@ M dot Strange: Same 3 Questions About Audience

I asked M dot Strange the same three questions I asked Arin Crumley about his relationship with his audience:

• How do you see your relationship with your audience?
• How do you integrate your audience into your lifestyle?
• How do you compartmentalize your audience into the big picture of what you’re doing?

It’s a pretty short interview but M dot touches on interesting ideas about being amongst his audience rather than separated from them. He uses the awareness this gives him to inform how he can best crowdsource for his films and use his audience community as a barometer for keeping him on track….

Listen here for the full M dot Strange interview >>>>>>

As I said previously, I’ll be asking these questions to people I meet along the way. Soon to come, Jamie King’s answers to these same three questions along with other stuff from CPH Dox, Copenhagen…

Copenhagen Dox Forum

I’m really excited to be heading to Copenhagen tomorrow in time for the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival’s forum on creative distribution for creative docs.

I’ll be there asking the curators/fest directors/sales agents/distributors - whoever - how they see themselves fitting into the big picture in this new paradigm. I’m curious to see if and how they’re rethinking their relationships with audience and to listen to what ideas they’re bringing with them to the forum. I’m also looking forward to hearing what the filmmakers themselves have to say - as I’ll be taking in the proceedings with my own film in mind…

Read below for the full blurb - Lance is also speaking there as part of the event.

THE DOX:FORUM, 12-14 NOVEMBER 2008

Launched successfully in 2007, the DOX:FORUM is an exclusive 3 day market, running in conjunction with CPH:DOX.
The Forum presents a tightly packed program of work-in-progress presentations, pre-arranged one-on-one meetings, matchmaking events, distribution platform pitches and a line-up of seminars.

The DOX:FORUM has been launched to explore other distribution possibilities for documentary film than TV and focuses on theatrical as well as alternative distribution venues as museums, art galleries and online platforms.
Thus, the Forum positions itself as a new international meeting place for film professionals focusing on high quality, artistic and visually strong documentary films.

With a participant list counting major international distributors, sales agents, curators, festival directors, programmers from alternative and art venues and representatives from new online marking platforms, the Forum offers an excellent opportunity for filmmakers to introduce upcoming documentaries to international decision makers and to enhance distribution possibilities for their films. And with its exclusive selection of new, upcoming films, reflecting CPH:DOX overall interest in strong cinematic documentary film making, invited content seekers are given a priority chance for discovering the next big title on the international market before it hits the big winter and early spring venues.

@ Arin Crumley: “How Do You Compartmentalize Your Audience Community Into The Big Picture Of What You’re Doing?”

Here’s Arin’s answer to the last of my three questions: How do you compartmentalize your audience community into the big picture of what you’re doing?

Interestingly, he interpreted the question in a broader way - how do you compartmentalize your life, using the tools now at your disposal in this new culture of communication?

Arin sees categorization as a way of navigating our new social space more efficiently - because a new social environment necessitates new social rules. - Not the internet as a separate space but as an extension of every other aspect of our lives and world.

Because of this, in the last part of our interview Arin talks about the ‘mashing up’ of personal and private life, and compartmentalization as a means to filtering out noise.

Continuing the theme so far, he talks about embracing what is now at our fingertips and “Being willing to be an interacting human being in this new era” and how that is “going to make it a little easier for the compartmentalizing to happen a little more automatically.”

Click here for Arin’s full answer to question 3 >>>>>>

Click here to hear Arin’s answers to questions one and two.

@ Arin Crumley: “How Do You Integrate Your Audience Into Your Lifestyle?”

“There’s just a volume that we all have - a particular wavelength that’s affecting others (- which is why I don’t think privacy really exists). It’s also why I don’t think you can put a shield up to protect people from understanding you. People are inherently going to understand you for who you are so you might as well help them in that process. Be open and honest.”

- Part of Arin’s answer to my second question: ‘How do you integrate your audience into your lifestyle?’.

In his full answer, Arin explores what it means to share yourself and your life online.  He sees ‘audience’ as really a network of peers - and the term ‘audience’ itself as just another word for human interaction.

This kind of perspective informs how Arin relates to and with his audience and how he approaches the internet as really just an extension of the physical world.

What I find most interesting about that concept, if you take it on board, is the way it at once makes life both a constant performance and a never-performance. - It seems in that sense that a film is just a moment - and that ones web presence for the film is it’s natural tendency to have an existence beyond it’s otherwise highly constructed borders.

I can see how the ideas Arin expresses here inform the process of a person whose work is very much about his life - and whose audience relationship is built upon that foundation. I think Arin’s a good case study in terms of audience intimacy.

I once heard an excellent tip that I’m reminded of here: - that your online audience will usually respond to you in the same manner that you communicate with them. It seems there are many ways to relate with your audience and that it’s usually good to be conscious of where you’re positioning yourself in relation to them - and how that actually defines the kind of relationship you’re going to have.

Listen HERE to Arin’s full answer to question 2…… >>>

Arin is currently working on As The Dust Settles. Click here for his bio on the Power to the Pixel website.

@ Arin Crumley: “How Do You See Your Relationship With Your Audience?”

At Power to the Pixel, I asked Arin Crumley and M Dot Strange the same three questions:

• How do you see your relationship with your audience?
• How do you integrate your audience into your lifestyle?
• How do you compartmentalize your audience community into the big picture of what you’re doing?

