Stephen Dane recounts experience on Blade Runner
I’ve been following this project for a long time now, and am glad to see it finally coming out soon. On June 20th, Elaine McMillion and team will be launching a new type of doc – an online only, interactive, participatory doc experience called Hollow. From the press release:
Hollow explores the issues of small-town America through the voices and ideas of people living in McDowell County, W.Va., will launch June 20 West Virginia’s 150th statehood celebration. The immersive, online experience will combine video portraits, user-generated content, data, grassroots mapping and soundscapes on an HTML5 site and an accompanying community tool to tell the story of those living in boom-and-bust areas in small-town America.
“Hollow is an evolving story and allows the residents to update their stories to the many viewers online. This type of format provides a lean-forward and lean-back experience that both engages the user and allows them to be told a story,” McMillion said.
The interactive documentary allows users to experience the stories of over 30 residents, captures user-input data and provides story updates to featured community members through an embedded WordPress site.
I’m looking forward to checking it ou soon and hope it’s as ground-breaking as I suspect it might just be.
From Time, a great new cover from Ai Weiwei – and check out the film too!
This week’s TIME cover story, which is illustrated by the artist-activist Ai Weiwei, examines China’s place in the world.
Read a preview of the story here.
(Art by Ai Weiwei for TIME, Typography by Post Typography)
From Time, a great new cover from Ai Weiwei – and check out the film too!
This week’s TIME cover story, which is illustrated by the artist-activist Ai Weiwei, examines China’s place in the world.
Read a preview of the story here.
(Art by Ai Weiwei for TIME, Typography by Post Typography)
It isn’t magic. At the end of the day, the math for filmmakers (and distributors and other artists) is pretty simple:
You can either spend a lot on marketing or slowly build a base of fans.
But you must do the second one early and it takes a lot of hard work. It can’t be bought. Social marketing never works from scratch even with a big budget (although as Psy shows, money helps a lot).
This seems simple enough, perhaps too simple to share. But I get calls and emails from filmmakers and artists, as well as big companies, all the time about this. They think they can just start marketing something on Facebook or Twitter and win. But they can’t, because they haven’t built that base of fans. They have to spend dollars instead. And all the time, I hear from filmmakers that social doesn’t work, you have to be Kevin Smith or that Eddie Burns is just lucky. But that’s not it. They did the hard work. They built their fan base, and it works.
