Layers on Layers on Layers. Making an Independent Documentary Series on the 2016 election.
During the 2016 election, I co-created an indie documentary series. There were a lot of firsts for me during the creative process. Ditto for my co-creator.
This is a post about how strategic decisions can impact storytelling. It is not a technical post on equipment, software, reporting, or politics (but if you’re curious on any of these, ask!).
We learned in public, on the fly, so perhaps this might be helpful during the preparation phase to others thinking about doing something similar. Everything you read below is based on this one experience, so be aware of that as you read the sweeping conclusions below.
I’ll be editing this as I get notes and questions. Don’t hesitate to give feedback. Here’s a quick TL;DR for those shorter on time.
- There are three layers to your story: the story itself, where it is watched, and the current state of mind of society (your audience).
- Topical timeliness is out of your control but very important.
- Platforms have some generic ideal content types and rules. Know when you’re in a position to break those…or not.
- Your framing and release schedule are really important for setting expectations with an audience and will impact your creative work.
- Constraints are just constraints, not necessarily project killers. Don’t forget why you’re doing what you’re doing.
- Crowdfunding is hard.
Layers Above of Your Story
There are three primary layers to storytelling. It’s not just your story itself. It’s also where that story is being told, and the current state of mind of society (your audience) at large.
Society is the current state of the human hive mind. What do we care about? What topics is my audience focusing on? You just don’t have any control over this. You have to work within it.
Location is where people watch. You have some choice where you publish, but not all platforms are open, and all platforms have rules and constraints you need to operate under.
Message is what we normally think of as the story. How are you packaging it? Is it a series, a one off? What are the topics, characters, conflicts? These are the things you fully* control.
As an indie creator, you’re responsible for making sure your ultimate message and the package around it makes sense through all these layers.
*Non-Fiction can have unpredictable twists and turns in regards to interviews, archival, and other materials, but ultimately how you piece everything together is fully in your control.
Topic Timeliness Matters
11:38 was the average YouTube watch time our first episode on debates, and 5:31 was our average YouTube watch time for our fourth episode on the campaigns of Jill Stein and Gary Johnson (this same dynamic played out on Facebook :30 seconds to :10 seconds).
Subjectively our first episode is our worst in regards to photography, editing, graphics, and length BUT it did the best in regards to views and watch time. Why is that?
Here’s google search trends and when we released those two episodes.
That’s quite a spike we got in front of just in time for our debate episode. We clearly missed the boat on our fourth one.
11 minutes to 5 minutes is a really big difference. I think it’s safe to say that while you don’t have to strive to be part of the daily news cycle, there are definitely societal deadlines for when people will give their attention to certain subject matter.
Generic Documentary Content Types
To my eyes, the generic content types currently available for “traditional” non-fiction storytelling at this time breakdown like so:
These are guidelines that seem to fit the default user behavior of the platforms. There are plenty of ways to bend the rules. Live keeps people engaged much longer. Strong personalities can keep people engaged.
I think the key to those exceptions is that the audience knows what they are getting into before they start. For the mere mortals out there who don’t have an established brand, the guidelines are a good place to start.
In our project, we played a bit out of position by releasing monthly(ish) 16–20 minute episodes on YouTube. Knowing what we know now about our numbers, I’d rethink our release plan (more on this later). This is mostly gut with just a little data mixed in, but in general, I’m bearish the short format will be a viable format for the long haul. Things are getting pulled towards the social and premium ends.
Platform Numbers
We had 320,000+ recorded views across Facebook and YouTube. 130,000 of those came from posts that Jill Stein’s team posted natively* on their page. Minus Jill’s numbers, we generated ~190,000 views and ~3,990 hours watched.
IVN and Jill’s team were our only big distribution wins. We had less than 1,000 Facebook fans. 200 or so Twitter followers. Maybe 160 YouTube subscribers. Our biggest traffic source was Reddit.
YouTube generated ~10% of our views, but accounted for 48% of our minutes watched. Facebook, while massive with view counts, was only racking up :10–30 second views. Moving forward, I’ll use Facebook for things less than 2 minutes only. YouTube is more for watching video than Facebook. That’s not breaking news. But, sometimes what you know intellectually sinks in on a different level of knowledge when you see it play out with your own work.
*Early on we were sharing Vimeo links with the download function enabled. During the craze of the campaign her team downloaded and posted native to Facebook themselves, so we don’t have that data. We corrected this by sending youtube links and direct links to the post on FB to share. Pitching/promotion lesson learned.
Release Schedule Impacts Creative
This may have been the most important decision we made. We wanted to model VICE on HBO. A monthly feature length episode with a short debrief from us for a little extra commentary.
We knew that most people only care about these sort of topics in the midst of an election cycle, so we wanted to release during the election in order to be as timely as possible. As we saw earlier, being timely is a good way to get attention with no distribution. Because of this decision, episodes participated in the election news cycle, instead of documenting what happened.
This mattered. I think our first three episodes that were during the election naturally took on more of an explainer role, whereas our two released after the election focused more on people, settings, and characters.
