What would you do with that material?

The traditional method is to develop the stories yourself. Write prose, film screenplays, develop videogames, produce a TV series. Even in the most contemporary of versions, you’ll make the webseries yourself. You may distribute through traditional channels, or you might let the internets with all their fancy new media channels help you distribute direct to your masses.

But you retain control. You’re still the only one telling the stories.

But what if you shared that ability? What if you let anyone and everyone tell whatever stories they wished with your characters? Fans, pros, whoever?

What if you gave up control?

But retained authority.

Anyone could produce whatever they wished with your characters in your universe. Or even alter the characters and/or universe to their heart’s content.

But you retain sole authority on what’s “official”, on what’s “canon” in your storyverse.

So the ’shippers can make their slash stories to their heart’s content, but they won’t be canon, they won’t carry the same weight as the main storyline. There can be character deaths, births, marriages, whatever, but unless they get the seal of approval from the creator, they’re a side-storyverse.

Could that work? Is there enough respect for the authorial voice that retaining only the right to say what’s canon would carry value?

I think it could if the voice were strong enough, if the vision was clear enough. If things got too helter-skelter, the fans would lose respect and then the value is gone. But if everything in the canon coheres, no matter who produces it, that should work for everyone.

Of course, this happens now with nearly all popular science fiction and fantasy media. What makes this different?

Go a step further with it. Let the masses sell their material, let them do whatever they wish with it. Let them make tshirts and dolls (er, “action figures”), models, collectible cards, whatever. As long as they attribute the source material back to you and they can’t call it “canon approved” without your official word. Let the splinters thrive as far as they can go with it, and if someone creates something good enough for canon-ization, you work out a deal that benefits all parties.

There’s risk here, of course.

The creator can’t start making things canon solely, or even primarily, on the basis of how lucrative it is to do so. Fans will sniff that out before it even happens. Value will be lost. Long-term damage will be done.

It’s also possible that if you’re letting anyone produce material and merchandising for your storyverse that some of them are going to do it better than you. If that’s the case, they start to win. But you’ll never lose entirely. You still own the base material. At the very least you retain attribution rights, which you can leverage to some gain no matter what (similar to today’s Creative Commons licensing, or “CC”).

A bigger risk is that an entity with more marketing muscle just runs you over with money and connections. A network produces a TV show, etc. You can’t reach a “canon” agreement, they go ahead anyway. Fans attach to that version simply because it’s better known. This one is tougher, you’re just competing with sheer power, which is a difficult spot to be in. But you do still retain basic ownership, and if done correctly, you have as much right to what they produce with your storyverse as they do. So there are ways to co-opt their muscle and make it work for you.

All in all, it’s a not a path without some serious risks. But it’s also a path with some serious potential benefits. A storyverse that doesn’t require you to do all the heavy lifting to spread the material to the masses. The masses can benefit from your success directly themselves, making them even more invested.

To me it seems like an idea worthy of deeper exploration. Something that might just work.

More on this later.

So with my web sketch comedy group Monkey With A Shotgun, I’ve got an actual revenue-generating video series over on Babelgum.

Babelgum is a distribution channel, like YouTube.  Much lower traffic (less than one-half of one percent of Youtube’s traffic), but still a solid, reliable delivery system.  What they are not is a marketing or promotional company.  In fact, the whole reason they’re paying for webseries is to bring more traffic to their site.  So for that to work, the series has to, you know, bring in traffic..

That leaves the filmmakers responsible for marketing.  This is true for any independent project, from video series to feature film.   If you’re on a studio project you’re less responsible for marketing the project, though you should still be very aware of marketing your personal career.   But even if an indie feature gets theatrical distribution, the filmmakers will still be the primary marketers.  Direct to video, you’ll live or die by your own promotion. And internet shorts? There’s no one but you.

The good news is that the internet makes it possible to pull off your own promotion.  You still might get lucky and get some mainstream coverage, say a NPR interview, but even if you don’t you can do much for yourself.

The secret of a good internet marketing campaign is simple- Allow as many entrypoints into the campaign as possible and feed them all into a sticky, central site.

By entrypoints, I mean that you want people to have as many ways to stumble on your work as possible.  You want to be on as many sites as can, hitting as many different audiences as you can.  You don’t really know where your fans are, and you can’t rely on them to come to you, so you want to cast your net wide.  To some extent this is a numbers game.

What does this mean in practice?  Well, ideally you’d put your video on every single video site there is.  That’s not practical with this particular scheme since the revenue is only being generated by Babelgum views, so you want people to watch there.  That could change with other revenue sources, if you had a brand sponsor, or the video itself was promoting other sales, or merchandising of elements of the series itself.

