Hey all you doc makers! RT @Mashable : How Social Media has Changed the Game for Documentary Filmmaking

Alexander Hotz is a freelance multimedia journalist and public radio junkie based in New York City. Currently he teaches digital media at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Follow Alex on Twitter at @hotzington.

When filmmaker Andrew Lampard began promoting his documentary Two Summers in Kosovo last fall, he didn’t pay much attention to social media. Lampard used his personal Twitter (Twitter

) and Facebook (Facebook

) accounts to keep his friends informed, but he didn’t use any social media tools to promote the movie — something he regrets today.

“We could have used social media to connect with more audiences,” said Lampard, whose film focuses on the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict. “After the war, Serb and Albanian diasporas popped up all over the West — in Europe, North America, even Australia (Australia

). Beyond raising awareness among festival programmers, I like to think we could have set up our own independent screenings within the Balkans and these diasporas.”

While Lampard’s film generated some attention in Kosovo, it went largely unnoticed outside of Europe. Could social media have made a difference? Lampard isn’t certain, but for his future films, he plans to do what many filmmakers are already doing — using social media to aggressively promote their work.

Outreach

Like Two Summers in Kosovo, most documentaries are produced by a small team on a tight budget. Since social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are free, it makes sense for documentary filmmakers to take advantage of them. But that doesn’t mean that just anyone should be doing the outreach.

“You can tell when someone sits down once a day and just blasts a bunch of stuff, having little relevance,” said Viki Psihoyos, who developed the social media strategy for the Oscar winner The Cove.

Psihoyos, whose husband directed The Cove, stressed that social media tools work best when the people behind them have a genuine passion for what they’re sharing. For Psihoyos, The Cove is “her baby,” so its online presence is something she takes very seriously.

“I have a style that I have developed so I bristle when I see the tools used badly,” Psihoyos added. “Blatant marketing bothers me…Yes, I remind people that The Cove will be on Animal Planet, but I also ask who is live blogging it? I like to grow and feed a community.”

Different National Networks

The Cove was successful in the United States, but it was made primarily to change whaling policies in Japan. Psihoyos used Facebook and Twitter to promote The Cove at home, but in Japan she used a platform called Mixi to ensure she reached the Japanese public. “We had to hire translators to set us up on Mixi, which boasts 80% of the market there,” Psihoyos said. “From the start, we have been hoping to get the Japanese people aware and active on the issues taking place in Japan.”

Funding

Aside from the ubiquitous Facebook and Twitter, Kickstarter, the online funding platform for creative projects, should be on the radar of every filmmaker short on cash. Despite being barely over a year old, the startup has proved itself an impressive resource for documentary funding.

The Delta Smelt (working title), a documentary about the precarious fate of the largest estuary in the western United States, recently reached its $3,500 goal with contributions from 36 backers. Another film, Keepers of the Earth, easily surpassed its goal of $20,000 by raising over $2,500 thanks to over 300 backers. Amazingly, these successes aren’t unusual on Kickstarter.

Connecting With Other Filmmakers

It’s no secret that filmmakers choose Vimeo (Vimeo

), the high-quality video hosting site, to share their clips. But the platform is also a great network for professionals to chat about their craft. Philip Bloom, a veteran filmmaker who has worked for Lucasfilm, BBC and others, uses the site regularly for feedback on his work and to explore the films of his peers.

“Many of the colleagues I work with these days I’ve known from social media — that’s how we’ve become friends,” said Bloom. “It’s a great way of learning about things and helping each other out. I think it’s absolutely essential.”

Festivals

Before the Internet (Internet

), documentaries typically reached the public’s attention once they were featured in a film festival. Social media may have made it easier for filmmakers to get the word out about their work, but now even festivals are using social media to connect with filmmakers and their audiences.

Jennifer Nedbalsky, the Program Manager for Human Rights Watch’s Film Festival, said the social networking site for group meetings Meetup is important for her community outreach. “It’s a wonderful way for audience members to involve friends,” said Nedbalsky. “It also multiplies the amount of people you can reach, while taking less work from audience members to share.”

