This past September, The Orchard was lucky enough to “shack up” with the Quad Cinema in an exciting partnership that pairs the old-school (theatrical release in an actual cinema) with the new-school (The Orchard’s streamlined digital distribution model). Now, less than six months later, we are thrilled to be releasing four more high-caliber documentaries that have played or will play at the Quad, and we are on track to sign a total of 25 Quad films in 2013.
Tales From Dell City, Texas, directed by Josh Carter, was filmed over a period of 10 years. According to the New York Times’ warm review, the film “immortalizes a dusty slice of vanishing Americana, delivering a parched ode to hard work, endurance and desert dreams.” The Orchard released the film on iTunes on February 26th.
Fast-paced and looking toward the future, American Autumn: An Occudoc, is the aesthetic opposite of Dell City, Texas. An impassioned look into the Occupy Wall Street movement, Variety’s glowing review describes it as “a strong, well-crafted documentary [...] that impresses most where many docs disappoint, expanding its scope without short-changing the wider subjects it covers.” You can find it on iTunes starting April 9th.
It’s not often that you come across Emmy-winning directors who are also accomplished sailors, but that is what you might expect from someone named Sprague Theobald. His latest documentary, the stunningly beautiful The Other Side of the Ice is the chronicle of his harrowing 2009 journey, with his complicated family, through the Arctic’s legendary Northwest Passage. It opens March 8th at the Quad and will be released by The Orchard on iTunes on March 19th. You can read a Q and A with Theobald about the life-threatening process of making the film on Travel + Leisure’s website.
Finally, on the heels of the phenomenal success of the Civil War biopic Lincoln, comes Wendy Jo Cohen’s laugh-out-loud mockumentary, The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek. Filmed in the style of Ken Burns, who calls the film “an incredibly wonderful and funny film,” it tells the “true story” of four forgotten Civil War heroes: an opium-addicted gay colonel, an aging Chinese launderer, a nerdy escaped slave, and a one- armed teenage prostitute. The film, which will be released digitally by The Orchard in the late summer, opened theatrically at the Quad last week.
We recently launched an app in The Orchard Marketplace which makes it its goal to pair artists and labels with the perfect director for their music videos.
This app, Radar Music Videos, has quite a few success stories to support its mission, and in this guest blog post, Caroline Bottomley, Managing Director of Radar, is going to share two of them.
Read up, and if you’re a client of The Orchard, install Radar Music Videos in the Marketplace.
Alt-J “Breezeblocks” — Director: Ellis Bahl
The Artist/Label and The Brief
Spring last year, Infectious Music posted a music video brief for their new UK signing Alt-J on Radar, with the teasing headline “INTRIGUING DIRECTORS ONLY NEED APPLY.”
Alt-J were still relatively unknown at the time, but sharper directors knew the band and liked the look of the £4k (approx. $6k) budget.
The Response
Radar has thousands of professional directors worldwide and our back-end shows the brief was viewed nearly 1,500 times. 41 directors submitted treatments to Infectious’ label manager Connie Meade, via the Radar mechanism. That was a lot of treatments for Connie to work through. Nowadays we recommend that labels expecting a big response state: “we only want to hear from experienced directors who have made popular, award-winning, brand-commissioned or editorially-featured videos,” or something similar.
The Director
Ellis Bahl was a young director in New York. He’d had some success with MTV Idents and co-directions of music videos, but was ready to branch out on his own. You can see the treatment he wrote on the Radar blog — and you’ll see it has a different ending to the finished video.
What Happened Next
Infectious’ brilliant marketing helped push Alt-J higher and higher up the media’s agenda. This video in particular got them coverage across U.K. media and a high profile feature in The Huffington Post. The director began to be courted by talent spotters and he’s now represented by two of the best agencies in the U.S. and U.K. (and now works with much bigger budgets). By the end of the year, Alt-J had won the Mercury Prize, the video won ‘Best Alternative Video’ at the UK Music Video Awards and from amongst the many millions of videos on Vimeo, it was chosen as one of the Best 12 Videos on Vimeo of 2012.
Back in November, YouTube launched a new channel-driven experience for logged-in users. This experience encourages users to subscribe and provides a feed-like experience when logged in. Ultimately YouTube is looking to build audiences. Not only do engaged audiences attract advertisers (at higher rates), but they create brand loyalty to specific channels. The long-term goal here is to be a real alternative to television, not a source for cat videos. (Unless you make a stream of incredible cat videos, of course!)
Given that goal, YouTube’s algorithms have also begun to change. The emphasis is coming off of overall plays (and we’ve all seen how those can change) while giving more importance to other factors. Combined subscribership, overall minutes watched, and number of videos watched were given additional weight over the last few months, and as a result traffic patterns have changed. Videos that may once have been holed off in the dregs of page 10 in search results and never popped up in suggested videos are suddenly trumping videos with more views or prominence.
The next step in this plan is to change the channel experience; this is where One Channel comes in. If you want to increase subscribers and float more engaging content to the top, a good place to start is providing an equitable experience across all platforms. The current landscape sees a desktop version, a differing mobile experience, and a plethora of app designs on diverse platforms ranging from tablets to Xbox.
One Channel addresses this by creating a layout which lives on the web and responds to the device upon which it’s being viewed. I wouldn’t call this a classic example of responsive design, but it does take it in another direction. In large part, the design works by basing all the visuals around a large image suitable for television viewing. When used in the other contexts, like mobile, tablet, or internet-connected television, the design crops the image used. Desktop has a large banner, with mobile and tablet having smaller versions. This experience prepares us as well for the change of the landscape as more internet-connected televisions come to market and more people watch YouTube through their television set.
