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A List of Film Collaboration Websites

LAST UPDATED 11/30/2009

It seems like I get a pitch in my inbox once a week for a website that allows filmmakers to collaborate or raise funds. In the interest of keeping them straight in my own head, I've decided to start a list. Here they are, in alphabetical order. Add the names of the many I've overlooked in the comments below.

Boolaka
boolaka.com

Booklaka is a Web 2.0 site that aims to be a one-stop shop: a social network, jobs board, fund raiser and web distribution platform. They have way too intrusive ads for my taste.

Craigslist
craigslist.org

Yes, I'm including this old standby. Why? Because, although it doesn't offer all the social media bells and whistles of other websites, it's a great way to crew a movie, or find used equipment. It definitely has the widest user base of any of these websites, and it is conveniently organized by geography.

Crews.TV
www.crews.tv

Readers outside the US should check out Crews.tv, a "boutique-like" social network for freelance film crews that has been operating in New Zealand for 10 years and just expanded to Australia, Asia and South Africa. They plan to add UK and Europe by the end of 2009. (U.S. is announced as "coming soon" on the website.) According to rep Yves Simard, you have to be vetted to join.

Eumagine Factory
eumagine.eu

This site bills itself as a watering hole for producers and editors, at least I think it does. The English on the site seems to be machine-translated. Also, the pages loaded slowly when I tried clicking around.

Film Annex
filmannex.com

"Film Annex is an online film distribution company and Web Television Network. Its mission is to finance the productions of independent filmmakers and the social responsibility projects of organizations through the use of its distribution technology." Distribution technology meaning an embeddable player that can also serve ads. In other words, it does what YouTube does, only more selectively. It seems like their terms are better than YouTube's Partner terms, but of course do your own due diligence. They also have a feature where you can have your own blog.

Five Sprockets
fivesprockets.com

Five Sprockets is a Web 2.0 offering that is designed explicitly for filmmakers. It has modules for collaborating on every aspect of production. I like that it feels more like software than 'Facebook-for-filmmakers.' You can read my initial assessment here.

Icewhole
icewhole.com

This site has a terrible name and wasn't even working when I went to check in on it. They do have a Facebook page, which convinces me I didn't invent the name in a terrible dream about a dictionary and a tornado. From the looks of it, they run competitions in addition to being a social networking site for filmmakers.

Kickstarter
kickstarter.com

This site gained prominence thanks to a nytimes.com mention, although it doesn't sound like their model is entirely solvent. Right now they are invitation only. So if they are around long enough for you to get in, it could be useful. One drawback is that the contributions your donors make through them are not tax-deductible, which can be a big incentive for people to give, but if your project is non-profit, you should be going through a non-profit anyway.

Mandy
mandy.com

Mandy seems to be one of the main production jobs boards, at least here in LA. They have a great user base of working professionals.

People Jar
peoplejar.com

People Jar aims to help people looking for people with specific talents. The example they give in a press release is "a blonde hair, brown eyed actor that lives in LA and knows how to scuba dive." I went to the site and searched for just that. I got 0 results. Maybe the site will get enough users for that fine-grained a search. Right now, it seems optimized for searching for actors by location and union affiliation, which is useful enough. It might work better as a Facebook or MySpace app -- someplace that already has a larger built-in user base.

ProductionHUB
productionhub.com

If Craigslist is too broad for you, you could use ProductionHUB to post and find crew. I've never heard of anyone using it - I think Mandy pretty much dominates this space.

Power Filmmaking
powerfilmmaking.com

This is a social network for filmmakers that seems to be in large part promotion for filmmaker Jason Tomaric's book and filmmaking tutorial videos. It doesn't have a large user base and had some kinks that still needed to be worked out last time I tried it. Still, registration is free and there is a lot of useful filmmaking information available after you register, so I might recommend it to beginners.

Put It On
putiton.com

I don't know anything about this site, which seems to be affiliated with New York Film Academy. They have an online festival, and it looks like they have ambitions to include artists from other media, such as musicians and fashion.

Shooting People
shootingpeople.org

This is not a website for people who like to hunt the most dangerous game, it's a social network for indie filmmakers. From what I can tell, they have a pretty active community, mostly European, especially UK. I get lots of emails from them which I quickly started to ignore which makes them a bit spammy. The site costs £30/yr to join but I don't remember paying any money so maybe it used to be free. They get funds from the UK Film Council which is a serious movie funding organization. There's a wealth of informational resources on the site (including access to David Lynch's famous weather reports) which makes the design a bit cluttered and they will host/stream your movie for you. I haven't gotten anything out of the site but I haven't put any time or effort into to trying to get anything out of the site.

Studio Beyond
studiobeyond.net

This is another site I heard about thanks to an email pitch. Their annoyingly Flash-heavy site makes big promises about "barrier-free access to industry executives and talent." I'll believe it when I see it.

Studio Path
studiopath.net

I got an email about this when I heard Tribe Hollywood was shutting down. I didn't dare click around the site -- it looked was too sketchy. They advertise a toolbar, a classic malware ploy. Um, no thanks.

Talenthouse
talenthouse.com

Talenthouse is not just limited to filmmakers, although they claim Fernando Meirelles (co-director, City of God) as a user. They aim to have musicians, photographers, fashion designers and artists as well. Don't know much beyond that other than it looks UK oriented and the main page is too busy for my taste.

Tribe Hollywood
tribehollywood.com

UPDATE: Tribe Hollywood has shut down and moved entirely to Facebook.

Tribe Hollywood has been around much longer than most of these sites. Way back in 2004, some NYU grads decided to start an industry networking site as a way to advance their careers. As an NYU grad, I'd like to be able to recommend the site, but I haven't gotten anything out of it other than a lot of spammy emails. I guess I could be sending spammy emails right back. The site is in need of a re-design to compete with all the uber-clean web 2.0 offerings. One advantage it has is that only real industry professionals are allowed to join, so it is smaller and more serious by design.

Unusuals
unusuals.net

As you can see from when I talked about this site earlier, their confused pitches didn't convince me to try a three month trial. They have a cute, clean design but it looks like the site would be dead in the water if LinkedIn added the ability to have reels. Does anybody pay to post their reel and resume? You could do it free with Vimeo and Blogspot.

Vimeo
vimeo.com

You may think of Vimeo primarily as a video hosting site. But they also have some social networking features and are more aggressive than YouTube in seeking out filmmakers and film artists (as opposed to people who upload videos of their cats). I like that you can add yourself to the credits of films to which you contributed. Although it's not built specifically for collaboration, the clean interface and social features make Vimeo a fun option.

Wreck A Movie
wreckamovie.com

A group of filmmakers in Finland created a platform so they could collaborate over the web to create a parody movie called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. They later decided to open up the platform. Wreck A Movie seems to have a pretty strong international user base, with a decided emphasis on computer effects specialists.

I have recently dipped my toe in the water with the site, and was able to find an enthusiastic effects artist to help me complete some green-screen and graphics work for a music video. The site can be a bit kludgy to use, and has severe limitations in sharing video files of reasonable sizes, but I have to give it a strong recommendation based on the users I've interacted with there so far.

YouTube
youtube.com

The 1,000 lb gorilla in the room. Bought out by Google, the web's most popular video site also includes some social networking-type features. I don't think they are as good as Vimeo at the social part as it relates to filmmakers, but they add features with such frequency, I wouldn't ever count them out.