Beatrix Coles lives and breathes film. She has worked for the London Film Festival, the Edinburgh Film Festival, Film Victoria, the Australian Performing Arts Market and the 37° South Market at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
“For me the appeal of web series and web festivals is their ability to make both national and global connections. I hope that web festivals continue to evolve as they currently are with a strong, engaged and passionate international community,” she says.
She is currently managing the consultancy ScreenHerd; an online audience engagement platform that helps filmmakers build communities and manage social media outreach.
Beatrix Coles
Last year Beatrix was a speaker for the Melbourne WebFest panel “Economics of Digital media: Finance, Monetisation and Online Audiences“.
She loved having a mix of content creators and consultants chatting to one another and especially appreciated the presence of the writer-director-producer Michael Ajakwe but found monetisation a hard topic to tackle.
“Monetisation can sometimes be a bit of a bleak topic but this was a really positive experience with people showing how innovative approaches and community building can help you to build an audience and a career,” she says.
This year she is back in the capacity as a judge, and she will also be running a workshop on how content creators can engage their audiences online through outreach and social media.
The focus is on how you can build and leverage your web presence (website, social media, content strategy) to support upcoming productions, crowdfunding campaigns and sell directly to your audience.
In terms of content, Beatrix is particularly interested in series that are very specific to the internet and could not work as effectively on another platform.
“I’m not that keen on series that seem to be just really short films that play on the internet. I really like it when a series integrates a web-based technology in an innovative and interesting way, for example the way that Broad City used in-screen Skype conversations,” she says.
Beatrix is currently working on the South Australian creature-feature Drop Bears and the New Zealand based documentary funding initiative Loading Docs. Loading Docs is supporting feature documentaries in small cities in New Zealand such as CatKiller, a dark mystery based in the small town of Raglan, New Zealand where more than 30 domestic cats have disappeared, some turning up dead partially frozen in plastic bags and Living Like Kings, the story of small group of homeless people who are ‘Living Like Kings’ after the disaster of the Christchurch Earthquake.
Beatrix believes social media is important because it enables direct interconnectedness between the audience and the creator, which is crucial for increasing publicity. She explains that screen writing is a challenging process and a lengthy road from writing to production.
“Writing for film and television is a very difficult landscape to navigate. Projects can take a long time to move from development into production if they leave the development phase at all. It’s a challenge environment to move into and one that can be very difficult to make money from.
“Finding a producer is something that a lot of writers grapple with. They are not easy to find and it’s very important that you have a strong relationship and share the same goals for the work,” she says.
This year Beatrix is running a series of panels at the Emerging Writers’ Festival on Friday 30 May. She hopes to highlight the underrepresented areas of writing for screen such as creating content for the web.
“I hope that people come away with some ideas about how they can develop their careers outside of writing feature films,” she says.
Rachel Clayton is in her third year of a Media and Communications Degree at The University of Melbourne. She was born and raised in New Zealand but now calls Melbourne home. Rachel is passionate about finding stories and seeking the truth and has had work published in Broadsheet and her University magazine.