If you’ve been following Easy Water Films, then you’ve noticed a lot of changes recently. The heart of those changes are based in social networking, web 2.0, and new media. I’m not entirely sure what all of that means, but we’re involved with it now and in a big way.
The number of unique visitors and hits to www.easywaterfilms.com is growing exponentially. We had tremendous numbers in 2008, and if trends continue we’ll beat those number in 2009 by April. Not too shabby. Were trying to make this site valuable to the people who come here. I hope, specifically, that the content that Easy Water Films is generating is meaningful to all of you. We have opinions, commentary, and research on this blog and we have films and organization information on the main site.
What we don’t have is a connection. I don’t know who any of you are.
In the last month, Easy Water Films has launched a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, and a YouTube Channel. We have made this push in an effort to connect with you, the audience. We want to know who you are. We want to know what your opinion is. We want you involved in our filmmaking processes, to follow along with us as we develop ideas into projects and projects into films. We’ve taken steps to provide the communication channel, and the content. We’ve invested in ways to capture more of the process in new and innovative ways. You may have already benefited from some of this technology through the Production Diaries currently available on Facebook and YouTube. We hope to do more things like that in the future, and will take every effort to document all of our projects from this point on.
At Easy Water Films we believe in making the kinds of films that excite us. We’re not trying to make films by committee. We just believe that there is a large group out there who share our sensibilities and tastes and we want to reach those people. In this world of content saturation there are simply too many things vying for our attention and it’s impossible to watch and discover everything. We believe that the network of individuals will (is) becoming a very strong factor in information delivery. Hollywood can spend millions of dollars to convince you that a movie is good, but if your best friend says it’s terrible, chances are you won’t see it.
I find it interesting that there are as many people over 55 watching YouTube daily as there are people under 18. I find it interesting that Facebook would change their terms of use because enough of the Facebook community said “We don’t like this.” It seems to me that in all of the clutter and the noise of the internet and digital age, the way we seek and consume entertainment has been brought more under our control. The theater is not the only place to see a movie anymore. Trailers are not the only way to entice an audience. Instead we can choose what we watch, when we watch, and how we watch. That’s marvelous, but also daunting for a content creator like Easy Water Films. We have the potential to reach as many people and more through the internet as we could through a fully studio backed theatrical release. That’s an incredible opportunity, but also one that’s difficult to leverage.
We hope that our infrastructure efforts over the past month have laid the ground work for spreading our work to a larger audience, and more importantly, provided a way to reach out to you and start putting some personalities with the numbers.
Christopher Johnson, Director, Easy Water Films, L.L.C.