October 21, 2009
FNB Innovators: Ted Hope
This week FIlmNewsBriefs sat with Ted Hope, who has produced over 60 films including some our favorites such as Ice Storm, American Splendor and Adventureland. We discuss Ted ‘s current relationship with social media, how he’s found a voice talking about the opportunities the Internet is creating for independent filmmakers, and how he’s looking to start incorporate these ideas into his own work.
FilmNewsBriefs: When did you start your first blog?
Ted Hope: I think the first stuff I started blogging was about a year ago June and it was all stuff I did for my son on Bowl of Noses. It came as an outgrowth, when he had been born I started communicating with other parents back and forth and started doing kid email blasts to that group, and then parent email would blast back and forth about how helpful they were, and why didn’t I collect them on a blog. I was really nervous about that idea. When that was started, some time around that point I was sending out email blasts, first and foremost on net neutrality issues. Though I didn’t know that much about it, I felt very confident that the Internet was the key to remaining independent and all of the paranoia of how the Internet could change was warranted. Then the IFP asked me if I would start to write a blog on that subject on behalf of the IFP and I was like, how do I write a blog? What do you mean? Well, get somebody to teach me. Those were two of the factors and then being asked by Film Independent to give their keynote at their forum last October. And I was very much frustrated by how all the media was focusing on the ‘crisis’ but nobody was talking about the opportunities that were there for filmmakers. I felt there were so many things happening that it counter balanced all the negatives, particularly for the emerging filmmakers. So when I gave that lecture that was meant to be the antidote to the sky is falling, called it “1000 Phoenix Rising.” (You can read the speech HERE)
I felt like a hypocrite if I didn’t start living up to my words. That was the first series. It was basically this time last year and felt that all of these filmmakers are going to be going to Sundance and hoping for a sale and there’s no way that’s going to happen. They are going to be squandering this great media opportunity and that’s there’s another way to look at it. I didn’t see that anyone was talking from the indie perspective about how to use the festival launch as a media launch. If one filmmaker does that at least that’s one filmmaker getting their movie made. Those four things all came together. And the day I started writing following that launch, I had done a little bit of blogging and then I had gone out to San Francisco for The Conversation, another conference, and when I was there I think I wrote my first 10 blog posts, all in the course of one evening.
FNB: Is this the same time that you also engaged with Twitter and Facebook?
TH: I didn’t jump on Facebook till the beginning of this year and Twitter I’ve only been on for three or four months. It was much shorter and each of them I was so nervous each step of the way. I had many conversations about what was the proper way to represent myself both on a blog and then in a social network. And I was very hesitant, and embarked on Twitter as an experiment and then really fell in love with it. I have to say it’s so fascinating, all of that has changed my life in such a short period of time. And really united to what I found most rewarding about cinema. I love how cinema really brings people together, helps us connect.
It has meant so much to me when someone comes up to me after seeing one of my films and say how that film has affected them. The more the film has a social message, like The Laramie Project, the more you hear, but even movies like The Savages, which deals with death, and how adults have so much trouble talking about that big issue. Movies help us bridge that gap. That component that’s always been missing from cinema, the thing that separate art-slash-specialized film from Hollywood film is that when you see an art movie, you feel compelled to talk about it. And there used to be a bigger forum for doing that, whether it was a coffee house, or lobby, or film society, critics that did more than synopsize or put it in a cultural context. And now that function that can happen through social media is so thrilling to me, it really is, and expanding the definition of what cinema is.
FNB: It seems the key themes you discuss are Content, Community and Audience.
TH: I would also add Discovery, though I don’t write for Hammer to Nail, it was something I had thought of and it was the first one to really launched at that time, which is all about discovery.
FNB: Discuss your Power to the Pixel address and how this concept relates to content.
TH: (You) can’t separate content from audience engagement, and the film business has been doing a series of one-offs which is a problem because you have to re-invent the wheel every single time. Whereas if you take a lesson from the music industry and what they did when the sales of their main product collapsed, it was essentially, well, two lessons became really clear, one being how to move from this one-off model and onto an ongoing conversation. How do you keep your audience engaged with you at all times? And the second was to diversify to provide people with a far greater range of products which folk can buy and use to demonstrate their passion in different ways.
On a creative level, what really gets me excited is talking to them about how to expand the narrative in different directions. Things that may not even be initially found but might be for those that want to dig deep and have a more resonant experience. Or they might very well be the kind of thing that because they are on point or on theme, that might help aggregate audiences. Generally, people start with a feature film script but once that’s in place I recommend starting to try and figure out where six or seven other shorts would come from and how to do that. And recognize not exactly asking the filmmaker or the director to make it all themselves but something they might be able to curate so that they can stay involved. That’s the kind of stuff that’s generated by the artist or group of artists and I think there’s much more that can be done by letting others engage in that process.
FNB: This method seems to take the control out of the marketing team and give the control to the artists making it more relevant to the subject matter since its coming from the same place the story comes from.
