Building community through local film

One of the cool things about building with technology is the places you get to go to and the people you get to meet. This year with Cinevite, an app I built for independent film events, I got to meet a lot of cool people at events in different parts of the country.

I had a ton of fun at the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival in Iowa and met really inspiring filmmakers through the Denton Black Film Festival in Texas. This past weekend I attended the Central Coast Entertainment Expo in San Luis Obispo, California.

The event, hosted by the Central Coast Film Society, is in its second year. This year, I partnered with them to integrate Cinevite into the event to enable digital networking and to allow attendees to easily RSVP/wishlist event sessions. I built Cinevite because I wanted to make it easier for people to connect through film and I am happy that it was able to do that for this event.

Attending events like the CCEE is enlightening because it’s a window into how different demographics of aspiring artists and filmmakers are thinking about their creative futures. Frankly, the sentiment this year hasn’t been hopeful.

The film industry is facing challenges on multiple fronts from corporate consolidation, to production outsourcing, to AI. You can tell that anxiety is in the air because as the sessions at CCEE went over specialized topics, the conversations afterwards steered towards AI and what it meant for that particular specialty.

Filmmakers largely haven’t grappled with AI beyond it being a threat and that causes them to be distracted. Multiple times I heard a version of “this is something that AI won’t ever be able to do” and in a lot of cases I agreed.

AI likely won’t ever have the subjective taste a sound designer brings to the soundscape of a film, as I heard someone say after the session on “The Sound of Film”. It probably won’t ever replace some of the workflows and creative approaches that filmmakers use today, but what doesn’t get discussed is the potential for it to be an altogether new creative medium beyond film.

Another insight that I walked away with was that there still isn’t a clear path that the independent filmmaking community sees for distributing their films. This has always been a challenge for independent filmmakers and it’s more acute now with the content saturation we have today. One positive sentiment that I appreciated was from panelists who talked about how they created their own events as a way to build community to showcase their work.

I see this as the future of independent film. Independent film is becoming even more niche in our contemporary media environment and as that trend continues, it will become increasingly infeasible to rely on platforms and gatekeepers to get eyeballs on indie films. Platforms like YouTube, Netflix, and other streamers are already content saturated. Gatekeepers like film festivals are becoming less viable as businesses that can bring in attendees.

What people today crave is community and that is an opportunity for independent filmmakers. Filmmakers can build community around a genre. They can build community around their creative specialties. They can build community through collaborating on showcasing each other’s work.

Jason Kaiser, a panelist at one of the sessions, is the co-founder of the MicroHorrors showcase and he explained how he was able to build community around indie horror while showcasing his work. This suggests that the future of low budget independent film is in small pockets of filmmakers in different places, bound by their own common cause.

That is much of what the Central Coast Entertainment Expo and the Central Coast Film Society is all about. The Central Coast doesn’t register at all when people think about film, but as the industry decentralizes from LA, filmmakers will no longer move to the city of angels to chase their Hollywood dreams.

With no city of stars to move to, the local filmmaking communities across the country will become more important. While Hollywood’s slow decline may seem like a loss, perhaps we’ll find a better future for film in our own backyards.