SJIWFF10 Day 1: Digital Dames

This is a special guest post by visiting filmmaker and blogger Laura Zinger* To read more about her trip to the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival and impressions of Canada and Newfoundland, visit her blog 20kfilms.com

I hurried my breakfast this morning, because today was the workshop I was most interested in: Making an Interactive Documentary. The workshop was led by filmmaker Helene Choquette who created a web-based, interactive documentary called GDP: Measuring the Human Side of the Canadian Economic Crisis.

What exactly is a “web-based, interactive documentary?” Basically, at least according to the GDP’s model, that means 8-13 directors follow “characters” (documentary subjects) that were heavily researched and were deeply affected by the Canadian Economic Crisis. (I’m an idiot and didn’t realize that Canada had an economic crisis too, but apparently, not just Americans felt the recent downturn.)

The directors edit one 3-5 minute documentary video short per month. They send it to Project Creator, Helene, who reviews the videos, polishes them up with another editor, gives them the okay, and posts them online. The shorts were supposed to add up to a whole so that each “character” followed had about 12 episodes. Basically, an interactive documentary, from what I can gather, is a series of episodic shorts about a documentary subject, that, when viewed sequentially, becomes a larger story.

My thoughts on the workshop:

• The website is amazing. This is truly the future of documentary filmmaking. Documentaries will no longer have a definite time length of 1-2 hours. This project is a finalist at the Canadian New Media Awards 2010. If you’re going to make an interactive documentary, design is uber important, and their website is that amazing. Overall, hundreds of 3-5 minute short docs comprise the 14-hour work.
• The website plays a huge part in the interactivity of this documentary, and there really is no way to separate the two. This means that television broadcast is not an option, which may mean less viewers for now, until television and the internet have fully merged. They’ll get there, but that’s still a little while off.
• So, they are really ahead of their time with this interactive documentary. Their budget was 1.5 million dollars for the project, and they only had 300,000 unique viewers that spent an average of 7 minutes on the site (that’s about 2 video views). But, as Helene said, getting an audience of 300,000 for a broadcast view is pretty incredible, so when you look at it that way, the project is extremely successful. It’s interesting that they only had 162 comments on the English side and 145 on the French side of the site, but Helen said that they had more comments on Facebook, where it’s easier to type a quick post. The challenge still is, as I can see it, getting viewers to actually interact with the website in order to discuss the “human side of the Canadian economic crisis.” Unfortunately, Helene can’t measure if the interactive documentary affected people in their real lives, because there is no way to track something like that without online surveys that people won’t take the time to fill out. (This is why Facebook is a marketer’s dream. You can get to know your target audience a lot more intimately.)
• I would love to know if Canadians voted any differently after watching some of the videos. On the front page of the site is a very provocative statistic: “Canadian tax-payers contributed $14.5 Billion to bailing out Chrysler and GM –which nonetheless closed its last Windsor plant in 2010.” That statement enrages me, and I’d love to know if Canadians, upon seeing that statistic and viewing the site, would vote differently in the next election. Canadians are mostly socially liberal, although their current federal government is more conservative at the moment. I understand the value of seeing and understanding the Canadian Economic Crisis from a human standpoint, but I really want to know who the intended audience was (Helene said “all Canadians”) and what the goal was with the interactive documentary. Was it meant to evoke change? I’m huge into putting social documentaries into action by encouraging a community of people to act and change or try to enact legislation that will help said community out, but I’m not sure I’ve made up my mind if that needs to be the ultimate goal of every social documentary. That seems to be where they are headed, though.
• The interactive documentary is excellent because it shows and follows so many stories, and illustrates how wide and varied the effect of the crisis was. I mean, it really succeeds in doing this well and making you feel.
• The production quality is also excellent. All of the videos were shot on Sony Ex-3s and were edited using Final Cut Pro. The musical score is incredible and was composed by a famous Canadian composer whose name I unfortunately cannot remember, because it was French. So, after seeing what has been accomplished with this interactive documentary, I want to do this! The 1.5 million dollar budget they had is not something I can conceivably raise, but I love how interactive, compelling, and freaking fantastic the website is. I really want to work this interactive documentary model into a future 20K Films project. It just makes sense with how many documentaries revolve around un-ending social issues that, in this format, can be constantly updated and added to. I think this interactive documentary model would work well to spread media about American health care to the public.
• This interactive documentary model also brings to light the new distribution paths that are currently on the horizon, if not already entering our social and private lives: Google TV, Apple TV and possibly even the Starbucks Digital Network. One of the directors, Janice Goudie, was also at the workshop to talk about her experience with the GDP project.

Overall, the workshop was fantastic! It was extremely helpful to hear behind-the-scenes stories about how trust between subject and filmmaker is essential for any documentary to work.

