Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Earth Days Project


Introduction

This report concerns a project undertaken by the Film Producer class FIL-4661 offered by the Film Department at the University of Central Florida in the spring of 2009.

This class included overviews and tutorials on marketing approaches such as learning how to set up blogs, promote, market, and find target audiences through using social online networking such as Myspace and Facebook Ads, and how to set up a Basecamp account to communicate with group members.

Furthermore, the class included lectures from marketing experts such as Florida Film Festival programmer Matthew Curtis, producer Christine Vachon, UCF professors and previous marking directors of the Florida Film Festival; Shannon Lacek and Rich Grula, former students of The Film Producer class; Tom Hurter and Nick Martinolich, and Professor Randy Finch.

The Film Producer class was divided into twenty teams, which included ten documentaries, nine feature narratives, and one Florida feature from a former UCF graduate student Danny Daneau. Each team was assigned a film that would screen in competition at the 2009 Florida Film Festival. As well, students worked with the Florida Film Festival staff and the various filmmakers. The students in FIL-4661 were responsible for the guerrilla marketing of the competition films.

Our team included Addison Bryan, Cinema Studies major, expected graduation in 2009, Nicole Monahan, Cinema Studies major, expected graduation in 2010, and Hector Sierra, Cinema Studies major, expected graduation in 2010. We were assigned a film in the documentary competition entitled Earth Days. The filmmaker/producer we were in contact with was Robert Stone, as well as Jen Holmes the Account Executive of The American Experience.

The following is a report on what we attempted, what we accomplished and, most importantly, what we learned.


Synopsis and History


Synopsis

From the Oscar nominated director Robert Stone comes a documentary about the history of our first earth day. This eye opening film follows nine environment supporters and their past and present attempts to help the earth recover from the damages of human kind and their creation of one of the most important calendar days, Earth Day.

Some of the interviewees included Stewart Brand (editor of Whole Earth Catalog), Paul Ehrlich (wrote the best selling and controversial book The Population Bomb), Denis Hayes (chief organizer of the original Earth Day in 1970), L. Hunter Lovins (part of the California Conservation Project and the Rocky Mountain Institute), Paul McCloskey (Republican congressman from California and served as co-organizer of the original Earth Day with Denis Hayes), Denis Meadows (co-author of the book Limits to Growth), Stephanie Mills (editor-in-chief of Earth Times), Russell Schweickart (lunar module pilot for Apollo 9 and Commissioner of Energy in 1979), and Stewart Udall (Secretary of the Interior under President Kennedy and Johnson).

Biography

Filmmaker: Robert Stone
Robert Stone is an award winning documentary filmmaker. His first film Radio Bikini in 1988 was nominated for an Oscar. Stone also made featured documentaries such as Oswald’s Ghost and Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst. His newest film, which is Earth Days was an official selection and premiered at Sundance in January 2009.

This film is an American Experience Film and it is believed that this film already had distribution from them. Even in the films press release that was sent to us it says,
“EARTH DAYS has been selected to be the Closing Night Film at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. It will be released theatrically in 2009, followed by a national broadcast on PBS/American Experience in April 2010 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day.”
Therefore, this film probably already received distribution from American Experience prior to its Florida Film Festival debut.

Marketing Work


Plan of Action

Our first plan of action was finding our target audience. Since our film was a documentary about the environment we figured some of our target audience would include anyone who was interested in the environment, documentaries/indie films, democrats, and science teachers.

Due to the subject of our film, we decided that we probably shouldn’t distribute flyers that promoted our film about the environment so instead we attempted an online marketing campaign. We decided to market this way because since our main focus was environmentalists, and paper flyering would be wasteful and potentially harmful to our environment.

Were you successful in attracting interest? Did you get butts in the seats?

This online campaign was most challenging because sending emails is not as effective as handing out flyers. Flyers have brief information that people can take with them and look at and keep with them. They are all so are more approachable, when you are handing out flyer you can also talk to people as opposed to emails where most people ignore them, delete, them or just send it to a spam folder. For our first screening we got about 44 people out of 70 seats, and on the second screening about 49.

Both theaters were pretty small but it seemed like a good majority were there. Because our group never received any material and the filmmaker had never sent anything to the film festival, we could only rely on these emailing techniques. As well, since the film already has some prior distribution the filmmaker was not too helpful when it came to marketing the film, yet for what little marketing help we got it seems like we did get more than we expected to in the theaters.

Describe in detail what each team member actually did. How did it work?

Addison’s Role:

• In charge of contacting the filmmaker and production company about our plan of attack.
• Contacted environmental groups in the area and requested to be included in their newsletter.
• Promoted the film in most fraternity and sorority chapters.
• Invited over 1300 friends to the facebook event.
• Created Myspace page

Nicole’s Role:

• Sent out emails about the film to our target audience.
• Created Facebook Event and sent invites to friends and family
• Promoted film at Eco Advocates Meeting
• Created and sent out E-vites.

