Minimum Noise Sponsors Toronto Youth Shorts

We are happy to sponsor The Toronto Youth Shorts Film Festival.
Good luck to all the contestants!

The Essentials of Scoring Film

… Traditionally, films are scored after a great deal of the movie has been shot, though some composers may begin work after previewing a few sample scenes. The director and the musician collaborate on the score style in the process known as “spotting.”
Preliminary work involves using MIDI mock ups of cues and themes.
The music is composed for orchestra and then performed by the conductor…

Read the rest of the article here: The Essentials of Scoring Film

Transfer Area and Pre-payment

I am really happy to announce this one.

The number one request that we have had for a while has definitely for us to handle the transactions between project owners and winners.
We do that now. When a winner is selected, a transfer is created, where the winner can upload the original files and approve. When the project owner approves as well, the files are unlocked for download and the winner receives the money.
Currently, we encourage PayPal for the transfer but if you ask really nicely, we can figure something out. This will change in the future, but then, we might also implement support for other money services like MoneyBookers if the demand is strong enough.

The other change is that projects now have to be pre-paid. You cannot create a project without transfering the prize money to us. This is a way to signal that you are serious about the project. Of course, we have the 100% money back guarantee if you are not happy with the results.

Submission Elimination, License Models and Great Music!

This week has been pretty hectic for us – The Minimum Noise project for TumbleBall has become really popular,
attracting more submissions than we are used to.

This means that right after I was done implementing our new license model choices, I had to start optimizing the pages in order to handle the sudden load on our servers. For a start, project owners can now eliminate submissions that they know are not going to win. This will also help them keep track of things a bit.

I have to say that I am in awe over the quality of the tracks that are being submitted though – really good stuff! It seems that both Graphicster and Minimum Noise attract extraordinary talent!

Create Graphicster Projects for Free!

We have been a bit quiet about this as we don’t want to encourage too many spammers and other .. well interesting people.
But, for a limited time and in order to gain some momentum, creating projects on Graphicster is free. You still have to pay the winning artist of course, unless you happen to have a particularly interesting project in which case we might even sponsor it for you (contact me for details about this).

Private Messages

This one has been on the task list for some time – I finally got around to it. Until now, sending a private message to another member would only result in an email being sent but there is now a proper message system. The implementation is still a little rough but it does the job.

We’re all in Marketing Now

In an interview by Derek Sivers, Seth Godin talks about what musicians can do to make it in this world where the music industry is revolting. “Very good music is unheard every day, because very good music is not in short supply.” This article about the trend for film music makers points out at least one area where it’s very clear. In general, all of us who work with data – musicians, designers, writers as well as programmers have suddendly have found ourselves competing with the entire rest of the world. Basically, the supply is in an entirely different league now. The same has happened to the demand obviously, but if you live in a first world country, this development is not to your advantage.

So what do you do to survive? You have to stand out – you’re in marketing now. Personal branding should be on your agenda.

I intend to write about this topic quite a bit but for now, here are a couple of resources that you should check out no matter what your industry is:
Seth’s Blog
Derek Sivers’ Music Marketing Advice book
Music Marketing – Gen-Y Rock Stars

..and if you want the firehose, subscribe to these: AdAge Power150

Twitter Accounts

If you are on Twitter, follow us on @minimumnoise and @graphicster. You can also follow me personally if you should be interested in my personal stream of ramblings and non-insight: @kristiandupont 🙂

See you there!

Pre-paid Projects and Deadlines

A popular request has always been for project dealines and the possibility of pre-paid projects.
These two features are implemented and have been running for a while. There is a default deadline of two weeks after the project has been approved. In the future, it will be possible to choose other project lengths, but two weeks seems reasonable for now.
This means that all the old projects on Minimum Noise have been closed, but this is alright for they had no activity anyway.

We are communicating with a number of producers from various industries who are interested in trying out these platforms, so we expect to see some interesting proejcts soon. Stay tuned!

Ratings System

We are discussing how to make the best rating system for MN and G here:
http://www.graphicster.com/ForumPosts.aspx/29

There are lots of sites that have systems in place (a star-ratings system is common), but I have never felt that they worked completely as intended. I would love any sort of feedback on how to improve this.