Mark Pesce - Words.
CHU - Images.
Steve 'Fly Agaric'' - Mixing
Unevenly Distributed: Table of Contents
Production Models for the 21st Century
I. The Wheels Fall Off the Cart
In mid-1994, sometime shortly after Tony Parisi and I had
fused the new technology of the World Wide Web to a 3D
visualization engine, to create VRML, we paid a visit to the
University of Santa Cruz, about 120 kilometers south of San
Francisco. Two UCSC students wanted to pitch us on their
own web media project. The Internet Underground Music
Archive, or IUMA, featured a simple directory of artists,
complete with links to MP3 files of these artists’ recordings.
(Before I go any further, I should state that they had all the
necessary clearances to put musical works up onto the Web –
IUMA was not violating anyone’s copyrights.) The idea
behind IUMA was simple enough, the technology absolutely
straightforward – and yet, for all that, it was utterly
revolutionary. Anyone, anywhere could surf over to the
IUMA site, pick an artist, then download a track and play it.
This was in the days before broadband, so downloading a
multi-megabyte MP3 recording could take upwards of an
hour per track – something that seems ridiculous today, but
was still so potent back in 1994 that IUMA immediately
became one of the most popular sites on the still-quite-tiny
Web. The founders of IUMA – Rob Lord and Jon Luini –
wanted to create a place where unsigned or non-commercial
musicians could share their music with the public in order to
reach a larger audience, gain recognition, and perhaps even
end up with a recording deal. IUMA was always better as a
proof-of-concept than as a business opportunity, but the
founders did get venture capital, and tried to make a go of
selling music online. However, given the relative obscurity of
the musicians on IUMA, and the pre-iPod lack of pervasive
MP3 players, IUMA ran through its money by 2001,
shuttering during the dot-com implosion of the same year.
Despite that, every music site which followed IUMA, legal and
otherwise, from Napster to Rhapsody to iTunes, has walked in
its footsteps. Now, nearing the end of the first decade of the
21st century, we have a broadband infrastructure capable of
delivery MP3s, and several hundred million devices which can
play them. IUMA was a good idea, but five years too early.
Just forty-eight hours ago, a new music service, calling itself
Qtrax, aborted its international launch – though it promises
to be up “real soon now.” Qtrax also promises that anyone,
anywhere will be able to download any of its twenty-five
million songs perfectly legally, and listen to them practically
anywhere they like – along with an inserted advertisement.
Using peer-to-peer networking to relieve the burden on its
own servers, and Digital Rights Management, or DRM, Qtrax
ensures that there are no abuses of these pseudo-free
recordings.
Most of the words that I used to describe Qtrax in the
preceding paragraph didn’t exist in common usage when
IUMA disappeared from the scene in the first year of this
millennium. The years between IUMA and Qtrax are a
geological age in Internet time, so it’s a good idea to walk back
through that era and have a good look at the fossils which
speak to how we evolved to where we are today.
In 1999, a curly-haired undergraduate at Boston’s
Northeastern University built a piece of software that allowed
him to share his MP3 collection with a few of his friends on
campus, and allowed him access to their MP3s. This scanned
the MP3s on each hard drive, publishing the list to a shared
database, allowing each person using the software to
download the MP3 from someone else’s hard drive to his own.
This is simple enough, technically, but Shawn Fanning’s
Napster created a dual-headed revolution. First, it was the
killer app for broadband: using Napster on a dial-up
connection was essentially impossible. Second, it completely
ignored the established systems of distribution used for
recorded music.
This second point is the one which has the most relevance to
my talk this morning; Napster had an entirely unpredicted
effect on the distribution methodologies which had been the
bedrock of the recording industry for the past hundred years.
The music industry grew up around the licensing, distribution
and sale of a physical medium – a piano roll, a wax recording,
a vinyl disk, a digital compact disc. However, when the
recording industry made the transition to CDs in the 1980s
(and reaped windfall profits as the public purchased new
copies of older recordings) they also signed their own death
warrants. Digital recordings are entirely ephemeral,
composed only of mathematics, not of matter. Any system
which transmitted the mathematics would suffice for the
distribution of music, and the compact disc met this need
only until computers were powerful enough to play the more
compact MP3 format, and broadband connections were fast
enough to allow these smaller files to be transmitted quickly.