Digital Dames Part 2 – Social Media and Republic of Doyle.

There was another workshop held after the Making an Interactive Documentary that was added a few days before on social media marketing. I need to find a listing for the workshop, but it was set up as an interview between two women, one who did the interviewing and the other was a woman who is a Story coordinator for a popular TV series called Republic of Doyle that tapes in Newfoundland and is currently only broadcast in Canada, UK (starting next week), and Australia soon after. It is currently not broadcast in America.

At the start of the workshop, I was confused at first to what the Republic of Doyle was, because I am American, and I wasn’t sure if it was a TV show, or a movie that they were making episodic web videos for or not.

I did finally figure it out 5 minutes in, and by the end of the workshop, I was most impressed with the following about the workshop:

1. The woman who did handled all of the social marketing for the show (Facebook and Twitter) was actually the Story Coordinator for the show who was testing out the social marketing as an experiment with really no expectations.
2. They have 50,000 friends on their Facebook fan page which when I went to look at the page today has around 2,000 likes. But on their facebook page yesterday during the workshop, I saw 50,000 friends, so I don’t know what’s going on.
3. Their twitter page has 2,000 followers and is only following 153. Usually you see people on Twitter with a large number of followers and they’re following just as many people. That’s just twitter etiquette and everyone trying to build up their numbers at that point. A lot of people will just twitter request tons of people hoping that they will request them back to help their numbers, but that really does nothing to make me believe that their twitter feed is worth following. But Republic of Doyle’s twitter page has some real fans. Just look at their ratio of Followers to those they follow and you’ll see what I mean.
4. The woman who handled all of the social marketing for ROD (Republic of Doyle) had some great suggestions for people who want to get into tweeting to help market their films:
   a. Follow Tom Hanks. His feed is short and simple and he includes lots of pictures, which he uses Twitpic to post. I’m not entirely familiar with Twitpic so you’ll have to check it out yourself.
   b. Tweetdeck is a great app for Twitter that allows a user to not only tweet, but it also lets them follow trends in the Twitterverse (which also speaks to worldwide trends which is what marketers’ whole careers are based on predicting) AND it lets you see if your twitter feed or you as a person or your product, film, book, etc is getting any mentions in the Twitterverse.
   c. Adding small little contests for your fan base on Facebook can help keep your Facebook page interactive with your users. (there are strict guidelines for offering contests on Facebook and might even be against the rules at this point, so please do some research before you attempt this.)

From what I can tell Facebook and Twitter are great vehicles for getting information about yourself and your “product” whatever that is, because it’s basically like a giant web of social contacts. If you can tweet or post about something that others find interesting, then they will repost or re-tweet what you have written. That, to me at least, seems to be what your end goal should be. To not only cater to your network of fans and contacts, but to try and jump on other people’s twitter and Facebook networks so that you can reach a larger audience. Ah, I know that this is important for the modern day, “Entreprenuerial artist” as Roberta Munroe called modern day filmmakers in her Short Film workshop, but all of this gives honestly me a headache in the end. If filmmakers are doing all of this, when can they get any artistic work done?!

And here’s a nifty guide to twitterspeak/twitter language for anyone starting out. It’s a must to understand how to write and read in twitterspeak if you’re going to do this. You just won’t get the full effect of marketing with twitter if you don’t learn this. Google more if you need some more info on this.

So, in summary, yes, social media marketing is necessary for your product/film/art/novel, and yes, it’s necessary to brand yourself and create an identity for yourself that people can relate to. Sorry all of you anti-social artists, and Kafka’s writing your novels in some dank and dark basement, but this is a necessity in today’s hyper-connected world. And Roberta is right, if you can’t do this yourself or you aren’t capable of doing this yourself, then find someone!!

Read all of Laura Zinger’s blog posts on The St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival 2010. They’re so good, it’s almost like being there:

• SJIWFF10 Day 1: Digital Dames
• SJIWFF10 Day 2: Roberta Munroe
• SJIWFF10 Day 3: My Film Proceed and Be Bold Screens at the Festival!
• SJIWFF10 Day 4: Christine Vachon and Pitch This with Jan Miller
• SJIWFF10 Day 5: Going Home

Don’t miss this othe great article on the festival. Joy Loewen of NSI Drama Prize Loves the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival

*Laura Zinger is the Founder of Chicago Production Company 20K Films. She currently teaches introductory courses in video production and editing in the Motion Picture/Television Department at the College of DuPage. In 2008, Laura went all in and independently produced and directed the feature-length documentary Proceed and Be Bold!, which has screened internationally in Italy, Germany, Austria, England and Canada. The documentary also screened as an official selection in six American film festivals, including the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival and the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival in Newfoundland Canada.

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