August 4, 2005
film blogging
Congratulations to Gia for landing the film blogger job. And it’s a proper Hollywood movie, not some local indie thing.
Funnily enough, I knew the producer of the film (who also produced “Trainspotting” and “The Beach”) when I was a kid in Edinburgh– I wrote about that in early 2004.
Also around the same time, I wrote something called “10 Rules for Professional Movie Blogging”. Some of it still holds up; I especially like Number Seven:
7. Start early. To build awareness of the movie properly needs at least least a year, preferably two. It’s not about telling millions of people at once. You talk to a few thousand at a time. Let the word spread gradually. Give it time to seep into the Zeitgeist, like absinthe on a sugar cube.
Good news for Gia. Rock on.
Thanks so much, Hugh! xxxxx
Cool. Hugh’s Movie Blogging post is one of my all-time favorites.
Slightly scary though… I love Danny Boyle, but the synopsis just makes me pray it’s a comedy:
“Plot Outline: A team of astronauts set out on a mission to re-ignite a part of the dying sun. Another team was sent out before them, but was never heard from again.”
Hmm… nuclear bombs… asteroids…
Seriously though, congratulations Gia.
I hope this works so well that blog-like movie promotion permanently displaces all those ten-gigabyte Flash monsters rampaging on the Hollyweb.
Two years sound reasonable. For about half a year, I’ve been talking about one film in which Lucire might appear, called Two for the Money, and it still hasn’t seeped in to the Zeitgeist yet. Still hope the movie does well but it may get one of those more boring Hollywood pushes. And in 2005, I’m not totally convinced that it works. I really would rather download a trailer myself, given an incentive to do so. Worked for King Kong, and that was talked about and blogged for years. (Go back to 1999 and someone uploaded an early script.)
I don’t think anyone wants to do away with trailer downloads. If anything, more and better trailers is the trend (think Pixar).
The great thing about the blogging angle is it gives the audience more of the inside/back story. Film is glamorous, even in its drudgery. I don’t really care whether Brad and Angie hook up, but I’d definitely go look at their phone-cam shots of production. And I’d *really* like to see informal thoughts from the director and cinematographer.
With this you can keep people coming back to the site, keep them interested, get them talking about the movie. If the movie doesn’t suck (however you want to define that) then it will surely help.
Also, the budget for this type of thing is *negligible* in the world of even serious indies, let alone Hollywood numbers. Whenever I think about it I wonder how the film business can be so clueless about the whole topic… but once in a while I talk to some random alien from Hollywood and am reminded what a different world they live in.
Anyway, yeah, definitely trailers. And definitely blogs. And please OH GOD PLEASE no Flash simulation of the exploding sun!
Who Would have thunk it: Professional Film Blogger
Gapingvoid writes a professional film blogging job, which sounds really great. Are there other unique blogging jobs out there?
Frosty, it’s written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle… it wouldn’t be possible to be anything *like* Deep Impact
Thank fuck it’s not directed by Michael Bay…