Theresa Riley, the Interactive Director for the PBS documentary series POV, often learns about the films submitted to POV through everyday social media tools like Facebook, but POV is also experimenting with new methods to promote their filmmakers’ work. Recently, POV asked viewers of Food Inc. to host a post-film potluck dinner with friends at their homes. About 130 potlucks were held, and viewers uploaded pictures of their experience on Flickr (Flickr

). POV also hosts live chats with the filmmakers via Cover it Live the day after a film screens.

A New Approach?

Arguably the most ambitious use of social media by a documentarian is Vaquita.tv, a free web-based documentary project entirely reliant on social media for its promotion. The documentary itself, which is broken into seven web-friendly parts, sheds light on the dire situation of the Vaquita, a Mexican porpoise on the brink of extinction. With about 250 porpoises left, filmmaker Chris Johnson “felt there was no time to spend years making a film to only watch the Vaquita go extinct during [the film's] production and finding a market.”

The urgency of Johnson’s cause is evident throughout the site, and in a recent blog post he even asked, “can social media save a species?”

“Social media is a great ally during the production of a project, the marketing of it, and potentially keeping the issues addressed in your film in the media for a long time after someone has watched it,” Johnson said. “I believe that you never finish making a documentary film.”

More Social Good Resources from Mashable:

- The Real Value of Social Media for Social Good [INTERVIEW]
- 5 iPhone Apps to Help Fight Poverty
- How Non-Profits Can Maximize a Foursquare Account
- 5 Cool Non-Profit Uses of Location-Based Tech
- Are Social Media Giving Contests Good for Non-Profits?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto (iStockphoto

), craftvision

I'm going to hope it's better than the film (I know - arguments coming): Christopher Nolan Wants Inception Videogame | GameLife

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Inception director Christopher Nolan hopes to create a videogame based on his cerebral sci-fi film, Variety reported Tuesday.

“(What) we are looking at doing is developing a videogame based on the world of the film, which has all kinds of ideas that you can’t fit into a feature film,” he said during a press conference in Rome.

Inception was Nolan’s follow-up to his hit Batman sequel, The Dark Knight. Released in July to positive reviews, the mind-bending movie about dream hijackers has grossed more than $750 million worldwide.

Many critics noted Inception’s adherence to the laws, logic and imagery of videogames — particularly the flick’s climactic action sequence, which looked like a level cribbed straight out of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

The planned videogame is still on the horizon. Nolan said plans are all “long term,” meaning it’ll probably be several years before an Inception game sees the light of day.

Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/09/inception-videogame/#ixzz10JAxm1Pq

Fascinating: Likes Turn Facebook Into Loyalty Card of the Web - Advertising Age

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How Your Likes Are Turning Facebook Into the 'Loyalty Card of the Internet'
Brands Such as Levi's, Urban Outfitters Are Using the Clicks of Approval to Tailor Marketing, but Will They Scare Consumers?

by Kunur Patel
Published: September 20, 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Facebook has been collecting thumbs up on everything from Levi's black denim leggings to Sarah Palin videos since April. But where do all those clicks of approval go? And when are brands going to benefit?

Urban Outfitters recently began to rank products based on likes, displaying the most thumbs-upped products first.
When the social network launched its open graph and "like" buttons that could be seeded anywhere across the internet, it began to layer brand and media preferences onto its more than half-billion user profiles. At the time of the announcement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg evangelized about a web that could morph to suit individual users' likes and social networks. In exchange for hosting its like buttons and spreading the gospel, brands and publishers could gain access to approving users' Facebook feeds, but not much else -- until recently. Now, some new programs from the likes of shopping search engine TheFind and Urban Outfitters point to a future where brands can actually flip the pipe to use all that data to personalize their own websites.
TheFind recently launched a search option where users could refine searches based on stores and brands they've liked elsewhere on the internet. After logging in with Facebook credentials and searching for products, users can visit a "Shop Like Me" tab to see results only from stores or brands they've liked elsewhere. Facebook Like lets the site tailor search results to user preferences without having to collect that information itself, said Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind, which had 13.7 million unique visitors in July, according to ComScore. Having users list their own preferences at TheFind is "a lot of work for people," he said. "We looked at likes and what was attractive is that there are 500 million users that have done a lot of that already." Two million of Facebook's users, for example, have liked Nike, 1.6 million have liked Walmart and 1.2 million have liked Best Buy.

