The Difference Between a Fan and a Friend

Lance Weiler organized a few roundtable discussions at SXSW this year, outside of the conference itself; audio and video will be posted on the From Here to Awesome site at some point.

They were held at the offices of B-Side Entertainment. I'm not exactly sure how to describe the focus of the conversation, which lasted about two hours and included about 20 people packed into the conference room at B-Side. It touched on financing and fandom, contracts and deals, marketing, patronage, and new distribution avenues. (The roundtable I was part of included Brian Chirls, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, Tommy Pallotta, Scott Macaulay, Brett Gaylor, Isis Masoud, David Garber, Slava Rubin, Danae Ringelmann, and Scilla Andreen, among others I didn't really know.)

For me, the most interesting threat of the conversation was about fans: how you accumulate them, and how the nature of fandom is changing. (We started by summarizing Kevin Kelly's excellent essay 1,000 True Fans.)

I tossed out the idea that "fan" is starting to feel like a vestige of the (good) old mass media days. In the age of Facebook and MySpace "friends," is anyone happy to simply be a fan anymore?

"Fan" feels like such a passive word. They're supposed to join your fan club, read the fan club newsletter, and buy tickets to your movies when they come out. They're consumers, pure and simple -- a ready audience when you need them.

The new fan -- or friend -- or "peer" (the term that Susan Buice proposed) wants to be more connected to you and your work. They want to hear first about your new project. They want to have input to it, or help shape it in some way (Brett Gaylor is allowing "friends" of his documentary project Open Source Cinema to edit some of the sequences.) They want to respond to your YouTube videos, comment on your blog, tell you when they think you're selling out or full of shit. (Some "friends" those are!) They want to give you ideas and be credited for their ideas. They may even be willing to help finance your next project or pre-buy the DVD through sites like IndieGoGo or IndieMaverick. They'll help promote it when it's finished, embedding clips in their blogs or Twittering their friends that they're on the way to the premiere.

What's amazing about the Internet is that there are the tools that let you communicate with this "friend base" and ask them for help.

What's even more amazing is that people are willing to offer help, if it's asked for in the right way (and rewarded in the right way, with recognition and perhaps more tangible trinkets.)

But what's scary is that it's still hard to tell which of your "friends" will actually *do something*, like turn up in a theater and buy a ticket, and which ones are simply compulsive about creating new connections, adding you to their own ever-growing roster of friends. And I think it will be challenging (perhaps scary) to manage some of your friends who want to be more than just friends ... like sending you the script they hope will turn into your next movie.

I'm not suggesting "friend" is definitively the right term to be using. (I still think of a friend as someone who intuitively knows when you need to be taken out and bought a beer, and who knows about large swaths of your history.) Peer is pretty good, as is collaborator. Patron feels too passive, like someone who's just bankrolling a project.

But finding a new term for the people who support creative endeavors seems to be an important step in moving beyond just thinking about them as fans.

Talking with Brian Chirls about Online Audience-Building

Last Wednesday, I had a chance to sit down for a few minutes with Brian Chirls, the tech guru who helped Arin Crumley and Susan Buice build an audience for 'Four Eyed Monsters.' More recently, he has been working with John Sayles on the online marketing for 'Honeydripper.'

Brian's a smart guy... we mostly talked about the importance of collecting information about your fans (and who's a super-fan versus someone who's just mildly interested in your movie). We also touched on the deal that 'Four Eyed Monsters' did with YouTube and Spout, where YouTube offered the full movie for free, and Spout served as a sponsor, paying the filmmakers a buck for every new member who joined after watching the movie on YouTube.

More from the IFP Filmmaker Conference

Lance Weiler moderated a great panel yesterday afternoon that was supposed to be about "Consumer Viewing Habits" but wound up being more about the economics of supporting one's creative work, whether it involves full-length features (Arin and Susan from 'Four Eyed Monsters' were there), short-form funny videos (Andrew Baron from Rocketboom), or documentary (Brett Gaylor of Open Source Cinema).

Some very random notes:

Arin mentioned to Brett how important it is to collect ZIP codes from people interested in your project. That way, when you're doing theatrical screenings or events (or trying to figure out where you should do these events), you have a sense of the geography of your fan base: do people love you in Madison, Wisconsin, while they couldn't care less in Portland, Oregon?

Brett showed the trailer for his doc, which garnered applause -- a good sign. It should be finished next year, he says.

Andrew said that Rocketboom is one of YouTube's advertising partners, and that YouTube will share revenue from the ads it places on Rocketboom. But none of the ads have started showing up yet. Lance suggested that one reason why is that someone created a hack for Firefox that allows you to strip the ads off YouTube's videos. I suspect there may be other reasons, too. Afterward, Baron told me that the ad payments are based on impressions (not click-throughs), and that YouTube would be splitting the revenue roughly down the middle with its creators.

Arin and Susan shared a lot of financial info about 'Four Eyed Monsters.' They've grossed about $135,000 from the movie so far (but are still trying to erase some credit card debt.) About 69 percent of that has come from selling DVDs, movie tickets, and downloads, and 31 percent has come from selling t-shirts, posters, and other merch.

Afterward, Hunter Weeks (director of the doc '10 MPH') came up and we talked about distribution a bit. He said he hasn't really been selling many downloads on Amazon Unbox, even though an Amazon PR rep told me recently that his films was among the best-selling indie downloads on that site. (They had 12 downloads in the month of August through Unbox...and yet a representative for Amazon's CreateSpace division, which handles the indie content on Unbox, told me that month that they were "in the top 20 Unbox titles." What does that say about how well Unbox is doing?) Hunter said he also sells digital versions of the movie on his own site using a service called E-Junkie, which charges $80 a month to host the movie -- and nothing per transaction.

