Here's an excellent panel from this year's Sundance Film Festival, sponsored by Adobe and featuring Vincent Laforet, Rob Legato, Jacob Rosenberg, and Sharlto Copley. The 77-minute panel follows, in full, with some pulled quotes and highlights:

Here are some points and quotes I found especially worthwhile:

Vincent Laforet: "The cameras are out there, they're being used... let's move onto the next thing, and the interesting thing about technology is how filmmakers reach out to their audience, and social media, and different ways of distribution and connection."

Sharlto Copley: "Neil Blomkamp was a good example of... if you can do visual effects yourself, if you can composite, if you can do sound, if you can do everything, then you can force yourself into a position where people will notice you. You can't really worry about whether Hollywood is going to give you a crack or not."

Finally, you might have noticed that, with this website and Man-child, I've been pursuing exactly what Vincent Laforet talks about here:

You share what you do. You don't hide it, you don't horde it, we share as much of the process [as we can], because people get really interested, they learn a lot, it becomes a community, and it becomes [part of] the democratization of film... the hope is that someday, you can go back to that audience and... that it can lead to the connection at some point to help make the film better, either by donations or by people buying the film at a small price, as opposed to going begging to Hollywood, and having to adhere to their limitations, and rules, and marketing, etc. Every independent filmmaker wants to break the model -- we all want to find a way around the system.

Amen, brother.

[via FilmmakerIQ]