Napster leveraged both of these criteria – the mathematical
nature of digitally-encoded music and the prevalence of
broadband connections on America’s college campuses – to
produce a sensation.
In its earliest days, Napster reflected the tastes of its collegeage
users, but, as word got out, the collection of tracks
available through Napster grew more varied and more
interesting. Many individuals took recordings that were only
available on vinyl, and digitally recorded them specifically to
post them on Napster. Napster quickly had a more complete
selection of recordings than all but the most comprehensive
music stores. This only attracted more users to Napster, who
added more oddities from their on collections, which
attracted more users, and so on, until Napster became seen as
the authoritative source for recorded music.
Given that all of this “file-sharing”, as it was termed,
happened outside of the economic systems of distribution
established by the recording industry, it was taking money out
of their pockets – probably something greater than billions of
dollars a year was lost, if all of these downloads had been
converted into sales. (Studies indicate this was unlikely –
college students have ever been poor.) The recording industry
launched a massive lawsuit against Napster in 2000, forcing
the service to shutter in 2001, just as it reached an incredible
peak of 14 million simultaneous users, out of a worldwide
broadband population of probably only 100 million. This
means that one in seven computers connected to the
broadband internet were using Napster just as it was being
shut down.
Here’s where it gets more interesting: the recording industry
thought they’d brought the horse back into the barn. What
they hadn’t realized was that the gate had burnt down. The
millions of Napster users had their appetites whet by a world
where an incredible variety of music was instantaneously
available with few clicks of the mouse. In the absence of
Napster, that pressure remained, and it only took a few weeks
for a few enterprising engineers to create a successor to
Napster, known as Gnutella, which provided the same service
as Napster, but used a profoundly different technology for its
filesharing. Where Napster had all of its users register their
tracks within a centralized database (which disappeared when
Napster was shut down) Gnutella created a vast, amorphous,
distributed database, spread out across all of the computers
running Guntella. Gnutella had no center to strike at, and
therefore could not be shut down.
It is because of the actions of the recording industry that
Gnutella was developed. If legal pressure hadn’t driven
Napster out of business, Gnutella would not have been
necessary. The recording industry turned out to be its own
worst enemy, because it turned a potentially profitable
relationship with its customers into an ever-escalating arms
race of file-sharing tools, lawsuits, and public relations
nightmares.
Once Gnutella and its descendants – Kazaa, Limewire, and
Acquisition – arrived on the scene, the listening public had
wholly taken control of the distribution of recorded music.
Every attempt to shut down these ever-more-invisible
“darknets” has ended in failure and only spurred the
continued growth of these networks. Now, with Qtrax, the
recording industry is seeking to make an accommodation with
an audience which expects music to be both free and freely
available, falling back on advertising revenue source to
recover some of their production costs.
At first, it seemed that filmic media would be immune from
the disruptions that have plagued the recording industry –
films and TV shows, even when heavily compressed, are very
large files, on the order of hundreds of millions of bytes of
data. Systems like Gnutella, which allow you to transfer a file
directly from one computer to another are not particularly
well-suited to such large file transfers. In 2002, an
unemployed programmer named Bram Cohen solved that
problem definitively with the introduction of a new filesharing
system known as BitTorrent.
BitTorrent is a bit mysterious to most everyone not deeply
involved in technology, so a brief of explanation will help to
explain its inner workings. Suppose, for a moment, that I
have a short film, just 1000 frames in length, digitally
encoded on my hard drive. If I wanted to share this film with
each of you via Gnutella, you’d have to wait in a queue as I
served up the film, time and time again, to each of you. The
last person in the queue would wait quite a long time. But if,
instead, I gave the first ten frames of the film to the first
person in the queue, and the second ten frames to the second
person in the queue, and the third ten frames to the third
person in the queue, and so on, until I’d handed out all
thousand frames, all I need do at that point is tell each of you
that each of your “peers” has the missing frames, and that you
needed to get them from those peers. A flurry of transfers
would result, as each peer picked up the pieces it needed to
make a complete whole from other peers. From my point of
view, I only had to transmit the film once – something I can
do relatively quickly. From your point of view, none of you
had to queue to get the film – because the pieces were
scattered widely around, in little puzzle pieces, that you could
gather together on your own.
