Active Audiences

My partners and I have begun what will likely be a very, very long discussion about engaging our audiences in our stories long before we begin production on a film. Partly as a marketing strategy (i.e. "ploy"), partly because it seems like a novel way to break through some clutter, and partly because we can no longer assume our audience is passive.

We used to assume that because the audience doesn't interact with the viewing of the movie, that ours was a passive medium. But it seems to us that could not be further from the truth. From moment to moment along the life of creating a motion picture, details about stories become available, actors are announced, directors are chosen, production art is shown, test screenings are held, trailers released, and blogs and bulletin boards are filled with opinions and thoughts from our audiences. Technology has made our audience more active than they have ever been in the history of the movies.

We can fear it, or we can embrace it.

So we're starting to think about ways to involve our audiences from the moment we secure rights to a script or book or whatnot, and go from there. The details of how we propose to do that are what we hope will prove this could work. The first real test of it is probably at least a year away at this point. But it will be an interesting experience, and it's going to shake things up for us as a company in some possibly unpredictable ways(as to "how things have always been done").

But I love disruptive change. :)