Digital Independence

Days 2-4: The Joys of a Scene

Reflections from the amazing communal experience that was ARGFest-o-Con from the POV of the search for independence during my Death by Junket: the most amazing and terrifying phase of any independent arts movement is when it is a scene but still growing. Scenes are different than industries or genres or movements (although they sometimes grow into those things if they are successful) because they can maintain a sense of intimacy and collaboration -- what you have in common with other members of the scene tends to transcend whatever differences there might be.

]]> The alternate reality gaming scene is at the beautiful, magical and fragile phase in its lifetime. What maybe started as the merging of fan bases of different games has, for a while now, been a scene of its own. It's intimate enough for most people to know each other, at least through the contributions if not personally. That intimacy breeds open collaboration on how to promote the scene overall. At the same time, the academic world is looking at ARGing more and more, just as the advertising world and gaming worlds and entertainment worlds are. The scrutiny of the scene by "outsiders" or "newcomers" is becoming a large shadow on the intimacy.

There was a meta conversation not happening among the scene, but starting to bubble. That meta conversation right now sounds like fears. Elan Lee said he worried if the genre could hit a wall, that all of this could end. Jane McGonigal voiced similar fears. My version was "how do we produce more self-sustaining work and less corporate-sponsored work?"

In reflection, I think it is inevitable that the "ARG scene" will come to end. That's what scenes do -- they are artistic moments in time among a finite set of devotees. Some become historical treasures, like the Beat Movement, that have impact on other things even if they don't survive as living movements. Others, like the independent film movement of the 60s and 70s grow into industries ... they become something different than a scene, but sustainable over multiple generations of artists. Others scenes become genres, metastasized communities that are more loosely connected, the way "comedy" metastasizes from theater or "science fiction" metastasizes from literature.

The sad thing about a scene is that it almost never lasts; the forces of growth always end up changing into something else. For example, a trait that the independent film industry (not a scene) has that the alternate reality gaming scene (not an industry) doesn't have is the cycles of rebellion -- every decade or so, a new generation of indie filmmakers comes along to rattle the cages of those who have grown complacent. That only starts happening when groups and companies have it down well enough to start calcifying instead of adapting. If you buy into the idea that one day the ARG scene might grow into a small indie industry, you've got to imagine an industry susceptible to needing waves of rebellion against status quos to fuel creativity.

In the meantime, what makes a great scene, how do you prolong the length of that phase (or do you even want to) and what do you gain from that? I think these are the kinds of questions that the scene needs to be asking of itself, and part of that means dreaming what the scene would want to become. For much of my life, I've been fascinated by the impact of scenes on the cultural landscape, such as the importance of Tangiers in American modern culture or how a year without a summer forever changed the horror genre. The commonality among these kinds of experiences, these scenes, seems to be that intense collaboration and influence on each others' work drive artistic summits that have long, long resonances. Maybe that's what a scene should try to accomplish before it starts to become something other than scene.

Day Zero: Overture to Indie

I love a good metaphoric roadtrip story, probably more than I actually love being on roadtrips. For the next two weeks I'm on just such a journey, exploring a broad set of communities of American artistic independence. Unfortunately, there's always that pesky and boring travel part, which for me started with 11 hours of airports and travel from Orlando to San Francisco via Texas. I had a companion for the journy, though: songs from 737 of the bands playing at SXSW this year (worth the 3.1 GB download for the glimpse into where the independent music scene breathes and snarls.) The budding Kerouac in me thinks of it as an overture to the exploration -- my personal definitions of indie baked in the oven of SXSW and Midwest independent music scene of the early 1990s, and my roadtrip will eventually end back there again in a couple of weeks (or a decade and a half later, depending on how you view it.)

]]> In the early 1990s a college town like Columbia, Missouri (in the tour routes of the "third coast" movement of independent bands) was a great place to fall in love with the indie band scene. I spent a number of years as a studio engineer, record producer, and tour organizer, even running a small indie label called Three Minute Dog that released a few CDs and (*gasp*) 7" vinyl singles. It was as much of a "scene" as it was an indie movement, really, although we were never afraid as a community to flyer music conventions with fliers bearing slogans like "Every band is a local band somewhere" or "Local Music: The Jockstrap of the Industry" or "Less Money Equals More Soul."

