SDI Archives

Scott Harris is an Edinburgh based documentary filmmaker who has taken part in SDI’s Bridging The Gap and Interdoc schemes. Last year he wrote two guest posts about the online release of his first film, Being Ginger, and he’s back with a case study about the crowdfunding campaign of his newest project, An American Ginger In Paris.

For the last year I’ve been planning to do a crowdfunding campaign for my second film. The biggest issue I had was trying to figure out a reasonable goal. Every campaign is different but I tried to talk to filmmakers who had raised $30,000 and $50,000 to see how big their mailing list was at the start, how much of their money came from that list, and how much came from people who were new to them. Unfortunately I found it difficult to get accurate information.

The only advice I got came from an Indiegogo presentation at Hot Docs where they suggested I figure out how much I could expect to raise from friends and family and set my goal at three times that number. But I had 2,500 people on my mailing list. I hoped I could get considerably more than that.

Last month I finished a Kickstarter campaign for my second film, An American Ginger In Paris (AAGIP), bringing in $15,788 towards a goal of $15k. I spent last week looking over the numbers to see where the money came from and thought it might interest a few others.

We launched the pay-it-forward concept with FUTURE MY LOVE at IDFA in Amsterdam a few months ago. This blog post about the thinking behind it was first published on the Huffington Post blog. We're republishing it here on the occasion of I AM BREATHING now also being available as pay-it-forward.

"To challenge economy is to challenge ourselves," says filmmaker Maja Borg. "It is far harder than complaining about the banking system." Maja's debut feature Future My Love tells a story of idealism and failure, looking at concepts for both our personal lives and society as whole. "Economy is a human relationship," states the film's tag line.

Contemplating the ideal of a world without money (or, respectively, a relationship without possessiveness), the film focuses on Jacque Fresco's ideas for an economic system in which goods, services and information would be freely available. Fresco's Venus Project (Wikipedia) and the related Zeitgeist Movement have hundreds of thousands followers worldwide. In charge of audience relations for Future My Love, I could possibly tap into a large existing community.

With a thought-provoking Scottish-Swedish co-production that has been critically acclaimed, toured international festivals for more than a year, and won a Green documentary award, what could possibly go wrong?

This summer, Scottish Documentary Institute used downloadable copies of I AM BREATHING for its theatrical Global Screening Day free from digital rights management (DRM) – and with no noticeable piracy or impact. In the first of a series of articles looking at some of the myths, challenges and opportunities around digital distribution, Nic Wistreich questions why it can still be so hard to pay to watch a film you want to see legally.

Perhaps no sector has been more involved in shifting the debate around video piracy than the TV industry. It seemingly began in late 2006, nine months after Steve Jobs had sold Pixar to Disney, joined their board and become more involved in their operations. Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney (pictured) declared at a conference that piracy was not simply a threat, but a competitor – that pirates competed on quality, price and availability. On all of these levels, she recognised, Hollywood was losing: "We don't like the model but we realise it's competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward." Hulu launched five months later and competed on all three levels with free, ad-funded, flexible streams; the BBC’s iPlayer arrived not long after.

Piracy "better than an Emmy"

Then in August this year, Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes appeared to jump the shark when he announced that piracy was "better than [winning] an Emmy." Time Warner/HBO’s Game of Thrones is one of the most-pirated TV shows of the last few years, and possibly one that has gained the most free marketing from piracy. "We’ve been dealing with this issue for literally 20-30 years,"  Bewkes said. "Our experience is, it all leads to more subs."

The difficulty with Bewkes’ argument, when related to independent feature films, is that he’s talking about episodic TV. A percentage of the people who got hooked on early episodes and seasons of Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead through pirate copies will subscribe to channels and services offering the latest episodes so they can watch them first. Their fandom expressed on Twitter and Facebook also builds awareness and might convince their non-pirating followers and friends to tune into those channels.

But one-off dramas, documentaries and features can’t benefit from these effects; a pirate stream or download will rarely translate into further money for the filmmaker other than occasionally through a future crowdfunding campaign, or platforms like Vodo or BitTorrent that let people Donate-After-View (DAV).

Michael Franklin is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Capitalising on Creativity and an industry consultant at Film Business Research. He wrote this response to Sonja Henrici's proposal of a 'Triple Bottom Line in Film?'

Sonja Henrici started a really interesting debate proposing a Triple Bottom Line in Film (TBL). The concept as I understand it involves adding social and environmental concerns, “people and planet”, to the profit bottom line. Sonja suggests the need for a template, or standard accounting practice that measures “actual cultural value”. One purpose of demonstrating “positive social action” or “positive audience engagement” is the gaining of rewards like “future investment, funding or sponsorship”. Reflection of a film’s impact additional to financial measurement is proposed as a potential avenue to satisfy funders and investors in the independent film business.

As Ben Kempas points out in comments on the post, the debate is timely given the attention on film funding in Scotland at the moment. Any institutional funding or investment for film must have a strategy behind it and underpinning such a strategy must be the intelligent use of data. As a consultant on the Virtuous Circle initiative of the Scottish Documentary Institute and an academic researcher dealing with this topic, I was kindly invited to contribute some thoughts. I am particularly focused on how the film market becomes digitally mediated through various metrics.

