Zen Films

Pirate Cat Radio Interview (87.9FM)

I was very pleased to be interviewed on Pirate Cat Radio at the weekend.

Here's an mp3 of my bit but the full show can be found here.

Advice for Creating a Viral Video

This past year I've been working with the guys over at Viralskool, a new creative community that's looking to pay filmmakers, animators and so on for making viral videos for top companies.

Here's some advice based on the work I did. Note that it relates to creating "branded entertainment" for paying clients rather than, say, creating a movie trailer that you want to "go viral". I've addressed that a little before in other posts but I'll make a new post specifically about creating trailers for the web.

What is A Viral Video?

So first, let's define what I mean by a viral video... It ought to be a video that becomes popular because one person recommends it to their friends and they then recommend it to their friends and so on until the video views grow exponentially. So let's say a cool clip that people want to share.

There are those who argue a video is only viral after it's been shared or if it has several hundred thousand views. But I think it's more helpful to look at "viral video" as a genre - just like music video or short film or feature film.

Note that just uploading a clip to YouTube won't make it "go viral" and those popular clips from well-known brands all have additional marketing support (PR, paid advertising etc) and what's known as "seeding" - outreach to blogs and destination sites asking them to feature the clip.

So How Do You Make Your Videos Sharable?

You have to put yourself in the shoes of the sharer and the receiver. Nobody wants to be associated with lame content, right? So don’t create anything that’s lame, self-indulgent, pretentious or badly acted unless it’s for humorous effect!

Ask yourself these questions. When I send someone a link to this video:

• Will I look cool for sharing this video?
• Will it strengthen my friendship with the person I’m sending the video to?
• Will they look cool passing it on?

Unless you can answer “yes” to all the above then revisit your video idea until you score 3 out of 3.

So here's my advice for optimising your video to make it spreadable:

• Spend more time thinking up a great idea than you spend shooting it. This will keep your costs down, keep your enthusiasm high and is most likely to yield the best results.
   
• Grab attention in the first 5 seconds. Be surprising, be funny, be shocking or tease. Just make sure you grab attention or else you’ll be dead in the water.
   
• Finish with a punch line. There has to be a reward for anyone that’s given you up to 30 seconds of their life! Make the last 5 seconds more surprising, funnier, more shocking or more provocative than the first 5 seconds. You want someone to finish the video and think “OMG I have to send this to ….”
   
• Use the middle part of the video to engage. The part between the beginning and the end is the part that needs to keep evolving the idea or revealing something new. If you look at the Levi’s viral Guy Backflips into Jeans, it’s only about someone jumping into a pair of jeans but the team tries to keep the idea fresh by using different methods and places to jump. It’s the same for the Ray-ban Never Hide videos.
  
  Although there's no limit to how long your video can be, it's better to get in, do the job and get out within 30 seconds... 90 seconds tops. Sure, you'll find videos that are longer but you'll find that your time and money is better spent getting those 30 seconds the best they can be than making the video longer.
    
• Invoke a primary emotion in the viewer. Think about which emotion you're trying to invoke in the viewer. Research on viral marketing from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University found that the best emotions to invoke were surprise & joy. Others possible, although less effective, were sadness, anger, disgust, fear. Although not essential for the viral spread of your video, it's important for the client that the emotions invoked and the connections/connotations brought to mind are consistent with the brand's image and what their fans believe.
   
• Don't make an advert: Your goal is to entertain, not to inform. An advert is different from what I'm defining as a viral video in that it has overt branding, slogans, product details. Virals are much more subtle in their selling - they're entertainment first and a sales pitch a distant second. Creating a great advert is really tough to achieve and if you have limited resources or lack experience then there's a risk that your "viral" will look like a poor advert... which is unlikely to spread. So concentrate on making something entertaining that people want to share.

Viral Video Styles and Further Tips

As the world of viral video evolves it's possible to see some similarities among the types of content that's popular online. Note that the styles are not mutually exclusive which means a video's spreadable potential is often helped by combining several styles.

