Jeremy Bird, 2012 Obama National Field Director, Talks Grassroots Organizing and Film: Part 2

In our previous post we talked to Jeremy Bird, the former National Field Director of the Obama campaign in 2012, and discussed best practices from the Obama campaign that could help filmmakers distribute their films. In this post we will discuss our takeaways and conclusion from the interview. Takeaways

From our interview with Jeremy Bird, it is clear that filmmakers have 3 main disadvantages compared to political campaigns: 1) In film it is hard to access data and it is not clear what data sources will be most effective for targeting audiences, 2) You need experts that can interpret and use data to create models and 3) Models have to be customized to a specific campaign and this takes a lot of money and resources that independent filmmakers do not have.

However, Bird also recalled that when he first worked for the Obama campaign as the Field Director of South Carolina during the primary, they had to build their network and entire operation from scratch like many independent filmmakers when distributing their films. Bird went on to highlight 4 best practices from the campaign that filmmakers could adapt to distribute their movies.

1) Empowering volunteers by sharing access to more data and giving them real responsibility. Bird stressed that volunteers form the foundation of any true grassroots organization and need to be motivated through a sense of trust, responsibility and ownership. One of the major reasons the Obama campaign was able to effectively collect data and target persuadable voters was because organizers recruited an army of volunteers to call and knock on doors to figure out who in the universe were supporters. Without volunteers on the ground to collect information about voters, the data team would have had a far less accurate model of targeting persuadable voters.  This can only be done by giving real responsibility to volunteers and making them understand they are an integral part of the campaign.

2) Organizing consumer data to target potential supporters of a film. This can be the starting point for creating a data set of supporters for a specific film. For example, Bird mentioned the Obama campaign was able to look at consumer data and determine that someone who drove a Prius car is environmentally friendly and therefore a likely Obama supporter. The same type of modeling could be helpful for independent film, i.e. someone who liked the cult film Blue Velvet might also want to see another cult film like, Donnie Darko.  Examining consumer information further, someone who subscribes to Filmmaker Magazine or the Sundance Channel are avid indie movie goers and far more likely to want to see your independent film compared to the average consumer.

3) Creating multiple narratives about your film that market to both broad and niche audiences. The Obama campaign was very creative in forming many sub constituency groups like, Students for Obama, Latino’s for Obama and Veterans for Obama just to name a few. These constituency groups helped attract a diverse range of supporters by making them feel included. At the same time, the Obama campaign used messaging like “Change We Can Believe In” to appeal to a broad audience. In contrast, filmmakers often limit themselves by trying to decide if they should market their film as a story that appeals to the masses or only small niche audiences. The example of the Obama campaign suggests filmmakers might not have to chose and should market to both mainstream and specific groups. For example, filmmakers could cut multiple trailers of their film, one that appeals to the mainstream and other trailers that focus on certain themes that appeal to specific niche groups.

4) Using commit cards to motivate audiences to opt-in to watching your film at home. The Obama campaign increased the turnout of sporadic Democrats, people who have a poor record of voting; by asking them fill out commit cards that were eventually mailed back to their house to remind them they committed to voting. The same strategy could be used to motivate audiences to watch a film at their home. Filmmakers could create a sense of urgency around signing commit cards by sharing goals for number of VOD rentals, or hits on YouTube. For example, “commit to watching ‘Glory at Sea’ March 30th, and help us break our goal of 10,000 views.” Once someone signs an online commit card to watch a film on a certain date, it would then be sent back to them in an email to remind them of their commitment to see the film.

Conclusion

At the end of the interview, Jeremy Bird explained that with digital media the Obama campaign was trying to

“Create our own channel. When you have 20 million people on your email list, you’re no longer reliant on the establishment. We weren’t scared of things that were said about us in the bubble world because we had our own mechanism to distribute information.”

We have studied many independent filmmakers that have created their own distribution channels in order to overcome the established marketplace of Hollywood. However, many of these filmmakers are at a huge disadvantage from the start since there is no organization that can provides them with the necessary data, resources and knowledge they need to run an effective film campaign.

In contrast, political candidates can hire companies like 270 Strategies for consulting advice, and organizations like OFA and the DNC already have large voter databases and email lists they can tap in order to build their campaigns. This makes us wonder if a similar consulting firm like 270 Strategies or an umbrella hub like Organizing for Action, might be helpful for the film world.

However, how would the organization build its email lists and tap into data sources that independent filmmakers could use to grow and target their audiences? Would the organization consist of mostly of people in the film industry, or people from the non-profit and community organizing world? We plan to explore these questions in later posts.

-Michael, Josh and Carl

Jeremy Bird, 2012 Obama National Field Director, Talks Grassroots Organizing and Film: Part 1

Recently we interviewed Jeremy Bird to get his thoughts on grassroots organizing and how it can be related to film.  Jeremy Bird has become the ‘keeper of the flame’ when it comes to lessons learned from the Obama campaign. He studied under Marshall Ganz who was Obama's community organizing mentor and later worked as the Ohio General Election Director for Obama’s 2008 campaign, and served as the National Field Director for the campaign in 2012.  Jeremy recently co-founded a political consulting firm called 270 Strategies with former Obama Campaign Battleground States Director, Mitch Stewart.  270 Strategies helps clients connect with key constituencies and design innovative programs. Their current list of clients includes Cory Booker’s Senate campaign,  Ready for Hillary and Battleground Texas. Jeremy discussed the definition of grassroots and how organizing and targeting strategies from the Obama campaign could be adapted to help distribute film.

MG: What are the essential grassroots elements of the Obama campaign that you think can be translated to other industries like film. Is it going against an establishment, is it about empowering people, is it structure…What makes something a true grassroots operation?

Jeremy Bird: 1) Access to data and information.

That seems like something that just everybody does but people didn’t do that before. They would give access to their staff…but they wouldn’t give access to data and information down to the individual volunteer.

2) Real responsibility and goals at the local level.

Instead of saying here’s a packet call these people it’s, ‘let me talk to you about how we’re going to win your neighborhood and I want you to be a member of the team that’s going to do that.’ Now you’re going to do tactics, you’re going to do specific tasks but I’m going to think of you as someone who is responsible for this instead of someone who’s just going to do something because I tell you to.

3) The ability to scale and make your campaign accessible.

Ultimately what you’re trying to do is have people talking to people individually face to face as much as possible. You can’t do that if you’re centralizing the whole operation in D.C., Chicago or a different place.

4) A fundamental philosophy that volunteers can change the outcome.

I think the big difference starting in 2008 is that Plouffe and other people really believed that volunteers had the ability to change the outcome. So it all starts with that kind of philosophy and what you want to give people at the local level.

MG: In the film world there is a stunning lack of data about who is going to see what and how they are seeing it and that creates a problem immediately from a grassroots perspective. Have you ever had an experience where there is very little awareness about the candidate or issue and you’re starting from total scratch to see where they’re at? How do you handle a situation like that?

Jeremy Bird: When I first got to South Carolina no one knew who we were and no one knew how to pronounce our name so we did everything. We paid for TV ads, we did mail, we hired organizers on the ground to up our name idea, the full gamut of everything digital etc.

If you were trying to figure out who is most likely to go see an indie film for example as opposed to a Hollywood film, you want to figure out how big of a universe you need to talk to who tell you ‘yeah I like independent film’ and how can you build a model to say other people who look like them are likely to like independent film using a data set that you have on folks. You know we have it on voter file a lot of other people have it on consumer information.

But really, if somebody in Ohio had told us in 2010 that they supported Governor Strickland, that superceded any other piece of information we could ever get on them. It didn’t matter what car they drove, it didn’t matter where they lived, it didn’t matter what race they were…If they had told us in our worst year that they supported a Democratic candidate they were going to vote for Barack Obama.

The question is how do you actually ask people in some scalable way what movie they like to watch or what they like to eat or these things you want to know about them and then ask enough people that question that you can then build a model.

MG: A lot of filmmakers are stuck wondering if they should try to sell their film appealing to the broadest number of people possible like ‘this is a film that everyone can embrace’ or if they should try to target and isolate the audience that might like their film specifically. In your experience is it smarter to break up the audience and go after targeted constituencies or is it smarter to appeal to the broader elements of your candidate?

Jeremy Bird: Both. You have to have an overarching narrative that appeals to the largest audience possible, especially in a political campaign, then within that frame you figure out what are the things you really want to stress with specific constituencies…you want to have a broad narrative that ties it all together but then you want to highlight actually specific pieces for constituency to really speak to the issues that really matter to them. So I think it’s both.

MG: Have you ever had to do a campaign where people had to take action at home? That’s sort of a thing we have to deal with when it comes to people renting a movie on a certain day.

Jeremy Bird: That’s what we did for bad voting Democrats, sporadics. We called it commitment cards, or basically an ‘I’m in’ program. We would go to them and say, ‘do you commit to voting on Election Day?’ and have them fill out a card either online or in person saying ‘I will commit to vote.’ We wanted to know that they lived there still, that all the data was right but also that they were going to turn out.

The best was in Ohio we would send them back the card they actually filled out with their own handwriting reminding them that they committed to vote. In the states that did that in 2010, it upped turnout by like 4 to 7 points because people were reminded of something they previously committed to.

Part 2:

Our interview with Jeremy Bird gave us many key insights into how the Obama grassroots model could be utilized to distribute film. In our next post we will reflect more on what we learned from our conversation with Jeremy Bird, and present new ideas for how grassroots organizing methods can be used to empower audiences and improve targeting for film.

-Michael, Josh and Carl

A Conversation with Gregory Bayne: Why It Could Pay to Distribute for Free

Following our interview with filmmaker Jay Craven about his screening tour in rural New England, we recently talked to another self-distributing filmmaker, Gregory Bayne. Greg took an unconventional approach by distributing his first narrative feature, Person of Interest (2010), for free on torrent sites instead of submitting it to festivals. Greg realized early on that Person of Interest, which follows an Iraq veteran’s descent into PTSD, was more suited for an online audience instead of theatrical distribution. Greg reflects,

“I looked at Person of Interest which kind of has a very underground esthetic and I thought the best way to release this thing is for free, vie torrents. It did pretty well, it quickly rose to like 100,000 downloads. But then the more remarkable thing was that because it was free to share someone uploaded it to YouTube and it pulled in three quarters of a million views on YouTube and sparked a fairly long conversation about things the film deals with.”

