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Sometimes, It’s Just About Telling The Right Story In The Right Way

September 20th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in update

I found this story on Mashable today. It’s the latest outing in the real-time ‘what happens next?’ genre that blogging and the web in general is so good for.

Chris wants Jeanne to marry him - and she thinks he’s not romantic. So he’s set up a blog and a 6 day treasure hunt that all the world can follow - except Jeanne. At the end of the trail, the treasure is a marriage proposal she knows nothing about. It’s all true. It’s all happening right now. We get to see how it unfolds in real time.

Dramatic tension, ‘page-turnability’, high stakes, relatability. This simple idea has all the hallmarks of something that will keep the crowd tuned-in. Viewers are encouraged to subscribe and also to leave their comments.

The format of the blog is low-maintenance. Just a picture and a quote of something that Jeanne’s said everyday - and even a caveat from the very beginning that a day here or there might fall by the wayside when romance and adventure prevails.

The simplicity of the way he’s doing it gives it a poetic quality and adds to how easily we can project ourselves into his story. It keeps it focused on the universal theme we can all relate to rather than the differences we might have as people. Because of this, it reduces the barriers to entry and widens the audience potential. The fact that it’s happening in real-time is what makes the story so potent.

It’s all very sweet, all very intriguing. The earnestness of Chris and the heart-on-a-plate thing keeps you rooting. Jeanne, because she’s kept in the dark, is a mysterious character herself and we tune in as much as anything to find out about what she’s like and why Chris loves her - and how she’s going to respond. He’s said from the get-go that she’s going to say yes but she’s such an unknown quantity we’re still not sure - so he’s really put himself out there.

Anyway, hooking the audience into wanting to know what happens next is as good a tool on the web for audience engagement as it is in any other medium. When you couple that with the real-time possibilities that the web - and especially a blog (with it’s chronological format) - enables, it’s no huge step to getting all eyes on you. This sort of a project is totally viral-compatible as a lot of people are going to want to spread the word on your behalf. It’s clear what’s at stake and we can empathize with Chris putting his heart on the line (as opposed to ‘Osama Loves’, which didn’t have these two qualities).

Like traditional stories, real-time ‘what happens next’ web projects have beginnings, middles and, usually, ends - something to keep coming back for. With ‘Jeanne Says…’ it’s the quality of the idea and simplicity of the format that’s the elexir - and with that, it’s what’s drawing the audience in. I think it’s great.

BLACK GOLD: The Film And The Roller-Coaster Ride - Part 2

September 14th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in update

This is the second of four posts covering the film BLACK GOLD - a social-issue driven documentary co-produced/directed by brothers Marc and Nick Francis. The film joins the dots between coffee consumption in the west and coffee production in developing countries.

As I said last week, BLACK GOLD is remarkable because of the tangible social impact it has had on the issues it covers and because audiences rallied around the film and really took it as their own.

Last week, Marc spoke about the making of the film and how they engaged with NGO’s from very early pre-production to form relationships that helped them build their audience once the film was complete. We also heard how they levered their acceptance into Sundance 2006 to create waves around the issues the film covers.

In this next post - we chart how BLACK GOLD received more audience attention than Marc and Nick ever would have expected, how they managed this attention and levered it to it’s maximum potential - and how it was their very success that nearly took them under before they’d even had a chance to get going…

Marc Francis: AS FILMMAKERS, WE WANT OUR AUDIENCE TO BE EFFECTED IN SOME WAY WHEN THEY LEAVE THE CINEMA.

- We’re not interested in popcorn filmmaking which, for us, is you’re there for the thrill of the ride and by the time you’ve gotten out of the cinema you’ve forgotten about it. We want people to wake up the next day and be thinking about it. Effected by it. The experience lives on.

BUT WHAT WE DIDN’T REALISE WAS HOW BIG THE REACTION WAS GOING TO BE FROM OUR AUDIENCE.

We had no idea about it. And that was the reaction we got. On the one hand, we got people wanting to give us thousands of dollars to help us help Ethiopia and people were saying they wanna invest in ethical companies now they’d seen our film. On the other hand, we’ve got companies like Starbucks building an international PR campaign to discredit our film and tell the world to think good about Starbucks coffee. - And really, to be able to manage all of that attention and interests from all sides you need an organisation that can really try to match up to those standards.

On top of that, we’ve got emails flooding in from all over the world from people wanting to see the film, screen the film, show the film! Our inboxes started to quadruple

LS: You must’ve been really stressed!

MF: YEAH! YOU ALMOST GET TO THE POINT OF IMPLODING BECAUSE YOU CAN’T ACTUALLY COPE WITH THE DEMAND - YOU CAN’T MEET THE DEMAND. YOU COULD ALMOST IMPLODE BEFORE YOU’VE EVEN GOT OUT OF THE STARTING BLOCKS. AND THAT NEARLY HAPPENED TO THE TWO OF US. More »

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BLACK GOLD: The Film and the Roller-Coaster Ride - Part 1

September 7th, 2008 | 2 Comments | Posted in update

This is the first of four posts looking at the film BLACK GOLD.

