Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, host of the Unscripted SEO podcast, and I am here with Ethan Felizarri Castillo.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: You said it.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Amazing.
Yo practicar mucho.
I need to learn Spanish SEO phrases, I am sure, because there's always that technical layer of another language.
There's, you know, donde estala biblioteca, but there's also, like, the words for the complicated components of rank tracking and shards and all of that.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: I
[00:00:39] Speaker A: think there's a second layer to learning that aspect, so maybe someday.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. It's a whole other side of it, of the language even I don't even fully grasp sometimes. I forget sometimes. So it's hard. It's hard.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: So why don't you give yourself a good introduction where you are, and then we'll dive into the doors that open. It's unscripted. Let's roll with
[00:01:05] Speaker B: it. Yeah, let's do it. My name is Ethan Felizar Castillo. As Jeremy said, I am primarily a director and producer for a production company called CK Productions, which I started back in 2013. We have various branches and we're multimedia production companies company.
So we work in the film and theater space and in the music space as well. And a few years back, we decided to open up a specific marketing, entertainment marketing sector of the company where we work with films, specifically independent films, and also other artistic endeavors like music, individual recording artists, things like that. And we work within the marketing space in that realm. So, you know, we're an entertainment company. I've been working in entertainment since I was a little kid, working mainly as an actor, first starting in local theater productions and then diving into in high school, actually opening up CK producing and directing. And the same company I opened when I was a junior in high school is the same company I work for today in my late 20s. So it's pretty exciting. So, yeah,
[00:02:09] Speaker A: my company was overpricing. They had those promotional boxes of candy they allowed you to sell. Well, I had a company where I would restock those on the sly and I turn in the allotted money and then just use that as cover for my undercover candy selling business.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: That's amazing. I love it. I love it.
What a hustle there. That's a good one.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
So I. I'm fascinated because I haven't had a chance to talk to somebody who's doing SEO or doing marketing that's in the entertainment space. And I see that there are a lot of changes in the SERP when it comes to Google's recognition of the knowledge panel.
There are special designated SERPs that celebrities get that book authors get.
So I would imagine that that plays a component and a role in your process or your vision.
How does the special treatment that people of notability receive becomes part of that process? And how do you sort out those challenges?
Because not everybody who says that they are an actor truly is an actor. When it comes to Google saying that they are an
[00:03:34] Speaker B: actor. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, it is, it is very challenging. So I think it really depends on the scope of the film and who you have attached to it. Right. When it comes to a movie, I think there's so many. When I first get offered a project, or even if we're working with our own projects in house, which we do our own marketing for, you know, we look at the project as a whole and we say, okay, where is it on the commercial scale? Right. Is the project something that is going to have Timothy Chalamet and Zendaya in it, where everyone's going to immediately know who these people are, or a Leonardo DiCaprio, where, you know, SEO is much easier, you put their names in and then, you know, things are popping up right away. Right. Versus is it gonna have someone who no one's ever heard of before? Maybe they have some credits, but they're more of an independent film actor or they star in those smaller, more, more intimate films. Right. So the, the hard part there is really trying to make sure that when you're starting a project is organizing by, I guess, like status and ranking a little bit and figuring out, okay, what do you have here that we can utilize and what do we need to boost here? And, you know, everything that we do in the beginning of a project has to be organically, especially with small independent projects, you don't have the budget for it. Right. And I think it kind of is the.
It's very similar to how any other small business would run. So. So my family used to. Well, they still do. They all own their own small business all throughout New York. They all do different things. My brother works in the menswear industry. My mom's a life coach. So, you know, everybody has their own thing in my family that they focus on. And what I've learned from, you know, a small business is the fact that, you know, you, you're working with, with little marketing dollars and little dollars that you can put into things like SEO or boosting and any, in any capacity, whether it's social media, whether it's Google, what doesn't matter what it is. So it's the same kind of idea and thinking with an independent film. And you know, you use, when you first approach it, you use what you do have to your, your strength and then which whatever you don't have, you try and make up with, you know, boosting later on and, and you know, more paid media later on. But it's a lot of creativity and, and figuring out how can I get this actor that no one's ever heard of to come across like they are larger or if it's, you know, I did worked on a amazing documentary that you know was about North Korean defectors. And the, the doc, thankfully when I came on, already had a lot of recognition. It went to, it won Sundance, it had played in a bunch of festivals. So it had a little bit of recognition beforehand. But you know, how do you make a story about a guy who was following a pastor who has like this underground railroad of sorts for North Korean defectors? It's a really beautiful film.
