Originally from Toronto, Canada, Kai Soremekun started her career as an actress in New York City. Her many credits include the films “Heat”, “Regarding Henry” and a series regular role on the FOX Television drama “Medicine Ball”.  Kai recently finished production on the 20 episode first season of her interactive web series CHICK. The show, created by and starring Kai, is about a woman who sets out on a quest to realize her dream of becoming a superhero. CHICK has been featured in The Washington Post and received an Indie Soap Award for best directing.

Woohoo!  You get a hand clap!  If you’ve followed the advice in parts one and two of this series then you’ve got a finished film in your hands.  That is a huge deal, so congratulations!

By now you understand just how much hard work it takes to get a film in the can and the hard work continues as you find ways to get your film out into the world.

I believe the internet offers the most opportunity to get exposure for your work but you can also benefit from submitting your film to festivals and competitions.  The attitude should be, any chance to get your film in front of people is an opportunity you should take.  You never know who will be in the audience: a casting director you’ve wanted to get in front of, someone interested in financing your next film or another actor you want to work with.  My motto is, always say yes to screening opportunities for your film.

Film festivals can get expensive quickly with the submission fees.  You might want to consider making this a line item in your initial budget so it’s accounted for.  Withoutabox is a free membership site for filmmakers where you can streamline the submission process for over 5,000 film festivals worldwide.  It allows you to create profiles for each of your films so the submission process becomes a matter of a few clicks instead of filing out the same information over and over again for each festival submission.

An added bonus is IMDB owns Withoutabox which means the opportunity to get your film listed on the IMDb website is greater.  It isn’t an automatic guarantee and there’s still a procedure to follow, but if you’re film gets into any significant film festival it’s usually a fairly straight forward process.  Getting listed on IMDb is an important goal.  It adds credibility to your name as a legitimate actor/producer.

So back to the main purpose of this series, How To Be A Star.  Dictionary.com defines star as we reference it to be “a person who is celebrated or distinguished in some art, profession, or other field”.  So the next question to ponder is how does someone become celebrated or distinguished?  Usually they perform at a high level in their field and gain mass followers who love what they do.  In other words, they have a fan base (more on this in a second).  When a film star gets millions of dollars to star in a film, it’s because the producers and studio of that film know the star has a large fan base most likely to spend money to see a film featuring that actor.  This justifies the high salary and makes it a logical business decision.

Staying focused on business for a second, it’s important to remember that even though you’re an artist, you are still in a business, the entertainment business.  In business the main question is always how will I make this venture a success?  The sooner you can embrace this, the better off you’ll be.  Normally success is defined in terms of making money but I encourage you to think outside the box when defining success for your first project.  A short film won’t likely make you a fortune, but if you can turn that short film into a loyal base of fans for your work, this can pay dividends down the road.  Regardless of how you define success, make sure you have clearly defined goals for what you want to accomplish with your finished film.

Using our bigger goal of becoming a star, a great business goal at this stage would be to build your fan base.  This doesn’t necessarily have initial money rewards, but down the road, as your fans grow, they will be way more valuable then if you just focus on the short term and getting the money you put into your film back.

Let’s create a practical example.  If you build a fan base of 20,000 dedicated followers this automatically gives you power to use in a number of ways.  You could approach a sponsor to fund your next project.  Knowing they will be able to expose their brand to your followers who trust you is an attractive opportunity for them.  A producer may see your fans loyally commenting about you all over the web and decide to bring you in for a role on their latest show.  The possibilities are endless but it all starts with building your fan base.  So how do you do this?

I love the internet.  It’s a wondrous place that levels the playing field for people like you and me.  We may not have the big marketing budgets like the studios and networks, but on the internet it doesn’t take a lot of marketing dollars to get your stuff out there right next to the big boys.  The goal is to use the internet to build a fan base not only for your film but for you as an actor.

Let’s explore a simple strategy for establishing your internet presence with your project.  From there you can personalize things specifically for your film.

