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Tonight, the local picture palace was packed for a preview screening of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, care of Matt’s Movies, a subscriber-supported group from Santa Monica’s KCRW 89.9FM.

The film is based on the memoir of French Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was paralyzed at 42. Filmmaker Julian Schnabel, who won for his directing this year at Cannes (and before, with Before Night Falls), moves you within Bauby’s constraints. With the help of Janusz Kaminski (“Spielberg’s DP”), focus goes in and out, the perspective is limited, but the humanity is left to embrace: his memory and imagination are still free. It’s a noble purpose, that go with you after the credits rise.

The movie opens in select theaters Friday.

Poster by Indika.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=a-eELc1Ae48

As any kind of artist, you want the general public to experience your best work and, by attribution, have the best impression of your professional ability. When it comes promoting or distributing online, there’s no “A” for effort to just fulfill today’s expectation that you have something up. Online, tracking public behavior is just like reporting traffic on the 405 freeway — you can count cars over time, where they are, and how they got there. You want people to stick with it, en route to their destination with you. The question is that the work you have online, is it engaging the public or is, literally, a one hit wonder?

It’s a pain to understand traffic online beyond the over-valued sense of “hits.” It’s a pain to fire up Google Analytics for each and every one of your projects. When you send an e-mail out to your friends (and your fan club) about your latest and greatest creative work, it’s a pain to know whether or not your effort was a shot in the dark.

FWD:labs feels that pain. You need a painless truth to your sense of YouTube plays and MySpace views. You need clear terms and intuitive graphics that can inform your next decision to make quick improvements. This latest feature of FWDlabs.com informs you about your audience engagement.

When an artist signs in and adds a project, there is a traffic report for each one. Without any effort, the project is listed on the site, search engines find it, and your audience consumes it. With effort, you can tell if anyone click the link you added to Facebook. The goal is to clear up any thoughts that only a ringing phone or empty in-box mean you’re up or down. Knowing and adapting with the information might even increase your bottom line.

Before, if you ever wanted to know:

• How popular is my profile and each individual project?
• How is my site doing today?
• What’s the highest traffic this week for my project last year?
• Who linked to me or my work and how often?

Now, with traffic reports, you’ll know.

Engagement is not views racked up by browser reloads or geek-centric jargon. Engagement is founded by knowing that one Homo sapien visitor is one unique count, not ten pageviews or twenty “hits.” It’s knowing which link someone clicked to find you and checking out that link yourself. It’s knowing how you’re trending this week with a stock-line bar graph and your week’s high and low. It’s knowing you and your work are out there and about the people who seek it out: your audience.

Part of a series of posts about the updates and upgrades of the quick iterations and new features at FWDlabs.com.

FWD:labs’ self-service web application kick-started in November 2006. You might not know it, but a lot has happened since. The quick iterations and new features have not been communicated as transparently, directly or clearly as I’d like. Time to get real about how it’s getting real.

I’d like to share the additions, fixes and efforts toward the web application and the discoveries, actions and receptions of self-starting a small, niche collective for creative artists in cinema.

Here is the behind-the-scenes activity in the last 3 months:

• 11/17: E-mailed all artists who use FWDlabs.com
• 11/13: Received feedback on 11/12’s goals from a FWD:labs member: “I just read it. It is good. Very nichey.”
• 11/13: Received Q Collective’s e-mailer highlighting their business card. “Love the sticker concept.”
• 11/13: Found camerajobs.net and thought, “Wow, this was painless. But will it be useful?”
• 11/13: Heard about the ActorsAndCrew.com marketing e-mail via YouTube and spoke with a collective member about it: “Interesting approach (to highlight one member’s showreel). Good for one active user and maybe good prospective active users. Bad for everyone else?”
• 11/13: FEATURE Added text only export of resume, easy for copy-and-paste to e-mails, other sites, etc.
• 11/12: Revised a new PDF — big, bold words on FWD:labs’ goals, which needed re-aligning
• 11/9: Sad but inspiring to find out about The Office in Santa Monica, a member’s only retreat for screenwriters, and its hit from the WGA strike
• 11/4: FUNCTIONALITY Added e-mail privacy preferences — now database driven and self-service
• 10/31: FEATURE Added database listing, grouped by role (standard titles) — now a way to show off every entry in the cast and crew database, across all projects
• 10/30: Found a killer presentation (PDF): “No Time For Games: Playfulness in Interaction Design … Kevin Kearney, User Experience Director, Avenue A/Razorfish”
• 10/28: FEATURE Added cast and crew database, complimenting the project database, with add/edit multiple with sorting, and mini-mailing list; updated project views, links, messages about cast/crew — now another reference and aggregate of collaborators
• 10/27: FUNCTIONALITY Removed a middle step in updating a project; if it’s got errors, you’re back to the form with the usual highlighted note; if it’s problem-free, you’re congratulated back on your list of projects
• 10/27: FUNCTIONALITY Added a visual calendar to select the date of a project, rather than typing in YYYY-MM-DD format.
• 10/21: Revised the CSS style guide to re-align the clean image for FWD:labs
• 10/21: FUNCTIONALITY Fixed the intranet profile page; think it’ll be best to put all modules into different PHP files, depending on their privacy issues (i.e. one for intranet, the rest pulled from the other side of the wall)
• 10/21: FUNCTIONALITY Fixed the date from being year only (2007), to year/month/day (2007-10-21), for more intelligent sorting on the automated resume
• 10/21: FUNCTIONALITY Fixed the hit counts from stopping at 127, a particular MySQL column limitation
• 10/21: Added ThinkVitamin.com’s forms article to our Basecamp
• 10/17: Found NPR’s This American Life – The Allure of Meanness
• 10/13: Contacted a friend (print designer) about hiring interns: “You had some luck posting a job for an intern? I could use one myself. What was your ad like? Where did you post it? How’s the deal work — unpaid, hourly, or flat rates?”
• 9/30: Found a traffic spike from Google result #26
• 9/29: Re-evaluating the invite process w/ community developer
• 9/23: Back to basics — shot “Scubaman” with a FWD:labs member
• 9/21: Contacted a FWD:labs member about salon gathering venues: “IFC Center would be perfect but I believe the bar section is closed now… isn’t crazy loud music / dancing, you can sit, talk, drink and its off 6th Ave and easy to find.â€?
• 9/17: Re-visited several chapters of “Getting Real,” from 37signals, to reinforce kicking butt

FWD:labs is alive and well, but it’s time to pick up the pace. I’ve held back from e-mailing our members and the consequences have meant sleepy users, missing out on what’s happened in the last 365 days.

Now, I’m ready to share the activity and evolution of the collective and energize the base to blossom and grow. I believe this web application solves real problems, exhibits well a handful of best practices in self-marketing, and lets members do extraordinary things for themselves care of FWD:labs.

I didn’t need to see the trailer, visit the web site, or notice the poster before I ordered a ticket last month during the New York Film Festival to see the new Coen Brothers film. It already got to me — word of mouth, because Roger Deakins shot it. But the film opens in limited release this November 9, and Miramax did its marketing some justice. The posters are strong, the trailers fierce, and the web-plus-Facebook presence well done.

Movie Marketing Madness explains how the convergence of images (and brand) impressed:

“Everything — the trailer, the posters, the website — has a similar look and feel. That strikes me as the work of a studio that cares about selling the movie to the RIGHT audience, one that’s going to be sucked into the movie’s world and so wants to use the campaign as the tool to draw them into engagement with the movie’s brand.”

Scope

• Trailers, with different title cards and aims.
• Poster, and a series of character posters. (Designed by BLT & Associates.)
• Web Site, consistent with the poster and full-screen video transitions. (Site by Real Pie Media.)
  • Cast & Filmmakers
  • Film (Synopsis and Production Notes)
  • Book (Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel)
  • Gallery
  • Downloads
  • Video
  • Accolades
  • E-card
  • News & Links
• Facebook app, using a friend-based “coin toss” game

Surface

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2WqpMp4cQnQ

Trailer (“red band” version on official site)

Poster Series

Web Site

Facebook game