But how no one knows who this guy is. No one's ever heard of this, this literal modern day hero.
How do you now build this guy up? And that takes just a lot of time and effort and creativity and yeah, figuring out how is Google gonna recognize this person? So it's interesting. Depending on the film, your strategy kind of changes. Changes whether it's a really small budget or nonfiction versus something that is narrative. So it's. Yeah, it's tricky.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Interesting. So on the tactical side of a concrete specific thing is that trying to secure interviews for people that are on the staff with established places, is it reaching out to blogs, letting them know, hey, this movie is coming up.
Do you give like teaser clips that you're trying to shop out? Like what on the tactical side are some of those tools that you're trying to leverage?
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean one thing that I always like to do is think of what our press outreach is going to be. I think that there's nothing better for people who are interested in looking up a film or a project in the arts and considering giving their money or their time to watch something than finding a way for them to be able to relate to the people behind the project. So I think interviews are like, that's always number one. Every time I've worked on a project, whether I've been, you know, marketing manager or marketing director or whatever it is, you know, that's always like number one, how can we get as much press as possible? But specifically press where the, the artist or the creative or the person we are trying to put promote, how can we get them speaking? Right. So It's a, it's a huge part of the strategy. And blogs, too. I mean, it's, it's hard because with entertainment, you have very specific trades that are, you know, you have the Hollywood Reporter, you have deadline, you have variety of things like Rolling Stone, right? Like these large organizations that want to feature, you know, the biggest, you know, the biggest names. They don't necessarily want the small story. So it's, it's a lot of creativity and figuring out how to get in touch with those people because they have the most power when it comes to where your ranking is on Google and everywhere, really your social value, in a weird sense, in your digital footprint.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: So one of my previous guests, Keith Percay, he does SEO coaching, but he described a method called the Bishop's Court, where if you want to talk to the Pope, you can't like just walk up and say, what's up, Pope?
You gotta work your way up. And you start with the cardinal. You know, you start with the pastor who introduces you to the cardinal, who introduce you to the bishop. He calls it the Bishop Square to finally get that conversation. So what's an example of where you've got a project and you want to promote it and you've had to like, like start at the base and build up those relationships so that you can ultimately achieve what that marketing goal was?
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, so much of what I do is in the independent world.
I tend to, you know, we pride ourselves at CK Productions that the projects we tend to work on are going to stay fully independent. And, you know, on our website, if you go Visit us, is 100% independent. And we really do everything we can tend to, to take on those projects versus working for the larger studio systems. So every single project we are starting at the very bottom. We were starting with the local, the local pastors. As, as your friend said. Right. We are, we're starting all the way down there, right? Because that's, that's how we have to. It's out of kind of necessity. What I like to do first is, you know, I have a long standing list and I started on my phone and this is something I've been doing now for about a year.
But I go to my notes and I add, if I'm on Instagram, I'm scrolling through and I see, let's say a podcast or, you know, an image that it looks like a clickbaity image. But then I click on it and I find out it's some sort of news source or blog they're posting On Instagram, I go and I save that blog and I. Even if it has 100 followers, if it has, you know, 10,000 followers, has a million plus. Right. I save it and I include it in my. In the next project I work on. And what I do is every time, and there's so many of them out there, I find the smallest ones and then I find those really large ones. And what I do is I immediately make a plan for us to start reaching out to those small ones right in the beginning. Right. Develop that relationship really, really early on. So oftentimes, you know, and this kind of relates to the film that I'm working on now that I'm directing and producing called Backyard Desert.
You know, one of the. One of the hard things about being independent is when you're doing an independent film like ours, you are your own marketing people, you are your own everything. You're your own publicist and all that.
And we realized early on that we have something very interesting to say with this film.
