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.

Audience Building Tools

Brian Chirls created the following video presentation for the Workbook Project’s DIY DAYS event in LA. In the presentation he details some excellent audience building concepts. Brian has work extensively with the films Four Eyed Monsters and Honeydripper to create distribution and audience building strategies. For more on Brian visit his site.

Audience Building Tools - a special presentation by Brian Chirls

Bob Dylan - Practicing in Public

I’m reading Bob Dylan’s autobiography ‘Chronicles’ - an amazing (and amazingly written) book. It’s hard to put down.

The other night I came across the part where he’s talking about touring in the 80’s with an eye to retiring. Feeling like he was all dried up and being fine with that. He knew that he had to get through his last big tours though (one with Petty and one with the Dead) and was feeling like he almost didn’t have it in him. It was taking it’s toll and when the Dead made some requests he felt he just wasn’t up to, he walked out with the intention of not coming back.

He had a couple of revelations though that did bring him back. Not only to the Dead gigs, but which made him want to tour intensely for the next three years, perfecting a technique of playing he’d discovered that liberated him and his songs. But he realised that if he was going to do this, if he was going to play this way and perfect this technique, he was going to have to find a new audience:

“… my audience at that time had more or less grown up on my records and was past the point of accepting me as a new artist… in many ways, this audience was past its prime and its reflexes were shot. They came to stare and not participate. That was okay, but the kind of crowd that would have to find me would be the kind of crowd who didn’t know what yesterday was.”

I like that he talks about the audience having to find him. And that despite - and likely because of - his immense fame, he was going to have to roll up his sleeves and work at building a new audience. He knew exactly how he was going to do it too - playing lots of gigs in towns across the world and then going back to each of those towns a total of three times over three years in order transform his audience from the old one that was dragging him down to the new one that would push him forward.

” I figured it would take me at least three years to get to the beginning, to find the right audience, or for the right audience to find me. The reason I thought it would take three years was that after the first year a lot of the older people wouldn’t be coming back, but younger fans would bring their friends the second year so attendance would be just about equal. And in the third year, those people would also bring their friends and it would form the nucleus of my future audience. “

More »

A Bit Of An Intro…

Welcome Everyone!

As Lance said in the last post, this blog and site will be diving deeply into the subject of how to build – and keep – an audience. Aimed at filmmakers, we’ll be exploring wherever people in general have made discoveries on the subject and then reigning it back in to the focus here.

The first step has been to put together the beginnings of an online learning resource which you’ll see links to in the sidebar. The objective there is to create a comprehensive jumping-in point for anyone wanting to experiment around building audience for their films but who is unfamiliar with the territory.

My aspiration for the resource is that a filmmaker with no prior know-how or experience could wake up one morning, decide they were going to actively build audience around their film and by the evening, feel confident enough to roll-up their sleeves and get going – knowing the general direction they were headed, not feeling that it was all going to be blind fumbling.

Because of that it’s pretty extensive. There’s a lot of information to be culled from across the web (and beyond) on ‘filmmaking 2.0’ - the Workbook Project has been a primary resource. By combining that information with my own experience in this area, I’ve tried to put something together that is a comprehensive overview - something that attempts to structure the information and put it in a wider context.

This page will fill you in on my background and how I came to put this all together. I also encourage you to take a look at the ‘How This How-To Works’ page to check-out how it all works and will develop.

In all, both the blog and the how-to are very much a works-in-progress. We’ll be tweaking and adding as we go. Please leave comments or suggestions on any part of this site as to what you’d like to see or find out more about. We’re hoping this is going to be a conversation.

Cheers,

Lisa Salem