Archives for December 2016

I recently watched the film HyperNormalisation.

It’s 2 hours and 40 minutes. 90% of the film is the director narrating his thoughts at you over seemingly arbitrary images. Many sequences feel like they could be taken out and the central message of the film would be intact. It’s everything I’m trying to make sure my documentary isn’t. It’s barely even a documentary. as much as a video essay, the kind of thing only an already established filmmaker with a contract with the BBC could get away with.

And I think it might have been really good.

Like, really, really good.

I’m still thinking about it days later. The basic thesis of the film is that because the reality is too complex, people have retreated into a world of fantasy, replacing the truth with fake narratives. Corporations and politicians fight over whose fake narrative will rule our reality. People know these narratives are fake, but chose to accept them because they can’t comprehend the alternative.

Like a lot of modern left-wing art, it’s a thinly veiled critique of Trump. There were dozens of “Bush is Hitler” films coming out when I was a kid during his Presidency, so I expect we’ll be seeing more of the same in the future. Two things differentiate this film though – 1) it predicted Trumps win (the film was released in October 2016, before the election) and 2) it has a sharp critique of the left from the left.

In an interview the director stated the left has two big problems. First, they are unwilling to discuss power. The films shows how when occupy wall street and the arab spring came to power, they had no vision of what sort of system of power to replace the old system with – so things went back to the way they were.

In the arab spring, the Muslim brotherhood actually did have a vision of what kind of system they wanted to create – so they took power. The kids behind the arab spring begged the generals they overthrew to stop them. Likewise, in the US, some of the left have called for a military coup – from the CIA or the electorate – to stop Trump. Isn’t this the system they are supposed to oppose? When did the deep state become the ally of the left?

Second, they have no compelling vision of the future. Without that, you can only rely on fear. “Vote this or ELSE…” Or else climate change will destroy the planet. Or else fascism will rise to power. Or else racism. Or else you’ll have to pay back those college loans. The director Adam Curtis himself says the right is the only side right now with a compelling vision of the future. A thing they are fighting FOR. That is what people sacrifice for and are willing to give up the comforts of their life to create.

Unwilling to address power, or create a vision of the future, the left has retreated into fantasy. For goddsakes, how many political posts have you seen that reference Harry Potter or Star Wars? These are children’s fantasies being used to understand global politics.

In the modern era – there is no difference between fiction storytelling and political narratives. Zero. None. Storytelling is storytelling is storytelling. And whoever has the best story is going to win.

How these fake narratives are woven make up some of the most interesting parts of the film. For example, one of Putin’s chief political technologists is former theater major who uses avant garde theater techniques on the political stage. (I wish there’d been more on this, so if you run across a book on this, tweet it at me.)

The biggest realization I got from this film is that people want to live in these fake narratives. They prefer it. How many posts did you read this election that began “unfriend me if…”? These posts don’t convince anyone. They’re just “get out of my bubble.” As the film’s wikipedia page puts it: “The American Left’s attempt to resist Trump on the internet had no effect. In fact, they were just feeding the social media corporations who valued their many additional clicks.” Those people were in for a shock after election day.

Or not? Maybe they can just keep inventing fake narratives for every time reality happens. Maybe after everything they thought about the world turned out wrong, they’ll just make a new fake narrative. Maybe.

My only criticism of the film is that I’m not sure this is anything new. Were people really getting the truth 1000 years ago, or were they just choosing the fake narratives of the medieval Catholic church and the local noblemen over what their eyes presented?

Perhaps the difference between then and now is that we know on some level these narratives are false. What this film adds is that those who chose to disappear into fake realities and fantasy  will render themselves politically impotent and those who create the right narrative can rise to great power.

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If you’d like to let go of fake stories and find out the truth about something, check out my upcoming documentary American Circumcision.

This last weekend, I took the edit of my new documentary American Circumcision from 2 hours and 47 min, to 1 hour and 57 min. While this is not a final edit, it is enough that I can start doing test screenings for close friends.

If you’re interested in getting in email when we have public or semi-public test screenings, subscribe here.

In the last post on crowdfunding, I said you might need to do 100,000 impressions on social media to lead to the 1000 who’d actually contribute to your campaign.

So how the heck do you do that?

Two words:

Sharable Content

You have to create things that people gain social value by sharing.

Odds are, your page, email list, and social media accounts can’t do those number solo. But your combined audience might be able to. Add a couple other big pages, and you definitely could. So if you can create content that gets shared by other people with audiences, you can reach your goal.

So what makes people share?

Sharing Is About Them, Not You

In a TED talk, the founder of College Humor said, “People share content for one reason and one reason only – identity creation.” People share to socially signal who they are. If you share a funny video, you’re telling people that you’re fun. If you share a serious issue, you’re telling people that you care. Sharing is how most people socially signal what tribe they’re a part of.

When creating content, you have to think about not how good you can make yourself look, but how good you can make the person sharing your content look.

In my case, our film covers an important issue. People who wanted to signal they cared about this issue or agreed with the statement our meme was making would share our content.

Remember, in the digital world there is no limit to how much you can publish. If you buy a TV ad, you use up airtime they could be using to run something else. However, there is no limit to how many Facebook posts a page can run. So if you create great content for someone else’s audience, you can help each other out. You get attention for your campaign, and they give free value to their followers.

But we’re still talking about thousands of impressions. How do you reach that many?

Two ways – distribution and volume.

Distribution

Find pages with huge audiences and offer your content for their audience.

Our film was shared by a number of really huge pages from wildly different groups. Everything from activist groups like The Whole Network and Intact America, to alternative media like Stefan Molyneux and Red Panels, to sex positive educators like Buck Angel and Sexplainations creator, Lindsey Doe. Some of these we reached out to directly. Others were a surprise.

The commonality is that all of these groups gained value by sharing our content, and were able to signal something who they are and what they support.

Volume

During our campaign, we were posting 3-5 times a day. So how do you create that much content?

You pyramid it (credit to GaryVee for this concept). Take one piece of content and see how much you can draw from it.

Say you have a video – or in our case a full feature length film you’re working on. How many ways can you use that? You could do a trailer. Multiple trailers. You can pull stills, and turn them into quote memes. You could use that content across platforms, if you format it right. You could even do some stuff we didn’t do. For example, you could pull audio and do podcasts and radio spots. You could make gifs.

We call this pyramiding, because from the peak of one piece of content you draw out something you can use on every platform. Plus if you document the process, you can turn that into even more behind the scenes content. I’m turning my crowdfunding process into a blog post now, right?

There are a million ways to do this. Get creative. If we’d had more time, we probably could have done even more. Our campaign had a month of planning, and we were still making things as we were launching. There was probably some audience left on the table.

By the way – this works on on live event as well. Protests, educational events, parties – just bring a camera and document. Now, doing live events during your crowdfunding campaign can scale.

Give Before You Ask

Audience building never stops. You can keep doing this process as much before or as much after a crowdfunding campaign as you’d like.

The best part about this approach is it’s built on offering value. It turns crowdfunding from an ask (“Please give me money!”) to a give (“I made you this cool thing. It’s free. If you want more, you can support me here.”).

Speaking of an ask, if you want to see the film I crowdfunded all this money for, check it out here. You can see a free preview clip from the film if you sign up for our email list here. Sign up for my email list here.

Read More: Kickstarting: The Math