Experimental Distribution

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DCPTV: From Here to Awesome: Three Filmmaking Tips

DCPTV: From Here to Awesome: Promo Video

Arin Crumley, cofounder of From Here to Awesome, captures DV footage for recent Four Eyed Monsters episodes into Apple Final Cut Studio on a Power Mac G5.
Photo: Mike Hedge

At South by Southwest (SXSW) this year, there was an interesting dichotomy happening. Not only did the interactive panels outnumber the film-oriented ones by about three to one, but talk of digital distribution and pirating overtook many of the more traditional film-related discussions. While some festivalgoers argued that digital delivery is ruining the industry, others looked for ways that content producers can benefit from this technological inevitability. Who says a couple of high-powered studio executives sitting in an office in Hollywood are the only ones who can decide what movies we can see when the Internet provides an open, global marketplace?

This caused a lot of chatter that some festivalgoers may have felt was off-topic for certain panels. But it is increasingly clear that web-based content will forever be mentioned in the same breath as theatrically distributed film. Those who don't realize the wave of the future will merely be plugging the dam until the pressure becomes too much and eventually breaks right through.

The music side of the industry already has a number of highly publicized success stories of self-distribution. Although Radiohead won't release exact sales figures, in October 2007, the band allowed its new album to be downloaded for whatever price the buyer thought fair. The band then released traditional hard copies of the album to retail, after which the album promptly shot up to number one, according to SoundScan. Nine Inch Nails also cut out the middle man, digitally releasing its new recordings this March to a whopping $1.6 million in revenue in its first week. Obviously, these bands have huge followings from years of major-label-supported ad campaigns, but this is proof that the market is not merely in the process of transformation. It has already changed.

With the expansion of digital cinema and advances in Internet technology, distribution methods for filmmakers are becoming more democratic. Online festivals and independent distribution models can now take digital content to a worldwide market without the help of a movie studio. Content creators must make sure that their thinking is as up to date as their equipment in this fast-changing environment.

Three indie filmmakers who are intimately familiar with the DIY process have teamed up to launch an unorthodox online film festival that allows directors to retain their rights while receiving revenue directly from the distribution outlets. Filmmakers Lance Weiler, Arin Crumley, and M dot Strange (also known as Mike Belmont) started the From Here to Awesome (FHTA) discovery and distribution festival, which is in full swing this month. Created by filmmakers to benefit filmmakers, the festival's goal is no less than the complete inversion of the film-festival model.

There are no submission fees to enter, and FHTA is sponsored by a wide assortment of web partners. Online viewers will determine winners across a variety of websites and platforms that will aggregate the results back to FHTA. The top 10 shorts and features will move on to be part of the festival, receiving opportunities for cash, sponsorship, and further distribution, all leading up to the final showcase in November at Paris' prestigious Cinémathèque Française.

From Here To Awesome cofounder Lance Weiler speaks at many events on behalf of new distribution techniques, including Power to the Pixel in London.
Photo: Arin Crumley

Weiler was one of the first to embrace alternative distribution, having coordinated the first ever all-digital theatrical run for his debut feature, The Last Broadcast. Its follow-up, Head Trauma, made a 17-city digital run before hitting retail stores on DVD. The idea for FHTA sprang from a website Weiler also founded, The Workbook Project, which is a collaborative environment for filmmakers to share ideas and experiences while working toward developing new business models. “It's meant to be a social, open-source project that is a repository of information,” Weiler says.

Crumley and Susan Buice claim that Four Eyed Monsters, directed by the couple, is the first feature film to be shown in its entirety on YouTube. The movie became a cult phenomenon when its accompanying video podcast received more than 2 million views, and some theaters across the country began booking the film specifically due to its online fanbase. Crumley was booked on the festival circuit along with Belmont and Weiler to talk about their unique stories when the group decided to take the idea of alternative distribution and turn it into a working film festival.

“Part of our success was due to the fact that what we've done is kind of rare. But in a way, it shouldn't be. This should be stuff that all filmmakers can utilize. That's what was cool about The Work[book] Project. Here's all this information where now we can educate ourselves. But then From Here to Awesome takes that a step further,” Crumley says. “From beginning, middle, and end, you can get yourself a little marketing campaign where you make a submission video and then get it out there where you start building and collecting the demand for your film — and then finally, you actually distribute it to that fan base with partners and help and support.”