But we need to get attention in order to get more funding, in order to get more investors, more people attracted to the project. We want to start building some buzz around the project, around the things that we do, do have. So what I like to do with films is start early on. So before we're even actually pushing the marketing and saying, like, go watch this movie, do whatever I can to, like, sprinkle a little something so that people now know this thing exists. There's like now this little buzz. And then you search up our film, Backyard Desert online, you're gonna see a handful of articles already and some interviews. The movie's not even shot yet. You know, the movie's shooting in late spring.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: So what that has done now for me as an independent producer is now it's given me a little bit of a leg up where Google has some time to recognize, you know, any. Any contacts that I have at social media companies that I can leverage getting certain things and accounts verified or whatever. Right. Utilizing that, verifying all these accounts. And now you've created almost like this social proofing, which I find really helps. So. So, yeah, that's sort of my typical approach. But it really depends because every film is different. Sometimes I come on projects when the film is a month out from going into movie theaters, and that's obviously a completely different kind of strategy there. So it depends.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: There's so many questions I have about the SEO aspect. I would imagine that measurement of your metrics that you're looking at are a little bit different.
In some ways from small businesses because they're looking at, hey, I got rankings, then I got traffic, and then I got conversion. You actually, you've got a movie, at some point it's going to enter the theater and you want people to watch it and then it's going get distributed somewhere and you want them to also go and watch it wherever it is. And so it's seems to me some of the focus might be different in terms of success. Not necessarily looking at what's your benchmark as far as traffic coming to sites that you control versus counting your media mentions, or what are the metrics that you kind of use to gauge, oh, we really need to step this up, or hey, things are kind of looking good, or is it, is it even possible to attribute that? Where does that stand for you?
[00:13:55] Speaker B: It's so funny you say, because like, the secret that I have learned is that all the metrics with film are just, they're all kind of all over the place because it doesn't. If it's so hard to be able to say that if you clicked on an article or you clicked on something and we measure traffic, that that's going to turn into an actual theater goer. But what that does turn into is awareness. And awareness for a film is almost equally as important as someone going to buy a ticket for a movie. And what I mean by that is that nowadays
[00:14:27] Speaker A: reputation,
[00:14:28] Speaker B: reputation is, is everything when it comes to a film, especially these days, right? Because what you have is you have the ability with our modern streaming services to have a film be a absolute box office failure, make almost no money at the box office, but then could be number one on Netflix the week it comes out, or it could be number one on Peacock or number one on T vod, right? Like, like actually buying or renting on stores. And people do that, you know, and it's like the, there's, there's a whole other element now to making a film into marketing a film when it's completed. So it's interesting because it becomes, the conversation becomes more on like, what phase are we in? Are we in an awareness phase where our only goal is to get exactly what you said, we're counting media mentions, we're counting, you know, we're counting, we're looking at social media and how that is implemented and how we're doing on organic engagement and followers and all this before we're pushing stuff out and in terms of SEO, you know, trying to find out, okay, where's our film landing? If you were to type in, you Know, for example, our film Backyard Desert. If you type in Backyard Desert, do a bunch of backyards come up or does our movie come up? Right? Okay, some backyards are still coming up great. But if you type in backyard desert film, great, now our thing comes up first. So what do we need to do to be the very first thing that Google recognizes? So it becomes more like the awareness phase to me, becomes so much of the. What the rest of the campaign is going to look like, because that's going to tell you what you need to know if, if you should be focusing on like. Like, because if you're getting. If you're. If. If your film is being talked about everywhere and everyone wants to know what's going on with this project, you know for sure there's enough buzz that can turn into butts and seats, right? That can actually turn into people going out to movie theaters. But if there is nobody actually interested in just a bunch of. Bunch of people picking it up and no engagement, or you don't really see anything, the campaign has to then shift and you then say, okay, great, now we're extending this awareness campaign. We're going to grow in popularity. We're going to get some critic reviews, we're going to get some people talking about this film in a positive way. And then when it enters streaming, that's where we're really going to now push for people to leave Instagram or leave Google or leave Facebook or wherever it is that they're in and go and stream this movie. So it's. Yeah, it's. It's. You got to be. Got to be adaptable like any other business. But, but especially with film, it's. It's hard to calculate metrics and figure out what works, what doesn't work. So, yeah,
[00:17:04] Speaker A: that's. That's fascinating. It.