That’s how BitTorrent works. It is both incredibly efficient
and incredibly resilient – peers can come and go as they
please, yet the total number of peers guaratees that
somewhere out there is an entire copy of the film available at
all times. And, even more perversely, the more people who
want copies of my film, the easier it is for each successive
person to get a copy of the film – because there are more
peers to grab pieces from. This group of peers, known as a
“swarm”, is the most efficient system yet developed for the
distribution of digital media. In fact, a single, underpowered
computer, on a single, underpowered broadband link can, via
BitTorrent, create a swarm of peers. BitTorrent allows
anyone, anywhere, distribute any large media file at
essentially no cost.
It is estimated that upwards of 60% of all traffic on the
Internet is composed of BitTorrent transfers. Much of this
traffic is perfectly legitimate – software, such as the free
Linux operating system, is distributed using BitTorrent. Still,
it is well known that movies and television programmes are
also distributed using BitTorrent, in violation of copyright.
This became absolutely clear on the 14th of October 2003,
when Sky Broadcasting in the UK premiered the first episode
of Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore’s dark re-imagining of the
famous shlocky 1970s TV series. Because the American
distributor, SciFi Channel, had chosen to hold off until
January to broadcast the series, fans in the UK recorded the
programmes and posted them to BitTorrent for American
fans to download. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the
episodes circulated in the United States – and conventional
thinking would reckon that this would seriously impact the
ratings of the show upon its US premiere. In fact, precisely
the opposite happened: the show was so well written and
produced that the word-of-mouth engendered by all this mass
piracy created an enormous broadcast audience for the series,
making it the most successful in SciFi Channel history.
In the age of BitTorrent, piracy is not necessarily a menace.
The ability to “hyperdistribute” a programme – using
BitTorrent to send a single copy of a programme to millions of
people around the world efficiently and instantaneously –
creates an environment where the more something is shared,
the more valuable it becomes. This seems counterintuitive,
but only in the context of systems of distribution which were
part-and-parcel of the scarce exhibition outlets of theaters
and broadcasters. Once everyone, everywhere had the
capability to “tuning into” a BitTorrent broadcast, the
economics of distribution were turned on their heads. The
distributioin gatekeepers, stripped of their power, whinge
about piracy. But, as was the case with recorded music, the
audience has simply asserted its control over distribution.
This is not about piracy. This is about the audience getting
whatever it wants, by any means necessary. They have the
tools, they have the intent, and they have the power of
numbers. It is foolishness to insist that the future will be
substantially different from the world we see today. We can
not change the behavior of the audience. Instead, we must all
adapt to things as they are.
But things as the are have changed more than you might
know. This is not the story of how piracy destroyed the film
industry. This is the story how the audience became not just
the distributors but the producers of their own content, and,
in so doing, brought down the high walls which separate
professionals from amateurs.
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| Lies Lies Lies by CHU |
II. The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls
Without any doubt the most outstanding success of the
second phase of the Web (known colloquially as “Web 2.0”) is
the video-sharing site YouTube. Founded in early 2005, as of
yesterday YouTube was the third most visited site on the
entire Web, led only by Yahoo! and YouTube’s parent, Google.
There are a lot of videos on YouTube. I’m not sure if anyone
knows quite how many, but they easily number in the tens of
millions, quite likely approaching a hundred million. Another
hundred thousand videos are uploaded each day; YouTube
grows by three million videos a month. That’s a lot of video,
difficult even to contemplate. But an understanding of
YouTube is essential for anyone in the film and television
industries in the 21st century, because, in the most pure,
absolute sense, YouTube is your competitor.
