7/29/2019 1204 FLM DIST Audience-Building

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74 F IL MM AK E R FALL 2012

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Theres something we should have

learned in the last five years, which

is the most important lesson we can

carry into the next 20 years: ignore audience

at your own peril.

For a while now, indie films m.o. has been,

Build it and they will come. Well, audienc-

es have stopped coming. A few years ago, if

you asked a young indie filmmaker who his

or her audience was, you heard everyone.

Nowadays, ask an indie filmmaker aboutaudience and most likely you get I dont

know, or perhaps just panicked silence. But

we keep making thousands of indie films a

year, having conceded budget as a hedge

against diminishing streams of revenue.

As an Asian-American producer, Ive had

a front-row seat to this seismic shift hitting

our industry. In the late 90s, there were

three Asian-American indie features made

a year. Now there are 20 to 30, nearly all

of which do not get distribution. Some cel-

ebrate this as progress, yet the real story

has been happening elsewhere, on YouTube,

where the top stars and highest earners are,

incredibly, Asian-American.

How did the top five Asian Americans on

YouTube amass more than 3 billion views,

while indie filmmakers learned to settle for

a few thousand? To confront this question,

with the help of my collaborators Chi-hui

Yang and Gary Chou, were gathering cre-

ators from across the industry in an ongoing

summit called Present/Future. Heres what

Ive learned so far. Five years ago, when in-

dustry gatekeepers put up the usual barriers,instead of appeasing the gatekeepers, young

Asian-American creators went online and

posted homemade videos on the then newly

created YouTube. When they realized people

other than their friends were watching, they

made more videos that people liked. Now,

five years later, theyve cultivated a global au-

dience large enough to pay their rent, finance

their work, recoup their operating costs, gen-

erate sold-out international tours and attract

serious Hollywood attention. Recently, when

asked what she would do to capture the 5

million subscribers YouTubes number two

star Ryan Higa has, a network TV exec said,

I would kill each and every one of my staff if I

had to. Audience is the new power.

The YouTube stars are inadvertently re-

writing the indie film equation. Instead of:

festival awards + angel investors + unpaid

labor x five years = microbudget first fea-

ture, they formulated a new model: audience

= financing + distribution = more audience.

And what comes from audience is sus-

tainability: financial, emotional, creative

sustainability. Without it, indie film is in

more danger of becoming a game for the

privileged, winnable, only by the top 1 per-

cent. How many writers, directors, actors or

producers do you know who make a living

from making independent films?

Im not advocating for indie filmmakers tobecome YouTube stars. What I hope is that

our industry will learn from the current cul-

tural moment, the present/future if you will,

and begin investing in audience as much

as we invest in content. Imagine if we had

the same amount of labs, initiatives, youth

programs and grants dedicated to growing

audience as we do for developing story and

financing films. The present/future of indie

film depends on innovating content and

distribution and prioritizing audience. Kick-

starter, a huge step in this direction, shows

clearly how audience engagement also

drives content innovation.

And thinking about audience necessarily

means engaging globally. Theres no law that

says American indie films can only be watched

by a small group of American cinephiles. Cre-

ators dont stop at American borders when

chasing a story to tell, so why dont we think

about audience in the same skys-the-limit

way? In China, storytelling is not allowed to be

boundless, and truly independent films can-

not be distributed legally. So, to tell the stories

they want to tell, Chinese filmmakers must

think about audience beyond Chinese borders.

Theyve found an international audience to

support their work, and that enables them to

fight hard-won battles to show their films for

free in China. These may be two very disparate

realities, but Asian-American YouTube starsand Chinese indie filmmakers have this com-

mon: they prioritize audience above all else,

and they know that the value of engaging with

their core audience is priceless.

Audience, simply put, is the new indepen-

dence. For purposes of sustainability of our

makers and our industry, as well as the inno-

vation of content and distribution, we must

start investing time, money and resources

in developing audience. For what good is a

well-developed story if it falls in a theater

and no one is there to see it?

YouTube stars Antonio Alvarez, Sung Kang and Ryan Higa inActing for Action

Investing in Audience

LINE ITEMS +20

Karin Chien on independent films new equation .