The Death of Audience
October 23rd, 2008 @ 1:55 | by Timo Vuorensola
Power to the Pixel is a part of London Film Festival held in - surprise, surprise - London. It’s a technology-minded part, a bit separate from the festival itself, and it humours the subject of filmmaking and -distribution online. This year, they had a nice lineup of people flown over from the States and some from the Europe - the online filmmakers family get-together, more or less.
Again, the topics were the same I’m quite used to: everyone can make films, nowadays everything is cross-platform, utilize your community, don’t work with the old media industry, piracy is good, copyright is bad - maybe not so original, but hopefully for somebody it was inspiring. I think somebody said it well: “Nowadays, there’s no more “audience”. Today, it’s the community. So act accordingly.”
And eventually everyone was asking and trying to answer the question: how to make money with your film that’s released for free. And, as usual, nobody was able to answer to it. Why? Because there’s not one idiot-proof model to it. It’s stream of revenues that combined make the profit. One thing is for sure, at least: nobody has made a million with it. And on the Internet, you only count in millions. But then again, in the ideal world, every filmmaker would be happy to make a decent living and enough revenue to do the next film. But I don’t think that most important issue is the money, it’s the way of working, the philosophy of working with your audience, your community. If it’s sustainable, it will turn to dollars. If it’s not, it would’ve died already - so guess it’s on the good route, let’s just stick to it.
Before the model starts to work, or - God forbid - to make money, we need to sort out the biggest problem of the whole new industry. Why so few filmmakers make films online - there would definitively be a huge market for it, and when thinking further on the Long Tail theory, if that applies to film, there should be hudreds of thousands of new, aspiring filmmakers utilizing the Internet in the future. But there is not. It’s almost impossible to find good case examples from the Europe (Star Wreck is one of the very, very few), and in the States it’s mainly the same guys they wheel to festivals all the time - Four-Eyed Monsters, We Are The Strange and Steal This Film. So what’s the problem? Everything is out there, why don’t people make more Internet films, but stick to the old, supposedly non-working models and industry that they voluntarely let assrape them over and over again? The fragmentation of the whole field (of Internet filmmaking) is the biggest problem. Nobody would know where to start out with - there are dozen of community funding possibilities, tens of tools to collaborate on the film, and hudreds of ways to self-distribute it on the Internet and make some cash out of it. But there’s nobody that’s gonna take you by the hand and show how to use the Internet for filmmaking.
One of the problems is the platformisation of the working model, versus the requirement for the filmmakers to be independent. There, I am quite aware, also WAM has things to develope. The problem is that nobody wants to be “just another production in a platform”, so they’d rather create an own platform to it (if they are ambitious enough to start with, and if they are not, prolly they never finish the film anyway) instead of setting their films to a heap of other films fighting for the lebensraum. Instead of everyone flipping out their platform plans, the independent internet filmmakers should focus on trying to find ways to make the process as clear as possible, as understandable as possible, and have some good references of successful executions to back up the message.
There are few that try to do this - From Here to Awesome and Workbook Project, also IndieGoGo has some good guidelines on the Internet. But I’m looking forward into even more clearer system that would answer the few main questions *every* filmmaker has to ask:
1. Where to start?
2. What then?
3. Will I get paid?
4. Who have succeeded on it before, and how well?
When these questions are answered, filmmakers are more willing to approach this model. And eventually, it’s the filmmakers that need to be assured, definitively not the distributors and other middlemen. If somebody answers the four questions there in a convincing and clear way, it’s the middlemen that lose their jobs. But fear not, there’s always room for middlemen in whatever kind of industry future, and eventually it will be as always - the middlemen make the money. But maybe in the future the filmmakers would be more free to express themselves?
Right now I’m in a SAS plane flying over from London to Stocholm, where tomorrow morning we have a Nordic Cultural Commens Conference , with a discussion about “how to make money by giving away stuff for free”. I’m not expecting any groundbreaking revelations to pop up, but this is the only way - the clearer the concept gets, the clearer people identify the problems and needs of the people on both sides of the community, the closer to the surface the best answers travel.
So let’s just hope next time this industry - no, this form of art, storytelling and entertainment - makes the rules, it’s the filmmakers, not the middlemen, who set them.
M dot Strange talking about his experiences in creating a community around We are the Strange, and distributing the film on the Internet.
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