We're almost halfway through October, and the Fall has started to make us shiver in New York City. No more pleasant breezes; we're getting ready for Winter already! To me, September is the beginning of the year. I think my mind still runs on school schedule sometimes, and I see September as a new "semester" that brings new opportunities and possibilities. Basically, September is my January. And this one in particular went by super fast.
This week was a crucial one at Film Annex as our homepage got a "face-lift." The design is the same, but the content is a bit different as you might have already noticed. After Jonathan Ng's recent visit to our studio a couple weeks ago, I started thinking about how we can make sure that our filmmakers get financially rewarded more consistently. My goal was to come up with a plan that would enable them to keep generating substantial revenues on a regular basis so that they could have a continuous revenue stream. I had a conversation with Francesco to explore new ideas and come up with a new system that allows filmmakers to be featured on our homepage more regularly as opposed to having one-time weekly features. And that brought about the idea for Eren's Picks.
The homepage now presents 15 Web TVs. Every time you refresh your browser, you'll see a new featured channel in the "Sponsored Web TV" section. This list will get bigger as we add more channels to it in order to highlight new filmmakers who join our platform. Another thing you might have noticed is the green BuzzScore button next to the filmmaker names in Eren's Picks. The BuzzScore is indicative of how active a filmmaker is on Film Annex and how much that filmmaker is engaging her audience with her content. Our new BuzzScore page will be online very soon and explain how this works in more detail! In the meantime, I'd like to direct your attention to the fact that the filmmakers are listed in the order of their BuzzScores from high to low. Moreover, the filmmaker with a higher BuzzScore will get more rotation time in the "Sponsored Web TV" section compared to a filmmaker with a lower BuzzScore. The idea is to give the most interactive filmmaker the highest exposure, since they're working the hardest, and encourage others to be more active in promoting their content. We are in the process of making more additions to the site to explain this system, so stay tuned!
On other news, I got in touch with several filmmakers and video artists to promote and distribute their work on Film Annex. Sean Peckold, Allison Schulnik, and Alex Prager are included in this list. I always thought that one of Film Annex's biggest strengths is its catalog of amazing animated films, and I want to see this catalog grow.
We've also made some progress in building the Film Annex social media curriculum for students in Afghanistan and prepared exam questions about social media. Coming up with smart, yet simple questions for high schoolers was much more difficult than I thought, but it was also an excuse to test myself and see how much I know about social media. Turns out I'm doing OK.
Speaking of social media and interacting, our professional blogging platform, The Annex Press, also needed a review, so I went through the blogs of all of our writers and made sure the top contributors were on the list and the news ones were added to it. Soon, you'll see some of our filmmakers contributing to our blogging platform as well. After all, they're multitalented and experts in their fields whether it's animation, narrative, or music video.
More films, Web TV channels, and filmmaker profiles are being added to Eren's Picks, as well as Sports and Current Events Picks as you read this. So I think it's time for me to stop writing and for you to enjoy our new highlights. Till next week,