It’s Called a Nut GRAPH
If you look at our trailer as a nut graph to the whole series, we chose to introduce things with the question — “Why is it rare, not normal, to see more than two candidates in a debate?” This seemed timely and relevant since our first episode was on debate access. Also, the story evolved beyond the candidates as we learned more. That’s an inherent part of documentary making.
I’d change this if you could go back. Having a candidate-based framing, may have tied us to closely to the societal sentiment of third party candidates. Framing things with larger entities like Bernie and Trump to say “What is it about our system that made these outsiders run through the parties?” may have worked better.
All Things Equal
I‘m very happy with what we covered — Debate Access, Ballot Access, Voting Structures, Campaigns — however, unless you were already familiar with the topics (most people aren’t), it was tough to see how all of them were interrelated the way we released content.
All things equal (meaning budget, material, platform, timelines, etc all stay the same), if I were to do it all over again, I’d do these format and schedule changes:
- 90 second docs once a month July-December. This keeps us topical and active during the election. Post on both YouTube and Facebook.
- Release all feature episodes at once in January only on YouTube. Create 30–60 second trailers for each episode on Facebook, but link out to YouTube for the full episode.
- Make the first feature episode a summary of what’s to come. Similar to how the Planet Earth series does a sweeping first episode to get you excited for the rest.
- Really, buckle down on better intros to each feature episode. On YouTube, it is really on the first 20–30 seconds to give the audience an idea of what they’re getting into. At the very least you need to incentivize them to save it to a watch later playlist (in a place like Netflix, the platform features do a better job of setting expectations upfront).
This would have taken into account timeliness, played better to the strengths of each platform, and allowed us to set strong expectations with the audience.
Constraints Are Just Constraints. Not Killers.
The initial idea for this project had a budget of about $100,000, a crew of four. The second iteration of the idea cut things down to a crew of two and $40,000. When all was said and done with crowdfunding (fees and whatnot), John and I raised $31,000, and did the whole project for around $35,000.
A third of what we raised immediately went to equipment, so we still could have gotten our inner Tangerine on somehow to cut things even more.
What would have happened if we had we forced ourselves to do sub-ten minute episodes? 90 second docs only? Would we have become more efficient writers and more ruthless editors? Undoubtedly. And it still would have gotten done. No episode length or camera equipment power would have changed that we were absolutely addressing topics worth talking about more.
Don’t Forget Why You’re Doing What You’re Doing.
You’ll revisit this mentally over and over again. It’s an anchor for writing, for when you get stuck, for editing, for framing external communication, for securing interviews, and most of all, for when things get hard.
For us, it started with some simple questions — “Why is it news that Gary’s polling 9–11% in March? Why did the #nevertrump movement never happen? Why didn’t Bernie run as an independent?”
Polarization is getting worse, everywhere. People don’t feel represented. People don’t trust our government. If everything about government is broken, doesn’t that mean the way we vet and elect our leaders is broken as well? We wanted to encourage engagement over apathy in the country’s largest voting bloc by breaking the election system down into tangible chunks to make it less intimidating, less monolithic, and show how individuals are doing their part to change it.
There are personal reasons as well. I knew I had access to Gary Johnson, I value life experiences, and knew this would be a unique way to experience an election season. John was looking to move from biology lab work into journalism and writing. I could teach him how to shoot and edit video, and he could be a teammate in what would be a once-in-a lifetime experience during a history making election.
Crowdfunding, Oy.
Consider this a reality check if you’re thinking about crowdfunding. It’s a grind. It doesn’t build your audience for you.
Crowdfunding consists of three things:
- A pitch
- Your network
- Constant communication
Once you have your pitch down it is all about how big of an email list you can build up before hitting “go.” If you don’t already have a big network, or have people you know who do willing to help you out, it’s going to be a requirement that you partner up before you start the campaign.
We were idiots in assuming that the Green and Libertarian campaigns and parties would share our project like crazy to their supporters, only to find out there are laws against that, and they’re not going to raise money for us when they need to raise money for themselves. Duh. We were massively fortunate to have friends and family step up huge, directly, and by looping in other people. Not everyone can or will have that good fortune.
DO NOT do what we did and campaign while you have to be doing anything else. Full stop. Be better planners. I consistently felt like we were 3 weeks behind on getting episodes out, because we spent 4–5 weeks shooting and raising money, instead of shooting and editing. We were on serious deadlines, so we had no choice. Make sure you:
- Make it an entire part of your overall production calendar.
- Give yourself 2–3 weeks of campaign assets and messaging preparation.
- Secure partnerships before you campaign.
- Secure ⅓ of your raise before you even get launched.
In crowdfunding, optics matter. People want to back things that look like they will get done.
But don’t just listen me, we’ve only crowdfunded once, LISTEN to the people at the crowdfunding platforms. I promise you they will be right when they give you feedback or caveats. h/t to Seed&Spark for all the help.
Random Closing Fact and Question
It cost us roughly $3.50 per minute of viewership. That’s a worthless stat in isolation (especially given our lack of distribution). Regardless, I’d be curious if there’s some sort of universal metric like this for the industry. Is there?