TH: Yeah, I’ve gotten some flack from people on both, the artist side and the marketing/business side saying it’s a false line of demarcation. Marketing and content or art and commerce – however we want to call it – but it’s recognizing the high level of media literacy that audiences now have across all genres and that’s only going to continue to go up. We’re doing ourselves a disservice in selling one thing and delivering another. With several films I’ve made, I get a lot of emails, notes and conversations where they talk about that disconnect, on the way the film was marketed versus what the film really is. I like to know what I’m getting and to encourage creators to take more control, to seize the media, and to say that they will be involved in those initial discovery tools of short films, all sorts of trailers, posters – the whole image campaign. I feel that as the creator, it can help because people will start to recognize really what it is they are getting.
FNB: In finding new ways to connect to audiences, a creator can now see an audience’s reaction. How do you think about using this Fourth Dimension in your filmmaking?
TH: I encourage filmmakers to engage as fully as they can with the audience and open themselves up. Much in the same way that you learn things in test screenings of your films, that here is a contrast to the way people speak than what they feel. There’s also a contrast to how they react. I talked to some friends who are recent blogger converts about how remarkable a list is as popular form in blog posts but its also one of the lower forms of writing. There’s a great post in The Guardian on 22 things that can change the face of journalism and one of them is to never write a numerical list. (Read the article HERE) Its interesting to me how some people really do dig down deep with things like Twitter. There are some posts that I wrote three weeks ago that keep coming back. They tend to be the more inspirational platitudes or something that de-line a philosophy as opposed to a contest or opportunity. I’ve always loved the idea of a movie that isn’t fully locked in the moment that it’s made. That has the opportunity to change while the audience changes with it.
FNB: Like the videogame movie, choose your own adventure form of a movie?
TH: Not so much a changing ending but more an opportunity of something that dealt with a popular definition of beauty, or scary, or cool, and it’s presented in an open video format that allows the insertion into that process. Where someone might look back into an alternate universe and that alternate universe is an open video that’s kind of sourced fan fiction that would be based on voting at the time. Where the first level might stay but the background level would change. And that can circle back around so there are different reactions to how that is. We’re moving to a much more organic, ever-changing way to present media. Film, as we call it, is the conversation starter and then the conversation and experience a much more fulfilling thing. I work in film because as much as I love making movies, I love watching movies but I love to talk about movies even more.
FNB: So the next is to create a ning.com site?
TH: That’s funny that you say that. I’ve been looking at some things other people have done and was thinking that. I wish I had more time and there are so many interesting things I’d love to experiment with and play with and that’s the thing that’s so great about the time we live in and also so depressing about the film business in general. There’s a huge list of things that I want to do that I don’t have time with that are all about engaging with the things that have already been invented and other people are playing with.
FNB: Regarding online tools, you tend to use them as a way to talk about the philosophies of using them, rather then actually integrating them into your work as a filmmaker. When I walked in here I forgot that you have this huge operation of making movies and you don’t refer to that much online. Do you plan on talking about this layer to your life you keep offline? Is there’s a reason for that?
TH: That’s an excellent question and some of it is related to bandwidth and there’s only so much time I have and I felt that one of my first obligations is for people entering the film business as creators and how the changing world affected them. And where the opportunities were different and to engage them and keep them engaged. That’s where the focus has been. A lot of my development work is very old world traditional established film industry and that’s where it’s being funded and that’s how that’s going out and I think there’s more that can be done there. I definitely have used the Internet to find new talent and engage with them. And that’s something that I’ve enjoyed a great deal and use my blog as more curatorial thing and try to promote different filmmakers’ work that I admire and things that interest me. We do have some projects that would be described as trans-media projects. Cross platform stories that we’re working on but it takes time. James Gunn, who I’m producing a movie with now, is someone that I first encountered through social media, through his webisodes, through his Twitter, and he’s very advanced and sophisticated on how he uses these tools as is our star, Rainn Wilson and both are eager to play in the process so we will be doing that.
FNB: Will we hear you Twitter about a specific film or use Indiegogo.com or Kickstarter.com to raise money?
TH: All of the above, I think I haven’t yet found a way to shift modes into a film specific voice. That I’ll maintain my voice on Facebook, Twitter and I’m eager to try Tumbler and all of that, but yes, I would like to do it in a film world but also, I’m really excited about the potential for doing this more with a crowd whether its crowd funding or a more activated crowd engagement from the very beginning. I’m looking at which projects of ours are best suited for it and looking to that in the next six months.
Read Ted’s Blogs:
http://infowantstobefree.blogspot.com/
Tracking the media issues that effect true indies.
http://letsmakebetterfilms.blogspot.com/
Thoughts on the process and the results of filmmaking
http://trulyfreefilm.blogspot.com
If we want a film culture owned, maintained, and loved by audiences and creators, we have to really work together.
Follow Ted on Twitter: @TedHope
Posted in: Hammer to Nail, IFP, Innovators, James Gunn, Ning.com, Power to the pixel, Rainn Wilson, Ted Hope, The Conversation, The Laramie Project, The Savages