Independent movies and Social Media

Low budget independent movies often struggle to find an audience beyond the friends and families of those involved with the film itself.  Thousands, perhaps millions, of directors, writers, and actors take part in these films, pouring in their love and passion.  I have to believe that many real gems are made even though few are ever fully appreciated.

Now, I am not saying Gotta Find Barry deserves an Oscar.  I haven’t yet seen it but the story line is definitely that of a light-hearted comedy that has the makings of a funny and relaxing night out.   Rich Camp is hoping that social media will play a role in building an audience for his movie, just as it did for his last independent film titled Lumberjacking.

Rich Camp is the owner of  Rich Camp Entertainment.  He is also the writer, director, and lead actor in Gotta Find Barry.  I chatted with Rich and David Graziano this week to learn more.  David is helping Rich with the social media aspects of the production (yes, he is also in the movie with a small part I believe).

In Rich’s last movie, Lumberjacking, social media was used to both build awareness of the production as well as to raise money to support the effort.  Through a mix of traditional and new media means they raised around $1000 for production and grew a Facebook presence of more than 1500 members.  Throughout the production of this movie they updated the Facebook page with information on what was happening with the movie.  For example, checking out a theatre, shooting this scene today, and on and on.  The Facebook community was engaged and Rich had an audience of 1000 or more people attend the movie’s showing.  Not a bad audience for a small film. 

For Gotta Find Barry Rich and David are making minor changes to how they are using Social Media.  For example:

• While they are still fund-raising on the site they also held a traditional fundraiser.  They used the Facebook page to promote the event, and had somewhere between 100 and 150 people come to the fundraiser as a result.
• While they have updated the page with information about the production of the movie they will deliver a trailer of the movie also.

Twitter is also getting use more for this  movie.  While they have been primarily pushing out updates about the movie they are soon going to launch an interesting campaign where accounts will be created for each the movies characters.  Each character will tweet out, conversationally, to other characters, using the personalities of the characters from the movie.  The hope is that people will get to know the characters, love them, and have even more reason to see the movie, translating those tweets into ticket sales when the movie premiers in Rhode Island this November.

Will the approach work?  Yes, the Facebook work is going well and this new Twitter experiment is something I love and feel strongly will work well for any movie or book release.

Oh yeah….  A couple of other points:

• The branding, the messaging, across all channels is in perfect alignment.  What you find on Facebook matches what you find on their website.
• The plot?  Two ghost hunters go to hunted house to find their old buddy Barry, who is a ghost, in order to hang out with him one more time. 
• No, I am not in the movie… Maybe I’ll have to audition for whatever movie Rich comes up with next.

John

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