CULTURE HACKER: Moving Filmmakers to a Transmedia Business Model
By Robert Pratten – I’ve been working with two entertainment properties and a media start-up the past couple of months and I wanted to share the business models I developed to explain where we’re heading.
Here’s what we already know: pulling in an audience is tough but pulling in finance is tougher.
The Old Days
In the “old days” – as shown in Figure 1 – raising finance was what you did first. You needed that money to make the movie and then you’d sell the movie to a distributor whose job it was to sell it to the audience. Hell, you might even get presales in which case you’d killed two birds with one stone.
The important point from this is that as the filmmaker you only had to convince a limited number of people (investors) that you had a movie worth making (because it would make money). You didn’t have to convince them it was worth watching.
One reason you didn’t have to prove you had an audience waiting to see your movie was because it couldn’t be proven. Instead, one might use (often bogus) comparisons with other movies and of course, whenever possible, outliers like The Blair Witch Project or Fahrenheit 911 or Sideways etc.
When the finished movie failed to find an audience it was the distributor’s fault. They didn’t know how to position the movie correctly. They didn’t spend enough money on P&A. The box art was crap.
Figure 1
"Old" Filmmaking Model
Having worked with our distributors in some markets and selling directly at some horror conventions, it’s very sobering to get a firsthand experience of audience expectations.
Me: It’s about love and sacrifice and how you don’t notice you’re onto something good until it’s gone.
Horror fan: Great. How much T&A is there?
The New Model
When MySpace, Facebook, YouTube etc. arrived it became possible to raise awareness of the movie and start building an audience before the movie was released. But still it felt like something peripheral to the marketing of the movie. The audience building was an industry-side activity that you could take to the distributor with your one-sheet and your reviews: look we have several thousand fans. Most of whom in all likelihood were other independents flogging a movie or a book.
Today, most filmmakers – maybe not Culture Hacker readers – but most filmmakers still have the mindset towards social media that it’s a new spam tool. Look, now I can pester people to be my “fan” and I can get them to pester their friends to be my “fan”. Please Digg me up. Please Stumble on me. It’s the worst kind of networking: “please help me” they bleat.
Worst still are the crowdfunders: “please give me money”. I’m not against audiences paying upfront – as with the Kickstarter model – so it’s not the principle, it’s typically execution I have a problem with. And I totally believe in the power of social media but I don’t like it when it’s so often used in an unproductive, disappointing way.
So enter the new model of filmmaking as shown in Figure 2:
- there’s a genuine affection… nay, anticipation… between the audience and the movie
- the affection is leveraged to pre-sell to the audience while still raising finance in the traditional way
- when the movie is available for viewing, it might be that only a subset of the audience will pay for it. So they’ll be simultaneous free exhibition and sales.
At this time it’s hard to believe that serious money is going to be raised to finance a movie through crowdsourcing. Some money? Maybe. Millions? I doubt it. And so for expensive feature films there’s still a place for large-ticket or savvy investors. Please forget about Obama’s fundraising blah blah blah. It’s an outlier. And where’s his socially networked audience when he needs them to fight for healthcare? They’ve gone missing. Maybe Obama’s massive email list isn’t really his personal fan base? Maybe the people on that email database were fans of his first movie but don’t like his second?
What this says as to us as filmmakers is that we’re going to be only as good as our next movie. Don’t expect your 1000 mythical spending fans to follow you from movie to movie regardless of what you propose to make.
Figure 2
"New" Filmmaking Model
My point is that independents are going to have to start audience building early and prove that there’s an appetite for their movie. And so this brings me to my final model.
The Transmedia Model
Raising awareness and audience building is tough. It’s tough enough when you have a finished movie but try doing it for a movie that’s yet to be made.
And that’s why I think we’ll move to a transmedia model for filmmaking in which the filmmaker uses his own money to make some (low-cost) content to build an audience ahead of doing anything else.