Let me unroll that statement a bit, because I don’t wish it to
be taken as simply as it sounds. It’s not that YouTube is
competing with you for dollars – it isn’t, at least not yet – but
rather, it is competing for attention. Attention is the limiting
factor for the audience; we are cashed up but time-poor. Yet,
even as we’ve become so time-poor, the number of options for
how we can spend that time entertaining ourselves has grown
so grotesquely large as to be almost unfathomable. This is the
real lesson of YouTube, the one I want you to consider in your
deliberations today. In just the past three years we have gone
from an essential scarcity of filmic media – presented through
limited and highly regulated distribution channels – to a
hyperabundance of viewing options.
This hyperabundance of choices, it was supposed until
recently, would lead to a sort of “decision paralysis,” whereby
the viewer would be so overwhelmed by the number of
choices on offer that they would simply run back, terrified, to
the highly regularized offerings of the old-school distribution
channels. This has not happened; in fact, the opposite has
occured: the audience is fragmenting, breaking up into eversmaller
“microaudiences”. It is these microaudiences that
YouTube speaks directly to. The language of microaudiences
is YouTube’s native tongue.
In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely
overtaken us, let’s consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old
boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting
his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM,
surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably
taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a
television, somewhere in the background, or it might be
coming from the Web browser right in front of him.
(Actually, it’s probably both simultaneously.) This teenager
has a limited suite of selections available on the telly – even
with satellite or cable, there won’t be more than a few
hundred choices on offer, and he’s probably settled for
something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good
enough to play in the background.
Meanwhile, on his laptop, he’s viewing a whole series of
YouTube videos that he’s received from his friends; they’ve
found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately
forwarded them along, knowing that he’ll enjoy them. He
views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other
friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other
friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the
media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it
can’t be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it
can’t be forwarded along, it’s broken.
For this fifteen year-old, the concept of a broadcast network
no longer exists. Television programmes might be watched as
they’re broadcast through the airwaves, but more likely
they’re spooled off of a digital video recorder, or downloaded
from the torrent and watched where and when he chooses.
The broadcast network has been replaced by the social
network of his friends, all of whom are constantly sharing the
newest, coolest things with one another. The current hot item
might be something that was created at great expense for a
mass audience, but the relationship between a hot piece of
media and its meaningfulness for a microaudience is purely
coincidental. All the marketing dollars in the world can foster
some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire
that fifteen year old to forward something along – because his
social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along
something lame, he’ll lose social standing with his peers. This
factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of
runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch.
Because of the hyperabundance of media – something he
takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development – all
of his media decisions are weighed against the values and
tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of
choices.
This means that the true value of media in the 21st century is
entirely personal, and based upon the salience, that is, the
importance, of that media to the individual and that
individual’s social network. The mass market, with its
enforced scarcity, simply does not enter into his calculations.
Yes, he might go to the theatre to see Transformers with his
mates; but he’s just as likely to download a copy recorded in
the movie theatre with an illegally smuggled-in camera that
was uploaded to the Pirate Bay a few hours after its release.
That’s today. Now let’s project ourselves five years into the
future. YouTube is still around, but now it has more than two
hundred million videos (probably much more), all available,
all the time, from short-form to full-length features, many of
which are now available in high-definition. There’s so much
“there” there that it is inconceivable that conventional media
distribution mechanisms of exhibition and broadcast could
compete. For this twenty year-old, every decision to spend
some of his increasingly-valuable attention watching
anything is measured against salience: “How important is
this for me, right now?” When you weigh the latest episode of
a TV series against some newly-made video that is meant only
to appeal to a few thousand people – such as himself – that
video will win, every time. It more completely satisfies him.
As the number of videos on offer through YouTube and its
competitors continues to grow, the number of salient choices
grows ever larger. His social network, communicating now
through FaceBook and MySpace and next-generation mobile
handsets and iPods and goodness-knows-what-else is
constantly delivering an ever-growing and increasinglyrelevant
suite of media options. He, as a vital node within his
social network, is doing his best to give as good as he gets.
