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Truly Free Film

The WASTELANDER PANDA Saga! Part 4. Production: Keeping our Audience Engaged

by Kirsty Stark (Producer), Ella Macintyre (PMD) and Victoria Cocks (Writer/Director)

Part 4. Production: Keeping our Audience Engaged

Once we had our project funded, we needed to find a way to keep our audience engaged over the year it took to write, produce and release our three Wastelander Panda films.

When we released our Prologue, it was nothing more than a three-minute film, so all of the traffic we gained was directed back to our production company, Epic Films, via our website and Facebook page.  This was far from ideal, especially considering that the company’s two other short films, L’Artiste! and Landscape Scene, were very different in tone and subject matter.  We needed to separate our Wastelander Panda branding in order to give it the best possible chance of succeeding online long-term, so our first step after funding the project was to create a new Wastelander Panda website (at this stage a WordPress blog), Facebook page and Twitter account.

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It turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated to migrate all of our fans over to the new pages.  This taught us a great lesson

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Truly Free Film

The WASTELANDER PANDA Saga! Part 3. Financing: Generating Certainty Online

by Kirsty Stark (Producer), Ella Macintyre (PMD) and Victoria Cocks (Writer/Director)

Part 3. Financing: Generating Certainty Online

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Once we had proven Wastelander Panda was a viable concept and had an audience (through the success of the Prologue), we needed to find a way to finance future stages of the project.  Still aiming to eventually take it to television, we looked at what we had done so far, and assessed the likelihood of getting funding, keeping in mind that we were first-time filmmakers.  Speaking to experienced producers from the local industry, as well as looking at the questions being raised online from viewers, we realized that we still had a lot to prove before we would be able to attract any kind of significant finance:

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Truly Free Film

The WASTELANDER PANDA Saga! Part 2. Promotion: How We Drove our Prologue to 100,000 views in 3 Days

by Kirsty Stark (Producer), Ella Macintyre (PMD) and Victoria Cocks (Writer/Director)

Part 2. Promotion: How We Drove our Prologue to 100,000 views in 3 Days

The day we posted our three-minute Wastelander Panda Prologue online, our intention was to share it with friends, with the hope that others would also enjoy it.  The accessibility and overwhelming amount of content on the Internet gives you a sense that you can easily put something up and people will find it.  What we realized is that realistically, you have to put it in front of them.  The evening we uploaded it, we happened to be at our friend Ella Macintyre’s house.  She’s one of those people that has grown up on the Internet, and knows it backwards and forwards – which blogs are owned by which media companies, who pays attention to whose content, and how information spreads from one place to the next.  The first thing she asked us was “So, where are you sending this thing?”

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Despite our initial ignorance, and lack of prior planning, we managed to have our Prologue seen by over 100,000 people in its first three days online.

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Truly Free Film

The WASTELANDER PANDA Saga! Part 1. Development: Creating the Storyworld of Wastelander Panda

by Kirsty Stark (Producer), Ella Macintyre (PMD) and Victoria Cocks (Writer/Director)

Part 1. Development: Creating the Storyworld of Wastelander Panda

One of the first questions we’re asked when people hear about Wastelander Panda is “How did you come up with the idea?”  It’s a strange concept – the meshing of two ideas that don’t necessarily fit – but this seemingly incongruous pairing is one reason we believe the project has had so much attention so far.  Our initial three-minute Prologue, designed to test the concept and see if we had an audience, had over 100,000 views in its first three days online.  However, our success hasn’t all come down to luck, but is due to a carefully planned process that saw us create a story world from scratch and go on to implement an online distribution strategy.XBlog-1.1

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Truly Free Film

10 Questions Every Filmmaker Should Ask Themselves

By Marc Schiller

Back in early May, I had the pleasure of attending “A2E: Artist To Entrepreneur” a fantastic lab organized by Ted Hope and the San Francisco Film Society. Over a three day period, a group of extremely talented filmmakers, technologists, marketing and distribution experts came together to explore new paradigms for film distribution.

On the first day of the lab, Ted and his team passed around a worksheet that all of the filmmakers were asked to complete. While filmmakers are often asked to submit information when applying for funding, few are compelled to explore their film from a marketing and distribution perspective as effectively and as thoroughly as the A2E worksheet demanded.

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Truly Free Film

Ask Not What Your Audience Can Do For You – But What You Can Do For Your Audience

Part 2 of How to Make Money in the Age of Abundance

By Jon Reiss       

When I wrote the first post in this series, I thought this would only be a two-parter, but I decided to expand this to a 3-part series because of a little voice in my head that said I needed to talk about audience engagement more. 

Yes, I said in Part 1 that I wasn’t going to address it in this series because I had addressed it before – sue me. The truth is, audience engagement is so central to this whole process that I needed to add my evolving thoughts on it. I think you’ll appreciate my change of heart.

Audience engagement is a term that I have recently come to use interchangeably with “distribution and marketing.” What else is distribution and marketing – if not enticing, conversing with, and ultimately wooing your audience?

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Truly Free Film

The Digital Recession, Pt 4: The Future

By Jim Cummings

(This week we have enjoyed this discussion on The Digital Recession. It concludes with this post.)

Should schools still charge so much for things that you can learn on youtube for free? Will anyone be able to in 20 years?

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