The B - roll Project
17 August 2009
DocMovies is proud to introduce The B-roll Project, a series of interviews dedicated to documentary and new media. This time we had the honor to speak with Scott Kirsner author of Fans, Friends & Followers "the heart of the book is a collection of thirty interviews with visual artists, comedians, animators, documentary filmmakers, musicians, writers, and others who’ve pioneered new ways to build a creative career online (and off.)"
Kirsner is a journalist who writes about innovation, with a focus on the ways that new technologies are changing the entertainment industry.
He writes regularly for Variety and The Boston Globe, and has been a contributing writer for Fast Company, BusinessWeek, and Wired. He edits the blog CinemaTech.
We discussed with Krisner about documentary filmmaking and new media, and how filmmakers are utilizing many aspects of the online world to publish and distribute their work.
DM - The documentary industry is mostly composed out of independent filmmakers, 5 years ago they had only television and DVD to distribute their works, but now with the new digital world they can look at new horizons. You write a lot about that subject and travel the country participating in many panels discussing this issue. Is the Internet a friend or an enemy for filmmakers?
ST - I think the Internet is definitely an enemy if you'd like to try to preserve the status quo, and only have people consume your movies onDVDs or in theaters. For those filmmakers, all the Internet does is make it easier for people to pirate your movies illegally.
But the Internet offers great opportunities for filmmakers if you're interested in taking advantage of them. When has it ever been possible to make a global audience aware of your work, and ideally, sell it to those interested in buying it -- without signing your life away to a studio or distributor or another middleman? Particularly for films that speak initially to small-but-passionate fan bases (but perhaps will break out to wider success), the Internet is the perfect channel for the marketing and delivery of movies.
DM- Many filmmakers are deterred from the idea that they should handle the business and marketing aspects of their films. In your book Fans, Friends, and Followers you write how filmmakers, musicians and artists market their films through youtube and social groups. Should every filmmaker understand that we are living in a new world that demands from them to be part of the digital world?
SK- Well, I think it's a perfectly reasonable approach to collaborate with someone who understands all these new tools and technologies, and who can help you use them effectively. Not everyone is technologically inclined. But I do think there's a shift happening where successful filmmakers are spending more time on what has traditionally been thought of as marketing and promotion (I prefer to call it "audience-building") than they ever have before. There's just so much noise in the marketplace, so many other films being released, that if you only want to spend five or ten percent of your time on audience-building, odds are good your film will just get lost.
DM- Can the digital world really offer filmmakers total control and creative freedom? In other words if we can distribute our films without a major distribution company, do we have any constrains from platforms like iTunes, Amazon VOD, Netflix?
SK- The short answer is yes -- I do think that because the digital world offers the possibility to connect directly with the viewer, if you can put together the budget to make something on your own, you can have total creative freedom. And that's great. Now, there is definitely a question as to whether platforms like iTunes and Amazon will carry really edgy stuff, stuff that might be rated X for some reason other than that it's pornography. I wrote a piece three years ago for Variety about whether we're going to see the same kind of MPAA ratings system for Web content that we see in theaters -- but that question is still unanswered:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117951108.html?categoryid=13&cs=1
DM- We see that platforms like iTunes Hulu, Snagfilms and Amazon VOD open up a new world of distribution for filmmakers, but we hear many complaints from filmmakers that like the "old" distribution system, they have no access to get their films on their services. They need to go to companies or aggregators who take a huge cut from their small earnings in order to secure release on one of the major digital platform. Is this the brave new world we imagined?