There’s long been a school of thought that says to get finance for your feature you should shoot the trailer or shoot a short film based on the feature. I know this can work but I’ve never been a fan of this approach if only because I know finance is most often raised without it. Amazingly though this week, as I write, this short film Panic Attack secured a movie deal.
What transmedia storytelling offers however is not the Cinderella story of “big investor swoops to finance movie” but a genuine, low-cost, grass-roots audience building.
Right now, (online) comic books seem to be the order of the day – offering an excellent way to engage audiences in the story and show some visual flare or at worst nice eye candy to grab attention. But there’s lots of untapped potential for simple social games utilizing Twitter and social networks without the need for coding: we just don’t have enough reference cases to illustrate all the possibilities yet.
A small word of warning: the content has to have value. It can’t be a trailer or marketing fluff – you have to produce the real McCoy if you’re going to capture audiences.
Transmedia Filmmaking Business Model
In the transmedia filmmaking model, the financing, exhibition and fundraising work together in tandem with the potential for the feature film to become self-funding. Remember that it’s not all for free! Free is your loss-leader to generate the money. Even if it’s “real content” you might still effectively look at it as a marketing cost – it can help to position it in this way to investors. And note that what’s free and what’s paid will be in flux – maybe changing over time and from media to media.
So in the ideal scenario the filmmaker bootstraps the movie with the low-cost media, the website, presumably some merchandise but then it’s up to the audience to decide what happens next. The filmmaker will use a basket of financing initiatives: free, pre-paid, paid, paid+, investment and sponsorship (including brand integration/product placement) to finance the movie. [Paid+ is where buyers can opt to pay more than the base price – usually via a drop-down menu of price points.]
This model has several implications:
- If you do it right they’ll be demand for more content… which maybe you can’t afford to make in the early days. Or at least can’t afford to make alone. And that’s why collaboration of all kinds is important to the indie – with audiences and with other filmmakers. Collaboration platforms like Wreakamovie are going to save the indie.
- Sponsorship in the form of cash (rather than products for free) from brands won’t solely go to properties with big audiences. If your story reaches the audiences that other marketing finds hard to reach then that’s going to work too. The one significant problem I can see is that few brands want to be associated with edgy content… unless it’s “edgy” in the Green Day plastic-punk, manufactured sense rather than the raw, authentic Poison Girls/Flux of Pink Indians edgy. Counterbalancing this is fans who may appreciate that you’ve rejected the brands… maybe
- Filmmakers are going to become familiar with audience needs and they’ll learn how to captivate them. It won’t be anyone else’s fault that you don’t have an audience. There’s no opportunity to finish the movie and then throw it over the wall to someone else to find the audience for it
- Free media is a feeler gauge: collect comments, listen to feedback, evolve the feature to meet the audience expectations
- It’s going to be a long commitment to the audience so be sure you pick a story you really want to tell. Indies that follow this transmedia model will be offering an evolving service rather than a one-off product and that means audiences become customers that need to be listened to, responded to, cared for and managed
- If you perfect this evolving transmedia ecosystem you may ask yourself if you still want to make a feature after all.
A final sobering thought: I know we’d all like to believe that story is king but audiences will only discover the story if you hook them in. Don’t expect anyone to delve deeply into your storyworld looking for brilliance. You have to provide “satellite media” that orbits the core: it’s easy to digest and looks cool or fun. Celebrity cast or crew and genre are going to get attention and convey credibility – just as they always have.
I’ve illustrated this in the figure below where I’ve taken the sales funnel model and used it to illustrate how you want to pull in audiences, turning casual interest to hardcore repeat purchases.
Matching Content to Audience Commitment
To summarize then, filmmakers will move to transmedia storytelling because it’s going to be the way you build audiences. And building an audience will unlock the financing – either from fans, sponsors or investors. But it’s going to demand new skills.
Robert Pratten is an award-winning feature film director, writer & producer that has been fighting the need to return to his marketing consultancy roots since Internet piracy stole his livelihood. Robert has advised international telecoms operators and vendors such as Nokia, Ericsson, Lucent, Telia and Telmex and now divides his time between filmmaking and advising media tech start-ups and producers. Fortunately, he enjoys both. He writes a popular blog on movie production, marketing and distribution at www.zenfilms.com
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Thanks, great article !
great insight, Robert.
