Documentary film makers learn from Obama campaign

TEXAS: Documentary film makers striving to spread their messages are taking lessons from the freshly crowned king of online community organizing US President Barack Obama.

Internet culture and technology are changing the business of making documentary films, from how producers find important stories to how finished works reach viewers, according to The Good Pitch chief executive Jess Search.

‘It is daunting for film makers because everything they learned about film is being taken away,’ Search said during a South By Southwest panel talk here about film and other media engaging citizen activism in ‘the age of Obama.’ The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation in Britain is behind Pitch, which puts new-age tools to work developing, funding, and distributing documentary films.

‘Where film makers are setting out with social change in mind, it is a time for becoming much more strategic about that,’ Search said.

‘Online techniques of distribution and community organizing that go into political campaigns can be put to work.’

The Pitch community connects non-profit groups and potential backers with documentary makers seeking film topics or funding.

It also uses Internet tactics to get finished works in front of audiences.

In the case of documentary ‘Chosen’ about sexually abused boys at a British preparatory school the targeted audience was a single government minister, who watched the film and initiated a formal investigation, according to Search.

In contrast, a documentary being done about overfishing of the world's seas is meant for everyone.

The Web will be used to orchestrate screenings in homes or at parties and to get the documentary posted on blogs and video-sharing websites.

Theater owners more interested in filling seats than promoting social causes can be coaxed into showing films by having people in towns sign online promises to attend.

‘It's sort of a death-of-television model,’ Search said. ‘You've been used to very bad television here for a long time.

As Brits, we come here to learn from you because it is just starting to happen to us.’ Documentaries took a drubbing under former president George W. Bush, according to Dustin Smith of Roadside Attractions, maker of the film

‘Supersize Me.’ ‘People on the right thought you were treasonous and people on the left were so depressed they didn't want to pay 10 dollars to go see a movie about what they thought anyway,’ said Smith, who took part in the panel.

Roadside partnered with a major Hollywood studio to promote its latest release about America's dangerously massive debt ‘I.O.U.S.A.’ by linking it to uncut versions of blockbuster films.

‘Before that we opened with regular commercial releases in art theaters and it just didn't perform,’ Smith said.

‘There are alternative ways of releasing documentaries, now and people need to tap into those. If you are trying to change the minds of people who don't already agree with you, then theatrical is not the way to go.’ Search said there are strong parallels between promoting documentaries and politicians since the Internet no longer lets either get away with simply beaming messages at passive audiences.

In Britain, documentary makers have started referring to viewers as ‘the people formerly known as the audience,’ Search quipped.

‘The downside is we lost the easy money and the mass audience,’ Search said. ‘The good news is that we have much more meaningful ways of reaching people.’ AFP