Here’s a really interesting article and study on social video from the good folks at iMedia Connection – what you spend, and what value you get in return.  Check it out at iMedia Connection.

In 2008, actress-writer-director-producer Illeana Douglas created the IKEA-sponsored web series Easy To Assemble.  Three seasons and a handful of awards later, she is kind enough to discuss the origins of her show, the brand sponsorship, and much more.  If you haven’t seen Easy, here’s the pilot episode, or go to the series’ website to watch and learn more.

The show follows Illeana as she quits her Hollywood career and goes to work at IKEA Burbank in an attempt at a ‘normal life.’  However, your past is often more difficult to leave behind than you think.  Especially when Hollywood craziness with its gossip columnists, stalkers, and celebrity friends follows you.  Can Illeana assimilate in ‘civilian’ life and prove that ‘art is where you make it?’

John:  How did the series come about?  More so the creative, the concept, leaving your Hollywood life – how did that spark?

Illeana:  Well, I’ve always grappled with the idea of trying to make movies and also maintaining the idea of celebrity and being at the right place and photographed at the right time.  And I was never really comfortable with that.  What happened was when I first started getting successful things like that were not important.  And then it became important.

So in my early career, I remember being in movies, and you’d go to a film festival – it was so

Dummy premieres at Toronto

much fun.  So much fun.  I mean the early days of the Toronto Film Festival were just insane.  It was a combination of great movies, too much drinking, hook-ups – just everything, everything I got into show biz for, you know?  And then this change started to come about starting, I think, with the IMDB Ratings, obsession with how old you were, what your rating was.  And then the foreign market started depending on, “Well, we need more famous people.”  And then the whole indie market starts changing where suddenly you have to be incredibly famous.  I’m losing parts to Anjelica Houston.  The whole bottom of the indie market just started to fall apart.

From Supermarket

I was in a supermarket and I was with somebody and he was also a big indie star and they [the supermarket employees] were complimenting us – and we were completely out of work at the time.  And we were thinking, it’s funny, that’d be a funny idea – he’s going on and on and you pull out and realize we actually work at the supermarket.  And my friend said, you have to make that.  You have to make that into a movie.  And I said I’m just kidding around.  And he said no, no, I’m serious, that’s a brilliant idea, you’ve got to do that.  And so I made the short movie and it sort of took off from there.

That was the original creative part.  It was based on something that was really going on.  And now we’re sort of at the apex of it where my friend Kevin Pollack says we’re now in this celebrity culture where we’re now in the Roman amphitheater where it’s thumbs up or thumbs down.  As I say in the first season of the show, it was fun to be famous when no one was famous, but now everybody is famous and I’m obsolete.  So we’re living in a society now where we all get awards, we’re all famous, and whether or not you’re an actor is really meaningless.  I mean, you’re an actor, so what?  Do you have a good sex tape?  Do you have anything other than being a good actor?  What’s your brand?

So all these things I’m grappling with myself mentally, I put into the show.  And eventually, I’m probably going to start writing movies, but I feel like when you first start out writing it can be very autobiographical.  And I do think that’s there a voice that’s missing in comedy that’s not the gross out humor, but that’s more like a female Curb Your Enthusiasm.  That’s the area I like to maintain.  That’s what I think I write about.

I like romantic comedies that are not sort of sappy, but that appeal to people who feel sort of lost and out of the mainstream and go around thinking, “Is it just me?”  Because I feel like there is this generation of people who feel that way but don’t want to admit it – who are incredibly uncool in this new cool world where you have to be hip.  I actually feel people have more of a tendency to wear their heart on their sleeve, but you don’t see that in movies too many times now.  Especially with women lately the trend is that everybody has to be uber cool and hip and have snappy retorts and all that.

John:  How did the partnership with IKEA come about?  Were you out pitching brands or…?

Illeana:  Yes, I was.  I did a pilot called Illeanarama, and I did a short film which was called Supermarket.  Then I did a series where I compiled all of my short films for the Sundance Channel and I called it Illeanarama.  I said I want to do something like Supermarket because you could get a brand to sponsor the entire show.  I wanted it to be like a variety show but the difference being that it wasn’t going to be stand-up comedians doing the variety, it was going to be actors doing the comedy.  Actors doing funny stuff.  So I compiled all these shorts and I was going around pitching that, but that didn’t go anywhere.

And eventually I did this pilot called Illeanarama which was based on this premise that I worked at this supermarket called Supermarket Of The Stars.  Ed Begley was in it and Justine Bateman.  I got Jerry Mathers who was the Beaver and Jane Lynch.  And it was the juxtapositioning of celebrities being in the supermarket versus the regular people that work there.  We did the pilot and it didn’t go.  Interestingly, it spawned a bunch of shows that were just like my show.  There were a bunch of shows that then came out that were about supermarkets.  And movies.  There was Employee Of The Month, Ten Items Or Less, there was suddenly this proliferation of supermarket shows.  But they always shied away from the idea of actress or celebrity working in the supermarket – that always bothered them.  So then I went around to actual supermarkets like Whole Foods and Vons and all these people thought I was out of my mind.  They were like, “A show… in a supermarket…?  I don’t think so.”

