Sundog Pictures used YouTube to release its film about the war on drugs. Co-founder Johnny Webb tells Jonathan Webdale why he thinks the traditional model for feature-length docs is broken.
Johnny Webb
YouTube is frequently pilloried for playing host to dogs on skateboards and viral sensations like the Harlem Shake tend to steal all the headlines, but some of the site’s greatest successes have been serious documentaries.
Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald’s Life in a Day marked a seminal moment. The 2011 crowd-sourced film took videos shot by 80,000 YouTube users on a single day that year and condensed them into a 90-minute feature, released theatrically ahead of online.
Life in a Day has clocked up close to 35 million views on YouTube and has been turned into a format, with the BBC commissioning a UK version in the run-up to last year’s London Olympics and Japan’s Fuji Television ordering its own to commemorate the anniversary of the country’s catastrophic 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Meanwhile, last year’s Kony 2012, a campaigning half-hour film calling for the capture of fugitive African militia leader Joseph Kony, was endorsed by celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie. As a result it went viral, coming close to achieving one billion YouTube views.
Sundog Pictures, the UK indie run by Sam Branson and former Virgin Media TV chief Johnny Webb, was inspired by these projects for the English-language launch of its own feature-length doc, a film about the global war on drugs called Breaking the Taboo.
Morgan Freeman in Breaking the Taboo
Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it features a host of influential figures, including former US presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, talking about how policies for fighting the narcotics trade have failed. Added celebrity support came from Sam’s father Richard Branson, Kate Winslet, Bob Geldof and others.
The film was two years in the making and contained its own campaign message, designed to chime with various legislative changes that were happening around the world and encourage viewers to sign a petition.
“With documentary – whether it’s TV or cinema – the audience may be moved by a story, but as a filmmaker, how do you act upon that emotion you’re evoking?” says Webb.
“I have to say, we took some of our cues from Kony because what that film did very effectively at the end was say ‘Now go and do three things,’ and that really appealed to me. I thought it was very specific and directional, so actually we ended our film saying, ‘Here’s what you can do right now: go and sign the petition that we will give to the United Nations to ask them to re-examine and change global drugs policy.’”
Kony 2012
Because of its time-sensitive nature, the slowness of progressing through the festival circuit to the big screen and need to reach as many people as possible, Sundog decided to eschew a traditional release.
“We swapped the cinema window for YouTube,” explains Webb. “It launched globally on December 7 for five weeks for free. We brought 1.5 million views to the channel. We got just shy of 800,000 views for the film itself, which was obviously significantly more than we would have received if we’d gone down the theatrical route.”
Visit the Breaking The Taboo YouTube channel now, however, and you can’t watch it, since the film has entered a different distribution window.
Sundog enrolled TVF International to sell the film to broadcasters around the world and plenty have snapped it up.
Current TV, which Al Jazeera acquired earlier this year for a reported US$500m and is due to be rebranded as Al Jazeera America, is among a string of nets that have licensed rights.
Bill Clinton in Breaking the Taboo
Other buyers include TVO in Canada, ORF in Austria, TV4 in Sweden, DR TV in Denmark, Israel’s Yes DBS, ERR in Estonia, Russia’s 24Docs and the film is also being released through Apple iTunes.
The demand is perhaps surprising given that Breaking The Taboo has already been released via the world’s biggest video sharing platform, but Webb argues to the contrary. “I’ve been a broadcaster for most of my life so I know what it’s like – it’s a relatively conservative constituency,” he says, conceding that there was some “initial scepticism” but that this was soon hushed by the noise the YouTube release generated elsewhere in the social sphere, on Twitter and Facebook.
“For the 800,000 people that watched the film clearly, there are millions and millions more who are interested in the subject but want to watch it in HD or through the TV,” says Webb.
“By using YouTube this way, we were testing a new hypothesis, which was ‘Can we build recognition for the film and awareness of the message in the first window to the extent that when it plays out on global TV we’ve warmed people up because we’ve had that splash – that oxygen of publicity?’”
The answer would appear to be ‘yes,’ though it has to be said 800,000 views is no YouTube record, leaving broadcasters with the strong possibility of reaching people who’ve never seen the doc. Still, Kony 2012 secured its first broadcast deal when it was at the 50 million views mark – proof perhaps that YouTube and traditional TV can happily co-exist.
Sundog now plans to draw on its experiences and the 10,000 subscribers its YouTube channel has amassed to tackle other subjects.
“Our ambition now, after the success of this one, is to create a Breaking The Taboo franchise and do a series of films that take different global taboos,” says Webb. He believes that coming up with new means of funding and distributing such projects is an imperative.
“The model is slightly broken for feature docs,” he says. “Not enough are getting through the festival circuit, are getting financed, are getting noticed. We’ve got to find a new way that allows us to get more publicity, that allows filmmakers to get their work to eager audiences but at the same time fuels the existing business models.”
The first Breaking The Taboo film was financed by private investors but Webb says Sundog will be looking to Kickstarter or other forms of crowd-sourcing to provide at least some of the money for future features.
“We’re still looking for the gap. I hope that if the marketing principal of using YouTube as a first window comes true then we’re delivering more value to our broadcast partners around the world, and that that might reflect in fees next time round,” he says.
