Stand-Out Shorts

by Russell Evans

  8. Keep your email and message campaign about your movie live, even now you have finished editing and are ready to upload it. Ask people to leave feedback, rate the film, and pass it on to friends. Open your campaign with a party – like a regular film premiere – where you give out cards with details about the film and ask everyone to help create a buzz for it.

  9. Check out problems you might have with your movie. Will anyone get offended to see themselves on YouTube in your movie? Did you ask and get written permission to use them? Check out Chapter 9, Law and the Movies to make sure you are covered. Look at YouTube’S Ground Rules for videos, and for how you interact with other people online. Movies that cause offence get flagged up and removed, so check that what seems like a comedy to one person is not offending another.

  10. Now you are ready to move on to the pyramid plan in Ch 28, Your Web Plan. It’s going to help you create one big organic campaign, where every site energizes the others and all traffic moves to and from each site, all the time creating a bigger wave about your movie. The key thing is not to rely on one site only.

  FIGURE 26.2 Aaron Yorkin, maker of Life and Death of a Pumpkin, directs viewers to his own site to boost hits for his series f Star Wars spoofs, Chad Vader. Yorkin’s Blame Society Productions channel has 134,000 subscribers, creating over 7 million hits for one episode alone of Chad Vader.

  FIGURE 26.3 Firecracker Films has built up a huge following on YouTube with its own channel of documentaries and shorts.

  Table 26.1 Making the most of YouTube

  Area What to Do

  Unique tags Grab the passing viewer and get them to look in by choosing tags that reflect your movie in a unique way, using words that aren’t used too often alongside regular descriptions that most people look for. Avoid using tags that might grab attention but have no connection to the movie.

  Category Make the category match the video so it’s relevant. Find out what people expect to see in a category to check whether yours is in the right place. For instance, a short documentary about a fashion show might sit in Film and Animation or in Style. Fully two-thirds of all videos go into just three categories: entertainment, music and comedy, according to the University of Calgary, 2007. So consider whether your video will get more hits in those categories or whether it will get swamped by too much choice for viewers.

  Title and description For the title, use descriptive words to grab the audience. Don’t just describe your movie as a kite-surfing clip – instead go for a “scary, awesome, unbelievable kite-surfing.” Descriptive tags also help the casual viewer decide sooner whether to watch the movie. Find words that describe the movie well, in a concise way.

  Movie length Short movies get watched more often. If a movie is just 30 seconds long it doesn’t need much commitment from the viewer – they’ll give it a try and need less convincing. Movies lasting 1–2 minutes do really well, but anything above 3 minutes is out of many people’s attention range. For longer movies, try Vimeo, or chop up the movie into episodes.Only 21% of movies viewed were larger than 21 MB (Calgary study).

  Use words concisely Avoid standard “stopwords,” in what is called Natural Language Processing (NLP) – words like ‘and,’ ‘on,’ ‘to,’ ‘with’ and so on, which get filtered out in web searches. These are wasted words which don’t help describe or flag up your movie.

  Links As well as communities or groups you might join, link the film to other sites and get the movie embedded elsewhere. Be smart about which ones to go for, choosing particular forums or sites where you know people who might like your movie tend to get together. For instance, if your film is a UFO story, start linking with UFOlogist discussion boards and conspiracy theory sites.

  Thumbnails Make full use of thumbnails used to show the film in lists on YouTube. YouTube lets you select the thumbnail image from the quarter, halfway and three-quarter mark. Some people purposely select frames that look good or show off the best parts of the movie.

  Remixes If your movie is suitable, allow your video to be remixed by other users, by using simple images and visuals that don’t rely on words. Comedy works best in this area.

  Related videos Related videos are those that viewers link together. Your video gets tagged from the title you give it plus any other tags you added. Then, as it gets watched a few times it gets placed next to other videos according to how other users link them together. So if people watch a high-ranking video, yours could link next to it simply by being similar. It doesn’t matter whether your movie has only had a few dozen hits, nor whether it’s new or old, it can still get linked to a big-hitter. It’s a fair system because it all rests on how other people link videos together, and not necessarily on the numbers who watched it yet. So, use the tags well, and find movies that you can hitch a ride with, by using similar words as tags. Everything is fair in this area – if the movie is closely linked by other people it will get listed.

  Video responses On YouTube and other sites, videos can be linked as a response to a film. If you watch a video that inspires you, you can post your video – or move one that’s already online – so it’s listed as a response. That means it appears as a link below the video, increasing the number of hits you’ll get. Some responses can be the exact opposite of the main video, like a repost to a sexist movie, or an alternative viewpoint to a news item. Others might be simply a similar movie inspired by it. But go easy on what films you respond to – it looks cheap if you hitch up next to a multimillion hit clip that has no connection to your movie. Choose movies that have some similarity to yours.

  FIGURE 26.4 This YouTube hit, The Life and Death of a Pumpkin was made by Aaron Yorkin and scored a Best Short prize at the Chicago Horror Film Festival. It attracted 31 video responses from viewers with similar videos.

  FIGURE 26.5 If you think viewers who like a clip on YouTube will like yours, upload it as a “related video.” The list of related videos is not connected to how many hits you get, just on whether viewers think your film is related.

