The chance you will watch an independent ‘film’ in a theatre has decreased significantly just in the last 10 years. The sheer volume of titles available on Netflix Watch Instantly, not to mention VOD IFC, HBO, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon and countless other streaming and on-demand services means viewers no longer need advance planning to watch at home (or anywhere they have a laptop or iPhone).

Filmmakers can find this a bit depressing. Watching a film in a theatre is exciting. It’s big! It’s usually calibrated to look as good as it can. And most importantly, there are a bunch of people—strangers!—watching it together.

Creating this sense of spirit is a challenge for independents and perhaps the main opportunity to compete with the mainstream industry. We don’t have studio-size spends, but we can understand our audiences more precisely and have a more personal relationship.

For live settings, event screenings work very well. But can we make digital screenings social? We generally have little to no control over when people watch the films online, their physical circumstances, who, if anyone, they are with, or even if they watch the whole film.

Still, filmmakers have come up with some innovative ways of bringing the audience for digital screenings together. Transmedia, expressing your story in a different context, can play a great role. Lance Weiler’s Head Trauma featured a game that embedded clues in flash frames of the film itself, so viewers had to watch the film repeatedly to play and engaged with each other on the film’s site. You could offer live events to viewers of the movie during a digital rollout, such as a Skype-based Q&A. Using a technology like CrowdControls, viewers could identify their location and you could plan post-screening events in popular places.

Do you have other examples of ways to make online screenings exciting or social? Or are we doomed to living in a room with a virtual helmet?

As filmmakers face all kinds of challenges, I have two very different panels in the SXSW Panel Picker hoping for your vote.

Broadband Issues for Content Makers helps film and video makers understand some of the issues around Broadband and ‘Net Neutrality’ and how they specifically impact independent producers.

Live! Nude! Audience! takes YOUR submission to be instantly reviewed by our crack team of experts and evaluated for marketing and outreach opportunities. You’ll get to see the process in action for your own film or discover the best ideas to use for future projects. And of course, we’ll be naked.

I’ll be presenting a workshop at IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Documentary Lab this week and I’ll be interested to see up close how filmmakers are thinking about audience engagement. Twitter is abuzz today about Jeff Steele’s take on the crowdfunding model (he’s against it) and he calls audience building a “Loser.”

Building an audience as a way to appeal to investors/financiers might sound like a great idea, but having a bunch of YouTube hits does not translate into dollars and means almost nothing to the buyers or financiers.

Of course, his comments are in the context of films which require “financiers,” which we are seeing to be less necessary in a super-low-budget-higher-quality-own-it-yourself model that is emerging due to various technological advances. Still, the other model will linger as long as schools can sell creative MBAs and the AFM can get anyone to attend.

Had fun moderating and ‘advising’ at The Conversation on Saturday. Lots of thoughts always arise when you get many interesting and innovative thinkers together, but I think one thing has been on my mind and only became more intensely so after a day of discussing various kinds of viability for media creation.

There are some basic realities in an economic context that are altering the fundamental possibilities for filmmakers now. When I was focused on the distribution end, I saw this as largely troubling. I do think there will be things I currently love that may not survive the kind of changes we are seeing now. But there are also potential upsides that can be embraced.

Hollywood-style cinema seems to be moving more and more into over-the-top, event-based cinema that can’t be replicated in a home environment. The movies that tend to do well at the box office are the ones with astronomical budgets. The box office prices are going up to reflect that. If a big 3-D movie is $19.50 now, then exhibitors may be reluctant to play small movies that have smaller audiences at a reduced admission.

On the other hand, independent filmmakers can increasingly make high-quality films for very low amounts of money. They may not be able to access the old distribution channels, and they also may choose whether a traditional distribution model makes sense, compared to the various alternatives that are emerging. Since very few films ever make back their budget through domestic distribution and the majority of films made don’t even have the option of accessing traditional distribution, it’s no surprise that new ways of reaching an audience and potentially getting revenue are emerging.

What I’m waiting to see, and to figure out myself as a filmmaker, is what elements of financing or reaching an audience from the “old ways” can work with a model in which the work I make is not only a product I then license to other people in hopes of some return for the work I’ve done. Instead I’d like it to be viable in a financial way (and also good, by the standards I have) and also a part of some larger body of communication that remix and reproductive culture demands. I think we may not be there yet but the tools are developing.

See you at DIY Days!

The fabulous Brian Newman will be presenting a panel on audience building at DCTV on Monday, February 22 at 7:30PM. As this falls just a couple weeks before my own audience engagement panel at SXSW, I will totally be mining Brian’s mind for great ideas- and it’s sure to be a fun event.

Via Ted Hope, a thought-provoking article on the idea of transmedia storytelling in film by David Bordwell. Bordwell is generally in favour of the concept, pointing out that it can bring a new dimension to the experience of the viewer.

Some transmedia narratives create a more complex overall experience than that provided by any text alone. This can be accomplished by spreading characters and plot twists among the different texts. If you haven’t tracked the story world on different platforms, you have an imperfect grasp of it.

However, he’s also cautionary about the arbitrary push to create transmedia experiences for all films.

For one thing, most Hollywood and indie films aren’t particularly good. Perhaps it’s best to let most storyworlds molder away. Does every horror movie need a zigzag trail of web pages? Do you want a diary of Daredevil’s down time? Do you want to look at the Flickr page of the family in Little Miss Sunshine? Do you want to receive Tweets from Juno? Pursued to the max, transmedia storytelling could be as alternately dull and maddening as your own life.

To me it seems like the transmedia approach is useful only when it helps to bring an audience into a risher shared experience- i.e., something they want to explore with each other. As Bordwell points out, there is a more natural extension with television or with film that has an element of cult appeal. But we shouldn’t limit our transmedia ideas to just traditional social networking/graphic novels/novelizations/sequels/remakes. Each project may have specific means of reimagining that helps its audience to connect both with the film and with each other.

Useful to think about in terms of reaching communities and audiences…