Internet is the new platform for filmmakers

The participants in the Seminar titled ‘Viral Cinema’ opined that the social media can play a vital role to promote and market cinema if it’s done in the proper way.

Neeraj Ghaywan who worked as a Second Unit Director of Anurag Kashyap for the film ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ (I &II), said that each social networking site serves a unique purpose. He said that Facebook is good for distributing visual content like movie posters and so on whereas twitter is a much better platform to distribute conversational content. Blogs also play a major role in the promotion of a film especially through reviews and commentaries of films. He also said that social media is not limited to facebook and twitter, but rather any conversation that happens online whether through blogs, websites, youtube or flickr comes under ‘social media’. He elaborated several online strategies which are implemented for the film ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ through social networking for the promotion of that film.

Quashiq Mukherjee, the Kolkatta based filmmaker, known for his film ‘Gandu’, said that the trend of online filmmaking is highly increasing mainly because of the proliferation of internet-based films and the increasing number of online audience. He also said that thousands of short films are made each year and a lot of the filmmakers are engineers or engineering students. He jokingly said that ‘if Apple and Steve Jobs were not there, I’ll not be where I am now’.

Margereta, is a French producer who worked as an international salesperson for 20 years raised an interesting point that when the global financial crisis happened in 2007, the Public funding by the European Ministry for the production of films severely decreased. Hence a lot of the emerging filmmakers made use of the internet to market their films and get revenue over it. The foremost kind of marketing for any film is by word-of-mouth, and when it is done through the internet it becomes an ‘electronic word-of-mouth’, said B. Ajith Kumar, the National Award winning editor for the film ‘Naalu Pennungal’.  Any information that is properly structured and distributed through the internet will spread like a joke spreads, he said.

The Seminar was conducted by the members of GRAFTII (Graduates of FTII), Kerala in collaboration with the 17^th IFFK on Hotel Horizon at 11 AM today. Bina Paul who is a member of GRAFTII herself delivered the introductory speech.