This was a regional scene, too ... the local music crowd in Columbia knew the crowd in Lawrence and Springfield and St. Louis and Kansas City and Lincoln, etc. If there was an Emerald City in this local music Oz, it only existed for a week in March in Austin, Texas. It was called SXSW, and much of beginning of each was jockeying by bands to gain slots in that lineup. Sometimes the alternate weekly in the town got to pick one. There were SXSW "local organizers" in each city that held battle of the bands for other slots. Even bands that didn't "get in" would head to Austin ... they'd play on the street corner, or they'd rent out store frontages after hours. It was the Mecca of the Midwest for musicians.

Now you can carry that 66 CD compliation of the bands playing in two weeks on your iPod: it's not the same thing as being there, by a long stretch, but the collection is a remarkable way to taste (okay, 50+ hours of music is a big taste, but it's a big festival) where the scene is now. Reflecting on those days while listening to its decendants will end up being the soundtrack of the next two weeks.

Coda: survived the 4.2 earthquake under a full moon just fine -- what a Shakespearean opening for the trip. Wrath of Nature excepted, I'll hope to write more daily during these two weeks of the Death by Junket tour.

Loopy Ambitions Plus 5 Free Ideas

The most exciting aspects to me about our new community indieLOOP are my high ambitions for what the indieWIRE community will end doing with it. As a community, we've also got the advantage that one group's not-quite-shameful self-promotion is almost always another group's valuable content: film festival deadlines and information are valuable to filmmakers, deeper information about film projects is of interest to others in the industry, etc. With a tool as complex as indieLOOP, though, it's going to take some smart innovative thinkers to build the "first of breed" that other independents look to for good ideas. I'm doing my part trying to get a public group about film blogging going, but if I could wave a magic wand and make six more examples appear that I'd be pointing people to, they'd be:

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A Film Festival Semi-Private Group -- the Lake Eola Film Festival starts a group set up a semi-private, so that only their staff get accepted as "members" able to publish Journals, photos and event announcements (although the group can be read by anyone in the community and non-members and participate in discussions in the forums.) Once their line-up is announced, they invite those filmmakers to also be a part of the group (and encourage them to post photos and share stories from their festival experience.)
A Film Semi-Private Group -- the film "Revenge of the Poddogs" starts up a semi-private for the same reasons the Lake Eola Film Festival did: so that just their director, producer and what not can contribute to journals and events, but anyone in the community can read and discuss. They start listing their upcoming festival screening dates and times as group events, building out event photo albums from their festival circuit while bookmarking press reviews and posting Journals from the road.
A Regional Public Group -- Maria Local, average indieWIRE user, launches a public group to outreach to other "Key North, Florida Filmmakers". As a group, they meet each other, share journal entries, photos and events from around the local scene and, in the process, give the rest of a glimpse into a unique wrinkle of the American independent film scene we wouldn't have otherwise.
The Public Festival Premiere Event -- the film "Greenback Avalanche" decide to throw a public party at their premiere at the Lake Eola Film Festival in Key North Florida: their event listing starts getting RSVPs from other community members, thus spreading to other people's "My Friend's Events" screens. After the event, RSVPed attendees upload pictures to the event album.
The Story We Must Link To -- we're already planning on doing Buzz highlights of things happening in the community: but imagine a story that made us as indieWIRE have to link to where it was happening, there in the community, like some combination of the above.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of firsts to be had, and a lot of opportunity for the community to become more and more connected to each other: it's all about incubating and highlighting the early great ideas that the indieWIRE community comes up with.

The Point of the Loop

On Friday, we quietly launched indieLOOP (see my profile), our new social networking space at indieWIRE. Gone are the days of just providing classified and event announcements and a scattering of discussion boards: we've always wanted to provide the community something far more substantial than just that.

