But first: we’re very happy to announce that ITVS has partnered with Telegraph 21 and The Big Screen Project to provide a very special Grand Prize to the winner.

In August, the winning film will be shown on the big screen, in the bustling heart of the Big Apple. Located four blocks from the Empire State Building, on the Chelsea/Midtown border, The Big Screen Project at the Eventi Hotel has become a magnet for New Yorkers seeking fine cuisine and food for thought. Learn more about the project here.

And so without further ado, we are pleased to announce the winner. Drum roll, please…

The winner of the 2011 FUTURESTATES Audience Award is That Which Once Was by Kimi Takesue. Set in 2032, the film follows an 8-year-old Caribbean boy who — after being displaced by global warming — fends for himself as an environmental refugee in a hostile Northern metropolis and forms an unexpected friendship with an Inuk ice carver.

Congratulations to all the films and filmmakers — it was a very close race — and thanks to everyone who watched and voted. Stay tuned to Futurestates.tv and the Futurestates Fan Page and Twitter feed for more updates on the original online series over the summer.

Watch this web-savvy interview with filmmaker Kimi Takesue, courtesy of Max Pearlstein’s A Well-Lighted Place.

IndiesLab Director Davin Hutchins runs through the digital successes achieved by the Independent Lens film, The Parking Lot Movie.

For those of you who aren’t aware of the mission of IndiesLab, it is a joint initiative of ITVS and PBS and our goal is to test and devise strategies for filmmaker success on emerging online distribution platforms. Our distribution partners include iTunes, Amazon Video-On-Demand, Hulu, YouTube, SnagFilms, PBS Video, and several other video-on-demand services on cable.

In IndiesLab’s first year, we focused on establishing and strengthening relationships with these new partners. We spent much of our second year placing great ITVS and Independent Lens titles onto these platforms. In year two, we learned that just because a film resides on a prominent platform does not necessarily mean it will break out. It turns out the keys to success are: first, making a film available digitally when it is most visible elsewhere; and second, support it by concentrated online marketing and smart, tight windowing.

This strategy aims to maximize revenue first while striving to reach the widest audience possible down the road. This year’s season of Independent Lens gave us an opportunity to put our theories into practice. And we witnessed some extremely positive signs with Meghan Eckman’s The Parking Lot Movie and its initial release on iTunes.

Meghan did the hard work months ago by hiring friend and social media consultant Howard Arnn after the film’s critical praise at South by Southwest. Arnn’s goal: to revamp her website with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and e-mail newsletter buttons to grow her core base. Short video was key.

Meghan says,  “At several points along the film’s career, we created a first-person video of me in our communications just conveying our strategy and telling the audience what we needed them to do. We told the audience that we’re a small, independent film and we could use their help.”

As we mentioned in previous case studies on Beyond the Box, we noticed iTunes appears to have a “virtuous cycle” where robust rentals and sales in the first few weeks help create a longer tail over time. So we recommended to Meghan that the most effective thing she could do is reach out to her fans and get them to rate and review the film on iTunes.

On the ITVS and PBS side, we deployed Google, Facebook, and PBS.org banner ad campaigns and Facebook fan outreach to promote the film’s availability on iTunes. This resulted in millions of impressions for Meghan’s film and tens of thousands of clicks to The Parking Lot Movie’s iTunes page.

Meghan also kicked her network into high gear during the film’s first week: “After the Independent Lens national broadcast on PBS, my e-mail list and Facebook fans doubled. So I sent everyone in my network another video and said, ‘Even if you’ve already seen this movie and you liked it, help us make it a bigger hit, by renting it for $2.99 on iTunes. I sent a movie poster to whoever rented it in the first week.”

In the first month after its debut, The Parking Lot Movie cracked the Top 10 on iTunes documentary list for three weeks straight. Through grassroots efforts, Meghan and IndiesLab helped stimulate more than 81 ratings and dozens of reviews. In two short months, The Parking Lot Movie has sold or rented more than 1,300 units on iTunes alone. The strength of its iTunes performance also helped IndiesLab in its discussions to get the film on Netflix and cable VOD.

What we are learning at the lab is there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to a successful online debut, but creativity, collaboration, and coordination can really help kick-start an independent film’s digital career.

One of the more notable documentaries in our stable of IndiesLab films is Art & Copy, which recently aired on Independent Lens on October 26. In case you haven’t seen it, the film pays homage to the groundbreaking advertising campaigns of the 60’s and 70’s in an aesthetically-pleasing walk down memory lane — in this case, Madison Avenue.

