How to Reach a Million Views on YouTube

Posted on July 26, 2011 in Filmmaking 360, Internet | No Comments

In this five part series from Nino Film, screenwriter and director Gregor Schmidinger discusses how he got his YouTube film, “The Boy Next Door” to top 1 million views.


Part 1: The Set Up

During my third year at Salzburg University of Applied Sciences I had the chance to go to the US studying with the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. The Boy Next Door was an in-class project for my Sync-Sound Production class. The assignment was to write five pages of script over Christmas brake, shooting them in spring semester of 2008.


Part 2: The Art of Filmmaking

Art is a bit like meditation. It has an atmosphere of mystery to it – but in the end, neither art nor meditation have to be mysterious. As a matter of fact, art and meditation seem to use similar concepts to achieve their effects – but one step at a time.


Part 3: Ancient Heritage

First of all, we‘ll have a look at the grand concept of compelling stories that Joseph Campbell, author of the famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, calls the monomyth. After that we have a look at Aristotle‘s three act structure and how I mapped The Boy Next Door onto it. So, let‘s dive into the ancient heritage of great drama and myths, that is not so ancient after all.


Part 4: Emotions and Meaning

Today I want to finish our excursion on story with a scientific look at the two core elements of a compelling stories – emotions and meaning. When we think of movies we usually think of an emotional experience. This seems pretty obvious. Usually we don‘t think so much about meaning but meaning is as equally important, propelling a story into new heights. If we combine both we get something that is even greater than its sum and it‘s called aesthetic emotion. But let‘s start with an evolutionary explanation of emotion and meaning in order do understand why emotional stories with meaning work so well in the first place.


Part 5: Talking Business

After a very artsy perspective on the topic of filmmaking, we jump right into the nuts and bolts of the business. My opinion is that the business aspects are as important as the story. There are a lot of great movies out there that most people won‘t hear about simply because they don‘t know how to reach their audience. And what use does an unseen movie have? Just to be clear, all the best business measures won’t turn a bad movie into a great one. We can experience that with a lot of Hollywood movies: Great trailer but disappointing movie. We are clearly not aiming for that.

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