"Self-Started" Succeeds Through Social Media

Self-Started Production Companies

Promotion through Social Media

          

Production. Distribution. Screenings.

These are the main facets of the film industry. It used to be that if you want get involved in this industry you had to play with the “big boys” like 20^th Century Fox, Universal, MGM, or another big production/distribution companies. If you wanted to have your piece seen, you’d have to go through movie theaters to get your piece on the “silver screen.” Either that or you’d have to go to a film or record manufacturer/distribution company, which would allow your piece to be seen on a home television screen through a video player or television station.

But now with the internet and social media outlets, these facets of film and sound recording have become more accessible to the people. Now anyone with access to a computer and recording equipment can create a video or music content and distribute to online viewers. (which make up over 75% of the population in the U.S.) 

           

Now let’s talk self-produced. These are three production/distribution groups I’m going to be talking about in this post: 

• Scott Bradlee & Postmodern Jukebox
• SoulPancake (The Science of Love)
• Hit RECord

Postmodern Jukebox

            Postmodern Jukebox is a music experiment founded by Scott Bradlee. The band, known to fans as a collective whole as Postmodern Jukebox, is comprised of members Robyn Adele Anderson on vocals, Adam Kubota on bass, Allan Mednard on drums, and Scott himself on piano. This group has been around for about a year and a half now, though Bradlee was making YouTube videos since about 4 years back.

            The first video of the group published on YouTube was in February 2013. The song covered is Mackelmore’s “Thrift Shop.”

This is no ordinary YouTube cover. Bradlee and the rest of the group is dedicated exposing the musical flexibility and hidden potentials of recent pop hits. He does mash-ups of music & vocal genres, and presents most of his work in his very own apartment. Though for this project the studio apartment has become an apartment studio.

Other early recordings include a country version of Kesha’s “Die Young.”

Scott has found as a musician and a student of music as an art form, that roping music strictly to their original genre is not the way to go about experiencing music. Through social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and the group’s own site he has been able to produced (record and film) these re-imagined pop hits and distribute them online.

            Over the past year the group has reached an over 600,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel, and their videos have a collective total of over 25 million hits. The group has collaborated with dozens of guest artists, some already viral such as Puddles Pity Party the “Sad Clown with the Golden Voice.” 

They’ve coved such recent songs as “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor to superstar status artists like Miley Cryus.

Through the group’s impressive use of social media on the production and distribution level, they have gained a national following and are currently on tour!

\

         

SoulPancake

SoulPancake small, viral “production company” based in LA and founded by actor Rainn Wilson (The Office), and his friends Joshua Homnick and Devon Gundry. 
This production group is sub-divided into about 6 different video series. These sub-groups in SoulPancake cover a wide range of topics. 

I particularly like the series “The Science of Love.” This series, like much the others from SoulPancake, contains reaching out to regular people in the creators communities and bringing them into a conversation.  

On “The Science of Love” these conversations rang from topics such as intimacy to Tinder.

The creators spend a lot of time & effort crafting this productions, just like any other profession production company. And because of this hard work and collaboration they then get to share it through SoulPancake's managed social media outlets such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

Today the group has over 1 million subscribers on their YouTube channel, and their videos have a collective total of over 35 million hits. Like Postmodern Jukebox, it is highly collaborative and eclectic in taste, and uses social media to help produce and distribute its work for the online community to see.

Hit RECord

Hit RECord is another film and art production outlet. This self-produced project is interesting because it focuses so heavily on collaboration. The project was started by actor Joseph-Gordon Levitt, and is now based all over the U.S. with hundreds of thousands participating in collaborations through the Hit RECord project.

Short film, "Yes We're Sinking"

It's all about the collaboration. The Hit RECord YouTube channel has sever examples of this collaboration, but the website gives followers all the bits and pieces and individual artists who contribute to this ongoing initiative. 

Watch video here

Hit RECord engages the smaller population of online content creators from photographers, to studio artists, to writers, to filmmakers. So while the “following” on YouTube and other social media may not be as high as the other two examples, it is constantly growing. It also shows an impressive amount of engagement in the online creating community. Considering there are less than 25% of America’s online population contributing to the creation of content the following Hit RECord has gained is truly impressive.  

As of today, Hit RECord has over 100,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel, and their videos have a collective total of over 3 million hits. But they certainly are cornering the social media market through the group’s own YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Gordon-Levitt also promotes the project through a “HitRECordJoe” account on nearly all of this media.

The project has been going on for several years now, but has only recently gotten very formal on the collaborative level. Perhaps this has been enhanced because of their clearly strong participation in social media. (I’m going to guess, yes.) Just a little over a year ago, the project got picked up as a television show, and the first season just aired on the television station Pivot.

The Take-Away

Self-produced, self-promoted film and recording groups online have changed the way we’re exposed to film and music. We’re also experiencing it differently. This genre works though because social media is providing a platform to produced, distribute, and promote new works. Self-produced production groups use on social media to promote and distribute their work, and therefore viewers are getting a whole other category of film and recording to experience.

New information. New talent. New ideas.