But even in this case there are many other venues for promotion.  There’s mentions on blogs.  On sites that cover the internet video industry.  Interviews with the filmmakers.  I’d push hard to get every reviewer I could, pro and amateur to review the series.  It almost doesn’t matter what they say, as long as they link back to you.  Even a pan review will pique curiosity.

This goes back to an old web aphorism – “Links are the currency of the internet.”   That is, links to your work have a definite value.  The beauty of the web is that it is a web, a mass of interconnections leading from point to the next.  It can all tie back into your site, everything leading to your point of revenue generation.  You want those links, they’re your gold.

You can also use social networks.  I’ve seen some effective work in promoting web series via facebook fan pages.  Fan pages are an easy way to keep people in the loop and aware of what’s going on with your series.  New episodes, where you’re planning to take things, etc.   It’s not something you have to do, but it’s definitely a missed opportunity if you don’t.

Then there’s the king of the social media hill these days, Twitter.  Twitter is a complicated beast to tame. A lot of people give up too soon on it, but Twitter is potentially the most powerful tool in your internet marketing arsenal (at least this year).

The one thing you need to know about Twitter is this- Twitter is personality.

It’s not about hawking your wares, not directly, it’s about making connections with people on the basis of you personality. Your Twitter persona can be a selective version of your personality (or maybe even a constructed version), but it has to be a personality. It’s about being intelligent, interesting, and entertaining.  If you pull that off, people will naturally be interested in what you’re doing, and since they have that personal connection with you, they’ll help you spread the word.

I’ve been watching people build their careers with Twitter being a primary source for their advancement.  Making the connections, building the interest in what they’re doing.  It may sound sales-y to you, but I’m actually saying the sales-y stuff doesn’t work that well. Remember- intelligent, interesting, and entertaining.   Personality.   And if you’re excited about what you’re doing, it’s not exactly work to talk about it.   And if you’re not excited about it, why are you doing it at all?

The nice thing is that a lot of the indie film community- filmmakers, reviewers, reporters, festivals, distributors – have really taken to Twitter, and there’s a nice community already there.  For any of your projects, you really want to get as many of your cast and crew on and talking about the project as possible.  Make those person-to-person connections.

So that’s many-entrypoints part.  What about the sticky, central site part?

What you really want a central site that keeps people coming back once they’ve come to visit it once or twice. The key is to build a community around the site itself.  The filmmakers should be producing longer form blog postings about the experience of making the project and the aftermath.   More insight into the process, into the people.  Allow comments, and RESPOND to those comments! Interact with your audience.  Provide forums for people to discuss your project.  What they think about it, what they would like to see, etc.  Again, INTERACT.  You want people to come to your site for your content discover there’s a whole world there to explore.  And to return to.

One very important note here at the end- NONE OF THIS WORKS IF YOUR PROJECT SUCKS.  Your project has to be good or all is for naught.  Content is still king.  But community has moved into the prince’s seat.

Anyway.  Longer than intended, but there’s much more to say.

Later!

It’s true that the real successes of web video series can be counted on one hand. But then we’re still very early on in the game. The things people are trying now are different from what they were trying a year ago, or two years ago. It’s a field that’s still evolving, month by month. Different models come and go. Just because most of what’s been tried hasn’t worked doesn’t mean that nothing can work.

In my opinion, the major problem is that most models aren’t bold enough. No one is trying the full-on assault yet, everything is either aimed at being under the radar weird or boring mainstream. The same categories we’ve been with for years. Until we get new models that break out of those paradigms, we can’t even proclaim the birth of online video, much less its death.

For me, the key thing to realize is that it’s more than just production and distribution that have been democratized, it’s the whole shebang. And the big success will come from a model that incorporates all aspects of the filmmaking business process, not just one or two.

Of course, that’s really, really hard to do. Therein lies the adventure.

Over the last 6 weeks or so, Monkey’s 20th video, Spanish For Your Nanny, has succeeded in hitting a target, and is approaching half a million views on the sites we track (and likely many more on sites we don’t!). There’s several reasons for the success of the video, but those are for a later post.

Instead, I’m going to look at how the video has spread and what that might indicate about the nature of a viral video.

All of Monkey’s videos are posted to a variety of sites, about a dozen in all. We’ve found that there’s no real way to predict which video will succeed on which site, so we post all our videos on all our sites. We’ve been featured on a number of them, but that always occurs at the whim of the site’s editors, and isn’t anything we rely on. While a featured spot on the front page of Yahoo or Myspace can certainly bring in a number of hits, it’s usually a brief burst and doesn’t seem to carry over to other sites very often (though it can provide an ancillary boost to our other videos on the same site).

In this case, we’d posted Nanny to the usual sites, and we were getting a bit more than the usual number of views, and the video had been “stolen” and posted on other sites a fair amount, but nothing really spectacular, outside of one site where we had been featured (JoeCartoon).