It's almost like that part of your job is actually change Google's perception of what a key word is related to by creating an entity which is the movie, and then doing everything you can to push it. So that would actually lead to an interesting question. I don't know if you had this experience, but have you come back to or been an influence on how you name a movie? Because there's no way that you're going to change Kentucky Derby as a Google search results.
And so maybe you go with a different name or maybe that is the strategy. If there's so many people searching for Kentucky Derby that if you manage to switch that SERP to get even a portion of it, then the search itself can function as Kind of publicity that there is this thing because there is that binary switch, right? Like Google either knows it exists and it attributes a SERP to a particular thing, but then something happens, like a movie comes into existence, it's going to be shot and now people are searching for it. So that's a very niche part of SEO. What do you think about that? Have you had that experience or what's your take on that?
[00:18:26] Speaker B: So look, I mean, that's the hard thing, right?
I think with a film like you had mentioned in the beginning, the beginning, you know, the, the idea is, is with the introduction of things like Knowledge Panel or even with the AI features that are now on Google when you're searching, you want to be at the very top of all those things, right? You want to be the thing that people associated with it. But it is, it is so hard, man. Like there's, there's a movie I, I just worked on that. I won't say the title of it, but it is, it is a. I'm still on it. And it's, it's a fan. It's a very interesting film film to have worked on. And it's a. Such a creative, interesting campaign, but it's centered around a political figure. And the problem is, how do you get the political figure to now be associated and it's just a political figure's name. How do we get that guy to be completely associated with our movie? It's impossible because this political figure is in the news. This political figure is going to be talked about not just in American news, but it's going to be talked about in international news. So it's a, it becomes a very challenging topic because then, then you say, okay, great, well, should we change the name depending on the market that we're in? Like if it's a, if it's a global film, should we be saying, okay, hey, you know, should we, in the, the US Marketing, should we be going forward with this name for the film? And then it becomes more of a question for the producers and the people actually behind the movie if they're willing to make that kind of a change or that kind of a jump. For me, I'll tell you as a director and writer and as someone who also gets a chance to, you know, I say my main focus usually is. Is on producing or marketing. And from the producing aspect, because I get to develop scripts sometimes from the very beginning, I oftentimes will talk to the writer and I'll say, you should consider changing that name. I have one film that is in very early stages.
And I had to put on my marketing hat for a second. I said, will anyone come out to see this film's name? And I, I can't say the name of it yet, but I will say that it has a curse word as the very first word. And I said, will anybody go and see a film? This name, like, it's subversive. It's interesting from a marketing perspective, it's like, boom, it's in your face. It gets you like, from a creative marketing perspective, it's like, yeah, okay, wow, this is exciting, this is interesting. But then you take a back seat and think, okay, from a digital marketing perspective, is this word or is this phrase going to be the thing that's going to be able to appear higher? So, you know, being that I get to oftentimes wear multiple hats, especially as a producer, I usually can guide things to a certain, a certain title.
But yeah, man, it is that. Getting a title recognized by Google Knowledge Panel for some reason is not always easy. And then when it finally does, there's always issues with it too. And that's obviously a greater question on Google and their infrastructure. But like, yeah, there's, there's wrong info, wrong actors, wrong release dates. It's like, it gets, it gets pretty wild. But it's, you know, independent films need that, like, you need that kind of natural attention so that when people, when you're on a podcast, when you're on something like this and I'm talking about my film Backyard Desert, I want you to be able to go and look it up. But if I don't have all my stuff organized or if it's not populated yet, you're not going to find it. And realistically, listeners or audience members or you know, followers, they, they, you know, we all have shorter attention, Spanish and also we all have a million things to do, you know, so it's like,
[00:22:06] Speaker A: yeah,
[00:22:06] Speaker B: if I can't find it on first view on my first search or my first two searches, I'm done, I quit. You know, so, yeah, it is very vital for a film for sure.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: A rose by any other name would be as sweet, but Poo Poo Flower does not sell as many.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: That's exactly it. Yep.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: Let's, let's talk about Knowledge Panel because I've done some exploration and I am now a published author. My book is called I self published this SEO book and all I got was this lousy Knowledge panel. The irony is I published it to get the Knowledge Panel as an author, as a cynical ploy and I still don't have my knowledge panel as an SEO author. I do have the featured snippet now though, so that's nice. But not the official knowledge panel yet.
