When the Audience Takes Control

An important thing to keep in mind when building an audience is that you want to strive to create a conversation. Their needs to be value in the sense that you want the audience to be engaged and to feel invested. In the current issue of Filmmaker Magazine I wrote an article entitled “When the Audience Takes Control.” It is a look at a number of filmmakers who are pushing the boundaries in terms of audience interaction.

FILMMAKER MAGAZINE SUMMER ISSUE:

by Lance Weiler - It starts early in the filmmaking process as filmmakers are instructed to write what they know, consider what they have access to and keep their limitations in mind. Those three points are essential when making a truly independent film. But many filmmakers wind up consumed by the filmmaking process. Their resources are spread thin and the epic journey to complete a film leaves them exhausted. And as focused as they are on their work, the sad truth is that many filmmakers do not consider their audience — their interests, expectations or the feasibility of reaching them — while making their films. A common way of dealing with the audience issue is through denial. Two concepts tend to be the norm: “Build it and they will come,” or, even worse, “I make movies for people like me.” But with a congested market and competition for the audience‘s time due to games, TV, other films, online activities and real life, it has become clear that independent filmmakers need to start changing the ways that they interact with their prospective audiences.

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Meanwhile over at the DIY DAYS site we’ve posted a panel from the LA event:

It was the end of DIY DAYS LA and the mics began to drop like flies. In the end we were left with a single mic for five people.

The future of independent film is not in content aggregation, which is quickly becoming commoditized, but in audience aggregation. Sustainability for filmmakers lies directly in the hands of the audience. Direct to audience models have shaken the core of the music industry. But the power of Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” seems good in theory but where do you start? What are the steps to building an audience around your work and most importantly how do you keep the conversation going? Discussion Leader: Saskia Wilson-Brown (Current TV) - Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters) - Micki Krimmel (expert in social media and online community) - Alex Johnson (digital media strategist / filmmaker) - Lance Weiler (The Last Broadcast, Head Trauma)

To view the panel click here

Audience Building Tools

Brian Chirls created the following video presentation for the Workbook Project’s DIY DAYS event in LA. In the presentation he details some excellent audience building concepts. Brian has work extensively with the films Four Eyed Monsters and Honeydripper to create distribution and audience building strategies. For more on Brian visit his site.

Audience Building Tools - a special presentation by Brian Chirls

Bob Dylan - Practicing in Public

I’m reading Bob Dylan’s autobiography ‘Chronicles’ - an amazing (and amazingly written) book. It’s hard to put down.

The other night I came across the part where he’s talking about touring in the 80’s with an eye to retiring. Feeling like he was all dried up and being fine with that. He knew that he had to get through his last big tours though (one with Petty and one with the Dead) and was feeling like he almost didn’t have it in him. It was taking it’s toll and when the Dead made some requests he felt he just wasn’t up to, he walked out with the intention of not coming back.

He had a couple of revelations though that did bring him back. Not only to the Dead gigs, but which made him want to tour intensely for the next three years, perfecting a technique of playing he’d discovered that liberated him and his songs. But he realised that if he was going to do this, if he was going to play this way and perfect this technique, he was going to have to find a new audience:

“… my audience at that time had more or less grown up on my records and was past the point of accepting me as a new artist… in many ways, this audience was past its prime and its reflexes were shot. They came to stare and not participate. That was okay, but the kind of crowd that would have to find me would be the kind of crowd who didn’t know what yesterday was.”

I like that he talks about the audience having to find him. And that despite - and likely because of - his immense fame, he was going to have to roll up his sleeves and work at building a new audience. He knew exactly how he was going to do it too - playing lots of gigs in towns across the world and then going back to each of those towns a total of three times over three years in order transform his audience from the old one that was dragging him down to the new one that would push him forward.

” I figured it would take me at least three years to get to the beginning, to find the right audience, or for the right audience to find me. The reason I thought it would take three years was that after the first year a lot of the older people wouldn’t be coming back, but younger fans would bring their friends the second year so attendance would be just about equal. And in the third year, those people would also bring their friends and it would form the nucleus of my future audience. “

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A Bit Of An Intro…

Welcome Everyone!

As Lance said in the last post, this blog and site will be diving deeply into the subject of how to build – and keep – an audience. Aimed at filmmakers, we’ll be exploring wherever people in general have made discoveries on the subject and then reigning it back in to the focus here.

The first step has been to put together the beginnings of an online learning resource which you’ll see links to in the sidebar. The objective there is to create a comprehensive jumping-in point for anyone wanting to experiment around building audience for their films but who is unfamiliar with the territory.

My aspiration for the resource is that a filmmaker with no prior know-how or experience could wake up one morning, decide they were going to actively build audience around their film and by the evening, feel confident enough to roll-up their sleeves and get going – knowing the general direction they were headed, not feeling that it was all going to be blind fumbling.

Because of that it’s pretty extensive. There’s a lot of information to be culled from across the web (and beyond) on ‘filmmaking 2.0’ - the Workbook Project has been a primary resource. By combining that information with my own experience in this area, I’ve tried to put something together that is a comprehensive overview - something that attempts to structure the information and put it in a wider context.

This page will fill you in on my background and how I came to put this all together. I also encourage you to take a look at the ‘How This How-To Works’ page to check-out how it all works and will develop.

In all, both the blog and the how-to are very much a works-in-progress. We’ll be tweaking and adding as we go. Please leave comments or suggestions on any part of this site as to what you’d like to see or find out more about. We’re hoping this is going to be a conversation.

Cheers,

Lisa Salem