This resulted in Greg saving money on the expensive marketing and submission costs that normally go into a festival run, while also making the film more accessible to his target audience.

For Greg's next project Driven (2011), a feature documentary that follows the personal struggles of UFC legend Jens Pulver, he  again distributing the film through unconventional grassroots methods and online tools.  In order to fund the project he launched a Kickstarter campaign that tapped into the built in audience of the Mixed Martial Arts world. Greg then decided to immediately distribute the film online and through community screenings since he felt a festival run would only slow down the momentum generated from the kickstarter campaign.

In order to build interest in the film and attract a distributor (via 3rd party) to the film, Greg built a sense of urgency around online screenings by making it available for fans to watch or download for a limited period of time.  He did this first by streaming the entire film on his website for 24 hours so people could watch it for free.  This lead to an incredible 3,000+ people seeing the film a single day.  Needless to say, that is an even larger audience than screenings at major festival like Sundance and SXSW. Greg later made the film available to watch a second time through a free online stream on Valentines Day, which lead to different Mixed Martial Arts sites like Cage Potato supporting the promotion of the film.

After sparking an interest in the film, Greg realized the best way to organize community screenings with limited resources was by  “empowering people in their local community that had really enjoyed the film and really like Jens and thought that it would be valuable to show the community.” Greg did this by allowing fans to sign up on the website to host their own screenings, and then provided them with a two page guide that explained how to setup a screening.  Greg also offered a flat fee for one time licenses to screen the film.  This enabled organizations and individuals to raise money for programs that advocated for at-risk youth since they were able to keep 100% of the proceeds. Eventually the success from online and community screenings drew a significant amount of press to the film and lead to Gravitas Ventures distributing Driven through Warner Bros. on iTunes and a wide VOD (video on demand) release.

The success Greg has achieved by distributing his films through unconventional means, proves that the traditional festival and theater run is no longer necessarily a required step. As Greg observes,

“A theatrical release now is a very small pebble in a very large ocean in terms of who hears about it or who can see it. In terms of video on demand, whether it be Netflix, or iTunes or Hulu or whatever else it’s out there. People can see it and since now it’s been validated by these services and retailers who use it everyday, it’s like a studio validated you to a certain degree.”

Although DIY distribution and grassroots methods have probably helped Greg gain more exposure for his films than if he followed a more common distribution path, Greg also expressed how the whole process can be exhausting. Greg states, “When you’re an independent filmmaker you’re also doing professional gigs on the side to pay the bills, it’s managing a lot, and the biggest lesson learned for me over time is that you can’t do it all…”

This sentiment represents a common struggle many independent filmmakers experience in the digital age of distribution. There are so many tools for distribution that one can do everything on their own, but it can also wear you down overtime. Still, Greg’s remarkable resourcefulness and ability to legitimize his films through online and community screenings, sheds light on the new distribution channels that are starting to emerge for independent filmmakers. In our study we plan to further explore how grassroots organizing methods from the Obama campaign might help filmmakers build a volunteer base and infrastructure to support new and innovative ways to distribute their films.

-Michael, Josh and Carl

The Limits of Transparency

In his article on Indiewire, "Why Are People Frustrated with Film Financing? Maybe They Aren't Going After the Right Investors," Colin Brown, whose commentary we've posted about before, contends that a solution to the fractured economic state of independent film world may be the existence of investors who don't strictly have the bottom line in mind. However, the problem he raises, is that these higher-minded investors trade in their interest in the fiscal for their desire to be involved early in the process. This would not be a problem at all, in Brown's mind, except for the precious personal stakes that director, star, and producer have in keeping the process behind closed doors. It is largely perceived that it is better to conceal the making of the sausage. Transparency, as we've mentioned before, was a key hallmark of the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012. Campaign representatives were upfront and direct about specific goals and where money would go -- amongst field operations, in working with volunteers, and in video messages to the huge body of supporters. This was contrary to prior logic at the time as well.

Despite Colin Brown's concerns, transparency may be something that independent filmmakers could use to their advantage, as many of them transition to using a non-profit, donation-based, sometimes crowdfunded model of financing. Donors tend to have different expectations than investors anyway, and if communicated with properly and honestly, with respect, their growing enthusiasm can be mobilized down the road in many forms: to spread their support to their friends and family, to show up in large numbers as an audience, to volunteer to bring in more audience, and/or, of course, for further donations.

Also, the barriers to transparency that Brown names are largely oriented around the "big personalities" and motivations of a select few working on the film. This is akin to paralysis in operational finesse in a traditional political campaign, because everyone is worried about upsetting the big players. Independent films often have loftier, or higher minded ambitions than studio fare, and so the motivation for most people getting involved is bigger than strictly fiscal. If a grassroots mentality is instilled such that everyone understands that the particular concerns of a director, producer, or star are secondary to the Larger Cause of getting the film made, then transparency with the donor/audience base should not be an issue.

(Also, it's worth mentioning that most independent filmmakers aren't working with stars! And directors and producers, at a grassroots level of independent filmmaking, are just happy to get their film made!)

How to Set a Guinness World Record and Sell Your Film

Background and Context In this post we interviewed Clay Broga, one of the producers of the feature documentary Honor Flight, which set the Guinness World Record for the largest film screening. Premiering on August 14th, 2012 at Milwaukee’s baseball stadium, Miller Park, Honor Flight drew 28,422 attendees. The film tells the story of the Honor Flight program, which raises money so WWII veterans can fly to the nation’s capital for free to visit the WWII memorial. The storyline focuses on a group of Wisconsin veterans who are flown out to Washington, D.C. to see the WWII Memorial, which was constructed in 2004.

The Honor Flight Network is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that has 117 hubs across in the U.S. They are primarily funded by individual donors, fraternal organizations like local the American Legion, and various corporations on a local level. Priority for Honor Flight trips is given to World War II veterans and other veterans who may be terminally ill.

The filmmakers started on the project independently by producing a YouTube clip of veterans from Wisconsin visiting the WWII memorial thanks to the Honor Flight program. When the filmmakers published the clip online on Veterans Day in 2009, it went viral, receiving over 30,000 hits on YouTube on its first day. The filmmakers later decided to turn the project into a feature-length documentary and the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight chapter, which is a Milwaukee based Honor Flight hub featured in the film, volunteered to act as a fiscal sponsor by raising a significant portion of the budget to help produce the film. The filmmakers and the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight chapter agreed to split the future revenue of the film, until the filmmakers recoup their production costs. At that point, the remaining revenue would go to SSHF.

Key Takeaways

There are three key takeaways that can be learned from the grassroots distribution experience of Honor Flight. 1) Working under the umbrella of an existing production company or agency gives filmmakers the significant personnel and outreach advantage, 2) Creating a sense of urgency gives a film’s distribution process the constant momentum of a campaign and 3) For films that appeal to a specialized audience, trying to squeeze into the traditional distribution process and pipeline for independent film may not pay off, both in audience reach and in financial returns.

1) After the first video clip about Honor Flight went viral, producer Clay Broga and director Dan Hayes started their own company, Freethink Media, to produce similar videos for issue advocacy organizations. Through this company, they were able to get other work such that they had an operation already in place when they went into the making of the feature, Honor Flight. This umbrella organization expanded their ability not only to raise money for the film, but, with a personnel beyond just the filmmakers, Freethink Media was able to do outreach and establish the media contacts necessary to help distribute the film after it was produced.

A common theme in our research is that filmmakers often have to build their own workforce and contacts from scratch every time they produce a film. But for Clay and Dan, Freethink is “kind of like a production company creative house,” so “by the time the film was done we had already built a full-time team and we had started to build more of a marketing capability as well.”

2) The marketing team at Freethink Media worked with the SSHF chapter in Wisconsin and the National Honor Flight Network to build a sense of urgency around the release of the film. The filmmakers released the trailer before Memorial Day, using it as a deadline to ask supporters to help the trailer reach a certain number of views on YouTube. Clay reflects,

“[We] made the language, ‘Help us get 50,000 views in honor of these veterans for Memorial Day. Showing that you care, send this on to 5 friends and family.’ And we posted it through Facebook Causes… And that worked beyond our wildest dreams. Within a few weeks we had 4.5 million views, and it was all earned and organic through Facebook.”

In addition, as a result of the trailer going viral, Freethink Media received $13,000 in unsolicited donations through Facebook Causes.

The team then created a sense of urgency to help build for the premiere of the film by announcing the goal of setting the Guinness World Record for the largest film screening at Miller Park. Freethink Media combined its network of online supporters and media contacts with the network of Honor Flight chapters to advertise for the screening. In addition, the local radio host Charlie Sykes of AM 620 WTMJ in Milwaukee, who is a partner of SSHF and is featured in the film, played a significant role by persistently promoting the event on his show. Ultimately, the cause inspired 28,442 people to attend, surpassing the previous Guinness World Record for the largest film screening by more than 1,000 attendees. The team decided to hold back on selling DVD’s at the screening since they did not want to limit their options for a theatrical and DVD retail deal and also a possible Academy Award run.

3) However, since Honor Flight had a built in-group of supporters through the Honor Flight Network, and such successful online word of mouth already, a non-conventional publicity campaign from the start might have been more profitable and effective for reaching their target audience. In addition, the choice to go for an Academy Award run meant 1) that the filmmakers had to pay for a PR firm to maximize their exposure and increase their chances, and 2) that they had to hold off on selling DVD’s until after a theatrical run (per Academy rules). Therefore, a traditional theatrical run, though it was brief, ended up costing P & A dollars as well as potential DVD units sold.

Still, it is also important to note that when the filmmakers realized the conventional distribution model did not fit their film they capitalized on the broad attention they had received by taking the film to communities across the country – an example of nimble, non-traditional thinking when it comes to self-distribution. Clay explains, “Basically our approach was to do big blowout events (like mini versions of the premiere) that we’d attract a large grassroots audience to, and try to make the events really special with big name people, speeches and bands and WWII vets from the film at screenings, etc…”

Through hosting unorthodox theatrical and community screenings, the Honor Flight team successfully held a high profile screening at the US Capital with 500 attendees, a 1,000 person screening at the Byrd in Richmond and a 1500-person screening at DAR Constitution Hall. For this national initiative, the Honor Flight team decided to mix their own screening tour while simultaneously partnering with the website Tugg.com. The Marketing Director for the film, Jo Jensen, explains how members from Honor Flight hubs and other supporters would request screenings through the Tugg.com website:

“Once they selected a date for the screening, Tugg talked to the national movie chains that they were affiliated with --- about 75% of all movie theaters --- to locate a venue. And then the screening had to meet an attendance threshold, usually about 70 people. The organization that hosted the screening received 5% of the proceeds and had the opportunity to raise funds for their cause. So we routinely raised $600-$1,200 for an Honor Flight chapter through these Tugg screenings.”