Amazing data visualisation of traditional metrics for film evaluation by Tom Evans (atacatcalledfrank) – could we do the same for social impact?

Clarity of Objective

There is great merit in exploring non-financial valuation frameworks for creative works. Documentary film is a perfect example and many fiction features could also claim similar worth. However, this is an area fraught with complexities and enticing tangential asides. A great deal of policy literature on public funding investigates attempts to capture the non-financial returns on cultural or creative investment. This is a broad topic that falls in and out of fashion, but is yet to define stable results. The BFI reported on cultural value of film in 2011 and the general topic continues to attract attention of institutions like the RSA. But if the aim of this initiative is a practical outcome, these wide debates are diversions and crucial distinctions need to be made to define a goal more narrowly.

Duncan Cowles, currently a volunteer in our team at Scottish Documentary Institute, made a video that, within 24 hours, had more than 350,000 views on YouTube. Can he teach us how to make things go viral?

Let me start off by saying that The Lady with the Lamp was a complete accident. It has been however, my most successful accident to date.

For those of you who haven’t seen the film here it is. (It’s only 3 minutes 49 seconds so if you don’t like it, you've not wasted too much time.)

On what was probably the only day I hadn't washed my hair in the entire year of 2010, my mum came into my bedroom to inform me that my bedside lamp was not quite up to house standards, and that I should invest in a new one. Unbeknown to her I’d been in the middle of filming what was (from what I remember) a really exciting video blog for my second year film at Edinburgh College of Art, Pooling Together. 

Anyway, I more or less forgot about the whole experience until editing where I re-discovered my mum’s interruption. I called my brother through to my room to show him. His reaction told me that at least those who knew my mum would appreciate the footage. So I took the film, at the time creatively named LAMP and showed my classmates and lecturer David Cairns alongside my hand-in piece.

“Should I bother putting effort into a film ever again?”

The general consensus was that it was miles better and more entertaining than the film I’d spent eight months making. “Should I bother putting effort into a film ever again?” I asked myself.

Showing my mum and some visiting family members was the next step. Safe to say they all (Mum included) got a good laugh out of it, and my Grandma suggested a new title, The Lady with the Lamp, named after Florence Nightingale. I was all set to attempt submitting to film festivals.

So here's an idea.

Last week I attended the Global Entrepreneurial Leaders conference, in short GEL, organised by the Scottish charity WildHearts and hosted by RBS in its campus-like headquarters in Edinburgh. As a filmmaker, it is rare to find yourself in the presence of politicians, billionaires, bankers, accountants, school kids, teachers, the third sector as well as an inspiring businesswoman from Uganda – at the same time. At the core of the conference was the idea of compassion in business and celebrating 'entrepreneurial spirit' in Scotland and beyond as a way out of economic and emotional poverty. 

How did I find myself there? A free ticket. Why I got that is less interesting than how GEL made me think and feel. Listening to WildHearts' thought leader and founder Mick Jackson (a former musician), to big-name representatives from RBS (Chris Sullivan), to the Scottish Government (John Swinney) and to Tom Hunter (pictured), digesting the discussion of entrepreneurship and values among business leaders, I got a sense that perhaps the film industry has a way to go itself, implementing 'compassion' in its processes.

Even I catch myself thinking, well, "I work in documentary, aren't we contributing enough 'compassion' or social impact, by just doing what we're doing?"

Scott Harris came to Scotland four years ago to pursue an MFA at the Edinburgh College of Art. He previously specialized in short observational documentaries but is today releasing his first feature, a personal doc called Being Ginger. Rather than attempting to screen at film festivals or sell to a broadcaster, he is releasing the film for sale directly on his website. 

When the Scottish Documentary Institute approached me to guest blog for them they suggested I might write about why I'm doing a direct release of my new documentary "rather than the festival game." The simple fact that they'd call it a game is a big part of why my film won't appear on the film festival circuit.

Instead, Being Ginger will have a joint premiere at the world's two largest redhead festivals (this weekend and next) while simultaneously being available for download direct from my website (today).

I should start by saying I'm not quite sure how I should present this. Which is to say that I am mindful of my tone. While I want to be accurate and honest, I don't want to sound bitter and angry, because I'm not. But I also don't want it to seem like this has been easy, because it's been anything but.

I'm a relatively young filmmaker, just 32 years old. I graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art two years ago with an MFA in Film. Being Ginger is my first feature. My graduation film was a 23-minute doc by the same name. It was about my experience as a redhead and my quest for love. If I may be allowed to say, it was charming, warm, and painfully honest. It screened twice, first at the college's degree show, then at a special industry screening, and both times it brought the house down. I had lofty expectations when I sent it to festivals, 35 in all, but I was nervous. Previously, I'd been very proud of my first year film only to see it rejected by every one of the 80 festivals I applied to. I privately told my friends that if the same thing happened this time I was done making films. I didn't see the point in trying to bang my head on the door hoping that someone would let me in. One friend, an industry professional who has been extremely successful with several short docs and was at both screenings, told me not to worry: "There is no way a film that gets that kind of reaction from an audience won't get picked up by some big festivals."