  YOUR MOVIE GOES VIRAL

  A viral movie is one that gets huge viewing figures and seems to break out of its own usual audience, getting passed around between friends and coworkers. Many virals are adverts, and marketing people have found lots of ways to manipulate online viewing by paying bloggers to spread the word about films that advertise products. But beyond the commercial world, films made by people who love film do get spread around widely, eventually snowballing into viral success stories. Despite what the guys in suits want us to watch, people still seem able to discover great shorts and pass them around.

  There are no sure fire rules to make your film “go viral” but start with these, based on successful viral videos:

  Your movie has to have something with impact – whether it’s something gory, something bizarre, scary, funny or whatever. It has to be so memorable that you can sum it up in just a few words.

  It has to encourage repeated viewing, maybe by having something totally unexpected or visually interesting.

  A movie might go viral because it is about an issue people feel strongly about. A 2009 public information film to warn people about texting while driving made for a small police force in South Wales, UK, attracted millions of hits around the world after gradually going viral. Director Peter Watkins-Hughes put a clip on YouTube to show a friend, and from there it got copied to other sites. Within two weeks it beat a JAY-Z music promo in the top 10 viral chart. The horrific and explicit images of the car crash showed in this film certainly helped push it viral but it was also the skill of the director in wringing every last drop of emotion out of a common road traffic accident.

  FIGURE 26.6 A public information video on the dangers of texting while driving became a huge online hit in 2009, reaching over 7 million viewers around the world.

  Political campaigns make good virals. A video showing factory hens got huge hits despite being shot with poor quality video and shaky images.

  It doesn’t have to be dumb. Some of the top viral video
s are long, wordy, no-action epics, like the top-viewing 9-minute one-shot of Al Franken (a US senator and author) shouting down a crowd as he explains his voting on a bill. Or there’s the text-heavy 4-minute film about the growth of social networking sites, which went huge despite it looking like a college lecture. If it’s interesting, people want to know.

  Emotional is good. People like high emotional stuff, such as the 2009 hit viral film Free Hugs Campaign, (60 million hits and counting).

  A neat idea, cheaply done and with a low-tech feel to it. Videos that avoid expensive effects and instead opt for an original idea get strong hits. Singer-songwriter Oren Lavie’s Her Morning Elegance video transformed a little-known performer after a massive viral spread led to millions of viewings.

  Make it recyclable, so that it can be used and remixed by other people.

  Create a buzz through social networking sites, emails, friends, links to other sites, all asking people to click to the video and pass it on. Use tags on YouTube to ensure it gets linked to other fast viral videos in the “related videos” list.

  HOW TO LINK TO THE RIGHT SITE AND FIND THE RIGHT COMMUNITY

  You might spend valuable time creating links with certain sites, or you might link up with existing communities to share your video. But take a moment to check out whether the site is really going to work hard for you, or whether you are better off elsewhere.

  Click on the excellent web research site www.alexa.com. Alexa is a vast resource of data to help you find sites on a certain theme, and then investigate all sorts of useful facts about who visits.

  Take a sci-fi movie for instance. You might have made a neat short sci-fi and want to try to flag it up with sci-fi enthusiasts. Alexa brings up a long list of sci-fi sites, among them www.mania.com which also hosts various blogs, communities and groups. But is it a site that is growing or shrinking? Alexa’s data says that it grew 22% in the one three-month period, and that people spend an average of six minutes looking around, which is a relatively long time. It also says that 51% of users come from the USA, so that might suit your movie. Meanwhile, a similar site was down 2% in the same period, but on the other hand was a particularly fast site to get into, a whole 85% faster than other similar sites.

  Also use www.alexa.com to investigate which social networking site is most suitable for you and your movies.

  FIGURE 26.7 www.alexa.com lets you find out the traffic and spread of any website. This graph from www.alexa.com shows how YouTube performed over one month.

  STUFF THAT DOESN’T WORK

  Tags can be unreliable. YouTube can only use the tags you give it, so choose them carefully.

  Avoid tags that have nothing to do with your movie.

  Don’t upload repetitive videos or clips copied from TV just so it links to your main movie.

  Beware of spam tools that tell you they will “optimize” your video for you. They are irritating to viewers, and can get you removed from YouTube. A lot of videos do get removed because they become a nuisance to viewers.

  Don’t use automatic generators to automatically share videos. These are software services that automatically send and upload your movie to over a dozen other video sharing sites. A lot of users don’t like this kind of approach because it treads pretty close to spam, but the benefits may attract you, especially if you are doing commercial work. It also gives you stats, showing you which sites are watching it more. You usually have to pay, but rates vary. If you really want to do this, try www.heyspread.com/ or www.vidmetrix.com/ at the budget end of the market. Beware, though, your movie instantly becomes a product just like ads and marketing campaigns and you lose respect among filmmakers.

  It’s impossible to try to get your movie onto the YouTube “featured video” list. It’s an internal and very secretive YouTube process so don’t bother trying to influence it. But you can affect the outcome of “most discussed” by encouraging your group members to talk about it on YouTube.

