A while back we had Dynamo Player’s founder Rob Millis introduce us to this useful tool for DIY Distribution. But how do the filmmakers using it, feel about the Dynamo Player? Today, Felicia Ptolemy, one of the producers behind one very successful film, Transcendent Man, shares their thoughts on the Dynamo Player.
I look forward to sharing more direct reviews of the tools we use to get our work made and seen. If you are filmmaker using some of the innovative tools and methods that both necessity and opportunity has offered Indie / Truly Free Film recently, let us know your experiences. Write to me and we can run a post for the community, okay?
Transcendent Man is a film about the democratization of technology. Basically, exponentially growing information technologies are allowing for an explosion of new applications that are disrupting entire industries and offering powerful tools to people everywhere. Dynamo is one such tool, affording the filmmaker, directly, the opportunity to offer our audience immediate access to our film and ease of payment, which together create an instantaneous and seamless viewing experience.
With today’s audiences expecting and demanding to watch movies the way they want to watch them, Dynamo introduces the unique convenience of an embeddable video player that can be hosted on any relevant destination. We started by putting the film on our own website – the first place our potential viewers go to learn about Transcendent Man and find out where they can watch it. As a filmmaker, once you capture the interest of a viewer, you want to close the deal. There is so much content out there to distract people and by eliminating the need to go to another site to watch the film, we’ve captured the audience interest at its height. We also simultaneously put up the Dynamo player on our Facebook fan page, where many new and existing fans of the film go daily to share information and debate the ideas – it was a perfect spot to again access a passionate and interested audience (who can also easily share the film with their network) and offer the film for rent right there on the spot. By creating this flexibility and allowing us to embed a player right at the source, Dynamo gave us a tool to combat a primary challenge facing filmmakers today: content over-proliferation.
Also, with exhibitors still demanding a 90-120 day holdback to DVD release, Dynamo offers a more timely opportunity for our fans, which are demanding that a film like Transcendent Man should be available via many portals using any and all new technologies. This is the primary reason we wanted to use Dynamo, who was the first video player application that could accept safe, reliable forms of payment via trusted sites like PayPal. Couple that with the capability of embedding the video player on any website or portal where Transcendent Man is relevant to that site’s content and we have an exponentially growing audience who is not being blindly marketed to, but rather who have found the film naturally through their own likes and interests. Highly democratizing!
For these reasons and many more that we are still learning, Dynamo is a powerful tool for filmmakers and self-distributors. We’ve even had filmmaker friends learn about Dynamo through us and thank us for making them aware of a tool with so much potential. It’s a portal that offers access and convenience to a targeted audience and expands on your existing fan base organically across the web. It transcends the limitations previously put on filmmakers whose goal has always been to just get more people to enjoy their films.
— Felicia Ptolemy
Felicia Ptolemy is an independent producer working in television and film for the past 10 years. She produces under the Ptolemaic Productions banner with her husband, Barry Ptolemy. Her most recent project, Transcendent Man, the documentary about Ray Kurzweil’s life and ideas, is available on DVD and iTunes.
