BRIGHT IDEAS
T HE HINK ANK
T H E E V O L U T I O O F B R I G H T I D E A F R O M C U R A T O T O L A B O R A T O R
N S R Y
BY JA M E S KAE L AN
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ISSUE No. 5
On August 14, 2013, six weeks after starting at Seed&Spark, I sent an email to our CEO, and BRIGHT IDEAS’ future publisher, Emily Best. In it I laid out a patently insane idea: What if our fledgling startup, at a time when we hardly had the money to cover payroll, launched an aggressively independent print publication about American film? “To build a community of innovators,” I posited, “we will profile the people innovating in accordance with our values. We will create genuinely cool, vital, and intelligent content, for and about the people we want to read our work—and with whom we want to work.” When Harold Ross defined The New Yorker in his 1925 prospectus, he asserted that his magazine would “print facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal nor sensation for the sake of sensation.” In other words, The New Yorker would cover what its editors and writers felt deeply interested in investigating, and its readers would read it because, in short order, they would grow to trust the taste and ethics of the staff. “Covering Avatar, or even Marion Cotillard,” I echoed in my email to Best, “is perhaps the best way to sell magazines—in the short run. But it’s also the least sustainable method, because that’s what everyone else is doing. Instead, we will use our magazine to sell the people inside it, not the people inside it to sell our magazine.” The strain of idealism Ross first articulated, and that I was parroting, flushes the cheeks and raises the pulse. But it is also tends to empty bank accounts. Nonetheless, when Best responded to my email, she wrote: “I have reread this, like, four times—including out loud to my mom. Let’s do it!” To a number of our investors, and even a few founding employees of the company, her enthusiasm smacked of impulsiveness. But what Best identified in my email that instilled in her the confidence to, quite literally, risk Seed&Spark to make a print magazine, was that we weren’t making a print mag-
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BRIGHT IDEAS
azine: We were launching a think tank. In the summer of 2013, less than a year after our site went live, we were only just coming to the realization that Seed&Spark was an independent film ecosystem. We already had empirical proof that our core competency, crowdfunding, provided diligent creators a path to financing. We had, in a sense, solved funding. But crowdfunding is only sustainable in the long term if filmmakers can hold onto, and grow, their crowd. To
Digital Bolex, we fused print and video with “Alphaville: A Remix,” a feminist redux of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville that existed as both a photo spread, and a Slamdancepremiering short film. As of our fourth issue, we’d embarked on theorizing about, and producing, Virtual Reality content. We helped Janicza Bravo, who graced the cover of BRIGHT IDEAS no. 4, create a VR experience that premiered as part of Sundance’s 10th anniversary New
develop a true ecosystem, in which creators and audiences coexist and co-sustain, we somehow needed to test out, publicly and transparently, a series of wild ideas and approaches. If Seed&Spark was the factory, BRIGHT IDEAS needed to be the R&D department. Even in our first issue, beginning with Meredith Danluck’s still-image film, “Idol Killer,” we were experimenting with the commissioning, production, and dissemination of narratives. In our second issue we pushed the concept further by giving our cover subject, Ana Lily Amirpour, a budget—and creative carte blanche—to tell a visual story in print. (Her “We Watched This Girl Die In the Most Public Place in America and All We Did Was Take Her Picture,” featuring A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night star Sheila Vand as a woman disintegrating in Times Square, is one of the strangest, most gruesome, and most powerful things we’ve published.) By our third issue, with the support of
Frontiers program in January, and made another immersive film, “The Visitor” (p. 28) that bowed at Slamdance 2016. Now with our fifth issue, as we enter 2016, we’re thrilled to announce the next logical step in our evolution as Seed&Spark’s incubator for innovation in independent film: BRIGHT IDEAS Pictures. As the theatrical and digital distribution arm of our company, BRIGHT IDEAS Pictures will release up to four films per year, beginning with Natalie Johns’ documentary, I Am Thalente: the Audience Award-winner from the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival, one of the most successful campaigns to ever crowdfund on Seed&Spark, and most crucially, a harrowing film about the ascent of a homeless skateboarder from the streets of Cape Town. Our goal is to help bring crowdfunded films made in accordance with our values of diversity, gender parity, and narrative innovation to the audiences hungry to see them. And we’re going to be as transparent as we
possibly can about what we learn from this process. Because ultimately, the goal of Seed&Spark and BRIGHT IDEAS isn’t to establish a new hierarchical system where we choose what succeeds. Our goal is to experiment, study our successes and failures, and pass that information on to our community. True independence isn’t about reconsolidating power and influence. It’s about keeping the power in the hands of the creators themselves. In a truly sustainable independent film ecosystem—where filmmakers can access capital and audiences through crowdfunding, and then distribute their films to those audiences without acquiescing their ownership—someone must constantly challenge the citizenry to stay ambitious. If Seed&Spark is the great leveler of independent film, giving content creators the tools to build their careers without having to ask permission, BRIGHT IDEAS is the experimental laboratory hell bent on fostering innovation and excellence. And if our integrity should remain above suspicion, you the filmmakers and audiences powering this new generation of storytelling, must keep us honest, and demand of us an insoluble sincerity and transparency. We’re taking this shit seriously, and we know you are, too.
“Art is the bullet of democracy, and the people the powder. But the press aims the gun.” Anastasio Sevilla 4