Thank you Graham for an inspiring keynote speech at the LAIFF yesterday. Very tweet-worthy. And a welcome reminder of what matters and how to keep going. With flair and style no less. Wish I could’ve been there. You definitely made a list for folks to put up on their wall by their desk (reproduced below for easy clipping).
Graham Taylor’s Brief To-Do list To Improve Indie Film Ecosystem:
• We have to encourage young people.
• We can’t be an agist business where we cast off older filmmakers.
• It’s important to have a strong point of view.
• It’s easy to be the person who points out how nothing will ever work. It’s much harder to take a leap of faith and challenge yourself when things do blow up. We never got anywhere in life by playing it safe.
• You should take the time to tweet and blog. And for those of you who comment on Deadline, if you have something positive to say, something that offers real reflection and insight, even critical thought then we should throw you a float parade. But for all of those people who are just spreading hate, you should enjoy a large glass of go fuck yourself.
• It doesn’t hurt to have a sense of humor.
• Don’t stand for apathy and cynicism in either the creative or business communities as it is ultimately cancerous to the evolution of art.
In closing: I’m not an optimist because I’m a lunatic. It’s a learned optimism, one that’s founded upon years of experience, tenacity, and perseverance in this business. We have to be educated on the issues and challenges that face us. I have not gone into the economic issues today as they are well-documented and we are bombarded with them every day. BORING!
What’s not boring is making shit happen. We are the inmates taking over the asylum. We Build, Enable and Activate content, financing and distribution. We are in a revolution and now is our time. We finally have a bigger seat at the table.
Read Graham’s entire speech here (complete with music cues).
One of things we love about films is how they transport us a different time and place. Perhaps nothing has such a strong hold on our memories as our first steps towards adulthood. For me that period is fully equated with my visits and eventual move to NYC. When I produced The Ice Storm it was a daily trip back to my most awkward moments. I return there when ever I enter the canon of NYC Coming-Of-Age tales; they are truly a genre on their own. For a filmmaker to walk into this community, requires great courage and knowledge, ambition and research. I was happily reassured viewing Gavin Wiesen’s THE ART OF GETTING BY, for it was clear that Gavin did not take this responsibility lightly. His guest post today reveals that he also had what is ultimately most required in that daunting task: a great deal of love for all that has walked there before (and he thankfully has that in ample supply).
When I was a kid, John Hughes movies literally seemed like a gift from god, something made for the older kids, containing road maps to the coming challenges of growing up, while being hilarious and truthful and occasionally disarmingly sad. A little later, in my early teens, I rented VHS copies of The Graduate and Harold and Maude and watched them over and over until the tape wore out. In film school, studying masterpieces like The 400 Blows and Murmur of the Heart, we would then go see a movie like Dazed and Confused in the theater to simply be entertained. We maybe didn’t admit it at the time, but it spoke just as precisely to how we felt about our recently-ended adolescence as those earlier seminal movies did for their generation.
In sitting down to write what would become The Art of Getting By, I needed to get very honest with myself: what did I truly want to see, and what emotions would be worth exploring? Not, What new ground could I possibly break, trying to invent new revisionist genre hybrid fantasies, but what would be authentic to who I was as a writer? What world would I want to live inside of for a few months, that would bring me pleasure and ultimately move me (and therefore, hopefully others)?
I had just reached my early thirties and was looking back at my high school years for the first time with nostalgia, new-found understanding, and an aching sense of loss. To recreate that world, to go back and revisit the intense feelings of first freedoms and first love and bring to life the fun and the terror of that exact moment between childhood and adulthood, was at times like entering a trance. I started from a place of memories and invented from there. I righted some wrongs. Forgave some people and thanked others. Communed with my more clever, more hard-boiled and yet more troubled alter-ego on the page. Got the girl, sort of. But more than anything, I experienced the feeling of being young again through my teenage characters — and realized they weren’t that different from us, just a little more new to feeling lost, a little more raw and open.
