Living in the Futures Past: Film
feature film release
Academy Award Winner, Jeff Bridges presents this beautifully photographed tour de force of original thinking on who we are and the environmental challenges we face. Bridges, alongside prominent scientists and authors, weaves evolution, emergence, entropy, dark ecology, and what some are calling the end of nature, into a story that helps us understand our place among the species of Earth’s household. Living in the Future’s past is a film that upends our way of thinking and provides original insights into our subconscious motivations, the unintended consequences, and how our fundamental animal nature influences our future as humankind.
The Challenge
The challenge of every new film release is to generate as much return as possible. More specifically, to go net positive fast. That can be difficult with smaller independent films, that don’t necessarily have the same resources and media spend as the big Hollywood studios. With a big name star like Jeff Bridges attached to this project, the team behind Living in the Future’s past, was keen on maximizing audience engagement, vitality, and social reach, especially within the educational community. We focused on a limited theatrical distribution for Academy qualification, followed by a targeted campaign for VOD and EST, and ongoing grassroots engagement with educational institutions, NGOs, and community organizations for supplemental screenings and amplification.
our solutions
Our solution was to create a full-scale creative marketing strategy and road-map. This included identifying proper target audiences and aligned organizations to our cause, determining media spend, optimizing deployment, creating content, and growing awareness and engagement through a variety of creative marketing campaigns. Our ability to leverage organic grassroots amplification for all these tactics was crucial in generating word-of-mouth buzz as well as leveraging third-party support on aligned social platforms and community forums.
Audience engagement and awareness began with the creation of a custom website that was used as the center point of all marketing efforts. With it's sleek and simple design, the official Living in the Future's Past site tells the story of the film, and provides useful links to help drive theatrical and VOD sales through each unique phase of distribution.
A hyper-targeted social media strategy was created to identify and engage audiences on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with a particular set of interests and behaviors. From educators, to NGOs, thought leaders, and climate/animal activists, we split-tested and optimized audience persona to be leveraged in our paid media and email marketing campaigns.
A variety of inspiring content was created throughout a number of different mediums (GIFs, Cinemagraphs, Teaser Trailers, etc) for consistent deployment across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Custom assets were also created for each influencer affiliated with the film along with aligned organizations who supported the cause.
the results
Living in the Future’s Past was released theatrically in select cities with multiple sold-out engagements and extended runs in strategic markets. The film was released on VOD and Cable on November 9th 2018 with critical acclaim and placed on iTunes front-page headers for ‘New & Noteworthy’ from a successful pre-order campaign and continues to climb the charts. Most notably, LITFP has been selected ‘for consideration’ in this year’s Academy Awards Documentary Feature category. The film continues to enjoy tremendous social engagement and interest from aligned organizations inspired by the cause and eager to leave a lasting impact on our world.