So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be blogging about indieLOOP and some of the cool things we hope the indie film community do with the tools inside it (and, hopefully, I can point out some good examples to give other people ideas.) The place to start, though, is with what the point of the LOOP is (as it helps to visualize some of the things we imagine people might do with it.)

]]> Here's the key: as a community gets bigger and more public, participating in that community can become overhwhelming (especially online.) Typically, online community is an all or nothing affair -- small private conversations, or large public ones.The natural way to overcome that is to filter your view of the community through the people you are already connected with -- what events are they attending and hosting? what are they journaling about? what bookmarks have they shared? what groups are they participating in? Maybe, in fact, those reciprical friends are the only people you want to share your journal with. Maybe you have a photo album you only want 3 other friends to be able to see.

indieLOOP tries to cover all those bases. You can have materials (from events to photos) available only privately, you can have other materials (from journals to albums of photos) shared publicly, or somewhere in between. Just as an example, every indieLOOP member has a "Journal" which is essentially like having a small blog if you're posting publicly (you can read the public journal stream here). An indieLOOP Journal is very different from a blog, though, since each entry can be limited to totally different viewers -- this entry is public, that entry is just for my reciprical friends, this other one is private between me and one other person.

We think that some of the "best stuff" the community will do won't ever be publicly seen (although we're hoping some amazing things happen publicly as well.) With indieLOOP, indieWIRE can be a place more private discussions to take place in addition to the public ones: it is a community crafted by the community. Lots more to blog about with indieLOOP, but in the meantime indieWIRE members (and SF360 members!) can get started setting up a profile and jump right in. In the next few weeks, I hope to highlight some of the interesting things you start making!

January is Always indieCRAZY

The hectic energy around Park City alone is usually enough to make January the most insane month of the year for indieWIRE. This year, though, we have even more going on than normal. With the publishing of this year's Top 10 Undistributed Films list, it means it is time to start ramping up the Undiscovered Gems program with the California Film Institute and Emerging Pictures (in ways that make it bigger than ever.) We're in the process of relaunching our Community with a really amazing social networking system from Sparta Social Networks instead of simple discussion boards and classifieds. It will be integrated seemlessly into our existing Member system (so your free indieWIRE membership is going to unlock more functionality than ever before.) And we're hoping to get all of those done before an indieWIRE co-hosted bash in Park City with the San Francisco Film Society, with whom we'll be announcing a major new West Coast initiative. And between now and then, I resolve to blog a little bit more about each of those.

How to Write a Killer BlogAd

After working with tens of thousands of dollars of BlogAds across hundred of different blogs for a number of different clients, I started to realize that part of the reason I saw such better response (as an advertiser) from BlogAds as compared to other advertisements (even on other blogs) was the format of the ads. Freed from the constraints of official banner sizes and given the flexibility of "mixed elements," we consistently saw BlogAds over-perform for us if you found ways to make the most of those potentials.

As the publisher of indieWIRE, I'm wearing the opposite hat – I want you as an advertiser to have all of those same advantages when you're advertising with us. The lessons we learned across so many BlogAd placements about how to make the elements perform the best ended up being the same kind of advice we give indieWIRE advertisers: you're talking to a close knit community of regular readers.

]]> That was one of the biggest reasons for indieWIRE switching to the BlogAds format: it lets you provide richer information in a way that doesn't scream for that attention. In fact, it's a tremendous opportunity to start a dialog with our readers (which is the best way for your ads to interact with our audience in any format) – many of you are providing information about opportunities our audience is already looking for.

This means thinking about your BlogAd a little differently than you've thought about other ads you've placed online – if you duplicate the strategies you've used in banner bars, you'll find your response rate is just about what you've grown (grudgingly) used to from other banner bars. There are much better ways to use these ads, and we have a vested interest in seeing our advertisers make the most of their budget.