Art & Copy emerged on the scene in January 2009 at the Sundance Film Festival to generally positive reviews from critics and strong word-of-mouth buzz. The film made its way online onto iTunes in May 2010. Since its launch, we’ve spotted a couple of interesting patterns in this film’s career on iTunes that you might want to consider when plotting out your online digital distribution strategy.

In an interview with IndiesLab and Beyond the Box, director Doug Pray said that he had no idea about the online possibilities for his film.  “My attitude [toward digital distribution] was much more conservative and wary. One year ago, I would have been cautious and said, ‘Oh know we’re going to cannibalize this other thing over here.’ Now, I’m just sitting back and going ‘wow.’ …The old school rules aren’t flying so much.”

By the time the film appeared on iTunes in May 2010, its reputation as an elegant film worth watching definitely preceded it. Art & Copy began selling straight out of the gate with brisk sales — between 150 and 250 purchases or rentals per week. The film was consistently in the top five of our entire PBS Indies library for months; sales hardly dropped off.

Why? Well we noticed that the iTunes user interface seems to have a built-in “virtuous cycle” which helps best-sellers keep on selling. In iTunes, films or songs that sell well tend to float to the top. For example, our PBS Indies iTunes page ranks our top-selling films first by default. Because of strong initial sales, Art & Copy always appeared as one of the top five thumbnails. This high placement, in turn, encouraged more sales. Eventually, Art & Copy appeared a few times in the Top Charts column.

So it behooves any filmmaker with plans to put their film on iTunes to concentrate any promotional, Twitter and Facebook power they have to the film’s landing page. (You can find it by clicking on the Rent Movie bar and scrolling down to Get Link.)  Filmmakers should encourage sales, reviews and ratings from their devoted community in the first week or two of the film’s debut.

It also didn’t hurt that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings actually chose Art & Copy as his demo film to showcase searching on the iPhone Netflix app at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in May as well.

Soon after its iTunes debut, the PBS team figured that Art & Copy shared some of the same glam-ad nostalgia that has made AMC’s Mad Men such a nationwide obsession. So we sold iTunes on a limited promotional discount for Art & Copy to celebrate the Mad Men’s 2010 season premiere. Art & Copy began rotating in the main iTunes documentary carousel thanks to consistently strong sales. Lowering the price temporarily had a pronounced effect. Sales of Art & Copy nearly quadrupled for the duration of the promotion and were elevated for few weeks afterward. So, strategic discounting in narrow windows may also be helpful in stimulating a film’s sales.

So bottom line: if you want a long-tail in sales on iTunes as a documentary filmmaker, do everything you can to create a large head during your first few weeks in debut.

The Bioneers Conference — held this month in San Rafael, CA —

On October 9 at the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library, the entire 11 short films of the FUTURESTATES series was screened in its entirety as part of the Bioneers Film Festival. At this year’s conference, social and scientific innovators focused on solutions inspired by nature and human ingenuity.  Experts including Jane Goodall and James Hansen spoke about the most important issues facing our planet today.

For the past 21 years, the annual Bioneers Conference has screened environmental and social justice themed films as part of its annual conference. For the first time, they expanded the film series to a week of public screenings in the bay area that included the entire FUTURESTATES series.  A small but dedicated audience stayed for the entire three hours of 11 short films.  The audience’s reaction was quite positive if not somewhat overwhelmed by watching such an amazing combination of powerful social and environmental messages in such diverse visual styles and dramatic structures.

Steve Silberman and Karim Ahmad

The event was facilitated by Steve Silberman who is a frequent contributor for Wired Magazine and Shambala Sun. He was also Alan Ginsberg’s research assistant at Naropa University.  Steve was joined by FUTURESTATES Series Manager Karim Ahmad.  Ahmad spoke about the process for selecting filmmakers for this series, how many filmmakers are sent proposals with various parameters and then a team reviews and selects 12 from that process.

The popularity of the short Plastic Bag was discussed for both its surprising humor and powerful spiritual message.  The almost iconic voice of Werner Herzog was such a huge part of the film’s texture and it was interesting to hear about the production process.  Ahmad was then off to attend the film shoot of the next FUTURESTATES series currently in production.

The second season is entering production this summer, and is planned to launch online this spring. Stay tuned to futurestates.tv for updates on the run-up to the second season, but in the meantime, we’re excited to announce the greenlit filmmakers and their projects!