Here are the styles/models I've identified:

• Repeat & innovate: keep it fresh
• Do This at Home/Mash-Up
• How Did They Do That? Did They Really Do That?
• Outrageous (ly Funny)
• Sensational Story
• Surreal

There's also a short discussion here, Cool But Not Viral?, about why these popular videos are not "viral" in the definition I've given above.

Repeat and innovate: keep it fresh
Videos that fall into this category are the Levi’s Guy Backflips into Jeans and the Ray-ban video Guy Catches Glasses with Face. The Levi’s viral is only about someone jumping into a pair of jeans – each jump shown as one shot - but the team tries to keep the idea fresh by using different methods and places to jump and different angles. The idea (of jumping into jeans) is big enough to sustain several iterations. Ditto with Guys Catches Glasses with Face but note how in both the videos the best feat is saved until last – it’s the pay-off, the reward for watching until the end.

Both of these videos have the Did They Really Do That? engagement too which prompts viewers to stop, pause and rewind the video – spurring conversation and more sharing.

Thorton’s “Stuck” by Harmony Korine is also in this repeat and innovate category but rather than go for amazement and laughs, it’s wonderfully touching and by returning to the boy on the bench we get the sense of a story unfolding. The limitation of Stuck is that it creates a warm feeling inside rather than the uplifting rush of success (as with the Levis and Ray-ban videos) and this potentially contributes to less sharing.

Guy Backflips into Jeans

Guy Catches Glasses with Face

 

Thorton’s “Stuck”

 

Do This At Home/Mash-Up
The benefit of a simple idea or a very clear concept is that viewers can spoof it, parody it and mash it up to produce spin-offs that further spread awareness of the original video.

For an example in this category, take Cadbury's Eyebrows. It's impossible to watch and not feel invited to move your eyebrows as the two kids do! Not only does it offer excellent potential to parody with different music and/or different characters but it also invokes the Did They Really Do That question - don't those eyebrows move to fast not to have been enhanced with computer graphics?

Cadbury's Eyebrows

 

How Did They Do That? Did They Really Do That?

Kobe Jumps Over Speeding Car doesn’t have a powerful grab in the first 5 seconds but because it’s Kobe Bryant, it’s his celebrity and the promise of the video title that gets us hooked. Then he jumps the car and we wonder, did he really do that? Whenever you can provoke a comments war about whether the clip is "fake" or "real" then you've engaged an audience!

I've also included in this style T-mobile's Life's for Sharing although in truth it's a combination of many styles. For example, it's surprising, it follows the Repeat and Innovate model - frequently changing songs and dance moves to keep it fresh, it begs the How Did They Do That? question to stimulate conversation and further enquiry, it even has a just little of the Do This At Home going for it. It's main failing is the weak primary emotion (wonderment) and the lack of a punch line. However, the strength of the Repeat & Innovate and the How Did They Do That? vibes probably overcome the weaknesses but even so, when everyone stops dancing and walks off it's a bit flat after all the energy in the video.

Kobe Jumps Over a Speeding Car

 

T-Mobile "Life's for Sharing"

 

Outrageous (ly Funny)
The perfect example of this is the Durex Get It On. This viral scores on so many levels: it’s funny because it’s taboo (sex, animal sex) yet cute (balloon creatures) so doesn’t become gross-out funny and it’s technically cool and makes viewers ask “How Did They Do That”?

I've also included in this category a music video for the group Make The Girl Dance. Although not outrageously funny, it's outrageous in the sense of three women walking nude through Paris! The video works not just because of the nudity but because it's excellently executed in one continuous shot (very difficult to achieve), it innovates with different girls, it's humorous & engaging to watch at the bystanders' reactions and it's amazing that they got away with it!

