From the blog of Felicia Day. Apart from being adorable and talented, Felicia is pretty smart. She’s been around the block a few times with the whole “original web series” thing which, at the end of the day, is the same as independent filmmaking. All four of these questions apply just as much to your indie doc feature as they do to her web series about online role-playing gamers.
The internet isn’t TV: It’s 20 million channels rather than 200. If you can’t sit down and easily identify what kind of person will like your show and name 5 places that person might go to on the internet, you will have a hard time getting the word out, no matter how good it is.
As a filmmaker, your web site is one of the best marketing tools you have. Long before the lights go down at your first screening, your web site is where people will learn about you and your film. Months (years!) after the festival ends, your movie’s site will be the touchstone for those curious about your work. Dollar for dollar, there is nothing else you can buy that will work for your movie as tirelessly and as effectively as the electronic sentinel that is a web site.
So make it good.
One of the best collections of advice for filmmakers I’ve encountered about their web sites comes from my friend Jette Kernion in her Open Letter to Indy/Low-Budget Filmmakers. Go ahead, click on over and read it. I’ll wait.
Back again? Good. I hope Jette’s words are sinking in and that you’re ready to build a web site that isn’t just attractive but useful as well. Let’s review her advice with a few extra pointers.
» Include lots of text about the film, including the names of the cast and crew, so that the site shows up in Google searches. The fancy name for this is “search engine optimization,” but the plain truth is that search engines grab onto text best. If you’re rendering that text as graphics or you’ve embedded it into a Flash presentation, you could be shooting yourself in the foot. Keep it simple and leave the flaming logos to the site for the next Tomb Raider film.
» Post a number of striking photos at different resolutions, and make them easily available for download. The less you make a journalist (whether an editor from Variety or a local blogger) work, the more likely you are to get good coverage. Cropping screen captures is work. Resizing photos is work. I think you can figure out the rest. Again, don’t hide them inside a PDF, a fancy Flash slideshow, or assume that a trailer is a sufficient substitute for still photos. If you want the word to spread, you have to make the spreading easy.
» Publish your contact info, including e-mail, telephone, and snail mail. Your web site is your business card to the world. If the world can’t get in touch with you, it can’t write nice stories about you. Or ask you about a new job on a film crew. Or buy your movie. So get your contact info out there, and get a good spam filter. (I recommend using gmail.)
» Post a trailer. Or five. Any halfway entertaining footage (bloopers, deleted scenes, etc) that didn’t actually make it into the film should be present somewhere on the site. Include links to your previous work, especially short films that can be digested quickly and easily online. Make sure your trailer is on YouTube or a similar video site so that visitors can post it on their own web sites and blogs. (Get familiar with the mantra “Embed and Spread.” It works.) Give away as much free entertainment as you can, because it’s the way you win fans who will later pay to see your work.
» Start a blog. Yeah, you read that right. A blog. Most filmmakers like the idea of starting a blog but don’t have a clue what to put in it. I’ll cover that more in a later post, but for now start posting stories about the making of the film. Profile your cast and crew. Mention your other projects. Announce your upcoming screenings. Post recaps of your question-and-answer sessions. If your film is a documentary, post news about your doc’s subject. (You can even get Yahoo News to email you the latest stories on your subject of choice.) It’s a big world out there, and there’s lots to talk about. A blog provides your fans with a reason to come back, so even if you just post once a week, post.
» Ask visitors to sign up for email updates. Both Yahoo Groups and Google Groups offer easy-to-run mailing lists where your visitors can subscribe to the latest news about your film. If you want more control over your e-mail newsletter, use a service like MailChimp for a more professional touch. Updates should be more selective than, say, your blog, but once or twice a month is fine if you have something to say. Be sure to announce upcoming screenings in your e-mails, and mention the existence of your blog. Every e-mail you send to the list should have a link to your web site.
» Take advantage of existing social networks. People spend hours each day on services like MySpace and Facebook; insert yourself there and take advantage of the tools they provide. A MySpace page isn’t a substitute for a real web site, but you’d be foolish not to have a presence there at all. Ditto for Facebook. Sign up for a number of social networking sites — as many as you can reasonably manage — and duplicate your content across the services. Check out the sidebar on the web site for Four Eyed Monsters — they have pages and profiles everywhere. Just make sure your profiles all link back to the mothership: your main web site.
» When you start receiving reviews, post complimentary quotes from those reviews on your site and link back to them. E-mail the author of the review mentioning your link and ask for a link back. You should be doing periodic Google searches for your film’s title to find the latest mentions of your movie. Anywhere you find your film referenced, e-mail to make sure that an accompanying link is included.
» Your web site address or “URL” should end in .com. It should also be as simple and easy to remember as possible. In these days when every conceivable web address seems taken that can be a challenge, but do your best. Then spread the URL everywhere. It should be on all of your printed material and most especially in the signature of every email you send. Think about all the emails you send out in a day — sometimes even your friends and family need to be reminded of your film’s existence.
» Start a links section and link to your favorite films on the festival circuit. Link to your friends’ films and projects, and ask them to link back. Yeah, a link exchange is pretty 1997, but you know what? It still works.
» Don’t just set it and forget it — a web site needs tending. Think of it as your end of an ongoing conversation with your audience. If you don’t hold up your end of the conversation, the audience will get bored and move on.
» You don’t have to do it all yourself. This all probably sounds like a lot of work, and you’re not wrong. But you don’t have to learn HTML or CSS or programming, and you don’t have to write every word of content on the site. Recruit from within your crew or elsewhere in your personal network. Chances are your girlfriend’s brother is just the nerd you need to get your film’s web site up and running. You just have to ask.