ASPARAGUS by Robby Henson
In a regimented near future, an agricultural engineer learns a lesson about life and love from a renegade asparagus.

THE DIG by Bennett Cohen
An archaeological dig trying to uncover why an ancient civilization fell in an environmental disaster leads to the unexpected discovery of faith.

DIGITAL ANTIQUITIES by JP Chan
Decades from now, a woman in an antique electronics shop is visited by a desperate young man seeking to recover data from an old floppy disk.  In recovering the data, the woman unearths a secret that unites them both.

EXPOSURE by Mia Trachinger
In a world where government agents are employed as live body contagions to immunize urban populations, an unvaccinated man resists being inoculated, and in doing so, learns that the danger of his fears may surpass that of the disease.

THE SPRING OF SORROW by Suzi Yoonessi and Jonako Donley
In this environmentally barren and hardscrabble future, teenage Isabelle desperately offers hope to her eight-year-old sister Lily, by telling a fairy tale allegorically explaining how this tragic world came to be and its  possible salvation by finding the “spring of sorrow.”

REMIGRATION by Barry Jenkins
In this economically polarized future, a disenfranchised family is brought back to San Francisco in an effort to replenish the working class.

THAT WHICH ONCE WAS by Kimi Takesue
In 2050, a twelve-year old boy from the Caribbean, displaced by global warming, fends for himself as an “environmental refugee” in a hostile Northern metropolis. When he forges an unlikely friendship with a similarly displaced ice-carver, the boy learns the value of memory.

BEHOLDER by Nisha Ganatra
In this future, conservative parents now genetically modify their children while they are in vitro, and with the discovery of the “Gay Gene,” selecting against homosexuality has become the popular norm. Here, we find Sasha, an expecting mother who discovers her unborn child has tested positive for the “Gay Gene.” She and her husband conflict over the fate of their child, and their future together.

WHITE by A. Sayeeda Clarke
Global warming has accelerated and the sun has become a tangible threat to survival.  Here, we find Bato, an expecting father, who must sacrifice his pride and his racial identity as he is forced to sell the new currency of this world.

WORKER DRONE by Sharat Raju
In the global economy of the future, whole countries specialize in particular industries, and in India, it’s tech support. Here we find a computer specialist, enlisted by an American company, who competes in a combat simulator to secure a lucrative contract – unaware of the game’s dark secret.

Greg Pak's Mister Green, created for ITVS's FUTURESTATES, is a parable about change.

When you think of public television in the United States, science fiction, or any type of fiction, may not spring to mind.

Independent Television Services (ITVS) is trying to change that perception by creating a series of 11 fictional mini-features on American society in the not-too-distant future. Launched March 8 as an immersive destination website to be available for free via streaming video with subsequent distribution on pbs.org, FUTURESTATES feautres directors such as Greg Pak (Robot Stories) and Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) thinking into the future while staying tethered to current events. The series dropped down on the South by Southwest and San Francisco International Asian American film festival this past month, and after viewing two of the mini-features at an event held at the Jellyfish Gallery in SOMA sponsored by Next American City magazine and ITVS, I sat down with FUTURESTATES programming manager Karim Ahmad to talk about the forward-thinking initiative.

SF360: You mentioned something at the event launching the series about only having the filmmakers project a little bit into the future, not going 100 years from now but more so 10, 15 into the future.

Karim Ahmad: Well, there’s definitely some variance from film to film. One film Plastic Bag which was directed by Ramin Bahrani . . . you follow a plastic bag as it goes home with its ‘maker,’ the woman who takes it home from the store. It lives with this woman for a period of months until it gets thrown away eventually. And then it goes to a landfill where it’s buried for years and years, an unforeseeable amount of time. And then when it finally becomes free . . . .

Read the full interview on SF360.org >>

But did you have a chance to check out the “Predict-o-Meter” yet? After watching a few episodes, forecast future events and explore the predictions left by others on the immersive timeline.

When will the ice caps melt? Will our first female president be elected? Will the rainforest rebound, or disappear? Will California sink into the Pacific?

Submit your own prediction and see others about what lies ahead >>

The new online fictional series from ITVS represents a huge innovation for public media. Check out the New York Times story below to learn more about the creative concept behind the series and what makes it so unique.

Also, be sure to watch FUTURESTATES today by visiting http://www.futurestates.tv and tell us what you think!