From Here to Awesome has partnered with new media companies across the spectrum of the Web — including viewing and social platforms such as YouTube, MySpace, Amazon Unbox, Blip.tv, Current, and Vudu; distribution services such as Withoutabox, IndieFlix, B-Side, and Breakthrough Distribution (see sidebar on p. 24); and various other promotional partners such as nonprofit organization IFP (Independent Feature Project) and product-placement specialist PlaceVine. With help from these partners, FHTA gives content producers the outlet for discovery of their film and the opportunity to disseminate all content related to its promotion across multiple outlets. “They [can] actually use the Internet to get an audience for their film,” Crumley says. “From Here to Awesome is trying to take everything we've learned about our own films and just give that to our fellow filmmakers.”

Another idea that separates FHTA from other film festivals is its lack of a submission fee, which is a big hurdle for cash-strapped filmmakers when the possibility exists that the film will be rejected. However, in order to promote a movie online, filmmakers who enter the festival should be prepared to create additional content. “Instead of just sending your film, take a moment and think about who your audience is and create this 3-minute introduction. Tell them what makes your film awesome. What was it like? Personalize it. Tell them about your struggle or your story or why you made this film,” Weiler says. “So instead of paying out a submission fee, [you're] getting something that [you can] use to promote and build [your] own audiences. The idea [is] to try to find ways to aggregate those opportunities, aggregate those services, aggregate those distribution points — and help filmmakers in volume start to realize the value of them being in an aggregate together, and hopefully leveraging those opportunities for them in meaningful ways where they would see direct benefit from it.”

Online voting on a single website is an easy process to manipulate if you have the proper amount of web savvy, so FHTA strives to track true interest in a film by using the video-analytic tools of partner TubeMogul. Every time a film is favorited on YouTube or friended on MySpace and Facebook, it counts toward that film's score. When a person clicks on the “This Film Seems Awesome” button on FHTA's homepage, that is also a factor. “We can look at all these things, and we're creating an algorithm to look at — this advanced series of math that will factor in all these various levels of interest coming out of real people,” Crumley says. “And at the end of the day, that's the top 10 films. The top 10 films — categorized [and] ranked in all these different ways.”

In the current anything-goes atmosphere of digital content creation,
the idea of collective knowledge being shared in an open forum is as
important as picking the 10 feature-length films and 10 short films
with the most interest. New technologies and programs are being created
every day, and there are rewards to be reaped for those who tap into
their inherent value first. Filmmakers are encouraged to participate in
the online discussion by creating video tutorials or contributing to
any number of online panels and keynotes that will all be archived at fromheretoawesome.com. After all, the festival is as much a social experiment as it is a showcase of talent.

“Whatever a filmmaker might be an expert about, we're actually
encouraging them to make a tutorial, 'cause that's stuff we've all done
in our own filmmaking. Lance has posted instructional information on
how to do something. So has Mike Belmont, and so have we. We have a
whole tutorial category on our own website for our own film. So the
idea is if everybody shares what their area of expertise is, then we're
slowly building a really vast resource that's ever-changing and
ever-evolving that teaches you whatever it is you don't know,” Crumley
says. “Maybe you're trying to get signed up with some new site, or
maybe you are trying to get something working when you're building your
social community — or maybe it's just how to use a camera properly or
even how to do lighting, if you're just brand-new to filmmaking. So all
of these things are already creeping up all over the Internet in terms
of filmmakers making tutorials about what they know, but that's part of
the celebration that will be happening with this festival. We want to
bring all that stuff together and encourage all of the participating
filmmakers to create tutorials about at least one thing that they feel
they're an expert at.”

Audience interaction with the filmmakers, not just the films, is
also essential to the goals of FHTA. Besides the large amount of
web-based conversation, the festival is also hosting live panels during
DIY Days — a series of keynote speeches and filmmaker Q&As that
will take place in Los Angeles in July and San Francisco and Boston in
August. DIY Days will also host group discussions without any sort of
hierarchy, where everyone's voice can be heard.

“We're going to get together for a day of discussion around all
different aspects of what it is to self-sustain as a film and let it
groom — what it takes to build your audiences, get your work out there,
and give an opportunity to network in the offline kind of way,” Weiler
says. As many of these workshops as possible, he says, will be streamed
live and archived online.

After true interest is gauged and the showcased movies are picked by
the online community, the screenings will begin through a variety of
outlets. Rather than one or two weeks as is the custom at a traditional
festival, From Here to Awesome will screen its featured films over a
six-month period. This larger release window will give each film an
opportunity to take advantage of virtually every form of distribution
currently available — such as theaters, video-on-demand services,
mobile devices, web-based TV, cable TV, living rooms, and grassroots
guerilla screenings at drive-ins around the world through mobmov.org.
Through the festival's partnerships, each featured film will also
receive free errors and omissions (E&O) insurance courtesy of
Heretic Films, which Weiler values at approximately $12,000 to $14,000.