Durex Get it On

 

Make The Girl Dance "Baby Baby Baby"

Sensational Story
For this format to work, at its heart there has to be a story that generates conversation around the water cooler - it has to be a sensational story. It's the kind of tale that passes for "news" in the tabloids and gossip magazines - we know it's unimportant but it's fun to talk about. The stories provide light-hearted "humorous shock" and there's often a sense of schadenfreude (which kind of means laughing at someone else's misery).

This is a tough category to get right. A great example is the video below for Triumph Boats. It looks like a candid clip because it's taken in one shot, the picture quality isn't so great and at the end the camera operator runs away leaving the camera running. But it was actually created by an ad agency to highlight & promote the strength of Triumph's boats.

Another, less effective example, is Leaked Assassination Footage from Russia for the video game MIR-12. The problem with this "viral" is that it doesn't invoke any strong primary emotions and it isn't surprising or shocking enough. It succeeds in part because it has a "Did They Really Do That?" interest: it makes the viewer consider if this is actually real footage (although it had us immediately shouting "fake" - the acting & action is too poorly staged and executed to look "realistic"). It's doubtful that this video was actually shared among many friends.

Triumph Boats

 

Leaked Assassination Footage from Russia

 

Surreal

This is my last category and ought to be used with caution. It's very easy to say "my video is surreal" when what really ought to be said is that it's confusing! In many ways, most viral videos have some surreal quality to them but it's worth looking at a couple of the best examples.

A classic example of this style is Cadbury's Gorilla. This viral was so ahead of it's time that it generated incredible off-net conversations around the water cooler that further fueled its online growth. More than just surreal though, the video is inventive, engaging, humorous and touching. Investing the gorilla with human traits gives us a warm feeling inside but it also acts as a hook to keep us engaged and in suspense wondering what's going to happen.

Still great but a little less successful is Ray-ban's Cow Gives Birth to Dude. Although it's surreal, it's surprising, it's humorous... it lacks a real feel-good vibe or laugh-out-loud punch line. Massive Yarn Ball Rolls Through San Francisco is better although in a similar vein - it's cool, it's surreal, it's makes you smile but the punch line could just be a little better.

Cadbury's Gorilla.

 

Cow Gives Birth to Dude

 

Massive Yarn Ball Rolls Through San Francisco

 

Cool But Not Viral?

There are many (award-winning) commercials that get shared on the Internet but that doesn't make them a "spreadable". For example, Air New Zealand Nothing to Hide creates a stir because of the nudity/cheekiness and it's certainly inventive but the overt branding and advertising limits it's spreadability - how many more people would have forwarded this video were it not an advert?

The same can be said of Gucci’s Flora by Chris Cunningham. Again it's a wonderful video but it’s not a viral. Quite apart from the fact that it ends on a pack shot, it doesn't invoke a strong enough primary emotion - joy maybe but it's more of wonderment than happiness.

Air New Zealand Nothing to Hide

 

Gucci Flora

 

Shot Size Guide & 3-Point Lighting

Have spent the evening creating materials for my film directing course in Bangkok this September with Learn Film Asia.

I know it's basic stuff but it's nice to sex it up a little - just like the report on weapons of mass destruction.

This is a slide for the usual shot sizes.

And this is the one for 3-point lighting. Might need to click this image to view it properly.

Film Piracy

In a week when the Swedes elected the Pirate Party to Brussels it's interesting to read Phil Hawkin's blog about how he's been robbed by pirates.

I posted this lengthly post as a comment on Phil's page but thought I might as well share it here as I've not posted anything for a while :)

Unfortunately piracy is here to stay and is going to get worse. The only thing limiting it now is spread of broadband and technical knowledge. 

 To the person "yomamma" who writes they're an avid fan of media so should they miss out because she can't afford the DVD?. LOL Are you kidding me? Would you think about going into a shop and running out with a Mars bar shouting "but I'm an avid fan of chocolate why should I be denied?" Come on, piracy is theft plain and simple, end of story. All the other fluff and nonsense around the benefits of increased exposure is just that - a fig leaf to cover the naked stealing. 