Then there was some hanging around in the lobby...I spoke with a couple knowledgeable folks about when, if ever, indie movies will appear on iTunes. The smart money is on 2008 -- not this year. iTunes is supposedly still more focused on trying to get more studio content. (It is now almost two years since I wrote this opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle arguing that Apple is being hypocritical by not allowing independent creators to sell their film and video on iTunes.)

Then there was a dinner that Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo organized....which brought together the 'Four Eyed Monsters' team, Lance, Brett, and M dot Strange...basically, an incredible about of DIY filmmaking smarts gathered around one long table.

No Flash for iPhone Users ... Peter Jackson Bids Farewell to the Original Alamo Drafthouse ... Ken Burns Wants You ... And More

- For some reason, that fancy new iPhone won't play video in Adobe's popular Flash format. (All of the YouTube videos that you can watch on the phone have been re-encoded into h.264, the video format Apple prefers.)

- Courtesy of Anne Thompson's blog, here's a video farewell from Peter Jackson and Edgar Wright to the original Alamo Drafthouse, in Austin, TX. An "improved" Drafthouse will open in September, in a different location.

- Ken Burns is asking citizen documentarians to go out and interview World War II vets for the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. Here's how you can participate.

- The Wall Street Journal makes note of 'Four Eyed Monsters' on YouTube; the full film remains there until August 15th.

'Four Eyed Monsters' on YouTube: $23,000 So Far

Spout.com just put out a press release with some info on how well 'Four Eyed Monsters' is doing on YouTube. (Earlier post is here..) You'll remember that YouTube is hosting the full-length feature, and that Spout is paying the filmmakers $1 for every new user who signs up for their online community. It'll be available until August 15th, and the upper limit on Spout's generosity is $100,000.

From the release:

The campaign has raised $23,644 to date and will continue through the YouTube run.

"In one week on YouTube, Four Eyed Monsters was seen many times over by more than the amount of people who saw it in two years of traveling to over a dozen film festivals and self-distributing the movie," says Arin Crumley, co- creator of Four Eyed Monsters.

Actually, with YouTube, I'd note that you may know how many people started playing the movie -- but I suspect the site hasn't shared data with Arin about how many people watch 10 minutes of it, or the whole thing.

(So far the movie has racked up 500,000 "views"... but as with all YouTube content, it automatically starts playing when you visit its page.)

First Feature Film on YouTube: 'Four-Eyed Monsters' (and more Saturday news)

- The first (legal) feature film is up on YouTube, all 70 minutes of it. The experiment involves YouTube, the online filmfan community Spout.com, and `Four-Eyed Monsters' directors (and stars) Susan Buice and Arin Crumley.

Here's how it works -- watching the film is free, but before it plays, you get a one-minute message from Susan and Arin explaining that if you go join sign up for Spout.com, the site will pay them $1 for every new member they bring in, up to $100,000. Susan and Arin also ask viewers to post any video responses to the film on YouTube, and promise that they'll interact with viewers there for the next week. (Update: film will stay on YouTube for just one week.)

So this is basically a "bounty" business model, with an underwriter (Spout) promising the filmmakers a bounty for new members they can bring in. 'Four-Eyed Monsters,' of course, has already been on the festival circuit, already played theaters, and is already available for purchase as a DVD or a DRM-free digital download.

I'm embedding the film below. This is the first time you'll hear, on YouTube, the words "and now, the feature presentation..." (But probably not the last.)

Here's the official press release.

- The Visual Effects Society is holding its 2007 Festival of Visual Effects in Beverly Hills this weekend. If you can't make it in person, their list of the 50 greatest visual effects films of all time is well worth a look (here it is in PDF form. As is the teaser video with clips from many of the movies. I love the mix of classic films and recent ones...

The Wall Street Journal has a piece about the VES' top 50 list, in which Joe Morganstern writes:

Special effects don't have to be big to be special. The vast -- and vastly expensive -- motion-capture process behind "Polar Express" (a film wisely omitted from the VES 50/51 list) largely failed to capture emotions, and not just in the case of the glove-puppet-like faces; even the train of the title seemed inert. Yet the fleeting apparition of an almost incandescent train in Steven Spielberg's remake of "War of the Worlds" is a stunning effect, because the train represents escape from fearful danger. In Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter," a film set in a town that has lost its children in a bus accident, the depiction of the bus plunging from a road into an icy river is technically modest, and visually removed; the whole thing is seen in extreme long shot. Yet it's anything but remote. The moment is, in fact, shattering, because we're watching what we're watching, a school bus with its precious cargo slowly sinking beneath a sheet of ice.

Looking at it another way, the more we bring to special effects, the more special they become. Heavy-duty digital genius wasn't needed for the moment at the end of John Boorman's "Excalibur" when the sword is flung back in the lake and received by a hand which, rising above the waters, submerges once again. For many of us, that image epitomizes the Arthurian legend (and maybe even evokes "Camelot," Richard Harris, Richard Burton, Lerner and Loewe and JFK.) Similarly, the effects in Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" are, by the filmmaker's choice, almost homespun -- a few digital creatures and embellishments, yes, but also puppets, painted sets and a monster who, quite discernibly, is an actor wearing a fantastical costume. Yet the cumulative effect is intense, for all of these excursions from literalism are part of a seamless whole that uses reality as a starting point. The end point, and the whole point, is magic.

- Could Amazon be mulling a purchase of Netflix? BusinessWeek.com looks at the possibility, noting:

Amazon could potentially address some of Netflix's subscriber-growth troubles by marketing the service to its large user base. It could also seek to improve [Amazon's download service] Unbox by combining it with Netflix's download service—should that model begin gaining significant traction with consumers.

- Another great BizWeek piece asks, How Big Will the iPhone Be?