The online release of Requiem For Romance happened recently on the Bravo!FACT website. Bravo!FACT was one of the main contributors financially to the project and in exchange they control the rights to the first broadcast window.
A few days later, I launched my own online premiere from Facebook across all my channels, including Film Annex, Vimeo, my website jonjonphenomenon.com, and BravoFACT via YouTube.
The film quickly made Vimeo Staff Picks and Short of the Week thanks to Vimeo curator Jason Sondhi. I was getting lots of likes, adds, and shares that week. A limited print and DVD sale here and there. My email started to get backed up. But when it hit io9 and Reddit, the traffic just soared through the roof, and I started getting so many orders of limited prints.
While Film Annex is still earning decent revenues for all my content, the viral attention that my film got on the blogs redirected a lot of the traffic to my website where I had recently installed Paypal add to cart buttons. I'm new to running an online store (I set up Paypal on my website in the hotel in Melbourne). I actually didn't get official go ahead to sell prints in person at MIFF, so I reacted to that by setting up my website, and telling people at the screening to go to the site. I handed out post cards prior to the screening with print catalogs on the back.
Because the site was already up and running, when the film started to get some viral attention on the internet, everything was in place to capitalize on that opportunity. I ended up shipping prints all across Canada, US, UK, Australia, Hong Kong.
Even Vimeo's Tip Jar has a little bit of tips. In the last week, the views have trailed off to something more normal, to about a 1500 views a day on my Vimeo stats. Seems like that's the natural rise and fall of internet traffic.
I'm going to be traveling on the festival circuit again soon to festivals like DC Shorts and Ottawa International Animation Festival and then possibly to festivals in San Diego and Hawaii.
All of this momentum from touring festivals in person, and the attention the film has garnered online is going to help propel me forward as I move deeper into development and financing of the feature film.