Tugg was helpful in offering the filmmakers the tech and online platform needed to successfully book a theatrical screening of the film. However, other times if the Honor Flight team wanted a bigger venue than a normal theater they found it more effective to host the screenings themselves along with other partners. Furthermore, the theater screenings set up through Tugg were effective in raising funds towards the cause, but not in generating revenue for the filmmakers. Tugg is premised on local theaters and organizations hosting (and benefiting from) the screenings – in addition to Tugg itself. So between the filmmakers, the hosting organization, the theaters, as well as the Honor Flight chapters that received proceeds, the revenue was split across so many partners that the profit left for the filmmakers proper was limited.

Conclusion

In the age of digital media and the web, there are so many tools for filmmakers to distribute their films it can be difficult to choose, and it is always tempting to go the conventional route. Clay points out,

“When we made some of those early decisions (like not selling DVDs at the premiere) it was because we were still considering more traditional options, conventional theatrical for instance, and wanted to leave the door open. But as we progressed we realized those weren’t good options for us and went the more unconventional route.”

For example, any criticism about not selling DVD’s at the premiere should come with a large caveat, because very recently, in another example of savvy marketing around an urgent initiative, the filmmakers were able to leverage their considerable body of fans such that the film debuted as the best-selling documentary on Amazon and the top rated film of all DVDs (measured by customer reviews).

In our study, we have seen films like Four Eyed Monsters and Honor Flight find their own audience through improvising and essentially creating their own distribution mode. However, we wonder if there might be a way to offer filmmakers a toolbox to help them chose the best grassroots distribution model for their specific film. This is one goal we hope to work towards and share with filmmakers at the end of this study.

-Michael, Josh and Carl

How to Be Leaner and Meaner with Targeting and Data

The New York Times magazine recently ran a 10 page feature giving an inside look at how the analytics team at the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 (alternatively described as "huge R & D projects") turned the TV marketing world on its head by being extremely savvy, and precisely targeted, with data. There is much to be learned from in here, from the angle of film distribution. Firstly, in detailing the corporate nature of some of the Obama team's lives after the campaign, the article makes clear targeting seems to be an example of one kind of tactic that is relevant in a for-profit venture as much as a non-profit political campaign (although maybe we should not be so quick to lump "non-profit" and "campaign" together all the time -- as the author puts it in this article, campaigns are more like "start-ups aimed at a one day sale," inadvertently also highlighting another similarity they have with a film's distribution). Though in former posts we've contemplated the state of the independent film world as caught in a binary between a for-profit venture and a donation-based arts-patronage endeavor, more recent posts about the Scottish Documentary Institute and NationBuilder demonstrate that some organizations are giving all entry points a seat at the table, at once. Targeting works from either angle.

The thrust of the article basically conjures the campaign's process in finding a cheaper and more effective way to use data to identify who they should be targeting with their persuasion tactics. Through cross-referencing data sets from voter contact, Facebook, party-voter lists, and a new TV tracking firm, the campaign ended up spending 35% less per broadcast than the Romney campaign, but got 40,000 more spots on the air for $90 million less. (Truly astounding). The ultimate irony, from a film business lens, is that that tracking firm they used is Rentrak -- which, while also being a competitor for Nielsen to inform TV viewing practices, has been the film industry's standard paid-for service to measure how films perform in each of their theatrical venues and markets. In other words, the campaign utilized one of the film industry's tools, but more effectively than the film industry itself, the big studios of which likely (and this is conjecture) use what the article classifies as the more antiquated, less reliable, and certainly less precise Nielsen system to determine where to throw their advertising dollars (combined with "hunches and deductions"). Nielsen is in 22,000 homes; Rentrak is in 8 million. Nielsen breaks down audiences into big chunks like "18 to 49 year-old male"; it did not provide a proper data set to cross-reference the 15 million potential Obama voters the campaign had identified through Facebook. Nielsen is what tells advertisers and studios to broadcast an ad aimed at a huge swath of the U.S. during primetime; the campaign's Rentrak-based data told them they could do more for less by targeting "Judge Joe Brown" and "The Insider" viewers in early afternoon and 1 A.M., respectively.

This is where the clunky, old school, risk-averse practices of industry entities like studios put them at a potential disadvantage to independent filmmakers - if, and only if, independent filmmakers can be nimble with data like the campaign was. Of course the campaign was a national entity with massively widespread recognition for the "movie" they were selling, and it had plenty of money for its operation, but targeting is desirable because it uses less resources to get more results. This is the bedrock of a grassroots philosophy. Admittedly, this article centralizes one specific format for advertising: television, which requires more money than most grassroots filmmakers will have in their budgets in order to use it to advertise. But both the origin story of where they got the data that led to the TV ads and how they thought about their TV ads are relevant.

For one, Dan Wagner, the analytics guru featured in the article, notes the sea change in the political data world from the Bush years, where they would divine how a person would likely vote from their car and sports preferences. "Why engage in such divination when you have the time and money to just call voters and ask them about their leanings directly?" he asked, describing what they went on to do. Both Obama campaigns oriented their volunteer force around giant voter outreach operations, which supplied much of the data that people like Wagner had to work with -- specifically, who was undecided or should otherwise be targeted for persuasion. Another caveat is deserved to say that Wagner does attribute this to "time and money," two things that a grassroots filmmaker likely won't have much of, but it is still relatively cheap to pick up the phone and ask someone about their preferences. Could this be applied to a film's release? A political campaign can start with a party voter list; how would a film campaign know what numbers to call? The answer, as it was for the Obama staff, may be in cross-referencing. See how far one gets through social media -- not everyone who likes a film on Facebook is going to turn out for it. They, and their friends who may have the same film-going interests as them, provide a place to start. Also, in doing grassroots outreach to organizations based on an "issue" or subject matter that might be of interest to them, filmmakers are already sort of doing "targeted" cold-calling. It's just a matter of prioritizing phone conversations like these, as well as mining the aforementioned social media outreach for potential audience members. Also, though the idea of going door-to-door to gauge or spread interest in an independent film that is premiering locally seems like madness, if other data sets generated a targeted map to go from one house of a likely independent film watcher to another, it might seem like more than just a drop in a bucket.

The Obama campaign spent 50% of their budget on advertising. That might at first read as a stark rebuttal of the importance of their field operation. But for grassroots filmmakers, outreach like this is the equivalent of advertising; there is no reason not to prioritize it just as much as the campaign did. In fact, if filmmakers save enough money by doing outreach, they may even have enough left over to actually advertise on TV themselves! If research yields that one spot on a certain show at a certain time would give enough bang for the buck, why not?

Bringing the parallel worlds full circle, the folks at Wagner's new venture, Civis Analytics, seem perfectly set up to be used by filmmakers: they aim to "use analytics to help nonprofit and for-profit companies reach out to segments of the population they were struggling to connect with."

Does Independent Film Need its own Google?

In a recent Indiewire article, "In Film Buying and Selling: Too Much Insider Information, Not Enough Data," Editorial Director of Slated Colin Brown makes a resounding plea for something we have harped on numerous times in our findings: more data. In this case, he means specifically more transparency in the film business around sales numbers. He mentions how the variety of players in the film industry contribute to the secrecy around numbers; everyone from a producer to a distributor to a director seems to have a reason to maintain their "tendency to massage, manipulate, and even muddy figures for individual gain." In fact, an entire format of distribution (and an increasingly popular one) is notorious for not making sales numbers readily available; though access to something like Rentrack to check specific theatrical grosses is privileged and costly, at least it exists, which is more than can be said for Video-on-Demand. (However, if you want to see a thorough presentation on film that thrived specifically on its VOD sales, complete with actual, not secret VOD numbers, check the accompanying article from Indiewire about the film American: The Bill Hicks Story). Brown makes a very strong case and hits on many of the problems we've encountered, though he does imply that distributors can benefit from making sales data available as much as producers. Specifically in independent film, this seems like a dubious idea; 1) already distributors have more access to sales data by nature of their jobs, and 2) by withholding what is a commonly paid advance or normative terms for a certain kind of film, distributors can more easily get to the negotiating table with producers. In the festival context of being met with a much bleaker market for their film than expected, filmmakers can become open to deals with certain distributors based on other factors.

In fact, Brown's post leads us to wonder: if there were some sort of publicly accessible information set regarding film sales -- like Hollywood's own Google -- is it likely that as many films would even get made? As this article makes clear, many films are pitched to investors with faulty business plans, based on sloppy estimates as to what kind of films did what kind of business in what kind of formats. If all of that was out in the open, and just a few clicks away, would equity investors go in for nearly as many films as they do currently? Or is this even a relevant question at this point; has the independent film industry been living off of the misinformed hopes of investors for so long that it is ingrained into the business's ecosystem?

Imagining something beyond the current status quo, it seems that the independent film world could go one of two ways. One option is to make this data publicly available and risk that production would slow. This would not necessarily be a bad thing, in that the glut of production being forced into relatively limited distribution channels (without filmmakers inventing their own paths) has proven to be problematic. What would be a bad thing is if production didn't slow down, but rather become boring -- in other words, that the information available would lead investors to play it safe with safer, broader films. (Said another way: even artier, less commercial filmmakers are currently thriving on the lack of available data out there).

The second option would be to really make strides so as to provide a ready-made recourse for filmmakers that sense that their film might not have much market value as an asset to a distribution company, in whatever format. Everyone is focused on sales -- even artier filmmakers -- because it is the only tangible perception of a film's success. The thought of putting a film out yourself is still just too scary. If, through popularizing grassroots tactics, the thought of self-distribution wasn't so daunting, and there were tried-and-true techniques that could allow you to get more of an audience for less of a cost, sales could be made an irrelevant idea for non-commercial films where it is, truly, irrelevant.  Websites like Kickstarter show that we are in an age where otherwise tough-to-finance film can be made (and attract an engaged audience) on a donation and campaign based model. So let's give up the ghost: if the film someone wants to make just isn't sellable, he or she need not waste time searching for data to trick an investor into thinking it's otherwise. There are other ways to get it made, and perhaps sales should not be your end goal to begin with.

