Panelists explore future production models
Producers Series urged exploration of new ideas

Media makers, who are pushing the boundaries of commercial, narrative, and documentary production, encouraged a recent IFP 2010 Producers Series audience to explore opportunities for innovation in a changing marketplace.

Brian Newman, former Tribeca Film Institute CEO, urged producers to “think of films not just as films but as projects: what other components are crucial to accomplishing what you want to accomplish?”

Particularly for documentaries, he said, “A feature film may not be the best way to engage your audience.”

He also exhorted producers to harness evolving channels of financing, production, marketing and distribution — and the conflicting impulse of media companies to push the market toward a closed system, as in the Apple-controlled platforms on the iTunes store and the iPad.

Lance Weiler of Philadelphia-based Seize the Media, showcased his own ongoing experimentation with transmedia production. “Because of dwindling acquisition prices, there’s not much of a path to sustainability” in conventional distribution, he said.

Instead, Seize the Media “focuses on building direct connections to the audience” through interactive storytelling and online community building.

“We create a story world that’s a gateway for people to meet others,” Weiler said. “The audience is more savvy than before. They’re looking for real connections with storytellers or between other people sharing their stories. We’ve had people meet and get married through our experiences.”

Weiler’s apocalyptic thriller “HIM,” about a mysterious pandemic that leads to the disappearance of everyone over age 21, was the first transmedia project at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in January.

Among an elaborate series of multi-platform initiatives, Seize the Media is also building a cell phone application that allows users to create virtual survivalist cells within the world of the “HIM” story, employing geotagging to root the game experience in real-world environments.

Moxie Pictures’ CEO, New York-based Robert Fernandez, talked with IFP Chicago board president Claire Connelly and Milwaukee-based series producer Lisa Gildehaus about the work they all did on the advertiser-sponsored documentary series. “Y’all vs. Us.”

Last fall, Young & Rubicam enlisted Moxie to produce the Cellular South-sponsored 10-part series “Y’all vs. Us,” about the rivalry between two top high school football teams in rural Mississippi.

The series was part of a saturated regional campaign that included extensive production at games, live TV, and web video.

The producers said they took pains to approach the series as documentary rather than reality TV — looking for genuine drama rather than manufacturing it and remaining sensitive to the values of the local community.

Cellular South only financed coverage of the regular season, so Moxie self-financed two more episodes to cover their teams’ state championship runs. Fox Sports broadcast the series nationally in April.

“It’s becoming less and less about traditional TV,” Fernandez said. “Cellular South didn’t want traditional TV commercials.”

Despite a budget that he characterized as a third of what he needed for the undertaking, “In the changing landscape of marketing we felt it was an invaluable opportunity to produce this kind of program and show it can work…The hard part is to get marketers to think differently than product placement.”

—Ed M. Koziarski

Ed M. Koziarski is co-director of the feature film “The First Breath of Tengan Rei”.
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