Chris Rickard

The word focus evokes such corny overly-blogged emotions in me. From sleezy SEO marketers, to sage like though leaders - focus is a drum that is repeatidly beaten, and I guess there is good reason for that.

Now I’m not a focus champion. People don’t laugh about me for my lack of focus, but at the same time I have not won any trophies, ribbons, or pats on the back for my mad focus skills. It’s something I am going to change.. well not the trophy & ribbon part… I am pretty sure they don’t exist.

I do feel confident getting from A to Z - and even more so if there is pressure. I work well under time constraints, and when a lot is riding on my shoulders. Funny hey? Even this morning I am packing up my possessions to move to Sydney for 3 months to work on my Startup - and I have only just packed. I knew that I would be more efficient, effective and focused within the last few hours.

Now I’m sure this is common - but I do feel it’s an easy excuse. Laziness. Wait until you have to do it, because you have no other choice. I have been fine with this for 29 years, but it’s starting to irk me.

Startups have a nice way of flooring you. No one - except maybe your co-founder(s) - is going to dangle that carrot in front of your face. And really, that is not your co-founder(s) job. Even worse, you will have to choose from hundreds, possibly thousands of carrots that you are constantly dangling in front of your own face. So clarity and focus are more important than ever.

I am attempting to debug myself.. let’s start with focus.

“Every year thosands of great movies are made - but only a fraction of them ever make it to the big screen. The problem is they never find a home.”

Prescreen is an exciting new website providing curated social discovery of new films. A video-on-demand platform, specifically designed to promote and showcase premium video content.

Everyday, Prescreen features a new indie film on their website & email list. If you find that film interesting - you can click through to watch the trailer. If you then feel you want to watch the whole thing - you can stream it for just $4 (on that first day). The film is available on the website for 60 days - but for the remaining 59 days the film will cost $8 to watch - so Prescreen is rewarding early watchers with a 50% discount. Great idea.

Once you have purchased the film you have 48 hours to finish watching it - so you don’t have to worry if you get interrupted part-way through.

Overall, I think Prescreen is a great idea. DVD sales are dropping, and people are growing wearier of TV advertising. Film distribution needs to be brought into 2012, and anything that helps the discovery and distribution of indie films is a win in my books.

And even better? Filmmakers share in the profiles their films make.

Checkout Prescreen - at http://prescreen.com

Great piece about new digital filmmaking, vs classic photochemical techniques.

iPhones, iPads, iPods, and Macbooks - seeing an iDevice in a TV show or movie nowadays is certainly not out of place - in fact - in the young-teen market it is almost mandatory.

But unlike other products, Apple states they have never paid a cent for advertising in TV or movies. Where other brands pay the big bucks, Apple sits back, focusing on their product and brand, and Hollywood comes to them with open arms.

In 2011 iDevices were shown or discussed in close to 900 productions (30% more than 2010). 40% of films that topped the weekly box office, are included in this figure. Even the most common brands (Dell, Chevy, Ford) don’t have this production penetration - and they will pay for it.

And one of Apples most viral placements? Their luminous Apple logo on the back of their Macbooks. Perfectly placed (and flipped) to appear upright when on film.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com

Wil Wheaton (from Stand by Me fame!) has a great post about the usefulness of BitTorrent. Fast, distributed downloading of files - any file - not just shaky cam rips of the latest super hero movie.

Amazing - the story of how Pixar almost lost Toy Story 2 to a bad backup.

From being in software development for over 10 years - I can tell you, nothing makes you tighten your backup procedure like  failed backup disaster!

Two heads are better than one right? Well billions of heads, located all around the world are even better… Especially if those heads find your head interesting, and have wallets.

Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are two examples of popular crowd-funding websites that are shaking up the world of fundraising.  No longer are inventors, filmmakers, or anyone else with an idea forced to don a suit and sell their soul to investors. Investors who may or may not even actually care about their product.

Crowd-funding connects those who share a passion and allows them to fund their passion. Want to see that nifty iPad case get created? You can help with that. Dig the look of that film and would love to actually watch it someday? You can help with that too.

