Renée Olbert is the Chief Content Officer at the media platform startup, Throwing Fruit. Her journey to reach this point in her career has taken her down many different roads and uniquely positions her to provide interesting insight to filmmakers. Olbert, a graduate of York University in Toronto, is a former actor and producer, whose credits include working with greats like two-time Academy Award winning director Malcolm Clarke. She is also the award winning creator of the successful web series "Seeking Simone." She hung up her red carpet dress a few years ago to address the systemic failures she faced in the industry by co-founding and running content at Throwing Fruit. The platform is a content management and creation system which provides filmmakers the tools they need to create native mobile apps using their content. This enables filmmakers to control their own distribution as well as create interactive communities for their fans via mobile devices. 

You've got data coming in from your distribution platform and you’re ready to start being "data-driven". But what are these numbers really telling you? Let’s break down some common metrics and what you can deduce from them.

In his BRIGHT IDEAS article "Towards a Poor Cinema: Part II,"  James Kaelan introduced the term "ionic collective." Like its atomic counterparts, ionic collectives have members that can work in multiple production positions, “capable of dissolving and recombining to form infinite iterations of the same compound.” They also find power in distribution, where members can promote their peers' work, and also pay to see that work. Ionic collectives, he said, are much more effective in distribution than their siblings, covalent collectives, small groups of filmmakers that work consistently in one production position.