Roll Credits
The site was promoted through several non-traditional channels. Peter Guber gave more than thirty interviews to promote the book, and in every interview he also mentioned the site. There were banner swaps on movie sites such as Internet Movie Database, Ifilm, and filmmaking.com. And Mandalay did street promotion at schools including NYU, UCLA, and USC.
Dromi says the site received 35,000 unique visitors during the first run of classes. About 9,400 people subscribed to the site, which gave them complete access to its content. Subscribers filled out questionnaires that provided Mandalay with detailed demographic information. Seventy percent of the audience was American, with the rest logging in from all over the world. They skewed more male than female, and the median age was in the mid-twenties.
The site was designed for broadband access, which is evident when you try to access it via dialup. In this case, the rich content can become a deterrent to exploration. "As a developer, I am challenged," says Dromi. "On the one hand, I believe you need to make a site accessible to the lowest common denominator. On the other hand, I take the attitude that I want to create the biggest and the best." As for the people who can't access it, Dromi argues that you need to "give them another reason to finally spring for broadband." Ultimately, more than half the visitors accessed the site via dialup, with another 35 percent connecting via DSL and the remainder via T-1 or better.
When I confess to Walsh that I live in upstate New York and had some frustration when I accessed the site via a 56Kbps connection, he asks, "What the hell are you doing on a dialup?" and then says to Siegel, "We're so oblivious to this in the city." But truth is, the wannabes and wannasees, the aspiring filmmakers who live in studio apartments around the country, aren't all hooked up to high-speed connections yet. InsideSessions addressed this issue by sending a supplemental CD-ROM to its students, providing dialup users with a pseudo-broadband experience.
Siegel and Walsh learned firsthand what was being taught in the course about business in Hollywood. "We saw that relationships were leveraged," says Siegel. "For example, Peter Guber has a very good relationship with Yahoo, so they leveraged that relationship to get back-end stuff done for the e-learning portion of the site."
"Things happen from who you know and what you know," adds Walsh. "In this industry, it's pretty potent."
Dromi had only one complaint: "The site works for shit on Macs, and here's the problem I face as a developer time and time again: If you're producing Friends, it looks the same on a Sony television as it does on a Toshiba television. But a Web site on different operating systems, different browsers, looks completely different. There has to be rich, compelling content for the lowest common denominator so they don't feel like they're missing out. Yahoo has a great proprietary toolset in terms of streaming the assets, but so many people I talked to just couldn't get the site to work."
Overall, however, the experience of creating the site was positive for Dromi. "I still would have liked more planning time. There were a lot of things about the UI that I was completely wrong about." In particular, Dromi is less than satisfied with the way support materials, such as audio streams and stills, were linked to specific lessons. While Yahoo Broadcast makes it possible for hotlinks to these materials to appear in each lesson, Shoot Out Online users have to exit the lesson they're studying in order to find the relevant support materials.
Dromi found user feedback about this and other facets of the site invaluable, and the community aspect of it made Siegel happy, too. There was a message board where people talked about which lessons they liked and filmmakers looked for investors and advice. That provided the interaction students would get in a live classroom.
Following its run as a free offering, Shoot Out Online will be offered to registered students at Global Film School. "Shoot Out is a one-off, but that doesn't mean we won't revisit this in some capacity. Mandalay will continue to support Global Film School," says Dromi. "The amount of people who showed up far exceeded our wildest expectations."
Gordon Bass is based in upstate New York and writes about technology for numerous publications. Contact him at [email protected].
