The Workbook Project, Lance Weiler’s “open source” media collaboration platform pulled off its third outstanding DIY days event in NYC yesterday. I’ll be posting some great links, thoughts and feedback this week on what I’ve learned, but here’s one for tonight: a spinoff of the WB project has developed this award-winning 3 minute documentary series: RADAR. Check it out.

This is just one of their outstanding pieces:

With the whole media world rushing pell-mell into the “online viewing experience” you’ve got to wonder who’s minding the cash drawer. We all love the free media, but how is quality programming going to get funded? It’s not apparently, if we are looking from money from the best looking, smartest video site in the pack – Hulu.

clipped from www.businessinsider.com

Hulu Can Barely Cover Its Bandwidth Bills

Michael Learmonth | Mar. 30, 2010, 8:57 AM

We're going bankrupt, but it's cool!

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Hulu is everyone’s favorite provider of TV on the web, but it’s facing an ideological battle over its future. On one side are its network backers, which would like Hulu to become a paid service. On the other is the advertising community, which would like to keep Hulu free as a test-bed for new targeted-ad formats that can’t be skipped.

Hulu is feeling pressure from its partners to erect a pay wall which would allow the web video provider to get some of the cable programming it covets, such as ‘The Daily Show’ which Viacom pulled off the service last month. ctd..

Scott Kirstner’s book on creating a fanbase in the web 2.0 world is available here till the end of SxSW festival.

A couple great sites that have come into their own in the last two years:

The Workbook Project is an online collaboration that studies, discusses and creates the next generation of multi-platform independent media.

Massify is a filmmaker, actor, producer online community with some pretty big partners (Lionsgate, Killer Films, etc.)

D-word is a documentary specific forum for fans and creators.

Here’s an unsophisticated, but thorough list of documentary resources.

Finally, this is afilm and video finder that links to eight of the most significant educational doc distributors.

Click the pic to see the whole gallery.

Raging at Red's in SB... Brewce & Dave Reul of the Skatanic Rednecks

The Santa Barbara Independent wrote us up and interviewed Brewce last week. Check out what the “indy press” thinks about hillbilly anarchists.

Remy Stratton came up from the wilds of Orange County to experience the good life in SB… check it out here.Enjoy!

How can something created in 1976 still seem as if it were created last night?

Great stuff – Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network:

Mad As Hell! Kinetic Typography from Aaron Leming on Vimeo.

Check out this write upon our film in the Amsterdam Event Guide:

The single most common question that independent producers ask me in my role at Mountain Lake PBS (after learning that we don’t have the resources to fund outside projects – even the most promising) is where they can raise their production funding. The answers is that they have to do it the same difficult way we do at PBS: apply for grants, approach sponsors (underwriters in PBS-speak), consider “crowd funding”, get a bank loan, look for tax credits, etc.

But in each of these cases, the filmmakers will have to consider what it is the funders are looking for. Many a relationship between funder and filmmaker has foundered on mis-understanding. A new project hopes to layout a lot of misconceptions for media makers before things go off the rails. Check out The Prenups. Excellent work that every filmmaker should read. You can download the 2 page summary Matchmaker Guide for the Cliff Notes version

The open source world is great. Check this out: The Documentary Film Makers Handbook There is tons of great stuff to be found here. Page 323, for instance has a list of all the major international doc markets.