But here's the thing. Piracy is here and what motivates it is not only the desire to have something for free, it's the immediacy and convenience. Your strategy Phil should have been to make the film available as a paid download before or as the DVD came out - at least then downloaders can buy a copy to watch there and then. Without making the paid download available you're not satisfying a need.

Unfortunately just as we get the Government we deserve, we get the films we deserve. Piracy is killing the industry - no doubt about it. Distributors have gone out of business and retailers are dying too. All that's going to be left is PG films that the advertisers are prepared to sponsor and Hollywood blockbusters from major studios who can make their money on merchandising and licensing. 

For indies it's almost game over. There's a lot of talk about building a community around your movie and building a fan base etc and some will be able to do this but most won't because doing that marketing work takes a special set of producing & social media skills that haven't typically been those of the filmmaker. 

For those that talk about the donation model - that's f**ked too. Look at the example of Steal This Movie - 2 million or more free downloads and only $40k back (maybe it was £40k?). I suspect that some of those downloaders were like me - downloaded with good intention to watch but still haven't got around to it yet :) 

Phil, my recommendation is quickly make it possible to buy a downloadable version of your movie - there's lots of options, including download to burn the DVD. Check out my latest feature http://www.mind-flesh.com to see what we've done. I'll be honest with you, our DVD is outselling the download but folks are buying downloads - thank you everyone :)

You can't beat the piracy Phil, wrong though it is and there's no appealing to anyone's good nature or better judgement. You've got to go with the flow and make money in spite of it.

Tracking with Mocha vs. After Effects CS4

I had to create an intro video for a start-up I've been working for and one of my bright ideas was to shoot some footage around town, handheld, and the track the company logo into billboards and buses.

I have to say that the results with Mocha are amazing and much quicker to achieve than in After Effects. However, I did run into a few teething problems so I thought I'd post them here for others.

All this is probably covered in the very slim .pdf user guide but if you're someone like me that likes to dive in and just give it a go or skim read, here's a few highlights so you don't run into problems:

• when you import your clip into Mocha, make sure you set the frame rate correctly. For some reason the default was 10 fps. I was expecting Mocha to look into the clip and set it automatically                                                                                                                            
• make sure you take a little care to define the plane correctly and the surface. The user guilde gives the impression you can just sling up a spline and it'll magically do everything. Well it's almost as good as that. You don't have to worry about tracking points but I got the best results by checking the spline sides ran as  paralllel as possible to my plane. And make sure you define the Surface - those corner points are what's used to corner-pin your graphic/overlay in AE           
• make sure the timeline cursor is at the start of the clip. When I cut and pasted the tracking data into AE I'd accidentally made the work area one frame bigger than the graphic I wanted to track - hence the tracking data was a frame too many and incidentally a frame out. It's easy to adjust of course but I didn't catch the problem straight away - can look like it's way off                                                      
• you'll need to position the corner-pinned graphic in AE. When I first cut-and-pasted the tracking data into AE it sent the graphic off screen and I wondered what had happened to it. I had to zoom out to find those corner pins and then use position to drag it back to the visible screen area.

That's all for now. Writing this as the clip renders out :) 

Just for reference, I worked at 1920 x 1080 throughout on an uncompressed .avi file.

Publishing content for the Kindle

With the launch of the Kindle DX and a new cut of London Voodoo, I thought I’d re-publish (for the Kindle) the anthology we put together for the movie’s original UK release. And here it is:

SIDE BAR: Kindle for iPhone
Note that if you don't have a Kindle, there is a Kindle iPhone app which works really well and you can sample some of the book for free.
Download the app and sign in. Then, when on Amazon, push the content to the phone. 

Note too that you can listen free to Stepping Offby Mike Davis read by Doug "Hellraiser" Bradley by clicking here for the MP3 or here for the podcast in iTunes.

Continuing....

Ought to be straight-forward right? Well.. kinda but still took a bit of searching for information and trial & error.  FYI I had my original document in Word 2007. So here’s my insight. 