I was just pitching it and pitching it and pitching it and eventually I got this call…  I was asked to pitch something to Ford, a series of funny commercials to Ford utilizing this car.  I remember going and talking to them, but it didn’t go anywhere.  Then the next thing I knew was I got this call saying do you want to meet the people from IKEA?  They were interested in doing interstitials.  So I met with them.  We were talking about what we wanted to do, and the more we continued to talk, I said, “What about this idea of doing this show where I work for IKEA?”  And I wrote the script and I said I’ll try to reach out to some people I know and see if they’ll do it.  It was such a new idea at the time on the internet that I was able to get Tom Arnold and Jeff Goldblum and Justine who was completely into it and wanted to do the show.  So I wrote it and I just had as many people as I possibly could come do it.

Cheri Oteri at the Easy To Assemble premiere

It was probably wildly ahead of its time.  Of course now it’s, oh, a web series, everybody’s got to have a web series.  But at the time it did seem pretty crazy.  When we got our second year pick-up, it started to get that people were approaching me saying, “I really want to be in it.”  Like Cheri Oteri, she saw it and said I really think it’s funny and I really want to be in it.  So people started coming to me and saying I want to be in it, which was great.  It gave me this opportunity to be a comedy writer without having to go through all the steps of rejection like I’d done before…my three failed pilots that didn’t go anywhere.  It was great.  It was like 1950s television where, basically, the only thing that’s branded about the show is that we all work for IKEA.  And that’s kind of what makes it funny.

I think there’s something humorous about the brand.  So doing a show at IKEA for some reason works.  I don’t know if it would necessarily work for another department store like Macy’s.  We all work at Macy’s!  And it’s hysterical!  Although I wouldn’t turn them down – if they wanted me to write a show for them I certainly wouldn’t turn them down.  But there’s something so kookie about the Swedish-ness of IKEA that it seems like you could believe that I would go there to work.  And a lot of what is put into the script is semi-true.  It’s either based on things that are part of IKEA culture or part of what’s going on in my life.

John:  Is IKEA, as far as the creative side, are they involved creatively a lot, or are they more “here’s the check, now go make the show”?

Illeana:  They’re involved creatively in the sense of the basic things – you can’t disparage the brand.  However, they’ve been kind of

Illeana and Tom Arnold

unbelievable in what they let me do.  They know I’m pushing the envelope as much as possible.  Their thing is as long as it has a twinkle in the eye and it’s family friendly.  I told this story to the LA Times.  I had waited a couple of years to tell it, but it was an absolutely true story.  I had written in Tom Arnold, who is my friend in real life, too, and we’ve done all these movies together and hung out together and been photographed on the red carpet together.

So I said let’s write in this story line together where you’re trying to get me to rev up my career by doing a sex tape video with you.  So what happens is that we do the sex video and it does not turn out well.  I say I’ve got to go to work.  And you pull back to reveal that we’ve done the entire thing in one of the living rooms in IKEA in Burbank.  Now we really did that.

When IKEA read it, their only note was that I couldn’t say “sex video”.  I could just say “video”.  When we shot it, we were scantily clad with shoppers coming by.  The only requirement was that we could not block the aisles.  The fact that Tom and I – I’m in lingerie and Tom’s in boxer shorts – and we’re shooting it in the middle of an IKEA, and kids are watching, seems to be perfectly fine as long as people can still get to the bedding section.  So in that sense, they’ve been amazing.

The main concern is always that we’re not disrupting the shoppers or the shopping process or causing any kind of danger to anyone shopping.  As far as the editorial content goes, I always pitch them the general idea of the script, where I’m gonna go.  I don’t just throw something at them.  I don’t swear – I try not to swear.  So that’s hard.  I have to think of things like, “I wonder if they’re going to let me say ‘ass’” and things like that.  I try to keep it family friendly, but there’s a lot of innuendo in the show.  And I find that that goes along with the brand.  I think it’s a kind of a cheeky brand.  And I think certain brands – Virgin Airlines, Jet Blue, Starbucks – have a more cheeky presence probably more than Wal-Mart or something like that.  I’m just guessing.  I don’t know if you could do a lot of innuendo at Wal-Mart.  That seems more middle America.  There’s something about IKEA where they want to be stylish and hip and all those things so it works.

John:  Yeah – I read something, maybe the LA Times thing, where you said everyone you know is looking to work with a brand.  Why do you think that is?