And as for ways to get it to the world? Fortunately data (of the unrelated-to-sales variety) does have an important place in the  non-profit/campaign/donation-based world -- which is the sandbox you are now playing in, if you accept that your film is not a business enterprise. Being transparent with data about goals for example -- how many theaters you'd like to hold over your film (realistically), or how many audience members you think you can engage based on a similar prior film -- can really inspire your audience to become advocates for you. This is similar to the way that David Plouffe used data in videos to inspire donors and volunteers; he would remark on exactly how many voters the Obama campaign needed to reach in order to make sure that enough people came out on Election Day. Or he'd be upfront with exactly why they were targeting certain states in order to reach a precise electoral college goal.

Maybe sales data is the wrong kind of data to be searching for altogether. More likely, the question a self-distributing filmmaker needs to know is not "How much will my film make?" but rather, "Who is the audience for my film?" Answering that question will enable them to target them, and empower them, and then be able to answer that first question with at least some sort of clue. A great thing about a site like Kickstarter is that besides enabling the funding of your film, it also identifies an already-opted-in audience for it. What if engaging that audience on the other end of that film's life (in its reception) seemed as easy-to-do and popular as Kickstarter? In campaign terms: you've identified your voters. Now the task is to activate them for Election Day.

We hope to be able to figure out how to help filmmakers do this, by the end of our fellowship.

The Scottish Documentary Institute and NationBuilder

A collaboration on a recent documentary sheds light on two organizations doing very interesting things in the world of independent film financing, distribution, audience building, and campaigning.

The film itself -- I Am Breathing -- lends itself to a grassroots approach already. The film follows a Yorkshire man named Neil Platt, who has Motor Neurone Disease, as he records the last few months of his life, as the disease takes its toll on him. The film is meant to be a record of who he was for his toddler son, and to complement filming he also blogs throughout the movie as well -- about how he feels, what he's going through, etc. It is a heart-wrenching film to watch, but it is a perfect example of having a built-in audience for a possible campaign. First there are people who have the disease itself, or who are in social or familial circles with people who do. Secondly there's the created audience started by the subject's blog. In fact, the film began merely as a short film meant very specifically to shed light on the condition of Motor Neurone Disease; this is similar to the origins of Honor Flight, a film we'll explore in a coming blog post. The directors of I Am Breathing note the community parallels in this article: "We planned initially to make a short film for MND but somehow [Neil's] ambition, honesty and desire to communicate pushed it to be a much bigger film. I Am Breathing, like the blog is about creating community around this horrendous disease –reminding us of a humanity in the midst of such suffering."

The Scottish Documentary Institute, which fostered the film's production and distribution, knew that though the film had become a much larger thing, it still lent itself to a campaign to raise awareness. They used Global Motor Neurone Disease Day as a moment to encourage hosting screenings of the film. Right on the SDI's main page for the film, the layout and arrow like icons seem to push you to go from watching the trailer to finding where you can see it near you to how you can host a screening... a veritable trapdoor progression of involvement. Naturally, as is common with "issue" films, revenue from any and all screenings will be split with the proper charity. What's fascinating about the Scottish Documentary Institute is that they are explicitly interested in "bridging the gap between academia and the industry," as noted here, the potential for which is a recurring theme in our findings -- see our prior post on Jay Craven. With the campaign for "I Am Breathing" they are debuting a fundraising widget that stands to be applicable for many different kinds of films, with many different kinds of contributors: "Without an intermediary platform, this toolset will not only facilitate crowdfunding or donations as currently known; it will offer groundbreaking functionality such as instant digital rewards, flexible pricing, automated handling of community screenings, and pay-it-forward technology." They're matching this with some on-the-ground outreach to proper community contacts - "making sure the widget will be implemented by hundreds of partners with an interest in the films’ subject matters. SDI aims to generate additional revenue enabling future investments, to grow its supporter base, to return value to its partners, and to deliver a robust fundraising solution that could benefit many others in the future." This sounds related to what Seed&Spark are doing; what's most fascinating is that filmgoers with various interests in a film could all use this tool -- be it a donor who just wants to support a film that he or she believes in, an internet user looking for rewards for donating to or sharing info about a film, a micro-investor, or big-time investor. With most current crowdfunding sites focusing on one or two of these kinds of users (ie the difference between Kickstarter and Slated), it will be interesting to see how this one-size-fits-all approach plays out.

An organization called NationBuilder was also involved in the audience outreach and organizing for "I Am Breathing." A quick video introduces the basics of what NationBuilder does, but basically it helps organize online and offline campaigns for any "nation," defined here as "a group of people - fans, followers, constituents, members, donors, volunteers, customers, shareholders, partners - united behind a common purpose." The idea of a "nation" is a convenient way to group many organizations we've seen that do have similar structures in their building of an audience; our whole CRI inquiry is based on the idea that an independent film's distribution has much to be learned from something like a non-profit. NationBuilder is like the digital agency Blue State Digital, in that they consult for non-profits, governments, politicians, and work off of a set of tried-and-true online tools (ie the control panel). If anything NationBuilder has a more uniform aesthetic for their clients (see the navigation bar in the video -- it's almost like a cross between Blue State Digital and Wordpress), while each website that's worked with BSD looks differently. However, what's most striking about NationBuilder is it also works with businesses, striking an equivalency between non-profits, governments, political campaigns, and strictly for capital enterprises. While for nonprofits and political campaigns, the site has an overlapping goal to "organize your supporters, volunteers, and donors,"  and a government's goal to "connect with constituents" seems not too far off from that, the video says that business owners can use NationBuilder to "nurture prospects, and grow customer relationships..."

This is the tension within the independent film industry at the moment, borne of a fracture between filmmakers who interact with audiences as a brand they want them to relate to, and those that essentially want them to support their non-profit. No matter what, it seems like NationBuilder is very relevant to modern film distribution -- whether your nation are advocates being rallied to support a cause by seeing your film, or just an audience who wants some escapist entertainment.

Jay Craven: Cultivating Your Film Audience

Background & Context This week we interviewed Jay Craven who has developed his own grassroots screening circuit in the specific New England region whose culture, history, and stories take center stage in his films, which often take place in rural Vermont and New Hampshire. For screenings, Jay focuses on small towns, some of which have populations as small as 300. These towns are so small they typically can’t support a movie theater, and so locals typically look to church theater productions and high school sporting events for entertainment. This provides Jay with a unique opportunity to cultivate his own audience instead of competing against big budget films at the box office.

Key Takeaways

Jay has used three grassroots methods to establish a circuit of town screenings: 1) engaging the audience early on to grow a list of supporters 2) turning town screenings into a community event and 3) using offline and online sign-ups to grow his audience.

1) Jay was able to build an infrastructure of grassroots supporters that later helped finance and distribute his feature films by screening short student films in New England towns.  He came up with the idea of using grassroots organizing methods to distribute films during the Vietnam War. Jay explains,

“In 1971, I helped to make a Vietnam War documentary that was called Time is Running Out. We made 50 prints and took it to colleges and communities across the country--to help organize a big civil disobedience demonstration in Washington, DC in May 1971, where 14,000 people got arrested for committing civil non-violence disobedience… It was initially through this experience that the idea of mission-driven filmmaking appealed to me.”

When Jay joined the faculty of Marlboro College, his productions became educational opportunities for his students. He made a regional comedy series (WIndy Acres) with mostly students and he set up internships for ten students on his feature film, Disappearances.  In 2012 he took this idea one step further.  Two-thirds of the crew for his latest film, Northern Borders (2013) consisted of students from a dozen different colleges who came to Malrboro College for a film intensive semester that included literature and film study along with hands-on production classes, visiting artists, and six weeks of feature production, where students worked in substantial positions ranging from script supervisor, boom operator, associate editor, and location manager to assistant directors, costumes, props, and production coordinator. For Northern Borders, half the budget would be provided by Marlboro. This is a great example of the prominence and potential of academic institutions as points of intersections for grassroots ideas and industry tools (what with their shared resources) — a recurring theme we plan to explore later on in our study.

After Where the Rivers Flow North screened at Sundance and other film festivals, Jay activated his grassroots network of supporters in rural Vermont towns to do another round of regional screenings before its theatrical release. The film ultimately grossed a million dollars theatrically.

This is another example of how filmmakers can establish their contacts and audience through other means besides screening their film.  Similar to how B-Side was able to grow its email listserve by providing an online service that people opted into at film festivals, Jay was able to cultivate his own audience in rural New England towns by first organizing a touring film series to small towns where he showed classic, foreign, and indie films, along with his films and his students' shorts. Also similar to how B-Side was able to later use their listserve to distribute Super High Me locally, Jay was able to distribute his future feature films by gradually growing the network of supporters who originally attended his short film screenings.

2) The audience Jay seeks to attract to his town screenings may or may not be consistent movie fans, but they take an active interest in major events in their hometown.  Jay recognizes that,

“half my audience at least does not go to the movies very often except if I bring something to them… The theater is pretty full, and so the audience is reacting together, and there is a kind of chemistry that forms and there is an electricity that comes off the event that is like a performing arts event."

Not to mention that Jay enhances the appeal of the screening by being present himself to hold Q & A’s afterwards at nearly 80% of the events. Furthermore, by making screenings more accessible to residents in rural towns who have limited options for live entertainment, Jay is able to trigger a word of mouth campaign within the community. Jay notes that, “If my movie were playing 25 miles away at a movie theater, people who were motivated and into it would go. But when the movie is in their town or the town next to where they are, and their neighbors and friends are buzzing about it they will go because it is an event.”

From our perspective working on the Obama campaign, making campaign events more accessible played a critical role in expanding the campaigns’ volunteer base.  Similar to how Jay turned church basements, school auditoriums and libraries into town screenings for his film, the Obama campaign transformed barber shops, supporters’ homes and storefronts into phonebanks, voter registration drives and canvasses.  The effort to make the campaign more accessible led to thousands of volunteers to get involved especially in rural areas where supporters would have had to travel 30-60 minutes to reach the closest field office to their town. The accessibility and word of mouth campaign from Jay’s town screenings lead to an average audience of 80 in towns where the population size averaged 300. That means Jay was able to attract 26% of a town’s total population to the screening of his film.

