On the 11/11/2016, I attended a film screening for the film Darkest Dawn (2016) and Q&A with Miles Bullough and Drew Casson, part of the production team at the company Wildseed Studios. The film itself was a live-action, horror, sci-fi, thriller hybrid and is released on iTunes, Amazon and Sky Store, hitting number 12 on the iTunes pre-order chart within 3 days of sale.
The thing that I personally found striking about the entire film was two things; the actors and the origin of the film. Darkest Dawn had a very specific acting set, Youtube 'celebrities' such as Bethany Leadley, Cherry Wallis and Stuart Ashen. This is a very strategic thing to do, as Youtube celebrities usually have a large following, and because of this, an independent company (such as Wildseed) can use this for free marketing. The reason why I found the origin of the film striking is because it again comes back to Youtube. The director Drew Casson, started out as a VFX artist on Youtube, creating small projects and videos, until he was noticed by Miles Bullough, who previously was an executive producer for Aardman's A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008). Bullough contacted Drew and the two created the film Darkest Dawn.
Youtube played a huge role in the creation of this film, from it's origin to it's actors. Now this is a very interesting thing to me, as it's a completely different way for marketing than I have seen. Youtube is now a decade old, it's mainstream and has a very large demographic, it reaches over 81.2% of the internet's users in the US alone. Bethany Leadley and Cherry Wallis, actors from the film, both have popular make-up & cosmetic heavy content on their channel, which actually are the most popular videos for women on Youtube. Videos containing makeup & cosmetics accumulate 89.31% of the female viewership on Youtube, so these girls are very likely to get noticed by many female users.
Stuart Ashen's Youtube channel is very review and comedy heavy and has accumulated over 1,000,000 subscribers to his channel. Stuart has a very large following, and his videos usually get roughly 250,000 views. Now this to me, seems like a very good opportunity for both independent film studios and Youtubers; independent film studios can have cheaper publicity and actors and the Youtubers can finally be on th ebig screen, not just through a computer monitor. Considering the film had around a £45,000, this was a strategic thing for Wildseed to do.
The reason I am intrigued by this, why I have focused specifically on marketing through Youtube, and why I am talking about this overall is because as I have previously talked about in Ethel & Ernest, hand-drawn animation is no longer the mainstream medium, it's very independent after the boom of CGI. If independent hand-drawn animation has a hope of surviving, it needs an audience, and I think many studios can appreciate what Wildseed did in order to reach their audience, they chose popular Youtubers and used them to promote their film by having them star in the film.
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