Once your film, or some part of it, is online, you will want people to be able to find it. You may even want to try to get the attention of as many people as possible. When trying to attract web traffic to your site, you must remember two key rules. First, nobody likes spam. It is fine to use your website and social networks to promote your film. Unsolicited emails and comments, how-ever, are considered spam and are highly unwelcome. If you plan to pay someone to promote your film or your site, ask about the practices employed and about how they avoid spamming people while promoting films. Secondly, there are some things that truly do help people find your site. One school of thought is that you might employ search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics to make your site and its content as accessible as possible to search engines such as Google. It is worth spending some time exploring ways of optimising your content for the web (you might even try typing the phrases ‘optimising web content’ and ‘SEO’ into an internet search engine).
Once you’ve got the attention of viewers, you may want to know who is visiting your site and where they come from. There are a number of ways to track that kind of information. One of the most common at the time of writing this chapter is the use of Google Analytics to keep track of traffic to your site. Useful information such as what pages are most/least visited can be obtained, as well as details about the areas of the world your visitors come from.
Key points
• The media landscape continually evolves. As a filmmaker, it is important to ask how these changes impact your own production process.
• Increased user interaction with films online, on mobile phones and elsewhere leads to increased expectations of participation by those users. It is important to consider, from the outset, the nature and level of interaction you hope your viewers/audience will have with your film.
• Planning an interactive narrative should include the creation of a nodal or star map
to show connections or pathways through your project. ▲
Notes
1 The twenty-first century has seen an increase in the production of video essays as film criticism. In producing such essays, filmmakers and scholars create videos containing scenes from an original film and a range of elements such as images, sound, text and voice-over that relate to a particular critical question about that film. Catherine Grant’s ‘Unsentimental Education’ is an example of this kind of video essay and it can be found online at: http://
filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/ (accessed on 10 May 2010).
• The internet and new technologies that follow will change the way that films are made and seen. The important question to ask is: How can you use new technologies to expand your own filmmaking and your film audience?
• It is important to distinguish between simply putting your documentary online and making an internet documentary.
• Mobile media and social networks continue to change the way films get made and seen. It is important to look out for new and novel events such as the citizen journalism events in 2009 and the rise of crowd-funding for films.
• When putting your film online, think twice about where you will put it and at what point in your overall production timeline.
• Make time to plan for updating material online and investigate ways to save time and money by using online film distribution channels.
Exercise
The task
Consider the various ways digital technologies might affect your film and ask yourself the following questions.
1. What is the structure of your film? Draw out a map for a non-linear narrative, using a nodal or star map to illustrate key moments or connections within the story.
2. How will you use the internet and other technology to create your film? Will you use a blog or other website to document the making of your film? Will you create or use a structure to facilitate user engagement with your film through comments, mash-ups or other interactions?
3. How will you use the internet to promote and distribute your film? Will it be a place where you pro-mote your film by making a website or publishing it on another site for distribution?
4. Will you use the internet to archive your film in some way? Will you post it to YouTube or Facebook or some other site? Will you create multiple formats so that your film can be seen on a number of internet-enabled devices?
5. How can users interact with your film? Will you make the film available for reuse? Will you publish supporting images or other materials for your audience to use?
6. As always, with changing technologies come new expectations. Can you think of a new or novel way to use the internet or other digital media to grow the audience of your film?
2 According to Meadows, during observation, the viewer/user makes an assessment. During exploration, they do something. At the point of modification, the viewer/user changes the system and then reciprocal change occurs as the system tries to change the viewer/user. Taken from his book, Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative (Peachpit, 2003).
3 As a filmmaker, you might consider your film as a constellation of ideas and materials. In addition to the film itself, you will often be asked to participate in the creation of images, texts, sounds and other materials for the internet and other contexts. Increasingly, film and television projects are linked to web-based and mobile content such as games, comics and other materials.
4 Jenkins publishes and comments on an article about the transmedia generation on his website. The article is useful both for the way that it addresses international engagement with digital film and for the references it makes to other filmic and internet developments of relev-ance to you as a filmmaker: http://henryjenkins.org/2010/03/transmedia_generation.html (accessed on 12 May 2010).
5 http://toshootanelephant.com/ (accessed on 15 May 2010).
6 To Shoot an Elephant begins with a Creative Commons statement:
‘ This work has been registered under a Creative Commons license.
You are free to download, redistribute, translate And build upon this work non-commercially, As long as you credit it,
And license your new creation under identical terms.
So any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.
PROTECTING CREATIVITY THROUGH SHARING.’
7 The film’s title comes from an essay by George Orwell: ‘Shooting an elephant’, originally pub-lished in New Writing in 1948:
‘. . . afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant.
The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it.’
George Orwell defined a way of witnessing Asia that still remains valid. The project’s website frames the film with the following information provided by the director: To shoot an elephant is an eyewitness account from the Gaza Strip. December 27th, 2008, Operation Cast Lead.
21 days shooting elephants. Urgent, insomniac, dirty, shuddering images from the only foreigners who decided and managed to stay embedded inside Gaza Strip ambulances, with Palestinian civilians.
8 URLs for these sites can be found in the Further reading section at the end of this book.
9 The UK’s Channel 4 has produced a website called 4Docs that hosts a wide range of docu-mentary films and related resources. In addition to films, there is a blog containing useful (and regularly updated) information about opportunities, resources and contemporary debates relevant to documentary filmmakers: http://www.4docs.org.uk/.
10 At the time of writing, there was much debate about and movement from Flash video formats to HTML5 video formats. The latter allows video to be seen on popular devices such as certain mobile phones including the iPhone, and other computers that do not have (or choose not to use) Flash, such as the iPad. Both YouTube and Vimeo have taken steps to ensure that their catalogue of films is rendered in HTML5-friendly h.264 format (leaving you to worry about your film and not its format).
11 There is ongoing debate about whether or not films should have dedicated websites. Often, sites developed only for a specific film become quickly dated and often forgotten. It is import-ant to consider the time and resources you can contribute to maintaining a website for an individual film. Nothing is worse than an outdated website containing information about a
‘New film! Coming soon in 2002’.