3) Jay also grew his list of grassroots supporters by establishing a solid sign-up process at screenings and through offline postcards. Jay discussed,

“the standard that we have used a lot is postcards because for small and even medium sized towns you can mail a post card to everybody in town… when you go to larger areas you start working with mailing lists… and we have are own [email] lists. I have a solid list that is probably 4,000 people.”

Jay has people who attend his screenings sign in so he can add them to an email list he uses to advertise his screenings locally.  This allows Jay to continuously build his audience through every screening on his tour. In addition to sending emails to advertise screenings, Jay sends offline postcards to residents in small New England towns. Postcards add a personal touch that help Jay advertise in rural areas where people might not have Internet or are not frequent uses of the web.

Conclusion

The main question Jay’s town distribution model raises is whether independent filmmakers are better off trying to reach a demographic beyond indie and blockbuster audiences through local or regional screenings.  Not only is this method cost effective, but it also provides filmmakers with an opportunity to tap into support from people in small towns that are not lured into high budget Hollywood movies and more likely to appreciate the regionally specific cultural aspects of independent film.

However, Jay’s town circuit is dependent upon a very specific region of northern England where the setting of most his films take place.  Could town screenings for independent films be effective in other rural and medium sized towns across U.S? Should independent filmmakers consider making screenings more accessible to people in small towns where the cultural themes and setting of their film resonate? By knowing that his film will connect with a specific audience that he knows he’s going to target, Jay can avoid the problematic bottleneck “gatekeepers” of independent film festivals. We plan to explore how Jay Craven’s town screening model might be applicable for distributing independent films with different cultural themes in future posts.

-Michael, Josh and Carl

Speaking in Tongues: Case Study

Background & Context In this post we report on an interview with Marcia Jarmel, director of the documentary film Speaking in Tongues. Marcia shared a generous amount of insight from her own experience with grassroots distribution.

Marcia and her co-director Ken Schneider partnered with Working Films, a national nonprofit that focuses on audience engagement to work strategically with particular documentaries to make a social impact. As Speaking in Tongues deals with issues of secondary languages in schools, the campaign attempted to raise awareness of the importance of bilingualism through community screenings, educational distribution, and community action. In other words, they explicitly imagined and positioned their film as a tool for social change.

The Speaking in Tongues team utilized two grassroots methods to distribute the film nationally: (1) reaching out to advocacy and issue interested groups and (2) community screenings. To coordinate outreach for community screenings, they identified six key audiences: Policymakers, Legislators, Parents, Educators, Youth, and Language Advocates.

To promote sales online, Marcia and her team sent out alerts electronically and reached out to a network of partner organizations that posted the trailer on their websites and blogs.  The outreach resulted in more than 250 community screenings across the United States, many of which were hosted by community groups, advocates and conferences.  The highest attendance for a screening was over 300 and the film has sold close to 3,000 DVD's to date.  It continues to screen and reach new educational audiences 4 years after its premiere.

Key Takeaways

There are four key themes to be considered through a grassroots/campaign lens, from the film: 1) clear goals for interpreting and formulating metrics from the start, 2) the advantages of positioning a film as a social instrument, 3) the need for a specific kind of workforce, and 4) the current potential of gathering and reusing valuable data for future film campaigns. Finally, we’ll end with some concluding ideas on how some of Marcia’s challenges could be rectified.

1) We showed in our past post on Participant Media that using a film as a tool for social action can usually create a metric system for impact that a standard film cannot. External action is simply easier to measure – and the case of Speaking in Tongues is no different. The filmmakers used a service called Sparkwise that tracked all the data that they selected as relevant to the film; this could be everything from number of likes on Facebook to what states had passed H.R. 6036, the Excellence and Innovation in Language Learning Act. In other words, the filmmakers tied the film’s success to the success of the larger social movement it was supporting.

However, the film did not begin tracking these metrics until the campaign was waning; the platform wasn't available yet, and it was unknown at the time how useful they would be. The Speaking in Tongues filmmakers did do substantial work to connect with advocates and set up community screenings, as well as email blasts to thousands of educators interested in the issue. They screened at about 20 conferences to audiences large and small. The idea was that these audiences would then bring the film and its materials and messages back to their own communities. Of course, the social impact of one film can be extremely tricky to measure, especially with a film like Speaking in Tongues, which was one voice in a broader debate. To isolate & measure impact would mean isolating the film from its social movement; instead, Marcia says, "our strategy... was to connect with campaigns already in process rather than try to create and implement our own campaign... because we didn't have the people power or organizing expertise in house."

2) Marcia considered the film’s status as an instrument for change not as a hindrance to its popularity but rather as helpful in the distribution opportunities they were exploring. In the personal contact required to build the community screenings, the film’s agenda provided a common goal for citizens previously unaffiliated with the film – as opposed to trying to get them to advocate for a film that does not take on a cause they care about. Marcia reflected:

“It’s really about relationship building, which is probably very similar to political campaigning… Instead of offering [just] a film which people can see as a request to promote a film for free, you frame it in terms of what the organization needs.  What are they trying to do.  Can we create an event that can serve to push their own agenda forward? ... These relationships take time and management.”

This is Community Organizing 101: sharing your story and framing the challenge at hand in terms of how its resolution can move toward a common goal. In order to do this, however, you need organizers that can reach out to supporters through intimate, one-on-one meetings on the ground. Which leads to our next takeaway:

3) If there was one thing that Marcia kept coming back to, was the need for a larger workforce to collaborate with. With the campaign for the film so oriented around community screenings, it was clear that more direct, on the ground, hands-on attention to these screenings could have made them exponentially more popular, which would have been good both for the film’s political goals and for it as a thing in the marketplace.

As anyone who has worked in a campaign regional field office knows, it’s fundamentally important to engage volunteers to build whatever you are staging in the area. Local volunteers can also provide tactical advice and event-building support in a much more customized and impactful way than mass emails. Finally, organizers on the ground could also have helped conduct press outreach, which is an activity unfamiliar and uncomfortable to many volunteers but vital to a sustainable promotional campaign.

“Having more people nurturing those relationships, checking in with contacts regularly, having the budget to travel to meet people face to face, all of that would have made a big difference in what could have happened and the pace at which things happened,” reflects Marcia. When asked what the most important factor is in the success of campaigns like hers, she concluded “I think it’s people.”

The interns that Marcia did have were not, in fact, people interested in advancing in the film industry, nor were they up and coming political activists with a particular interest in the cause. Rather, they were folks interested in marketing. Marcia conceded that anyone interested in documentary film should be much more versed in this kind of ground-level organizing skill set. We’ll revisit this idea in the last, concluding takeaway.

4) A brief but simple takeaway: Marcia’s film is a textbook case about how valuable data can be in the modern self-distribution landscape. Throughout the course of her film’s campaign (and all of its outreach, community screenings, and publicity), innumerable names, phone numbers, and email addresses were acquired. However, at the end of the ordeal, there was not a logical place to pass it on to, when it seemed like there very much should be. Marcia reflects,

“It’s not the data that I don’t know what to do with, but the universe of the film…website, Facebook and Twitter followers, newsletter subscribers, blog followers.  There’s a universe there that I don’t have the bandwidth to sustain.  I will continue to include the contacts in my outreach for future films, but the network of people following these issues through us, seems like a resource that shouldn’t be let go.”

We’ve established in other posts that information like this is pivotal for self-distribution. As Marcia mentioned, it seems like it should have a life beyond one film’s outreach – as it did with B-Side. However, B-Side was an organization; this is one group of filmmakers. But what if there was a legitimate way for filmmakers to share information like this?

Conclusion

“At the beginning of this I had zero experience … I started out thinking I could do everything myself, and made myself pretty nuts for a while. It is much, much easier to have an army of people helping you. I think most filmmakers do not have that.”

If there has been one recurring theme from our conversations with Marcia and other independent filmmakers is that filmmakers often feel overwhelmed by having to create their own digital and community outreach campaign from scratch. Not only does this create more work and stress for the filmmaker in areas that are not their expertise, but it also results in the important data gathered from audiences who are already engaged going to waste once the distribution run of the film is done.

This makes us wonder if a film collective could be formed so that when audiences ‘opt-in’ to a film project – i.e. they give their information at a community screening, or to a volunteer -- the information is shared and passed onto a group of filmmakers that later use the information for their future campaigns. Taking it further, this collective could also share best practices, organizers, and even volunteers so that filmmakers like Marcia do not have to start from scratch every time they make a film. Especially for filmmakers who want to use their film as a tool for change, the skills necessary for organizing an engaged populace for voting and for filmgoing overlap in a major way. We’ll end with this quotation from Marcia:

“I think there is a huge disconnect between people who are doing advocacy and political work…they don’t understand how film can be a tool for them. Everybody wants to have a video for their website that promotes their own agenda but people do not understand how powerful stories can be in moving that agenda forward. The more independent those stories are from the advocacy organization itself,  the more powerful they can be in bringing people in beyond the choir.”

What would such a “film organizing” organization look like? Would it consist mostly of filmmakers or include community organizers and activists as well? This is an idea we plan to explore in future posts.

Marcia and the Speaking in Tongues team will be putting up a new section of their website this summer that will include information on best practices and case studies about the successful impact of their film.  Anyone interested in following the Speaking in Tongues campaign can join their mailing list at (www.speakingintonguesfilm.info) and / or their Facebook page at (https://www.facebook.com/Speaking.in.Tongues.film).  The website also has many free and useful resources for organizing community screenings of Speaking in Tongues.

-Michael, Josh and Carl

Missing the Forest for the Trees: The Donor vs Investor Debate

A recent article in Indiewire got our attention, entitled "The Reason Kickstarter is a Gamechanger? Donating is Better than Investing When it Comes to the Arts."  In it, filmmaker Dan Mirvish makes a case for why the popularity of websites like Kickstarter should finally make it abundantly clear that independent filmmakers should consider what they do as arts to be contributed to, as opposed to a business venture to be invested in. (However, he also heralds Kickstarter's ability to garner him traditional investors as well as contributors, but that paradox nonwithstanding...) From the point of view of grassroots distribution, we have two equally paradoxical thoughts. One is that the endeavor of this study is predicated on the idea that there must be something filmmakers can learn from a political campaign, which very much is a donation-based model. Many of the successes we've written about so far have involved when filmmakers act like their film is a campaign to be donated to, one with a viewing "base" to be engaged and motivated, and to use deadlines to spark action. To donate to something is to be an advocate for it, and the (seemingly large) potential of transforming an audience into advocates is what we are exploring here. At the end of the day, besides contributing fiscally, a donor becomes part of a built-in audience. That's a good thing; how you build an audience is key.

