“Movie stars still hold an incredible value both creatively and financially,” said “Hangover” director Todd Phillips. “But it’s getting to be more about the movie and whether it delivers on the promise of its trailers and commercials.”
In that quote is an invaluable lesson in the marketing of movies and television: Marketing is a promise to the consumer. Consistently delivering on the promise keeps them coming back for more. Fail to keep the promise and they’ll hang you for it.
Every decision that goes into a production, any kind of production, is a marketing decision. In the overcrowded mediascape, marketable elements have to be built into the production from the ground up, starting in the development phase. The nature of those marketable elements will depend on the product at hand, but the very core existence of a product has to be fascinating to the intended audience, other wise that audience will never even find it.
If those elements are in place, and well executed, the marketing and advertising should be relatively straight forward. The trouble comes when the marketing team misunderstands the marketable elements of a product, and takes the message in a different direction. This leads to a schism between the voice of the marketing and the content of the product, and that never ends well.
I spent years marketing TV shows in the form of network promos. Now I find myself trying to unlearn much of what I was taught 15 years ago. I was trained how to use dynamic editing and copy writing to create a hook for entertainment products that had no hook of their own. There were long meetings and hours of revisions to make a promo feel glitzier, sexier, and more exploitative. It didn’t matter if the show would never live up to those expectations. That was the programming department’s problem.
These days I work on the marketing for movies and TV shows that I also produce and distribute. I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t use those old TV promo tricks to build marketable elements into a production after the fact. The media savvy audience always knows when we’re bullshitting, and they hang us for it every time.
The “hybrid” that Mr. Schneider is referring to already has a name: Infotainment.
There is virtually no appetite for feature length documentaries anymore, no matter how deep they delve into important subject matter. Pure information is no longer marketable, so information has been packaged into entertainment products and propaganda.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. The resurgence in feature docs a few years ago was fueled by Michael Moore, the master of feature length infotainment. Moore’s narrative style and the high concept techniques of reality TV have completely rewritten the aesthetic rules of documentary entertainment.
You want to start a dialogue about obesity in America? Package it as a first person attack on the world’s largest fast food chain (Supersize Me.) Or better yet package it as a contest series where people compete to lose weight (The Biggest Loser.)
You want college kids to pay attention to political news? Package it as ironic satire, with John Stewart or Stephan Colbert in the anchor chair.
The entire entertainment industry has been whittled down to the packaging of marketable elements into a consumer friendly form. I don’t mean this to sound entirely derogatory. Sometimes the packaging is well executed, and the information delivery is effective. The Food Network and Discovery Channel are pretty good at this. But the need for consumer friendly packaging makes it tough to go deep into more sensitive subject matter, which in turn puts more emphasis on the lighter fare that fills the cable networks.
For those few consumers who want more information and less packaging, there’s always Errol Morris, but he’s the last of a dying breed.
I’m not an engineer, so I don’t understand the technicalities of this, but Michael Jackson almost killed the Internet. People who do understand the technicalities are saying this is just a sample of how the Internet would be crippled it there were an actual large scale calamity.
Every time I start rambling about Internet delivered video, someone always says, “What about the bandwidth?” I live under the naive assumption that Internet bandwidth expands constantly under some kind of Moore’s Law equation, but I guess that’s not true. Does this hinder the eventuality that much of the video content that we consume will come through the Internet?
Yoo Star packages a web camera, a portable green screen, and basic post production software into a consumer friendly interface for under $200. They give you a handful of scenes from actual movies to green screen your self into. It sounds mildly amusing, but its ludicrous to think this gimmick has the same kind of licensing potential as Guitar Hero.
Are the studios not seeing the same demos of the Microsoft Natal that I am? I assume that the studio’s would be clamoring all over themselves to license movies to Microsoft for integration with motion capture and artificial intelligence technology. I don’t want a half-ass green screen of myself in “Witness.” I want to be Batman, acting opposite Heath Ledger’s Joker. I don’t know how far away we are from that possibility, but its gotta suck to be Yoo Star right now. They’re selling a web cam and a green screen while the video game industry is building the Holodeck.
Here are two predicted downsides for the studios that contributed footage to Yoo Star:
A) Yoo Star will overwhelmingly be used to make fun of your movies. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that:
B) Yoo Star encourages uploading of the resulting videos! Its built into the marketing plan! I thought the studios had an aversion to uninhibited uploading of their movies? Now they risk filling the internet with inferior fan made versions of famous movie scenes, most of which will be making fun of the movies and their characters.
That seems like a lose lose for the studios, and its probably not worth whatever licensing fee they’re getting.
I ran across this short article in Video Business covering an event called the Digital Video Conference. There are countless digital media conferences these days, and substantial debate about Internet delivered video. These debates tend to be too myopic, or overly broad, and the terminology becomes cross purposed and conflicted.
First of all, I’m often unsure what is meant by “Internet video.” Does that mean video that I watch on my computer screen? Or does that mean video content delivered to my living room TV via the Internet? Those are two different phenomenon, and the broad debate over Internet video often ignores that these are two potentially different business models.
Secondly, Hulu gets injected into these debates because of the perceived success of the site. In this Video Business article, Hulu is labeled as an “aggregator” as opposed to “network programmers” like NBC or Fox. This a confusing generalization because A) Hulu is owned by the “network programmers” in a joint venture between News Corp, NBC Universal, and Disney. B) The network programmers are themselves a form of aggregator. They’re actually “packagers,” but that’s a fine distinction in this media landscape. If Hulu debuts an original production, they’ll be a “packager” too.
