M dot Strange On The Art of Alienating The Right People

This is the first in a series of posts out of Power to the Pixel 2008 - which was a pretty mind-blowing experience for me. M dot Strange was the first person I interviewed and he quickly got me questioning some of my assumptions about whether or not you get to choose your core audience, or whether it’s actually them who choose you:

On the Power to the Pixel site, it says this about M dot Strange:

“When M dot Strange touched down in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 for the world premiere of his first animated feature, We Are the Strange, thousands of Internet-obsessed teens and twentysomethings already knew more about the film than any buyer at the festival. For months M dot had been leaking footage and behind-the-scenes featurettes of the film to YouTube, and once he was accepted to Sundance he put up the trailer. It got 500,000 views in four days. Not bad for a guy who made a movie in his bedroom. With a love for 8-bit video games and stop-motion animation, the San Jose–based M dot has been honing his bizarre brand of stories since the late ’90s. “I’ve never taken a film class or an art class ever,” he says. “I learned everything through the Internet and reading books — the Internet was my film school.” M dot is currently working on his next animated feature film - a 3d Samurai film entitled Heart String Marionette due for completion January 2010.”

Listen HERE to M dot talk a little about branding - how he approaches it, how he uses it to let his audience self-select, and how, sometimes, it can be really good to alienate a few people along the way…

Tomorrow, Listen in on Lance, Arin Crumley, M dot Strange and more:

Power to the Pixel Hits London Again Tomorrow…

“Starting at 10am GMT on Wednesday, 22nd October, we’ll begin webcasting live to audiences worldwide. You can watch things unfold at http://powertothepixel.com/webcast or at http://www.screendaily.com .”

I’ll be covering the forum and reporting back…

BLACK GOLD: The Film And The Roller-Coaster Ride - Part 3

This is the third and last part of my interview with Marc Francis - co-director/producer (with his brother Nick) of the film BLACK GOLD.

You can view parts one and two here.

Next week, I’ll look in more detail at a few of the points he’s hit in the course of our conversation - and what we, as content-creators in this new environment, can glean from what Marc’s talked about.

Last time Marc spoke about the experience of putting BLACK GOLD out into the world as a roller-coaster ride - one where it’s very success threatened to sink this independent film before it had even gotten out of the starting gates.

This time, we look at straddling both mainstream and alternative models of distribution and what it means to be a filmmaker when you take responsibility for building audience around your films.

We look at how this changes the process of filmmaking itself and how to think about what you are and aren’t willing to do as a filmmaker in order to save your film from oblivion in the marketplace.

… Last time, we left off with Marc saying how BLACK GOLD, and it’s demands on them as filmmakers two years after it’s initial release, is finally slowing down - but still not stopping. In fact, it’s still very much alive - and that’s a good thing, no matter how demanding that may be...

Marc Francis: IT’S QUIETENED DOWN BECAUSE WE’VE TRIED TO QUIETEN IT DOWN, BUT IT’S NOT GONNA STOP AND IT SHOULDN’T STOP AND IT SHOULD CARRY ON - DEFINITELY.

LS: It’s like a business - it’s scaling.

MF: Absolutely. And coz it comes down to the obligation of the filmmaker to keep it going, that’s why it becomes really hard - but this might never happen again. I mean, we really hope it does but the fact that one should always embrace demand - I believe - if you have have a film that’s generating that coz you don’t know if it’s gonna happen again.

WE MIGHT LOOK BACK AND GO - ‘OH MY GOD, WE HAD NO IDEA HOW INCREDIBLE THAT TIME WAS! AND IT’S NEVER HAPPENED AGAIN FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES!’

So we said, let’s embrace the experience, let’s go on the ride, and let’s really give it everything we’ve got to maximize it’s global release and it’s global attention.

And it’s just been released online in the States now and there’s gonna be a whole online thing very soon with it in the UK.

SO I HAVE CONVERSATIONS WITH FILMMAKERS SAYING - TO WHAT EXTENT ARE YOU A FILMMAKER AND TO WHAT EXTENT ARE YOU A DISTRIBUTOR?

And I think there’s a very important argument to have - I think ultimately, if you get a distribution deal and if somebody is prepared to give you a $50million marketing budget and it’s gonna be on billboards and buses, great! You just turn up to your few world premiere launches and do your master interviews and get on with your next film.

But out of the thousands of filmmakers, how many actually end up being in that situation? And to what extent is it up to the filmmaker to really try and do it themselves, until they’re able to get into that situation? And some filmmakers will never be in that situation coz the type of film they’re making is not suitable for that type of global distribution.

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