A long time ago, I discovered Kwoon. Essentially, a group of Kung Fu students got together and made 4 episodes of a martial arts parody… thing. I think their ultimate goal was to get the series on network television but to my knowledge, it didn’t work out.
Strangely enough, it wasn’t the episodes that caught my attention but rather the extra videos they put on their site. Writer/Director Todd Roy took Kwoon on a massive tour of Comic Conventions and brought a camera along for a ride. (A nifty steady-cam rig no less.)
I bought the DVD as it promised to be packed with dozens of these videos in addition to the main episodes of the show. As an aspiring filmmaker, what I learned was how much effort you have to put in to promote your films. Team Kwoon did a pretty phenomenal job getting themselves noticed. One particular video stayed with me to this day.
It was called No Money Marketing.
In it, Todd humorously demonstrated various marketing tips like writing your website on currency, sticking promo stickers to cats and food items and more… It wasn’t meant to be serious but he had a point.
You have to do whatever it takes to gain exposure in the industry and get your projects noticed.
These days, we have a lot more tools at our disposal than he did. Thanks to the social networking explosion, small production companies like 17W can market themselves for virtually nothing. The upside to this strategy is limitless and all it costs is time.
Over the last year, I’ve logged a ton of hours building a tiny network for 17 West Productions.
Not to mention our own personal Facebook pages and IMDB profiles.
With every single one of those sites linked back to 17west.ca, I hope that people will stumble upon us and stick around for a lot of interesting content and updates.
I’m the first person to admit that we don’t score thousands of page hits a day. However, I can sleep at night knowing we’re well represented on the web.
You have to start somewhere right?
PS: If anyone wants an extremely reliable web hosting service, I highly recommend www.startlogic.com. Awesome customer support for idiots like me and simple to use. (Also mention 17west and we get 10 bucks!)
