Inviting audience participation in your project

Part 1

After months and perhaps years of producing your film, you realise that you have a character who can stand on their own. They set the tone of the film and set it apart from all others. So how can you use your character to grab different audiences, engage them in your film and story, and give your project a longer shelf life? One way is to create a blog.

Many filmmakers and artists have created blogs based around, or for, their characters as a way of allowing users to engage with them on a personal level. The character (ie. you or someone with some time on their hands) expresses views on their community, their most annoying new neighbour or their latest travels in their quest for fulfilment, answers posts from fans as they create another life in the virtual world. You are in some ways beginning to create a brand based around your character, something which is marketable and perhaps, merchandisable.

Imagine your film is based around the story of a journalist who uncovers a local mystery that has long been neglected. Themes or topics that would be explored in such a piece could include relationships between family members, historical aspects of the area and the controlling powers within communities that come and go. Create a blog that delved into other local mysteries – myth or fact – by your journalist inviting contributions from communities. A collection of postings would grow that documented local urban myths, tales or facts that would make stimulating reading, and link back to your film. Or perhaps a serialised approach whereby the journalist made regular posts that chronicled the discovery of several myths, either fictitious or factual and the ongoing impacts this has upon the community, their posts appearing in the blog also. Potentially further story material…

Further examples of how to use a blog:

+ your character’s ongoing diary entries (post their life in the film)
+ news articles surrounding a particular incident or event
+ ongoing uncovering of clues in a mystery or conspiracy
+ the airing of different points of view on a main issue explored in your film (written from your characters point of view or invited from visitors to your blog site)

Blogs can be extremely useful for documentaries by inviting commentary about the issues raised. It could even be helpful or therapeutic to have a forum where users can come together to discuss shared problems or common interests that originate from the content of your film. Allowing anonymous posts here is a consideration.

So how do you get a blog? There are free blog sites that step you through setting up free accounts and providing templates for how it will look. WordPress and Google’s Blogger are the most popular sites.

Other tips regarding blogs:

+ regular posting to blogs can take time. Set yourself a goal for how many times you’ll contribute and don’t be too ambitious. You have many other projects to work on.
+ Some blogs allow a group of users to add posts to your site. This can be advantageous to help spread the load of posting and replying to visitor comments.
+ They can be valuable information sharing or network creating tools. Discuss the development of your projects and welcome contributions for help on any stage. You have a particular problem with editing software or sound engineering: post it. Someone out there might have a solution!

If you’ve got a successful blog happening for your film project, let me and the rest of the world know about it!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.