But it kind of points to okay, just publishing a book, even a self published book, like there's a barrier there as far as perception. And this is what I'm learning too is some of these things are so much a perception thing of it's oh my God, you actually published a book. I'm like, yeah, I spent like an hour clicking buttons to upload it, a 10 page Google document and made an image for the COVID So there's things that on the inside that are super easy but they appear like, oh, that's that next level thing. But even sometimes that's not all there is. So when it comes to knowledge panels specifically, what are some very tactical things that you execute to try to grab that?
[00:23:54] Speaker B: Yeah, so my, my partner in life and also in business, her name is Rosie. She has, she's a fantastic actress and she's a content creator on socials and has done really well and started to, to get some really exciting roles and exciting traction. What we noticed a few months ago, I think it was a few months ago, maybe even a year ago at this point, but we noticed that she didn't have a knowledge panel yet, yet she had a bunch of followers on social media.
She had some, some films that are on some streaming platforms. We're like, huh, what is missing here? So what we quickly tried to do, you know, at that time she was releasing more music. So what we tried to do is we said okay, when we release some music immediately when a song comes out, let's get like 10 articles written about it, right? Let's find people who are willing to write articles without a publicist, you know, doing this. Just, just us reaching out to some people, sending out some emails and, and seeing what we can do. What that did was that helped populate at least the conversation and her name associated with her art form. So whether that was music, whether it was acting, whether it was social media, now she was being recognized. And then what I did was I made sure that on IMDb when we went to the Internet Movie database, we actually went through and organized her credits, put a picture there, did little things that we didn't think initially were going to help and they actually helped a whole bunch like adding images, adding more content.
It started to self populate and then started, you know, we ran into the problem where things were wrong or like it linked off. There's another her name is Rosie Dean. There's another Rosie Dean out there who is deceased and she is an actress from many, many, many, many years ago. And it was putting her pages and her links on the Knowledge Panel and we're like, well, that's clearly not her. So then it's, you know, then it's a matter of again getting Google to recognize and even opening up help tickets and all that. Some of it works, sometimes it doesn't, as I'm sure you know. You know, sometimes it, sometimes it can work, sometimes it won't.
And you know, it just became okay getting Google to consistently recognize that she is doing this. And it's crazy. The second she got the Knowledge Panel, we started seeing her name pop up on other databases. So like famous birthdays, you know, which has like random celebrity birthdays is posted and then like, you know what I mean? It was like, it was such a, it was such a wonderful testament to the fact that like, if you can create enough social proofing, there things like Google, Google Knowledge Panel, things like AI, you know, search engines and search engine tools, they just automatically recognize who this person is because you've now populated enough. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, my advice to anyone trying to get Knowledge Panel is just keep getting more people talking about it and keep populating more images and content with that same exact thing that you want to be recognized for, you know, because that's what's worked. And it's worked for me too, even, you know, I never, I never, I mean, I hadn't done anything that I thought was Knowledge Panel worthy. And then all of a sudden I had a Knowledge Panel. After some time of, you know, just being on interviews or, you know, getting mentioned in blogs, IMDb getting more populated, it just sort of came to be.
But yeah, it's a testament to that kind of marketing approach for sure.
[00:27:12] Speaker A: So I talked with Mike Buckbee. He runs an AI tool called Noa Toa and they kind of look at multiple AI tools and then you put in your keyword and it does those searches. So you can kind of get a rough heartbeat of do I show up at all in these different models? Because
[00:27:34] Speaker B: there's
[00:27:34] Speaker A: GPT, there's Claude, there's Bing, Copilot, Gemini from Google. There's at least four major sites. And now both GPT and Perplexity actually connect to Bing's search index.