I don’t know how Internet delivered video will shake down for independent producers, but right now it smells a bit like the DVD boom of the early 2000s. The big conglomerate media companies paid for the development of the DVD format, remastered their back catalogs, spent millions marketing the format to consumers, and created a retail valuation. Once that infrastructure was in place, independent producers were able to exploit the new medium and sell movies to millions of consumers they didn’t previously have access to. If those producers had spent more time building brands and establishing better relationships with consumers, the transition to Internet video delivery might not be so daunting. Instead they turned the DVD market into “shovelware” by glutting retail shelves with too many mediocre movies. Now retail is dying, and few of those producers have the kind of direct customer relationships that equal sales on the Internet. They’re waiting for the studios to set up an Internet infrastructure that they can slide into, wondering if lighting will strike twice.
By the way, lightning does strike the same place twice, all the time.
This week I’m back to work on “Godkiller,” Halo-8’s first Illustrated Film. An Illustrated Film is a highly stylized animated movie that mixes original graphic novel illustrations with motion graphics and dramatic voice performances to create an edgy new style of story telling. Its like Liquid Television meets Ralph Bakshi, allowing us to tackle stories that we wouldn’t be able to do with video.
Halo-8 doesn’t have experience producing animated titles, so I didn’t have a post production work flow in place. I sought advice from a couple of people who work with traditional animation, then tried to adapt that work flow to Illustrated Films. The VO recording was handled by The Engine Room in Hollywood. We recorded the voice actors in separate sessions as “wild lines,” meaning there was no cut picture for them to reference. After the session, I would get the audio files organized by script page, which left me with the chore of compiling all the takes together. Basically, I gather each take of every line of dialogue and stack them on top of each other in the timeline. When all of the takes are compiled, I have what I call the “Take Matrix.” There can be anywhere from 2 to 12 takes of every line. By putting each take on a subsequent audio track, I can solo individual tracks and quickly hear every take of a line. After the Take Matrix is assembled, I go through every take and copy the select take to track one. When I’m done with that process, track one represents a completely compiled performance for that actor using the best read of each line. If I need to make tweaks, I can easily go back into the Take Matrix and audition other reads.
This was especially useful in working with Lance Henriksen’s performance. Lance likes to do long takes and fall into a groove. He’ll do a bunch of these long takes, kind of riffing on the dialogue and making subtle variations along the way. His compiled dialogue performance ended up with a lot of edits because I went deep into mixing and matching his variations, pulling individual phrases of a monologue from several different takes. It makes for a really dynamic voice performance.
"Take Matrix" for Lance Henriksen's performance in Godkiller.
Once you’ve got a Take Matrix for each actor, its very easy to combine all of the actors selected takes into the final dialog track for the film. You just go to track one of the Take Matrix for each actor, copy from the compiled performance on track one, and paste the dialog into the master edit. Its easy to make tweaks as necessary by going back to the Take Matrix and auditioning new lines.
I spent much of last week authoring the DVD for “POP SKULL,” a new release from Halo-8. Pop Skull is a manic, twisted, drug-infused and award-winning psychological horror film directed & co-written by Adam Wingard (“HOME SICK”), starring & co-written by newcomer Lane Hughes, co-written and co-produced by E.L. Katz (”AUTOPSY“), and produced by Peter Katz (”MORTUARY“). These guys made a great film in Pop Skull, and Director Adam Wingard went the extra mile on special features for the DVD. Special features can quickly turn into a wank, especially the formulaic publicity schlock that ends up on many DVDs from the major studios. But not for Pop Skull. Adam gave us seven short films, nine deleted scenes, on-camera intros for each of the deleted scenes, a short documentary featurette on the origins of Pop Skull, an audio commentary with himself and the film’s star Lane Hughes, DVD menu backgrounds using elements of from the film, and still photos of the lead actors for the DVD cover. Its all well crafted, and in perfect sync with the aesthetic of the film. Pop Skull is definitely a film geek’s DVD, and we are excited to be involved.
The DVD comes out July 28th from Halo-8. Here’s the trailer:
The saying goes, “Good, fast, cheap. Pick two.” Its a clever anachronism, and broadly applicable to a wide range of endeavors. I doubt that it was coined to describe working in TV and movie production, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard it used over the years. Trouble is, it makes less and less sense every day. In fact, In the revised landscape of media 2.0, its straight up nonsense.
Let’s break this saying down into its parts:
“Good” - The definition of “good” is entirely dependent on the expectations of the audience. In the fractured, niche driven mediascape of cable TV and web video, where most video professionals do their work, “good” content is that with an authentic voice and a unique point of view. If the production values are positioned to support authenticity, then the content will have value to the viewer. So “good” really means “good for what it is.” Or more accurately, “good for the market in which the content competes.”
“Fast” - Once you’ve figured out how to satisfy your market place, you need a system for the consistent release of timely content. The zeitgeist moves too quickly for us to spend two years producing a movie, TV series, or webisode, and releasing quality content at regular intervals is the only way to stay visible in the vast ether of niche media. If you miss a couple of release opportunities, the fan base generated by your debut will quickly forget that you exist.
“Cheap” - The price of HD prosumer equipment has fallen sharply over the years, so there’s less excuse for video production to be costly. Decide what kind of production value your marketplace demands and produce accordingly. If you drastically over produce, then you end up with a system that can’t sustain the consistent release of material, and your beautiful production values will disappear into the ether. You’re better off using modest resources to build a following, then expanding the production values as applicable.
