evangelical PHP developer, I am what you might call language agnostic. It really doesn’t matter to me what you build something in as long as it’s the right tool for the job and it’s open source. I don’t wanna pay for support or my framework thanks Microsoft .NET MVC

Anyway, I quickly discounted Python because of a simple lack of knowledge but I did spend some time playing with Ruby on Rails, experimenting with building the kind of code that’d need to be integral to OpenIndie. I found Rails extremely quick to develop with and I was learning Ruby at a good speed too. However, overall I knew building the site in anything other than PHP would mean a learning curve that I couldn’t afford on a one-man development project. So PHP it is, Zend Framework to be precise. I can’t tell you that I considered Cake or CodeIgniter or Syphony before making my choice because I simply think that Zend Framework is so elegant, robust and consistent that there was no other choice for me. If you’re interested in learning more about the development of OpenIndie and following my exploits on my three month roller coaster, you should check out our blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.

100 trail blazing filmmakers

I have spent almost fifteen years of my life learning about film and web development / hosting. My passions have collide and become OpenIndie. I am determined to make this site a reality and contribute to the change happening in the independent film world. Our time is precious and it is time that I used my technical skills to make a difference to an art form that I love. Please consider helping Arin and I making this a reality by either donating whatever you can afford to our Kickstater campaign or if you are a filmmaker by becoming one of our 100 pioneering filmmakers ready to embrace modern cinema. Here’s the deal: as part of our Kickstarter campaign, we’re looking for 100 filmmakers to donate $100 each and in return you will become the first, the very first, 100 films featured on openindie.com. You will be given the opportunity to add information about your film, a poster image, and trailer etc. then you will be asked to upload any list of fans you have already gathered. Ideally these would have email addresses and zip codes included because then, our system can pre-register those users for our invite only beta launch. This means that if you’re one of the first 100 filmmakers, your film is featured and your current fan base, along with those of the other 99 filmmakers, can start requesting your film in their area and putting on user-generated screenings straight out of the gate. Brilliant!

But, that’s not all. The lucky 100 will also get one hour of Arin Crumley’s time. This time gives you unique access to a filmmaking and self-distribution talent who has been there and done it. Ask him whatever you want. Get advice. Get a reality check. Get confident. Whatever you need, he’s yours for an hour either via telephone or face to face in NYC or San Franciso. Arin and I are determined to make OpenIndie happen, please take some time to watch our Kickstarter video and donate whatever you can.

Check out the inspiration and research blog on Tumblr

Photo rights attributed to: Wiesmier on Flickr. Entitled: The Levels

More information coming soon…