Crowd-funded films made up 10% of the total entries into Sundance this year. That’s 14 films that were funded by faceless allies, brought together through the internet by a shared passion - and all willing to invest in a film made by a person they have never met.

In the last three years Kickstarter & IndieGoGo alone have helped over 4,600 films raise the funding they need. That’s over $42 million dollars raised! And it’s growing at an incredible rate.

In an age where interconnectivity is taken for granted, the term ‘crowd’ is becoming a common prefix. Crowd-funded, crowd-sourced, crowd-curated.  The crowds are the connections -and crowd-sourced capital is just the tip of the iceberg.

The ‘crowd collective’ will apply to film in many ways in the coming years, and it’s an exciting time to be part of that crowd.

Create your daily callsheets faster than ever before.  Big statement you say?  We’re pretty confident that our new addition of callsheet creation to Setkick is faster and easier than any other alternatives out there.

You hardly have to lift a finger.  We automatically detect the daily weather, the address of the closest hospital, and (if you have broken everything down for that day) we populate all the cast, crew, and elements that are required for that day.  All you have to do is enter call times, special instructions, walkie channels, and you’re done!

You can preview your call sheet as a PDF, and when it’s looking perfect - simply click ‘Publish’ and then ‘Save’.  Your callsheet is now available to download by all members of your project - or if you prefer - you can easily email the PDF to your cast and crew, just in time for tomorrows shoot.

As a mixture of film & tech - the Setkick team is particularly interested in Y-Combinator’s request for new startups to Kill Hollywood.

Now this doesn’t mean destroy all films, or burn all clapperboards - YC is asserting that the traditional Hollywood models of studio-dominance, distribution, and political power is dying out. It’s time for new blood to step up and put it out of it’s misery - not *just* because it’s time for it to go, but also so that on Hollywood’s way out it doesn’t continuously resort to acts like SOPA in order to maintain it’s old business model.

Y-Combinator’s “Kill Hollywood” stance is not just an everyday blog post. It’s much more powerful than that.

YC holds a lot of sway in the tech and startup community, and when they release a ‘Request for Startups’ it means they are actively looking to fund startups that focus on this niche.  When this request happens, techies/entrepreneurs everywhere put down their phones and take notice.

It’s safe to say there are now hundreds of people around the world thinking - and acting on - new ways to “kill Hollywood”… and get funded by YC.

We have always felt there is a new wave passing over Hollywood, and it is refreshing to hear others talk about how they too see the old ways of the industry are less and less sustainable, and how it needs to be shaken up.

Setkick is focusing on project management for productions, and in this niche alone there are many processes that need to be looked at again with some modern objectivity.  We are not trying to replace 100 years worth of scheduling and production processes; we are simply trying to bring them up to speed, and take advantage of the technologies we have today.  Setkick increases the efficiency of these processes and creates the ability to collaborate on them by leveraging the cloud, and deploying this information to mobile devices.

The digital and mobile paradigm is opening the doors to a new breed of filmmaking.  ”Crowd-sourcing”, “crowd-funding”, “cloud-based” and “mobile computing” are no longer just buzzwords for the tech industry.

Setkick is very happy to announce that we have been accepted into Startmate - an amazing Sydney based incubator. Startmate is co-op of sorts, providing mentorship from 25 of the smartest guys in Australia & the world. They accept a small bunch of startups each year (8 this round), providing free office space for 3 months, weekly meetings with the mentors, and some seed funding to help us do what we do best - Setkick.

So tomorrow the Setkick team are jumping on a plane to Sydney, and embarking on 3 epic months of customer & product development. We plan on getting a lot of great features out the door very soon, and also putting a focus on customer feedback and requests.

We will be learning all we can from those that have walked this path before, and focusing 100% on making SK the best possible tool it can be.

With a flurry of excitement to rival the greatest of blockbuster movie releases - last week we creaked open the floodgates, and trickled private beta access to Setkick - to 70 willing and waiting filmmakers.

