Building and nurturing a valuable relationship with your audience

Ryan Koo is a writer, director and founder of NoFilmSchool. He has built a community over the last few years that is passionate about filmmaking. By paying it forward, he’s been able to find interesting opportunities to engage and learn from the community. At DIY DAYS NYC Ryan will share insights around what it takes to have an extended conversation with an audience.

5 Questions with Ryan Koo

What will you be doing at DIY DAYS?

I’m looking forward to being in the audience for another year of eye-opening workshops. Oh, and I have a workshop of my own this year… see below.

You recently raised over 100k using crowdfunding what factors helped you to accomplish that goal?

I spent two years building a following of other filmmakers with my website NoFilmSchool, where I focus on providing useful information for filmmakers on a daily basis. I also wrote a 100-page eBook called The DSLR Cinematography Guide. The website and the eBook are totally free, so over the months more and more people found out about the site and starting coming back regularly. At the same time, I’d been working on the script for my first feature, Man-child, and so by the time I decided to do a Kickstarter fundraising campaign, I had built my own platform with which to publicize the campaign. I had my fingers crossed that my audience would “pay it forward” to help me make my own feature, and thankfully they did just that!

What is your background?

Along with Zack Lieberman, I created a web series called The West Side, which won the Webby Award for Best Drama Series in 2008. We spent a few years after that trying to get our next project made, and I eventually came to the realization that spending so much time knocking on doors in Hollywood was not something I wanted to do the rest of my life. So I decided to try to build up my own audience and infrastructure; thus NoFilmSchool. Most indie filmmakers take on clients or do other jobs to support themselves in addition to working on their own projects, so I thought maybe my “other job” could be to provide useful information to other filmmakers, and in the process maybe I could help support myself at the same time.

What’s your wish for the future?

I wish boring day jobs were a thing of the past.

If you could share a book, film, album, and experience with the future what would each be?

I’m going to limit myself to things that came out in the past year, otherwise this question is too difficult. Book-wise I’d bring Frank Rose’s The Art of Immersion, because it places the evolution of storytelling in terrific historical context. For an album, I might actually bring Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy because it captured the zeitgeist, and, well, it was also a beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy. Finally, I’d bring along the film Contagion to make sure people in the future wash their hands. However, if there were a lot of other people bringing things into the future, then I would probably go with more obscure choices to seem cooler.

WHAT RYAN WILL BE DOING AT DIY DAYS

Building and nurturing a valuable relationship with your audience

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there… you know the saying. Similarly, if you create work and no one sees it… are you achieving your goals? This workshop will focus on building an audience online, as well as deriving value and meaning from that relationship. Despite the proliferation of digital tools to CREATE work, it’s often a mystery as to how best CONNECT and BUILD an audience for your work. We’ll take a look at all of the different methods of making yourself accessible in a connected age — Facebook, Twitter, and some less obvious choices — and we’ll see which ones work (and which ones don’t). Ryan will draw from his experiences building his website, NoFilmSchool, which two years after launch is currently averaging 750,000 pageviews a month. He will also share analytics from his $125,000 Kickstarter campaign to make his first feature film, Man-child. His goal is to arm you with a plan for building a long-term, mutually-beneficial, self-sustaining relationship with an always-growing audience.

Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces in 2008, Ryan Koo co-wrote, directed, shot, and edited the Webby Award-winning web series The West Side. His first feature-length script, Man-child, has been selected for IFP’s Emerging Narrative, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Emerging Visions, and the Tribeca Film Institute’s All Access programs. He is also the founder of nofilmschool.com, which won Total Film’s Best Creative Blog award in 2011. Thanks in large part to NoFilmSchool, he was able to raise $125,000 on Kickstarter to fund Man-child’s forthcoming production.

Twitter: @ryanbkoo
Website: www.NoFilmSchool.com
Kickstarter: Man-child

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