Establish a presence for your project with an official website, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel.  You want to establish a consistency between each of these places so, for example, if the name of your film is “I Am A Star” then you’d want your official website to be iamastar.com, your Facebook page should be facebook.com/iamastar and your YouTube channel would be youtube.com/iamastar.  Now let’s look at each of these individually.

The I Am A Star Official Website

The main reason to have an official website is to give your project legitimacy.  You also want to use this site as the hub you direct anyone to who you tell about your film.

My recommendation is to use WordPress to create your site.  WordPress is a web software that allows you to create a website very simply.  It is famous for the five minute installation designed to allow the average joe to be up and running in no time even with limited web design knowledge.  The best part is wordpress is free!  If you want an even simpler option you can sign up for a free blog account at WordPress.com where the back-end is already setup, and then pay a small annual fee to have a custom url attached to your account.  So for example when creating a wordpress.com account your url is normally iamastar.wordpress.com.  But you can change this so that even though wordpress.com is hosting your site the url can be switched to iamastar.com.

Facebook

There are over 500 million people on Facebook now which means everyone should be on there if they have something to share or promote.  You want to set up a dedicated facebook page, sometimes called a fan page for your film or project.  In order to do this you must first have a personal account.  From there you can use Facebook’s help section to get your page up and running.

Once you’ve created your page make sure to customize it with a few simple changes.  Change your Facebook page’s picture.  If you’ve created a poster for your film you can use this or any memorable image that represents your film well.  This is an important image as it is often the first thing someone will see in connection with your film on facebook.  Describe your film in the note box directly below your page photo.  Be sure to include the url for your official site here writing out the complete address, starting with http:// so that it converts to a link people can click on and be automatically sent to your website.  What’s great about facebook is it allows you to initiate dialogue with your fans.  Post questions to your wall related to your film or your films subject.  By getting people engaged you are developing rapport and increasing their loyalty to you and your film.  Lastly name your facebook page.  Customizing your facebook page is known as creating a Facebook Vanity url for your page.  In order to be able to do this you must have at least 25 fans.  You can then visit the Facebook user name dashboard to create your vanity url.

YouTube

YouTube is way ahead of all other video distribution sites by a large margin in terms of visitors.  YouTube can be overwhelming with the amount of content available on the site but it’s still a good idea to have a presence there.  As with Facebook, customize your channel with a picture related to your film and a description with a link to your official website.  You can also further customize by changing the color combinations of your channel to tie into your film or official site in some way.  Once you upload your film or at least a trailer of your film to YouTube, then you can embed that video on your website and on your Facebook page.  It also allows your fans to embed your film on their websites and facebook pages so they can spread the word and help you build that all important fan base.

Stay Active

Get these up and running and you’re off to a great start, but it’s important to remember none of this will matter if you don’t stay active on these sites you’ve created.  Consider asking people on your team to help out.  Have your cast and crew write guest posts on your website about the process of making the film.  Make them administrators on your facebook page so they can update it with news about your film.  Bring on an intern and have them update your YouTube channel and Facebook page by responding to any comments etc. you receive from your fans.  Have them visit other people’s channels on YouTube to make comments on their videos so you can build a rapport with others in the community.

You should also consider starting a mailing list for your fans.  This is the one thing you can own that isn’t connected to a third party site and in my opinion holds the most value over time.  These are people who we assume like your work and so when you move onto your next project you can take that mailing list with you to the next project and already have a built in following.  An email marketing company like Aweber can be used to manage a mailing list with software that lets you put an opt-in form on your website and facebook page very easily.

Final Thoughts

A lot of filmmakers I talk to think they shouldn’t create their internet presence until after they’ve finished their film.  I believe the opposite.  As soon as you know you’re committed to making your project get your internet presence up and running.  Then include your fans in the process of making your film.  Tell them about the casting process, locations you’re considering etc.  Get their feedback.  The more you can include them in the process, the more invested they will be in your film and the more likely they are to share it with their friends and family and become loyal fans for years to come.

Good luck with your projects.  It’s a huge challenge to make a film and get it out into the world but also very rewarding.  If you have a question you can always shoot me a message.

Here’s to your creativity and becoming a star!