Award-winning documentary Lo and Behold–produced by Saville Productions’ Rupert Maconick and directed by Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams)–examines the Internet’s groundbreaking past and present.
Lo and Behold earned an AICP Next Award for Next Branded Content in Manhattan last week.
From 1969 on the campus of UCLA, where a professor shows us the first computer to communicate with another computer at the “birthplace of the Internet,” Herzog explores through a series of vignettes a variety of internet-spurred phenomena, from self-driving cars, to a rehab clinic for gaming addicts, to the pending Mission to Mars. The film overall provides colorful insight into the worldwide web’s total transformation of social communication and invention.
Premiering at 2016 Sundance Film Festival, making the international rounds of the festival circuit and being picked up and distributed by Magnolia Pictures, the film was sponsored by web services company NETSCOUT, which in turn raised awareness for the corporation worldwide.
Maconick stated, “[NEWSCOUT’s] impressions went up by tenfold. It became a huge bonanza for them in terms of impressions…and the fundamental thing is, there was no media buy. When we went to Sundance, we sold it to Magnolia. They were going to push the hell out of [the documentary], which they did, and the brand made money back.”
Courtesy loandbehold-film.com
NEWSCOUT’s sponsorship, however, did not impede the creative direction sought by the accomplished documentarian Herzog. Rupert adds, “You don’t feed [participants] the stories and say, ‘this is what you’re gonna say,’ which sometimes happens in ads. And if you have someone like Werner along, if you want to use his name to promote it, it’s got to be his vision, really.”
Lo and Behold provides an example of a tie between earnest, award-winning documentary production and the incentive for sponsors who fund such projects. Maconick continues, “I think brands should be making sponsored entertainment and proper-length docs, or TV or films, as opposed to making like 4-minute-long ads and sticking them on YouTube…I think that’s a flawed strategy. And hopefully, brands will do more things that you can actually sell.”
After it’s 2016 Sundance debut, Lo and Behold screened at the 2016 Cleveland International Film Festival 2016, where it was nominated in the Nesnadny + Schwartz Documentary Competition for Best Documentary. The film later won an Honorable Mention for the One Future Prize at the 2016 Munich Film Festival.
Courtesy loandbehold-film.com
Learn more about the documentary HERE.