Illeana:  Currently they are, yeah.  Because at the time I was first starting to talk to brands, even they didn’t know what I was talking about.  Two years later I was meeting with companies that represented brands.  I met with the company that represented Heineken that put together the whole Mad Men – Heineken deal.  Now I think the reason people are looking for a brand is that it’s a way to fund something quickly where there’s a benefit for the brand, certainly, and there’s a benefit for the artist.  I think that if they go hand in hand, you can actually do some great content.  But I know a lot of people come to me now and say, “I have this idea and what brand do you think would be interested in it?”  And those days are almost already over.  Now you’ve got companies or advertising agencies that are so savvy – like there was this little window like there was with indie films where I could get right to the brand.  But that has gone away.  That has been sealed up again by the advertising agencies or the distributors.  They want to go to the brands.  You know, the last thing anybody ever wants is for the artist to have direct control with the money.  The fact is, that’s what I have learned.  Because that’s the most dangerous thing.  Because an artist will be like I’ll do that whole thing for a hundred grand!  The advertising agency wants to tell the brand give us a million dollars and then we’ll go out and get this person and that person.

It’s the same thing with the distributor.  Some of these distribution outlets now online basically stole the idea from the artist, like myself, that is just looking for a way to do content online.  And they were like – oh this is a great idea!  We will go to brands, we’ll say that we produced all this stuff that we’re simply distributing, and you give us x, y, and z and we’ll go out and hire the talent and all that and of course for a quarter of the cost.  That’s kind of what’s going on right now.  That’s why you see a lull in branded entertainment because people are locking up their brands right now – removing that relationship that the artist has with the brand, which I think is too bad.  Unless you can create your own brand.  Unless you can become your own Adam Carolla or your own Tom Green or your own Dane Cook.  And somebody can see what they are and they’re an identifiable thing and then a motor oil company or – brands will start pursuing you.

John:  The Dane Cook thing, another thing I wanted to ask you about.  He’s kind of known in comedy circles as being one of the first people to get really really big primarily through social media – Facebook, at the time MySpace.

Illeana:  Yeah, yeah.

John:  Like on Twitter, now I think somebody like Rob Delaney or Megan Amram, who are incredibly funny, were like the Twitter kids who got big because of Twitter, or by using Twitter.  Whereas Dane was in the old days MySpace-Facebook.  I follow you on Twitter and so I find out what’s up with the show, stuff like that–

Illeana:  So you know that I hung out with Jo Anne Worley, which is just the coolest.  You know how hip I am.

John:  Yes.  I am impressed and jealous.  But my question is, you’ve got content and you’re distributing it over the web – do you like Twitter as a tool for distribution or promotion?

Illeana:  I was sort of doing it for the show, not really for myself, but then as the Easy To Assemble show started to progress I thought – wait a minute, I’m devoting so much time to the Easy To Assemble blogs, I should probably take more time to do my own thing, my own varied interests, etcetera.

So this year, this season, is when I started for the first time doing it more and more.  I do feel like I have a strong point of view.  You can’t compete with the giants, the Steve Martins, but every once in a while it’s exciting, you get in there with a good tweet that somebody retweets.  I think it’s good because I think the future of real estate is in figuring out how to create this little tribe around you.  Because they’re going to support you when other people say oh I don’t know if he’s so sellable.  And again, somebody like Tom Green is the perfect example of that.  It’s as if his career stalled but by going on the road and doing his own thing he maintains probably a more successful career and he doesn’t have to be at the mercy of this production, that production.  He can maintain a living and in a sense rebuild his own credibility as an actor and as an artist.

NOISE!

So that’s where I think the time we’re in right now is.  For somebody like me or somebody like Kevin Pollack, I do think the tweeting is very important.  For me, establishing myself as being a being a writer and producer and also being someone who is funny and can write funny and eventually, rather than trying to force a script you wrote down someone’s throat, you can see the evidence of it online.  So in that sense I find it’s become easier.

I think the overnight sensations are always going to be the overnight sensations.  I don’t know how you compete with an overnight sensation.  I mean the girls with their makeup tips, stuff like that.  You can’t create that.  Then you get into this other issue where you have these people like the Kardashians and Real Housewives and the proliferation of what is real and what is not real is somewhat troubling right now.  We’re inundated with it and there’s so much noise it’s difficult then to find a space.
John:  That actually leads to another question – there’s a bizillion videos uploaded to YouTube and everywhere else every minute.  There’s a bizillion people on Twitter.  There’s all this noise, like you said.  You have a show that people actually watch.  Most of these videos nobody ever sees.  Was it instantly successful in getting people to watch it?  Did IKEA help promote it?  How did you get people initially to watch it and has the audience built over time?

Illeana:  Yes, it definitely built over time.  I think it was a combination of my quirky fan base, people who liked me, people who liked Justine Bateman, the quality of the show.  And then also there’s this built in audience for people who like IKEA.  This was another epiphany that I had, and we hadn’t gotten to that point yet, where I’m always saying to them that IKEA needs its own channel.  The IKEA Channel.  Which would be Easy To Assemble, it could also have DIY.

