“One Small Step” And The Audience That Will Bring Your Work To Life

When David Hastings’ play ONE SMALL STEP was taken up to the Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival this month - the festival’s most respected venue -  the outlook was quite pragmatic: take the show up there, expect a financial loss but gather thy reviews and hope they harvest into eyeballs and cash in the form of a UK tour of the play over the next year - something that might not even be possible without an Edinburgh premiere and the prestige that can garner.

So when Scotlands’ main national newspaper gave it a 5 star review last week  - one of only 8 of the 598 plays they’ve reviewed at the festival this year - hopes and expectations were raised a notch for the Oxford Playhouse team who brought the production up there.

Since Sunday, when the review was released, audiences that began at 20 and plateaued at 40 suddenly spiked sharply to a full house (122 seats) and haven’t relented since.

David Hastings, the author of the play and a friend of mine sent me an email:

“Audiences are going mad for it… it’s not the  play anymore which is exciting, it’s the audience. The atmosphere is extraordinary. I said to our producer, ‘We created it, The Scotsman discovered it, and Edinburgh audiences own it.’ - reality next week.”.

Whereas with the smaller audiences, ONE SMALL STEP was receiving a wholesome, happy applause, now they’re getting standing ovations for every show.

It’s interesting. In the next post, we’ll be looking at the film BLACK GOLD - an independent social-issue driven documentary that began life as something that no funders would sniff at and resulted in becoming a film whose success was so powerful that the audience, in taking it for their own, were almost too powerful and the demand almost too strong for the filmmakers to keep up with.

In both cases, I’d say it’s a classic case of the audience being the element that really breathes life into something clearly worthy but that, without their attention and investment, essentially fails. The upside is that when opportunities for audience succeed, alchemy takes hold. In the case of ONE SMALL STEP, as also in the case of BLACK GOLD, success breeds success - and without some kind of kismet, it’s uncertain how, when or whether history might repeat itself.

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Running Around, Only To Be Tripped Up By Your Own Marketing Tactics

Channel 4 in the UK is running a project called ‘Osama Loves’ as part of its Islam Season. The project is currently in blog form and will be made into an hour-long film aired on the channel sometime in September.

Farrah and Masood are in the last week of their journey across the world - attempting to find 500 ‘Osamas’ in 50 days to ask each one of them, “What do you love?”. It’s easy to gather from reading their online journal that it’s been a difficult project for a number of reasons. They’ve encountered many obstacles along the way - not least of which, I imagine, discovering well into their journey that they’d been denied a visa to continue their search in the U.S., where many of the 500+ Osamas on Facebook reside.

Though whether or not that’s the reason that in 44 days of their 50 day project they’ve only managed to amass 106 Osamas, I don’t know.

I’d posit that their mistake was in trying to do this on their own - in not enrolling the audience effectively to lead them to their goal. If they’d have used the blog and the potential of the internet to really bring out their issues (- they wanted to put a ‘friendlier face on Islam’) they could have incited the audience to do the leg work for them. Not only might this well have made them more successful, it would also have directly attracted their core audience, made for a much more interesting read -  and made their efforts far more meaningful.

A blog, in this instance, has the ability to press on the very sore-spots they’re trying to highlight. If they’d have awoken the dragon they could then have harnessed the result. The end product then, would have been much more than a pretty picture or whimsical jaunt - it might well have caused genuine change. In turn, the number ‘500′ would have become much more meaningful too, and ultimately, more attainable.

Instead, the experience of reading the blog is more like witnessing a stranger on a calm street rushing to catch a bus. For a while it holds our attention - it breaks the monotony - but that’s about it. Our attention is hinged on the spectacle but not the outcome. The rush in itself does not enroll us. And because of that it’s uncertain whether we even look long enough to see if they make it.

IN THE HOW-TO…

In the how-to, we look at how to start a conversation with your audience - how this can keep it personal, get them engaged and keep them coming back. All of these elements play a part in making a project matter. If you make it matter to your audience, you’ve harnessed the power of their attention to keep you moving towards your goal. When it doesn’t matter, a goal can be an empty marketing catch - one that essentially trips you up and obstructs the very thing you’re trying to do. I think that this may well be one of the primary reasons that “Osama Loves” failed to reach it’s target - and also, in a larger sense, failed to achieve the potential of the blog.

