OK, so whilst I’ve been relatively quite on the blogosphere, I have been out spreading the word of slingshot in other places.

Last Friday saw not one but two conference appearances (what can I say, I’m like a travelliing troubador, singing the songs of the sling). In the morning I was at the London Media Summitt where I got to debate Content, Cash and Creativity with Reuter’s “Head of Innovation” and the aliterating nemesis of the UK digital media scene Azeem Azhar

One of the more interesting questions was about how one can use new technologies and new business models to better harness creativity. It’s a question that tends to stump most creative business entrepeneurs, but there are interesting examples of it out there.

Here is one: StarWreck - a collaborative creative phenomenon which would have been unthinkable in the pre-social media era. The transformative effect of MySpace on the garage band (a melee my brother has just joined); as is the collaborative journalism/discussion of the blogosphere itself: see the high scholarship and wit being applied to shopping by the VisaDiarist and her peers.
Any others people can think of?

But that was just the mornings conference. In the afternoon, I was speaking, with the gorgeous Mr. Gary Love at the BFI’s Young Talent week, part of the London Film Festival. We told war stories, including this one, from our experience on Sugarhouse Lane, and it all seemed to go down quite well. Almost as well as the vino tinto at the reception at the end of that day of speaking. Well what can I say, one gets a dry throat…

one of the things we set out to do at slingshot was think about niche audiences that the traditional film-making establishment was ignoring.

Recent pieces in the press about “britsh urban cinema” suggests that we may be on to something in that area with Sugarhouse Lane. More on the sugarblog…

HOWEVER, the fact that 3 of the 6 movies in competition in the British Film Festival at Dinard (including 2 of the 3 winners) were also British Urban stories, suggests that we aren’t the only ones… which on balance is a good thing….