By Mike Johnston

This week, when I saw Jamin and Kiowa Winans of Double Edge Films sending out excited messages on Twitter to the effect that their movie Ink had been ripped and uploaded to Pirate Bay I was intrigued. I guess I was just sort of programmed by negative publicity to see sites like Pirate Bay as a bad thing. On the other hand, once I thought about it, I could certainly see the exposure potential of putting a project in front of the 140 million users of bittorrent sites worldwide. So I put my show up on Pirate Bay to see what would happen. In two days views of the show on its home page tripled.

It is more tricky for a movie though, since a movie is much more of a one shot deal than a weekly TV show. Most people will see a film once, maybe twice if they really like it and maybe buy the DVD if they really, really like it whereas a TV show needs to attract and hold repeat viewers. From that perspective the major studios and probably most indie filmmakers see a pirated film as lost revenue and so bittorrent remains pretty much unexplored territory in relation to positive outcomes.

Kiowa and Jamin on the other hand seem to be approaching the issue from a different perspective. I wanted to get their views on what is happening with their film and spoke to Jamin about it.

Click this link  to continue reading the story on the Filmmaker Magazine site:

http://filmmakermagazine.com/webexclusives/2009/11/indie-film-ink-pirated-filmmakers.php

To go directly to the film's website click here:

http://www.doubleedgefilms.com/