This year's Berlinale Talent Campus series 'The Indie Filmmakers Guide to the Internet' featured two heroes of online movie marketing for indie filmmakers, DIY animation guru M dot Strange and Finnish actor and director Timo Vuorensola. As part of this session they presented their approaches to online distribution, demonstrating how they use the Internet to connect directly with their audiences.

Keep it strange with M dot

American filmmaker M dot Strange created his DIY masterpiece We are the Strange with the help of stop motion tricks, CG artwork, green screen effects and lots of dolls. The result is a one and a half hour animated film that can easily keep up with major Hollywood productions. After the completion of the film, the artist showed his work to various distributors, but almost all the film rights would have been owned by the distributors who would have collected the revenue for themselves.

YouTube was the answer

To get around this situation, M dot Strange decided to publish and distribute the movie himself, which was an unusual but highly successful step. He made the entire film accessible to anyone for free by uploading it to YouTube. Within a few weeks he had an enthusiastic group of fans who started to recommend the movie to all their friends. To complement the success of the film, he also uploaded some short videos called Film Skool, where he talked about the experience of making an animated film. These behind-the-scenes films gave the growing fan community a deeper insight into his processes and lead to M dot integrating his online buddies into ‘We are the Strange' asking for his online buddies to contribute a picture of themselves. These pictures were used to build a crowd scene in 'We are the Strange'.

The old system screwed me!

M dot Strange presented his film in the Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. It was not a roaring success - a large part of the audience left the cinema during the screening. 'In the old way, by just having the old system, I would have been screwed!' says M dot. But even an unresponsive audience at such a high-profile event couldn't stop his success. He recorded video interviews with the people who left the cinema and skillfully integrated those into his marketing strategy. By contrasting them with some videos created by his online fans and uploading it to his YouTube channel, he created his very own Internet controversy. And again, the number of fans increased rapidly and so did the sale of the DVD, which he sold on the independent filmmakers platform www.filmbaby.com. The DVD is available in 17 languages, by the way, translated by M dot's online community.

M dot Strange - online marketing expert

At the Berlinale Talent Campus M dot shared some of his tricks and encouraged all attending film directors, cameramen, scriptwriters and producers to start marketing their movies creatively and to use all the resources at their disposal to bring their films to the world:

Use your creativity

What we have learned from M dot's example is that you have to integrate your movie marketing into your daily work as soon as possible. Set up a blog and use it as a production diary, post about your next steps on Twitter, upload bits of your film to YouTube, Dailymotion or Vimeo. Doing this exposes your film everywhere so you can start creating an audience. The most important thing is to use your creativity to find the best channels to get your film out there!

Watch the whole M dot Session here!