This is part two of a revised series of articles originally written for South by Southwest 2008. The revisions add new and updated information and make the series more applicable to other festivals.
(Disclosure – both Four Eyed Monsters and Blood Car, referenced in the screen captures above, are represented in some fashion by my employer, B-Side Entertainment.)
Rather than spend a lot of money on a theatrical release that would almost certainly leave him further in debt, Crawford director David Modigliani and indie distribution company B-Side (my employer) has released the film on Hulu, betting that the exposure of free views on the web (combined with the timing of the upcoming election and the publicity of being the first film ever to debut on Hulu) will drive DVD sales. I’m hoping he’s right, because I’ll be following a similar model with my book, Film Festival Secrets: you’ll be able to download the book as a “try before you buy” PDF version and if you find it useful you can donate directly or purchase the print edition.
More to the point, however, is the fact that Crawford is a very, very good movie. No matter how timely the topic or novel the distribution strategy, a quality film is an inescapable prerequisite to success (unless you’re making a movie that involves zombies or vampires, in which a sub-par picture can be part of the fun). Please take some time to watch Crawford on Hulu, and if you like what you see consider buying the DVD for yourself or a friend.
Here’s a first: an indie film that plays festivals, gets some great buzz, then premieres on Hulu instead of in theaters. That’s exactly what’s happening with Crawford, one of the hit docs of this past year’s South by Southwest film festival, courtesy of distributor B-Side (my employer).
There’s a lot of talk about how indie film distribution will work in the future. In my opinion it really boils down to a simple equation: the more people see your movie, the more people will buy it. (Given that the potential of any indie film to saturate the market like a Hollywood film is practically nil, the idea that an indie film can be “overplayed” is laughable.) Congratulations to director David Modigliani for taking some brave first steps in the new world of progressive distribution.
Metacafe and Microcinema International, a leading international rights manager, exhibitor and specialty markets distributor of the “moving image arts,” are teaming to create and curate MetaFest 2008. MetaFest will be a juried online and offline film festival presenting international creative and contemporary short-form video entertainment. The call for entries begins today, and invites short video, film and digital media submissions of 10 minutes or less that are “narrative, humorous, artistic, dramatic, animated, documentary, mockumentary, music, experimental, alternative or avant-garde in any genre, format or style.”
Metafest’s call for entries is only open through September 10th, and as with any online festival (this one has online and offline components) I’d be sure to check the terms to make sure you’re not giving up any rights with which you’d be sorry to part.
Good news for indie filmmakers – YouTube is opening its doors to long-form independent films. While it’s not quite a free-for-all yet, it does bode well for those filmmakers who want to promote their films by giving them away as streaming video. As discussed previously, making your film readily available to view for free can actually increase your sales. YouTube also plans to sell advertising overlaid on the films, the revenues from which would be split with the filmmaker.
From the Silicon Alley Insider:
YouTube (GOOG) added some new details Wednesday night on its plan to make indie film and other long-form video part of the menu. Namely, a dedicated area within YouTube called “The Screening Room” that will host indie film, and offer tools to help producers build an audience and generate revenue.
YouTube will add four new indie films every two weeks–including some that have appeared in film festivals and others that have never been seen before.
Details on how YouTube plans to make money, or allow famously cash-strapped indie producers to make money, are thin. A press release said “The Screening Room” will include a “Buy Now” button allowing filmmakers to link to Web sites that sell DVDs and digital downloads of their films, as well as what it calls a “high quality” player to watch on the Web.
Now you can use your cell phone’s SMS features to get SXSW 2008 schedule information on the go and even rate the movies you see from your seat!
Just text your commands to this number: 47647
1. To set your phone to SxSW, send: bside fe sxsw2008
(You only have to do this once. You will get a confirmation message.)
2. To get showtimes, you can just text: bside show now
or, you can get showtimes for a specific day and time, like this: bside show fri 9pm
» To see showtimes by title, send: bside show title
ex: bside show woodpecker
» “Title” may also be any part of a film’s title — no need to punch in the whole thing. For example, you could see the showtimes for “‘Bama Girl” by sending: bside show bama
» Film and interactive panels are also contained in the schedule. To see the showtime for the panel “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts,” you could send: bside show design hurts
3. To rate a film you’ve seen on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent), send: bside rate title rating
For example, you could rate “Dear Zachary” as excellent by sending: bside rate zachary 5
» When you’re home in front of a computer, log in to sxsw.bside.com and create an account. Enter your cell phone number into your profile and your phone ratings will automatically be associated with your SxSW B-Side account.
If you’ve already discovered Lance Weiler’s Workbook Project, then you know it’s a great resource for filmmakers looking beyond the traditional models of exhibition and distribution. Lance (director of The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma) has been adding new voices to the site, the latest of which belongs to Zachary Mortensen. Mortensen is the creator of Space:Unicorn, a web shop for indie filmmakers. I’ve already written about the importance of a web site for your film, but Zachary has additional advice you should read. Whether you hire someone like Zachary to create your web site or build it yourself, this article makes some great points.
Right now is the first time that this outreach and awareness has been within our reach. Filmmakers need to harness these tools and be smart about it. You will spend a lot of time and money creating the film. Don’t forget to build and take care of a home for your film as well.
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From the blog of Felicia Day. Apart from being adorable and talented, Felicia is pretty smart. She’s been around the block a few times with the whole “original web series” thing which, at the end of the day, is the same as independent filmmaking. All four of these questions apply just as much to your indie doc feature as they do to her web series about online role-playing gamers.
Good news for indie filmmakers – YouTube is opening its doors to long-form independent films. While it’s not quite a free-for-all yet, it does bode well for those filmmakers who want to promote their films by giving them away as streaming video. As 