However, do we need to readily accept this classification of Independent Film as a "fancy art" to be granted to, donated to? Or is it just that filmmakers are trying to cram the massive amount of product out there into the same, tightly bottlenecked distribution pipelines? Going further, if we properly marshalled grassroots resources and ideas and structures, and were thus able to get our films more directly and profitably to the audiences that are right for them, would independent film be such a pitied profession, in which revenue is a bonus and not an expectation? If an independent film's financial life just ends with it being underwritten, then is its value merely in its existence and not in its shared enjoyment? Is it meant to just exist as a pet project -- the equivalent of a museum piece, to be viewed by an elite few who can find their way to it (and hopefully the small audience that donated it into existence in the first place).

A relatively small percentage of the country donated to the Obama campaign in 2008; however, 51% of the voting population voted for him. If films can be campaigns, campaigns certainly depends on donations. But the idea of a campaign is to win, and the idea of a grassroots campaign is to use little to win big. And in film, isn't winning big having as many people see (and pay for) your film as humanly possible? Or is the "paying for" part a lost cause?

The Hegemony of Big Data

Recently, the Tribeca Film Festival held a panel entitled "Big Data at the Movies," which was covered comprehensively by this article in Indiewire. The article defines Big Data like so: "extremely large data sets detailing -- in this case -- how media is consumed... Whether through long planned advertising campaigns, social media, or on-the-spot last minute marketing pushes, Big Data is shaping what you watch." In other words, Big Data is a vast amount of privileged information to which only corporations that can afford it have access. These days, with the multifaceted way that consumers watch films, and the all-important role of the internet in the watching of film, access to Big Data may be the attribute of a studio that truly distinguishes it from grassroots, independent film. It's not necessarily about not having a huge P & A budget, or more employees, or the ability to hire a PR company; it may boil down to just not being able to know who watches what where. The ability to see and use that information could allow independent filmmakers to be nimble with where they put the small resources they do have. Time and time again in these posts, we have hit upon how important access to data is -- even if it is just a list of email addresses.

However, the Indiewire article also hints at where big studios could be faultily using Big Data. FilmTrack Co-founder and CEO Jason Kassin "elaborated that the ideal method of data analysis on the studio end should always be in determining the best strategy for finding an audience and not in developing properties entirely around gaining an audience." If the studios overplay their hand and use Big Data to design properties, grassroots filmmakers could use smarter, craftier ways of finding audiences for their (usually more original) content. Original content can inspire passion, and even the Big Data prophets present at the panel knew that passion can win out over number-crunching. "Being in the filmmaking community, it's all about that passion. You can see it whether in a certain actor or actress or a director's vision," said Stacey Spikes, CEO of MoviePass. "Data at the end of the day can never grasp that."

A Large Caveat to Remarks on a Changing Landscape

Given the considerable boon in film production, met with the general stasis of "traditional" distribution channels, more than ever filmmakers have questions on how they can find effective means of getting their own films out to audiences. The intent of our research is to explore the efficacy of particular models based in political campaign structures and tactics. The flip side to the technology that creates such a glut in films produced is the technology that more easily enables their distribution. The impulse in discourse about the "changing landscape" of film distribution is to celebrate these new means of viewing films -- that modes like Video on Demand or digital distribution help match audiences to films that might otherwise go unnoticed. Take, for example this passage in Bajir Cannon's "The united states of unscreened cinema"  as he refers to "the key roles new technologies play in disrupting established power relations and increasing opportunities for democratic activism, participation, and competition (Bennett, 2003; Kellner, 1990; Picard, 2000), in challenging the concentration of ownership and media power (Compaine and Gomery, 2000; Negroponte, 1996), and, through emerging ‘horizontal’ distribution networks and the blurring line between mass and self-communications, in offering new opportunities for counter-power (Castells, 2007, 2009)" (page 3).

In summary, he is citing the litany of scholars who refer to the transformative power of the new technology -- how it can redistribute power to those who didn't have any in the former political economy of the film world.

However, if one approaches the current landscape from a political campaign perspective, the discussion at least deserves a caveat. Our study in a way is predicated on comparisons between the commonalities of film reception and the act of voting in an election: in both, organizations strive to get as much of the public to  manifest their interest/support for a particular "thing" (in politics, a measure or candidate; in film, a film). That could be said for any marketable product or brand, but the similarity is particularly apt with regard to film and politics, as there is a concentrated window of time that is of the utmost importance to the success of the endeavor that fans or voters show their support. Historically, in film, this has been a film's theatrical release, because this happens first and indicates how it's going to do in the marketplace long-term.

Now, however, the technology has disrupted the importance of this moment. First of all, most films won't get a theatrical release, but this doesn't mean they won't get any release at all... it will just occur digitally, or in phases. There is increasingly less of a science to what must happen first where to indicate that a film has indeed found its audience. But here's the caveat: no matter how the landscape changes, no matter how many new ways there is to see a film, the act of going to the theater will always be the most democratic way to see a film. This is of particular relevance to us because the ultimate act of a campaign, which is voting, also depends on a wholly democratic way for the public to show its support: as long as you are registered (which does not require money), you can go to a specific place and pull the lever and vote. Similarly, though distribution modes like VOD and digital distribution or even television depend on the ownership of some other device to experience a film, anyone with $5 to $12 can walk into a theater (the equivalent of a voting location) and go see a film.

This is important to keep in mind, because as we explore the various possibilities that new technologies present to distribution, it must with the caveat that such technologies are not in fact available to everyone. We are dealing with a limited group -- albeit not very limited, especially with regards to television, a medium that 97% of Americans have access to -- but nonetheless it is not a wholly democratic sample. Meanwhile, the endeavor of running a political campaign is predicated on the fact that everyone registered -- which could in fact be 100% of the public at saturation point -- will be able to come out and manifest their support for the candidate being pressed on them. This underscores the fact that the film industry 20 years ago, prior to the popularization of the internet and digital mediums, would make for a more direct comparison to political campaigns. In our current research, we must keep in mind that these two worlds are dealing with slightly different pools of the public. Everyone can be a voter, barring legality; but today, not everyone can be a viewer.

Online Distribution & Grassroots Distribution: Notes from a fellow CRI Fellow's Symposium

Claire Harlem’s CRI symposium on community and online distribution reflected a year of hard work and offered new insights into how the Internet is changing production, financing, and distribution. Claire’s program was especially relevant to our study since the Internet is a key tool for grassroots self-distribution. Here is a link to Claire’s fellowship blog from last year. During Claire’s symposium, several entrepreneurs spoke about social media sites they designed to help filmmakers raise funds and distribute their movies. The first presenter was Emily Best, the CEO and President of Seed&Spark.  Seed&Spark has a similar platform to Kickstarter with project pages that display a trailer, summary of the film, and prizes for donors. However, the Seed&Spark website also includes a wishlist where donors can contribute money or loan supplies that a filmmaker needs to make their movie. This feature seeks to tap into the “higher sense of service to others” that we discussed in our previous post Giving vs. Taking here.  Basically, creating a sense of service to others can be more effective than offering monetary rewards in motivate people to contribute since people have an inherent desire to help others in need.

However, Seed&Spark supplements the altruistic spirit presented by the wishlist with various material incentives and prizes for people who contribute. Similar to Kickstarter, Seed&Spark offers people who donate or loan supplies to a film project prizes such as DVD’s or movie posters. In addition, “sparks” points are awarded to people who sign up to follow projects, spread publicity for other films or watch films through the online cinema feature on the site. “Sparks” can then be used to watch movies offered on their cinema site or to get discounts from Seed&Spark partners, such as Film Independent and Big Vision Empty Wallet.

The Obama campaign applied an approach similar to that of Seed&Spark by having wishlists at field offices that displayed everything local offices needed, from food donations to cell phones and computer supplies. However, in contrast to "Seed&Spark," the campaign did not offer rewards or incentives to volunteers who donated. Instead, supporters were given more access to and ownership in the campaign, which motivated volunteers to believe that they were an integral part of a movement. See our post on Motivation and Transparency here.

Another speaker named David Geertz, discussed how his social media website Sokap seeks to create a community-based distribution system through a monetary relationship between the filmmaker and audience. Non-profits and individuals are incentivised to purchase the right to screen films in a town or city for a flat fee and then reap a certain percentage of the profit whenever someone buys the DVD in their area. This motivates people to advertise the film locally since they will receive a percentage of the revenue every time the film sells in their region. The amount of each commission varies between projects and is set by the filmmaker or production company. This model seems best suited for social issue films that relate to non-profit organizations with local chapters.

In contrast to Seed&Sparks, Sokap is focused on motivating audiences to help with the distribution of films locally rather than contributing resources for the production of the films. Furthermore, Sokap incentivizes audiences to get involved in the distribution of film by creating a monetary relationship with the filmmaker and audience, whereas Seed&Spark offers material prizes and “spark” points to motivate audiences.

All the speakers expressed the importance of filmmakers tweeting, facebooking and blogging in order to build their online audience. Although it is important for filmmakers to lay the groundwork for any future film by using social networking sites, we wonder if there is a ceiling to how much new filmmakers can accomplish when they do not have much work that is well known or at least can be shared and linked to on the internet. This is one place where a grassroots approach focused on offline outreach (cold calling non-profits, advocacy groups, etc.) to create relationships would probably bear more fruit in the early days. If no one is aware of who you are, tweeting a lot won’t magically build your audience. However, creating face-to-face or at least telephone relationships with people who have similar interests could result in people feeling more connected to you personally and later becoming more invested in your projects.

Social media platforms like Seed&Spark and Sokap that attempt to help filmmakers fund and distribute their films raise questions about what motivates people to donate their time, money and efforts to a project. Sokap attempts to motivate people to promote films by offering a percentage of the revenue.  Seed&Spark tries to motivate people through a sense of altruism offered by the wishlist and by offering material prizes. However, part of the success of sites like Kickstarter is the simplicity of pressing a few buttons and knowing you've contributed to a film's success. We found on the Obama campaign that when we tried to convey the power of donations in terms of what the amount of money could buy for the campaign, people were less incentivized to give. For example, giving $25 to a presidential campaign is more appealing than the explicit knowledge that that $25 will buy lunch for three organizers. In some cases, people seemed to prefer not knowing precisely how their monetary contribution would be used.

