The Beauty Of Slow
The INVISIBLE NATION Distribution / NonDē Exploration continues, w Pt2
It’s a little bit of the chicken versus the egg thing.
What births the other? Or in the case of NonDẽ Distro, do we need SLOW to be FlexyFlexy or is it a FlexyFlexy mindset that facilitates The Slow Approach?
Let’s not quibble amongst us civilians. Let’s just get good stuff done and figure how to leave it all better than we found it, yeah? And we can do NO harm with this dance, I’m sure. That’s three wins in a row in my book. Championship here we come!
We do know why we go slow now, right?
In this era where the corporate behemoths practice saturation marketing in hopes of burying all competition, we go underground for the long haul. Instead of clouding out others through their flood-the-zone tactics, we resort to building a steady cadence of impressions that subtly convert people towards action and from action we lead them towards engagement. We build audiences and graduate them into community. Communities take action and we all rise in the process.
I think that’s your wings flapping I hear now, right?
Perhaps you are bit new in town, and you need a rapid-fire bit-of-a-splainer. We are now in Year Three of Distribution of INVISIBLE NATION, the film Vanessa directed and that we produced with a lot of help from our friends, some of which were our fellow producers. Our goals were impact, but thanks to have half of our financing in grants and donations, an incredibly successful release in country of subject (Taiwan), and the implementation of Slow Distro, in terms of the film, we are successful in every way possible and things keep getting better. Much can be attributed to the specifics of the film for sure, but I am convinced our learnings and tactics are transferable to many films and they will enjoy similar results if not better.
So today we are diving into the principle of SLOW and all that it offers…
You’ve seen those kids in the playground with the fast hand and lightning reflexes. I wanted to be that, but my lot was a bit different. Yours too, perhaps? We all can’t get to where the puck is going to be on reflex and instinct alone. The truth is those we can each manufacture bullet-time with our movies. And in that zone we get to move in the liminal spaces between things. We can dodge pain in the slowed-down zone and we can amplify all sorts of victory. To walk across the water, you just have to know where the rocks are. Step out of Dimension GoGoGo and feast on the sweets of The Land of Slow.
That’s right. I want all of us to be Keanus. That won’t be so bad will it?
For all that slow brings, there is likely no greater gift than how the slow transforms into long. The longer the run we have, the more opportunity we breed. Each opportunity is another reach for serendipity. It is that fortunate falling into the gift of serendipity that truly elevates the art into the marvelous. More often than not, it is not genius that levitates the collaboration, but that old nugget of good luck. The miraculous will happen, but we first have to make room for it. We forget that when we operate on the quick. Go back to slow and long, and the angels will find you more often.
