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Fans, Friends and Followers: An Interview with Scott Kirsner

Published on November 20, 2009

By Jolene Pinder with contributions by Ashley Panzera

The last year has seen the arrival of two new and important resources for every documentary filmmaker’s bookshelf (or cache of PDFs as the case may be) — Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age by Scott Kirsner and Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers by Chris Holland.

These books both offer an arsenal of practical tips and an impressive dose of prescient vision about the state of independent distribution and the future of audience cultivation. This is the second in a two-part MediaRights.org series interviewing the authors.

Fans, Friends and Followers

Released last April, Scott Kirsner’s Fans, Friends and Followers is an insightful account of how filmmakers, artists, writers and musicians are doing the creative work they love and creating sustainable business models at the same time. Scott interviewed over 30 artists, from Sandi Dubowski to Jill Sobule, to discover best practices for maximizing your online presence and building community in a cluttered virtual space.

The book can be purchased as a paperback, (CreateSpace or Amazon.com), an e-book, or Amazon Kindle version. You can also follow Scott’s musings on digital cinema at his blog CinemaTech.

Why did you write the book Fans, Friends and Followers?

I wrote the book to address one of the big challenges I see right now: if you’re trying to make a film or any sort of creative work, how do you build up an audience in this really noisy environment? It just dawned on me one year at the SXSW festival, an event that obviously draws people from all over the country to one place—filmmakers, musicians, artists, writers—that everyone is just clamoring for attention.

People are plastering up posters on every vertical surface and leaving postcards on every horizontal surface wherever they can leave them. So, it dawned on me at SXSW that everyone was clamoring for attention and then when you go online, it’s multiplied a hundred or a thousand times over.

It’s just incredibly difficult to build up an audience and hold their attention. I just wanted to talk to people who have been dealing with that challenge and interview them about what they have been doing.

One of the things I found interesting in the book was this idea that breaking out is somehow more of a possibility than it ever has been and at the same time, harder than it ever has been. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that paradox?

Well, I think if you go back to the early 90’s or mid 90’s, it was really hard to reach a global audience, unless you had the support of some major distribution company or major film studio, or a major TV network that wanted to broadcast your film.

Once the Internet came along and it started being used for distributing video, selling DVDs and renting DVDs, I feel that made breaking out a real possibility, but it made it a possibility for everyone at once.

The paradox is that the tools are there and the channels are there to reach a really big audience, but you need to have a strategy that is clever, that takes advantage of the fact that you made something great.

You may not have the resources, but you have to give a lot of thought to who your audience is, how you connect with them and how you get them to engage in what you’re doing.

So, there’s a little bit of jujitsu involved, especially since the old power players still have all the money and still have a lot of the power, but I do think the Internet and this whole cluster of other technologies around it, make it possible for an individual, or a small team, to do really amazing things.

You lay out this really helpful set of “New Rules” in the book. I was wondering if you could talk about one of the rules that you think is most important with respect to the documentary community and give an example of a filmmaker who has found their own unique way to define that rule.

I feel like it’s just that these are the rules that I understood at the time I was writing the book, but the one that I think doesn’t occur to a lot of people is that reaching an audience isn’t just about building the greatest possible website and then trying to figure out how to herd people to your website. That’s very hard and it’s labor intensive, and often, it fails.

One of the rules is about thinking where is your audience and where is your prospective audience already hanging out online, where do they congregate?

Are there Facebook groups that exist already, or online discussion boards or forums, yahoo groups, or blogs where your prospective audience is already hanging out? From there, you can sort of build relationships with those sites and start considering them your marketing and distribution partners.

Scott_Kirsner

I think, Curt Ellis, Ian Cheney (co-producers), and Aaron Wolf (director), did a really good job of that in King Corn. They sort of said we’re making a movie about food and agriculture, so let’s find out where those people live online. They went to blogs like Sustainable Table and all these blogs that are connected with the slow food movement.

I think another great example is, Robert Greenwald, whether you like his documentaries or not, he did something phenomenal in connecting with MoveOn and kind of saying, “I want to be the resident filmmaker of moveon.org.” He then really used their audience to kind of catapult himself into documentary filmmaking. He had come out of the world of TV movies and feature films.

Yes, you want to have your own website, but the traffic and attention is going to come from going to these communities where your prospective audience is already spending their time and giving these sites clips and interviews and creating contests for them.

It’s about going where the audience is rather than forcing the audience to come to you.

A few filmmakers you interview in the book talk about how hard it is to see a film die or stagnate. How can a filmmaker with fewer resources prevent their films from “dying”?