His reputation depends on being “on the tip.”
When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-
Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of
distribution. What no one had expected was that the
professional producers would lose control of production. The
difference between an amateur and a professional – in the
media industries – has always centered on the point that the
professional sells their work into distribution, while the
amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that selfdistribution
is more effective than professional distribution,
how do we distinguish between the professional and the
amateur? This twenty year-old doesn’t know, and doesn’t
care.
There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film
and television production and distribution can survive in this
environment. This is an uncomfortable truth, but it is the
only truth on offer this morning. I’ve come to this conclusion
slowly, because it seems to spell the death of a hundred yearold
industry with many, many creative professionals. In this
environment, television is already rediscovering its roots as a
live medium, increasingly focusing on news, sport and “event”
based programming, such as Pop Idol, where being there live
is the essence of the experience. Broadcasting is uniquely
designed to support the efficient distribution of live
programming. Hollywood will continue to churn out
blockbuster after blockbuster, seeking a warmed-over middle
ground of thrills and chills which ensures that global receipts
will cover the ever-increasing production costs. In this form,
both industries will continue for some years to come, and will
probably continue to generate nice profits. But the audience’s
attentions have turned elsewhere. They’re not returning.
This future almost completely excludes “independent”
production, a vague term which basically means any
production which takes place outside of the media
megacorporations (News Corp, Disney, Sony, Universal and
TimeWarner), which increasingly dominate the mass media
landscape. Outside of their corporate embrace, finding an
audience sufficient to cover production and marketing costs
has become increasingly difficult. Film and television have
long been losing economic propositions (except for the most
lucky), but they’re now becoming financially suicidal.
National and regional funding bodies are growing
increasingly intolerant of funding productions which can not
find an audience; soon enough that pipeline will be cut off,
despite the damage to national cultures. Australia funds the
Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Council to
the tune of a hundred million dollars a year, to ensure that
Australian stories are told by Australian voices; but
Australians don’t go to see them in the theatres, and don’t buy
them on DVD.
The center can not hold. Instead, YouTube, which founder
Steve Chen insists has “no gold standard” of production
values, is rapidly becoming the vehicle for independent
productions; productions which cost not millions of euros,
but hundreds, and which make up for their low production
values in salience and in overwhelming numbers. This
tsunami of content can not be stopped or even slowed down;
it has nothing to do with piracy (only nine percent of the
videos viewed on YouTube are violations of copyright) but
reflects the natural accommodation of the audience to an era
of media hyperabundance.
What then, is to be done?
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| Sodtherich by CHU |
III. And The Penny Drops
It isn’t all bad news. But, like a good doctor, I want to give
you the bad news right up front: There is no single, long-term
solution for film or television production. No panacea. It’s
not even entirely clear that the massive Hollywood studios
will do business-as-usual for any length of time into the
future. Just a decade ago the entire music recording industry
seemed impregnable. Now it lies in ruins. To assume that
history won’t repeat itself is more than willful ignorance of the
facts; it’s bad business.
This means that the one-size-fits-all production-todistribution
model, which all of you have been taught as the
orthodoxy of the media industries, is worse than useless; it’s
actually blocking your progress because it is effectively
keeping you from thinking outside the square. This is a
wholly new world, one which is littered with golden
opportunities for those able to avail themselves of them. We
need to get you from where you are – bound to an obsolete
production model – to where you need to be. Let me
illustrate this transition with two examples.
In early 2005, producer Ronda Byrne got a production
agreement with Channel NINE, then the number one
Australian television network, to make a feature-length
television programme about the “law of attraction”, an idea
she’d learned of when reading a book published in 1910, The
Science of Getting Rich. The interviews and other footage
were shot in July and August, and after a few months in the
editing suite, she showed the finished production to
executives at Channel NINE, who declined to broadcast it,
believing it lacked mass appeal. Since Byrne wasn’t going to
be getting broadcast fees from Channel NINE to cover her
production costs, she negotiated a new deal with NINE,
allowing her to sell DVDs of the completed film.
