Hearts and love-o-meters

We’ve always known self distribution was possible, but just felt if we were going to do it, we wanted to really do it right. But for a long time it was a huge question mark, how are we going to get our film into theaters in a way that is managable, and makes sense and doesn’t require going an additional 50,000 into debt.

While traveling film festivals while hanging out and conversing with people the topic of conversatoin would often gravitate towards discussing what the future of cinema might look like. It became pretty obvious pretty quickly that digital micro-cinemas all tapped into a network that filmmakers had access to is the vision. But our contribution to that idea was collective curation. The idea that no one person has the ability or knowledge to know what everyone else would like to see. But that if there could be a system for individuals to pull a film to their city rather than have it pushed onto them, that the film going audience would be more content and the system for distribution would be more democratic.

When Jeff Abramson from Gen Art, our main man, introduced us to Joe Neulight and David Straus at Withoutabox conversation struck up imediately about all of these topics and it became clear very quickly they not only did we all share the vision, but that they had plans to do something about it. Something that could help filmmakers not have to re-invent the wheel everytime they set out to self distribute. One system that people could plug themselves into and be set. Now, of course, such a system does not exist today, or else their would be no point in discussing the matter, we’d all be set, but the sheer fact that they have plans for such a system, has kept us inspired by their companies direciton. And the fact that Four Eyed Monsters is an opportunity to kind of pave the way for what a system like that might entail became reason that they should support what we are doing. And that was huge. Withoutabox was the first and to this day still the only company to ever write us a check in support of what we are doing. We get a lot of messages from people in the film industry letting us know that they are watching us and waiting to see how things go, the awesome thing about Withoutabox is that they jumped in and got involved.

What we did with their financial contribution was move back to NYC and started shopping around for Mr. Awesome. Someone who knew filmmaking, got what we were doing and knew programming. We found Brian Chirls, a friend of Lis Davito who is an actress in our film. Brian and I hung out at an after party after our May 6th, 2006 screening at the Brooklyn Museum, instead of socializing, I pretty much hid in the corner with brian, not realizing we’d be working together, but instead just being trapped in conversation about things surrounding technology and film. He started helping out a little with the project and it soon became clear that he had some major abilities he never let on to. I was introduced to him as a fellow filmmaker, but it turned out he had studied computer science and economics when he went to U. Penn. So much to his reluctance, we yanked him back into a world he had kind of been avoiding, the world of web application development.

Andrew A. Peterson who has been with the project from the very beginning is kind of our idea man. He researches stuff thats going on and lets us know about it and we had been talking a lot about the future of digital micro-cinema and were reazling that it will really play out hand and hand with social networking. So when we started working with brian, it became an opportunity for some of the ideas we had been hoping could work to actually come into reality. And this all perfectly aligned with what withoutabox was encouraging us to do which was find a way to take our video podcast audience, have a way to quantify that on a local level and hopefully by the time we had that information, there would be some chains interested. The theater chains never came through, so what happened is brian, andrew and I each started talking directly to theaters. That process is covered a bit in our Thursdays in September video. Basically a lot of theaters didn’t trust our data. They didn’t trust these were people that would really show up. But we were able to find really cool theaters hoping that this will work who jumped on board. So now we are basically all set to have a pretty interesting experiment go down that should inform the next phaze of a micro-cinema network getting built and what it will need to look like.

Now just a note about how were going to get there. Companies will always be trying to make a system that makes everything work well, and there will sometimes be competing companies going for the same services and pulling a filmmaker in two directions, do you encode your video in this format or that format, what social networking should you use, but always remember as the filmmaker you are on the real front lines. It’s a company’s job to adjust to you and your needs. So don’t take things at face value. An example is MySpace providing a blog. They didn’t know they were creating a platform for us to distribute episodic content, but they were and that’s what their simple over the counter style blog has allowed us to do. So always look for these loop holes and ways to cut ahead of whats currently not available in the world.

So, the reason this blog is posted in our tutorial section, is because we hope that other filmmakers will be able to experiment with the idea of creating demand for a film and then having that film “pulled” to that area. The more filmmakers that do this kind of thing, the more general audience members will understand this concept and the better the chances of eventually having there be a completely plugged-in coherent system that handles all of this stuff completely automatically. So here is what you can do to build your own make shift “request” tool in the time being.

1. Sign up for a verticalresponse.com account. There are also other options out there for building a mailing list and any of them will work as long as they let you ask for an email, zip code and country. By the way, don’t ask for too much more than that, people don’t like giving out too much information.

2. Create a thank you page. Vertical response lets you have a page that people will go to once they have signed up. Have this page thank them for requesting the film and tell them they are about to get an email with a link they need to click to confirm their request.

3. Any good mailing list building tool like verticalresponse.com will give you html code you can paste into your myspace page or webiste. That way people will be able to enter their information right there. Now, the other advantage of taking the code and putting it on your own page is that you can change the fields. For example by default the vertical response mailing list gives you a check box that says, “i would like to get email updates” but you can change that in the html code to, “I would like to see this film in a a theater in my local area.”

4. Once you have this going you can make it part of your campaign, at any chance you have let people know they can do this. Emails, videos, comments, fliers etc…

5. An optional idea is to log into vertical response every few days and get the total number and update your site to reflect how well it’s growing.

6. Map it. (optional) Find a programmer/designer, don’t steel ours, that can take the information vertical response provides and use the google api to plot that out as a cluster map. Explain to the programmer that the cluster will be a 100 mile grid across the US and that the lattitue and longitude of each request will have weight that pulls all of those requests to an epicenter. That epicenter becomes a peg. You can make different icons to show the demand, in our case susan made some hearts. This step really is above and beyond, and hopefully soon there will be just a service you can sign up for that gives you this complete functionality.

6. Talk to theaters, feel free to steel ours, let them know your numbers are growing and agree ahead of time the number they’d like to see to feel confident for a screening or multiple screenings. In our case we told the theater it was 150. We based that on some screenings in major markets where 2.5 times the number of requesters showed up. So we deduced we might be able to sell out 4 nights and that was our pitch to theaters. Think of what makes most sense for your film. Accepting requests for your film might even be for the simple cause of determining which film festivals to attend.

Anyway, thats it for now, and lets hope september goes well for us so we’ll have a new model for distributing indie films, so get the word out!!!