Tuesday 20 April 2010

The trials and tribulations of social networking.



A few months ago I really felt like this was all beyond me. How do you maintain an audience when the main thing you are trying to do is sell an idea? It's not even a finished product yet so how are you supposed to get people interested in hearing about a film thats yet to be made. This is a particularly daunting prospect in the early stages of the edit when it feels like their isn't really much to say and quite frankly who gives a s%£*. 

I'm not going to lie to you, setting it up and understanding how it all works was fairly painful, and does take a couple of days but once you have got past the...'what the hell am i going to say' and 'who is going to be interested' it starts to make sense. Since i've been on Twitter i've realised that, aside from building an audience for your film, their is plethora of people tweeting info that is pretty essential to anyone out there trying to do this on their own. Personally I find it a much easier way of digesting all the info that's out there for filmmakers because lets face it, most of us working on unfunded projects are working day and night to make the best film we can and the less time spent actually having to go and find all that information the better. Here are some essential follows for independent film...

For making

For watching

Because they are just cool

There are definitely mistakes to be made, for example, its a wonderful thing to be able to hook your social networking sites and film platforms together but beware of clicking those buttons. I managed to post our short to my facebook profile about 6 times in the space of 2 minuets without realising and then had to ring my friend to get her to tell me how to delete on the iphone (i'm new to that too). Already conscious that I might be spamming you all with my plees to join, vote and support I was mortified, but it was definitely a lesson learned. Twitter has a good way of telling you that you are being tedious, your followers simply unfollow you, particularly i've found if you tweet too much information in one go. 
Follow us as we wrestle to find balance between being interesting and engaging to our audience while trying desperately not to scare people off with mindless self promotion...