Comment about strategy and whether to aim for a youtube series or documentary or TV show or etc:
Per my comment on a forum thread from a while ago: ” If I was an EA grantmaker, I’d want to start small by maybe hiring an educational-youtube-video personality (like John Green’s “Crash Course”) to make an Effective Altruism series. If that seemed to show good results, then I would escalate to funding a decent Netflix-style documentary movie, which I imagine could be had for something like $2-5 million—“An Inconvenient Truth” had a budget of around $1.5 million. Then, if everything was still going peachy, we could set our sights higher and consider a big Cosmos-style TV series with a big marketing push to really try and get the word out.”
I think funding a decently well-produced video series about EA topics would be a good idea today, just to provide another on-ramp into the movement alongside podcasts, student groups, conferences, blog posts, etc. (Each episode of the youtube series could tackle a different philosophical idea or global problem, roughly following the 80,000 Hours Podcast series “Effective Altruism: An Introduction” and “Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems”). And there are plenty of youtube studios with good track records of producing successful content.
A feature-film documentary seems like a dicier move because it seems harder to ensure that your documentary would really make a splash. Documentaries seem very heavy-tailed, where the biggest (like “An Inconvenient Truth”) are much more influential than the average. Rather than just funding an average documentary and rolling the dice that you become a hit by pure luck, which seems to me like a recipe for sure failure, I think we’d want to take a shot at making a documentary that has at least some of the elements of other mega-hits:
Star power of a well-known existing celebrity. Some people, like David Attenborough or Carl Sagan, are famous for being in good documentaries! Other times you have an outside celebrity, like Al Gore, lending their fame to a project. In a best-case scenario, EA might hope to get someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk involved.
Being directed by a famous director (like Peter Jackson, Ken Burns, Michael Moore, et cetera).
These days, I’m astonished at the degree to which Netflix (or other streaming services), can push a certain show merely by putting it on the front of on their homepage, and people will just watch it! (In part, I think, because people just want to watch what other people are watching so they can participate in the cultural conversation. And in part because people will sometimes just click on whatever you put in front of them.) Doing an EA documentary in partnership with an existing streaming site seems like a great way to generate an audience for what would otherwise be a niche topic.
Being timely; having some connection to politics or recent events (CitizenFour and Gaslands kinda have this going for them; this seems more difficult for EA, but maybe there is an angle to be found).
I’m sure there are other ways of trying to generate a documentary mega-hit that we could figure out.
My guess is that if you’re going to try to make a feature film and release in theaters, you might as well aim for a star-driven mega-hit, since making a low-budget niche documentary would be less effective than making a low-budget youtube series (the youtube series could go into more depth on various topics, and might do better at attracting young people who are a big focus of EA movement-building). But I really have no idea what the numbers look like; maybe I am underestimating how many views the typical documentary movie gets or how easily we could hire a top youtube studio to produce EA content.
How well do you think learning/success from a youtube series would translate into making something bigger? It seems to me they are kind of different beasts, though things such as what topics seems to generate more interest might be relevant. Also, I feel uneasy about outsourcing to much. I see the upsides in having someone with an estalished channel. And obviously we would want to have someone excellent doing it. But it seems we should be able to find a capable EA to do it and I would feel much more comfortable nowing that a value aligned person was leading it.
Great thought on how to set uo a documentary for success. My intuition would also be that it would be higher expected value to go big. However, I do believe chances of success would be rather slim anyways, so my guess is that we would want to try at least a few before deciding it isn’t woth the effort.
(Again I want to stress that I am a total lay man in this.)
Again, speaking only for myself and not my co-author in these comments!
I like your framing of trying out smaller (still ambitious enough though!) and potentially growing. I also think that if we were to produce this type of material on the EA movement that there is so much high quality work that has already been done that could be re-used (while still giving credit to the original creators) that could at least guarantee a relatively high quality to the production in terms of content.
In terms of how one could make a documentary impactful, I also think there are a lot of things one would need to do (in addition to just producing the movie) to increase the possibility of it being impactful (my co-author Vilhelm and I have been discussing writing a post just on this topic as well so hopefully we can post that in a few weeks). As we mentioned in this post, the effects of documentaries tend to be very short-lived, and if one wants the effects to be more long-term they need to supported by other strategies such as having a clear and achievable call to action and perhaps be coupled with some other behavior change techniques to increase their chances of impact.
In terms of gaining the attention necessary from mainstream media I definitely think we could get some relevant celebrities to agree to be interviewed (such as Bill or Elon that you mention). Less sure about how willing high-profile directors would be. It seems extremely relevant that the director is a good personal fit for the production.
