Film marketers ramping up cross-promotions

Media_httpwwwhollywoo_dqgvj

I can hear the echo of Jeff Gomez in this line:

'Brand partnerships let people 'touch and feel' movie.'

Here are the deets I find interesting:

"Iron Man 2" director Jon Favreau has used his Twitter account to leak tidbits about the superhero sequel to his fanboy followers, snagging mainstream media coverage of every "secret" he shared. Disney/Pixar has launched a screening program to show college students the first 65 minutes of "Toy Story 3" -- a "cliffhanger edition"-- to spark interest and blog posts. These students, most of whom were children when the first "Toy Story" movies were released, get into the screenings by signing up on Facebook. The studio just named a new nonentertainment industry marketing chief, M.T. Carney, a brand strategist who reportedly preaches the idea that communications don't have to be tied to ad buys.

The combination of traditional and emerging tactics is working.

Boxoffice is up 9.4% from last year's record-breaking run to $3.2 billion, partly because of the proliferation of 3D movies and their premium ticket prices. The top three pics of early 2010 were released in 3D: "Alice in Wonderland," "How to Train Your Dragon" and "Clash of the Titans." And of course, there's "Avatar."

First-quarter boxoffice snapped records with a $2.65 billion take, up 9% over the same period in 2009. Attendance, a real bellwether of success, is up 7.2%, which bodes well for the summer blockbuster season and beyond.

The Digital Writing is on the Wall

The Digital Writing is on the Wall

 

I’ve been mulling on the the potential of the web for film distribution for a while & I’m sure many others are too (Lawrence Lessig, Brett Gaylor,...numerous others).

 

 

Watching M.I.A.’s 'Born Free online crystalized ideas that have been floating since I watched Spike Jonze’s 'I’m Here' on its launch day.  And having to watch at 6:30 am to keep my preferred ticket wasn’t ideal - but I did it - which says something about the success of the campaign or about my geeky obsessions. 

 

http://www.imheremovie.com/

 

Both Jonze & Philips’ Cinema created an online presence for their films through teaser campaigns, trailers, & pings to fans. Philips’ use of Facebook has been highly active with numerous teasers, challenges & postings about location specific events. And both projects now stand as highly successful models of how to bypass distributers. The Absolut sponsored site for ‘I’m Here’ has increased its bandwidth to handle the volume of views and the film is now running on two hour cycles.

 

http://www.facebook.com/philipscinema?v=app_295019128299

 

M.I.A.’s video was released on the web without a specific host site & I’m sure everyone involved knew it would be quickly pulled from Youtube. Having the video removed for graphic content is an obvious value in the publicity generated. The violence however really is no more excessive than many a war film I’ve watched in the last decade and the premise of targeting a specific group because of a physical feature is very close to the one used by Jane Elliot in her ‘brown eyes/blue eyes’ anti-racism exercise and captured in the 1996 documentary ‘Blue-Eyed.’ Now that the video exists on multiple sites the only drawback I see is the challenge of tracking views. 

 

Whether you think ‘Born Free’ is a commercial grab or a genuine artistic statement or both, M.I.A’s video is another step towards direct distribution on the web. Video views may or may not drive up sales (it hasn’t cracked the top 200 on iTunes yet) but the number of sites hosting it & views will likely keep climbing. Very few artists exist completely outside of the commercial sphere and now, 2010, we are starting to see artists using the web & commercial partnerships to get their work out in ways that still maintain the integrity of the artistic work. In the last few months, we’ve seen a number of directors using the web to launch careers & projects. 

 

Ricardo de Montreuil’s just-launched short film, 'The Raven,' has been generating buzz as much for its low budget of $5000 as for its high quality.

 

 

And Fedez Alvarez’ release of his 5 minute trailer for ‘Panic Attack’ got him a $30 million deal for a feature with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures in fall 2009. 

 

 

If the digital writing is on the wall, and that wall is the existing system of distribution for filmmakers, the wall is also starting to crumble and artists have a real opportunity to not only affect but to decide how the future structures that mediate between artists and audiences take shape. So fellow artists, I can’t believe I’m going to quote Reagan, but, Tear Down That Wall! and start making something new.

Kuky se vrací - The true story of a teddy bear...