So they're able to pull live ranking data from the index as that evolves. And as Siri is now, if you have a newer model, you can actually connect Siri to Use GPT for those queries because Siri has always sucked. She's been terrible. And now you can get it to use GPT to give you an actual functional answer.
Is there anything in your mindset that changes or is it more of the same when it comes to surfacing in these LLM based tools and search functions?
[00:28:35] Speaker B: I mean, I think right now I view it as more of the same of, you know, still the old fashioned way of populating things. But I'm curious to see where it does go over the next few years. I feel like so much of it is just still so new and so many new developments that it's like, like so hard to see what the future of all of this. You know, I mean just SEO in general, just, you know, sort of just anything having to do with searching online what that's going to look like in a few years. I mean I, I, when Google first introduced, you know, their, their own AI, right as at the very top of all your searches, I mean, I remember everything was wrong. All the information looked absolutely wacky. You could type in some weird stuff and they'd give you even weirder replies and it would be, it was insane for a little bit and then all of a sudden it got really sharp and it started recognizing things and started linking things the right way. And you know, I think it's, it's more of that recognition and more of that social proofing. But I'm interested to see what happens with it because yeah, I mean, I really don't know, I don't know what the future of that's going to look like. But I have, I have had a lot of conversations with people regarding, you know, the use of AI and AI marketing tool and you know, just so much to do with AI within this space for entertainment. And you know, I guess because entertainment is something that has been controlled by major studios for so long, it always felt foreign that there would be tools to make things easier and accessible for the little guy or for the little film. And now that these tools are starting to come up, I can see that becoming more of a strategy for independent production companies and independent marketing firms that work with smaller films. I can totally see that being an emphasis. So it's going to be interesting see what happens with it.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: It's just a fascinating facet of SEO. And I think it's interesting too because I have worked with literal poop scooper companies and they have a very specific niche and they even have an annual conference called paws, like a poop scoopers association where they meet and they talk about marketing methods for their niche and industry. And Google treats their SERPs differently and there are different criteria, the battle ground is different.
So part of that is always defined by competitors. And so as far as what you do, how do you, do you see other films as competition, other directors as competition, other publishers as competition? Or are they, are you a lot of glad handed frenemies where you can smile and nod and like grumble behind their back when they succeed more than you, but you'll grudgingly give them a hand up? Because they'll give you a hand up and maybe give you an intro to this journalist because I can see that sometimes competitors are competitors and sometimes people who show up in rankings against you are potential allies.
So what's that like in your niche?
[00:32:07] Speaker B: It's so interesting because I think films don't necessarily compete with each other in any place with the exception of the box office or when things come out on streaming. Right.
It is, they just, they, they aren't in real competition with one another because it's so I, I think about like any person you see walking on the street, you ask them what they like and what they're interested in and what movies they want to go see or what, what are their favorite hobbies? They're gonna tell you one thing and then you ask the next person, they're gonna say completely different thing. Now they may, that same two people may have a need for a pooper scooper, but the same two people might not have the same interest in the movies that they choose to watch. One might love horror movies. One might be absolutely, absolutely terrified of horror movies. But
[00:32:56] Speaker A: yeah,
[00:32:57] Speaker B: you know, let's. Nosferatu came out so recently. So we'll say, you know, Lily Rose Depp, someone might be a huge fan of Lily Rose Depp, but hate horror movies. Someone else might be not a fan of Lily Rose Depp, but loves horror movies. So it becomes, you know, really less competition on movie to movie and more competition on us versus the audience member in a week. Weird way. And there's almost this like weird back and forth of like, how can I convince these people, these consumers to want to go give this movie a chance? Because there's only so much you can do, right? So much of film marketing is creative marketing, right? Because it's, it's a campaign that is, you know, filled with graphics and filled with clips and filled with trailers and filled with all of these, these digital spots and TV spots.