For Web and Public TV, Brief Films That Dramatize Issues

By Elizabeth Jensen
March 7, 2010

ITVS is best known for its financing of documentaries, many of which appear on PBS’s Independent Lens series. But beginning on Monday, the organization will present a series of brief, fictional films that cast social issues into the future, in the hopes of drawing a younger audience not necessarily interested in public television.

The new films, 11 in all, will appear first on the Web, and later move to broadcast. Their subjects will be familiar to those who watch ITVS-financed documentaries: climate change, immigration and exploitation of the poor, among other social issues. Under the series title FUTURESTATES, the films will give fictional treatments to the same kinds of subjects, some with a science-fiction twist, exploring how those issues can play out in the future.

The films, which run about 15 minutes each, are meant to attract a diverse audience of so-called millennials, young adults in their 20s and 30s, as well as filmmakers in that demographic group, said Sally Jo Fifer, the president and chief executive of ITVS. Fiction is “what they’re working in,” said Ms. Fifer, and online is where to reach them, ITVS executives said. “We wanted to get that demographic in the public media family,” Ms. Fifer added.

Congress created ITVS, which stands for the Independent Television Service, in 1991 to support independent voices in the media landscape, and finances it through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. ITVS has supported a handful of nondocumentary films in the past, but has largely found the cost of feature-length work prohibitive.

Moreover, PBS broadcasts little fictional programming with the exception of Masterpiece Theater, said Matthew Meschery, ITVS’s director of digital initiatives. “There’s very little, if any, distribution opportunity for narrative films on broadcast for public television,” he said.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting paid the $522,000 in development and production costs of FUTURESTATES, which can be seen starting on Monday at futurestates.tv. In about a month, after a screening at the South by Southwest festival, the films will be available on PBS.org. ITVS is exploring distribution via mobile devices and other online outlets as well, Mr. Meschery said, in addition to their eventual broadcast.

ITVS had 42 submissions for the first round of grants. Among the winners were Plastic Bag from Ramin Bahrani, about the life of a bag (narrated by the film director Werner Herzog); Mister Green, from Greg Pak, about global warming; Tent City, by Aldo Velasco, about an eviction officer grappling with the moral implications of his job; and Silver Sling, from Tze Chun, about a world where impoverished immigrants sell their bodies for use in chemically accelerated surrogate births.

The films, which run about 15 minutes each, are meant to attract a diverse audience of so-called millennials, young adults in their 20s and 30s, as well as filmmakers in that demographic group, said Sally Jo Fifer, the president and chief executive of ITVS. Fiction is “what they’re working in,” said Ms. Fifer, and online is where to reach them, ITVS executives said. “We wanted to get that demographic in the public media family,” Ms. Fifer added.

Watch FUTURESTATES today >>

X (Anthony Giangrande) is created as a robot in the story-within-a-story in Tent City by Aldo Velasco.

The wait is finally over!

Today, ITVS launched FUTURESTATES –– a brand new online fictional series that explores many of today’s complex social issues by imagining how they play out in the world of tomorrow.

Each of the 11 episodes are available for free on the series website www.futurestates.tv and will be available on pbs.org in April. FUTURESTATES will also have its theatrical premiere at South by Southwest on Sunday, March 14.

ITVS worked with some of today’s best and emerging indie filmmakers to complete the 11 films for the series. Contributors include acclaimed American director Ramin Bahrani, whose mini-feature entitled Plastic Bag is narrated by the legendary Werner Herzog, Greg Pak’s Mister Green and Tze Chun’s Silver Sling.

What life might look like in America in the decades and centuries to come?

Watch FUTURESTATES and find out >

A surrogate (Diana Masi) looks at her new scar in Tze Chun's Silver Sling.

What will life look like in America in the decades and centuries to come?

On Monday, March 8, ITVS will launch FUTURESTATES –– a new online fictional series that represents a huge innovation for public media.

Each of the 11 episodes will be available for free beginning March 8 on the series website www.futurestates.tv with subsequent distribution on pbs.org. FUTURESTATES will also have its theatrical premiere at South by Southwest on Sunday, March 14.

Have your own predictions for the future? Be sure to tell us on the “Predict-o-Meter,” a unique feature on the FUTURESTATES website where you can submit your own predictions about life in the future, and comment on the predictions of others. Think you know when the ice caps will melt? Know when we’ll elect our first female president? Will the rainforest rebound or disappear? Share your predictions with us on Monday.

Are you as excited as we are? Then you won’t want to miss the extended series trailer below!

Join the FUTURESTATES Facebook Fan Page >>

Bookmark the FUTURESTATES website and visit on Monday >>