Films, Fans and Likes

Lewis Bostock has made it his business to discover how independent film and web producers can make money, or as he puts it, become 'sustainable'. Ande Schurr interviews the freelance web video producer and co-host of web show The Social Life.

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In this small creative industry of ours, every good idea has more of a chance to be heard by a greater percentage of the people. From piracy to profitable film-making, Lewis Bostock's unique voice is gaining attention in the blogging world.

This interview with the 23-year-old looks at his solid Facebook PR campaign for the horror film Wound, why we should look at 'illegal' file-sharing differently, and how film-makers can recoup some of the money spent on production.

Lewis, let's start with your Facebook PR work on David Blyth's film Wound. The movie has obviously been a success in terms of publicity, having made its mark in many of the world's festivals. What did you do exactly?

Early on I had to do something risky. Before I met David, he had already set up a Facebook page with the title Wound. The page was getting some attention, but I was convinced that we could get more LIKEs, if we changed the name. Facebook users were seeing 'David likes Wound' pop up in their Facebook news feed, which read to me as strange. We later took down the page and relaunched it with the title Wound - New Zealand Horror Film. It's risky, because we had to basically start over with only a six weeks before its NZ premiere, but it indicated to me that David trusted me, and would take my advice. We then doubled the amount of LIKEs in half the time. We later set up a custom-made Facebook tab. When Facebook users visited Wound's page, they would first see a mini-web page with the trailer and a form for them to join our mailing list. We later used the email addresses to notify fans when the film was going to be released at film festivals and on DVD.

Facebook become an efficient way for us to distribute information about the film including interviews, reviews and news stories. Not everyone watched the TV3 interview with Ali Ikram when it aired, but we could link to it from Facebook to keep everyone in the loop. It was liked, shared and commented on. I also kept a close eye on the conversations about the film that began to appear across the web on blogs and social networks. Using Google, Facebook and Twitter, I found complaints from women who had suffered domestic abuse, reviews from insatiable horror bloggers, people who thought it was the best film ever made and people who thought it was the worst film ever made. I encouraged David to talk to his lifelong fans and respond directly to people who took issue with the film too.

You write, direct and co-host The Social Life, a web show about the ways social media collides with fashion, lifestyle and entertainment. How did this come about and what kind of ratings are you getting?

I was writing for SocialMediaNZ.com, a blog that covers social media and its related technologies. After long talks with Social Media NZ editor John Lai, who was already passionate about web video, I believed that we could take their former web show The Social-Lite to the next level by making it more attractive to advertisers and sponsors. We enhanced the production values, updated the brand, changed the title and wrote our own opinion into the content. Before I knew it, I was in front of the camera (for a change) talking about social media. To date, the web show has been great success with only five episodes and over 29,000 views. Watch Episode 1.

Do you have any practical solutions to those producers tearing out their hair because everyone is downloading their movie illegally?

I would tell them to RIP UP that infringement notice. I would to tell them to CHANGE their attitude. Illegal file-sharing is a symptom of a broken system. The problem is not piracy, the problem is distribution. We must stop playing the blame game. No amount of legislation is going to stop a die hard movie fan from getting what they want. When all they want to do is SEE a movie, these pirates are not our enemies, these pirates are the audience. Actually, pirates is the wrong word, fans is the right word. We must work with fans, listen to their frustration and figure out how to fix the system together. Oh, and by the way, 3D won't fix it either.

How can smaller filmmakers recoup their expenses?

• 1. Add to your crew somebody who exclusively handles social media and the film's overall marketing and distribution strategy.
• 2. Try some alternative distribution models such as the web 2.0 companies TopSpin, and Moviesparx.
• 3. Build your own social network very early on. We all acknowledge that it's not what you know, it's who you know, but too many people in the industry scoff at a powerful networking tool like Twitter because it's just 'a bunch of people telling you what they had for breakfast' when they could've struck up a conversation with that user on Twitter, and then later joined them for breakfast, because it turns out that user knows someone who knows someone who has a job waiting for them. We must join in before we judge.

What are the major reasons that independent films fail to make a profit in NZ? Is it because they fail to ignite the public?

In New Zealand, we simply don't have the volumes of people. We have the seats, but we don't necessarily have the bums. As a result, local filmmakers are becoming more reliant on international distribution deals, but the problem is our local films play it too safe for international audiences. It's no surprise that a film such as Wound, which doesn't play it safe, will launch in New Zealand, the conversation started bubbling away at home, and then online, but the film found its most passionate and most vocal audience overseas in the US and Germany.

As a freelancer yourself, what advice so you have for other freelancers to do better business in NZ?

Learn that there's nothing shameful about self-promotion, focus on good accounting, stop procrastinating out of fear of making the wrong decision, understand that artistic ambition doesn't make you 'pretentious', understand that being commercially savvy doesn't make you a 'sell out'.