americas regions
Pic caption for here please
National Parks Adventure celebrates America’s natural wonders
wanting to experience the USA. They are just great platforms for storytelling.” Getting National Parks Adventure to
the screen took two-and-a-half years, Garzilli says. Celebrating the centenary of the National Park Service, it has been seen by eight million people on Imax screens since its launch in February 2016 with a further two million streaming it online. Of those, 1.5 million downloads have been in China via video hosting service Youku. Since February this year, Netflix has also been streaming it globally. “We just finished our first detailed
ROI [return on investment] study of National Parks Adventure. It never stops generating ROI as audiences will be seeing it in the future. But as of now the ROI is in excess of 60 to 1. To put that in perspective, the Brand USA ROI, which we think is fantastic, is about 30 to 1 on our marketing. So we know this kind of storytelling works,” Garzilli says. America’s Musical Journey is narrated by another Hollywood superstar, Morgan Freeman, and follows musician Aloe
… provides a soundtrack to a nation and showcases its great musical cities
Blacc as he traces the music that helped shape America’s culture in cities such as New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Miami, Memphis and Nashville. Honoured with the Best Audience Recommendation Award at the 2018 Beijing International Film Festival, it has opened in six cities across Canada as well as in Paris, Moscow and locations in Mexico and India. It will be shown in Australia, Spain and the Netherlands in the summer and the UK this autumn.
Immersive experience The film is the 40th Imax film created
by MacGillivray Freeman since 1976. In that time, the number of Imax theatres worldwide has grown from four to more than 1,000. MacGillivray Freeman president Shaun MacGillivray describes the format as “special and unique” because it is so immersive, and says surveys have shown that 81% of people internationally who have watched National Parks Adventure were more likely to visit the US afterwards. MacGillivray adds that the film company pitched the idea of the music theme for the second movie to Brand USA and also suggested the locations and chose the A-list narrator, as it had for the first film. “With Robert Redford, conservation is part of his DNA so we felt he was the perfect storyteller for that [National Parks Adventure],” he says. Both films have original film scores. Aloe Blacc wrote a song especially for America’s Musical Journey that was released on the day the film premiered. McGillivray hopes it will be nominated for a Grammy or Academy Award. He says Brand USA was a “fantastic partner to work with”, while Garzilli acknowledges Expedia as its main partner on the Imax projects. “We could not have done these films without Expedia,” he says, adding that the partnership of both Subaru, for the first film, and Air Canada for the latest one,
wtm.com
was also “critically important”. Garzilli explains that the move into
streaming television with the launch of GoUSA TV offered the opportunity to continue adding content. “What we learned from the films is that wonderful though they are, the content is static,’ he says. “So if you go and see National Parks Adventure today it’s the same film you saw two years ago; still fresh but it’s the same places. We have an unending supply of great places to talk about and great stories to tell. “That’s why we chose streaming television, because it is a very rapidly growing technology. It’s going from being in 400 million households in 2017 to 650 million in 2021. And GoUSA TV is on Roku, Amazon and Apple and it will be on Google Chromecast very soon. “The goal of GoUSA TV is to become the most important, largest US content channel. And we’re going to do that by curating, licensing and creating our own content. So we are talking to great partners like Discovery, National Geographic, the BBC and other content creators to license their content to us. We’re also going to partners like California, Illinois, Texas and Tennessee who have great content. “We launched GoUSA TV in February.
We only started marketing it in April. We were targeting to do three million video views by year-end and we already have two-and-a-half million video views. So we will have surpassed three million certainly by mid-summer.” As for future projects, Brand USA and MacGillivray Freeman have already begun planning a third Imax film, due for release in February 2020. “We’ll focus a little bit more
probably on creators and innovators,” says Garzilli. “We want to talk about how exploration across the country developed. Beyond that it’s hard to really say what’s it’s going to look like. It’s so early.”
summer 2018 wtm insights 41
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