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…

“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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