In the future my belief is that – like in TV we have the SyFy Channel and TLC and Lifetime – what we’re going to see is that on the web.  There’s a guy on the web who has a network that is all horror.  They do low budget horror – it’s all about horror.  And you can find a niche audience for that.  So I see that as being the future.  If you like IKEA, and obviously millions of people like IKEA, you will probably like my show.  You see these shows, like Morning Joe on MSNBC, it’s a show that’s entirely sponsored by Starbucks Coffee.  It’s actually a great show, it’s on really early in the morning and when I can’t sleep I watch it.  It’s incredibly free-wheeling and probably the only reason they can keep it on the air is that all they have to do is drink Starbucks Coffee constantly.

Who knows, maybe it’s freeing to have a brand.  What I’m not as crazy about are the shows where they suddenly shove the brand down your throat, where it’s not integrated into the show properly.  I just kind of see that as the future.  You know, Red Bull sponsors sporting events.  So I’ve talked to them about developing a sports show.  I think the sports network is going online.  You could do sports shows.  Say you’re a tennis fan and you have a sitcom you want to do about tennis.  That’s not going to make it on the air.  There’s no way.  The odds are…  But say you want to take half that budget and do that show on the online tennis channel – I think that, as artists, that’s what we’re all balancing.  Do I want to work and get paid less but at least have people see my stuff?  I think that’s the climate we’re in right now.  The alternative is that you could try to write a great script every year and try to pitch it, but the odds of that to me seem so astronomical, that cultivating an online audience seems to be easier – if you’re good.  You’re always going to get the haters, as they say, but I suppose that’s part of it.  And I don’t think IKEA is going to take me off the air because one person out of two hundred doesn’t like the show or doesn’t like something that’s in it.

[Here is Illeana winning a Streamy Award for East To Assemble.]

John:  Writing and directing and acting in your own show seems like a lot of work.  You’re probably not gonna get rich off of a web show at this point.  So are you motivated by just wanting to work, or you need to this story or you need to tell your stories or a combination of all those things?

Illeana:  I think it’s a combination of all those things.  You’ve got this limited amount of time to tell stories.  It’s very hard not to get bogged down in wanting to be successful and be celebrated and have your things be celebrated.  But on the other hand I think it’s important to just work.  I’m just a big believer in that.  It’s important to work.

And people will see your movies.  They’ll find them, they’ll discover them.  I think of all the things I’ve discovered on YouTube.  Long dead performances where I’m like, “This guy’s a genius.”  It would have been better to discover them when they were alive, but I think you have a responsibility to try – to try to maintain your work and your voice as an artist.  If you think you have something valid to say, that is.  If you want to be famous then I think that’s a completely different ball game.  But all of this for me also goes hand in hand with wanting to make movies.  You know, I love movies and I love acting and I love telling stories.  But there does seem to be a somewhat limited opportunity right now to make movies.  So if you don’t do this then what is the alternative?  That’s what I always say.

Plus it gives me the opportunity to write something for Craig Bierko or Ed Begley, some of these characters, or Fred Willard.  Fred

Patricia Heaton on the set

Willard is a childhood idol.  So to be able to call him and then talk to him about a part I want to write for him and then have him be on the show is amazing.  To me that’s what’s so great.  Or Patricia Heaton, Kevin Pollack, all of these great people who have been on the show.  And as we go into season four, I meet people and say would you like to be on the show – it’s getting easier.  Kevin Pollack used to say – and I’m quoting Kevin Pollack too much – but he used to say it’d be like jury duty to try to get someone to be on your web show.  But it’s getting easier and easier now because people definitely see the viability of it.  You could come in and you can actually play a character on the show that’s a well written character – on my show.  There’s certainly other things on the web, there’s stuff that runs the gamut.  But my show is specifically a kind of indie film fest.

When Cheri Oteri was on the show, people really liked that part.  David Henrie and Tim Meadows – people always talk about when they were on the show.  So I get a lot of compliments for people just doing something different.  Patricia Heaton playing a Swedish mom.  Sung Kang, who is an action guy, coming on and doing comedy.  So I try to offer an alternative – something the person’s never really done before.

John:  That’s great.  All great.  I really admire how you’ve taken control of your career and your art.  Keep on rocking and thanks so much again for doing this!

Illeana:  Thank you!

–

Go check out Easy To Assemble if you haven’t already, and thanks again to Illeana for taking the time!

Case Studies In Social Storytelling examines past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling.

Jeff, a truly unique take on Jeffrey Dahmer, will be making its premiere at the prestigious and super-fun SXSW Film Festival this March in Austin, Texas.  If you’re down there, come out and see AboutFace director Chris James Thompson’s fearless Dahmer film.  Then grab a bite and a drink in one of the world’s most delicious and rocking cities.

Read more about the film via Duane Dudek and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Check out this article from the good folks at Fruition Interactive about Coca Cola’s plan to vastly increase their storytelling-based marketing over the next eight years, moving from ads to stories.  They even use the term “Dynamic Storytelling”, which you can also find on AboutFace’s home page, where it’s been for a few years now, just waiting for the world to catch on.

On the 15th, we pointed out the good job McDonald’s had done with their Supplier Stories videos.  Not amazing, but solid, certainly.  Now, the Huffington Post has an update on the McDonald’s Stories campaign… and it ain’t pretty.  While it’s important to make good video content, this is an instructive (and, honestly, pretty funny) lesson not in video content but in disseminating that video content through the social web.