SK- Well, we might never get to the perfect world of our imagination. While I agree that it'd be great to have a service that only took a 5 or 10 percent cut of the digital rental or sale, most existing services take more -- simply because they're doing the job of attracting the audience, and sometimes, in the case of Apple, designing technology like the iPod you may watch the movie on. There are some cases where you can pretty much work directly with a service (CreateSpace, for instance, is a division of Amazon that will get your films onto Amazon VOD), and lots of cases where you'll have to work with an aggregator. If you're doing the latter, you'd be smart to shop around, talk to other filmmakers, and compare the deals you're being offered. Anything worse than a 70/30 split (where you're getting less than 70 percent of the digital sale or rental price for your film) starts to seem unfair to me. If you believe you can sell downloads from your own Web site, and you don't need to rely on a site like iTunes or Amazon to carry your movie, you can use a digital sales system like E-Junkie to do that. I discuss E-Junkie and some other tools in the book. There's also a free wiki I created that talks about other useful tools.
DM- How do you regard the film festival world? It seems that hundreds of film festival are popping up everywhere demanding $40 or $50 dollars registration fee. DocMovies will publish an article covering this subject our findings are very disturbing, it seems like too many film festivals take advantage, can filmmakers skip small film fest and distribute their work only on digital platforms?
SK- I do think the top tier and second tier of film festivals still lend a lot of credibility to a new film from an unknown filmmaker. But in terms of paying to play at lots of festivals no one has ever heard of (The Chicopee International Film Festival, anyone?), there are probably better strategies to make people around the world (rather than just in Chicopee) aware of your film. Film festivals can be a good way to meet other filmmakers, critics, and industry types, and to try to create some early fans of your movie who will help generate buzz. But I also think that spending some time creating a digital promotion strategy -- setting up a blog or a Facebook fan page or inventing a really cool contest on Twitter -- can probably be just as effective, if not more.
DM- It seems that we have the need to get a set of rules that apply to all films, meaning if we all have a website and market our movie to a targeted audience, enter social web, than our films will get world wide exposure. Is this true just for the first generations of films who utilize that system? Would you say that filmmakers need to be also creative in their marketing strategy? Be innovative and invent the wheel in order to generate the buzz?
SK- There's an idea I talk about in Fans, Friends & Followers: take advantage of behavioral shifts. Observe what new technologies people are using, what Web sites and services they're spending time with, and think about how you can promote your work there -- or make work specifically for those new forums. D.W. Griffith, after all, was a stage actor who saw potential in directing movies. Walt Disney was a filmmaker who saw potential in making work for television. One of the people I feature in the book, Michael Buckley, had a local TV show and he saw potential in YouTube -- now he's one of the most-watched personalities on that site with his "Buck Hollywood" show. I do think it helps to be observant and pay attention to what people are doing with their time and attention. But that doesn't mean that just because other people are using YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, you can't build a really effective strategy around those sites, or make great work for them.
DM- DocMovies will publish another article about streaming websites screening documentaries for free, (we are not referring to torrents) websites upload films it to Google and bypass any illegal claims. We've had one comment to the article saying filmmakers should embrace this since it's another marketing tool to distribute their work. From you experience, is this how filmmakers regard those site, should they really be grateful?
SK- I think that free streaming, with the filmmaker's permission, can be a viable strategy, if there's a business plan behind it. (Like selling a sponsorship that supports the free streaming, encouraging people who view the stream to make a voluntary donation, or inviting them to buy a DVD or soundtrack CD, for instance.) But I don't believe that you need to offer your film as a free stream in order to be successful.
DM- Last question, will there be the next Michael Moore, or Errol Moris coming out of the digital world?
SK- I'm an optimist, and I think you should never underestimate the creativity and power of artists -- hopefully, that comes through in the book. I think that if you look at any new medium in its earliest days, whether it is photography or cinema or videogames or Internet video, you could say, "Oh, that's a juvenile art form, and no one has done any meaningful work in it yet." It seems simple and rudimentary compared to all the more sophisticated art forms that came before -- think about the early films of Thomas Edison compared to the great operas of Mozart -- what a joke Edison's movies were. But give it 20 or 50 or 100 years, and you get John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorcese and Frederick Wiseman and Errol Morris.
DM - We wish to thank you again we really appreciate it and are lookoing forward to your next project.
SK- Thanks for asking me to be part of DocMovies!
More from the B - roll project - read our interview with Making Documentary Films and Videos Author Barry Hampe
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