1. Go to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform at  http://dtp.amazon.com

2. Create an account
3. Now you’ll see a screen like the picture below. It’s a three-stage process

4. Stage One: Enter the book details and upload the cover art

5. Stage Two: This is the trial and error part..

In Word 2007, go to Save As.. Other Formats.. and select Web Page. There are other web-formatting options but Web Page is the one I used most successfully.

Open the newly-created webpage – which is your book in HTML format – either in a web-editing program (I used Dreamweaver) or a basic text editor – you’re going to need to edit bits of code.

Each book section was marked with the code 

<div class=SectionX> 

where “X” was the section number E.g. <div class=Section2>. 
Replace these lines with the Amazon custom tag 

<mbp:section> 

The other custom tag you may need is the one that forces a page break 

<mbp:pagebreak />

Upload the HTML file and preview it using Amazon’s preview tool. 

I found that there were too many blank lines. Well after all the anthology had been formatted for a different page size. That means deleting this code: 

<p class=MsoBodyText><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p> 

Then, the headers had too much space on the paragraph formatting. 

If you go to a header you’ll notice something like this: 

<h1><a name="_Toc151988948"><span lang=EN-GB>Stepping Off</span></a><span
lang=EN-GB> </span></h1>

The <h1> code is the heading format. You’ll need to search the start of the file in the style section to find where this defined. My file had this: 

h1
{mso-style-update:auto;
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-next:Normal;
margin-top:24.0pt;
margin-right:0cm;
margin-bottom:18.0pt;
margin-left:0cm;
page-break-before:always;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
page-break-after:avoid;
mso-outline-level:1;
font-size:14.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Palatino Linotype","serif";
mso-font-kerning:0pt;
mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;
font-weight:bold;
mso-bidi-font-weight:normal;}

I went in and changed the margin-top to 12.0pt.

6. And that's the hard part over. Now you set a price, enter your tax and bank details so they know how to pay you and that's it.

Discovering Cool Films and What’s Wrong with Movie Recommendation Systems

The biggest problem for an indie film is discovery. That is, having the audience/consumer know that you even exist!

Sure it’s a good move to build an audience early – before shooting – but after the film has been released and the initial buzz dies away it’s very difficult to maintain momentum. After all, if you have engaged an audience before the movie release, part of the thrill for the film fan is being first in the know; maybe influencing the project development in some way. With the movie out, there’s only so much evangelizing the core audience will do before they go off to find new projects.

Although the Internet and digital media has allowed many opportunities to get your work out there, just “getting it out there” doesn’t mean anyone’s searching for it and among those who are, will they find it?

Discovering new media

There are many ways people discover new books, music or films and there’s a good overview of the different systems here. I looked back at the media I’ve bought over the past month and it’s possible to see a combination of discovery methods at work from reviews to technology-assisted finds to friend recommendations. Here’s a quick summary:

• Gray’s Anatomy (book of essays by John Gray) and Nudge (audiobook, reviewed here) – discovered by my listening to the excellent podcast (radio show) Start The Week by Andrew Marr

• Tech Noir (book) – browsing book section of Forbidden Planet, London.

• Altered Carbon (audio book) – downloaded from iTunes. I actively looked for something outside the most popular titles. The synopsis read like something I might like and it had great reviews.

• The Inbetweeners (TV series) – recommended by two friends. It is hilarious. I’d guess that only a friend could have recommended this because you’d have to know about my social references and sense of humor. I’m not sure what movies or TV series in my collection would have given a clue to this… I love Gavin and Stacey, maybe that’s a clue? I doubt it though.

• The Baader Meinhof Complex (film) - good review on the Mark Kermode podcast and the kind of movie I like (political/historical/thriller)

• Let The Right One In (film) – a friend mailed the DVD from Sweden. It was also subsequently and independently recommended to me by a friend.

• Screamers (film) – recommended by Jinni (discussed more below).