This is a horror story in the realm of content marketing.

Bah-dah-bah-bah-bah…oh no what have we done?!

UPDATE:  More stories (and examples of negative tweets with the #McDStories hashtag) at The Daily Mail and Business Insider.  (Thanks to Dave and Teddy for the tips.)

This is an interesting article from the Columbia Journalism Review about documentary filmmakers working in Reality TV… and getting paid for it?!  Unreal!

(Note: They get paid when they work for us, too.)

Check out the cool Pitchfork.TV series Classic that starts by telling the story behind The Flaming Lips’ celebrated album The Soft Bulletin.  It’s a compelling rock ‘n’ roll documentary living online.  And it’s sponsored by branded content genius company Vans (who sponsored sports documentary classic Dogtown And Z-Boys).

This is interesting.  McDonald’s is using documentary-style video to tell the stories of the farmers and other real people who supply their restaurants with meat and veggies.  Real people’s stories to connect the audience to the brand + documentary + web optimization = has someone been reading AboutFace’s mail?  Either way, they’re doing a good job.  Almost as good as we do.

Jeff Feuerzeig, acclaimed director of documentaries like The Devil And Daniel Johnston and a friend of AF, is on a bit of a roll.  His excellent short documentary The Dude (which you can watch at the USA Network and/or read an interview with Jeff on it here) has been chosen for the Anarchy section of this year’s Slamdance Film Festival.  AND…  His monster hit documentary for ESPN Films, The Real Rocky, has been named one of the top 20 documentaries of 2011 by the respected and admired Documentary Blog.  The Real Rocky is about Chuck Wepner, the man who inspired Sylvester Stallone’s classic boxing film, Rocky.

So, congrats to Jeff.  He is rocking.

Here’s an interesting article from the director of marketing at Sharethrough on “What’s in Store For Social Video in 2012″.  And it was written in late 2011, so if any of it comes true, this guy has literally predicted the future!

” 2012 will be the year that online video gets so big China borrows a ton of money from it and it also becomes a more potent source of alternative energy than oil with the environmental impact of solar.”

- Someone who is kidding and is assigning living characteristics to a non-living entity.

But, really, what will 2012 look like for online video?  Growth?  Big growth?  Disruptively massive growth?
I don’t know, but this Tubefilter article suggests it’s gonna be pretty darned big.

Will this be the year that the Internet finally takes down TV once and for all?
I think not, given that from the beginning of time, people have needed stories in their lives, and TV is both a source and outlet for them.  But venture capitalist Mark Suster argues that TV is going down…eventually.

Do all these statistical reports for online video views (see the video above) include all the times people watch porn?
For the answers to this and other mysteries, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how 2012 plays out.

Happy New Year from AboutFace Media and the Internet and Online Video (the non-porn kind) and bears and mountains.  See you in 2012.

Rock The Bells is a documentary made by AboutFace directors Denis Henry Hennelly and Casey Suchan summarized on IMDB as “An inside look at what it took to bring the Wu-Tang Clan together for their final performance at the Rock the Bells Hip-Hop festival.”  The film premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, played the Chicago International Film Festival as well as Slamdance and hit theaters in 2007.  You can find it on DVD on Netflix or at your local video store (if there is still a local video where you live).

But that’s all results of making the movie.  We’ve got Denis and Casey here, and we’re going to talk more about making the movie and the story behind the story on screen.  (Full disclosure:  I was an executive producer on Rock The Bells, but that doesn’t mean when I say RTB is an excellent film that I’m exaggerating.  It is an excellent film.)

John:  How did you get this project going, how did it come about?

Casey:  Denis and I had been producing hip hop documentaries for a few years at QD3 Entertainment.  In 2004, we went out on our own to start doing projects where we could see

Chang (left) and the GU Crew

our vision all the way through.  We read an article in the LA Weekly about the upcoming Rock The Bells hip hop festival, and it said that the Wu Tang Clan was going to be there – together with a diverse lineup of supporting acts – and we thought it would make an interesting concert DVD.  So we met with Chang (the concert’s founder, promoter, and financier).  We realized that putting the festival together was a dramatic story worth telling, and Chang and his crew were compelling characters.  There was something in their underdog, D.I.Y. risk-everything spirit that encapsulated everything we’d come to appreciate about hip hop culture.

In our initial meeting we agreed to start shooting right away because the concert was only two weeks away. Getting Wu-Tang together seemed impossible; it was something promoters simply didn’t attempt anymore because so many had been burned trying.  We shot every meeting.  And simultaneously, Denis and I started watching concert docs like Woodstock and Gimme Shelter, thinking about the most compelling way to tell this story.  The day of the show we scrambled together a lot of excellent people who were willing to work for what little money we had, and they brought their cameras and shot.  Twenty cameras.  We shot from 8am that morning to 4am that night.  Then the editing began.

