Miami, FL — Sundance Institute and Knight Foundation announced today the first Artist Services workshop in Miami will take place this Saturday, October 25 at O Cinema Wynwood. Miami-area filmmakers are invited to attend the free day-long workshop and join industry experts in a critical conversation around creative financing, digital distribution, guerilla marketing and independent theatrical distribution.

Featured speakers include: Dennis Scholl (Knight Foundation), Straith Schreder (BitTorrent Inc), Jeremy Schwartz (SquareSpace), Emily Eddey (Light Iron), Toby Halbrooks (Producer, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), Jessica Jalsevac (Gumroad), James M. Johnston (Producer, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Listen Up Philip), and Yvonne Welbon (Producer, The New Black) as well as Sundance Institute staff. The event will be followed by a reception on site.

Since launching in 2011, Artist Services has helped to launch 120+ new and encore Sundance films into the digital marketplace and guided 200+ alumni artists with successful Kickstarter projects totaling over $8 Million. Artists whose work has been cultivated through the program include Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady (Detropia), Shane Carruth (Primer and Upstream Color) and Tiffany Shlain (Connected).

Select breakout sessions for the workshop include:

Finance and Fans: Every Kickstarter is a Story
• Dan Schoenbrun / Kickstarter
• Missy Laney / Sundance Institute

• The Artist Services team has helped raise over $8 million-dollars on Kickstarter and empowered more than 250 artists since launching in 2010. Sundance Institute staffer Missy Laney will show you the collective objective patterns of over 200 campaigns and what you can learn from them.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Digital Deliverables (But Were Afraid to Ask)
• Emily Eddey / Light Iron
• Holden Payne / Sundance Institute

• This asset delivery bootcamp will teach you how to get your digital master and assets in the necessary shape to satisfy the strict requirements of encoding houses and digital retailers. Not for the faint of technical heart, but priceless in its specificity of a one-of-a-kind educational opportunity.

What We Love Right Now: Gumroad
• Jessica Jalsevac / Gumroad

• Gumroad is for independent writers, designers, game developers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, and makers. Without the hassle and cost of selling within a marketplace, they can help you sell directly to your audience — just like you talk to them.

Designing Your Look and Feel
• Jeremy Schwartz / SquareSpace

• Based in New York City, Squarespace is a beautiful and intuitive website publishing platform that allows anyone to easily create professional blogs, pages, stores, and galleries without touching a line of code. Learn how to create a site that serves as a fitting representation of your project.

Strategy to Know: Screening for Audiences Without an All-Rights Deal
• Yvonne Welbon / Producer
• Chris Horton / Sundance Institute  

• Yvonne Welbon, producer and outreach director of the award-winning documentary The New Black, shows us how you can achieve top-tier distribution – screening your film on a big screen, with an audience, across the country – without the headaches of pursuing a traditional theatrical release.

Bittorrent and the Art of the Bundle
• Straith Schreder / BitTorrent Inc

• Explore the impact of Drafthouse Films’ decision to use BitTorrent Content Bundles to circumvent Phillipine censorship and deliver the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Act of Killing for free across the Internet: 3.5 million visits sent 45,000 visits to the iTunes Movies Store, where the film was available to buy or rent.

“The Producorialist”
• James M. Johnston / Filmmaker and Producer
• Toby Halbrooks / Filmmaker and Producer

• Second-Ever Edition! “The Producorialist” begins with the idea of creating a group keynote about the world of independent film and its strange and unexpected relationship to daily life.

For more information, please visit sundance.org/artistservices.

Sundance Institute
Sundance Institute is a global nonprofit organization founded by Robert Redford in 1981. Through its artistic development programs for directors, screenwriters, producers, composers and playwrights, the Institute seeks to discover and support independent film and theatre artists from the United States and around the world, and to connect audiences to their work. The Institute promotes independent storytelling as art and as a compelling and powerful way to inform, inspire and unite people. Internationally recognized for its annual Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Institute has supported such projects as Beasts of the Southern Wild, Fruitvale Station, Sin Nombre, The Invisible War, The Square, Dirty Wars, Spring Awakening, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and Fun Home. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.