Appropriately enough I saw this session advertised on twitter, as for some reason I missed it in the Film Victoria ebulletins.
Film Victoria’s Brad Giblin opened this information session at ACMI today by explaining that it was a follow up to a similar one held around a year ago. The Screen Business Online program is an attempt by Film Victoria to encourage and assist people to build their ongoing viability by ramping up their online presence, and engage with their audiences online. Up to $10,000 is available as a grant, and two of the three speakers in this session were past recipients.
So what did they do with their dough?
One key takeaway from the morning was the flood of people migrating onto the WordPress platform as a way of avoiding all that mind-boggling HTML code and enabling the owners of the business to update their content easily and constantly. WordPress is essentially a way of creating a blog, and it can be free, but it’s also a way of creating a web site that will look fine on the major browsers, including the horrible Internet Explorer. So you can slap content into your site without shoving the borders sideways or ending up with a blank screen. You can go a long way with WordPress, assisted if you wish by designers and techheads who know more about CSS than you ever wanted to.
And that was well demonstrated in the presentations by Sue Maslin and Robert Connolly, who both demonstrated gorgeous sites full of content.
Sue Maslin even quoted sales figures that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can make cold, hard moolah from online sales of your back catalogue – surely a thought that will bring smiles to every filmmaker’s screen. And useful wads of cash, not biscuit money.
Another thing that is obvious is that building interactive sites via WordPress or Apple apps, you’re dealing directly with your audience. And as Robert Connolly mused, filmmakers are more familiar with negotiating with intermediaries like distributors, sales agents and networks, not their audience, one to one. Now, filmmakers can have a conversation with potential consumers before you’ve even started shooting your movie on your iPhone.
James Boldistan, the third speaker of the morning, offered us a tantalising vision of the future where Apple will enter the TV game as a major player, thought to be on the horizon later this year, and perhaps an outfit such as HBO will create a drama series exclusively for the iPad platform, to see how it pans out.
Sue walked us through her process at Film Art Media, beginning with a number of websites that she and Daryl Dellora wanted to compress into one single portal for all their content. The aim was to be able to sell films they’d made over 20 years as part of their back catalogue as well as reaching out to new audiences, finding new ways to deliver content to audiences, and exploring multiple niches.
Sue admitted that at the start she and Daryl went back to the highly analogue butchers’ paper to map out their brand new site. They wanted to bring all their content under the one portal but make it easy for people to find what they were looking for and click on ‘purchase’. They created a site that allows people to buy products via Paypal, and links to significant other sites, such as Michael Kirby’s home page. The site is here: http://filmartmedia.com/
Once built, the site was publicised via an email newsletter to around 2000 people comprised of past buyers of their products, clients, and contacts of both Sue and Daryl. They found that of that 2000, around half opened it and 300 visited the site.
Robert Connolly and new media consultant Fahim Ahad talked about creating a new site for Arenamedia after Robert moved from Sydney to Melbourne and went out on his own. Robert explained how he operates as the face of the business, with a presence on facebook and twitter as a person, but with links back to the business.
The idea of the site was to create a portal that would look great on an iPad. As such, they took great pains to minimise the text, and also try to store their content on other sites, such as YouTube, Flickr, and Scribd. It can be viewed here: http://arenamedia.com.au/
“Over the years, people are always approaching me for a still from The Boys that was made years ago,” explained Robert, “and they always want a specific format and size. Now we’ve uploaded our production stills onto Flickr, which is great at allowing people to choose the format of the still they want to download.”
Part of that was a decision to post their publicity materials via a creative commons licence, which gives people a sense of empowerment to use the materials and share them.
The Arenamedia site has a row of links to other sites such as LinkedIn, twitter, facebook, Scribd, YouTube, iTunes, imdb and Madman. Fahid said they engaged Simon Britton of Media Wave to assist them in developing appropriate new media strategies.
Fahid mentioned a recent event where Tim Schafer broke Kickstarter records by raising its goal within 8 hours, and reached $1 million in 24 hours. The aim is to create Double Fine Adventure, a game/doco project whose pitch was rejected by the major players. But on Kickstarter it succeeded through the currency of Tim’s celebrity – he is a well known game designer in the US. More on that here: http://www.nowgamer.com/columns/nowgamer-team-blog/1255326/tim_schafers_kickstarter_adventure.html
James Boldiston’s presentation was about how screen businesses can build an app, probably for the Apple platform. “Think about an app as a kind of container,” he suggested. You can put all sorts of content into it, he demonstrated via iPads circling the room. He’s just done an app for a book on Carlton filmmaker Giorgio Mangiamele in partnership with ATOM, the Australian Teachers of Media.
He described the process from beginning to end, and suggested a price tag to build an app as 4 to 10 grand, by using a designer like himself to create the nuts and bolts. James has made more than a dozen apps for the iPad/iphone platform, and describes himself as ‘a bit of a propellerhead.’
Boldiston estimates that there are around 1 million iPad and android devices in Australia alone, and whole lot more iPhones, so there is a huge consumer market for apps that could appeal to people who watch film and TV.
He warned that targeting your app for Apple platforms brings one major hassle, which is their refusal to support anything to do with Flash. But on the other hand, Apple is poised to enter the television scene, and a new iPad is due out within a month. You can already use Airplay to link your iPad with your Apple TV and synch content and browse additional features on your device while watching a program.
As mentioned above, James suggests a budget of between 4 and 10 thousand to build an app, and once built you need to campaign the hell out of it so it reaches an audience. There’s a lot of apps out there! His site is here: http://www.nmgcorp.com.au/nmgCorp/index.html
During Q and A the issue was raised about the rights to existing content, such as a film with actors, creatives and crew who have been paid for theatrical and broadcast rights, but what about online screenings? Clearly this area needs to be thrashed out further, and Robert Connolly suggested it may be useful for an industry forum to discuss them.
Brad Giblin reminded everyone that the next Film Victoria Screen Business deadline is 23 March, so people have around a month to find a developer to help them come up with a proposal that would grow their online business. Check out the guidelines here:
Videos: http://film.vic.gov.au/showcase/case-studies/screen-business-online-videos
Guidelines: http://film.vic.gov.au/funding/business
Application forms: http://film.vic.gov.au/funding/business/applying-for-business
Published in Screen Hub the online journal.
MARK POOLE