Comment about strategy and whether to aim for a youtube series or documentary or TV show or etc:
Per my comment on a forum thread from a while ago: ” If I was an EA grantmaker, I’d want to start small by maybe hiring an educational-youtube-video personality (like John Green’s “Crash Course”) to make an Effective Altruism series. If that seemed to show good results, then I would escalate to funding a decent Netflix-style documentary movie, which I imagine could be had for something like $2-5 million—“An Inconvenient Truth” had a budget of around $1.5 million. Then, if everything was still going peachy, we could set our sights higher and consider a big Cosmos-style TV series with a big marketing push to really try and get the word out.”
I think funding a decently well-produced video series about EA topics would be a good idea today, just to provide another on-ramp into the movement alongside podcasts, student groups, conferences, blog posts, etc. (Each episode of the youtube series could tackle a different philosophical idea or global problem, roughly following the 80,000 Hours Podcast series “Effective Altruism: An Introduction” and “Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems”). And there are plenty of youtube studios with good track records of producing successful content.
A feature-film documentary seems like a dicier move because it seems harder to ensure that your documentary would really make a splash. Documentaries seem very heavy-tailed, where the biggest (like “An Inconvenient Truth”) are much more influential than the average. Rather than just funding an average documentary and rolling the dice that you become a hit by pure luck, which seems to me like a recipe for sure failure, I think we’d want to take a shot at making a documentary that has at least some of the elements of other mega-hits:
Star power of a well-known existing celebrity. Some people, like David Attenborough or Carl Sagan, are famous for being in good documentaries! Other times you have an outside celebrity, like Al Gore, lending their fame to a project. In a best-case scenario, EA might hope to get someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk involved.
Being directed by a famous director (like Peter Jackson, Ken Burns, Michael Moore, et cetera).
These days, I’m astonished at the degree to which Netflix (or other streaming services), can push a certain show merely by putting it on the front of on their homepage, and people will just watch it! (In part, I think, because people just want to watch what other people are watching so they can participate in the cultural conversation. And in part because people will sometimes just click on whatever you put in front of them.) Doing an EA documentary in partnership with an existing streaming site seems like a great way to generate an audience for what would otherwise be a niche topic.
Being timely; having some connection to politics or recent events (CitizenFour and Gaslands kinda have this going for them; this seems more difficult for EA, but maybe there is an angle to be found).
I’m sure there are other ways of trying to generate a documentary mega-hit that we could figure out.
My guess is that if you’re going to try to make a feature film and release in theaters, you might as well aim for a star-driven mega-hit, since making a low-budget niche documentary would be less effective than making a low-budget youtube series (the youtube series could go into more depth on various topics, and might do better at attracting young people who are a big focus of EA movement-building). But I really have no idea what the numbers look like; maybe I am underestimating how many views the typical documentary movie gets or how easily we could hire a top youtube studio to produce EA content.
I agree with most things you say. A few thoughts.
How well do you think learning/success from a youtube series would translate into making something bigger? It seems to me they are kind of different beasts, though things such as what topics seems to generate more interest might be relevant. Also, I feel uneasy about outsourcing to much. I see the upsides in having someone with an estalished channel. And obviously we would want to have someone excellent doing it. But it seems we should be able to find a capable EA to do it and I would feel much more comfortable nowing that a value aligned person was leading it.
Great thought on how to set uo a documentary for success. My intuition would also be that it would be higher expected value to go big. However, I do believe chances of success would be rather slim anyways, so my guess is that we would want to try at least a few before deciding it isn’t woth the effort.
(Again I want to stress that I am a total lay man in this.)
Again, speaking only for myself and not my co-author in these comments!
I like your framing of trying out smaller (still ambitious enough though!) and potentially growing. I also think that if we were to produce this type of material on the EA movement that there is so much high quality work that has already been done that could be re-used (while still giving credit to the original creators) that could at least guarantee a relatively high quality to the production in terms of content.
In terms of how one could make a documentary impactful, I also think there are a lot of things one would need to do (in addition to just producing the movie) to increase the possibility of it being impactful (my co-author Vilhelm and I have been discussing writing a post just on this topic as well so hopefully we can post that in a few weeks). As we mentioned in this post, the effects of documentaries tend to be very short-lived, and if one wants the effects to be more long-term they need to supported by other strategies such as having a clear and achievable call to action and perhaps be coupled with some other behavior change techniques to increase their chances of impact.
In terms of gaining the attention necessary from mainstream media I definitely think we could get some relevant celebrities to agree to be interviewed (such as Bill or Elon that you mention). Less sure about how willing high-profile directors would be. It seems extremely relevant that the director is a good personal fit for the production.