A couple of weeks after I had posted, a friend sent me an IM “Hey, you never stumbled Nanny”. He meant that I’d never given the video a thumbs up via the StumbleUpon browser plugin. StumbleUpon is a social network / link sharing site, in which your friends in your network see sites you’ve given a thumbs up, and vice versa. We’ve had some success using this and other similar sites, and I usually Stumble a new video post on YouTube as a matter of course. I use YouTube as the preferred Stumble site because it’s the most popular video site, and a video there benefits more from a greater view total than on any other site.

In any case, my friend Stumbled the site, and I immediately seconded it. The seconding serves two purposes, one it’s a vote of confidence in the first Stumble, which makes it more likely to be seen by others, and two it combines my stumble network with my friend’s, increasing the number of people the video can be exposed to.

Nanny caught on with the Stumble crowd, and racked up a number of views from people Stumbling on the page over the next couple of days.

But then the big step happened- the video got added to the FunWall application on Facebook. Someone, likely one of the Stumblers, started “forwarding” the video via FunWall, and the view count really took off.

To understand why, it’s important to understand the nature of FunWall, and of Facebook in general.

Among other things, Facebook is very good at reducing what I call “link friction” to almost nothing. The key element of a viral video is getting the link to the video into new hands. Thus the ease of passing the link is crucial. The effort involved in passing the link can be seen as “friction” working against the momentum a link builds as it’s passed from person to person. Having to cut-and-paste a link, for example, is a relatively high level of friction, as each stage of passing the link on requires that each person actively take several steps to do so. Something like StumbleUpon has somewhat lower friction. All you have to do is click the Thumbs Up icon in the plugin. Then others are more likely to see what you’ve approved.

But this is a sort of passive forwarding, low friction as it may be. Facebook encourages a more active level of participation. Since the advent of the application platform on Facebook, the culture of the FB community has become such that sending invites, links, and applications to your friends is a natural part of your Facebook usage. One of the most popular applications on Facebook is called FunWall. FunWall extends the functionality of your “wall”, which is the part of your Facebook profile page where friends can write messages for you. FunWall adds two features relevant to viral videos- one, it embeds video from sites like YouTube. Two, and perhaps more importantly, it includes a “Forward!” button on each FunWall post. Clicking this button allows you to forward the posts to any number of friends.

So FunWall both encourages active participation and does so with almost no Link Friction at all. It’s like magic pixie dust for viral videos.

Soon after the FunWall wave started, I started getting reports of Spanish For Your Nanny being emailed around as a file attachment. People I don’t know were sending it to other people I don’t know and it was eventually making its way back to me. This was Old Skool virality! Spirit Of Christmas stuff! It’s interesting to note this came later than the social network spread. It’s a good example of a higher friction process, but one that a viral video may grow into if the circumstances are right.

In recent days the video has gotten boosts from being featured on high profile sites such as those of talk radio hosts and so on. In some ways, this is sort of last stage virality, when the video bubbles up high enough for at least minor attention from mainstream media.

The important thing to note in this whole process is that the big gatekeepers have come at the end. Prior to that, the spread of the video has been accomplished by thousands of nano-gatekeepers, individuals deciding to either pass the video on to their friends or not. No one of these individuals has a lot of push in making the video spread, but collectively they can make a video spread much further and much faster than any one give large gatekeeper.

The ultimate lesson is rather straightforward- get your video in front of as many people as possible, using as many tools as you can to do so. You don’t know which of them will work best, so use them all. Take special care to use those tools that put your video in front of people in a way that makes it easy for them to spread it.

I hope this has all made at least some sense, and I look forward to adding to it as Monkey With A Shotgun has more videos on the loose!

Your movie has to be relatively cheap, and it can’t exist in isolation.

One likely solution is to sell a serial on the internet, via an aggregator, such as an iTunes like store.

Make something like one of the old serials, with a plotline that moves forward via a series of cliffhangers. You start off free, hook people into your storyworld, then charge a small amount per episode following.

Probably not going to make millions, but probably enough to be self-sustaining under certain sets of business circumstances.

Assuming, of course, that your content is fantastic (more on this later).

That’s one model.

A model that’s more likely to be self-sustaining is the full-service model. Make the serial. Build a website around it. Sell swag. Sell (HD)DVDs. Sell a fanclub. Sell behind the scenes looks. Sell advertising on the website. Sell all the ancillary aspects of the show you can think of.

“That’s not filmmaking”, you might say, “I don’t want to do it”. No, maybe not, but it is part of the gig. This still all happens when you go the studio route, you’re just farming it all out to the various arms of the studio and losing most of the money along the way.

The goal is to be a self-sustaining filmmaker first. After that you worry about growth and the wider audience. If you have to sell all the geegaws to get there, so be it.

Can you compete with the studios? Not on their battlefield, certainly not. You aren’t going to make Pirates Of The Caribbean 5 and sell it on the internet. You don’t have the resources and you couldn’t fight the studios for audience if you did. But is that really the goal?