Furthermore, millions of Obama supporters were willing to donate their money without the promise of material rewards largely because it was the ultimate example of giving to a very large cause that they believed in. The campaign built personal relationships with supporters and volunteers, and organizers met with local supporters one-on-one to connect their interests to the goals of the campaign. Through these personal relationships, supporters became more connected to the grand cause of getting Obama elected and driven by indirect prizes that would come from his administration like passing healthcare reform, middle class tax cuts and bringing soldiers home from Iraq. People were inspired to get involved because they felt included in a movement that gave them hope for the future of their country.

Perhaps if filmmakers ran more of an offline campaign to build relationships within a community, audiences would be more willing to donate and loan supplies to film projects, whether online or offline. The Obama campaign was able to create a personal connection with supporters by setting up field offices and deploying thousands of organizers across the country. Obviously, a film campaign is much smaller in size. But perhaps a more narrow and focused approach to offline grassroots organizing would help independent filmmakers grow a deeper and broader connection with audiences online.

-Josh, Michael and Carl

Helpful Definitions and a Chart

A close reading of Bajir Cannon's London School of Economics dissertation, "The united states of unscreened cinema:The political economy of the self-distribution of cinema in the U.S.", reveals much insight into the challenges and frustrations that self-distribution presents to a filmmaker.

Cannon's work will continue to be a reference point as we delve further into our area of study, but for now he does provide us with what could help us work towards a functioning definition of "grassroots" film -- a difficult and tricky term, but one that we should strive to clarify.

Cannon cites another author's definition of independent film, then the problems with their definition:

"Garnham (1994) identifies three sectors of independent film: 1) Hollywood-financed subsidiary production, 2) independent production that is acquired by the Hollywood studios for distribution after completion, and 3) independent production for specialized markets that do not compete with Hollywood within the exhibition sector (for which he offers as examples ‘nature films and soft porn’). Garnham fails to locate the significant majority of films currently produced each year in the U.S.: films that must compete with Hollywood within the exhibition sectors, but are produced and distributed entirely independently of the Hollywood studios." (page 8).

We can then assert that there should be a fourth sector here, the kinds of films that Cannon names at the end, that Garnham fails to account for. Indeed, in another part of Cannon's dissertation he cites the statistic that over 1,900 films were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, and that of that 3% were accepted (Cannon, page 3). Of that percentage, a similarly tiny percentage were then picked up by distribution companies from Hollywood. All of this points means that this fourth category -- of films that are produced and distributed totally independent of Hollywood -- is increasingly huge.

Would it be appropriate to label this fourth category as "grassroots films"? Though it's tempting, it raises serious problems. For one, it means that anything released by some of the most popular independent film distributors is grassroots. So, "It's a Disaster," starring recognizable actors like Julia Stiles and America Ferrera, distributed by (non-Hollywood-based) Oscilloscope Laboratories, would be a "grassroots" film. It would also mean that a micro-budget, regional, genre-busting film like "Beasts of the Southern Wild," starring non-professional, hitherto unrecognizable actors, would be disqualified from being a "grassroots" because it was distributed by Fox Searchlight (a Hollywood company associated with a major studio).

Could there be a fifth sector of independent film, for films that are produced and distributed entirely independently of any external company? In other words, where the filmmakers are doing everything themselves? These would certainly qualify as grassroots films, but it would exclude significant efforts made in service of films that might have formal distribution but are undeniably grassroots. For example, "Super High Me" was distributed by Red Envelope and B-Side, but in a manner that very much conjures the strictest definition of "grassroots" (read about how they did it in our post here).What we can conclude is that "grassroots" is a term that can define a whole film, or could define just the manner in which it is distributed. To define it in opposition to the involvement of Hollywood, or formal companies in general, is too simplistic. 

However, Cannon does hit upon some less problematic definitions, in breaking down what all goes into film distribution. The chart (Figure 1, Page 9), and its attendant definitions (Appendix II) are below.

Screen shot 2013-05-03 at 6.24.38 PM

Cannon defines the terms as such:

Marketing: The commercial advertising of a film. Publicity: The efforts to promote awareness of a film; through press, social networks, word-of- mouth outreach campaigns, etc. Circulation: The shipping, uploading, downloading, and sharing of a film. Transmission: The delivery, projection, and exhibition of a film. Management: The strategizing, selling, and sales fulfillment of a film.

These definitions address one fact we know about the modern cinema landscape: with online technology, everyone can be both an exhibitor and a distributor without having any formal role in the film industry. But what Cannon is tackling is the fact that it's too simple to place them all under the same broad terms. Per Cannon, sharing a trailer on Facebook, for example, transforms an audience member specifically into an agent of publicity. Downloading a film and giving it to a friend makes one part of a film's "circulation."

We can consider these terms and their relationship to each other as we go further in our study.

B-Side and “Super High Me” (Interview)

In this post, we present our conclusions from our interview with the former Marketing VP of B-side Entertainment, Liz Ogilvie. Although the company went out of business during the recession, it was a top priority for us to learn about B-side, given their apparent success in using grassroots outreach and community screenings to distribute the film “Super High Me,” which grossed over 3 million dollars with almost no marketing budget. The Start of B-Side

The inception of B-Side Entertainment came from Chris Hyams who previously worked as the V.P. of Engineering at the software company Trilogy. Chris became interested in exploring new ways to distribute independent film when he noticed that his brother John Hyams would screen his documentaries at sold out film festival audiences -- but then the theaters would be empty when studios distributed his film at large. Liz explains: “Chris decided it must have something to do with the audiences that is going to the festival and the experience the audiences are having at those festivals. Is it the element of discovery; is it the fact that the filmmakers are there? … Chris decided that he was going to find a way using technology to seek that answer.”

The Data Behind B-Side

Chris formed B-side in an attempt to use digital tools to discover a more effective way to monetize and distribute independent film. It began by offering an interactive, online festival guide that allowed audiences to plan their experience by organizing their own schedule and then reviewing films. In this capacity, B-Side became an invaluable resource for festival organizers and goers alike, eventually partnering with 245 film festivals, representing the largest online audience dedicated to film festivals. The company did this for free in exchange for the email addresses and other information collected from the audiences that used their program. Liz explains how the data process at festivals worked, “you would go in and be able to do recommendations, comments and reviews and see who else is buying tickets and see how popular the films are … And behind the scenes Chris and a group of tech engineers would be looking at all the data that was coming in.” This gave B-Side valuable information about what films were drawing the largest audiences and what kind of audiences were going to what kind of films. Chris and his team were then able to mine through data to find undervalued films to distribute. Also, half of the more than 3 million people that used the B-Side program opted into their email list, which resulted in B-Side collecting a massive online community they could tap into to help them distribute their films.

The Distribution of “Super High Me”

In 2007, Red Envelope, the distribution branch of NetFlix, decided to partner with B-Side in an effort to distribute the documentary “Super High Me.” In order to avoid the expensive cost of conventional film advertising campaigns, B-Side created their own “Roll your own screening” website that empowered users to host a screening on the celebratory marijuana holiday, “4/20.” Liz explains, “Everybody felt that this was really special and the fact that they were being allowed to do this. They just thought it was the coolest thing imaginable. And the website that we created was really funny… I think people thought that they were involved in a movement that only they knew about and I feel like that is the reason we got so many people talking about it.”

B-Side used its massive email listserve of over 1 million festivalgoers to spread the word about the “Roll your own screening” campaign. Just as B-side built its email list from audience surveys taking at film festivals, the Obama campaign gradually built its massive listserv though offline sign-ups at events, field offices, or canvassing, and by offering things like bumper stickers to supporters on their website. From taking advantage of “opt-in” moments like these, the self-fulfilling cycle of data collection helped both the Obama campaign and B-side grow huge online communities, which in turn made it easier to publicize anything occurring at the community level, with almost no expense. To complement this outreach, B-Side contacted and built relationships with the top pro-4/20 organizations to further publicize the screenings offline.

The diagram below explains how B-Side would identify and target the passionate supporters of a film, and empower them to spread the word of screenings to others through grassroots tools on their website.

You might notice that the graphic resembles the Obama campaign’s Snowflake Model we mentioned here. The Obama campaign similarly empowered volunteers by giving them more access and ownership of the campaign, that made them want to reach out and engage others.

The Success of “Super High Me”

Social media and digital marketing tools helped ignite a word of mouth campaign that equaled the impact of traditional film advertising. Ultimately, the “Roll Your Own Screening” campaign lead to over 1600 screenings on April 20 (the highest number of same-day screenings for a documentary ever) and cost only $8,000 (paid mostly for DVD’s) in print & advertising. For a point of comparison: that is significantly less than what one full-page ad in the New York Times would cost. As word of mouth spread from the screenings, the film sold 85,000 DVD’s in the first year of its release according to Rentrak, resulted in 650,000 NetFlix rentals and grossed a total of 3.4 million dollars. To date it is the second most watched title available on NetFlix Instant.

Lessons from “Super High Me”

B-Side was able to successfully distribute “Super High Me” while avoiding expensive marketing costs by combining three key ingredients: data, social media and grassroots organizing. 1) B-Side gathered data and contact information from audiences at festivals, 2) they created a social media site where fans could easily sign up to express interest in hosting or attending a screening of the film 3) B-Side staff met offline with pro-4/20 organizations to convince them to help publicize the screenings.

B-Side sets an important example of how innovative social media and grassroots methods can save filmmakers millions on marketing costs while at the same time organically build their audience at the local level. In addition, building for local events open up new revenue opportunities for filmmakers. Similar to how bands sell their CD’s and other merchandise when on tour, filmmakers could sell their DVD’s, t-shirts and other merchandise at community screenings to gain more revenue. For example, in B-Side’s distribution proposal for the documentary “Under the Great Northern Lights” about the band The White Stripes, they proposed a t-shirt contest and DVD sales at their “flash” screenings.

Although B-Side folded, Liz was confident that if they had stayed in business for six more months they would have been out of debt and making money for their investors. This leads us to wonder if another company could further develop B-Side’s model of distributing independent films in crowdsourced, locally organized supported screenings to effectively avoid spending millions on advertising for conventional movie theater distribution runs. Additionally, the experience of B-Side begs the question of what other ways start-up distribution companies – not to mention filmmakers individually – can access the kind of similarly huge data set that B-Side was working with? Is it necessary to create technology that has an altogether different use entirely (as they did) in order to gather such information?

