I’ve watched this documentary in my head about a hundred times. Believe me, it’s amazing.
It also has the considerable advantage of costing absolutely nothing to make in there.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been sharing an idea called UNMADE SEQUELS, asking people what they think, and trying to find out whether there’s enough interest to take it further. I’ve now done a more focused test with our Aliens Expanded audience.
The result is that I’m putting this particular idea on hold. I’m disappointed, but I thought you might be interested in how I got there. If I’m going to ask for your thoughts in public, it feels right to come back and tell you what happened.
First, the idea I’d fallen in love with
For anyone coming to this fresh, UNMADE SEQUELS would explore possible continuations of films we love. Perhaps a film never got a sequel. Perhaps it did, but there’s another direction you wish those characters had taken.
I wrote about the Aliens version here. Suppose Alien 3 never happened. What other adventures could Hicks and Newt have had? Could we bring writers, filmmakers and artists together to explore different story arcs, then let the audience experience some of those possibilities through illustration and animation?
I could picture the enjoyment of spending more time with those characters. Clearly, I had already bought my imaginary ticket.
Aliens was a useful place to focus the experiment because we’d already made Aliens Expanded, our five-hour documentary featuring James Cameron and members of the cast. We had an existing audience who loved that film. If we wanted to find out whether this idea appealed to Aliens fans, we knew people we could ask.
The Aliens-specific post: taking a broad idea and giving people something more concrete to respond to.
Following the signal
The response to the earlier Instagram posts encouraged me. There were hundreds of likes, plenty of comments, and people joining in with their own thoughts about the sequels they wished we’d seen.
That’s a big part of why I set up this account. I wanted somewhere to test ideas and connect with people who enjoy thinking about this stuff. There’s a lot of pleasure in discovering that a conversation you’ve been having in your own head is one other people want to have too.
The earlier Instagram post. The engagement gave me a reason to investigate further.
But an interesting Instagram conversation is only the beginning. I wanted to see what happened when I put a specific documentary proposition in front of a relevant audience.
So I put together a short survey and emailed around 5,000 of our Aliens Expanded backers. That was a subset of the audience, rather than everyone who had backed the documentary.
The encouraging bit, and the difficult bit
In the video, I talk about receiving around 215 survey responses. Roughly nine in ten respondents were interested in the concept. That was encouraging, and the comments helped me understand what people would want from it.
One response was very direct:
“If James Cameron and the main cast are part of it.”
Another said:
“I think having interviews with the creators and some visual aspect (storyboards, animation) would be ideal for me.”
I can understand that. If you love these characters, of course you’d want to hear from the people who helped create them and brought them to life. Those expectations are useful to know about before you start making a film.
They also have a practical consequence. Bringing Hollywood talent into a documentary is expensive. To make the version I was imagining, we’d need thousands of backers.
And that was the challenge: around 5,000 people emailed, around 215 responses. About 4% completed the survey.
That’s the survey response rate, rather than the email open rate.
The Tally dashboard shows 218 submissions in this screenshot; I refer to around 215 in the video. The percentages discussed here are approximate.
I don’t know why each person who didn’t respond chose not to. People are busy. Emails get missed. A survey can easily slide down a to-do list. I wouldn’t take that silence as proof that everybody else disliked the idea.
But I still have to decide whether there’s enough evidence of demand to commit to making it. The people who liked it really liked it. I didn’t come away confident that there were enough of them to support the level of production I had in mind.
So I’m putting UNMADE SEQUELS: Aliens on hold. I haven’t seen enough to take it into production.
The slightly uncomfortable part of doing this in public
It’s much easier to share an idea once you know it’s happening. You can tell the story with the awkward bits already worked out.
I’m trying to get more comfortable sharing the earlier part, when I’m excited about something and don’t know where it will go. That feels a bit scary. You can be very attached to an idea before anyone else has had a chance to tell you what they think.
I love big concepts. Once I can picture a documentary, I want to make it real. So yes, this is disappointing. I’d love to be writing the update where I tell you we’re moving forward.
But asking for feedback has to mean being willing to act on what you learn. Otherwise I’m really just asking people to agree with the documentary I’ve already made in my head.
I know what it feels like to take an idea from nothing to a documentary that thousands of people want to be part of. It’s an extraordinary feeling, and it’s why I keep doing this. Finding an idea that connects at that scale is rare. I don’t expect every one to get there.
I’d rather have nine ideas fall away early and find the one worth pursuing than keep pushing something because I’ve fallen in love with it.
To everyone who left a comment, dropped a like or filled out the survey: thank you. I appreciate the time you gave this, including the feedback that made me reconsider it. It helped me make a decision before committing to a much bigger undertaking.
Was the experiment worth doing? Absolutely. I learned more by putting it in front of people than I would have by spending another month polishing the version in my head.
I’ll keep sharing ideas here and on Instagram, and I’ll keep coming back with what I learn. Hopefully with slightly less emotional attachment to the next one. No promises.