This week Slated launched its own YouTube channel. An extension of the filmonomics brand, this weekly segment adds another discussion forum to complement both our regular online blog posts and the monthly Filmomics Talks that we have been hosting to packed rooms at Soho House. From now on, courtesy of YouTube’s endless reach, we can bring those discussions to a much wider audience as part of our mission to bring velocity and simplicity to a film business starved of both. It is only by getting mass consensus on the need to break away from the industry’s more suffocating paradigms that we can truly affect change. Which is why we invite everyone reading this to become active participants in that discussion. We want to agitate with a collective voice.
As narrated by regular host and Slated CEO Stephan Paternot, the first video in this YouTube series illustrates how the online marketplace he co-founded already helps ease the four identified “pain points” that prevent more film projects from finding their rightful place in the market.
Introductions to projects, talent, financing and sales are the four pillars on which Slated is founded. And the results of this quadruple focus are already being felt by members: 50% of film projects that completed financing while listed on Slated have been introduced to investors they'd never met before.
It’s a remarkable statistic. Had those projects been left to the real-world marketplace - a slow succession of phone calls, festival encounters and constant knocking on the same doors - chances are those new contacts would never have been introduced at all and the projects might still be languishing in limbo-land. And we’re just getting started. We believe that once our online connection engine becomes an ingrained habit, we will see an exponential rise in film production and participation.
Those who complain too many films are being made already need only look at what media moguls are willing to pay in order to bulk up their own collection of content-creating factories and outlets. Everywhere from Beijing to Mumbai, Abu Dhabi to Los Angeles, industrial conglomerates and their governments are making the transition from a carbon-based economy to a knowledge-based future driven by information, communication and entertainment. They know there really is no artificial ceiling on how many shows people are willing to watch any more than there are book titles that people are willing to read. Provided that entertainment is compelling. Premium content has become one of the most precious commodities on earth.
This global media explosion is being felt not just in the corporate boardrooms, but also in the private bedrooms of tomorrow’s YouTube stars. Film and TV are already the most ubiquitously consumed products on the planet. Now, it is also becoming the most ubiquitously manufactured product as well in this age of digital self-expression. The great news for all of us in the movie business is that gifted storytellers are the ones who hold the keys to this Kingdom. But only as long as those keys can find the right doors.
This is where Slated comes into the picture - as our debut YouTube segment sets out to demonstrate in vivid fashion.
As we all know, deal-making has been largely controlled by an inscrutable ecosystem of studio gatekeepers, agents and lawyers who not only determine what gets seen but are so often best positioned to siphon off profits before they have a chance to trickle down that revenue-sharing waterfall to producers and their backers.
Cinema remains one of the few industrial holdouts to have resisted online investment marketplaces that might more efficiently tap into its global popularity and allow a more friction-free flow of capital. Anyone entering the film business soon learns how confounding it can be connecting talent with films, finding the money and then securing a profitable avenue to a paying audience. Even the most established independent film producers say it’s a miracle getting any movie made. Behind so many award-winning successes such as Black Swan or Dallas Buyers Club is a tortuous film history, often spanning more than a decade, in which talent and money – and sometimes both – keep dropping out.
Much of that boils down to communication inefficiency. To this day, industry people still email one-sheets as PDFs; investors are left in the dark as to who is really attached and what information is up-to-date; and everyone waits on that agency to get back to them even as their project stalls. The process is inherently linear and cumbersome, when it needs to be multidimensional and so much faster. The technological tools to plug such black holes do exist. But their effectiveness is tied to how well they mimic – and augment - the behavioral patterns that govern movie deal-making. This is an industry built on relationships. It’s about whom you know and whom you can trust. Slated is built on that very premise: helping the film industry do what it does already so instinctively – only faster.
We aim to flatten the independent filmmaking landscape, creating efficiency and transparency across all its key dimensions. Whether that means sourcing a project, or finding talent, or communicating updates with all the stakeholders, or raising capital, we are in the business of simplifying and accelerating that process.
If content is indeed the new gold of the global economy, then data is the new plastic. It’s the common currency that opens up the trading world. In the particular case of film financing, data allows for better matches and more informed decisions to be made. You can just get stuff done more efficiently, more transparently, if you can compare apples to apples more easily, and where you're distributing the risk load among far more people, so people can actually do more things.
Crowdfunding, as we have come to know it through Kickstarter and Indiegogo, is certainly a start in the right direction. But they are still one-size-fits-all platforms for raising donations for everything, films included. As such, they don’t address the specific nuances of the film industry. They don’t help the average investor distinguish between a shrewd or ill-advised film investment. And they don’t help source deals or identify the key gatekeepers. After all, it’s one thing getting a film made, it’s quite another getting that film in front of a feasible programmer, a tier-one sales agent or the appropriate distributor.
With its scoring and filtering algorithms, Slated has tried to address such complexities in a holistic, business-centric fashion. Social proof is our guiding star here, just as it is in the tech world. When it comes to deliberating over whether or not to invest in a potential start-up, much of tech’s due diligence hinges on who sent the deal, and whether they too have skin in the game. For the rest, there are ample charts and research avenues to consult. Team evaluations are at the heart of that calculus. That goes for any investment position, and in any asset class. The ideal is to have an amazing team that knows what they're doing, and to piggyback on their expertise. In the film world, Slated helps you find those teams.
If we can serve as a trusted guide to steer newcomers into the film industry, we believe that this will open up the door to a pool of capital that will dwarf what is currently available through traditional sources. We will all benefit as a result – and the world’s trove of gifted storytellers will find themselves relying less on those Black Swan events to get their miracle projects made. And we as audiences will see the kind of diversity of movies we keep clamoring for.
But to achieve that we also need your participation. As this recent article in Fast Company reminds us: a big part of behavior change has to do with changing the environment that you’re in and changing the interactions that you have with people. Technology will only go so far in changing life-long habits. In the end, there is no silver bullet app or platform. The only way you can really change is to do it yourself.
Which is why we say again: join us. We don’t just want you to subscribe to our Filmonomics @ Slated channel, we want you to be an active part. We want you to share your own insights, engage your peers, re-live successes, dissect war stories, suggest new topics – and even come into our recording studio to interact with us in candid conversation. So, if you think you can be of value to the community please reach out to us at filmonomics@slated.com. And in the meantime, spread the word, invite the argument and keep logging on.