Replay and extensive summary of our webinar with Max Reisinger and Richard Rushfield. What can filmmakers learn from “creators”. “Two Sleepy People” mini case study.
There’s a quiet but undeniable shift happening in film—not just in how films are made, but in how they’re expected to live in the world. In this conversation between Jon Reiss, Max Reisinger, and Richard Rushfield, one idea keeps resurfacing: the audience is no longer something you arrive at. It’s something you leverage in the making of your film.
Creating a New Studio Model
Max’s trajectory towards starting Creator Camp–a company that he co-founded that develops, funds, and distributes films by digital creators–emerged from his own experience as a creator. Experimenting with putting content on YouTube early on, he shares, “I grew (my) channel to over 750,000 subscribers. Along the way, I met a lot of other creators who wanted to make films.” He noticed that these creators were only making “a few dollars” off their content, and he knew there had to be a better way.
Reisinger explains that many creators like Baron Ryan (director of Creator Camp’s first film, Two Sleepy People) get stuck on a “brand deal loop”, where they only get consistent revenue if they post constantly, leaving little time to work on something longer form and more creatively demanding. And thus, Creator Camp was born: Max and his co-conspirators saw an opportunity to build something that could fund, distribute, and support online creators. Or, as Reisinger frames it more practically: “What does it look like for us to build a community of this talent… and actually fund these projects, distribute [them], and create a new studio model?”
Case Study: Two Sleepy People
Two Sleepy People is a film that emerged directly out of Creator Camp’s ecosystem. As Max explains, the film was made for about $100k, and it wasn’t difficult to get the filmmakers to collaborate with them on the co-development of the film. “We were able to say, hey, we’ll give you capital so that you can actually invest time in this project.”
Theatrical as a First Move, Not a Last
Interestingly, this creator-first project decided to start with traditional theatrical. In a landscape where most creator projects begin (and often end) Max felt that there is a lot of value being left on the table when creators choose to show their films on digital platforms first.
“What we found coming from YouTube is that oftentimes creators are posting and you’re going to the bottom of the windowing process first, so you’re starting with ad-supported tiers, and for us, we’re like, there’s so much value being left on the table. Why not try to go to the most premium first? Because there are a lot of really engaged fans who I think would show up.”
Instead of defaulting to YouTube or digital platforms—where much of his audience already exists—the decision was to pursue theatrical exhibition first as a way of activating a deeper level of engagement from an already invested audience. The assumption/hope is that if an audience has been built over time, they may be willing to show up for the work.
The theaters that the team approached were hesitant to embrace this logic. For starters, where is this audience, exactly? How are you sure they will show up? In order to understand who their audience was, they built a website dedicated to the film that initially had the sole purpose of collecting audience emails, names, and zip codes (I’ve long insisted on the importance of capturing emails and data) while offering their names in the credits if they signed up – a pretty unique form of “gated content”. With 20,000 sign ups, the team engaged in a four city road show where they four-walled/rented the theaters and used their own ticketing service, collecting further audience data. It’s worth pointing out that this audience data collection is currently not possible in traditional theatrical bookings–a major pain point as we try to develop new economic models for independent distribution. This needs to be solved.
“We sold $40,000 in tickets across those four shows. And then we were like, hey, we have a $10,000 per screen average across four single show times. There is actual demand here.” With the success of these screenings, they finally got theaters on board with a theatrical booker. The second phase of the release included securing 30 one-night, single shows in theaters throughout the US. When these sold out in most cities, they got an additional 22 theaters on board for more single-night screenings. The third phase of the film was having it show in week long runs in 100 theaters totalling over 1,000 showtimes. Max acknowledged this benefit of a longer theatrical release: you can try different things, and you can develop over time. In total, the team brought in about $425,000 in ticket sales over 4-5 months.
Starting with the core audience early on allowed them to get momentum towards that wide release. Their promotion channels were organic social interactions, email, and text, and they stayed consistent about this through wider screenings, with the addition of $30k in paid ads. They trusted their audience, and their audience trusted them– and showed up! – in return.