John:  In the film, Chang and company put up guerrila marketing-style posters on the sides of roads, stuff like that, so the advertising doesn’t feel corporate.  Did you do that kind of marketing for the film itself?  Do you think that kind of street cred, street team style of marketing works?

Denis:  We used street teams and promoted it that way, yeah.  It was before the explosion of Facebook. With our subsequent film, Bold Native, we were able to sell out screenings all across America just using Facebook.  Our online promotion (with Rock The Bells) in 2006 was limited to discussion groups, fan forums, and chat rooms.  Which is fine, but it’s not as effective and immediate as social networking where people can build personal investment in a project.

John:  What was your favorite part of the experience?

Denis:  My favorite part was the test screenings.  When you’re editing a documentary you’re basically writing it in the editing room and you’re trying to find the most engaging and moving path through the story.  Test screenings give you the chance to engage with the audience and see what’s working and what’s not, so you have an opportunity to go back in and make it a more effective piece of story-telling.  Because once a film is released you don’t have that chance.

Casey:  (SPOILER ALERT) My favorite part of this whole process was when we were compelled to change the ending of the story, the licensing issues with Wu Tang music itself.  It was this kind of necessary thing where we had to take the music out of the movie, like it or not – at the time it felt devastating.  How can we end this movie without the music of

Fans REALLY want to see Wu Tang

Wu Tang?  But we ended up looking at it as a challenge – how can we make the best of this?  Now it ends without the musical performance and I think it’s a deeper, stronger film.  The film is about more than just this one moment where they’re all on stage together performing.  And it goes into this discussion of O.D.B., what was going on with him and their dynamic, because when he’s on stage he’s not really engaged.

Denis:  I couldn’t disagree more strenuously.  Everything Casey is saying was there with the music.  I think taking the music out limited our distribution deal.

Casey:  I think that’s true.  But I think it’s stronger without the music.

Denis:  I disagree.

Casey:  That’s why we make a good team!

John:  Other than having to deal with me and Barry Poltermann, what was the worst past of the experience?

Casey:  Maybe being in San Bernadino in 100-and-some degree weather?

Denis:  The fight to get this film to audiences.  I know there are people who would love this film who will never see it.  There are hip hop fans who go to the Rock The Bells festival and don’t even know that there’s a movie about it.  Then they see it and come back to us and say they can’t believe they missed it and it’s been out for a couple of years.  It’s hard to reach people.

John:  After Rock The Bells, you guys made a narrative film with Bold Native.  Did you use any doc-style tactics or aesthetics in BN?

Casey:  Docu-style tactics?  Yeah, from the producing side.  Producing the film, we didn’t try to own spaces.  We kept an efficient doc-style crew.  We shot in places that were working spaces, like in a restaurant that was actually open at the time.  Not a lot of big lighting.  And we tried to keep a low profile so actors could lose themselves in the moment.

Denis:  From a directing side – I agree with what Casey said.  We basically shot the film the same way we would have shot a documentary.  The only difference being that we controlled what was happening in front of the camera.  We shot in live places.  There were things happening around us we couldn’t control.  The only way we could afford to do the film was that we had to shoot it like a documentary.  And we learned so much about storytelling from documentary filmmaking because you have to take what you’re given and find the story within it.  So you have to be very creative in the editing room.  And on set you have to have an eye out for those story elements.  We’ve brought those skills to our narrative work, our fiction work.

John:  What’s next, documentary or narrative?

Casey:  We are in production on our next documentary feature, which is about a legal case – USA vs SHACUSA. Six activists were imprisoned for between 1 to 6 years in federal prison for what most Americans would consider free speech activity – running a website, making speeches, organizing protests. It deals with our legal system, animal rights, corporate power, the prison system… and tells the story of six very dedicated, intelligent and compelling individuals.

Denis:  A documentary that involves free speech, questions of what is terrorism, and the internet.

Casey:  And we’re also developing narrative projects, as well.

John:  You guys are machines!

–

Case Studies In Social Storytelling examines past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling.

Video ad spending is going to go up yet again in 2012.  Check out this ReelSEO article.

In 2000, the Ad Council and the US Army teamed up to fight rising high school drop out rates.  One of the results is BoostUp.org, a campaign aimed at helping kids in underfunded areas all over the country graduate.

Their approach is very smart.  They selected a diverse group of actual at-risk students – representative of kids all over the country, urban, rural, and in-between – and made documentary videos showing the students’ worlds, their challenges, and their desires to graduate and overcome adversity.

It’s a very affecting approach.  The realness of it, the honesty, makes a big impact.  The choice to do these as documentaries only bolsters the feeling.  I think they’re doing a great job.  It’s touching.  And after seeing the videos, it even got me to take out my wallet and kick in a little kitty to the cause (via DonorsChoose).

They’re also doing social media right with presences on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  Hopefully more and more folks will see their work and help the cause.

Check the videos out.

There is a trend developing in television.  (Although it failed to develop for critical darling Arrested Development.)  Dead shows brought back to life by fan campaigns using social media in addition to more traditional methods.

