Tiny Furniture premiers at this year’s SXSW narrative competition. The film is written, directed and stars Lena Dunham, who has been one of my favorites since I came across her project Creative Nonfiction. Go Lena!
But how to find them? I have a dream…
Few days back I read this rather interesting post on how to make a screening of your indie flick a festivity of sorts, in order to bring more folks in to see it (by Mike Vogel, maker of The waiting list, guest posting at Truly Free Film). Great ideas and inexpensive. As it happens I like telling people that they have great ideas (and if you don’t you’re a mean, cold fish), so I joined the discussion in the comments. Well, not so much the discussion as general congratulatory thread (nothing wrong with that). And we shortly discussed the following idea.
On a long list of cheap film-promotion activities (more on that soon), I have one which includes cross-promotion with another film via, among other things, trailers. The idea is thus: you pick a sort of sister-film for your film, based on ideas, style, the filmmaker, whatever indicates that people interested in your film could be interested in the other one and vice versus. It’s a basic fundament of all amazons and ebays: “people who bought this book were also interested in…”
Big studios do it too: they chose carefully the films, before which their trailers appear.
The grandest implementation of this idea in terms of art is perhaps last.fm – built, at least originally, to make it easy to find new music based on the music you already listened to and liked, based on what your friends like and a crowd-sourced system of recommendations.
And that’s the dream: last.fm for indie film trailers. It will perhaps remain a dream, although a system of this sort is readily available (it’s called libre.fm, and it’s an open source version of last.fm as well as the answer to the later service going slightly too… proprietary). The costs of hosting of that many film clips would, however, be insane. Youtube is not coming even, so what chances do we have. Actually, it’s pretty much only Apple, who can afford to host consistent catalogue of trailers and we all know where their heart lays when it’s comes to indie vs studio.
So for now I’m just throwing it out here as something to think about.
Browse Timeline
Comments ( 2 )
I definitely agree that good discovery services (like Last.fm) can be even more useful independent films than for more well-known ones. At Jinni (sometimes called ), our focus is on helping people find films they’ll enjoy beyond the blockbusters everyone is talking about; and to that end, we’re working all the time to expand our catalog.
Phoebe added these pithy words on
Mar 08 10 at
11:37 am
I had a hard time deciding whether this wasn’t a spam comment, but since the service is relevant lets go for it.
I gave the service a simple try:
typed “monty python” in the search > chose “the meaning of life” > looked at “more like this”…
3 “Biggest” answers: 2 other monty python movies and “da ali g show” – I mean, seriously? Second page of results slightly better – Peep Show and Gorge Carlin “Life is worth losing” film… I know it’s early days, but I don’t quite understand how the referencing works here, and why is it not up to user recommendations. Perhaps it’s too early? But I couldn’t find the way to vote on the particular reference link.
As far as indies go: The exploding Girl was in, Tiny Furniture wasn’t. Not sure how much of a community can there be around a service so proprietary in its judgements?
ana added these pithy words on
Mar 11 10 at
2:44 pm