I thought it might be useful to share six simple tips for making a good BlogAd based upon what we've found as fellow buyers of BlogAds as well:

1. Use All Three Elements! You've got a headline, an image, and a block of text that you can make all work together: design your ads to make the best use of all three. Rather than using the image to bring words along, move that content to the text that follows. It might even be helpful to think of your ad as a text newsletter ad plus an image and a headline.

2. Use HTML in the Text! Because is this the Web, you can make sections of your text bold or italic to improve the quick readability of a complex message. The Web is full of skim readers, and simple markup can help your message pop the important words that might attract the right readers' attention.

3. Use Hyperlinks in the Text! Believe it not, you'll increase your click-thru rate on the ads overall (we, in fact, try to find 2 or 3 detail pages to link to from the text of our ads.) Why not bold and hyperlink the word "submission deadline" directly to your submission page and let that word pop out as important in your ad?

4. Use provocative images! Your poster or your book cover is seldom the best image to use in your ad (although elements of those two might be.) People's faces, shots of locations, even production stills are frequently better source material. Logos, rendered text, and even too much detail work against letting that image tell part of your story.

5. Less can be more! The sizes that BlogAds give you are the maximums – but you could choose to do shorter images or no images at all, or a single line of call to action text or a bulleted list. Flexibility is one of the beautiful things about the format.

6. Change it up! With an online interface, just because you bought a week's slot doesn't mean you have to run the same ad for a week. For best results, try changing the creative message every few days (you'll find your click-thru rate goes up again after the change.) Every reader every day will see your see your ad: if they didn't click on after seeing it 10 times in one day, they probably won't click it tomorrow either. Find ways for a series of ads to tell a more complex story (while always linking them on to you for more information.)

You might not have noticed that the BlogAds above on this page aren't real – they are examples (thanks J.D. and Justice!) of the difference between a "bad BlogAd" and a "better BlogAd" following some of the tips above. There is also a gallery of ads (and critiques) over at BlogAds.com worth looking at (you'll find a few of our ads tucked away in there.)

Explaining the indieWIRE Relaunch to Members

The core of the indieWIRE experience is the community, especially that edge where it becomes physical (the indie film community that we're a part of.) That's best manifested in the indieWIRE membership that recieves indieWIRE:Daily (you can sign up as a member for free here.) We're getting ready to send out one of our extremely-rare emails that isn't an actual issue of the Daily explaining to that core community what the indieWIRE relaunch is about and where we are heading in the next few months.

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Yesterday we launched the first phase of a new indieWIRE site we've been working on for the last few months (just in time for Toronto!) You might have noticed something different if you clicked on links from yesterday's edition (or if you looked at today's edition unveiling the new look of indieWIRE:Daily.)

What we've launched is the tip of the iceberg of the new features we'll be unveiling over the next few months to become a better resource (as well as news source) for indieWIRE members like you. Alot of the changes we just launched set the stage for more exciting developments to come, but there's alot packed into the new site.

Our coverage for filmmakers and film professionals is now grouped together in indieWIRE Insider -- biz coverage, profiles of people, box office reports and our new regular Buzz & Rumors bits. Lead stories get bubbled up to a more cinephile-friendly news page (along with our movie and festival coverage.) Our new Calendar expands our abilities to give you a forward glimpse into movie and DVD releases, festivals and their call for entries, and other events happening in the indie film movement.

You'll probably also notice an increased focus on photography on indieWIRE -- big images with articles like this and huge iPoP from on the scene (how can you not love photos like this?)

In the months to come, we'll launch some new features that expand on these themes: unleashing people like you as photographers (iPoparazzi anyone?), the expansion of our community (with a special emphasis on the blogging community), deeper professional resources in Insider, and an "encyclopedia of indie" in "In Depth" that organizes indieWIRE's more than nine years of coverage into an effective research tool.

One thing about indieWIRE hasn't changed: our commitment to you (the indie community) as our number one priority. We hope indieWIRE's growth is aimed in that direction, supporting both the indie professional and film fan communities that indieWIRE feels a part of. Which means your feedback (and indulgence as we work out the kinks) is always appreciated -- my blog at http://blogs.indiewire.com/bclark/ is as good a place as any to start for comments.