I love that I have no need of Czech to get a full experience in these trailers. Love the whimsy of the critters! I want to get crafting right now! Gracias Johnny & Angus who tracked down this description (source below):

Kuky Returns is the story of a boy six Ondra, who suffers from asthma, and so on "health reasons" must be off his favorite toy - a pink bear kuky. When mom Kukyho throw in the trash, it will work Ondrová fantasy in which experienced Kukyho adventure in an unknown natural world. It's really just a dream a little boy or kuky actually went to the biggest adventure of his plush life.

Johnny & Angus blog here:

Part 3 A New Frontier in Storytelling | MimeFeed

As I said in Part 1, because the artform takes stories and shatters them into pieces, it’s a lot easier for the audience to put the story back together if it’s a kind of story they recognize. If it’s, in other words, a conventional narrative. So, say, detective mysteries tend to make pretty decent transmedia stories. In print stories, I like to break conventions, use less well understood conventions, and generally fart around. In transmedia, I’ve had to learn that I can make the character as complex as I want, but the structure of the narrative better be pretty simple.

The funny thing about transmedia storytelling is that for all it’s reliance on conventions, the artform itself doesn’t yet have many established conventions. And the ones that it has are probably conventions that will fall away as audiences learn the artform and as technology gets better.

For example, right now in connecting the pieces of the story, we often use puzzles. An audience member watches a video and in the video, the character mentions a particular kind of bike lock and asks that the audience member help him get it open. The audience member googles the make of bike lock and discovers it can be opened using a bic pen. When the audience member emails that information, it triggers the next chunk of story. That particular puzzle is simple. But the puzzles are often much more complex—ciphers, codes, hidden messages.

This particular structure was very successful in a breakout transmedia work, the ARG for Steven Spielberg’s AI. Elan Lee, Jordan Weisman, and Sean Stewart built a story which was gated by puzzles. When they created the work, known now as The Beast ARG but nameless when they created it (ARGs don’t have title pages), they did not for a moment think that all transmedia stories would be a series of websites and email communications gated by puzzles. A community of about 3,000 active members and 10,000 total followers came together to ‘play’ this story. (One player said about ARGs, ‘they’re a game in which you play a person exactly like yourself except you pretend that the story you are following is real.’) That community was unexpected. The collaborative work of solving puzzles—morse code hidden in a sound file of water dripping from a faucet, clues hidden in jpg images, messages in website source files, etc.—became the pleasure of the experience for some of the audience.

They enjoyed it so much that when it was over, several of them created their own grassroots transmedia internet experiences, modeled on The Beast ARG, including puzzles. But enjoying puzzles, like chess or bridge, is not really everyone’s cup of tea. A lot of people liked Myst, but the majority of them never finished it.

Making a transmedia project, like making a movie, can be expensive. We often do video and audio recordings. Streaming requires bandwidth. Websites have to be designed. Email and phone calls to thousands are expensive. Creating events and experiences in cities is also expensive. A project can easily run to the low seven figures. That’s a million dollars. Chump change in the movie industry, but not something you find lying around in the couch cushions. To raise that kind of money we need to reach a pretty large audience, but making transmedia narrative dependent on puzzles eliminates a vast percentage—probably the majority of that audience.

Nobody is quite sure how to make money from these things but if the audience doesn’t grow, no one is going to make money from these things. Transmedia projects have attracted hundreds of thousands of ‘hits’, that is, websites have had hundreds of thousands different people come to them, but no media project has yet broken out into mainstream awareness. There is no transmedia equivalent to Twilight, or Grand Theft Auto, no Lady Gaga or even Mad Men. There will be (and when there is, a lot of the people reading this post will be rolling their eyes and saying ‘New? New? I’ve been doing this for years!’) But something that depends on people figuring out morse code is not going to break out. (Although I wouldn’t have put my money on American Idol, so I am not an especially accurate authority on matters cultural.) But to me the puzzles are a limiting function. Might there always be some transmedia projects that use puzzles? Sure. There are video games that use puzzles. But there are lots of other kinds of video games, and there are lots of other kinds of transmedia narratives.

Maureen McHugh's 3rd post on New Frontiers in Storytelling is up on No Mimes Media