Building Our Digital Theatre
Our tech stack needed to mirror the functionality of a traditional cinema. We organized our work around “ticket booth”, “lobby”, “cinema”, and “post-screening question and answer” functionalities. Although we talk about parts of the theatre that we’re replicating, we don’t adhere to a strict skeuomorphic translation. Instead, we prefer to be inspired by what users expect in terms of experience, but embracing a decidedly digital interface.
Ticket booth: Just like in traditional movie theatres, we want to give those who are financially supporting our work access to our movie. We built a digital entitlements system–a ticket taker–allowing holders of “passes” or “tickets” to access the “inner” parts of the theatre.
Lobby: We want to create an event out of the experience of seeing our film. While streaming services are asynchronous, our movies start at particular times and people assemble to watch them. Part of this experience is being able to talk to your friends and other moviegoers.
Cinema: This is the actual experience of watching the movie.
Post-screening: Our screening events feature question and answer sessions with the filmmaker and special guests
Because of the lack of turnkey solutions for filmmakers (we explored various streaming partnerships, but found that the negatives outweigh the positives for our particular case), we built The Faithful’s tech platform from the bottom up so viewers could buy screening tickets on the site, watch the film on the site, and then participate in activities on the site. We expect to make the film available on screening services later on, but still feel that we are best positioned to approximate something resembling a conventional premiere ourselves.
Our ticket booth allows for the purchase of entitlements either through credit card payments (via Stripe) or by purchasing a Coil pass. Coil is a web monetization product that allows for streaming micropayments from ordinary end users to content creators.
Although the technology is in its infancy, we think it could be part of the solution for supporting movies like ours so we want to support it. (Full disclosure: I work with web monetization as part of my work as a Mozilla Fellow. Questions about the web’s economic future and if there’s a better way forward than the ad-supported model fascinate me.)
We’re actively working on our Lobby, Cinema, and Post-screening experience and are guided by these product principles:
We want moviegoers to share the movie at the same time. We want to create a communal viewing experience.
We want the quality of the video to be as high as possible, and are working to support mobile, desktop, and set-top boxes.
We realize our audience will have multiple devices and want to make use of them. Silence may be golden in the movie theatre, but we are exploring ways to keep users communicating throughout the movie as if they’re watching at home.
We want to make the transition between various technologies and phases as easy as walking through rooms in a theatre.
I’ll follow up with detailed screenshots of the experience to show what we ended up building. If you’re interested in joining our team, please reach out!
Open Distribution Isn’t YouTube
Filming on The Faithful started 20 years ago–a story in itself–in another digital era. Back then, possibility was in the air and footage was stored on bulky hard disk drives. Since then, it’s become infinitely easier to store and distribute digital video and much, much harder to create a website. Streaming and VOD services greatly simplify the process for filmmakers; they just sign a contract and the platform handles viewing and distribution in exchange for a hefty amount of the revenue.
However, all that ease comes at a price for filmmakers and viewers. Filmmakers lose control over pricing, distribution, sales and viewership metrics, and sometimes even over creative control of future projects. (Many film festivals we spoke to wanted our film to be first shown in their jurisdictions–what does that even mean in the global context of YouTube?) Viewers, meanwhile, are limited in only being able to easily consume content on streaming services they subscribe to or VOD services they have accounts with.
You could certainly make the argument that platforms are able to create a better viewing experience because they take rough edges off user experience. They’re able to sell ads and monetize in ways an individual would never be able to do themselves–at least without open proposals for direct ad sales, but that’s a different conversation. But I, for one, would love a viewing product that is optimized for a better experience instead of having me spend more time.
We imagine a world where sites are CGC, not UGC–creator generated content, not user generated content. Could we do all of the above without a single platform that takes a large percentage of our revenue? A movie–even a small one like ours–has hundreds of different skill sets working on it. Why not add “digital distributor” and “martech consultant” to the mix?
By distributing the movie ourselves, we will miss out on the serendipity of the algorithm (”you might also like”), but we believe there’s a fair amount to gain.
What We’ve Learned So Far
The biggest lesson we’ve learned so far is that while creating our own tech stack and viewing platform was challenging at times, it was also possible. All the building blocks are out there: Stripe for credit card payments, Coil for web monetization, Google Cloud for cloud services, Mux for viewing video, Mailchimp for marketing, and so on. Instead of having to build a solution from scratch, there is a wide range of solutions to work with and assemble.
Our emphasis is currently on user experience. We recognize that we’re living in a time when a conventional film premiere, with an in-theatre screening and showings for the general public, simply isn’t possible in much of the world. The Faithful is a labor of love and we want our viewers to share in its screenings as much as possible.
The Faithful will premiere on March 18, and we’re keeping an eye on metrics and results from our initial screenings to share with the filmmaking community. Although we fully recognize we’re putting ourselves on the line by creating our own platform from scratch, we want to blaze a trail for other filmmakers to go DIY and put together viewing solutions themselves.
See for yourself. Tickets are available at the-faithful.com and are free for Coil members.
