Movie maker embraces piracy
Independent film makers Jamin and Kiowa Winans anticipated that their film ‘Ink’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071804/) would be shared on torrent sites as a matter of course. What they didn’t expect was the overwhelming success their film has experienced as a result of the tremendous propagation ability of peer-to-peer.
Ink sat at number 4 on the top 10 list of the most pirated movies of the last week (http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Internet/10390.html).
Within 24 hours of being uploaded to trackers around the Web, the film had catapulted to number 16 on IMDb’s movie meter, shooting up by over 81 000% in popularity, making it one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world. This has bolstered sales of DVD and Blu-ray copies of the film.
“We’ve embraced the piracy and are just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure. We don’t know exactly where this will all lead, but the exposure is unquestionably a positive thing,” the Winans told TorrentFreak.
“We made this film on a budget of US$250 000 [±R1.84 million] and have fought to bring it to 15 [US] cities ourselves over the past ten months. Hollywood has claimed that they don’t know how to market the film or that it doesn’t have an audience, and what BitTorrent has done in the last four days is prove – unequivocally – that Hollywood is wrong,” said Kiowa Winans.
The Winans have publically expressed their thanks for the support that has been garnered for their film through to the file sharing community. In response to suggestions, they have established means of making donations through their online store (http://www.doubleedgefilms.com/), asking those who have watched and enjoyed the film to contribute what they can.
“We’re not looking to get rich, but would like to pay back our investors and the enormous amount of personal debt we’ve gone into making the film. We’re also not looking to make Hollywood films and plan on continuing the march of making fiercely independent films,” said Kiowa Winans.
“In order to do that we have to count on the power of the people, eyeballs all over the world and torrenters to throw our film a few bucks apiece. It’s the indie film model of the future and we appreciate each and every person who takes the time to watch our film. It appears we’re all rebels here, so let’s wave that flag proud,” Kiowa concluded.
Movies and piracy – discussion
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