@ M dot Strange: Same 3 Questions About Audience

I asked M dot Strange the same three questions I asked Arin Crumley about his relationship with his audience:

• How do you see your relationship with your audience?
• How do you integrate your audience into your lifestyle?
• How do you compartmentalize your audience into the big picture of what you’re doing?

It’s a pretty short interview but M dot touches on interesting ideas about being amongst his audience rather than separated from them. He uses the awareness this gives him to inform how he can best crowdsource for his films and use his audience community as a barometer for keeping him on track….

Listen here for the full M dot Strange interview >>>>>>

As I said previously, I’ll be asking these questions to people I meet along the way. Soon to come, Jamie King’s answers to these same three questions along with other stuff from CPH Dox, Copenhagen…

Copenhagen Dox Forum

I’m really excited to be heading to Copenhagen tomorrow in time for the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival’s forum on creative distribution for creative docs.

I’ll be there asking the curators/fest directors/sales agents/distributors - whoever - how they see themselves fitting into the big picture in this new paradigm. I’m curious to see if and how they’re rethinking their relationships with audience and to listen to what ideas they’re bringing with them to the forum. I’m also looking forward to hearing what the filmmakers themselves have to say - as I’ll be taking in the proceedings with my own film in mind…

Read below for the full blurb - Lance is also speaking there as part of the event.

THE DOX:FORUM, 12-14 NOVEMBER 2008

Launched successfully in 2007, the DOX:FORUM is an exclusive 3 day market, running in conjunction with CPH:DOX.
The Forum presents a tightly packed program of work-in-progress presentations, pre-arranged one-on-one meetings, matchmaking events, distribution platform pitches and a line-up of seminars.

The DOX:FORUM has been launched to explore other distribution possibilities for documentary film than TV and focuses on theatrical as well as alternative distribution venues as museums, art galleries and online platforms.
Thus, the Forum positions itself as a new international meeting place for film professionals focusing on high quality, artistic and visually strong documentary films.

With a participant list counting major international distributors, sales agents, curators, festival directors, programmers from alternative and art venues and representatives from new online marking platforms, the Forum offers an excellent opportunity for filmmakers to introduce upcoming documentaries to international decision makers and to enhance distribution possibilities for their films. And with its exclusive selection of new, upcoming films, reflecting CPH:DOX overall interest in strong cinematic documentary film making, invited content seekers are given a priority chance for discovering the next big title on the international market before it hits the big winter and early spring venues.

@ Arin Crumley: “How Do You Compartmentalize Your Audience Community Into The Big Picture Of What You’re Doing?”

Here’s Arin’s answer to the last of my three questions: How do you compartmentalize your audience community into the big picture of what you’re doing?

Interestingly, he interpreted the question in a broader way - how do you compartmentalize your life, using the tools now at your disposal in this new culture of communication?

Arin sees categorization as a way of navigating our new social space more efficiently - because a new social environment necessitates new social rules. - Not the internet as a separate space but as an extension of every other aspect of our lives and world.

Because of this, in the last part of our interview Arin talks about the ‘mashing up’ of personal and private life, and compartmentalization as a means to filtering out noise.

Continuing the theme so far, he talks about embracing what is now at our fingertips and “Being willing to be an interacting human being in this new era” and how that is “going to make it a little easier for the compartmentalizing to happen a little more automatically.”

Click here for Arin’s full answer to question 3 >>>>>>

Click here to hear Arin’s answers to questions one and two.

@ Arin Crumley: “How Do You Integrate Your Audience Into Your Lifestyle?”

“There’s just a volume that we all have - a particular wavelength that’s affecting others (- which is why I don’t think privacy really exists). It’s also why I don’t think you can put a shield up to protect people from understanding you. People are inherently going to understand you for who you are so you might as well help them in that process. Be open and honest.”

- Part of Arin’s answer to my second question: ‘How do you integrate your audience into your lifestyle?’.

In his full answer, Arin explores what it means to share yourself and your life online.  He sees ‘audience’ as really a network of peers - and the term ‘audience’ itself as just another word for human interaction.

This kind of perspective informs how Arin relates to and with his audience and how he approaches the internet as really just an extension of the physical world.

What I find most interesting about that concept, if you take it on board, is the way it at once makes life both a constant performance and a never-performance. - It seems in that sense that a film is just a moment - and that ones web presence for the film is it’s natural tendency to have an existence beyond it’s otherwise highly constructed borders.

I can see how the ideas Arin expresses here inform the process of a person whose work is very much about his life - and whose audience relationship is built upon that foundation. I think Arin’s a good case study in terms of audience intimacy.

I once heard an excellent tip that I’m reminded of here: - that your online audience will usually respond to you in the same manner that you communicate with them. It seems there are many ways to relate with your audience and that it’s usually good to be conscious of where you’re positioning yourself in relation to them - and how that actually defines the kind of relationship you’re going to have.

Listen HERE to Arin’s full answer to question 2…… >>>

Arin is currently working on As The Dust Settles. Click here for his bio on the Power to the Pixel website.

@ Arin Crumley: “How Do You See Your Relationship With Your Audience?”

At Power to the Pixel, I asked Arin Crumley and M Dot Strange the same three questions:

• How do you see your relationship with your audience?
• How do you integrate your audience into your lifestyle?
• How do you compartmentalize your audience community into the big picture of what you’re doing?

I was curious to see how they were going to interpret them.

Arin’s answers turned into a 90 minute thought-trail (I’d like to call it a thought-experiment but I guess strictly speaking I can’t).

In his first answer, he muses about what is ‘audience’, what is ‘privacy’ and what is ‘on’ and ‘off’ the web? He also touches on something else I’ve been wondering about - how you go from ‘herd mentality’ to ‘hive mind’?

Because it was such a long conversation, I’m posting it in three parts.

Click here to listen to Arin’s answer to question one.

…I’m hoping to be asking others these questions along the way too.

Read HERE for Arin’s bio.