Hector’s Role:

• Sent invites to the premier through facebook
• Created a gmail account for the film for contact purposes
• Edited the materials that were emailed from the production company, so contacts had screening information to spread the news
• Pestered the our contacts with emails by forwarding them once every couple of days
Successes and Failures

Just like every other group the Facebook event was a failure. Over a thousand people were invited and only 14 confirmed they were going and most of those people still didn’t go see the film. The emails were not as successful either because again, emails are not as personable as flyers. Thus, assuming since we only heard back from one person, most people probably just deleted our emails. However, we did get our film’s show times posted on The Unifying Theme and Environmental Stability for UCF websites’ event calendar.

We had a bad show times (6:30pm on a Tuesday night) for our second screening and had awful weather. Not to mention we had a terrible aspect ratio during the showing where at part the images of the earth looked like an egg.

We did not receive any promotional materials except images online. Even at both the Regal and Enzian there were tables filled with postcard of all the films in the festival and there was no postcards, posters, or anything about our film. Therefore, the filmmaker didn’t even send the festival any materials for the film either. But despite this Hector made some promotional images for us to use to send out through emails.

Since we wanted to be more earth friendly and not do the flyering that set us back a little. Instead of the flyers we had some ideas on what we could have done instead which included: doing more word of mouth guerilla marketing outside of the theater and the union, dress in hippie garb and flash recycled cardboard signs, promoting the film, and maybe write our show times on recycled pieces of paper. However, we thought of these things after the festival was over.

Calendar

Original Timeline

February, 25 - Contact filmmaker for posters/ fliers/ materials.
February, 27 - March 1 - Start making fliers/ posters if we need to.
March 2 - 8 - Start contacting local environmental groups and organizations on campus and in the area.
March 20 - 26- Distribute Flyers.

As you can see our timeline had change significantly throughout the past month. What we had originally thought was that since Robert Stone was an Oscar nominated director and he had his own production company and marketing team, we thought that it was not going to be a problem receiving materials from them.

Even in the event that we didn’t get any materials we had a back up plan to make promotional material and pass them out. However, not only did we not receive any materials, Robert Stone didn’t even send the film festival any materials for their use.

Furthermore, we hit another bump in the road after one of our other contacts Jen Holmes (Account Executive of The American Experience) emailed us back saying,

“I like your idea about flyers.... but consider the topic of the film. I don’t think it’s the most prudent thing to use paper flyers for a film about the environment. You can however create email postcards, or flyers, and eliminate both printing and environmental costs. They can also be spread far and wide across the web.”

Therefore, we knew it would be somewhat hypocritical to pass out pieces of paper promoting the environment, so we knew we had to create a strictly electronic promotional campaign. There by changing our entire timeline which mostly involved flyering and relying on promotional materials.

Actual Timeline

February 25- Contact Robert Stone and Jen Holmes for posters/ fliers/ materials.
March 4- Received response from Jen Holmes. Received images and press release from her.
March 9- Florida Film Festival schedule posted for Earth Days.
March 10- Sent out emails about film to target audience around the area.
March 14- Created Facebook event for film.
March 20- Sent out e-vites to target audience around the area.
March 24- Promoted film at Eco-Advocates meeting.
March 27- Florida Film Festival Begins.
March 28- Earth Days at Regal Winter Park Village 12pm-2pm.
March 31- Earth Days plays at Enzian 6:30- 8:30pm.

Marketing Strategy for the Future

One of the biggest challenges Earth Days had was to be able to attract audiences not interested in the environment with a movie trailer that doesn’t tell much about the movie or its content. If the film’s marketing department were to modify anything during production a few points may possibly make the movie more lucrative. One, is to add more shots of the space shuttle in space, and if possible, hire an attractive celebrity to host the movie.

If winning Film Festivals is the main propose, we would definitely try to get as many people as possible to watch the film so we could get more chances to win an audience award—in case the movie is not as good as the others—and finally try to promote the movie online to as many people as possible.

If we were to give an advice to the filmmaker of how to market the film in the future, a few points could be changed. First, we would highly recommend to make a new movie trailer, then do updates to their movie website as well as their IMDB profile, and finally we would urge to promote the film online through Google search and Yahoo search engines.

Conclusion

For a film to be successful, a delicate and balanced mix of effort needs to be applied from all levels of the production. We have learned from other films that, through relentless and creative marketing, a film can attract an audience to its premier, even if it is not as successful through the rest of its run, due to word of mouth and reviews. We also learned that just because you have a lot of positives in your corner, that doesn’t mean your film will sell. We had an Academy and Emmy award nominated director with his own marketing team and they still only sold out half of the seats, because not all of the necessary pieces were available for us to market the film to its fullest extent. Overall we have learned to be more creative when it comes to marketing a film, because there are so many generic campaigns out there, it is very important to stand out.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Appendix

Earth Days Press Release
Images created by Hector Sierra
Promotional images sent to us from Jen Holmes
E-vites
Samples of Emails sent out
Facebook Event
Links:
Myspace Page created: http://www.myspace.com/469323800
Earth Days Website: www.earthdaysmovie.com
Contacts:
Robert Stone
robert@robertstoneproductions.com
845-876-0550

Jen Holmes
Account Executive
American Experience
617.300.5388
jen_holmes@wgbh.org