Whatever made you become a part of the indieWIRE community, we hope the new site starts giving you even more of that (and on behalf of the entire indieWIRE team: thanks again for being an indieWIRE member.)

Best,

Brian Clark (Producer/Manager, indieWIRE)
http://blogs.indiewire.com/bclark/

Professionals, Consumers, Prosumers

In the past, indieWIRE has served three different audiences ... and not particularly well, I might add. Professionals look to indieWIRE to cover the "indie biz" as comprehensively as possible. Consumers, from film fanatics to occassionally just fanatics, see indieWIRE as a glimpse into thriving world of independent film. The prosumer audience (call them "the emerging indie filmmaker") is looking for indieWIRE as a resource, a native guide to the landscape. We try to scratch all three itches (as people frequently want more than one of them scratched), but scratching them better and more distinctly is a big part of what's driving the thinking of the "new indieWIRE."

]]> Example: once upon a time, a list of film titles from our box office tracking made an interesting little alcove to supplement the business data of the box office chart. Now it is a list of every speciality film that reported at least one screen of theatrical distribution since May 2003, hiding even more data underneath it (from "how much do you want to know about 'Donnie Darko'?" to "what's the scoop with TLA Releasing?") It makes a clumsy (at best) professional research tool (as you get the story on every speciality film that hit the circuit if you know where to dig) and it makes a clumsy encyclopedia to independent films and the story of how they emerged from the thriving indie scene for cinephiles.

The new indieWIRE is, in great part, us finally establishing a framework to do both effectively and intuitively for a few more years before it starts to feel overgrown again. On launch, it might appear far less dramatic than this, too: the weight of 9 years of archives is hard to escape despite the new ways of getting to them.

Old Blog, New indieWIRE

There's another premiere planned for the Toronto Film Festival that we've been tight lipped about: our own here at indieWIRE. Technically, it would be indieWIRE version 9 (see a rough ten-year history), but it is the heftiest re-creation of indieWIRE yet. First chunk rolls out in time for the editorial team's arrival in Toronto, with a fuller rollout during the festival. It seemed worth dusting off my year-old blog here at indieWIRE (you're soaking in part of the new design right now) to write a bit about what we're aiming for as we grow toward indieWIRE's tenth anniversary next year. Then I promise I'll return to writing about digital independence instead of community publishing strategy.

Please Send Bronze & Pottery

So today is officially the eighth anniversary of indieWIRE (so the traditional gift would be something bronze or pottery if you feel the burning need to send us something.) Some of those earliest editions of indieWIRE are "lost" to all but the elephantine memory of the Wayback Machine, but I remember when Karol Martesko forwarded me Issue #1 and by the time Issue #3 came around, we were helping Eugene and The Rabbi publish them to the Web. Long ago we stopped numbering the issues, but by my rough count today's edition is probably about Issue #2250.

]]> In 1997, on the occassion of indieWIRE's first ... I mean paper ... anniversary Eugene had this pithy Editor's Note:

"July 15, 1996 saw the debut of a media outlet aimed at
changing the way people get their news. It quickly garnered critical and
popular acclaim for its landmark use of the Internet as a new medium for
distributing news and information. That new service, dubbed MSNBC, may have
snagged the mainstream media spotlight from indieWIRE, but it was quite clear
that we not only share a launch date, but some common goals."

So, Happy Birthday, MSNBC! *evil grin*

Filmmakers as "Disruptive Messengers"

So I stumbled upon a new blog that's focused primarily on the world of public relations and the Web, and found a really challenging post that (from a PR perspective) describes the world of blogging, pinging and filmmaking by the new PR challenges they present: the rapid propogation of "disruptive messages" to existing brands.