FOX’s Family Guy was the first of these resuscitated shows.  In 2001, after three seasons, FOX canceled the animated comedy due to low ratings.  But fans bought the DVDs and the reruns on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim got strong ratings.  FOX subsequently brought the show back – in 2004.  If you have a TV, you probably know it’s still on FOX every Sunday night.  It was dead for three years, brought back, and now it’s a monster hit.  And it’s all because of the rabid fan base.

More recently, and more social, perhaps, was the campaign to save NBC’s spy comedy, Chuck.  This is a show that has a rabid fan base, yet a small (by network TV standards) fan base.  After Season 2 ended, the show was unofficially dead.  Ratings were bad, and it’s not the cheapest show in the world to make (they blow lots of stuff up… or pretend to).  But via social media, fans mounted a campaign to #SaveChuck and, smart and savvy as this show’s loyal supporters are, they targeted Subway – one of the show’s sponsors over the years.  They marched in droves to Subway stores nationwide.  There was video of it being shot and uploaded to YouTube.  Facebook and Twitter lit up with appeals to the sandwich chain.  The show’s stars Lachary Levi and Joshua Gomez heard what was happening and lent their support – both by doing TV interviews about what the fans were doing and actually meeting up with fan marches to Subway.

With all those fans going to Subway and buying sandwiches, with all the social media buzz around Chuck and Subway, and with all of the traditional nation media coverage courtesy of a little star power, Subway certainly got a lot of bang for no buck.  And seeing the passion, loyalty, and potential business opportunity in fans of Chuck, Subway made a deal with NBC to finance a more substantial chunk of the show’s budget (in exchange for some not-so-subtle product placement through the show’s run).  And thanks to the fans, Chuck was back.  Its ratings really never broke out.  It was never a true hit.  But it did make it five seasons (which will mean about 100 episodes, a successful run for any network show for sure) and make a lot of fanatic fans happy.

Just last week, the final episode of Community for 2011 ran on NBC.  It was this year’s Holiday Special, it was very funny, critics as usual praised the show, and, as usual, not a lot of people watched it.  A few weeks ago, NBC announced that their Spring lineup would not include Community.  So, is Community about to be canceled?  NBC says no, or not necessarily… but maybe…?  Twitter went crazy with #SaveCommunity messages.  The showrunner, Dan Harmon, and its cast are very good at both promoting their show and communicating with fans on Twitter.  And, like the demographics for Chuck, fans of the show are hip, savvy, technologically advanced, and let’s face it, kinda geeky.  They make money and are relatively young – so advertisers like them a lot.  But that didn’t save Arrested Development (albeit Arrested, I’d imagine, was a much more expensive show to produce).  So I guess we’ll see if NBC is simply putting Community gently/gradually into its grave, or if it is putting the show on a longer hiatus than usual.  Good news for Community is that NBC doesn’t have a ton of promising comedies on the air to fill its slot.  And, maybe even more importantly, Community fans are just as rabid as Chuck and Family Guy fans before them – so if it comes down to it, they may take the fight to NBC (or one of the show’s sponsors).  We’ll have to wait and see.

NOTE: Arrested Development, after being off the air for half a decade, will be back in production and set to have new episodes released in 2013.  It’s being financed by Netflix in a move I think is brilliant for the online distributor… but that’s another subject altogether.  Point is, if you have passionate fans, you’re never quite dead.

–

Case Studies In Social Storytelling is a weekly feature examining past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling. It is published each Tuesday.

Now we’re looking to the future.  But first, not to get all “teacher” on you, but let’s look at what we’ve covered so far.

Quick recap:
1. Your Goal;
2. Your Target Audience;
3. The Content or Stories That Appeal To That Audience;
4. What You Want Your Audience To Be Saying About You;
5. What Impressions Are Out There That You Want To Capitalize On, Challenge, Or Overcome;
6. Defining The Brand Image Your Media Should Convey;
7.  Is there any relevant background information on your company or brand that you want to incorporate; and
8.  Do you have any market research that can help shape your story?

Now, back to the future.

First – results.  What do you want to get out of telling your story?  A branding experience?  A measurable action (like a click-through, a purchase, an occupation of Wall Street)?  We’re talking the ultimate end results here, so be sure to be sure about what you want to accomplish.  A metaphor to illustrate this?  Of course!  If you fire a gun, you better be sure of what you want to hit.  So what do you want to hit?

If you’re after a measurable action, what is it?  Drill down on what’s important, what will help you, whether it’s leads on new clients or purchases that immediately benefit your bottom line.

Next week, we’re going to get into how to get your story seen.  Nobody wants to make a great movie, or TV show, or video series and have no one see it.  Sadly, if you’ve ever seen Friday Night Lights or some obscure video series, you know it happens.  Sometimes, great content doesn’t get seen.  I want to make sure that does not happen for you.  So until next week, go watch Friday Night Lights and be well!  (It was a great show!)