  Music without copyright can’t be used. YouTube and other sites are quick to remove videos that use copyright music without permission. This can be frustrating so use music that’s legal – check out Chapter 9, Law and the Movies to get more ideas.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Web Your Movie

  OVERVIEW

  Tailor your movie to the web’s narrow bandwidth and low resolution – and make sure it makes the most of the smallest screen.

  Everything looks different on the web. What started as just another way to show movies has become the default way to see anything. It does this at a cost – what you see looks pretty bad because the data that makes up the movie is reduced massively. Colors are dull or too garish, the image jerks and details are lost.

  But if you think about all this in advance then you can turn in a movie that sidesteps these problems and looks better than anyone else’s online. Shoot for the web, not against it, and your movie will somehow look more professional. It will stand out and get more viewers.

  Table 27.1 How to make your movie web-proof

  Possible Problem What it Means What to Do About It

  Stories and ideas The place we usually watch web movies – on the bus, at a lecture, when we are doing something else as well – means you can’t rely on a viewer’s full attention. You need to be more clear about what is happening in the plot. We can’t see so much screen, so make it easy for us to pick up on what’s happening by having events up close and obvious.

  Acting Actors know that you need to be a little different for each place you act – theatre is different from the movies Your actors need to be clear, to add a little mime as they talk, echoing old-school acting where stars like Cary Grant (a former acrobat) acted with body language as well as words, hyping up the performance as on a stage. Watch Grant’s wordless wait for a bus in a deserted road in North By Northwest, where he gets paranoid, puzzled, amused, and then fearful of his life – all without saying a word.

  Length of movie Online viewing is different: most people expect a quick hit, and can’t commit to anything longer than five minutes. If it’s over five minutes it has to work harder to attract and keep its viewers. Make the movie short. 1–2.5 minutes is an ideal limit. Most videos on YouTube average 2 minutes. It streams quickly, the viewer knows it’s all over soon, and compression can be less noticeable. And actually this ultra-short limit is a kind of haiku method of filmmaking – inspiring in its limitations.

  Audio Sounds on the web get compressed much less than images, so quality will be good. But there are limitations, especially if you view on a phone or MP4 player. Keep it to just three audio layers on the timeline when you edit: one for main voices or most prominent sounds, another for essential sound effects and a final one for ambient sound or music. With your sound design (check out Ch 23, Audio Editing for help) you will need to be more explicit and put important sounds up close, instead of going for subtlety. Test it out by playing the soundtrack over the telephone. It’s a useful exercise to see what sounds are most crucial to your movie.

  In an interview, sound is crucial so you might leave it relatively high at 32 bit mono, but frame rate can be cut right down to 10 frames per second (fps) as there is very little movement. Or for a sports movie you might increase the frame rate to 15 fps but massively reduce sound quality.

  Using the camera The screen on smart phones, the web or other devices is way smaller than TV so you have to change the way you think about the screen. Shoot as if it will be watched on the camcorder LCD monitor instead – it’s just a little smaller than the standard web movie screen so stand a couple of feet away as you shoot now and then to gauge whether an image is clear at this scale. Move the camera up close but don’t zoom in. Avoid panning or tracking if you can. On the plus side, a movie that plays it cool with this sort of framing – steady images and slow movement – tends to look a little more classy than others.

  Movement The problem is the frame rate used in most video compression. Uncompressed movie on your TV is played at 29.9 frames per seco
nd (fps) or 25 in the UK. That’s a lot of still images to be streamed each second, so the movie gets squeezed down to 15 fps or lower. This creates shuddering or jerky movements. Tell your actors to avoid too much fast movement. Instead, try close-ups to make it clearer what is happening, with rapid cutting between steady shots of detail.

  Lighting Web and phone playback is less subtle than your TV screen, and compression can reduce the range of shades in the image. Go for a strong key lamp so you get your main subject lit well with strong shadows. Avoid a cluttered background, so reduce smaller filler lights behind the subject. Use shadows on the face of your subject to reveal expressions more easily.

  Aspect ratio Most web or phone players will add black bars top and bottom of your movie rather than crop it to fit. That means your image is reduced even further. Work in 4:3, or 16:9, especially for YouTube.

  Text Web and phone players are small, so text is unreadable at normal movie size. Credits, subtitles and titles need to be large enough to be readable, with simple colors, little movement and in high contrast. Avoid words that spin into the frame or morph into other shapes. As a starting point, take the size of your font to be at least 20% of the height of the frame. Test it by standing a couple of feet away from the camera LCD monitor to see how easy it is to read.

  Colors The range of contrast and subtle tones is reduced on small screens. Compression software on the web looks for significant changes between frames, and if colors or tones are too similar doesn’t bother updating them. It can also flatten parts of the frame by grouping together pixels in a small section and summing them up with the color or tone they mostly resemble, so you lose definition. You’ll need to amp up the lighting and make your images more clear. You can’t get away with too many midtones as they will just merge to form a mass of sludgy colors. Choose three colors maximum and stick to these as the main palette for your film – a good choice for your movie whatever size it gets seen at, as it tends to make a stronger style overall.