]]> I'm going to write more about their approach at yet another of my blogs (the one focused on online marketing), as they are a fascinating combination of brilliance and Machivellian horror-show. But one aspect got me thinking about filmmakers (including one that has a blog here at indieWIRE):

"Disruptive messages that campaigns like Super Size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11 send out to audiences threaten brands (be it McDonalds or the Republican Party). But don?t think that for a second that the 'old' approach to online marketing (blasting out branded emails and canvassing highly-branded web sites with banner ads) will work to handle the new brand threat of blogging and talkback interactivity."

Spot on, right? Viva la revolution, baby! But their conclusions take a radical shift from my perspective:

"Any Fortune 1000 company that has a threat (blogs) also has a need. PR people...fill that need."

Hmm ... I suspect that Morgan Spurlock would say that McDonald's PR people did more to make sure that his film was "disruptive" (and successful), I wouldn't be surprised if Michael Moore wouldn't say the same thing about the Republican spin machine. If PR people are really going to be the answer for the companies that want to deal with the "threat" of bloggers, they are going to have to radically rethink the one-way channels of communication that they have grown used to.

I wonder if my blog tracking back to their blog will be seen as a disruptive message?

Foxing Fox With Fair Use

When guerilla documentary filmmaking meets the Internet and political activism, sparks are sure to fly, and Robert Greenwald is certainly causing alot of those sparks with his new documentary about Fox News' republican bias, "Out Foxed". Fox News (the people famous for suing Al Franken for trademark infringement for his book title) is now hinting they might sue the filmmaker (or are they?), bringing an added focus to the issue of "fair use" in modern copyright law. Some of the expected copyfight pundits are weighing in, but this is something that filmmakers (especially documentarians) should be paying close attention to -- issues like the broadcast flag treaty and the INDUCE act from Senator Hatch are eroding the important "fair use" provisions that make media activism and social critique as vibrant as it is.

Objectivity is Overrated

Eugene raised the question, "Is F9/11 a doc?" in his blog last night, a debate that I've been having with a lot of my friends down here in Orlando. Most of the F9/11-as-not-a-doc proponants I've talked to describe Moore's film as "propoganda," as if they are expecting a documentary to be "objective" and "comprehensive". If you're looking for objectivity, look to science and mathematics -- filmmaking is never truly objective, and the perspective of the filmmaker is one of the key qualitative componants of a doc. That perspective might seperate a "good doc" from a "bad doc," but it doesn't seperate docs from non-docs. Even nature documentaries inevitibly fail the "objective" test in most cases, as the editor's art is one of selectivity.

]]> Tom Hall threw out a rather good definition ("film that tells a story set in reality, using the actual participants of the events depicted to express the point of view of the artist behind the camera") although one fiction film I was involved in might challenge that description (and has actually played at a couple of documentary festivals even though it's a work of fiction.)

So do I think F9/11 is a documentary? Of course, it's almost a silly question to even pose, even from people who might argue with the film's objectivity or completeness. The people who argue otherwise are really showing what immature media consumers they are -- they probably think news coverage is supposed to be objective as well, or that truth is an absolute. The world is fuzzier than that, and a good documentarian uses their POV on the subject they are covering as means to get their audience to question their own POV and to debate out its assumptions.

Astroturfing Moore

Eugene posted a little piece about "Stop Michael Moore". There's actually moore to the story as a site called What Really Happened tracked down the PR firm behind it, Russo Marsh & Rogers, a GOP heavy-weight. In viral/buzz marketing circles, this is called an "astroturf campaign" -- techniques designed to simulate the appearance of a grassroots movement when there isn't one.

Harry Potter Producer Condemns Hollywood Films

Over the last couple of years, I've taken to reading Aljazerra.net as a broadening of the news coverage I consume. Imagine my surprise to find it writing about about Hollywood films. Mexican producer Alfonso Cuaron, no stranger to the indie scene, uses his Harry Potter soapbox to level some charges at Hollywood. When accused of being part of the Hollywood system he was criticizing, Cuaron replied: "That distinction is as offensive and sad as saying that the (US) Drug Enforcement Administration certifies other countries for their cooperation against trafficking, when we are really talking about the number-one producer (of drugs) in the world."