Case Study: Film about YouTube becomes a YouTube-distribution pioneer

When Ester Brym decided to make her first documentary, she decided to do it on the subject of YouTube, and when she finished it, she decided to distribute it on YouTube – but not for free.

Ester Brym on her "Butterflies" channel on YouTube

“Butterflies,” which focuses on some YouTube stars who have built fame and some fortune on the free video-distribution site is now the first feature film to actually be for rental under YouTube’s new pay option.

Charging $4.99 for 24 hours’ access to the 70-minute film, “Butterflies” has gotten (as of April 12) 3,091 views. Under the YouTube arrangement, the filmmaker receives half of that payment.

Brym, a Czech-born, Los Angeles-based film editor, only set out to learn more about a subject that fascinated her. It was always in the back of her mind to shoot a feature, she says, and it made sense to do a documentary because of some of the budget issues there.

“I wasn’t necessarily concentrating on one topic or another for a film,” she says, “and when YouTube came around, I became a big fan, because as an editor I used it to post my videos and my reel, and as I was doing that I discovered the YouTube community.”

Shooting a "Butterflies" interview

This was maybe 2006.  For about a year Ester watched “religiously, all these people, and then later they established a partnership in which they allowed these people to make money.”

It was through trying to explain the phenomenon to others she began work on “Butterflies.”

“Not only was I already interested in these people, but friends would ask me why I watched it so much and what was it all about. I tried over and over to explain this was a community, and that these kids got paid now. When I was explaining it for maybe the 50^th time, I thought, Why don’t I just contact these guys and do interviews with them, because I had all the equipment – I had a camera, I could do the editing, and I knew people in the business.”

At the end of 2007 she began preproduction, calling people who she hoped would be interested in participating, and she began shooting at the beginning of 2008. Working with her producer (and fellow Czech) Tom Duty, she strategized on how to score interviews with some of the better-known faces of YouTube.

“In the beginning I contacted a few YouTubers I was interested in,” she says. “I did sit-down interviews; the people I interviewed were not necessarily big YouTubers but it got the word out. It built the publicity around it. Then, every time an event would happen, I was able to get a press pass and go shoot. The way the trailer was constructed was to cater to the YouTube community – I’m showing bigger YouTubers in the trailer even though the film is more in-depth than that. But obviously the trailer is trying to get as much attention as possible.

She says she interviewed far more people than she knew she could fit into the film. “The six main people I ended up having are all different. There are a couple who are very professional – they have production facilities here in L.A., and then I also had a guy who was just sitting in front of a camera in his attic, just talking about his troubles. I ended up picking a little bit of everything. “

Some of the YouTubers she pursued were so well-known, “they didn’t even bother replying to me. The bigger people are very, very aware of their power, and they’re celebrities, or what I call ‘weblebrities.’ They’re making money and lots of them have their own agents, and they asked for money to even be interviewed. I ended up getting a lot of smaller YouTubers because they were interested in the exposure.”

But as the word got out and the film developed, she says, some of these people actually contacted her and said they wanted to be in the film.

Ester shot at first on a standard-def Panasonic AG-DVC30. It broke after a few months of shooting, so she got a Canon XH-A1, an HDV 1080i camcorder, but kept shooting in standard definition on it because she didn’t want to have big differences in the quality of footage.

The film opened at the Action On Film Festival in Pasadena, California, and went to New Filmmakers in New York and First Glance in Philadelphia, as well as a half-dozen other small festivals.

“We go approached by a few distributors when we were at film festivals, but as an independent filmmaker I’ve heard the horror stories and I just didn’t want to give away the film for free. It was less about making mone as it was about keeping our rights and seeing what we could do with our film. We ended up talking with Journeyman Pictures, which is based in the UK, and they’re great. They only distribute documentaries; I’d heard about them and the films they represent. They were interested, but wanted it shorter for broadcast. So we re-cut the film and sold them the rights for broadcast only. So far they’ve sold it to two TV networks (in New Zealand and Denmark).

“Because I just started shooting it as a few interviews with these kids, I thought I’d do it as a short film and put it on YouTube; I never really had a plan other than just thinking it would be interesting for people to see how things go on YouTube. I thought I’d just put it online, but I think it started getting attention just because of the general attention social media started getting.”

The completion of the film intersected with the new effort by YouTube to create a selling market for filmmakers.

“When the Sundance Film Festival put four Sundance short films on YouTube for rent, that was the first time they ever did it. They tried to get lots of media attention, and there were articles about it in the New York Times and other places, but each of the films only got about 300 rentals. It’s so new, and the majority of people who go to YouTube go there for content that’s free. The people who do wants films and will pay for them, they’ll go somewhere else – to Netflix and Hulu.

“What YouTube is trying to do now is to break into this part of the business. After they posted the Sundance films, our film was already done, but they were not offering the service to outsiders. I started thinking about that. We already had a distributor at that point but we had kept our digital rights. I kept thinking it would be really great if we could launch on YouTube, because this is what the film is about. It’s where our audience is, and we could promote it that way – we could start a new part of history when it comes to digital distribution. I emailed YouTube a few months later to see if this would be a possibility, and they weren’t ready yet, it was a kind of beta thing where they didn’t have everything set up.

“Then (YouTube) decided to put the SXSW films for rent, and I got an email back from them saying Yes, we are ready. That was in February that we launched “Butterflies” on YouTube. If you don’t count the festival films, which were short films, we’re the first feature film doing this.”

Ester says she’s not quite clear if the 3,091 figure on YouTube computes as sales or views (including multiple views by one buyer), but even at that the revenue through YouTube seems to compute to at least $5,000-$6,000 in revenue for the film.

“So far we’re doing well, but only time will tell if this is the new platform, is this where people are going to be watching movies?”

And she says she’s pleased at the number of paid views the film has gotten, because very few people seem to know about the pay option. When I told her I hadn’t even heard of it, she said, “I don’t think it’s that you don’t know about it, honestly nobody knows about it yet.”