By Ian Caddell | Photograph by Phillip Chin
Colleen Nystedt was one of the busiest local producers in the 1990s, working as either line producer or production manager for over a dozen films and was the president of her own company, New City Productions. Eventually, she decided to bring together her knowledge of productions and a lifelong curiosity about technologies to create MovieSet, a new media platform that brings behind-the-scenes filmmaking online and serving as a communication resource for producers.
1975 I was a teenager working for my father transposing survey forms results from the Urban Futures Project onto coding sheets for keypunch in the bowels of the UBC Computer Science building.
1985 I was working on a television movie called Nobody’s Child starring Marlo Thomas. I was the location manager, pregnant with my daughter, Shannon. The production offices were at Riverview Hospital which was also our principal set. Justis Greene was production manager and he had an early copy of Movie Magic. It was on that show that I got my first exposure to film industry production software.
1991 I had worked my way up the production ladder and formed my first production service company, New City Productions. I drew on my urban geography background and transformed soon-to-be redeveloped industrial properties into short-term turn-key studios. Throughout the 90s New City managed the production of several movies a year for the studios and networks. Managing multiple movies underscored the need for better tools. I got my hands on a range of software applications for managing film production, ranging from script to scheduling to budgeting and cost reporting. (For a technology-driven industry, motion picture production has the most arcane of software solutions. It’s still extremely paper-based, despite the fact that more sophisticated solutions are available. As a result, there’s no business model.)
1998 The strategy was to infiltrate the film business, learn it from the ground up in the trenches, and then reverse engineer into producing one’s own movies. By the late 90s I was doing just that, but was frustrated by the limitations of being an independent producer in Canada. We’re crippled by lack of distribution and can access just enough soft money to limp from service gig to service gig. It’s hard to build a real business. That year, I produced a kid’s film called Mr. Rice’s Secret, starring David Bowie. It was a fantastic script and we made it on a shoestring, but it was a labour of love. It sadly got caught up in the Canadian distribution syndrome and was doubly hamstrung because of the insurance-backed financing scheme that partially financed it. It never had a chance, and I remember thinking that if I’d had the ability as a producer to market the film directly to the people who would have loved it, it would have had an opportunity to find its audience. And it was then that I first thought about the internet as a solution.
2000 I sold New City into a public company, where my focus as an executive shifted to higher level finance and distribution activities.
2002 However, when the promised production funds hadn’t appeared by 2002, the writing was on the wall, and I moved toward independence.
2003 In the fall, I incorporated a new start up, New City Entertainment. David Rockwell, my pre-2000 CFO joined me in the new adventure.
2004 I created a distribution company, and sought eligibility under the Province of BC’s Small Business Venture Capital Act as an eBusiness Connection (eBC.) The company was intended to act as the conduit for investment between a VCC Fund and a slate of qualifying independent feature films. Drawing on my knowledge, experience and contacts derived from my production and executive years, I attempted to construct an investment fund for portfolios of locally produced motion pictures. The model was sound but for a variety of political reasons, which I won’t go into here, its creation was repeatedly delayed. As part of the thinking for the distribution company, I had come to focus my attention on technological change. After the first dot.com bubble burst, there was a retreat of sorts. But I remained convinced it was only a matter of time and bandwidth penetration before all distribution came online. Naturally there would be pushback, as there has been with every such revolution – from talkies, to television, from VCRs to DVDs to the internet. Each time, the status quo tries to kill the new technology and business processes until finally they themselves are rendered extinct or successfully adopt the new technology. The examples are legion. But I digress.
At ShoWest that year, the themes were familiar: decreasing theatrical audience; the increased cost of media buys (advertising), but also the migration of the audience to the internet. When asked about internet strategy executives looked like deer in headlights. No one had figured out how to monetize internet advertising, and it was generally viewed as a threat to conventional revenue streams.
I remember thinking ‘hmmmm, they’re missing the point. The internet isn’t unidirectional. What about online communities?’ We’d been watching the migration of the audience to the internet and seeing them form into communities around shared passions. This was pre-social networking. Families were building support communities around their children’s activities, for example. I reflected on Mr. Rice’s Secret and all the different kinds of people that would have been interested in the themes of that particular movie. Maybe the internet was the place you could go to target and engage with the right people in ways never before imagined. But how would they know about it? What would get them interested in the first place?
