The Threat of Obscurity: Why We’re Here

ENDING THIS YEAR WITH A REMINDER OR A PRIMER - WHICHEVER THIS MAY BE FOR YOU…

“The number one threat to a filmmaker nowadays is not piracy, it’s obscurity.” (Matt Hanson at Power To The Pixel 2007, re-quoting from Tim O’Reilly).

I want to end the year by going a little retro, so in a kind of year-end look-back-as-a-means-to-moving-forward, I’m posting these three videos from Power To The Pixel ‘07.

I went to three festivals in November this year: Power To The Pixel ‘08, Sheffield Doc Fest and CPH Dox. At all but Power To The Pixel, filmmakers were frequently asking me why the issues of self-distribution and audience-building were so important, and how to jump in and get an overview of who’s doing what, what’s going on… and why.

I think these videos are a really great introduction.

These presentations made a huge impact on me at the time. Although I’d been following the self-distribution conversation for a while, it wasn’t until I heard the Head Trauma and FEM case studies that everything really seemed to gel for me. It was then that I knew where I wanted to go, could see the way forward and had a notion of what needed to be done. Not only that, I was exhilarated at the prospect. I felt as much creative potential in the possibility of gathering an audience around my film as I did in the filmmaking process itself - and as well, the level of need for doing it also finally became clear.

TWO OF THE HIGHEST RISKS OF OBSCURITY FOR A FILM ARE:

a) Not understanding how big the risk of obscurity is and

b) Not understanding that, ultimately, only the filmmaker can save their film from obscurity.

(- Either, at least, by understanding the dynamics of the situation (understanding the risk!) and figuring out how to facilitate/oversee a scenario where others can help match your film to it’s potential audience for you, or by doing it yourself.)

These videos are good because they highlight this very clearly and speak specifically to the real threat obscurity poses. Better though, they offer inspiring examples as to how these obstacles were overcome, what kind of initiative and attitude it took, and how much fun can be had in the process.

LANCE’S HEAD TRAUMA CASE STUDY

Over and above anything specific Lance says, it’s his headspace and playfulness with every level of the process that are the most informative.

ARIN AND SUSAN’S FOUR EYED MONSTERS CASE STUDY

Arin makes the point that in today’s climate, learning how to build and connect with an audience should really be thought of as no different from learning how to shoot and use a camera.

SELF-DISTRIBUTION PANEL

This panel is great because it’s really valuable to hear the filmmakers dialogue about their process and the issues they’re mulling over. I especially like it when Jeremy Nathan says:

“I think the only solution is self-distribution - through models that we’ve just heard this afternoon - because those are the models that I think are delivering dollars into people’s pockets - even if it’s small money, it’s still money coming back. Because otherwise it’s a fiction - films don’t get seen and you don’t get paid, so why bother? It’s too painful a process.”

- and when Matt Hanson speculates about ducking out of the money-and-audience-at-the-end syndrome into a new system altogether.

GOING BACK TO BASICS

So whilst these videos are more general and don’t explicitly relate to audience, it’s good to look at the big picture. The thing to take away is that the audience is there for us to connect with, and that it’s neither up to others to give us permission to do that, nor is it solely upon others that we can relinquish the task.

You Bloom: Getting Fans Invested In Your Promotion

You Bloom is a new web platform that systematizes the process of how artists can build, connect with and monetize their fan base.

It seeks to enable artists to compete with corporations in how they can accumulate and make sense of user-data and also use that data to further grow a fanbase.

You Bloom also provides e-commerce tools that enable, amongst other things, a fan who likes a track to be able to buy it there and then - without having to leave your member page and go to an outside domain.

I spoke with You Bloom’s founder, Phil Harrington. In our interview he talks about how the You Bloom platform facilitates ways of getting fans directly invested in artists’ marketing and promotion, and how the goal of the site is to crack that proverbial nut of enabling content-creators to make money from the fanbases they’ve built - whether those fanbases be big or small…

Currently in beta, it’ll be rolled out in stages between now and fall next year. In it’s current form, the You Bloom team are concentrating on perfecting both the usefulness and usability of the site from an artists point-of-view. Next year, they’ll be shifting that focus to the fans themselves.

Whilst initially a music-centered environment, the roll-out will grow to adapt its features for filmmakers and other forms of content too.

Click here to hear the interview with Phil  >>>>

Participants vs Passive Users: A Radiohead Case Study

Interesting post over at Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog about how your project can still be a raging success when only 1 - 0.1% of your audience participate in your content in the way you’ve set out for them to - because the number of people the internet makes potentially accessable is so vast. He cites Wikipedia and You Tube as good examples of this - the latter being where only 0.1% of users upload videos and yet obviously this being more than enough to make You Tube the commodity that it is.

It brings to mind something I’ve been brooding on for a while now relating to the stats for Radiohead’s remix competition for their single ‘Nude’. When they launched their follow-up remix competition for ‘Reckoner’ they supplied these numbers (of user interactivity levels) in their newsletter for how the previous competition had gone:

• Unique visitors: 6,193,776
• Number of mixes: 2,252
• Number of votes: 461,090
• Number of track listens: 1,745,304

These numbers roughly translate as:

• 0.04% of individuals entered their own remixes (4 in every 10,000 people)
• 7.4% voted on their favorites tracks (740 people in 10,000) and
• 28.2% (2820 in 10,000) listened to those tracks.

Moreover, about 35% did something. 65% did nothing other than check out the site. And yet Radiohead happily described these stats as a huge success for their competition.

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