Making a film is a huge amount of work, and so when someone tells you that in addition to making the film, you need to create all this ancillary content—these extras and new stuff to promote the DVD release, to promote a TV broadcast, or to promote the film when its finally showing up on Netflix streaming—that can be intimidating.

It just feels like more work on top of already a lot of work, but I do think that it is more like a constant campaign of looking for events and opportunities where you can create a little bit of content or find some content from the archives that you’re going to present as a new two-minute clip on YouTube. Say your film has to do with World War II and it’s the anniversary of D-Day so you create a small piece since you feel like you can get a nice press hit.

I was at an event where Ted Hope was talking about this idea and he did say that there’s a different life cycle to films. It used to be that you made the feature and maybe you made a couple of extras for the DVD. Now, you really do need to think about this long string of pearls; it’s almost like you have lots of little droplets of content along the way to give to different outlets and websites, content that will get people excited at different points of time when different events are happening.

I do think at some point, you don’t let the film “die” but maybe the goal is that there is a website that’s kind of an ongoing resource for the film. Maybe you put five percent of your energy into keeping that website updated somehow.

There are interesting examples where you can create a great blog or you can ask people to participate and post messages, where that site can be a slow rolling boulder for a long time and give people reason to come back, and re-engage with the website and the film.

Now that there are so many more opportunities for fans to participate in the filmmaking process, I was wondering what sort of advice you may have for the filmmaker that feels overwhelmed at this prospect?

You could do things the old way and hope to be successful. The old way, I think of it as, you make your movie, you hope that someone will distribute it and then the marketing happens once you know your TV air dates or at which film festival you’ll premiere.

When I think about the new way, it really is about building an audience once you decide, I’m making this film about, you know, the asexual community, or I’m making this film about spelling bees. It’d be smart to acknowledge that the more successful approach is the one committed to building an audience from day one around your project.

Yes, part of it can be work but part of it can be beneficial when you ask people to help. I don’t think you will always succeed if you ask people to help finance your film. That’s going to work for some people and not going to work for others. But there are people with DV cameras that want to have some credit for their portfolio and it may be an interview that may not be as great as an interview you would do, but it’s probably fifty percent as good as the interview you would do and probably better than not having it at all.

There just are people out there that will help you with all kinds of things. They might score your film for free, for the credit, or will do some motion graphics for you. People really want to participate and it takes time to sort of invite them and manage that process.

The alternative is you’re going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do I raise ten thousand dollars to pay someone to do the motion graphics for my film?

Some filmmakers in FFF talk about reaching a niche audience while others see themselves as creating a film for a general audience. Can you talk about deciding which is the right path?

That’s a really hard question, but I think in documentaries at least, it’s hard to think of the documentary that, without a lot of marketing and spending, can become a documentary like Spellbound that does reach everybody. I’m not sure that they initially had a niche audience of people who were in the spelling bee community, but I think more common is the documentary that reaches a niche audience first and then that niche audience carries it over into a wider audience, and I think that there are a lot of strategies for doing that.

House parties are a viable strategy where you might have five people who really care about this issue at the house party and five people that might only sort of care about it or might just be going for the chips and salsa. I don’t think I have all the answers about how to get your niche audience to spread the buzz, but I think there’s a lot of power in stuff like Twitter and Facebook where a wider audience will see your niche audience tweeting, “Hey just got the new DVD of this new film and it’s really great.”

One thing is just asking the niche audience for help spreading the message.

You can’t always expect it. I think for some people it can seem like I’m groveling to ask people, “Hey, will you tweet about this?” or “Will you post a link on Facebook?” but people don’t always know that you want their help and that you want help spreading the message.

One of the things that people mention to me in the book is asking people to rate or review their film when it’s available on Amazon, or when it’s available on Netflix, not asking them to give me a good rating or good review, but just saying, “Hey if you’ve seen the film, I’d love for you to post a review or rating.” That makes it seem more real, and that other people are watching it as opposed to the films on Amazon that have zero stars.

Scott Kirsner is a journalist who writes about innovation, with a special focus on the ways that new technologies are changing the entertainment industry. He writes regularly for Variety and The Boston Globe, and has been a contributing writer for Fast Company, BusinessWeek, and Wired. He is the author of Inventing the Movies and The Future of Web Video.

Scott is a frequent moderator, speaker, and event host, and is also one of the founders of the annual Nantucket Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Future Forward, and The Conversation: The Future of Cinema, Games & Online Video, a new gathering for media-makers and technologists first held in 2008.

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