It is a fact that people like to watch movies being made. People will watch us park the trucks. They’ll stand around for hours and watch the crew set up lights. There is no doubt about it. People have an insatiable appetite for behind-thescenes of movies. But film crews hate the intrusion that represents. It interferes with production. Motion picture marketing strategy has historically skewed toward pre-release activity. During the production process, there is minimum emphasis on marketing, and often the publicity line item in the budget gets cut in an attempt to close production financing. Giving fans early access to movies wasn’t in the cards, despite the clear demand.
One day I heard about the Bagel Cam, where they put a web cam in the hole of a bagel on the craft service table. People tuned in, in droves. What a concept. Then Peter Jackson did this daily videoblog thing for his King Kong remake and served up new content daily. People came back every day. The studio later sold the whole set on DVD for $39.95 to accompany the theatrical release.
2005 I went up to Keats Island and wrote a so-called Vision document that detailed how to bring movie production online and generate content for the internet for daily consumption by fans. That features document continues to provide the foundation of what has become MovieSet™. I hired the first web designer to do a basic mock up. We put together an application for prototyping financing from the Canada New Media Fund (CNMF.)
June 13 I received a fax confirming the participation of the CNMF. I will always remember that day because it was also my father’s memorial service. With the support of the CNMF and leveraging some of the investment dollars we had raised into the distribution company, we put out a RFP (request for proposals) for technology companies to build the prototype of what at that time was called SETSCOPE. A Vancouver-based enterprise portal company called The Level won the contract.
Summer I supervised the wireframes and prototyping while running for Vancouver City Council (another outcome of the death of my father, former City Councillor Walter Hardwicke.)
November When I didn’t win, I threw myself back into completing the prototype.
December We conducted a brand blueprint session at the ad agency TBWA\Vancouver led by Chief Strategic Officer, Jim Southcott. We came away with a defined identity and a new name: MOVIESET™. Ironically, the original name we chose wasn’t available and MovieSet resonated. We miraculously were able to buy the domain name on auction.
January 2006 I received an email inviting me to enter the newly-minted MovieSet into competition at the McLuhan Festival of the Future. Frankly, I didn’t know it existed, but my father had given me my first copy of (Marshall McLuhan’s) Understanding Media, and I was hooked.
February The Festival was held at the Underground in Toronto and MovieSet was one of 43 companies competing in four categories: IT, mobile and wireless, online gaming and convergent entertainment. I presented on the fourth day and was very pleased to win the Vortex Award for Excellence in New Media Innovation. Now, I felt I had the intellectual validation for what I was trying to build. But I needed the money to do it.
March Having eBC status in British Columbia enabled us to raise more capital from friends and family, and particularly colleagues in the BC Film Industry. (Notably the first investor was the late, great Bob Scarabelli). We leveraged that money to build a functional alpha.
April We attended ShowCanada in Victoria. We set up a booth and entertained questions from a range of exhibitors and newly emergent digital media executives.
May Equinoxe Films of Montreal (who had distributed Mr. Rice’s Secret in Canada,) contributed our first picture and a small media buy to promote it online. We hired four co-op students from various post secondary institutions, and set up in the basement of my Kitsilano home. Over that summer we expanded our strategies for online marketing planning and did usability testing for motion picture production personnel.
July Over the summer we raised a little more cash, and added a handful of more shows. We streamed live from the makeup trailer during the making of the zombie movie The Undead and we streamed the Bif Naked video shoot in connection to Crossing.
October MovieSet added its first feature film from preproduction, Battle in Seattle, thanks to producer Kirk Shaw. Even though the director backed out of streaming live from set, we did receive regular content and were able to refine our editing and approval procedures. At the same time we experimented with identifying specific communities.
November I attended the AFM (American Film Market) in Santa Monica and began talking to my friends and producers in Los Angeles about what we were building with MovieSet. Over the fall it became increasingly apparent that we had outgrown our third party technology provider, and needed to think about bringing it in house. Ironically, we had developed the Setup Wizard and Cast and Crew modules at this time, but they were never released and later became part of our SRED (Scientific Research and Development) credits, precisely because the software engineering exercise failed. Various people had suggested that we go Open Source with a CMS (content management system) called Drupal. Vancouver has a substantial Drupal community and I had started to get the lay of the land of the technology industry in BC. It also became clear that raising money without control of your own technology was not realistic.