Eventize Eventize Eventize
Max and his team experimented with various ways of eventizing the theatrical experience. As a proof of concept they created a creator film festival premiering Two Sleepy People with a number of creator’s short films as a live experience, with Jack Conte (CEO of Patreon) and well-known YouTubers present, along with live music. “We’re trying to bring together internet-native filmmakers to make it more valuable of an experience.”
For the screenings in their roadshow, they went with more familiar tactics to drum up excitement (Q&As and a red carpet) along with having the composer of the film play live piano as the audience was leaving the theater. Still, he believes there’s “still a lot of space and room to innovate”. The main question here is, how do you make it interesting for folks to show up?
Merch: It Depends on Your Audience
While there are cases of merch helping to boost a film’s visibility and revenue, (and we are big fans of merch here at 8 Above when appropriate) Max admits that they may have overestimated the interest in merch for Two Sleepy People–or at least the spending power of their audience. They realized that despite how much the audience might be a fan of a filmmakers’ work, they might not yet be a fan of the film. Don’t abandon merch entirely, but start small, and test, test, test.
Perhaps Film Festivals are not Essential
Max shares that he and his team didn’t really consider festivals as part of their rollout strategy, mostly due to the fact that they had an audience they felt confident in. He offers, “What is the purpose of a festival, in our case, if we’re actually starting with distribution in some capacity?” He admits that there are both pros and cons to this thinking. Festivals still prove some form of legitimacy (and industry support)–in their case, distributors in Europe wanted to know what festivals they had been in, and this was a metric as to whether or not the film was good. Despite the “friction”, he thinks exhibitors are becoming more receptive to films that avoid the traditional festival circuit. At the end of the day, they are still prioritizing distributing their work themselves, so the strategy of showing at festivals in order to obtain acquisition is not at the top of their list.
Creators/Filmmakers – Learning From Each Other
What lingers after the conversation isn’t a set of tactics, but a shift in orientation. As Max says, “The movie is one story, but then what is the story about the movie and why people should care? I think getting good at telling two stories at the same time is really the skill to develop.” It’s no longer just how do I get my film seen, but where does my work live, before and after it becomes a film? What’s clear is that something is shifting, the old models are no longer sufficient, but the new ones are still being invented—collectively and with a lot of heart.
Even as someone fluent in building an audience, Max acknowledges how difficult it is (for both filmmakers and creators) to shift into “marketing mode”. For filmmakers, it can be especially important to protect the integrity of their work. The challenge is both a logistical and mental hurdle: how do we start thinking like marketers, shaping and packaging our films for a market with new demands? What emerges is the realization that in this new landscape, filmmakers are going to need to hold two roles at once: author and promotor, creator and marketer.
As much as we think of creators and filmmakers as being two distinct types of creatives, Max thinks it’s a common misconception that the two occupy different worlds. He draws a distinction between personality-driven, internet-native influencers and the growing class of creators, whose work more closely mirrors traditional filmmakers –they just have had different paths. “Everyone is a creator,” he insists. He believes that filmmakers can learn from creators’ fluency with audience, while creators are seeking the rigor and storytelling depth that filmmakers have become associated with.
Max recommends working with a team, and acknowledges that it is really easy to get burned out doing this work. It’s important to create a community to work together. Ultimately he feels that there is a lot of common ground between creators and filmmakers and that each can learn from the other. Collaborations anyone?
Key Takeaways – It’s Never Too Early to Start Gathering:
- Get audience data early. Max admits that they could have gotten audience information even earlier than they did, which would have helped build an even tighter strategy.
- Get theaters and venues interested. Reaching out to theaters and spaces to exhibit the film in (during their 4-city roadshow) even earlier would have helped inform their partnerships sooner.
- Making the movie is just the start. They decided to do much of the early work themselves, but in retrospect, they feel they could have leveraged the interest in the film to raise more money. Although making a film is a major accomplishment, it’s only the first step.
- Find your people. Don’t try to do everything on your own. You don’t need 5m followers to find a group of people to help you with your film.https://jonreiss.substack.com/p/cinema-meet-the-creator-economy-webinar-a28