• Death Cab for Cutie (music) – recommended by Pandora after I said I liked The Kooks. I’ve since bought all their back catalogue and these are now possibly one of my favourite bands in recent times; so great recommendation

• Matchbook Twenty (music) – I heard a tune in a store and used Shazam to tell me what it was. I bought the album

Looking at the above list, quite a lot of my recommendations come from friends and "curators" or what might be called "trusted sources" - many more than I would have thought actually. So while I'm about to criticize movie recommenders, don't forget the power of the social network (word of mouth) and PR.

So what’s the problem with movie recommendation systems?

Although many rave about Netflix because “there’s so much choice”, most members still continue to choose from the top ten. In fact, at a presentation by NetFlix, their man told the audience that people on all-you-can-eat subscription plans, members will watch what’s new, then the “classics”/cult films and then finally search further afield to more obscure titles. On the subscription plan, there’s no cost to trialing something new but that indie film is still at the mercy of the recommendation system. Netflix says it wants customers to find hidden movies because customers who can’t find anything to watch cancel their subscriptions. In fact, Netflix launched a competition to find a better recommendation algorithm than its current one, Cinematch. There’s an excellent article on the competition here at the New York Times.

The problem (for indie producers) is that most movie recommendation systems work on the basis of trying to match your likes and dislikes with another person (with the same or similar likes) and then assuming that if you both have the same tastes on films it knows you‘ve seen, you may also like films your doppelganger has seen but you haven’t. In the jargon this is called collaborative filtering. MovieLens works this way and Amazon works in a similar way with its “people who bought that also bought this”. This sounds like a reasonable approach but it means someone – anyone? - has to watch and/or rate your indie film for it to be discovered by others. Further, the more people that watch and rate your movie, the better chance of discovery you have. … and there’s the problem. Even with “so much choice” available, online markets are making blockbusters bigger and indie titles weaker. In fact, online recommenders are killing the niche.

Why?:

• because collaborative filters work better with more data… and where’s the most data? With the blockbusters

• even though there’s little or no overhead in selling “the long tail” it’s still in the online store’s interest to sell the most popular title.. the blockbuster

• fashions & fads and opinions on what’s cool and what’s not are being exchanged faster and wider than in the off-line world and this is actually contributing to an apparent homogenisation of taste… again, tending towards those blockbusters.

For an indication of how perilous life is going to become for the indie film business, look as usual to the music business. In an MCPS-PRS (UK music industry representing artists) study of one download site, from 13 million available tracks, 0.4% represented 80% of the revenue! This is corroborated by other studies by Nielson.

That says to me that you shouldn’t rely on technology to get discovered – especially not collaborative filtering. What we need is the film equivalent to Pandora where content is broken down to “genomes” that enables a much finer tuning and isn’t biased towards viewing figures. One such system I’ve been using is Jinni which claims to be just that. I have to say it’s pretty good. But there’s still the problem that adding a film to the database requires a human to classify or code the movie into all its genes. A solution would be to allow producers to add metadata for their films that did this codifying or to automate it – using an AI program to scan through the film and code it (probably a long way off).

If we can’t rely on technology alone, we’re left with friends (social networks) and “curators”. Curators are respected sources/reviewers: you find a film critic that likes the films you like and then trust their judgment. The problem here is that with more and more films to review, getting a well-known or respected film critic to review your film is very tough and usually impossible without a theatrical release. It’s slightly easier in the horror genre I’ve found to get reviewed because many reviewers are fans of the genre and like to find and discover new material. But even with a review, when someone is sat in their armchair ready to watch a movie, will they really go searching for reviews? No. They’ll find the film first and then check the reviews.

So what’s the bottom line for indie producers?

Don’t believe the bullshit about the long tail and how great it is for indies. With all the DVD stores closing or tending towards selling only the top tens, it’s harder than ever to get discovered.