January, 2007 I connected with Anthony Dutton of Primary Capital, who suggested I contact Mark Rutledge to assist in further capital assembly. I had known Mark from various incarnations within the film industry where he had begun as an entertainment attorney.
Spring We participated in a variety of events and started to meet the various players in the BC Technology Venture Capital business including the Rocketbuilders, WUTIF (Western Universities Technology Innovation Fund), Telus Innovation, VEF (Vancouver Enterprise Forum), Angel Forum and Canadian Financing Forum. Throughout this period we continued to add more films, and struggled to add more functionality within the existing platform until we migrated off The Level to Drupal.
July We went to San Francisco and began meeting with investment bankers, VCs (Venture Capital companies) and law firms who specialized in this area. It had become abundantly clear that the Vancouver Tech VC community had limited knowledge and interest in new media. In contrast, they knew what I was talking about in Palo Alto, Menlo Park and San Francisco. I presented at iHollywood and received two thumbs up from the VC panel, which generated momentum. That led to meetings with Intel and further connections within the Silicon Valley technology investment world. We also went to San Jose to meet with Adobe.
September The Drupal portal was released. It mirrored the functionality of The Level platform, but again focused solely on the fan-facing side of the platform. The strategy had been to prioritize building the fan-facing features in order to drive traffic to prove the business case. This was frustrating to me personally, because I knew that it was the production tools that would attract the participation of the crew, and therefore content. We had built a demo that showcased online editing of EPK materials which we took to Adobe. There was a steep learning curve as we became immersed in the web technology venture capital world. Momentum was building and by the fall we had our first “term sheet” from a fund in the US mid-west. My travels now included New York and Chicago.
November I again attended the AFM, this time with Mark Rutledge and Ryan Smith. We continued to evangelize and educate producers and distributors on the benefits of internet marketing of motion pictures beginning during the production phase and throughout. I also spoke at the iHollywood Seminar held in connection with the AFM.
December We finally moved out of my house and into real offices on West Broadway over the FedEx/Kinko’s. We traded in the dining room for a real Board room. It was weird to go home and not have the offices there. (It still is in a way.)
January, 2008 A watershed month. We had our first real board meeting in the offices. The original term sheet was terminated. The eBC allocations had been renewed and we were speaking to a number of local VCs, particularly Discovery Capital. Charles Cook was interested but they wanted an experienced strategic investor to lead the round. At the same time, we were endeavouring to add the production tools to the Drupal portal. We engaged another third party developer to build and implement those interfaces in anticipation of an industry launch at the Cannes Film festival in May. Then, a friend of mine in LA introduced me to a fellow in Montreal, who introduced me to Jeff Grammer of Rho Canada. Our first phone call was the most lucid conversation I had had with a venture capitalist. I was impressed by his knowledge and imagination.
Early February Jeff Grammer came to our office and met our team. Rho had invested locally in the citizen journalist portal, Now Public, and he was in town for their board meeting.
February 18 I flew back to Montreal to meet with the Rho partnership.
February 25 I received a message while I was in my Development Permit Board meeting at City Hall that the Rho partnership had elected to invest in MoviesSet.
March We received a term sheet and went into due diligence. For the next two months, we went through in-depth analysis of our financial model. Rho decided that they wanted a local VC to syndicate the A-round. I went back to Charles Cook of Discovery Capital. With Rho in place, their partnership was willing to follow on. At the same time, we were preparing for the Cannes Film Festival with the anticipation of launching new software.
Mid-May I landed in Cannes and set up our stand in the Palais. Six of us stayed together in an apartment just off the Croissette. The first full day we arrived, I received confirmation that the first $2M hit the bank in Vancouver. It was cause for celebration but sadly the technology failed us again. The Drupal build that was supposed to launch our production toolkit was un-releasable. Undaunted, we demonstrated the software from the staging site, and still managed to sign up seventy productions.
June I flew to Montreal for the Rho Canada annual general meeting, as their newest investee company. Then Jeff Grammer, now our board chairman, accompanied me to Los Angeles where MovieSet had been the only Canadian company named to the OnHollywood 100 list of disruptive new media companies.
