Some Pioneering Efforts in Independent Film Distribution

Now that it is so cheap to produce and distribute your own multimedia material, the value added provided by distribution companies is not as much as it used to be. The Internet has shattered the previous barriers for distributing video and information around the world, which has created an information explosion. And as Herbert Simon says, "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." So the mainstream media companies and movie distributers are now competing with individual bloggers, podcasters and videobloggers for the attention of audiences.

And so instead of pre-filtering gatekeepers deciding what will and will not be published, now anyone can publish anything and it is up to post-filtering systems like Amazon's recommendation systems or word of mouth that is built up from a network and community of followers.

Below are a few pointers to how this environment is changing the field of film distribution...

Steve Garfield pointed me to a nice round-up that he & David Tames did of the latest trends of videoblogging. He mentions collaborative efforts of The Echo Chamber Project as being a future trend to watch as well as the pioneering efforts of community building from the indie feature Four Eyed Monsters. These Slamdance alums have been putting out some very well-produced video podcasts documenting their struggles and determinations in completing their film and trying to find distribution.

Susan Buice and Arin Crumley have apparantly built up enough of a following to have teamed up with Withoutabox on a different type of approach to self-distribution. IndieWIRE has the best description of this new initiative:

Withoutabox has announced the launch of The Distribution Lab, a new program that will offer a suite of services to support filmmakers who plan to release their films themselves in various ways, including theatrical, DVD and on demand distribution. As part of the new program, participants will have access to ticketing, catalog management, accounting and online social networking and marketing solutions. A plan to offer DVD fulfillment and download distribution is also in the works.

Wow. This sounds really great, and the perfect type of solution for struggling filmmakers to get their material out there. We live in a new world of public relations and marketing where individuals can now start to build their own audiences through social networking sites like MySpace or a Drupal/CivicSpace site.

The Four Eyed Monster's press release cites some interesting statistics:

Crumley and Buice have built an audience base for their film with a video podcast series chronicling the creative struggles of filmmaking, their personal relationship, their journey on the film festival circuit, and eventually building have built a relationship with that audience through the video podcast. The podcast has been downloaded through iTunes or Myspace over 150,000 in a two month period.

Now 150,000 downloads seems like a lot of downloads, and I'm curious to know how they have been monitoring this. I'm also curious as to how many e-mails they've added to their list, and how many subscribers they have to their feedburner feed. These would be interesting metrics to know and watch over time. I'm sure there will be many lessons learned as they figure out ways to convert their following into theater tickets sold and DVDs bought.

The documentary What the Bleep Do We Know!? started in one theater in Oregon, and had so much sucess that it spread out to other theaters and eventually got picked up and distributed around the world and yielding a gross revenue of over $11 million dollars according to this New York Times article.

The film was a mix of quantum physics and spirituality with some quirky neuropeptide animations to describe how much our emotions influence our behavior. Needless to say, no one in Hollywood wanted to touch the film. As one of the directors describes it:

"I took the movie to every major studio in Hollywood and every one passed," said Betsy Chasse, one of the three filmmakers behind "Bleep," about her efforts to find a distributor for the first movie. "We had to prove to the gatekeepers that this film was going to fly before they'd touch it."

Some time after that initial presentation, Ms. Chasse recounted, an executive from a studio that had declined to take on the film leveled with her. "The person said, 'Not only did we not acknowledge and realize that this market existed, but we don't even understand how to get to that market, and we want to know,' " said Ms. Chasse. In other conversations with Hollywood officials, she said, this kind of statement became fairly typical.

Not only did What The Bleep? figure out how to reach audiences, it was able to create a cult following that had the film held over for over 40 extra weeks in some cities. After distributing the film themselves, it was eventually picked up by Samuel Goldwyn Films & Roadside Attractions for a much wider release. The filmmakers went on to create many spin-off products, conferences and enough momentum to create and a follow-up film called What the Bleep?: Down the Rabbit Hole that is going to be released this later this month. Here's a film trailer that features some reflections of the buzz that they were able to build.

Finally, Robert Greenwald has been a pioneer in using the political advocacy networks to help distribute his Outfoxed, Uncovered, and Walmart documentaries that I've talked about briefly before. Instead of going through the gatekeepers of film distribution companies, Greenwald has opted to build alliances with large groups like MoveON as well as smaller non-profits and
schools, communities of faith, family businesses and labor groups.

I've read quite a bit of Greg Spotts' book that documents the production of the Greenwald's latest Wal-Mart documentary. He talks a bit about the community-development efforts that were critical to being able to have over 7,000 house parties set up to screen his film.

The idea is that a lot of people get to see the film for free, and then a considerable portion of those people will end up buying the DVD to share with others.

In mid-December, Jim Gilliam reported that they sold nearly 100,000 DVDs and that around 500,000 people saw the film within the first month. This is certainly great, but the only concerning fact is that Gilliam also reports that "We're still nowhere near breaking even, but we knew that wasn't going to happen."

Greenwald had to take out a $1.6 million dollar loan in order to pay his crack team of producers, film crew and editors to shoot and edit the film within a year. I'm not sure if there was additional personal funds or investments that were made, but there were investors who bailed on the project because they feared the potential wrath of Wal-Mart.

My observation is that Greenwald and his Brave New Films team has been pioneering the use of collaborative technologies like wikis within the realm of distributed film production, but that there is quite a lot of room for innovation within the realm of post-production and editing.

Greenwald threw a team of four editors and two assistant editors to tirelessly work and rework the footage throughout the production of the film. This is certainly understandable considering that there is an enormous amount of footage that needed to consumed, filtered and recontextualized into short stories and edited sequences. The problem is that this approach is extremely linear and a huge bottleneck.

My belief is that my collaborative filmmaking schema could provide some interesting possiblities for making the post-production sequencing process much more collaborative and faster since it enables for the filtering and sensemaking process to operate in parallel. Imagine if people around the world could easily help sift through the source material and iterate through the infinite number of possible ways to parse the material down into a 90-minute film.

Of course, this type of system may not have worked in the type of investigative exposé films that Greenwald has worked on, but it just seems like independent filmmakers are still placed into these ridiculous situations of having to risk so much personal time and energy to create these types of socially-relevant films.

The personal itch that I am trying to scratch with The Echo Chamber Project is to have a way to engage a network of people within the process of creating a film and collecting additional context and meaning on the source material that I've gathered. It not only lowers the amount of risk for producing worthwhile documentaries, but it could also help build these support networks and communities that will continue to play bigger and bigger roles in helping shepard the distribution through word of mouth and create more breakthrough successes of independent films.