Getting the movie made was a different story. The independent film landscape was changing; there was less financing, less distribution, so many competing projects for so little money. Cast was becoming more important than ever. It wasn’t and still isn’t an easy task to put together a delicate, potentially familiar coming of age drama with a first time director and teenage leads. But I believed in the story, had great partners who did too, who had made a few small movies but not so many that they weren’t still hungry to do it again. We found the balance in the script between the fun entertaining elements and the part I was even more interested in — training a microscopic lens on the emotional experiences we go through at that age. I made a look book that became a compendium of every influence I wanted to pour into the movie — inspiring cinematographers; photographs of New York locations; watercolor character portraits; frame grabs from Woody Allen, Sofia Coppola, and Leos Carax movies; the Bob Dylan posters on the main character’s bedroom walls and the books he reads on his shelves.
We came to the decision that we would have to make the movie for half of what we thought we needed, in less days than the script required, or never make it at all. I reassured myself with the possibly deluded conviction that the run-and-gun nature of the production, on the streets of New York, would fit the story like a glove, keep it loose and honest, that we would get to capture some happy accidents, and that the many inevitable imperfections would help to make it its own thing. We got extremely lucky with our cast, really good actors who liked the script and happened to be free within the four weeks we had to shoot. We pulled together a hard-working, enthusiastic crew. We managed to get it done.
Every generation needs its own coming of age movies, to reflect their image back at them and tell them their own stories. In the case of TAOGB, I was telling my own generational story, filtered through current times. That subliminal harkening back to the dim pre-internet early nineties of my high school days is imprinted on the fabric of the movie. I wanted that to resonate with the current economic climate, and hopefully with a persistent search for authenticity in popular culture. More than anything, I would like to think it lends a timelessness to a story that I’d like kids to call their own, and avoid the disposability of most mainstream movies marketed to teens. As technology gets cheaper and cheaper and independent movies may perhaps become more democratic and more affordable to make, I hope that it gets easier to tell personal stories and find ways to connect them with audiences.
–Gavin Wiesen
Gavin Wiesen was born and raised in New York City and attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, majoring in film production. After college he worked as a script reader and assistant to producers and directors including Bruce Paltrow, before writing and developing several screenplays and television pilots. The Art of Getting By is his first feature.
How do you make your film go viral? That may be one of the questions that filmmakers ask most these days. And today we have the answer for you… sort of.
Hal Siegal guest posted here awhile back and today he explains the concept and practice of social loops. If you want people to engage and share with your work, you best read up now.
In my previous post regarding my experimental social film, HIM, HER AND THEM, I mentioned that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about “social loops”. So what the heck is a social loop, anyway? It’s not just an academic or rhetorical question—an understanding of social loops is absolutely critical for any filmmaker looking to build or engage an audience through the use of social media.
The notion of a social loop is derived from the term “viral expansion loop”. These loops or “hooks” are a key driver of the massive growth of many web 2.0 companies including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and more recently casual game companies like Zynga. However, the concept is not new: Tupperware parties were an early example of a viral loop in action. A viral expansion loop uses specific ideas from biology that describe the spread of viral diseases and combines this with the more generalized concept of a positive feedback loop (compounding interest in a bank account is the classic example of positive feedback: interest payments add to your balance and the result in turn increases the amount of interest).
What does a social loop look like? Consider the way Facebook works. Facebook is absolutely useless to you unless your friends are on it. Once a few friends have joined it is somewhat useful, and as more friends join, it becomes more useful—and the same thing is true for each friend in turn. The point here is not just that this creates growth, but that it can create exponential growth. (Note that this is just one simple example. Facebook incorporates many loops and even levels of loops—a social game like Cityville contains another set of loops built on top of Facebook itself).
It seems that filmmakers are beginning to understand the potential value inherent in social loops. For example, in support of his latest film NEWLYWEDS, Ed Burns held a crowdsourced poster contest and song contest. At their core, these types of contests employ a simple social loop: a participant submits an entry and then naturally encourages all his or her friends to vote for it. That’s the first half of the loop. The second half is where the friends learn about the contest and then submit their own entries, thus starting the loop over again (and this is where this particular example breaks down—the set of people interested in a given film + having the skills to create a decent original poster or piece of music is relatively small. Filmmakers would be wise to consider other types of social engagement that have lower barriers to entry).
