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Inventor of the Online Film Festival
A Conversation with ClickFlick's Michael Perry
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| ClickFlick's Michael Perry |
There aren't too many peaks in
the motion picture world that Michael Perry hasn't scaled.
After attending film school, Perry began directing television
commercials. From there, he launched a lengthy and successful
career as a music producer. And in 2000, he stuck a flag atop
the Internet with his company, ClickFlick. Launched in May of
2000, ClickFlick.tv is proving to be one of the most heavily traveled
movie sites on the World Wide Web. The site boasts approximately
one million hits per month. Here, Perry talks with MovieMaker about the philosophy of the site and the future of the Internet
as it pertains to moviemaking.
Jennifer Wood (MM): ClickFlick was launched
in May of 2000, but the idea came about much earlier. Give us
a brief timeline for the site.
Michael Perry (MP): I met Rus Reinsel, who is a producer for UPN right now, when he was working on Roseanne. We got to be good friends and thought about this whole Internet thing. It took us three years to plan it all out and figure out what the direction would be. In the beginning nobody had broadband, and what you saw on the Internet was just horrible. So we just waited it out.
MM: What was it about the Internet that interested you most?
MP: The exhibition opportunities. Before then, it was hard to see short films unless you were at a festival. The possibility of exhibiting the stuff that we enjoyed, without having to go directly through television, really interested us. Plus, of course, it's pretty much the future of exhibition.
MM: So ClickFlick applies a film festival philosophy to the Internet. How does that work?
MP: We run awards twice a year, in October and April, and each film gets a 60-day voting period. The reason we did the "festival" is become nobody else was doing that. AtomFilms, Shortbuzz (which is no longer) and a couple other sites were distributors. We didn't go that route because we felt that, eventually, if the distribution thing didn't work that well, filmmakers wouldn't want to send their films in. A lot of them would get caught. With ClickFlick, you can remove your film at any time--even within the 60 days--for whatever reason. So we're no threat.
MM: Besides flexibility, what other ways does the festival format help moviemakers?
MP: One director took his feature film and edited into a short. It wasn't really a movie trailer, it was just a short version of his feature, called Laughing Boy. He toured it around to different festivals and used our site as a way for people to see the film. He eventually signed a distribution deal at a festival here in Santa Monica. He also advertised.
MM: Advertised?
MP: It costs very, very little for filmmakers to advertise on our site. He advertised on our site but provided a link to his own site, where you could find out more about the film and where it was playing.
MM: What's the typical cost if a moviemaker wants to advetise?
MP: It's as little as $75 to $100 per month.
MM: Take me through ClickFlick's submission process.
MP: It's very simple. Go to our site and click on the link that says ‘Submit Your Film.' The information we're asking for is incredibly basic. Because it's a new media festival, artists with electronic art may also enter. Enter the creator's name, a little bio, the name of the film and tell us what you shot and edited on, as that's very interesting to other filmmakers.
MM: And then what happens? You wait to hear whether or not your film has been accepted?
MP: We try to accept most films. There are some films that we haven't accepted, as they were more like home videos with no editing. Also, we don't accept movies that are incredibly violent. We've got action films and some violent stuff, but we won't accept anything that we don't think is good for the community.
MM: How do you decide the festival winners?
MP: Voting is done by our online audience. So that the voting is fair, we monitor these votes carefully. You can only post one vote a day, and we really monitor where these votes are coming from. We also have a jury that consists of two professors from USC, a producer from UPN, a film critic and then one of us.
MM: You mentioned how other, similar-minded companies have already gone out of business. Why do you think ClickFlick is still around?
MP: When we started this, we went to an entertainment company in LA and they gave us a lot of great advice. Basically, the other people aren't around because they borrowed millions of dollars. They did a lot great advertising, they got a lot of hits, but there was no way to make money. Our overhead is incredibly low, and we're not going away because of that.
MM: What are ClickFlick's plans for the future?
MP: We are doing an original series that is going to be on our site. It's an interactive series about a musical group that sells their soul to the devil in exchange for some hit songs. But the audience gets to pick which direction the characters go. Say there were three characters, the audience will be able to follow one of them and help them make choices. The choices that get the most votes will be the ones filmed. At the end of each ‘cycle', we're editing all those individual characters and choices into a show, and are working with a television company right now.
MM: That seems to be a fairly significant departure from the film festival.
MP: In the future, the festival may not be enough to attract people. What I foresee is that a big television network, for example, will go and start swooping up all these smaller sites that have good hits that they like and charge everyone $5 to enter their network that has all these 50,000 to 60,000 purchased sites. To look good to them, you'd need to have something more original than just the festival. That's what I think, but I don't know. Nobody knows.
MM: What are some of your favorite Websites?
MP: When people ask about books for the new digital revolution, we send them to Focal Press (www.focalpress.com) - they've got everything! Another site we really like is SoundDogs (www.sounddogs.com). They sell sound effects by the piece - and they're top-notch sound effects. And they only charge $5 to $10 per download.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Michael Faunce-Brown on 3/24/08 at 6:35 pm
Are you anything to do with ClickFlickLLD and Glen Cohen, please?
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