So, if you’re going to spend advertising dollars, do it to get into a top ten. The higher you can get placed, the more likely you are to get recommended – the system is stacked in favour of the best selling titles and you need to be there. Although there are many sites that will create your DVD for you, few people will buy direct from your site - most prefering to buy for Amazon and iTunes. They're trusted and buyers already have their purchasing details stored there (credit card, shipping address etc.). So that’s where you need to be and you need to work on your sales ranking.

Social media (twitter, widgets, youtube etc.) can definitely help but social media can only work for you if there’s something social about your media. Widgets and trailers are only going to be shared and embedded if it enhances the embedder’s/sharer’s credibility – there’s got to be kudos in sharing your widget.

Don’t be a guilty pleasure and don’t be lame. Recognize that owning or recommending your movie says something about the buyer/recommender – and that “something” has to have value in that person’s social network (cool, funny, concerned). A “guilty pleasure” is a film that someone likes but is afraid to come out and say it because they know (or think they know) what popular opinion is! Helen and I love the film Armageddon but I rarely mention it in my social circles ;) You’ve got to be the film people are afraid to recommend.

Get reviewed. I’ve sent out DVD screeners to most people who ask and I’ve been active in finding cool sites that look like the sort of place our audience hangs out. The reviews help with the film’s discovery but they also give a potential buyer clues about whether they’ll like the movie or not.

Make it easy to be recommended. Provide easy URLs for your film so that if someone does want to recommend your film, it’s easy for them.

Creating Social Media for Indie Film Marketing

The purpose of this post is to explain how to market your indie movie correctly and avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made. This is a practical piece but it helps to understand the reasoning behind my suggestions. I’ve spent a couple of years now investigating and experimenting with social media on my own movies and not always getting it right! Much of the research and exploration I’ve done has been inspired by Henry Jenkin’s whitepaper on spreadable media, from the Workbook Project and a mountain of social media presentations on SlideShare!

I’m going to assume that as indie filmmakers (a) you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on advertising campaigns (although more on this in a later post) and hence (b) that you want to use word-of-mouth to make people aware of the movie ahead of it being seen.

So here it is: You have to create marketing materials – social media – that make a contribution to a person’s (online) social life. Audiences don’t build their world around your movie or your marketing materials - they take your movie and media use it for their own (social) purposes. That means (borrowing from Jenkin’s paper) you have to create media that allows your audience to:

• express something about themselves or their community
• express a deeply held perception or view of the world
• determine who’s in and who’s out
• conduct some kind of social function – like sharing, referring, alerting, gossiping, debating (etc.)

The problem with the usual trailer and movie poster is they can only work in this way if you’ve got the kudos built into the project from the beginning – like a named cast or named director, maybe a popular franchise. Then those well-known elements all bring a message or meaning which fans use to express themselves. And, media built on these elements has a social worth as a gift or tribute.

For example, if I decorate my MySpace or Facebook page with a poster from Old Boy or La Haine, it’s communicating something about me – I’m using the poster not to promote the film but to signal the type of person that I am and the people I’m interested to meet. Similarly, if I forward the link to a trailer to a friend, I’m doing it to reinforce the friendship because I think this gesture or “gift” will be appreciated and they’ll think kindly towards me. It’s not really because I want to promote the film (unless I know the filmmakers of course), it's what the trailer is doing for me.

So, if you’ve got an indie film that nobody’s heard of, your trailer isn't punching at the same weight – your trailer and poster are not performing those necessary social functions in the same way or as effectively. Worse still, until there’s a body of opinion that says your film isn’t lame, whoever carries your colors is going out on a limb under the threat of ridicule from the community. Not everyone’s ready to do that.

What to do?
First, recognize that you’ve got a problem. Second, break down all the elements in your film that you do have – start with the cast, the crew, the genre, the premise and the subject matter. Maybe the special effects, stunts, car chases? Look for all the things in your film that can contribute to various people's (social) life and perform one or all of the roles above. Third and finally, think how you’re going to make it easy and convenient to facilitate all those functions – the sharing, the referring, the debating etc.

