Filmstalker: UK Film Council losing internet audience?

There's a new website coming to the UK which will help promote non-mainstream cinema and try to increase cinema attendances for these films. Called myfilms.com, it will combine social networking and a community feel to the site in order to promote new films.

It will combine film reviews and information with a sophisticated recommendation engine that will endeavour to find non-mainstream films to match the taste of their users.

It all sounds quite interesting, and is backed by money from the UK Film Council, LOVEFiLM, IPC Media, Sky and Carlton Screen Advertising.

However, there seems to be a bit of a lack of focus on the Internet by the UK Film Council as we read these comments over at The Guardian.

"The aim is to increase the range and breadth of cinema going in the UK," said Pete Buckingham, head of distribution and exhibition at the UK Film Council. "It is extremely difficult getting anything other than blockbusters known in media such as papers or magazines, even movie-focussed websites take a strong blockbuster-led approach."

Has he looked on the Internet of late? Most of the sites I read are talking about smaller, independent films just as much as the big blockbusters, that is if you bother to look further than Empire, Coming Soon, etc. saying that, even these sites are favourable to the smaller films.

I find that the problem is the lack of decent story worthy information coming from these productions. Get some news worthy stories out, create a blog and release inside information, photos, video, etc. These things will get you much more Internet coverage and Internet audience attention than anything else, and it has been proven to work time and time again. Oh, and they are really, really cheap.

Instead the UK Film Council seem to think it's impossible for these films and creating this site will get the information out there. It sounds like a clone of so many other sites to be honest, and it's only going to be as good as the information going into it and the audience that sign up to it...yet another online community.

I do applaud their motives, but surely the money could be better spent offering help to these productions to get more press coverage along with the blockbusters? What about in creating a PR company specifically put out to cater to the Internet sites that they don't class as mainstream only? What about investing in creating more screenings outside of London for the large community of web writers?

Interestingly over at I Spit On Your Movie they wrote about the same topic, and they are a prime example of a site that really does pick out some great non-mainstream content. Certainly it's one of the sources that highlights non-mainstream films to me. Why couldn't they get behind these sites?

I still think that the easiest thing to do would be to set up a small marketing company specifically there to help non-mainstream films get noticed. Offer cheap marketing via these online sites, distribute assets on the Internet, including screeners, advertising and competition help, assistance with production blogs, etc. That would all have been much better than another social film site.

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it's probably more telling of their objectives, to create or build what would normally be regarded as niche films into major financial successes - well, i would say that films work better when they serve a small audience particualrly well, rather than when they're manipluated or created towards a much larger audience where they may well work but on a much more general level. as a film-by-film basis, small films inherantly only make small amount of money (for the most part) so it feels a bit misguided or illogical on the face of things... i would say it's counter-productive and against the lessons learnt over the decades to go for massive publicity or manipulation of smaller films, it's better to concentrate on promoting the concepts of individual taste in the face of what may be considered widely popular, and that way people will naturally support smaller films as and when they choose (though this obviously requires confidence in audience behaviour that might at first seem insecure or unpredictable as a way of working, and we've at least lost site of it and learnt to behave in a different fashion post-multiplex introduction : look abroad at other models of the cinema world to see alternatives to be inspired by), in a more realistic fashion, and therefore support all those that are involved in putting the film together and supplying it to the public. again, there seems to a fantasy of following the american model rather than seeking or repairing the old british model of small cinemas, domestic product for domestic audiences, realistic levels of finance, and so on...

Posted by: logboy | February 28, 2007 9:01 AM

"if you bother to look further than Empire, Coming Soon"

I think that's pretty much the point, though. Most people don't look beyond the blockbuster sites - and many people don't even look this far.

Sites like Filmstalker and ISOYM are great, but I very much doubt that you have anything like the traffic that Empire gets. If MyFilms gets off the ground it will (hopefully) be well funded enough to reach people who would enjoy more independent films but aren't interested enough to go hunting around the blogosphere.

On a side note, I don't know if you've heard but MyFilms don't actually own the myfilms.com domain name. What they meant to say is myfilms.co.uk

Posted by: Paul | February 28, 2007 7:23 PM

That's all very well to say that Paul, but it's just another service much like so many of the other social movie services out there, and they don't spread the word very well.

When a film trailer appears on YouTube, is it YouTube that hypes it so much or the film sites picking it up and sending it round?

It's like any other Web2.0 or Enterprise2.0 system. Don't rely on a single core, connect to other sytems, pull them in and make a network. Reuse and utilise the power of other sites to spread the word and connect to a much larger audience than you could with a single.

It makes much more sense. Sure I don't have the audience that Empire does, but I know I have a different audience. Now, pull together all the smaller film sites who are more willing to write about smaller films and I guarantee you'd smash the reading audience of Empire.

Posted by: Richard Brunton | February 28, 2007 8:13 PM

thats is if they want to talk about the films.

it's hard even to get people (at large) to discuss anything online,
that's why there's the potential for heros to be made of people doing something which should be every film fans everyday habit of wrangling issues and discussing the stuff that's around - and boy, do some people realise this!

so, you can take a horse to water...

it's more important to focus on other issues that would cause films that warrant and garner more discussion (than it is to try an get films that people would talk about if they wanted to) to be made, i think.

Posted by: logboy | March 1, 2007 8:54 AM