Some of you may have been charting the path of a project that is near and dear to my heart over the last 4 or 5 years: a independent feature film called The Beast of Bottomless Lake.
When Kennedy and Craig asked me to do the publicity for the film (I like to joke I’m the whole marketing department), I knew that we had to start early. I knew it would be too late to start to market the film when it was finished, so we started a blog that chronicled the filming process and all of the major highlights since. We got a facebook page. We got on Twitter, and we got a YouTube Channel.
And our little film that we made on love and not much cash has been successful. We have screened at three film festivals and a local sci-fi convention, and just received word a couple of weeks ago, that our film had been sold to the Superchannel here in Canada, and would begin airing on April 6.
They gave us two air dates in April. They also had social sharing enabled on their website, including a facebook like button. Well, we mobilized the troops (similar to what we did last summer to sell out the July screening at OIFF), and got everyone we knew to like that page. Key players in the group involved with the film all posted to their own statuses that if people hadn’t “liked” our facebook page yet, we’d love it if they would, to help increase our social clout. Our number of fans jumped over night by at 100+ and the Superchannel now has 13 showings of our film scheduled for the month of April.
It works, kids. It really does. But you have to start early.
On March 4, I attended the Women in Film Festival, and was a participant on a social media panel (using The Beast as an example). After, I did an interview with a local Shaw cable TV show called The Express, and here it is.