All other content has shifted to side columns and what YouTube calls shelves. To the right is space to promote various sidebar items that were further down in the old design (like featured channels). At the left the user sees their subscriptions. In the middle are the new shelves. While The Orchard did get an early chance to use One Channel, I don’t yet have any best-practices recommendations for using these shelves. There’s an assorted number of features including activity, recent uploads, playlists… similar to what exists in the old layout, but seemingly more impactful. You can see a channel we’ve been experimenting with in our new metal property: Infernal Racket.
One feature of the shelves I do know will have future importance is the welcome video. Non-subscribed visitors will get this video when they visit a channel and we’re already seeing folks from Geek & Sundry and iJustine to MysteryGuitarMan using these to promote more depth of content on their channels. Once subscribed, your visitors (now subscribers) won’t have to see this video anymore and can see a feature of your choosing. There are a wealth of examples already on how to use shelves. So far my favourite includes DeStorm’s.
While I’m personally (and professionally) excited about these changes and how we might inventively use them going forward, I’m sure just like any change there will be complaints. In particular, the loss of image maps in headers on channels will likely be a big source of pain for many users, particularly artists and labels used to using this space to link to music and tickets for purchase. Some of this functionality has moved; in fact you’ll notice links have now been moved from below the ‘about’ section to a nice set of overlays on the header of the desktop version of the site. I also feel the real estate that now exists takes over where a lot of those links left off, making the channel functionally more robust.
Expect to be able to opt-in yourselves in coming weeks. As always I’d love to hear your thoughts in comments.
Update: You can now opt-in to the new One Channel layout! Here’s a One Sheet to help you get started.
YouTube is becoming more important to the music community both in terms of marketing and revenue as well as sharing and engagement. The platform is often confused as being solely a video player. However, as YouTube grows and channel creators become more ambitious, relationships are becoming the driving force of this video machine. The traffic controller in this system is YouTube’s Content ID.
Content ID is what dictates copyright ownership and monetization around YouTube. For bands, this is what turns YouTube into a store. YouTube differs from every other digital retailers in that its core functionality depends on user generated content (UGC). This is excellent for sharing and community around the platform, but also opens the flood gates to copyrighted material and piracy (songs, music videos, movies, etc.). Without rightful ownership, the proper owner doesn’t get credit and compensation for the work. That’s where Content ID comes in.
Content ID uses technology similar to Shazam. The system takes pre-loaded audio files from bands and labels and compares them with other videos in the system. If there is a video on YouTube that has audio or visual content that matches this reference, Content ID makes a claim. This gives the copyright owner a chance to claim the content as theirs and monetize if they choose. Here’s how it works for both players in the Content ID loop:
Bands:
Sharing is a powerful tool in the music community. New bands rely on people sharing their music to expand the potential audience. However, they would prefer to get paid for unofficial uses of their music (if users can hear your songs on YouTube for free, why would they buy the album?). Content ID provides the best of both worlds in that it still allows YouTubers to use your music in their videos, but your band makes money from the ads that Content ID places on this video. Win win!
Official Video:
Fans:
Fans use popular copyrighted material in their YouTube videos for many reasons (and it’s not necessarily malicious pirating). In most cases, these users are legitimate, diehard fans that love the music their using. These are the best kinds of fans for bands. You have passionate, genuinely engaged users creating content for you (for free!). Why not keep it coming? By using Content ID to find these UGC videos, you can automatically track who is using your material and monetize it if you choose. Win win… win!
The Winter X Games 2013 wrapped up last week. The event has grown tremendously over the last 10 years and now has over 200 competing athletes with 150,000 visitors for the four-day festival. Last year, ESPN reported reaching more than 232 million homes in 200 countries and territories with X Games content.
Many athletes from this year’s event — hosted in Aspen, CO — can be found in films distributed by The Orchard. Here’s a quick run down of some highlights and where else you can see these guys.
Torstein Horgmo, the star of Horgasm — A Love Story, threw down a switch backside 1440 triple cork to win his fourth gold medal in the Big Air event. The trick is just as ridiculous and complicated as it sounds. And he stomped it perfectly. See the gold medal winning run for yourself below, and check out Horgasm on iTunes today at a special X-Games price. It’s the #1 snowboard film of 2012 and can be found on all major digital retailers, including Hulu.
Henrik Harlaut won gold in Ski Big Air. The 22-year-old hailing from Quebec, Canada can be seen featured in The Education of Style. Henrik made history by stomping the first ever nose-butter triple cork 1620, which earned a perfect score and the top spot of the podium. Bet that makes you want to watch his latest film, right?
A surprise came on Sunday night in the Men’s Superpipe when 14-year-old Ayumu Hirano of Japan almost nocked off 6-time gold medalist Shaun White. His insane run took home a silver medal and will be talked about for years to come. Catch a full dose of Hirano in the film Stonp or Die available on iTunes.
In the shadow of all the hype of gold medal runs, the music scene actually goes off in Aspen during Winter X. This year included performances at various parties by Major Lazer, Bloc Party, RJD2, Sex Panther and Trouble Andrew. Worlds collided when Calvin Harris hit a stage at the bottom of the X Games Superpipe; so many people were stomping on the snow at once that a heavy steam was emitting from the crowd — no joke. Check out The Orchard Sports Facebook page for a peek.
Until next year for an even more insane X Games!
