pat@hpnc.com
06-28-2007, 01:27 AM
I mentioned this in my other thread but thought it deserved a thread of its own.
Toward the end of Four Eyed Monsters, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice get a phone call from YouTube congratulating them for becoming the first filmmakers to land a feature-length narrative on the site.
The autobiographical movie, financed with $100,000 on credit cards, runs 71 minutes and has been viewed more than a half million times since it was posted on YouTube last week. The drama follows the couple's unusual dating rituals, as they abandon typical small talk and resort to writing each other paper notes.
The genius part: In the past week alone, Crumley and Buice say they've earned more than $20,000 in referral payments from sponsor Spout.com, a movie rate-and-review site that's giving the filmmakers $1 for each new recommendation for Monsters made by a site visitor.
"It's pretty insane that an independent film has made $20,000 in one week showing itself for free online," marvels Crumley, who also sells DVDs and DRM-free downloads through the Four Eyed Monsters store.
Indie filmmakers seeking success on YouTube are no longer content to bask in the validation of a few thousand viewers. Instead, these auteur-entrepreneurs are using software, crowd sourcing and "virtual studio" sites to broaden exposure for their work and make a few bucks while they're at it.
In the case of Monsters, the YouTube coup capped a shrewd 18-month campaign that began when the tech-savvy filmmakers posted behind-the-scenes episodes on their MySpace pages. Then, Crumley and Buice asked fans for help to book the movie in local theaters.
"People were commenting on the videos, then commenting on each other's comments and becoming friends with each other," says Crumley. "We wanted to take that social-networking dynamic and bring it into the offline world, so we asked everybody to give us their ZIP codes if they would like to see our film."
Fan clusters emerged in six cities. "We needed to acquire a directory of art-house theaters in those towns, so we invited our subscriber base to suggest local theaters they could imagine a movie like ours playing in. We took the problem of not knowing where we should book the film and crowd-sourced that."
Operating on the principal that people need to see a film before they shell out money to buy a DVD, Crumley and Buice staged a Second Life version of Four Eyed Monsters before landing on YouTube.
Student filmmaker Chris Mais used less elaborate means to push his motion-capture short Smile beyond the user-generated universe. After spending $1,000 and two years making the nine-minute comedy, he posted a making-of clip on his MySpace page to build his fan base, then submitted Smile to a couple dozen film festivals.
"Festival screenings took it to the next step and legitimatized Smile so it would stand out from any other video on YouTube," Mais says. "That's where I met distributors and stuff."
Shorts International signed Mais and placed Smile with iTunes. Mais says, "I've sold about 3,000 copies so far, which is pretty good considering it was just an undergraduate film I made."
Rest of article>>> http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/news/2007/06/youtubefest?currentPage=2
Toward the end of Four Eyed Monsters, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice get a phone call from YouTube congratulating them for becoming the first filmmakers to land a feature-length narrative on the site.
The autobiographical movie, financed with $100,000 on credit cards, runs 71 minutes and has been viewed more than a half million times since it was posted on YouTube last week. The drama follows the couple's unusual dating rituals, as they abandon typical small talk and resort to writing each other paper notes.
The genius part: In the past week alone, Crumley and Buice say they've earned more than $20,000 in referral payments from sponsor Spout.com, a movie rate-and-review site that's giving the filmmakers $1 for each new recommendation for Monsters made by a site visitor.
"It's pretty insane that an independent film has made $20,000 in one week showing itself for free online," marvels Crumley, who also sells DVDs and DRM-free downloads through the Four Eyed Monsters store.
Indie filmmakers seeking success on YouTube are no longer content to bask in the validation of a few thousand viewers. Instead, these auteur-entrepreneurs are using software, crowd sourcing and "virtual studio" sites to broaden exposure for their work and make a few bucks while they're at it.
In the case of Monsters, the YouTube coup capped a shrewd 18-month campaign that began when the tech-savvy filmmakers posted behind-the-scenes episodes on their MySpace pages. Then, Crumley and Buice asked fans for help to book the movie in local theaters.
"People were commenting on the videos, then commenting on each other's comments and becoming friends with each other," says Crumley. "We wanted to take that social-networking dynamic and bring it into the offline world, so we asked everybody to give us their ZIP codes if they would like to see our film."
Fan clusters emerged in six cities. "We needed to acquire a directory of art-house theaters in those towns, so we invited our subscriber base to suggest local theaters they could imagine a movie like ours playing in. We took the problem of not knowing where we should book the film and crowd-sourced that."
Operating on the principal that people need to see a film before they shell out money to buy a DVD, Crumley and Buice staged a Second Life version of Four Eyed Monsters before landing on YouTube.
Student filmmaker Chris Mais used less elaborate means to push his motion-capture short Smile beyond the user-generated universe. After spending $1,000 and two years making the nine-minute comedy, he posted a making-of clip on his MySpace page to build his fan base, then submitted Smile to a couple dozen film festivals.
"Festival screenings took it to the next step and legitimatized Smile so it would stand out from any other video on YouTube," Mais says. "That's where I met distributors and stuff."
Shorts International signed Mais and placed Smile with iTunes. Mais says, "I've sold about 3,000 copies so far, which is pretty good considering it was just an undergraduate film I made."
Rest of article>>> http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/news/2007/06/youtubefest?currentPage=2