Or is the goal to be a filmmaker on a self-sustaining basis?

Which brings us to branding. Which brings us, indirectly, back to having fantastic content.

For any of this to work, you’ve got to have a stream of content. You can’t cut it with one or two pieces of content. A short, a feature, whatever, not enough (see above). But with regular content, you’re building a following, a brand, an audience. People start to know who you are and what you do. What you do isn’t defined by one or two works, it’s defined by a series of works. And in order for people to care about what you do, it’s got to be fantastic. All of it.

There’s a huge machine out there, the hype/media/news/entertainment machine, and it wants you to make fantastic stuff. It NEEDS you to make fantastic stuff. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day, and the media needs a new story tomorrow (and “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”, as someone else once said). They need to make you a star, they just want you to give them a reason to do it. There’s always a Pretty Young Thing, in the broadest sense of the term, and a Pretty Young Thing producing fantastic content and distributing it in a sexy way (ie “outside the system”) is a story they love to tell, they’ve been doing that story over and over for at least 40 years now.

There’s a way to leverage their machine to your benefit. It can be done. Someone will.

Look, I’m the first to admit I’m not really talking about something the Average Joe can do. But I am talking about something the Smart, Hard-Working, Lucky Joe might pull off. Maybe. If it all falls into place, just right.

“Without mass marketing, you won’t capture the attention of a mass audience, and the Internet is not a viable way to attract a mass audience.”

Talk about whistling past the graveyard…

Zelon’s views on more than 640k RAM in home PCs were not stated in the article.

Digital Distribution | Filmmaking | Web Video | Marketing | Mandalay Pictures | David Zelon

Now, it happens that the first 8 minutes of this particular film are pretty self-contained, like a nice little prologue to the film itself. There’s a story, more or less complete in itself, but that implies a lot about the direction and style of the whole film.

It’s a unique situation, most films don’t have a prologue this self-contained. Honestly, most films don’t have a first 8 minutes that are this interesting. They’re often setups for for payoffs that come later, without any payoffs in themselves. Sequeneces from the middle of the movie are less desirable for a few reasons, not least because audiences will know it’s coming and will be expecting it until they see it, which might blemish their experience of the film.

So this technique might not work for most movies. It might not work for this one, coming as it does sort of late in the release window (though it wil likely help dvd sales).

But if your structure does support it, it’s a fantastic idea. If you have something, characters, plot, style, something that pulls people into the movie in the first section, this is a great way to let people get a solid taste of your film. And it’s a natural for digitally distributed films, why not? You’re reaching the audience that might pay to see the whole thing anyway.

Smart promotional technique, and will probably be widely linked and discussed. And emulated.

And we’ll eventually have studio execs asking filmmakers “Great, but what’s the youtube sequence?”

Digital Distribution | Filmmaking | The Weinstein Company | Lucky Number Slevin | Movie Promotion

For the last 4 years, I’ve been associated with the SoCal Film Group, a creative collective of writers, directors, and producers who have come together to take their filmmaking destiny into their own hands.

The group has had 15-20 members at any particular time, and about as many reasons for participation. For some of us, the group has been a relatively cheap film school, for others it’s been a place to hone talents and work towards the elusive “calling-card” short.

We’ve been able to leverage cheap, fast, light digital technology for a near-constant production schedule.

We’re currently using a Panasonic DVX-100 with a prototype adapter that allows us to use 35mm lenses to achieve variable depth-of-field. We then input the mini-dv footage into Final Cut Pro or Avid, and lay in a soundtrack from other friendly musicians or from Garageband. We then burn everything to DVD, and put the whole thing in a case with our own graphic design on the inserts.

Some members have acquired a large collection of second-hand lights, professional sound gear, and miscellaneous equipment, so our productions are nearly entirely self-contained. Combined with some nice lightweight camera dolly and support gear on permanent loan to the group, our gear allows us to shoot a huge variety of material, and do it fast. Forty shorts in four years is a nice pace.

We’ve had some success with our shorts- numerous festivals, a TV screening or two, several fun screening parties. But it’s time for the next step, getting our work to the larger audience. In that regard, I’m very excited about the potential of the internet for digital distribution. The barriers are gone, the gatekeepers are no more.

But…

Just because you can get your work to people doesn’t mean they know they want to see it. Part of what I want to explore in this blog are ways of getting your projects in front of people. Given the vast flood of material out there (check out the endless stream on YouTube), how can you stand out of the crowd?

Now that everyone can reach an audience, how do we build that audience? What sorts of promotion and marketing will work with this new frontier? The world is indeed flat again, but it’s also potentially very narrow. Is that good enough?

Time to find out.

SoCal Film Group | Short Film | Digital Distribution | Filmmaking