But you know, though that's not really meant to be competition with another Film because genre exists and it's so hard to like actually say that the same people who went to go see Mufasa are gonna go see Nosferatu. You know, like, it's not necessarily the same audience. Sure, there may be crossover, but like there's not necessarily the same audience. So. So, you know, the thing you end up competing against when, which I find is space within certain like, like timelines. So because the windows are much smaller. So with like a product or with a small business there, you know, you're not looking at a small business and saying, we need to do this within a two week window. You're looking at this and saying, okay, yeah, we need to. You know, the business needs money, the business needs attention, the business needs xyz. Within two months we're going to see this kind of a growth. But with film, sometimes you have two weeks. Sometimes you like, your best chance to catch an audience member, especially now that no one is buying movies that far in advance anymore is like the week of. So then that week of your competition becomes. It's less about the movie and more about the space that you're able to get for that movie. So that's articles.
Yeah, like if, you know, I had a film come out January 10th, January 10th typically is a tough date for an independent film to come out because it's the very last week that awards movies are doing their mandatory runs to get nominated for Oscars, right? It'll be like the very last week or it'll be the time, it'll be the re release for movies that came out for a week and then they'll come back out, start of the new year, you know, try and make some money, try and get some buzz between Oscar voters or awards voters. So if you drop a movie on January 10 and are trying to compete with a complete unknown, with Timothy Chalamet about Bob Dylan, you know, I mean, the odds of you getting any sort of traction, even if you have the exact same audience or different audiences or whatever, the odds of you getting traction because this movie is getting all the interviews, this movie is getting all the placement, that's where you start to have your issues. And that's where, if there's any competition with other films, to me that's where it would be, you know. But I often find that like if people, people are going to movies, if people are renting movies, if people are streaming movies, then that is a, is beneficial for your film as well, because it means that there are people who are still going out, they're still supporting Film. And that's a good thing. You know, someone goes, see a movie on a Saturday. Great. Now how can you convince them to go back to the movies on Sunday or on Monday or on Tuesday? On Wednesday, whatever. So it's a tricky one.
[00:36:21] Speaker A: I remember that summer when Deep Impact and Armageddon came out and they're both asteroid movies in the same summer blockbuster.
So, yeah, definitely dual competition.
One more question, which is about the length of things and actually about a peculiar cultural phenomenon of sometimes movies come back from the dead and they have a resurgence, you know, a year later, four years later, 10 years later, you know, either a song comes out and it makes it very popular, connected to that, or something happens. Is there any, do you know of anybody that's engineered the rise from the dead? Or if not, then talking about what's the post release world like and how do you continue to sustain for, you know, the purpose of streaming in perpetuity? Because there's movies that came out 10 years ago that I still, my wife watches religiously, like every couple months it comes back.
So what's the aftercare for the movies look like with the specter of maybe it gets to have a second, second sunrise.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: So it's interesting, like I, the, the doc that I worked on last year, Beyond Utopia, it, it did, like I'd mentioned to you, it had won Sundance and it, it did some really great things, ended up getting nominated for some of the major awards.
A movie like that is very easy to continue to push because now that it's gotten all of its awards stuff, anybody who hasn't seen it, the people who probably have seen it at that point are mainly going to be critics, gonna be absolute film nerds who are just really, really tapped into what's going on in the industry. Or like film lovers, cinephiles, people like me who just like, I'm obsessed with all things going on movies at all times.
But if you like movies, but you don't necessarily, you're not like fully tapped into every single aspect of what's going on with movies. You know, you use something like awards or a very successful run to catapult you for more success after you release that film, right? Because the film, the beautiful part about a film that you highlighted this is that a film lives on and a film can have an entire life after it is in a theater. A theater is a luxury. It is an amazing luxury to get place in the theater. However, nowadays with there being less and less movie theaters, with theaters struggling to keep the lights on, with tiny films and needing to put movies that are made by ginormous street studios in them. A small film may get lucky to get a one weekend run. And that's a great thing, it's a wonderful thing. And it's more so for the filmmakers egos and the novelty of it than anything, right? Because it's like we got a movie in a theater that's amazing. It's exciting for an investor, it's exciting for executive producers or other producers involved. We're in a big theater, movies on a big screen. However, the real life nowadays for a film comes after that movie has that theatrical release. And it's how you can continuously push it. Now what I like to do is really, I like to think of like, you know, the audience is two different kinds of audiences because there's audiences that are that passionate and will leave their home and leave their couch to go buy a movie. And then there's the audience who's like, I'll wait for it to go on Hulu, you know, and that's fine. Neither is a wrong audience because they're, they're perfectly acceptable these days now. And they, there's so many different platforms and so many different ways to consume media. So if you don't want to leave for whatever reason, you have kids at home, it's too hard for you to go out or it's too expensive because obviously the movie theaters are quite expensive these days. You know how you can get that audience, that secondary audience to want to give you time because they're not leaving their house, but you need to get their time.