Whether it is a protected RSS feed or a donation-based theatrical
screening, FHTA returns 100 percent of a sale back to the filmmaker
rather than acting as a sales rep for its showcased movies and taking a
cut of the money. “We're really trying to spread the reach and get it
out over as many different outlets as we possibly can, and we want to
turn back at the end and say, ‘What worked? What price points worked?
What was the best model that we saw? What was the best uptake?'' and
just present all that back,” Weiler says.

The filmmakers behind FHTA have proven that concentrating solely on
the creative concerns of your movie is not always the final step in
today's independent filmmaking process. Innovative marketing and
distribution can be just as important, and having a story built up
around it could guarantee your film a larger audience — even if the
screen that reaches that audience is no bigger than that of a cell
phone.

“Digital technology is here, and we should definitely be able to get
a film digitally to any platform, any service, any device — portable,
large, big, small, whatever. And all this should really be centered
around the filmmaker — the one who's created this message that they're
releasing to all these platforms, so this is our way of needing to get
there, by designing the festival to work that way,” Crumley says.

In the end, From Here to Awesome is a discovery festival in more
ways than one. It is not just the films that are being discovered, but
as the festival continues through the year, the most effective
distribution methods will be discovered as well. The dust will settle,
and the experiment can be analyzed as a whole. When asked about what
specific avenue of distribution will prove to be the most financially
beneficial to a filmmaker, Crumley says, “We don't really know. But
what we want to do is say that all of them should be pursued by every
filmmaker.”

From Here to Awesome (FHTA) is not the only outlet available to independent content creators eager to see their work receive more attention.

In order to maximize a film's distribution possibilities, Breakthrough Distribution will assign a project manager to help each filmmaker map out the appropriate combination of self-, retail-, or hybrid-distribution services. Within these services, Breakthrough can help get a movie released via a number of different outlets.

“Hybrid distribution is the most robust strategy as it includes the other approaches,” says Breakthrough President Jeff Rosen. “In hybrid distribution, a filmmaker can split up his rights: sell direct from his website, sign a deal with Showtime or Comcast, syndicate digital content across aggregators, ink a limited home-video deal with Image, sell into 10 foreign territories with 10 different sales agents, obtain a cover-mount deal with a U.K. paper, and exploit other channels.”

Like FHTA, Breakthrough relies heavily on business relationships that cross the lines of traditional film, developing a network of partners and the expertise to provide producers with the information, tools, strategic frameworks, and services necessary to successfully distribute their projects, retain their rights, and build their careers, Rosen says, adding that the platform can also help other content creators (authors, musicians, and game producers) in similar ways.

Scilla Andreen, CEO and cofounder of multiplatform independent film distributor IndieFlix, says she believes that an abundant supply of untapped content is just waiting to be discovered. “The film festival remains the primary means of discovering and viewing independent film and is replacing the art house. The Internet is next,” Andreen says. “The time is now. Consumers are beginning to plug in directly, and pressure is building for all forms of distribution to become highly flexible and offer an interactive marketing component.”

IndieFlix curates and programs content for third-party delivery platforms that don't accept submissions directly from the individual filmmaker. The company can help you coordinate the best marketing strategy for your movie. “The most effective marketing has been the use of the social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Veoh, Imeem, Ning, etc.,” Andreen says. “We also do lots of other grassroots marketing, such as tying in with charities, and that seems to boost sales a lot.”

It doesn't get more grassroots than Brave New Theaters, an online distribution system formed in 2003 as a way to get Robert Greenwald's controversial documentary Uncovered: The War on Iraq to interested audiences in the face of a traditional media that refused to cover the film. “We had to figure out a way to get this story out without relying on a television deal or selling it to a studio,” says Jim Gilliam, creator of Brave New Theaters. “So we did it ourselves and let anyone host a screening for free.”

By using the Brave New Theaters' online community as a promotional tool, a filmmaker can get press and direct revenue — provided the movie is issue-oriented. “It's all about finding screening hosts. A key way we've done that for our films, which are all political in nature, is reach out to nonprofits and activist groups who care about the issue,” Gilliam says. “We ask them to send emails to their members to host screenings, and we give them a cut of DVD sales. Then the hosts drum up interest in their local communities and reach out to press.” — E.M.

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