Social Networking with Scott Kirsner

I attended a seminar on Wednesday with Scott Kirsner, organised by North West Vision and Media (they should have a video of the event on their site shortly). He made a great presentation summarizing his book “Fans, Friends and Followers” with example YouTube videos and websites, and we had an interesting Q&A session afterwards.

I came away energised and (perhaps mistakenly) confident that I can use the internet to fund and distribute my work. Fortunately, Steve Turnbull mailed me an early draft of our new web serial “Winter” the night before, so I had something concrete to visualize applying these promotional techniques to. The key is to start early, and be patient – it takes time to build an audience. Let the promotion begin…

CrowdSourcing

Ted Hope of TrulyFreeFilm has an interesting post on crowdsourcing for film funding – notably the idea that nowadays filmmakers should demonstrate they can build an audience before seeking funding, and have a marketing strategy and ecommerce solutions in place. He makes a good point – many filmmakers see funding as merely an obstacle to getting their film made and don’t have any expectation of recovering it – and will often blame this on the state of the market and latterly the ecomony. But ultimately, if you don’t plan how to make your film profitable, then it’s probably just a vanity project. So why would anyone give you money to make it?

This is particularly applicable to my latest project, which like Steve, I’ll call “Winter”. The crowdsourcing, that is – not the vanity project…