I’d like to share some inspiring learnings. Friday, we were ecstatic to hit 1 million views in a single day for ReelwUrld’s first cinematic universe built with the audience as characters: Justice For Hire. We just hit 3.3 million views today, and are now at almost 28K followers on TikTok from one post alone (find it here). This was all organic with no marketing spend.
My team at ReelwUrld and I, having just moved into a new team home, put unpacking boxes aside to focus on rapidly refining our systems to handle the influx of new cast members (i.e. Users). Our social, website, app, and content strategy all needed a reality check and upgrade. Fun and intense stuff.
I sat and read through EVERY comment on our TikTok video (even attempted to decipher comments in Spanish, Russian, Greek, and more). I learned about what our people want, and different types of attentiveness. This is not just specific to the target audience of Justice For Hire, but to any intellectual property. I’ll break down these learnings into 3 sets of personas:
People that have waited for this moment to become a reality - Wow, these people are like music to my ears. The amount of folks that said, “OMG this is better than videos games” or “I’ve waited my whole life for this” or simply “I’m in”... They are the people that will fuel the future of the film & TV industry. They want to be a part of movies & shows as their own characters. They’ve been waiting for what ReelwUrld is bringing to culture for a long time. They are dedicated, ready to learn how to tell cinematic stories as a community, and execute. These folks got me PUMPED this weekend, and even shared films and anime that JFH reminded them of (The Circle, Nerve, My Hero Academia, Durarara).
People that just want to watch - As with any social platform, these folks will make up the majority of our audience, but what’s interesting about TikTok is that it allowed people to record themselves watching our video. Reaction videos are nothing new, but this was different. It was intimate. It reminded me of why I chose entertainment in the first place. We, as media professionals, have the privilege of direct access to people’s unguarded minds. This is powerful and dangerous if misused. I call the distance between your eyeballs and the screen the Divine Tunnel, as anything placed within it will be absorbed by the viewer. I see it as our duty to place information that uplifts and heals in that space. And yes, I say this while promoting a project about vigilantes. You’ll see why in time.
People that want to criticize - These folks are great. They help me clarify our legalese, and their trolling is hilarious. Use them to make the ship stronger.
Okay, so let’s take everything I said above and compare that to the email I got a few days ago from Ridley Scott’s documentary, Life in a Day 2020 (if it’s hard to read the pic, I’ll explain below):
Scott’s crowdsourced documentary had 324,000 content submissions, including mine, and only 500 submissions were included in the final cut of the film. So how do I feel? I feel like my time was wasted. Why was my time wasted? Because Hollywood does not have the infrastructure to support crowd creativity. In fact, my current feeling is the feeling that most actors, writers, directors, and producers feel—their efforts get left on the cutting room floor. Those days will end soon. Our team at ReelwUrld has built a system that contains all crowd created content and values it for what it is: Part of the story. Your story is part of our story. This is the future.
Before I go, I posted on social about my inventor grandfather, who is a pioneer of the touchscreen we all use daily, and holds several significant patents. This is a very personal post, so if you’d like to learn more about why I’m born to do what I do, here’s the link.
Today, a very special partnership has come to us. We’ll announce it in the coming days. Until then, please follow and share our equity crowdfunding campaign on NetCapital: https://netcapital.com/companies/reelwurld. As always, THANK YOU for the consistent love and support. With Love, Jan L.