From Subway to a million followers
The clipping economy explained, IMAX explores a sale weeks after Disney launched a competitor, and Netflix cut its Q1 movie output in half.
Hi everyone —
Happy Wednesday.
Will you be at Cine Gear Expo LA? We’ll be demoing Eddie AI at booth S1611 (Stage 16). Meet us and book a meeting.
Yesterday we publicly launched Logging v2 where you now provide Eddie AI with context about the edit project so it better logs and organizes your interviews and B-roll, creating the bins and stringouts of clips that you most want. We also added support for backgrounder docs, 20 hours of interview material, and B-roll logging for stills.
Enjoy today’s newsletter.
—Shamir
Also this week:
Alamo Drafthouse is now screening indie animated shorts before features nationwide, Radio Silence is directing a Choose Your Own Adventure movie, short stories posted to Reddit are getting seven-figure studio deals and Seattle’s largest IMAX screen is dropping feature films entirely.
Netflix cut its movie output to the lowest Q1 since 2018. Just 23 original films in the first quarter, down from 50 in 2022. The strategy is explicit: fewer films, bigger swings, more international. Greta Gerwig’s Narnia is the tentpole with a Tarantino sequel with Brad Pitt in development too.
Alamo Drafthouse is screening indie animated shorts before feature films. Animation Nights New York is curating the selections — no ads, no trailers, just short-form animation on the big screen. First up is Buzzkill, playing before Obsession at Alamo locations nationwide. One of the only theatrical distribution paths for independent animation outside the festival circuit.
Radio Silence is directing a Choose Your Own Adventure movie for 20th Century. The script is by Tom Bissell, who won a WGA Award for Andor and co-wrote The Disaster Artist. The interactive book series sold 250 million copies. No plot details yet, but the team behind Ready or Not adapting a branching-narrative format feels right.
Short stories are Hollywood’s hottest format. A profile of Scott Glassgold, who pivoted from repping sci-fi proof-of-concept shorts to representing self-published authors posting stories to Reddit. Several seven-figure deals later, the pipeline from Reddit post to studio acquisition is real and accelerating.
Films are more likely to star a man named Chris than a woman over 60. A UK study found six of the top 100 grossing films over three years had a male lead named Chris. Five had a female lead over 60. Emma Thompson: “So where are the stories about us?”
Seattle’s Boeing IMAX Theater is dropping feature films. The 80-foot, six-storey screen is the largest in Washington state and will only show documentaries going forward after the Space Needle purchased the venue. “The economics of operating a movie theater have become increasingly challenging.”
Netflix acquired The Black Ball for the US. The Spanish-language Cannes competition film that received a 20-minute standing ovation, the longest of the festival. Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close in supporting roles. A queer epic spanning three periods of Spanish history connected by the works of Federico García Lorca.
The clipping economy is eating everything
The NPR recently profiled a 25-year-old in Belgium who quit his Subway job to clip other people’s content full-time. Emrah Bayraktar takes long-form interviews, cuts them into short-form snippets, posts them to Instagram, and earns money through affiliate links and view-based bounties.
He went from making $12 one night to $2,500 two weeks later. Now he runs six clipping pages with over a million combined followers and teaches others how to do the same.
He’s not alone.
There are now entire marketplaces where agencies upload content and let anyone clip it for cash. Recent bounties include a dollar per thousand views for MLB game clips and $25 per thousand views for clips promoting an AI startup.
The pitch to brands is this: why spend money on Meta ads when you can flood social media with clips through a network of freelance clippers instead?
The implications for filmmakers and creators are worth sitting with.
The measure of success is no longer how many people watch your work, it’s how many people saw the clips. NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway’s podcast co-host Ed Elson discovered this firsthand when strangers started recognising him on the street.
They’d seen his clips but never watched his podcast.
This is the logical endpoint of what platforms have been optimising for. Attention measured in seconds, not minutes. A three-hour interview becomes twenty 90-second clips, each stripped of context, each competing for a scroll-stopping thumbnail.
The person who made the original content gets reach. The clipper gets paid. The viewer gets a fragment. Nobody gets the whole thing.
For anyone making long-form content; documentaries, podcasts, interviews, video essays etc the question becomes whether the clip is now the product and the original is the raw material nobody watches.
IMAX is exploring a sale. They’ve approached entertainment companies as potential buyers, according to the Wall Street Journal. The process is early and may not lead to a deal. IMAX’s domestic box office market share hit a record 5.2% last year. Weeks after Disney launched Infinity Vision to compete with it.
Panasonic’s new LUMIX L10 is already overwhelmed by preorders. The compact camera with a 20.4MP sensor and Leica-designed 24-75mm zoom lens is causing delivery delays in Japan before it’s even shipped. Panasonic says demand is “greatly exceeding expectations.” Whether the delays hit worldwide remains to be seen.
DJI is ending support for the Osmo Mobile 3 and OM 4 in August. Both gimbals stopped production in 2021 so this isn’t a surprise. Your gimbal won’t stop working but won’t get tech support either. DJI’s current range starts at $99 for the Osmo Mobile 7P if you need a replacement.
This week we’re watching:
A deep dive by Synthet into the origins of every meme sound effect you’ve heard a thousand times but never questioned.
A sad trombone that traces back to vaudeville and a plunger mute on the end of a bell. An anime “wow” from a 1990 Konami arcade game called Parodius. The Vine boom is a sledgehammer hitting an iron door, recorded in 2012 by a sound company called Blue Zone and degraded through years of MP3 compression.
Twelve minutes of sound archaeology that’ll make you hear your timeline differently.
Retail Therapy: The editing console for your other hand
The XPPen Pilot Pro is a one-handed editing controller with a joystick, dials, and enough buttons to map 100+ commands across Premiere, Resolve, or whatever your NLE of choice is. Colour wheel grading without modifier keys. Variable-speed playback with a flick of the joystick. Custom themes so you can organise your shortcuts however your brain works, which for most editors is chaotically.
What your other hand is doing while this one handles the timeline is entirely your business.
At $209, it’s cheaper than most pieces of kit that promise to speed up your workflow and actually might. Not revolutionary, but the kind of tool that quietly saves you twenty minutes a session until you can’t imagine editing without it.
Available at xp-pen.com.