July We closed the Discovery Capital syndication and now were in the position to move forward in developing our own technology to get the MovieSet product to market. We hired Tim Baur as VP Technology. On Tim’s recommendation, we determined to get off Drupal and build our own scalable and proprietary software platform. Over the summer, Tim assembled his team. We revisited the wire frames from the unsuccessful Drupal build. We worked on the UX (user experience) design. It was exciting to finally be able to execute the vision.
August I went to Ireland and spent quality time with family, friends and colleagues. (My long term plan is to establish a beach head there for MovieSet’s internationalization and localization activities for Europe.)
September The bottom had really started to drop out of the stock market. We presented a budget to the Board that stretched out our cash for as long as possible, with a conservative organic approach to building traffic. We were told that unless we emphasized traffic acquisition, it would be hard to bring on additional financing. We changed course.
November At the AFM we had a stand and half a dozen people sharing a bungalow in Venice Beach, working to bring more producers online and to add compelling content on location in Santa Monica. We launched the new portal and fan facing site-lets. The production tools were not complete and we had to show a demo to producers.
It was déjà vu all over again. Everyone tells me to expect this when dealing with software development, but it doesn’t make it any easier to live through!
December We rented a bungalow in Venice as a base of operations in LA. Up until this point we had focused on attracting independent filmmakers as our innovators and early adopters. Now it was time to start working on the studio strategy. My dear friend, Ruth Vitale, former president of Paramount Classics, began to help me set up meetings.
January 2009 At our board meeting, it had become abundantly clear that the recession was deepening. Raising additional investment capital was going to be impossible. Our VCs had options to exercise, but needed us to focus on traffic acquisition (at the expense again of building the production tools). With the aid of Michael Fergusson, an angel investor and member of our advisory board, the tech team re-jigged our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) analytics, and began work on integrating our Facebook and MySpace applications. I presented at the Canadian Financing Forum at the end of January and was named Forum Favourite.
February Half the month was spent in Los Angeles continuing to educate and evangelize to producers, production companies and studios alike. I attended a social media building blocks conference in San Francisco with an eye to refining our fan-facing features and developing further strategic partnerships.
March I traveled to New York City to meet with potential key strategic partners, and also with the managing partner of Rho Capital. Meanwhile, back in Vancouver, both the online marketing and technology teams worked diligently to add features and traffic. MovieSet’s behind-the-scenes show with Shaun Stewart and Eric Fell launched, with webisodes three times a week, featuring movies on MovieSet, and offering contests and an editorial view into pre-release movies. We also launched the Face-book Behind-the-Scenes Quiz Game where answers come from movies on MovieSet. A similar application was launched on MySpace. Our intrepid behind-the-scenes photo journalist, Quinn Bender, tracked the production of Death Warrior in Toronto and we experimented with targeted community marketing and tested live streaming and other features intended for wide deployment.
April 1 At the Board meeting we were able to demonstrate triple the traffic numbers from the previous month. Our VCs indicated that if we could double our traffic leading up to May and cement the relationship with a certain strategic investor that they would exercise their options. By the end of the month, we’ll be launching an iPhone web application, so you can access movies on MovieSet wherever.
It is now possible for producers to create and manage their own MovieSet site-lets. Production coordinators can manage their cast and crew lists online. Unit publicists can do everything from distribute their start of production press releases, to managing blogs and news alerts, above the line and cast biographies and production notes (i.e. blogs). Stills photographers can upload, tag and kill photos which progress through workflow to agents, and ultimately to producers and studio marketers for approval and publishing.
Fans can manage their own profiles. They can track movies through each phase of production. They can comment on stills, video and communicate back to production. Fans are recipients of “fresh content, delivered daily” by virtue of MovieSet’s tools.
I feel like we’re right in the middle of this story, so I don’t know how to end it yet. There are approximately 400 movies on MovieSet as of right now, with new ones added daily. Once a certain key strategic relationship is in place, we will have every movie on MovieSet from development through distribution and beyond. In the long tale, MovieSet then becomes the repository of the equivalent of bonus features on your DVD. And more than that, it changes the relationship between creators and consumers. Next up: Cannes in May of 2009.
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