That's where it becomes tricky again because you've already done your interviews, you've already done your press, you've already done all that big, you know, those, those big SEO things to boost your film. Now it's how can I reach the person, the human being behind it? And there's so many ways. But what I find the most exciting way to do is with influencers. I think right now, social influencers are what keeps independent movies specifically alive.
A good social influencer campaign can make or break a movie because they have the power to, to grab the cinephile who lives in, you know, somewhere in the middle of this country. And they don't have access to an independent movie theater, but they have access to an AMC or Regal or something of that nature. Big chain, you know, they didn't get to see that small movie, but they heard from an influencer that this movie's worth their time. Check it out. It's now streaming on Max it's now streaming on Disney plus. It's now streaming here. And that's really, I think how a movie gets its life the these days now the old fashioned way. Like when you think of movies like Rocky Horror Picture show, which was a bomb at the box office and did not do well, but you look at Rocky Horror Picture show now, I mean you can't even imagine how that film was a bomb considering people still do shadow cast performances of it and there's a musical adaptation and there's that, you know, I mean there's like that, that that film has become part of the cultural zeitgeist. So you know, there's some moments that I think just happened super organically. I have heard stories of things being engineered and people saying, yeah, we're going to hold off on certain marketing dollars and push it afterwards and like try and do it in a way where it's like, whoa, this random film no one's ever heard of. But that was the intention all along was to go that route. So you know, I have never been a part of it. I don't know anyone directly. I've heard stories of it. But it's, you know, it's, it's interesting. The life post theatrical release or even post streaming release. You know, you're continuously growing your film and pushing your film as far as it can go.
But the window of time is weird because unlike a business where again you're looking to advertise for a long period of time, hopefully you're hoping the business continues. The movie itself is an entity, but the movie itself has to, at some point you have to let it just go and you have to move on to the next project in order to continuously survive.
Yeah. And it's interesting because the entity almost slows down at some point and then it's organic and then you have to let people find it.
[00:42:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
This has been fascinating. One of my favorite conversations, honestly.
Tell
[00:42:48] Speaker B: me,
[00:42:50] Speaker A: tell anybody listening where they can find you about your next movie. When's it coming out?
[00:42:56] Speaker B: Yeah, promote
[00:42:57] Speaker A: yourself good.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: I, I am on all social media, but specifically I'm more prominent on Instagram. I think that's where I decide to post most of my stuff and threads and whatnot. So it's at Ethan Felizari. F E L I Z Z A R I is where you can find my social media. And then our production company, CK Productions is CK Productions ny.
All the information of all of our branches, including our marketing branch, CK Marketing is on that CK Productions page on our website, CK Productions New York. And that's fully spelled out. It's very long, I know, but. Ckproductionsnewyork.com you can find out information about our films, about our projects, and about our marketing as well and our marketing services. I mean, we, we love working in entertainment and we're not just, you know, this was a conversation center centered around film. But, you know, we love all forms of entertainment marketing and finding ways to work with, with other creatives who are looking to market their projects. It's, it's fun, it's exciting, and it's a field that is continuously growing and changing and that includes YouTubers, that includes podcasts, and finding ways to, to grow those entertainment platforms and these new things that are coming, coming up every day. And as far as my film, you know, my, my debut feature film that I'm directing is called Backyard Desert. We will be shooting it this year in the spring and we're hoping for a release next year at the top of next year and festivals and then who knows from there. But you can follow Backyard Desert's journey at Backyard Desert and look it up on Google a bunch. Let's boost that SEO a little.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Yeah, let's get, let's get it
[00:44:37] Speaker B: once a day. Type in back Backyard Desert and let's see what happens.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: Thanks so much for your time, Ethan. Thank
[00:44:47] Speaker B: you, Jeremy. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
