Dear friends and filmmakers,

To increase your revenues and gain complete independence over your films' distribution, we suggest you to to build an "army" of supporters and partners. The best way to achieve this is through involving your audience members in the production and post-production of your films. You can do this by making some of your footage available online and inviting your viewers to download and remix your content. This type of collaboration will create a much stronger relationship with your audience and drive more traffic to your film pages and Web TVs.

Film Annex is one of the few platforms out there that truly embraces open video. Many of you might already know what "open video" means, but for those of you who are unsure of the term's meaning, here it is:

What’s Open Video?

Open video is the movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video. Open video argues that the transmission of video must be open source and available to use on a royalty-free basis. It encourages sharing, open source, and the use of open standards.

As you all know, in addition to an "All Rights Reserved" license, Film Annex offers several Creative Commons licenses, namely Attribution, Attribution Share Alike, Attribution No Derivatives, Attribution Non-Commercial, Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike, and Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives.

How Can You Support Open Video & Increase Your Interaction with Your Audience?

In order to establish an active and reciprocal relationship with your audience, you must give them content. You are already doing this by presenting your films and videos on Film Annex. However, giving them content that they can take, edit, and remix is a different story. Keep in mind that your audience has many creative individuals, from filmmakers and artists to musicians. And your audience will keep coming back to your content only if you make them your partners!

In order to increase your online revenues, you need collaborators. This means going beyond the filmmaker-fan relationship. It means making your viewers your collaborators and giving them an opportunity to take part in your production and/or post-production. This is where remixing comes in. In order to establish this kind of relationship with your audience, we suggest you to upload one or more videos under a CC license, available for download, and state in your video's description that this particular video can be remixed (edited, recreated, etc.) by content creators like you! This way, you will not only be inspiring someone and helping them create quality content, but also getting ideas from your audience for the creation of new content and establishing a two-sided relationship.

Your open video does not have to be a full-length film. It can be a clip from your film, a b-roll, an interview, a piece of content you never used. In order to upload a CC licensed video, go to our upload form and choose the appropriate license in the licensing section. Please state in your description that this video can be "downloadable." If you have any questions, please contact us at eg@filmannex.com.


The Film Annex Team