The irony is that these multiple posts have come about as a result of what was originally intended to be a short phone conversation with filmmaker Marc Francis a couple of weeks ago - for a short piece looking at the film and how it managed to so successfully reach audiences around the issues it documents.

Our conversation turned into a long one though, and I’ve been at odds as to how best to cover the different points that were brought up as Marc recounted the story of how BLACK GOLD got made and put out into the world.

In the end I didn’t want to leave much out so I’ve decided to transcribe a lot of our 90 minute conversation over the next three posts and then post a fourth which will meditate upon some of the points we hit.

Marc is one half of the co-directing/producing team that made this film (his brother, Nick, is the other half) which looks at the worldwide coffee industry and the relationship between western coffee consumers and coffee farmers in the developing world.

It’s remarkable within the genre of social-issue documentary making because it’s audience took the film for their own and because it’s been the instrument of tangible change around the issues it explores.

Since the film’s world premiere at Sundance, the price of the coffee featured in the film has significantly risen, the film’s protagonist has met with Tony Blair, major corporations such as Starbucks and Kraft have been brought under the international spotlight and screenings and debates about trade policy and development have taken place in institutions such as the World Bank, EU and UN - and that’s just a portion of the impact the film has had.

All this for a film that started out as going against the conventions of films exploring similar issues - initially closing the doors to them of conventional funding routes and forcing them to forge their own path ahead.

What started out as purely a film project has become something that is really a movement more than a film. Whilst Marc and Nick were certainly savvy in the early stages of the filmmaking process, they were still totally surprised and unprepared for the force and gusto with which audiences reacted.

The result is that whilst this was obviously hugely gratifying for them personally and for what they were seeking to bring to the world’s attention through the channel of their film, it also, unexpectedly, made them both accountable to and responsible for the momentum that it generated. - A weighty, demanding position to find yourself in unexpectedly and one that forced them to reassess their expectations for what their roles would be as filmmakers as the role of spokesperson was thrust upon them.

In this first of our four posts, Marc outlines how BLACK GOLD got made up to it’s world premiere at Sundance. It explores why the premise of how they wanted to make the film made it difficult for them to get funding through traditional routes - and how that forced them to think about audiences from the earliest stages of the filmmaking process. It then charts the adventures of the film at Sundance and begins to explore how they used the festival as a platform to begin a dialogue with audiences about the issues of trade justice. More »

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Mail-Order Audience

September 1st, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in update

I like this post from Seth Godin - marketing sage.

In it, he talks about how, if you’re in a band, you can figure out how to reach the people most likely to like your music.

His suggestion is that if, for example, fans of the B52’s would probably be fans of your music too, buy a bunch of B52’s CD’s - new - then resell them at a really cheap price on Amazon and when you bung them in the mail, slip in one or many free copies of your own CD as well.

The idea is that those who are passionate enough about the B52’s may well get passionate about your music and that those people are the most likely to spread the word to others likely to also be passionate and spread the word.

Godin illustrates how the idea can translate to any kind of business. Obviously, for filmmakers it would translate into films and DVD’s. How cost-effective (or rather, cost-prohibitive) this might be for many of us, I don’t know, but there are two key things to take note of in this idea:

IT FOCUSES ON CULTIVATING QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

You can have a mailing list of email addresses or a MySpace network of friends reaching the tens of thousands but if the majority of them are not passionately engaged with what you’re doing their number is pretty meaningless - as is what you’re getting out of the relationship. Quality is what spreads the word, increases the scope of your project and, at the end of the day, makes it all worthwhile. Quality audience is the only kind worth building.

There are many ways to target quality audience and understanding who your core audience is is the first step towards it. After that though, the routes to engaging them are as diverse as the many types of audience there are - which leads me to the other thing I like about the idea…

IT ILLUSTRATES THE RIGHT APPROACH AND MINDSET

I like the creativity of the idea in Godin’s post - or rather the creative mindset that came to the idea in the first place. Building an audience takes the right way of thinking and that’s what the how-to seeks to cultivate. Once the basic concepts of what you’re trying to achieve are understood, how you nail it is anybody’s game - as well as half the fun of it.

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    • CONTRIBUTORS

      LISA SALEM set out to walk the whole of LA pushing a baby-stroller with a video-camera attached to the end of it, facing inwards. When people approached her, she invited them to walk with her while she videoed their conversations. She posted those videos to a blog and in the process attracted a large and intrigued audience to what she was doing. Since then, Lisa's been looking at the process of audience-building in detail. She lives in London now and when not working on her film-portrait of Los Angeles "WALK LA WITH ME", she runs workshops that help filmmakers be more independent.

      LANCE WEILER has written and directed two feature films (Head Trauma, The Last Broadcast) which he self distributed all over the world. Lance is the founder of the Workbook Project, and is currently working on a number of film, TV and cross-media projects.