POLLINATE: @ M dot Strange “The Art of Alienating The Right People”
Lisa Salem reports - This is the first in a series of posts out of Power to the Pixel 2008 - which was a pretty mind-blowing experience for me. M dot Strange was the first person I interviewed and he quickly got me questioning some of my assumptions about whether or not you get to choose your core audience, or whether it’s actually them who choose you:
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On the Power to the Pixel site, it says this about M dot Strange:
“When M dot Strange touched down in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 for the world premiere of his first animated feature, We Are the Strange, thousands of Internet-obsessed teens and twentysomethings already knew more about the film than any buyer at the festival. For months M dot had been leaking footage and behind-the-scenes featurettes of the film to YouTube, and once he was accepted to Sundance he put up the trailer. It got 500,000 views in four days. Not bad for a guy who made a movie in his bedroom. With a love for 8-bit video games and stop-motion animation, the San Jose–based M dot has been honing his bizarre brand of stories since the late ’90s. “I’ve never taken a film class or an art class ever,” he says. “I learned everything through the Internet and reading books — the Internet was my film school.” M dot is currently working on his next animated feature film - a 3d Samurai film entitled Heart String Marionette due for completion January 2010.”
LISA SALEM set out to walk the whole of LA pushing a baby-stroller with a video-camera attached to the end of it, facing inwards. When people approached her, she invited them to walk with her while she videoed their conversations. She posted those videos to a blog and in the process attracted a large and intrigued audience to what she was doing. Since then, Lisa’s been looking at the process of audience-building in detail. She lives in London now and when not working on her film-portrait of Los Angeles “WALK LA WITH ME”, she runs workshops that help filmmakers be more independent.
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