Don’t think about it as though you’re selling or promoting the movie: you’re trying to add value to someone’s life by giving them a piece of media that they can use for their purposes. If your media doesn’t do that then its spam.

So, for example, if you’ve got a great car chase or a great stunt, upload that clip to YouTube and find people interested in cars. It doesn’t matter that your film is a crime thriller or a horror and not really about cars at all, it’s got that chase and that clip can form the basis for social interaction – it’s a gift from you to the car community. Avoid at all costs spoiling the video with urls and logos – put that information in the description field. If it looks like an advert then it’ll spoil the value of the gift.

The media needn't be a clip or graphic, it could be an opinion piece, a comment on someone's blog, insider information (gossip) - any form of communication that adds value.

A point to note when uploading to YouTube (and other video sharing sites of course) is to give the video a title that reflects what’s in the clip, not the name of the movie. So in this case, it might be called “Car Chase on Wet Road” – it’s much more likely to be found by people looking for car chases. They’re not going to search for the name of your film because as yet nobody’s heard of it. You can actually see this at work with London Voodoo: a fan, without my knowledge or blessing, ripped the DVD and uploaded a collection of clips titled “Woman Possessed”. His video views far exceeded our “London Voodoo Trailer” because he tapped into the popular search term “possession” and into a subculture of people interested in possessed women.

Now, of course you’ll want a trailer and a poster but these are there to provide further information or increased involvement for anyone who wants to take their interest to the next level.

Please stay tuned for more in subsequent posts. I've started here with the assumption that your movie is already finished but I'd like to discuss how you might approach the project differently from the beginning now that you know this. And I'll discuss the media we created and why it worked and when it didn't.

Postmodern Horror

In my attempt this year to post more content that’s helpful to folk, I’m delighted to make available Dr. Dean Lockwood’s stolen lecture notes:) Dr. Lockwood is Senior Lecturer in Media Theory at the University of Lincoln.

I've got hold of these notes because he makes reference to MindFlesh and gives what I think is a pretty cool analysis – but more on this later.

The lecture notes discuss a popular horror topic which is how horror reflects or is influenced by the social and cultural changes of the time. I particularly like this paper because it discusses the growth of paranoid horror from what he describes as “secure horror” (I’ve reproduced his table below so you can easily see the difference).  References include The Thing  - one of my favourite movies - which is seen to be informed by the paranoia of the Vietnam war (nobody knows who’s friend or foe) .

There’s also an interesting discussion of Gothic horror in today’s world which I think provides some interesting tips for anyone writing a vampire novel or movie right now.

Secure Horror	Paranoid Horror
Successful human intervention	Failed human intervention
Effective expertise	Ineffective expertise
Authorities as legitimate	Authorities as unreliable
Sustainable order	Escalating disorder
‘External’ threats	‘Internal’ threats
Centre-periphery organisation	Victim groups organisation
Defined boundaries	Diffuse boundaries
Closed narratives	Open narratives

Oh yeah, here’s that MindFlesh write-up:

the central male protagonist obsessively surrenders to fantasy erotic visitations by an alluring succubus, sex with whom is violent, connoted as traumatic and abusive rather than innocently pleasurable. These episodes are related to guilty (and unreliable) memories of abuse at the hands of the protagonist’s mother (there is a strong resonance with Creed’s notions of the monstrous feminine) and it becomes clear that they are not purely fantasy, but have the ability to bleed through into the real physical world in various ways, including manifestations on the protagonist’s body. The film emphasizes the permeability of mind and body, fantasy and reality, focusing paranoiacally on the irruption of a more violent and indifferent universe and the material force of psychopathological (or demonic) impulses. In this film, it is as if the mind were itself become demonic.

Dairy of the Dead

Ok, this is just for fun so please nobody flame me :) Just had to quickly create this for all those who can't spell diary correctly! Animated in Poser again, of course and assembled in After Effects.