From the Internet to the Industry: Behind the Scenes of the CAMP Film Festival: New film fest aims to change online creator expectations – Screens

Big screen ready: The first cohort of filmmakers for the CAMP Film Festival. (Image Courtesy of Creator Camp/CAMP Film Festival)

“From the Internet to the Industry. From the Industry to the Internet.” It’s a simple catchphrase, but it’s the philosophy and raison d’être of the inaugural CAMP Film Festival.

As cofounder and CEO Max Reisinger explained, CAMP Film Festival isn’t your regular film fest but instead explores “this new territory between the internet and Hollywood.” The two-day event (running April 26-27), combines panels, workshops, and a special screening of 10 films commissioned especially for the fest. Reisinger described it as “planting a flag in the ground” for online content creators “and we’re going to do it in the Paramount, the biggest stage in Austin.”

Austin’s newest film festival is a spin-off from – or arguably the summation of – the work of the team behind Creator Camp. Over the past three years, they’ve held events to find like-minded creatives (as Reisinger dubbed them, “people who believe in this thing”) before launching the festival. To bring in film industry experience, they then teamed up with David Lawson Jr., the Austin-based producer of Aporia, Something in the Dirt, and the upcoming Man Finds Tape. Chris Duncan, festival cofounder and president, said, “He helped us, over the past hundred days, put together this cohort and make a slate of ten films.”

“He was the only one crazy enough to say yes to this project,” Reisinger laughed.

“If it’s posted on YouTube, then suddenly it’s a YouTube video. But if it’s put in cinemas then suddenly it’s a film.”

But what exactly is the project? Creator Camp was designed as a series of events and retreats to bring together creatives and artists working online and help open up their perspectives on their work and their career opportunities. The reality is that art and films created for online are treated differently to anything that starts in a different medium. For example, even among the organizations that do recognize online content, such as the Peabody Awards, they’re shuffled into their own category by virtue on being online. Reisinger explained, “There is significance to what’s happening on the internet, but there’s no traditional recognition to its significance.” He pointed to the quote from Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message. If it’s posted on YouTube, then suddenly it’s a YouTube video. But if it’s put in cinemas then suddenly it’s a film. People treat it differently, they interact with it differently.”

In part, that’s down to the ephemeral nature of the internet, which is seen as film and television’s lesser sibling in the way that TV used to be the junior partner to the movies. Duncan said, “People would work months to then release a project, and then if feels here’s this really insane high but it’s fleeting, and then it gets lost in the internet.”

The Creator Camp team comes from exactly that background and experience, having mostly started as YouTubers. Reisinger said that the big question was always, “Where does this go? Are we going to go to Hollywood? Are we going to make big movies? I don’t know.”

Duncan added, “Our entire community has been built around people posting stuff online, building little worlds in corners of the internet that didn’t exists 10 years ago, and through that we’ve realized that it’s a stepping stone to get somewhere else.”

“In a nerdier sense,” Reisinger said, “the IP is massively undervalued and underappreciated on the internet and it gets forgotten about, but there’s cultural weight it feels like it deserves to have the opportunity to be talked about in the culture and have a conversation about what it means.”

66 million YouTubers can’t be wrong: The Backrooms creator Kane Pixels will be one of the speakers at this year’s inaugural CAMP Film Festival.

Some people have made that jump from online to “real” media, and both Duncan and Reisinger said they were inspired by the Philippou brothers, who parlayed YouTube success into A24 horror Talk to Me. The CAMP Film Fest speaker roster includes two people who have made similar jumps: Wesley Wang, whose short “nothing, except everything.” has been optioned by TriStar and Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa, while Kane Pixels was announced to be developing his CreepyPasta-inspired web series The Backrooms as a feature for A24.

Such cases are outliers, as there’s no infrastructure in place to help people make that jump. There are obviously massively successful online creators, but they’re still treated like kids making videos. There are fandoms, but there’s no critical infrastructure analyzing what does and doesn’t work. There’s a lot of money being made, but all it takes is for a site to change its subscriber policies, or shift its ad revenue model, and a successful creator has no income. Duncan said, “We’ve got friends who’ve made YouTube videos that are 30 minutes long and have two million views, and they get demonetized, or it’s $2,000. The alternative way is sponsorships, but that just becomes this cycle where you’re constantly doing advertisements instead of making the art you want.”

That’s where Creator Camp and now CAMP Film Festival come in: not just giving creators a screen bigger than a smartphone to see their work, but to create that environment to change perceptions and expectations. Reisinger said, “It’s about bringing people together in person and showing them it’s real. It’s not just like hitting ‘publish’ and going off and not thinking about it.”

The inaugural CAMP Film Festival runs April 26-27 at the Paramount and LZR. Tickets and info at campfilmfestival.com.

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