If Enough People Are Watching, ‘One Red Paperclip’ Can Turn Into A House

On the ‘About’ page of Kyle MacDonald’s blog/site ‘One Red Paperclip’, the first comment on the page reads, “Dear Sir, Please teach me your ways”.

Not surprising. In 2005 Kyle managed to trade a single red paperclip for a house on Main Street, Saskatchewan. It took 14 trades over a period of a year. His site outlines the trades he made and how he made them. Below, he talks a little about what gave him the idea, the process and how it all became possible.

In many ways, what Kyle was trading was the buzz he was building. As the project progressed, word of it became viral. With each new trade, his buzz - and his audience - grew. In this instance, the buzz and the audience translated into something extremely tangible - a house. Now Kyle’s embarking on two new web-based projects; one to trade the house for… whatever comes his way, and another to discover the identity of a mysterious group of smiling men in headbands.

Check out how each trade came about, step-by-step, here and see how it was the audience that was watching that really made it all possible.

LS: Can you please briefly explain the story of ‘One Red Paperclip’?

KM: I started with a red paperclip and made trades with people for bigger and better things.  After 14 trades  I ended up with a house!

LS: What gave you the idea and what did you initially think might come of it?

KM: A game called Bigger or Better. You start with a small object and trade it for a bigger or better object. Repeat. Usually a kids game. More knocking on doors, less internet.  I thought I might be able to trade the red paperclip for a spoon….or maybe even a boot!

LS: How did you get the ball rolling (of getting the word out)?

KM: I started a little blog and then asked people if they wanted to trade via the barter section on Craigslist.

LS: Did you have a plan (for how the word would spread and also for how the trades might build in value)?

KM: None at all!  I really just took things one trade at a time and tried lots of stuff out. More »

PERMISSION CULTURE - PRESS ‘ESCAPE’

Direct access to audience holds the potential for a dramatic shift both on what we choose to make as filmmakers and, potentially, what our audiences expect to receive. I wrote this article for the Documentary Filmmakers Group here in the UK about how we should use our opportunity to bypass gatekeepers to audience to also think about the content we’re creating. It’s not enough to just access our audiences directly if all we’re making is more of the same thing that we’d've had to have made before. The article focusses on the UK primary broadcasting channels and the influence they’ve had on creativity in this country, but the argument can apply to many situations where till now there have been gatekeepers to audience:

PERMISSION CULTURE - PRESS ‘ESCAPE’

The tectonic plates of the film industry are shifting and it’s not a good time to just stand still and close your eyes. If you do, the next time you open them you might find you’ve ended up on the wrong side of town whilst standing still on the same spot.

If you snooze, as a filmmaker, you’re almost definitely going to lose.

As Filmmakers, We’ve Been Submissive

Till now, as independent filmmakers (especially of non-fiction), there have always been gatekeepers between us and our audience. In the UK, they’ve been the primary broadcasting channels. For anything we made to have stood a chance of getting any decent kind of viewership - in essence, to have had any voice at all - a handful of commissioning editors and the whims of their tastes (or the format du jour of those channels) would have to have given their approval. Not only did they have veto over what gets seen, but ultimately - what gets made. And till now we’ve been left with the conundrum of making what they want us to make if we’re going to stand a chance of obtaining audience, or making what we want to make and resigning ourselves to the idea of relative obscurity.

Ultimately, this has made us ‘independent’ filmmakers passive, subservient. And what’s more, it’s totally dictated what audiences expect to see. The entire process has been mediated, and rather than being free to express ourselves, as filmmakers we have become a permission culture waiting for the acceptance of the powerful few.

And this has had a very deep effect. It means they’ve been in control of how and what we create and how we think about film in general - as a culture. We’ve been deferring our creative thought processes to those in power. But now the internet era has arrived, and this paradigm is contra to everything that the web is about.

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