I was reading on Estsy an article by Stacey Brooke that gives recommendations to their community on how to help buyers recognize what they are getting when they purchase a hand-made item, and I couldn’t help but feel that a lot of it is readily applicable to the world of Truly Free Film. We are talking about hand-crafted personal work, not assembly line market-driven product. Truly Free Film is “a different thing entirely” from Hollywood. Brooke sums it up well:
Your products aren’t the blue arugula created on an assembly line by workers paid far too little and shipped across the country to big box warehouses who take all the money and credit for your blood and sweat. You make things and sell things you put your soul into. You need to impart that message to your buyers. You need to show them — it’s a whole different thing.
What she discusses is also so true about truly free film. Brooke & Etsy suggests to their sellers to document their process and post videos. In the film world, this is our “behind the scenes” video. Generally filmmakers just call this “additional content”. Yet, as pointed on Etsy, these videos help audiences and buyers recognize why a work is distinct.
They encourage their community to “bolster their descriptions” about what they are selling, to explain the process in detail. With a complex work like a feature film or cross-media project, this is not simple by any means. Yet the more we understand what an artist set out to accomplish, what they discovered, what their influences were, how things shifted over time — the more we are allowed into the creative process — the more we will feel intimate with the artist(s). The move we feel intimate with the artist(s), the more we are likely to promote and curate their work.
I personally love it when film gets personal. It’s one thing to do it with the content, but for me, being of the mind that cinema is really everything that surrounds a particular feature, it’s something a whole lot more, when the personal is illuminated in the process. I love the post that Matthew Porterfield did about his film PUTTY HILL because it felt truly heartfelt for me. It was intimate. That is another thing that all these Kickstarter campaigns do for me: they keep it intimate. I see their success and failure measured