I am working on a transmedia project and I am already “ruminating” what you describe as the last implication:
If you perfect this evolving transmedia ecosystem you may ask yourself if you still want to make a feature after all.
Why are filmmakers so afraid of selling? Who are you making your films and or transmedia product for? I really liked most of this article but I do take exception to the idea of crowdfunding being a bad idea as you put it. How, or better yet…DO YOU pay your crews that work on your shows? This costs money. Sustainable business starts with healthy happy people going to a job that allows them to pay the bills. This includes film.
If you want to raise money from suckers through a Limited Partnership or friends and family credit card deal that’s your business. Telling people to put more risk up than is necessary is where I step in. How are you going to defend your business plan in the current market? Unless you have presales or a deal…you can’t.
Please explain to me in detail if you would your reasoning around dismissing fans as finance and/or marketing. Your logic makes no sense, unless its an art thing…
Seriously…please answer this post.
Great article. Really good to see analysis like this of what is going on, the more people read about the new models, the faster we’ll get there. Keep up the great work!
PS There’s a typo, it’s Wreckamovie, not Wreakamovie. But I obviously agree 100% that collaboration will save the indie;-)
Great article. We’ve been doing the same now for one of my future projects: http://www.thehousefilmproject.com We had the pre-viz of airplane sequence made. Then posted links on Twitter/FB/freindfeed and dozens of other social media sites. People commented, told us what they liked. We perfected the pre-viz, and posted the results. It was like giving them the “behind-the-scenes” experience as it’s happening instead of just a bonus on the DVD after watching the film. We then picked up a composer who is going to create a soundtrack to the shot opening credit scene that we were developing. This composer is interested in doing the entire soundtrack for the film when we get financing. I was just originally creating it as a demo to show to investors that I could make an epic-sized film on a “under 1 million dollar budget”. I knew it is hard to prove on paper, you need some examples. But posting the demo, which will be photo-realistic when we’re done, drew in interest from people around the web. I was then inspired to set up a Facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage/?act=41646451#/pages/The-House-film-project/372545630494 and people started to join. It’s not tons of people, but keep in mind, we were just working on the demo and dropping links on SM sites. The audience loves feeling like they are “part of the show”, not just a customer. Create interaction and your audience will reward you for it!
[...] via culturehacker [...]
@david I don’t think the point is about crowdfunding being good or bad, it’s just that it seems like most projects get it totally wrong. At worst the execution is not much better than putting a hat on the street and asking people to put money in the hat. Most people would ask why they should do that. And if the answer is just that the person with the hat wants to make a movie, most people will keep their hard earned cash for themselves. I think that it’s better to start building the community first, ie sharing some thoughts of what you have in mind, inviting likeminded people to the project, ask for their comments, create an open dialog. You might even call this crowdsourcing;-) And if people like the project, get involved and engaged, they might also be interested enough to see “their” project get funded, maybe even give the project some of their own money. So yes, crowdfunding can work, but it has to be a bit more than “Hey, I want to make a movie, give me some money”.
Btw, some interesting projects to check out in the crowdsourcing area on Wreckamovie:
http://wreckamovie.com/iron-sky
http://wreckamovie.com/snowblind
http://wreckamovie.com/landing
http://wreckamovie.com/ironskyoperationhighjump
to name just a few.
Would be happy to see you there, wrecking some movies together:-)
We’ve been following this last model for the last year. We used our own cash to shoot the first fourth of the film. Now we’re out of cash and are trying to raise money for developing costs on kickstarter. If we raise that cash we will edit that first fourth and then post it on our website in hopes of raising funds for the second fourth.
It might be a longer route but once completed we’ll have a film completely funded by the fans giving us 100% ownership and control.
