"Ink" Ink A Deal With Their Fans

"Ink" is an indie feature film that gained traction last October after being ripped and downloaded by the bit torrent community 400,000 times in the first week, pushing it's popularity well past Hollywood giants released at the same time.

This wasn't an intentional strategy from the filmmakers, but they embraced the heightened awareness gained from it, and saw their DVD sales and rentals quadruple as a result. However, it was far from an "overnight" success.

Jamin and Kiowa Winan began with a fairly traditional hope:  shop the idea to Hollywood to gain a decent budget and name actors. When this failed, they pulled together a business plan and presented it to people they knew, small time investors, and scraped together enough to make the film with no-name actors and a small crew.

On completing their film, they entered the film into a few festivals, gained a positive reception, and looked for a distributer. However, the economy had taken a downturn, and the only distribution deals offered for Ink were back-end deals, no money upfront, with little chance of Ink's investors seeing any money back. So Jamin and Kiowa turned these deals down, choosing instead to distribute the film themselves.

Having previously taken two indie feature films on the "festival circuit", they decided that they wanted to do something different with Ink: a very short lead time between festival, theatrical, and dvd/downloads to capitalise on buzz. They go into detail on this distribution decision on their blog here.

Ink opened theatrically in their hometown of Denver, drawing on a contact list of about 500 locals. They planned to screen it for 2 weeks at the local cinema (still at this point hoping to gain a distributor who would see stubs sales as proof for a wider release), but audience demand led to a nine week run, and they found people were travelling from out of town to see the movie.
 

The filmmakers gained interviews with local newspapers, radio, and television, and to create extra buzz some of the screenings included Q&A's, behind-the-scenes clips, and 'in-costume' event days. Screenings were then set up in other nearby Colarado cities, and the success of ticket sales allowed the filmakers to gain screenings at indie cinemas in other cities around the US. They made good use of social networking sites and their blog to mobolise fans to each of the screenings.

By this stage the filmmakers realised a distributor wasn't about to help them out. They wanted to convert their fans from theatrical to dvd purchase while they still had the opportunity, so they released the dvd while they were still doing screenings - selling it off their website.

It was at this point in time, October 2009, that the dvd was ripped by a buyer and put on file sharing sites - where it went off big time. In the space of a weekend, Ink jumped from #12,991 on IMDB to #16, ahead of most major Hollywood movies - and it stayed in the Top 200 for two months. 

They've written a couple blog posts on their thoughts at the time on their movie being "pirated": on the whole they chose to embrace the publicity that came with it - it made their film way more well known. They also added a button on their website so that people who had watched the film for free could make a donation to the filmmakers (this was at the request of one of the file-sharing fans!).

Within a couple of weeks Ink was also added to Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes (where it got up to #4) and Amazon as additional ways for people to rent or purchase the film. A month later Hulu picked it up for free viewing, if you are in the US [the rest of the world is locked out of Hulu thanks to geolocking :( ]

The official Ink store sells autographed copies of the DVD (with director commentary & behind the scenes clips), poster, soundtrack and t-shirt. They plan to edit the extensive behind-the-scenes footage into it's own feature length documentary for release later this year.

What they did right:
- Created a tightknit local fanbase
- Made friends with the local mainstream media (radio, TV, newspapers) as well as festival blogs.
- Added value to their screenings, so it became an event rather than just a movie.
- Took the local buzz online, communicating through social networking sites & blog that helped spread word of mouth.
- Simultaneous release, so if people liked it, they could buy it immediately (rather than forgetting about it and needing prompting a year or so later when they might be less interested).
- Great public response to the 'pirating' success - instead of getting those 500,000 people offside, they engaged with them, encouraged them to spread the word, and provided them with multiple ways to purchase or donate if they liked the movie.
- Added value to the DVD's they're selling through the store by autographing them all.
- Website makes it easy to connect to them through Twitter, Facebook and Youtube

What could be improved:
- They have made 3 different trailers, the last (and best one in my point of view) is not on their main webpage.
- The website needs a site map and a media kit... a lot of great information is buried in the Double Edge Film Blog, but this isn't easily findable for bloggers and media looking for quick facts and marketing collateral. Make it easy for people to write a story! And easier still to spread the trailer and poster image... I've had to search for both of these to get the right code for my blog.

By the way, while it might not be the easiest to navigate, their blog has a lot of great candid insights for budding filmmakers, cataloging their journey, and they've done a number of interviews where you can get more info about them.
Double Edge Films Blog
Torrentfreak interview
Hulu interview
Video 20 Questions Podcast (have to sit through some boring 'Mac' talk to get to the good stuff).


And thanks to Ross Pruden who tipped me off about Ink, he runs a great blog on indie film distribution and social media.