-Josh, Michael and Carl

A Study in Film Campaigns, Part 1: The External Action Campaign

To follow up our post on Immersive vs. Inclusive campaigns, we will take a closer look at how three different kinds of film campaigns differ in their focus and engagement strategy. Through this endeavor hopefully we'll discover which works best, depending on a filmmaker's goal. The first film campaign we will explore is that of the Academy Award-nominated film, The Visitor, which drove awareness of unfair deportation processes for immigrants. The Visitor is an example of a film campaign that seeks to motivate its audience to take social action to create change beyond just distributing the film. After the film had been released in theaters, the distributor, Participant Media, launched an action campaign on their social advocacy website Take Part. The website offers a variety of tools to translate a desire to help into clear, actionable next steps.

The main menu of The Visitor website offers “5 Things That You Can Do Now:” 1) Watch interviews of immigrant detainees, 2) write letters to detainees, 3) connect to a virtual immigrant experience 4) learn how to represent detainees if you’re a lawyer, 5) learn about the deportation process. By clicking on the “If you’re a lawyer, connect with experts” tab, you go to a page where lawyers can sign up to attend a free legal action seminar conducted by the O’Melveny and Myers law firm. Interestingly, this not only leads the audience towards taking action but also provides clear goals and metrics that help measure the impact of the film’s campaign. In the podcast, “The Business,” one of the producers reveals that signups through the portal trained roughly 2,500 lawyers, who later represented more than 10,000 detainees. This metric gives The Visitor campaign tangible numbers to show that it was a success, which in turn helps build more of a movement around the film and its social goals.

Clicking on the "Virtual Immigrant" tab leads you to another website called “Iced” that immerses you in the world of immigrants in America who often endure unfair laws that result in their deportation. Once on the “Iced” website, you can download a video game where you walk around a neighborhood and have to make decisions in order to not be deported. Interestingly, the game is similar to the Django video game we explored in our previous post on Immersive vs. Inclusive campaigns. However, playing the game as a virtual immigrant leads the audience to gain a deeper understanding of the real life struggles of immigrants in America. In contrast, the Django game immerses you deeper into the fictional world of its characters. The Django game uses immersion to entertain and motivate the audience to buy the DVD or merchandise, whereas The Visitor action campaign uses immersion to educate and lead their audience towards taking action in the real world.

The campaign for The Visitor is of a kind that has as its goal for the audience to take action external to the film; in other words, the film is positioned as a tool to create change. Even the immersion methods are put into practice to transform the audience into active agents, not passive consumers. A characteristic specificto this kind of campaign is that because it is tied to real-world, tangible action, its impact can in fact be measured -- not in ticket sales, but in statistics like the number of lawyers trained. These social action campaigns are more measurable than social awareness campaigns, which often lack the numbers to prove that they are effective. However, it should be noted that any audience energy that social action campaigns direct towards tangible change is by definition not being directed towards advocating for the film itself; in other words, it's good for the world, but insignificant to the film's life in distribution. To put it bluntly, the number of lawyers that The Visitor campaign trained likely had no effect on how far the film went as a product in the marketplace. However, an actual political campaign can benefit from a "sense of service to others” because its social impact goal and its endgame are one and the same. (See our post on Giving vs. Taking here.)

That's not to say there aren't lessons learned from The Visitor that any campaign can put into use. All kinds of films could do a better job of tracking how many volunteers they engage, how many phone calls they make, and how many groups are reached out to, to help spread the word about a film. In our next post we will look at how the film campaign for Beasts of the Southern Wild focuses on engaging audiences to help with distribution instead of social action like The Visitor’s campaign. What metrics can grassroots film campaigns like Beasts gather in order to gain a better understanding of their audience and help market their film?

-Josh, Michael and Carl

Immersive vs. Inclusive Campaigns

A recurring theme in many of our posts is whether grassroots organizing tools can benefit all film distribution efforts or only films that fit into a specific genre type, or budget level: i.e. issue-based, non-fiction or independent. We will explore this question further by looking at the formative efforts to extend a film’s reach online, and what they tell us about the disparate roles of the internet in the contemporary distribution of different kinds of films. Donnie Darko and The Blair Witch Project were among the first films to break ground in how to expand a film’s presence through the internet. Both films succeed at drawing a deeper connection with fans by using their websites to extend the fictional world of their films. For example, when you click on the Donnie Darko webpage the user becomes like the character Donnie Darko, trying to collect clues and make sense of the mysterious world of time travel. Eerie music plays and the user must answer riddles to learn new information about the characters, themes and ideas in the film. The Blair Witch Project also seeks to immerses the audience deeper into its fictional world by extending the Blair Witch Myth in its website. The “Mythology” tab provides a pseudo history of the Blair Witch myth as if it were true. The “Filmmakers” tab offers a photo gallery of the filmmakers working on the project before they disappeared, making the story seem all the more real.

Over time, many Hollywood releases have emulated what Donnie Darko and The Blair Witch Project were the first to do by immersing the audience deeper into the fantasy world of their own films. For example, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained website offers a variety of games fans can chose from to go deeper into the imaginary world of Django. From the main menu screen, you can play a game where you shoot down slave owners as if you were Django in the film. You can watch an interactive trailer that asks you trivia questions about the film, and another screen lets you click around the Candy Land plantation to discover promotional material from the film. Other Hollywood films like Catfish and Men in Black use a similar approach to stoke fan-dom and develop a deep but passive relationship between the consumer and product. Though elaborate and certainly fun, the main goal of all these websites is actually merely to motivate fans to develop a deeper connection to the fictional world of the movie, such that they buy the DVD, spread the word about the film to their friends, and possibly purchase merchandise.

This leads us to understand that a key difference between how mainstream Hollywood films and what we can refer to as films with “legitimate grassroots” distribution campaigns that use the internet boils down to immersive vs. inclusive. Immersive campaigns seek to gain traction in sales by drawing the audience deeper into the fictional world of the film; this is basically just an isoteric and specialized form of marketing. In contrast, inclusive campaigns deliberately take an audience member out of the world of a film, to acknowledge explicitly that a film is a film, and one that needs support to survive; given this premise, they then actively include the audience in the distribution process. The relationship between the filmmaker and audience member is active and the goal is for the audience to be transformed into advocates of the film to others in their communities.

Four Eyed Monsters, Sleepwalk With Me and Beasts of the Southern Wild are all examples of inclusive distribution campaigns that break from the immersive marketing model, and ask their audience to use grassroots tools to help distribute their film. For instance, Four Eyed Monsters and Sleepwalk with Me ask audience members to transform their support for the film into action online to convince movie theaters to screen their film. The website for Beasts of the Southern Wild asks fans to contact the Beasts team directly to be enlisted to host house parties, community screenings or recruiting a group to see the film in theaters. Interestingly, however, Fox Searchlight created a separate website for Beasts called WelcometotheBathtub.com that uses immersive tactics to sell the film. This proves that immersive and inclusive campaigns do not have to be totally separate; in fact the two can complement each other.

Just as the independent films like Donnie Darko and Blair Witch Project led the way for immersive marketing methods on the web, contemporary films that use grassroots organizing tools could be paving the way for marketing films in the future. This does not mean that immersive campaigns are not still effective, but instead that inclusive campaigns present a new dynamic between filmmaker and audience member that distributors should not ignore. (For example, though Veronica Mars was produced and distributed by a major network, that didn’t stop the show from benefiting from a major grassroots show of support via Kickstarter to greenlight the production of a film based on the show). In our future posts we will continue to explore how grassroots organizing is starting to intersect with the distribution process for mainstream films.

-Josh, Michael and Carl

Motivation and Transparency

In our previous post, “Data and Metrics in Film,” we discussed how filmmakers could gain a greater understanding of how to market their film by applying the same data and metrics methods commonly used by political campaigns. However, in order to gather information from audiences, people have to be motivated to participate in a campaign first. In this post we will look at how the Obama campaign used transparency to motivate people to participate in its campaign and compare how transparency in film can empower fans to get more involved in the distribution process. In both the 2008 and 2012 election, the Obama campaign pioneered efforts to be transparent about process and goals from the top down. Early in the 2012 election, Jim Messina shared the campaign’s strategy for winning the election in the video, "Paths to 270 Electoral Votes." Here is the link.

In the video, Messina uses 6 different electoral maps to make the campaign’s intended path to victory in battleground states completely transparent. Messina then makes a clear and direct ask for supporters to get involved. “We fund this campaign in contributions of three dollars or 5 dollars or whatever you can do to help us expand the map, put people on the ground to build a real grassroots campaign that is going to be the difference between winning and losing.” First, Messina makes the campaign strategy easy for supporters to understand then he provides clear direction for how they can get involved. The video empowers supporters to become active participants in the campaign by making them feel like they are an integral part of its success.

Similar to the Obama campaign, filmmakers are pioneering new efforts to make the goals and process for distribution transparent so fans can get more involved. For example, the filmmakers of the romantic comedy Sleepwalk With Me released a list of targeted IFC movie theaters that they wanted the film to play in, thereby being entirely upfront with their distribution goals for the film. With these targeted venues totally public, they enlisted fans to call, tweet or facebook message to request a screening of the film in the theater in their neighborhood. The website reads, “If your town isn’t on the list…you don’t have to take that lying down. Below is a list of theaters that run indie films, with their phone numbers, email addresses, and twitter handles. Call them, email them, tweet at them with the hashtag #BringSleepwalk.” Similar to how Messina empowered supporters by illustrating which battleground states they need support from volunteers to win, the filmmakers of Sleepwalk With Me were 100% transparent about their goal to have the film screen in targeted movie theaters. Also like Messina, the filmmakers make a direct ask for fans to get involved by calling, facebook messaging or tweeting their local movie theaters. Sleepwalk With Me was able to transform their fans from being passive consumers of the film to active distributors by being transparent about their goals and making a direct ask to their audience.

Whether a campaign is for a political candidate or to distribute a film, being transparent about strategy and goals is the gateway for making people feel empowered. What other parts of the filmmaking process can be made transparent to empower more fans? This will be a theme we explore in future posts.

-Josh, Michael and Carl