The Little Death – indy, pirated, caught in change.
Ten students in the 2015 graduating class at the Masters of Screen Arts and Business program at the Australian Film Television & Radio School held a week long intensive investigation of piracy in the screen sector. They interviewed the various lobbyists, and talked to government. They discussed the raw impact of piracy in Australian on their own work.
The result was a new approach to research on piracy, an important report, and the birth of a new industry group – Screen Futures is ‘a collective of Australian next wave producers, directors, distributors and marketers’, also self-described as ‘next wave thought leaders for the screen industry.’ They emerged into the public eye at a launch on Thursday 13 August at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney.
According to David Court, who is the subject leader for Screen Business at AFTRS, ‘They are the emerging leadership of the industry. The point of the masters course is to identify the emerging leaders, and to assist their emergence. To help them develop the skills and capacity to take that role.’
Piracy turns out to be a pretty good trigger. According to Chloe Rickard, one of the ten originating members, ‘We came to the conclusion that whilst it was a very large issue to tackle, we felt there was a gap in the market for the voice of content creators.’ That statement points to a crucial problem in the Australian approach.
Missing from the discussion is the group of people most directly affected by piracy. Films like The Loves Ones, Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead and A Little Death have been publicly crushed. The enormous dedication and energy to make an independent feature had little return. Investors are being ripped off by the very public who most like the films.
They have also discovered that the piracy problem is reaching directly into the search for finance. In the case of The Loved Ones, exhibitors refused to handle the film once it was pirated, and walked away once they knew it had been released on DVD in other markets. Investors will now ask producers how they expect to deal with the piracy problem in new productions.
Said Rickard, ‘We decided to undertake our own research, and we engaged the Screen Audience Research Association, SARA, to undertake an attitudinal based study which seemed to be the first in Australia.’
The researchers interviewed nine hundred ‘direct pirates’ representing the 33% of the population they claim download illegally. ‘Instead of looking at the audience as demographics, which most of the research does,’ said Rickard, ‘we looked at it in terms of attitudes. We no longer see pirates as one group of people. Instead, we found four clear attitudinal groups.’
Conscious Cowboys believe they are driven by access and pricing, but would pay if they had the chance. 31% of the group, they only download 20% of the content. 10% of the total believe that content is too expensive; 18% didn’t want to wait for an official release.
Anxious Addicts feel guilty, love content, are worried about getting caught and know that piracy is destructive. They download 24% of the pirated material and are 22% of the group.
Nervous Newcomers are following the herd, but are open to argument and change. They were 27% of the group, and download 19% of the content.
Outraged Outlaws are just hard core. 22% of the group, 31% of the content. Where is my spray can and a white wall?
In other words, only 20% of the whole 900 are categorically unlikely to change. To the Screen Futures group, that is very encouraging.
They also discovered that these categories can’t be connected to conventional demographics. Young men, who are traditionally seen as the hardest core pirates, are actually scattered throughout the four groups. That suggests, for instance, that every community is reachable and there are no large coherent communities defending piracy, except online.
They asked detailed questions about the reasons why people might stop pirating and discovered that all the tools currently deployed are valuable in some cases. The most effective strategy remains a mix. Included in this are the ‘thank you for not pirating campaign’ and the ‘you wouldn’t steal a…’ ads. They do work.
According to Rickard, that first week of discussion revealed that the current approach to piracy is very negative. It is also dominated by larger companies offering mainstream productions.
Ultimately, they concluded this negativity is destructive. Said Rickard, ‘No-one seems to be acknowledging that actually these groups of pirates are probably the biggest fans of content we make. As producers we didn’t want to immediately discredit them. The pirates are actually saying we just love your content – we can’t get enough of it.
‘On the one hand it is very humbling because we are excited that audiences are consuming our product, but on the other hand it is devastating for the bottom line.’
The message from the pirates expressed in the SARA research echoes the conclusions from other projects. People want their content quickly, to find it easily, to pay a reasonable price. They want to be part of a conversation in their own communities about films and television productions, so they want it to be available to everyone at the same time. Behind a subscription barrier? We have thumb drives…etc.
Of course, some of these arguments are hypocritical, but they are entry points to a sympathetic conversation. And as Rickard emphasised, ‘It is all about the content we love. We are the film lovers, we make it, we consume it, the audience consumes it, we are one and the same with the content.’
What is more, the independent production sector is the most connected to its audience. It is deep in the social media discussion, it builds a support base by crowd funding, it runs event cinema tours, and works hard to develop word of mouth. For digital natives, this connectedness is vital from the first idea to the last long tail screening.
The conclusion? It is pretty clear to the group that independent producers can run a hearts and minds campaign which is separate from the mainstream, and speaks more deeply to the community of film lovers. It can be pretty precise, based around individual projects and the people who work on them. It can involve mixing paid for and free content.
According to David Court, the solution to piracy is not just technical and legal. ‘It is more than waving a big stick. It is about solving the problems of ease and cost, and generating a different set of social values. And that comes about through talking and engagement. The segmentation showed that the majority of people who are pirating are open to hear that conversation.’
But the Screen Futures group is thinking more broadly as well. It is talking about a deeper unity among the guilds and industry groups, to find a common voice focused much more on the independent producers, who are the most directly affected by the problem.
At the same time, it signals a collective vision from the independents which is not the same as the larger film and television sector. In some ways, they are uniquely placed to embrace the future – they are closest to the audience, they represent a new generation, they are desperate to embrace new opportunities, and they have no investment in the past.
David Court argues that questions about audience and piracy lead to ‘the digital challenge – the massive change affecting all of society, and coming to grips with it. It is a massive challenge. The solutions are going to be found by the next generation. We want to get them going – I am in the business of solutions, the business solutions and the policy solutions.’
The current members include Chloe Rickard, Imogen Banks, Bridget Callow-Wright, Ester Harding, Peter Drinkwater, Duncan Imberger, Paul Wiegard, Annie Parnell, John L. Simpson, Abi Tabone, and Galvin Scott Davis. They cover a broad range of experience, and some of them have been pushing new ideas for a long time, but they are all focused on change.
