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Truly Free Film

Beer Buzz #3: Audience Building — The Key to Success Building

By Steven C. Beer

In the marketing and distribution of independent films, the most critical and frequently overlooked key to success is the building of an audience. Whether you pursue traditional or alternate distribution platforms, or a combination thereof, your ability to identify, aggregate and mobilize an audience base directly impacts the prospect of your project’s success. Timing your audience building campaign is crucial. According to Jason Ward of Candy Factory Productions, you must begin to target and recruit your supporters the minute you decide to produce a film. Audience building is a slow and steady process that can take many months, if not years, so a multi-step game plan that evolves over time can serve as an audience building blueprint. Here are some tips I learned while moderating the Audience Building Panel at the New York Lounge at Sundance 2014:

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Truly Free Film

Nobody Knows Anything #5: Rethinking Transmedia and Crossmedia

By Charles Peirce  

Nobody5-300As I alluded to in a previous post, Transmedia is in the midst of a debate about its definition and who has the authority to determine that definition. It is one of those discussions I think best observed from the sidelines, but then I have no financial or artistic stake in that debate. However, I do think they’re important terms to understand.

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Truly Free Film

Life Cycles of Social Media Networks

By Reid Rosefelt

Social Media networks go through phases in their lives, just as we do in ours.

Most of us go through periods of adjustment which we handle with varying degrees of success. Many of us don’t climb very high up the ladder of success, and it’s a rare few that become superstars like Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Lawrence, Facebook or Twitter.

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Truly Free Film

Nobody Knows Anything #2: What Makes A Film Good?

By Charles Peirce  

Nobody2-300

Everyone, I’d hope, has some thoughts about what makes a film good. Perhaps it displays a degree of craft or a particular aesthetic sensibility, covers specific subject matter, has a quality story, certain stars, etc. As you get older and your exposure to cinema becomes both richer and more refined, that definition probably becomes more nuanced. Still, if further pressed most people will also have some few “guilty pleasures” — films that don’t fulfill all their own requirements of what makes for a good film but which they like anyway. Perhaps they were childhood favorites, particular genres or kinds of stories that give comfort, or they just have an indescribable something. It can all seem very subjective, but that discrepancy, between our self-defined tastes and our secret loves, is a telling one.

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Truly Free Film

Why Facebook Is In My Rear View Mirror

By Reid Rosefelt

Why-Facebook-is-in-my-Rear-

In May of 2012 I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to see what kind of Facebook Community I could create over the course of three months. I created a page called “Save the Supreme Court–Re-elect Obama.” I did this because I was concerned about what might happen to the Supreme Court if President Obama lost, but I was also thinking about it as an experiment for promoting a documentary, something I had done as a marketing consultant, for films like “The Island President.” I could be getting ready to make a film about the Supreme Court, and using Facebook to promote that would involve essentially the same work– utilizing targeted Facebook ads to assemble a community of people who were interested in the activities of the Court.

I gave myself a budget of $100.

My hundred bucks purchased a wide variety of tiny ads that turned up hundreds of thousands of times on the Facebook pages of people I felt might be interested in the Supreme Court, or had progressive politics. My $100 took me to about 800 members, but then I found myself unsatisfied and hungering for an even thousand. I threw caution to the wind and splurged on another twenty bucks to get there.

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Truly Free Film

The WASTELANDER PANDA Saga! Part 5. Release

by Kirsty Stark (Producer), Ella Macintyre (PMD) and Victoria Cocks (Writer/Director)

Part 5. Release: Wrap-Up & What’s Next

Our final step in this stage of the Wastelander Panda journey was to release the films.  We did this in three stages – a preview at the SXSW Film Festival in March, two back-to-back screenings at a local cinema in Adelaide on May 27th, and an online release that same evening. 

We had different reasons and goals for each of these three steps:

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Truly Free Film

Beyond Facebook

By Reid Rosefelt

As recently as last summer I thought that a filmmaker could do a good job with social media only using Facebook.

I’m not saying that anymore.

Back then, the crux of my argument came from my supposition that most independent filmmakers’ time was very limited.  If they had time to do Twitter, Instagram , Tumblr, etc., that would be great, but I knew what was involved in making a film and I knew that a log of people were doing DIY distribution.  Facebook was bigger was bigger than all other social networks combined.  Facebook offered unique advantages like cheap advertising.  Facebook took very little time compared to the others.

So I told filmmakers and other artists and said: “Learn how to use Facebook!”

That was then.