DIY Days NYC: Please Help

The Sundance/Youtube Experiment Post Mortem

Over the past few weeks, many blog sites and journalists have been quick to declare the day-and-date Sundance/YouTube rental experiment a failure. With just a little over $11K in revenue split between the 5 titles, and only about 300 views per film, it certainly seems that way on the surface. However, it took very little digging to reveal another frustrating, yet also more optimistic story. This is what I discovered:

1-Poor Accessibility. When I first read about the Sundance/YouTube deal, I was really excited that I would be able to watch The Cove and Children of Invention, two films that I'd read a lot about. However, I had a very maddening experience trying to find these films on YouTube, one that mirrors the experience Brian Newman had while at Sundance (well, minus the partying...), and that of many of the commenters on the YouTube blog. My cursory search on YouTube site yielded no links to the films' rental page, and my Google search for "YouTube Rental" was also for naught. I also couldn't find any readily apparent links on the Sundance page. After about 5 or 6min of this my patience was maxed out. For an experiment that had received so much press leading up to the launch, I was baffled that it was taking me so long to access the films. Why it wasn't more clearly advertised on the Sundance or YouTube homepages, I'm not sure. Why the Sundance PR dept didn't make more of an effort to include it in every press mention is also unclear. It's no secret that people's attention spans have grown shorter in this era of entertainment on demand. If content is not easy to access, then it is going to suffer limited viewership, no matter how many places its been publicized.

Another big frustration was the lack of accessibility to The Cove documentary by foreign audiences. For the lucky few who successfully navigated to YouTube's rental page for The Cove, those with non-US IPs were rewarded with this message: "Video contains content from Lionsgate who has decided to block it in your country". Why would Lionsgate draft an exclusive contract for the US? Did they think the rentals were going to negatively impact other foreign revenue streams? For all the comments on The Cove's Facebook page, on the YouTube blog, and other websites, I was unable to find an answer from Sundance, Lionsgate, YouTube or Google (the corporation nor the search engine).

2-Rental window WAY too brief. The rental window was only open from January 22-January 31. As pretty much any independent filmmaker knows (or will soon discover), profit never (if ever!) comes quickly. And it certainly doesn't come in just 10 days. These movies aren't Avatar or Batman; they require a lot more time than 10 days to successfully pervade the psyche of the film-going public. The fact that these movies made ANY money in such a short period with so many accessibility issues is a pretty impressive feat. Think--with clearer advertising, improved accessibility and a longer rental release window, these films could have made four or five times what's been quoted.

So the good news in all this frustration and disappointment is that the problems are not insurmountable.  Like Brian Newman says in the end of his post on the same subject, "Kudos to Sundance and YouTube for trying an experiment, and to the filmmakers that went along for the ride, but next time, put some more resources into implementation and marketing - you know, like good distributors do."

Monetizing Content: Social Media Numbers

I recently revisited this video while doing some research for the web series I'm trying to get off the ground (more on that later!). The video's creators at Socialnomics.net have hit the nail on the head by focusing on how fast the social networking space is changing. While it's true that trying to follow every new development is bound to give you whiplash, the takeaway is that the vastness of the space makes it possible for every savvy content creator to find an audience that can in turn advertise a project via their individual network. For my project, I've decided to bypass traditional approaches to storytelling and plug straight into this network and actively seek my audiences' participation and input in the development process. Due to my project's broad theme, episode ideas collected from a geographically diverse audience will actually help to dynamically define and transform the world depicted within the series as it goes along. By submitting ideas that adhere to a series of narrative guidelines, my viewers can help shape the series' development. In turn, they will be motivated to share their involvement via the social network of their choice, hopefully doubling and tripling the audience.

Lessons From Jane Campion

Thanks to Ted Hope's blog /Hammer to Nail I stumbled across Jane Campion's website for her excellent film Bright Star. This intimate and revealing website should be what filmmakers aspire to build for their films. Designed as a digital scrapbook, it's interactive, informative, and with a unique whimsical style that complements the film's style and subject. I spent an hour devouring everything from Jane's notes on her children's acting workshop (to cast for the role of Fanny Brawne's little sister) to DP Greig Fraser's breathtaking light studies (see photo below) to the art department's entry on how they decided to fold the love letters. What an excellent companion piece to the film and a great inspiration to young producers like myself looking for ideas as to how to creatively bring their films to life and connect with audiences on the web.