–

This is Part 14 of an ongoing series. Barry Poltermann will post one part of this series each week, at your regularly scheduled time (ie Friday mornings). Next up is “Part 15 – Get ‘Em To Watch”.

How dare CBS interrupt Two And A Half Men with commercials?! Oh, right, that's how they pay for the shows. My bad.

If you read The History Of Social Storytelling series that Barry Poltermann publishes here, you already know what Interruption Marketing means (and why it’s dying to some degree).  But if not, here’s a quick explanation.

Interruption Marketing is marketing/advertising that interrupts what a consumer is actually there for.  A commercial during a TV show is the best example.  You’re watching Ashton’s debut on Two And A Half Men and the act break arrives, CBS goes to a commercial break.  ”Break” is apt in that it is breaking the stream of one-liners you took time out of your life to tune in for.

It interrupts your viewing, whether you like it or not.  That’s Interruption Marketing.

It’s becoming less dominant every day due to neato things like TiVos/DVRs and the internet at large.  If you want to read more on why and how it’s all changed – and it has – check out Barry’s series, probably starting here with post number two.

–

Buzzwords is a weekly feature that explains and demystifies one current social media “Buzzword” per entry.  If you’d like to suggest a Buzzword for us to tackle, please email us at buzzwords@aboutfacemedia.com.

Community is a great example of storytelling on multiple levels.  First, if you’re a fan of comedy, especially edgy (for network TV) comedy, you probably already know that Community is a very strong show.  It’s consistently funny, has a great cast, and is always well-written with solid storylines.  So the show itself is a great story, well told, on a weekly basis.

But on another level, Community is interesting in that its creator and show runner, Dan Harmon, has some 60,000 plus Followers on Twitter and interacts with them there.  If you follow Dan (@danharmon), you might see him briefly talk about a joke, a subplot, or what music was used in a particular scene.  He responds to fans when they Tweet him questions or comments.  And Tweets funny things on and off topic, which you would hope to get out of a professional comedy writer.  Point is, Dan’s social presence is a deepening of the stories we see on his show.  It further connects us to the Community world.

There is a recent Wired article on Dan I highly recommend if you’re interested in the structure side of story (or in Dan or his show).  Dan goes into how he views story structure, not only on Community but in everything he watches.  It’s a nice, simple, clean way to look at it.  Check it out.  And check out Community. (NBC, Thursdays, 8pm)  It’s one of the best comedies around.

–

Case Studies In Social Storytelling is a weekly feature examining past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling. It is published each Tuesday.

Over the course of the last two parts of this series, we’ve been digging into the elements that will be important for telling your story.

We looked at:
1. Your Goal;
2. Your Target Audience;
3. The Content or Stories That Appeal To That Audience;
4. What You Want Your Audience To Be Saying About You;
5. What Impressions Are Out There That You Want To Capitalize On, Challenge, Or Overcome; and
6. Defining The Brand Image Your Media Should Convey.

Now let’s talk backstory.  Is there any relevant background information on your company or brand that you want to incorporate?  For example, we did a series on Perkins + Will, a design firm steeped in a celebrated history of sustainable design.  So we made that tradition and vision a focus of the videos.  You can check one out here.

You can see how we use the background, the backstory, of Perkins + Will to show what they’re about today.  It is the history of P + W that guides them.  If you have a similar guiding backstory, or history, or tradition, embrace it and make it part of your story – possibly even the focus.

Lastly regarding backstory, do you have any market research that can help shape your story?  Or that can help you find your audience?  Or that can help you in any other aspect of your initiative?  For example, maybe you sell dalmatians and your target audience is firefighters (a small, ridiculous market and example, I grant you, but cute, right?).  You’ve commissioned research to find out what firefighters are into and found out they love Rescue Me (the Dennis Leary show on FX).  So, now you may consider running spots on FX or ads on the show’s website because you know one place that firefighters are already going.

Alright, backstory properly mined, we’ll continue next week with a look toward the future.

–

This is Part 13 of an ongoing series. Barry Poltermann will post one part of this series each week, at your regularly scheduled time (ie Friday mornings). Next up is “Part 14 – Action”.

Wherever she is, geo targeting will allow content to be targeted to her based on her location. Big Brother style!

Here’s a bit from Wikipedia on Geotargeting:

Geo targeting in geomarketing and internet marketing is the method of determining the geolocation of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization,IP address, ISP or other criteria.

Cool.  So if you can determine where a user is, you can show them different content.  I live in Los Angeles.  You may live in New York.  If we both go to a car buying site, we can each get a video ad for a local dealer.  Mine will be in LA, yours will be in NY.  It’s good because it’s useful.  It’s useful because it’s targeted.

(The downside is that if you go to Europe or, as I did, shoot a movie in Colombia, Hulu and Netflix and everyone else will know where you are and you won’t be able to watch Modern Family until you’re back stateside.  That’s how Geotargeting is used for Copyright and Digital Rights Management, which is great unless you wanna watch some English-language TV online in Bogota.)