Of course, efforts like these still fall into the realm of marketing. With HIM, HER AND THEM, we took the next step and added a social loop into the film experience itself. This took the form of simple text additions that viewers and their friends could add to the film, thereby customizing and altering it. But of course these text additions are only meaningful if your friends can see them. So viewers are encouraged to invite friends to also watch and add to the film, and in turn they invite their friends to watch and add—and there’s the loop.
Since the film was released as a Facebook application, we are able to measure our audience engagement in ways that would be impossible in a traditional film. So how did we do with our first project? Our results were mixed. First the positive:
– We had approximately 6,000 viewers in the first month (with zero marketing dollars behind it)
– Of these, 50% interacted with the film socially in some way (by liking, sharing or commenting)
– 25% added to the story
– Average number of visits per user: 2. We assume that most people were viewing the film once, then returning to see what they friends added.
And now the negatives:
– We lost approximately 50% of our inbound viewers at the Facebook Permissions prompt. Ouch. We attribute this to the fact that a large number of inbound links were generated by StumbleUpon where users had no context that this was a Facebook application. This shows the importance of contextualizing your links and marketing. It also shows the hurdle that the Facebook Permissions screen represents—we did predict that this would be an issue.
– We had a lowly 3.33% conversion rate of friend requests to confirmations. This was very disappointing. We attribute it to Facebook’s new notification process and the fact that we weren’t able to invite friends via status updates on their walls or via email (in their defense, Facebook made the changes because social games were getting quite spammy with regards to email and wall notifications).
– Finally, viral growth is measurable as mathematical formula known as the viral coefficient. For growth to be viral, the coefficient has to be greater than 1. Ours was .07. That’s not so great in terms of growth and nowhere near exponential growth. In fairness though, this first project was largely a proof of concept. For our next projects we are thinking about deeper and more sophisticated social loops that will be specifically tailored to the nature of the story.
Social loops are clearly powerful, but the challenge is to use them with consideration and not in an exploitative manner (game mechanics face a similar challenge right now). Designed poorly, social loops will be perceived as a crass and manipulative tool. Designed well, with clear value and meaning for the user, social loops can be a gateway to entirely new kinds of engagement. This is our goal as we explore the possibilities of social films.
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Hal Siegel is a partner in Murmur, a hybrid studio/technology company that creates and distributes social films. He wrote and directed HIM, HER AND THEM.
What is a Producer’s “Vision”? How does she keep it all together and manage to lead all the various pursuits to a common goal? Do different approaches assure different results? Does different content require a different process?
Hank Blumenthal is old school NYC production. We’ve known each other a long time. He’s done it all. Recently he went back to school and has been focusing on new media. He’s a regular commenter on this blog; his comments lead me to ask him to take the lead at times, and today he offers us his first guest post.
Ted asked me to write a post about what it means to be a creative indie producer and the aesthetics of producing an independent movie. I can’t fully answer that question but I can start to address the main elements of that creative process and aesthetic. One approach might be to organize our thinking around four aesthetic aspects of producing: vision, community, logistics, and perspective.
A producer must have aesthetic vision. He literally has to be able to see the finished film in his mind’s eye. He has to grapple with the way it will situate meaningfulness in the culture a year in the future. And he must be able to share that vision with people so that they can be inspired enough to invest time, money, or spirit in a project.
Sometimes a film’s vision comes from a producer who conceives an idea, reads a book, or experiences a gestalt; and sometimes he embraces that from another creator. In either case this becomes the aesthetic basis for a project. This is the crucible where meaning is created. This meaning is informed by an argument or dialogue we want to have about how we perceive the world and how we share that understanding. This dialogue is grounded in artistic pleasure, emotional empathy, intellectual discourse, politics and economics.
On my last project, The Ghost Club, the idea for the story and most of the particulars came in a flash of inspiration and few hours of copious scrawling in my journal. My goal was to push the boundaries of storytelling to include a new form I call a storyscape – a story that is greater than the sum of movies, games, experiences and conceived as a whole. The storyscape is the medium, like a novel, that transmedia storytelling plays out on.