"Facebook is becoming the loyalty card of the internet, just like your key chain," said Tom Wentworth, VP-web solutions for technology company Ektron, which is developing products for corporate websites to tailor visits based on the user's social graph. Mr. Wentworth says Home Depot is considering Ektron's technology to better send its consumers down the paths that suit their interests, whether they be gardening or contracting.

Levi Strauss integrated Facebook likes into its website shortly after the open graph launched. Rather than having consumers simply like the brand, users can like individual products and styles on jeans. There's also a friends search tab, where, once signed in with your Facebook login, you can see all the jeans your friends have liked.

But Mr. Zuckerberg's vision of a personal web doesn't come without hurdles. Levi's likes for individual products took a lot of custom-designed technological tinkering -- it wasn't as simple as dropping the thumbs up in a line of code. Bookseller Borders has also implemented likes for individual titles on its site, and Urban Outfitters recently began to rank products based on likes, displaying the most thumbs-upped products first. But most use of the feature still focuses on affinity for the overall brand, vs. distinct products or services.

"Adding the buttons is easy," said Mr. Kumar. "But the second part is using that information for a better experience, and very few sites have done that."

Beyond search, one Facebook software firm, Vitrue, is building tools to let marketers send distinct messages to its fans based on their likes and preferences. For example, it hopes to slice and dice Levi's fans based on products they've liked to serve legging coupons to legging likers, rather than all sales and promotions to all likers.

"The hurdle with large brands is one more of coordination between the marketing department and the IT department," said Vitrue's Mr. Bradford. "Marketing owns the Facebook pages and, in many cases, IT owns the website."

There's also the question of consumer adoption -- do people think of likes as a way to catalog the boots they loved in Vogue, when we're used to using the like button to applaud Facebook updates on promotions at work or changed-relationship statuses? Also, what happens when likes paint us into corners that limit our web surfing?

"It's both about not scaring people but the other area to watch out is, if you personalize too much, it can be dangerous," said Ektron's Mr. Wentworth. "You don't want to make premature assumptions about somebody."

A project to watch for - launching Feb. 2011: exploring CLIMATE CHANGE

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exploring CLIMATE CHANGE is looking at Climate Change on a local perspective, but connects the different point of views and at the same time brings these different stories together to a global level. We think that it is not enough to show only the local effects to understand Climate Change or to bring together the scientific knowledge about different effects. We want to get knowledge about Climate Change, about backgrounds, but especially how it is affecting us as human beings. For this we will be visiting the people that are already feeling the changes in their livelihoods. So that we can see what Climate Change actually means. And as this is nothing what only affects the poor and vulnerable, but can also be seen in post-industrial nations all over the globe, we want to bring together stories from all over the world to shape a global picture of how Climate Change is affecting us. But we also think that this journalistic approach is not enough, it needs the scientific background on the different effects as well. And we want to see what already is been done in NGO’s all around the world. And we want YOU to take part in it! We want to capture the small to create the large, a global picture of Climate Change, powered by the stories of the the people that already feel the effects of Climate Change, supported by the knowledge of the scientists. And at the end the project will hopefully have created not only a broader understanding of the effects of Climate Change, but also about the different cultures and livelihoods on this planet.

The key aspects of the project will get translated by our team into English, Danish, German, Spanish and French to make it accessable for as many as possible.

Join us on this journey!

Maja Nordbrandt & Simon Sticker