At this point Byrne began spreading news of the film virally,
through the communities she thought would be most
interested in viewing it; specifically, spiritual and “New Age”
communities. People excited by Byrne’s teaser marketing
could pay $20 for a DVD copy of the film (with extended
features), or pay $5 to watch a streaming version directly on
their computer. As the film made its way to its intended
audience, word-of-mouth caused business to mushroom
overnight. The Secret became a blockbuster, selling millions
of copies on DVD. A companion book, also titled The Secret,
has sold over two million copies. And that arbiter of
American popular taste, Oprah, has featured the film and
book on her talk show, praising both to the skies. The film
has earned back many, many times its production costs,
making Byrne a wealthy woman. She’s already deep into the
production of a sequel to The Secret – a film which already
has an audience identified and targeted.
Chagrined, the television executives of Channel NINE finally
did broadcast The Secret in February 2007. It didn’t do that
well. This sums up the paradox distribution in the age of the
microaudience. Clearly The Secret had a massive world-wide
audience, but television wasn’t the most effective way to reach
them, because this audience was actually a collection of
microaudiences, rather than a single, aggregated audience. If
The Secret had opened theatrically, it’s unlikely it would have
done terribly well; it’s the kind of film that people want to
watch more than once, being in equal parts a self-help
handbook and a series of inspirational stories. It is wellsuited
for a direct-to-DVD release – a distribution vehicle that
no longer has the stigma of “failure” associated with it. It is
also well-suited to cross-media projects, such as books,
conferences, streamed delivery, podcasts, and so forth.
Having found her audience, Byrne has transformed The
Secret into an exceptional money-making franchise, as
lucrative, in its own way, and at its own scale, as any
Hollywood franchise.
The second example is utterly different from The Secret, yet
the fundamentals are strikingly similar. Just last month a
production group calling themselves “The League of Peers”
released a film titled Steal This Film, Part 2. The first part of
this film, released in late 2006, dealt with the rise of filesharing,
and, in specific, with the legal troubles of the world’s
largest BitTorrent site, Sweden’s The Pirate Bay. That film,
although earnest and coherent, felt as though it was produced
by individuals still learning the craft of filmmaking. This
latest film feels looks as professional as any documentary
created for BBC’s Horizon or PBS’s Frontline or ABC’s
4Corners. It is slick, well-lit, well-edited, and has a very
compelling story to tell about the history of copying –
beginning with the invention of the printing press, five
hundred years ago. Steal This Film is a political production, a
bit of propaganda with an bias. This, in itself, is not
uncommon in a documentary. The funding and distribution
model for this film is what makes it relatively unique.
Individuals who saw Steal This Film, Part One – which was
made freely available for download via BitTorrent – were
invited to contribute to the making of the sequel. Nearly five
million people downloaded Steal This Film, Part One, so
there was a substantial base of contributors to draw from. (I
myself donated five dollars after viewing the film. If every
viewer had done likewise that would cover the budget of a
major Hollywood production!) The League of Peers also
approached arts funding bodies, such as the BritishDocumentary Council, with their completed film in hand, the
statistics showing that their work reached a large audience,
and a roadmap for the second film – this got them additional
funding. Now, having released Steal This Film, Part Two,
viewers are again invited to contribute (if they like the film),
promised a “secret gift” for contributions of $15 or more.
While the tip jar – literally, busking – may seem a very weird
way to fund a film production, it’s likely that Steal This Film,
Part Two will find an even wider audience than Part One, and
that the coffers of the League of Peers will provide them with
enough funds to embark on their next film, The Oil of the 21st
Century, which will focus on the evolution of intellectual
property into a traded commodity.