Index of Video Embedding Sites

Discovered this great resource this morning that gives the facts and figures on most major video hosting sites. Using the same quicktime file, Karel has embedded his video into multiple sites, comparing and contrasting the results.

http://kareltests.co.uk/

TV Everywhere...For A Price

Jeff Bewkes (left) announced this summer the start of a new pilot program called TV Everywhere that would give subscribers access to their favorite content across multiple platforms.  Sure, this sounds great to subscribers, but what does it mean for the currently democratized internet space?  What will happen to alternate content distributors if material is suddenly yanked from their sites?  They may lose the advertising dollars necessary to turn a profit as consumers are forced to watch their favorite shows through their service provider's pay site .  In return, it could become harder for independent content providers to find a foothold .  If alternate online distributors start to disappear, and the independent content providers' material isn't being carried by a major subscription service outlet, how will this content find an audience?  Will every independent creator have to become their own distributor as well?

Service providers are so scared about losing revenue from the traditional source (subscribers) that they fail to see the merits of diversifying (ad supported streaming).  The way we consume media today is fundamentally different from the way we consumed media just five years ago.  Society is used to viewing content for 'free' in an ad supported model.  I can see TV Everywhere potentially working as a premium service, allowing subscribers to access content from their archives, see episodes before they premiere, watch content without commercials, etc.   However I can't see people embracing it in the form Bewkes is currently proposing.

DIY: Music Videos

I was blown away by the quality of this music video, shot entirely on the iPhone. Sure, the video's concept was simple to execute and the resulting picture may not have a lot of depth, but the image is crisp and the colors pop, which for a simple low budget web video like the one here, is all that you really need.

Music Video Shot on iPhone from Kenny Mosher on Vimeo.

Food for Thought: More on Transmedia Storytelling

Reading Ted Hope's blog this morning I came across a really interesting article on Transmedia Storytelling by David Bordwell, the well known film academic out of the Univ. of Wisconsin.  I used to refer to Bordwell's website from time to time in college, but haven't really looked at it since, so it was really fortuitous that Ted Hope linked to it, and even more fortuitous that it was to an article on my new favorite trend in filmmaking.  Among other things, Bordwell does an excellent job differentiating transmedia storytelling from your typical franchise:

Some transmedia narratives create a more complex overall experience than that provided by any text alone. This can be accomplished by spreading characters and plot twists among the different texts. If you haven’t tracked the story world on different platforms, you have an imperfect grasp of it...In most film franchises, the same characters play out their fixed roles in different movies, or comic books, or TV shows. You need not consume all to understand one. 

While I don't really agree with his assertion that transmedia storytelling is more difficult to realize with a film as opposed to a serialized form of entertainment like television, generally I found his observations to be dead on.  To read the rest of this essay, click here.

Say What? Transmedia Storytelling

Ever since DIY Days Philadelphia I've been thinking a lot about Transmedia Storytelling and how when employed skillfully, it can generate a constant and varied stream of revenue for the players involved. For those of you new to this buzz word, Transmedia Storytelling is "storytelling across multiple forms of media with each medium making distinctive contributions to the audience's understanding of the story" (thanks Wikipedia!). Pioneered by indie mavericks like Lance Weiler and the Blair Witch team, the Transmedia approach has slowly been entering our collective consciousness, evolving in tandem with the way we receive and perceive information in the digital age. Unlike in traditional unidirectional storytelling, where the audience receives the given information for a fixed period of time, this new media process is multi-directional, with multiple authors and architects helping to build the new fictional reality in which dynamic new narratives can play out over an indefinite period of time.

And with multiple points of entry (read: distribution outlets), there are multiple points to eke out a couple bucks. With the potential to create revenue streams through providing premium content, early access to new story developments, events and merchandise (to name only a few), transmedia allows a single product--whether a movie, a toy, a novel or a song--to be profitable long after the intial buzz has died down. Or in the case of television, keep viewers tuning in season after season.

Take the Star Wars franchise. The feature films alone have generated a cumulative worldwide box office of more than $4 billion. That doesn't even begin to factor in the novels, videogames, and toys that provide a constant stream of ancillary revenue. Then there's the Clone Wars cartoon feature and subsequent TV series. I know it's taken a beating in the press, but when viewed within a transmedia context, it takes on new significance. The Clone Wars reintroduces that original product from 1977 to a new Y2K audience. To the middle-aged geeks who grew up with the original trilogy, this new venture may seem abhorrent. But to the generation of pre-teens who were born after Al Gore invented the internet, The Clone Wars represents an exciting new world of sci-fi lore that started on the big screen and continues on multiple smaller screens.

This exciting new approach to storytelling is the wave of the future. Born out of the internet and a growing tech-savvy population, transmedia storytelling provides an alternate digital reality for people to connect with each other. It replicates in the online space the shared cinematic experience of a packed movie theater, or that of a story being told around a campfire and sustains the audience's interest long after the intial content has been consumed. Hopefully, opportunities to build these new complex alternate realities will continue to grow and when the time comes for me to look for my next career move (only 6 months from now!) a job working for a company like Starlight Runner will be waiting for me.