Ways Filmmakers Use Social Media Capitalism
Ways Filmmakers Use Social Media Capitalism
by STAFF WRITER source RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
is still niche. With time, however, that will change.
Rather than threatening the animation industry, greater access to software means smaller players can now compete with the big guns.
“ Six or eight years ago, there was a huge gap between what Hollywood studios could do and what people buying off-the-shelf software could do, especially in terms of modelling hair, clothes, skin, explosions, splashes. But every year the guys producing off-the-shelf products add features. They’ ve been playing catch-up for a decade, but now they can do most of what the big studios can do.”
The software used for modelling has also become easier to use.“ There’ s this kind of convergence where our technical guys have become more technical and the software has become less technical,” Meyer says, meaning people can build their own solutions.
“ For example, we built our own fur system from scratch because nothing could give us what we wanted. We wanted something specific and, between existing tools and node-based visual programming tools in our software, we built our own system for our needs.”
There’ s also enormous potential for overlap between the businesses of animation and“ rapid prototyping” or 3D printing.“ The rapid prototyping guys are on a parallel track to us and using similar technology, but we don’ t really understand each other’ s worlds,” Meyer says.“ Sooner or later we’ re going to cross-pollinate.”
BLOGGER Kipp Bodnar created a great new phrase: Social Media Capitalism. He defines this new term as how the internet is a wild wild west of internet marketeers who attach payment reference codes to anything they can think of in order to monetise the traffic they create – either to their Facebook pages, or to their blogs and websites.
A new web phenomenon was launched in 2009: Pinterest. com. Here registered users post photos of their favourite objects or venues. Pinterest adds a referral code to each picture its users upload, and then collects a commission each time a person goes to another website from Pinterest and buys something.
What this means, Bodnar argues, is that in order to capitalise of the traffic generated by www. pinteret. com, or any other affiliate marketing campaign, you need to understand and appreciate the powerful economic advantage of creating, building and and maintaining a solid social media campaign which integrates into the product you are trying to sell – in this case, your movie.
When Youtube( 2005), Facebook( 2007) and Twitter( 2008) were born there were no systems in place to monetise web traffic. These websites have grown to become the elite in a handful of globally recognised social media websites along with Linkedin and Flickr.
About 2 years ago, these social media campaigns started monetising the traffic to their websites by selling advertising. In the process they managed to shift advertising bucks from terrestial television and print to their websites.
What makes 2012 a key date in social media hsitory is that Pinster has figured out how to make money from their website from the Get! Ready! Go! Not through advertising, but from traffic to and from their site. This is something that no other site has managed to do. Pinster’ s explosive 4000 % growth in the past year makes it possibly the only website able to rival and threaten Facebook.
All of this has important lessons for filmmakers and suggests 7 Basic Ways:
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