An exciting future awaits.
p.s. if you want you can check out our kickstarter campaign at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/78440380/kids-go-free-to-fun-fun-time-a-16mm-indie-feature
very good artcle.the analysis each model is integral to social awareness and acceptance.an indipendent film maker has to look at the sun twice ,the first to rising sun in the morning ie the film making.with no time to look at the shadow the audience.the second in the evening the beuty of the sun set . its wonderful to have the crowd along with you this time.
the fact remains even the good films need to be marketed ,with communication skills and strategies.to that extent even the film maker.
iam the last person to run for crowd funding,chasing the audience.an audience for a is not born out of your sales pitch.
as don williams put ”you got to sing like you don’t need the money, you got to dance like nobody’s watching .a film is an art first and forever .
Whoa, this guy really knows how to make a point.
The transmedia business model would give the filmmaker, actors, writers and other craftspeople alot more chances to practice their art. It could also turn into a crowdsourcing project where fans get to make their own version of your videos (or whatever you create before the feature film).
Rather than just making a movie and quitting this is more about building a community and a vested interest in a storyworld that could lead to a much warmer reception of a film.
In a way this has been done for years: LOTR and Harry Potter were first done in print (a much cheaper medium), Iron Man and Spiderman were worked out on paper before ever becoming a film.
You can use the best of what franchises do and use it to make your own indie project.
@david sorry for the delay responding to your post. With it being the Christmas season I’ve been offline quite a bit.
I think Peter has already responded with pretty much how I feel about crowdfunding but I did write a detailed response to the crowdfunding question over at Culture Hacker.
http://culturehacker.workbookproject.com/2009/12/moving-filmmakers-to-a-transmedia-business-model/
I’m not sure why you think that friends and family putting money into a movie are suckers while the crowd funding a movie are not? I think it’s more likely to be the other way around.
Just for the record, we have paid cast and crew that worked on my movies. And it would be nice if we could all make a living from making movies. But unfortunately that’s not the reality. Most people making features do additional jobs to pay the bills.
I’m not dismissing fans as finance or marketing at all. But few people have many fans and what for crowdfunding it really comes down to asking strangers to show you charity. I saw one website recently where the producers went on and on about how hard everyone was working and how tough it is to make a film blah blah blah. So what? There’s a lot tougher, more boring jobs to do – why should anyone feel sympathy for these people? What they should have done was inspired me. I had to look hard to find out what the movie was about.
My point is to engage people in your story and sell what content you can so that there’s a fair exchange of value. Than use that content and income to build bigger and better. It’s still a tough route – absolutely it is. But spending your own cash to create some cool content is better than spending it on business plans and middlemen.
An interesting post.
While you are not wrong on your analysis of “The Old Days”, you are only partially right. And, while “The New Model” is well articulated and presented, it is not new.
In addition to the way you describe indie films getting made, many are traditionally funded by banks using collateral in the form of license agreements between the producer and a “buyer” – typically a distributor or end user (like a TV network). Any shortfall in the funding is deficit financed either through investors or Gap financing which is typically more expensive.
In the old way, films are made using a proof of concept model that has not changed in the last 20 years. The proof of concept model you describe – attracting investors before having an audience – is riskier but could create greater rewards as in the case of a Blair Witch because there are less cooks in the kitchen.
In the proof of concept model I describe it is filmmaking by committee at its best (or worst). The trade off is lower risk, yet potentially higher cost and watered down profit potential due to pre-selling (a risk mitigation strategy whereby someone who commits today gets the product at a reduced rate as a hedge).
As for the new model you describe, it is not so new in that “proof of concept” models have existed for years. The main difference is in the intended audience. Prior to the internet, B2C proof of concept was near impossible. The filmmaker would attract elements like a director and VFX team (thereby validating the project) and pitch it to an executive producer, network or distributor who would then further validate the project by licensing it or pitching it to investors, banks or end users. The only difference is that your model, which again is well articulated, takes it to the people.
The Transmedia model you outline may not be the norm today in a B2C sense, but those that tinker with it today, like yourself, will be in a good position when the shift occurs in full swing.
Keep forging ahead!
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