We have much love for our beta bud’s! And as both software engineers - as well as filmmakers - we know that a beta version of a product is a fine art. Balancing both the crux of the product, with glimpses of what is just around the corner.

A fledgling about to take flight, and we are excited to fly with you guys…

Well that got very philosophical all of a sudden… and on a less sentimental note, here is our lovely new logo!

Great question! We are just finishing off the final 2 of our initial features:

1. Customizable Calendars
2. Reports

Being able to customize your working week is a must for any film - 5 day, 6 day weeks, holidays, travel times - all this needs to be taken into account when calculating a schedule for shooting, or generating daily reports.

On reports, that is the other half of what we are finishing up. Fully customisable reports, viewable on the web or downloadable in PDF format. For distribution to crew, or simply just to print and put on your fridge - reporting on your project is the final output of managing a visual production through Setkick, and the circle is complete!

(on the right is a preview of the dialog for managing project calendars, and also a snippet of a ‘Day out of Days’ report - showing what Cast members are working on what days)

Learning has never been so much fun! We are currently undertaking alpha testing with Setkick. At the risk of sounding like a doting parent: it is akin to watching you baby walk for the first time.

Along with remote alpha testing, we are also doing a lot of ‘hands on’ testing - where we are physically in a room with the user, recording both a screencast, and a video of their behaviour/expressions etc.

Watching people use Setkick is so telling, and watching people’s responses who use sub-optimal alternatives on a daily basis (e.g excel spreadsheets & email) is heartwarming.

One very cool side effect of using Setkick on an iPad, is that there is no longer any need to print things out such as the production schedules, production reports, or daily callsheets.

in 1993, Sony pictures alone consumed over 103 million sheets of paper, 700 million sheets of paper per year, in the US alone*… now that’s a lot of paper.

* Source:  ’Sustainability in the Motion Picture Industry’ report by UCLA institute of environment.

As we are buried deep in programming land at the moment, all our blog posts are very geek-centric (but to be honest… most of Setkick is a bunch of geeks anyways).

We are edging super close to our alpha testing, and will probably be unveiling Setkick in all it’s early-alpha-glory to a bunch of lovely Vancouverites in the coming week.

Personally, im super excited about any type of *real* feedback. (This is may change if they all hate it of coarse) - but I know how important it is to build what your customers want - not what you think they want. So lets wait and see… 

Creating a piece of software, especially a large(ish) one - is certainly a journey.

When Setkick was just an seed, it was a simple, straight to the point idea. A small idea that would fill a big need.

After what seemed like thousands of hours of discussions, planning, wire framing, and mockups - the seed became larger. It was hard to imagine that our initial ‘small seed’ was going to be enough. good enough, valuable enough. But it was also hard to know when to stop it growing, when enough really is enough.

Analogies and late night ramblings aside - we now have a firm idea of what ‘enough’ actually is in terms of Setkick. Where we will be with our Alpha version (launching in a few weeks), with the Beta version - and what we want version 1 to look like.

After a stupid amount of hours writing lines of code, and drawing things - we now have a far clearer vision on what is hopefully the first few steps in this journey…

We just completed our first Setkick Camp ever last weekend and it was glorious. A full weekend of Coding and Styling, from early in the morning until late at night, the last push to our Alpha release. We got tones of work done and we’ve never been so close to be ready to show you something. It’s looking really good and we are all excited to invite our first round of beta users. Stay tuned!

Photo caption: Brian, one of our coders, eats ridiculous amounts of Muesli and yogurt. The angle of the photo doesn’t do it justice, but trust me - its about 8kg worth ;)

Classic Setkick work session :) 

This weekend we pushed live our “Signup for Beta” Page. We’re really excited for filmmakers to have the chance to try out our app and help us make a better product before we officially launch it.  Our development team is hard at work and we’re hoping to release the first iteration of our app in the very near future.

Head over to http://setkick.com/ and signup now to be one of the first users to try out this incredibly new and powerful production tool!