I have asked Screen Training Ireland to include a DVD of
Steal This Film, Part Two with the materials you received this
morning. You’ve been given the DVD version of the film, but
I encourage you to download the other versions of the film:
the XVID version, for playback on a PC; the iPod version, for
portable devices; and the high-definition version, for your
visual enjoyment. It’s proof positive that a viable economic
model exists for film, even when it is given away. It will not
work for all productions, but there is a global community of
individuals who are intensely interested in factual works
about copyright and intellectual property in the 21st century,
who find these works salient, and who are underserved by the
media megacorporations, who would not consider it in their
own economic best interest to produce or distribute such
works. The League of Peers, as part of the community whom
this film is intended for, knew how to get the word out about
the film (particularly through Boing Boing, the most popular
blog in the world, with two million readers a week), and,
within a few weeks, nearly everyone who should have heard of
the film had heard about it – through their social networks.
Both The Secret and Steal This Film, Part Two are factual
works, and it’s clear that this emerging distribution model –
which relies on targeting communities of interest – works
best with factual productions. One of the reasons that there
has been such an upsurge in the production of factual works
over the past few years is because these works have been able
to build their own funding models upon a deep knowledge of
the communities they are talking to – made by
microaudiences, for microaudiences. But microaudiences,
scaled to global proportions, can easily number in the
millions. Microaudiences are perfectly willing to pay for
something or contribute to something they consider of
particular value and salience; it is a visible thank you, a form
of social reinforcement which is very natural within social
networks.
What about drama, comedy and animation? Short-form
comedy and animation probably have the easiest go of it,
because they can be delivered online with an advertising
payload of some sort. Happy Tree Friends is a great example
of how this works – but it took producers Mondo Media
nearly a decade to stumble into a successful economic model.
Feature-length comedy and feature-length drama are more
difficult nuts to crack, but they are not impossible. Again, the
key is to find the communities which will be most interested
in the production; this is not always entirely obvious, but the
filmmaker should have some idea of the target audience for
their film. While in preproduction, these communities need
to be wooed and seduced into believing that this film is meant
just for them, that it is salient. Productions can be released
through complementary distribution channels: a limited,
occasional run in rented exhibition spaces (which can be
“events”, created to promote and showcase the film); direct
DVD sales (which are highly lucrative if the producer does
this directly); online distribution vehicles such as iTunes
Movie Store; and through “community” viewing, where a
DVD is given to a few key members of the community in the
hopes that word-of-mouth will spread in that community,
generating further DVD sales.
None of this guarantees success, but it is the way things work
for independent productions in the 21st-century. All of this is
new territory. It isn’t a role that belongs neatly to the
producer of the film, nor, in the absence of studio muscle, is it
something that a film distributor would be competent at. This
may not be the producer’s job. But it is someone’s job.
Someone has to do it. Starting at the earliest stages of preproduction,
someone has to sit down with the creatives and
the producer and ask the hard questions: “Who is this film
intended for?” “What audiences will want to see this film – or
see it more than once?” “How do we reach these audiences?”
From these first questions, it should be possible to construct a
marketing campaign which leverages microaudiences and
social networks into ticket receipts and DVD sales and online
purchases.
So, as you sit down to do your planning today, and discuss
how to move Irish screen industries into the 21st century, ask
yourselves who will be fulfilling this role. The producer is
already overloaded, time-poor, and may not be particularly
good at marketing. The director has a vision, but might be
practically autistic when it comes to working with
communities. This is a new role, one that is utterly vital to the
success of the production, but one which is not yet budgeted
for, and one which we do not yet train people to fill.
Individuals have succeeded in this new model through their
own tireless efforts, but each of these have been scattershot;
there is a way to systematize this. While every production and
every marketing plan will be unique – drawn from the
fundamentals of the story being told – there are
commonalities across productions which people will be able
to absorb and apply, production after production.
One of my favorite quotes from science fiction writer WilliamGibson goes,
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly
distributed.” This is so obviously true for film and television
production that I need only close by noting that there are a lot
of success stories out there, individuals who have taken the
new laws of hyperdistribution and sharing and turned them to
their own advantage. It is a challenge, and there will be
failures; but we learn more from our failures than from our
successes. Media production has always been a gamble; but
the audiences of the 21st century make success easier to
achieve than ever before.
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| Monorex 5th Birthday Party by CHU |
Mark Pesce - Words.
CHU - Images.
Steve 'Fly Agaric'' - Mixing
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