The Miracle of Crowdfunding: Uncomfortable is the new comfortable: new rules for a new age bigger picture (04/06/2014)

"Faced with a challenge today, it makes sense to ask: what would Google do?" 

- Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?

Artistic and financial success - ANY success - requires an understanding and exploitation of the bigger picture of today...

This applies just as much to filmmaking as it does to any other enterprising endeavour in today's world!

These reformulations and paradigm shifts are what I have spent the last 10 months researching in order to gain an understanding of how to go about exploiting these new rules of practice in my own endeavours.

I captured the above photo from one of the lectures of a course I am currently enrolled on:

Understanding Media by Understanding Google

As the name suggests, it dissects the Google business model in order to dissect the larger media reality of today. 

The course draws heavily on the book:

What Would Google Do? 

Filmmaking success requires embracing and engaging the business, marketing, distribution and networking infrastructures that operate beyond the central and comfortable filmmaking/content creation infrastructure.

This bigger engagement is exactly what I want to exercise throughout this documentary project and in the projects that are connected to it.

What would google do?

Google would embrace the combined knowledge, engagement and loyalty of its initial searching users to build an empire of resources that is now highly relevant to pretty much every person who uses the online arena... and very much encourages this wide plethora of users to keep contributing to its ongoing innovating efforts.

We have to think outside the box. 

Anyone can make a film and many people do... and, good or bad, that's it, that's all they have - a film. 

But how do make a film relevant to the audience you would ideally want to engage with, so that your film will have a life beyond the process of creating it? 

Furthermore, how do you insure that your film is a highly beneficial component of your ongoing career?

On Tuesday, I came across a book in the library that is very much the filmmaking equivalent of What Would Google Do?

I had a flick through it and I can see that it is just the stuff! I have invested in a copy so that I can annotate it.

Google started out as a simple indexing search engine... and now it has become a highly pervasive presence that is tapping into every area of our everyday lives - Google is the ultimate example of how to go about operating outside of your comfort zone.

Making a film is not enough, we have to embrace the bigger picture that now operates around it.

We have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.