I was curious to see how they were going to interpret them.

Arin’s answers turned into a 90 minute thought-trail (I’d like to call it a thought-experiment but I guess strictly speaking I can’t).

In his first answer, he muses about what is ‘audience’, what is ‘privacy’ and what is ‘on’ and ‘off’ the web? He also touches on something else I’ve been wondering about - how you go from ‘herd mentality’ to ‘hive mind’?

Because it was such a long conversation, I’m posting it in three parts.

Click here to listen to Arin’s answer to question one.

…I’m hoping to be asking others these questions along the way too.

Read HERE for Arin’s bio.

M dot Strange On The Art of Alienating The Right People

This is the first in a series of posts out of Power to the Pixel 2008 - which was a pretty mind-blowing experience for me. M dot Strange was the first person I interviewed and he quickly got me questioning some of my assumptions about whether or not you get to choose your core audience, or whether it’s actually them who choose you:

On the Power to the Pixel site, it says this about M dot Strange:

“When M dot Strange touched down in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 for the world premiere of his first animated feature, We Are the Strange, thousands of Internet-obsessed teens and twentysomethings already knew more about the film than any buyer at the festival. For months M dot had been leaking footage and behind-the-scenes featurettes of the film to YouTube, and once he was accepted to Sundance he put up the trailer. It got 500,000 views in four days. Not bad for a guy who made a movie in his bedroom. With a love for 8-bit video games and stop-motion animation, the San Jose–based M dot has been honing his bizarre brand of stories since the late ’90s. “I’ve never taken a film class or an art class ever,” he says. “I learned everything through the Internet and reading books — the Internet was my film school.” M dot is currently working on his next animated feature film - a 3d Samurai film entitled Heart String Marionette due for completion January 2010.”

Listen HERE to M dot talk a little about branding - how he approaches it, how he uses it to let his audience self-select, and how, sometimes, it can be really good to alienate a few people along the way…

Tomorrow, Listen in on Lance, Arin Crumley, M dot Strange and more:

Power to the Pixel Hits London Again Tomorrow…

“Starting at 10am GMT on Wednesday, 22nd October, we’ll begin webcasting live to audiences worldwide. You can watch things unfold at http://powertothepixel.com/webcast or at http://www.screendaily.com .”

I’ll be covering the forum and reporting back…

BLACK GOLD: The Film And The Roller-Coaster Ride - Part 3

This is the third and last part of my interview with Marc Francis - co-director/producer (with his brother Nick) of the film BLACK GOLD.

You can view parts one and two here.

Next week, I’ll look in more detail at a few of the points he’s hit in the course of our conversation - and what we, as content-creators in this new environment, can glean from what Marc’s talked about.

Last time Marc spoke about the experience of putting BLACK GOLD out into the world as a roller-coaster ride - one where it’s very success threatened to sink this independent film before it had even gotten out of the starting gates.

This time, we look at straddling both mainstream and alternative models of distribution and what it means to be a filmmaker when you take responsibility for building audience around your films.

We look at how this changes the process of filmmaking itself and how to think about what you are and aren’t willing to do as a filmmaker in order to save your film from oblivion in the marketplace.

… Last time, we left off with Marc saying how BLACK GOLD, and it’s demands on them as filmmakers two years after it’s initial release, is finally slowing down - but still not stopping. In fact, it’s still very much alive - and that’s a good thing, no matter how demanding that may be...

Marc Francis: IT’S QUIETENED DOWN BECAUSE WE’VE TRIED TO QUIETEN IT DOWN, BUT IT’S NOT GONNA STOP AND IT SHOULDN’T STOP AND IT SHOULD CARRY ON - DEFINITELY.

LS: It’s like a business - it’s scaling.

MF: Absolutely. And coz it comes down to the obligation of the filmmaker to keep it going, that’s why it becomes really hard - but this might never happen again. I mean, we really hope it does but the fact that one should always embrace demand - I believe - if you have have a film that’s generating that coz you don’t know if it’s gonna happen again.

WE MIGHT LOOK BACK AND GO - ‘OH MY GOD, WE HAD NO IDEA HOW INCREDIBLE THAT TIME WAS! AND IT’S NEVER HAPPENED AGAIN FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES!’

So we said, let’s embrace the experience, let’s go on the ride, and let’s really give it everything we’ve got to maximize it’s global release and it’s global attention.

And it’s just been released online in the States now and there’s gonna be a whole online thing very soon with it in the UK.

SO I HAVE CONVERSATIONS WITH FILMMAKERS SAYING - TO WHAT EXTENT ARE YOU A FILMMAKER AND TO WHAT EXTENT ARE YOU A DISTRIBUTOR?

And I think there’s a very important argument to have - I think ultimately, if you get a distribution deal and if somebody is prepared to give you a $50million marketing budget and it’s gonna be on billboards and buses, great! You just turn up to your few world premiere launches and do your master interviews and get on with your next film.

But out of the thousands of filmmakers, how many actually end up being in that situation? And to what extent is it up to the filmmaker to really try and do it themselves, until they’re able to get into that situation? And some filmmakers will never be in that situation coz the type of film they’re making is not suitable for that type of global distribution.

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