I had to conceive a whole universe with rules and connections between media like augmented reality games, websites, ghostpedias, and webisodes. Certainly there were only glimpses of what some of those elements were to be but the vision of the producer is to provide that scaffolding to the other artists – writers, directors, programmers, user experience designers – and to define the map where our efforts would go. Good producing, like modern transmedia, is about leaving gaps for our collaborators to fill in.
The producer must now form the aesthetic community that enforces that vision and interpretation. The key creatives on a movie – director, writer, producer – must disseminate and encompass all the other creative visions – actors, animators, designers, musicians, etc. – to make a community of meaning. The producer must take responsibility for this community and the coordination that scales the cinematic vision to the divisions of labor in making a movie. That is how the set decorator can choose the perfect flower or the composer the amazingly perfect cue. The producer, being responsible for the creation of an aesthetic ecology, must mediate translations of core principles across the various people involved, both communicating the larger vision while still respecting the particular area of the production.
I cannot stress this point enough, the aesthetics of the community’s collaboration is owned by the producer. The producer is responsible for who and how that team comes together. Providing an environment where people can excel and collaborate is fundamental to a producer’s role. Flexibility, openness, and respect for everyone in the process are a critical aesthetic of a producer’s community.
I was fortunate enough to work as a script supervisor with Spike Lee on music videos and commercials and see how he married a clear director’s vision with a producer’s openness to his collaborators to create the best works. Often crew, any crew (occasionally myself), would step up to him and make a suggestion. He would graciously and ruthlessly compare that against his vision and accept or reject it. More often it was rejected but the joy of collaboration was when he said “yes.” Movies are a collaborative medium and the way that process is curated defines the finished work. At the level of production, great indie movies can be traced to well-coordinated aesthetic ecologies, and therefore to careful translation from the producer.
To frame the next point, aesthetics and logistics, consider what Stanley Kubrick said in Sight and Sound in 1972: “I don’t think in terms of big movies, or small movies. Each movie presents problems of its own and has advantages of its own. Each movie requires everything that you have to give it, in order to overcome the artistic and logistic problems that it poses.” The aesthetics of logistics are where the producer’s collaboration with the ecology of production becomes artistic. Choices are not solely artistic but also exist within a larger economy that focuses attention and resources. This is where producing becomes artistic, and that art is not simply creative but economic. Where your resources are applied and to what aesthetic result becomes a large part of what the finished product looks like.
I still kick myself for not spending a thousand dollars (that I didn’t have anyway) on a location for “In the Soup” that was 200 ft closer to a view of Manhattan. The producer balances the artistic demands of the picture and makes hundreds of creative choices about crew, locations, props, sets and wardrobe – not to mention the actors who can have a huge artistic contribution of their own to make. The ability to translate creative vision down the line of production, then, is also the ability to translate final decisions – driven by who, where, how, and how much – to harmonize these points of production.
Finally there is perspective. When everyone else is up to their necks in the muck of production and post production it is essential that someone maintain the agreed upon artistic vision and keep their attention focused on the ultimate goal. The producer is the one who reminds the director of what the vision is as the director sinks into the serendipity of artistic creation often pulled by the brilliant thoughts of his collaborators. The producer is responsible for the direction of the picture through his aesthetic consistency.
Vision, community, logistics, and perspective can provide a beginning for how we can analyze the aesthetics of producing. I hope this can begin a deeper discussion into each of these areas and what that aesthetics entails. As to what a creative producer does, I think this touches on the many areas he must supply the aesthetics and vision. Movie making and meaning making are an ecology of aesthetic choices and the producer defines the nodes of that ecology.
—Hank Blumenthal
Hank Blumenthal is a producer and director of movies (The Ghost Club, In the Soup, Strawberry Fields) a creative director and producer for interactive television and digital media (Microsoft, Google, Viacom, R/GA, Bravo and IFC,) and a PhD student in digital media at Georgia Institute of Technology investigating transmedia storytelling and new paradigms for stories.