I sent it to most of the usual suspects, plus a few smaller festivals, and it was rejected by each and every one. A handful gave me feedback, and while I won't name names, some told me the film was just too long to program, which is fair (but they had all programmed longer shorts). Two others said there was no audience for a film about redheads.

"No audience for this"

While the film was still out to all these festivals I began to think that I had really only scratched the surface of the topic, and that I could go much deeper, so I decided to turn it into a feature. The original short would essentially become the first act, and I went on filming. I approached several broadcasters and numerous pitching forums but no one was interested. I tried not to take it personally, I was aware that there were an incredible amount of more experienced filmmakers out there, which makes it a very competitive market. Also, I have no problem admitting that for some people my film is just a hard sell. They don’t understand what it’s really about, and some people don’t want to give it a chance. You see it isn’t really a film about my hair at all, my hair is just a MacGuffin of sorts. The film is actually about something much more universal. It’s about being different and never feeling like you belong.  It’s about not having any self-confidence.  It’s about trying to get over the effects of bullying that went on long ago.  Not red-hair bullying, which most non-redheads think is funny, but the kind of nightmarish stuff that you wouldn’t wish on anyone.

But if I say I’ve made a film about bullying I’m not going to reach the audience that I want. So I decided to approach the subject with humour. My natural audience is redheads, but my hope is that it will branch out from there...

In 2006, novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow described how ‘technology giveth and technology taketh’; that for every hopeful revolution brought by our networked world there’s a downside, and for every peril, there’s potential. A nice illustration of the idea: running a search to find the article where I first read this quote gives me page after page of results linking to a no longer existing MP3 of Cory's talk, mistaken by a web-bot for a pop song, and I’m invited to send a ‘Technology Giveth Taketh Doctorow’ ringtone to my phone. So while it’s wonderful that the Internet allows you to find – without leaving your home – a recording of a lecture from years ago; it’s not great that the search is full of spam. Conversely, the issues raised in my previous blog – Peak Eyeballs and the Scarcity of Attention – at first glance are quite troubling. They suggest that not only must the independent film sector deal with the collapse of pre-sales and bank financing, with increased piracy and considerably reduced buyouts from distributors and lower acquisition prices from TV – but there’s more filmmakers competing than ever, all trying to communicate with an audience who has far more things hustling for their attention. 

But in spite of this, the global market for filmed entertainment is set to continue to grow by over 3% a year to $100bn in 2016 (PWC), and most of the challenges of the web are come hand-in-hand with benefits. So working back through some of the challenges raised in that blog post:

No limits to platform size

While there is much more competition on digital platforms, the barriers to market access have almost vanished. There is no artificial shelf space limit that prevents Amazon, iTunes, Netflix or LoveFilm from offering your film. One of the biggest frustrations for independent producers throughout the 20th century was the challenge of getting a film into a video store or cinema. In turn, the web has a potentially infinite ‘longtail’ distribution curve where hundreds of thousands of archive, niche and minority interest films combined can outperform the top 50 blockbusters at the head of the curve. (There was some academic research looking at 2000-2005 to suggest this may not apply as well to film as to books but this was done before subscription digital services like Netflix and LoveFilm took off.)

There are only so many hours in the day. Take a look – if it’s not etched already in your film business memory – at the graph of cinema admissions in the UK following the launch of television. TV's arrival, peaking in the 50s, did not herald an end to people engaging with mass-market moving image – but it dramatically changed the platform and format for where they did that.

This impact of TV on cinema, which cut admissions by some 3000% from the peak in 1946 to the very bottom in 1984, left much of the industry terrified of new distribution technology, leaving them erring on the side of caution henceforth. Indeed the first video-on-demand system running over a phone line was Zenith’s PhoneVision and was unveiled back in 1951. It aimed to offer Hollywood films direct to people's homes for a $1 a time, but in a pattern that many start-ups today could sympathise with, it never got the studio support it needed. It's understandable the majors were scared: thousands of cinemas had closed and laid empty or were turned into bingo halls and night clubs. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. But the appetite for great films didn't decline, it just moved to a different space. 

The graph is significant as it not only shows how dramatic an impact such a new ‘empowering technology’ can have on a business model, but also how slow adaptation allowed for the recovery of some lost ground. With the TV-saturated market of the 1980s and the threat of multi-channel TV and cable, cinemas began to split their screens into smaller spaces so they could show a wider range of films. It was a step backwards for the architecture but a jump forward for audiences and producers. The rise of the multiplex in the 1990s, a further unfortunate footnote in the history of architecture, helped to drive a resurgence in film-going that has not abated since, with admissions rising more than three-fold since the mid-80s and continuing to grow through recent recessions. In these adaptations, the cinemas had found that they could keep their base costs of running a building and box office roughly the same while offering more films to attract wider audiences. In other words, cinemas (eventually) evolved, much to the benefit of producers and filmgoers – and the cinemas' survival.