Toy Story Live Action: Primary Research

I sent Jonason and Jesse a message on the Toy Story Live Action Facebook page with some questions about their film and how social networking helped it.

''Yes absolutely. When we had been working on the movie for three months or so we posted the first video on YouTube where we told people what we were doing. We made the facebook page so that there would be one place for people to go for the project (YouTube had some other things on it already). Before the movie was even released, we had more than 1,000 people "like" the FB page. 

Kind of just continuing the story: We searched out Pixar and Toy Story fan pages online and talked about our movie there. I decided to get a twitter which ended up being a great idea in the long run because we had Lee Unkrich (director of Toy Story 3) re-tweet a couple of our videos which really spread the word. It's like trying to find the people who we knew would like our movie and telling them specifically. Toy Story fans would be following him on twitter for example. Our movie had it easy in that way I think because Toy Story already has a big fan base that we could go after. If we did something totally original we would have had a little bit of a harder time. Still, I think we would have done it nearly the same way. 

Social networking sites were definitely what helped the movie go viral. Once we put the movie online (something we only decided to do a week before we did it) it really took off. Some videos go viral a long time after being uploaded, but there were people we didn't even know who had been waiting for it for almost two years.''

Overall I feel that social networking and web 2.0 are what helped Jonason and Jesse produce their film and get the audience that they needed. In the past before the internet was being used, it would have been much harder for them to produce the film, this is because doing research for finding locations and the props would have been more difficult. Also distribution of the film would have been impossible, without YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the audience just would not have been there for the film to get viewed. Because the film is quite 'niche' as it is different to anything else out there, it is part of the long tail theory by Chris Anderson, which states there is 'unlimited shelf space' on the internet for films to be screened.