On dreaming big and member-driven filmmaking

Filmmaker Alan Seawright is the co-host and co-creator of the video series Cinema Therapy, along with his best friend and former college roommate Jonathan Decker. The series combines Alan’s filmmaking prowess with Jonathan’s expertise as a licensed therapist. Together, they geek out about movies and break down the mental health and relationship dynamics at play.

Cinema Therapy formed out of necessity and opportunity in 2020 after Alan moved his family to Los Angeles — only for the entire film industry to shut down. The collaborators built their audience on YouTube first and added membership on Patreon in September 2022.

In this episode of Backstage with Patreon, Alan shares fresh ideas and energy from their launch, as well as their vision for the show’s ongoing growth.

Subscribe to Backstage with Patreon on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or directly via RSS. Join the discussion about the episode in the Patreon Creator Community Discord server.

Episode transcript

Brian Keller:
Hello creators. You are backstage with Patreon where we opened the curtain on how to build a thriving business on Patreon. I'm Brian Keller from the Creator Success team. And today's guest is Alan Seawright, the co-host and co-creator of the video series Cinema Therapy, along with his college roommate and best friend, Jonathan Decker. Cinema Therapy combines Alan's expertise as a professional filmmaker with Jonathan's as a licensed therapist, geeking out about movies and breaking down the mental health and relationship dynamics. And Cinema Therapy forum out of necessity and opportunity in 2020 after Alan moved his family to Los Angeles, only for the entire film industry to shut down. They built their audience on YouTube and added membership on Patreon in September 2022, so Alan has some fresh ideas and energy from their launch and ongoing growth.

So let's get started with Alan Seawright on Backstage with Patreon, and you and Jonathan have this amazing dynamic on the show. You're blending the psychology side, the filmmaking commentary. When it comes to putting together the episodes, how do you find the balance and the amount of time to spend on the two different topics?

Alan Seawright:
This is going to sound really, really self-deprecating, but it actually isn't... I'm very, very analytics focused. Our goal with the show is to reach as many people as possible because obviously we want to make a living and we love doing the show, but the main thing that we want to do is help as many people as we can, which is why we have sort of the sugary goodness of talking about movies and little bits of filmmaking dotted in with the actual therapeutic, helpful stuff, and the analytics tell us that people don't care about me. Short ten second or less filmmaking insights tend to be fine. If I talk for longer than that about sort of filmmaking minutia, we tend to see that little slope on the YouTube graph where things start going down. So the balance ends up being about 65 or 70% therapeutic stuff from Jonathan, my co-host, versus 25 to maybe 30% my contribution, which is great. Frankly, I'm happy to be significantly less on the show.

Brian Keller:
Yeah, I really noticed that I was watching your episode about Firefly, which was one of my favorite series as well, and it definitely hooked me in of like, "Oh, I love this show," and bringing me back to those characters, but then seeing it in a totally different light, thinking about the dynamics of the crew and how they support each other and how they build a team. And then I noticed some of your comments are to do those reactions and the comment on what Jonathan's saying. How do you like that role of playing, not necessarily the straight man to it, but being able to react and add to it?

Alan Seawright:
I joke about this with Jonathan all the time. I'm a supporting role in my own show, which suits me just fine. Honestly, it's really funny because Jonathan's always like, "Hey, put more of you in the show, put more of you in the show," but I'm the one who's focused on the analytics, and every time I do, it's like, "Jono, I know you love me because you're my best friend. Nobody else loves me as much as you do, so it's fine. You are the star and I'll be here to be an audience surrogate and feel some feelings and occasionally chime in with like, 'Oh, here's probably how they did that.'"

Brian Keller:
Well, it's a good reminder of you have to have your dynamic, your concept for the show and stay true to it, but this idea of dig into the numbers, figure out what's working or not, and have that flexibility around what it could look like and how to keep responding so you're reaching the right impact there.

And Alan, the other thing that's really notable on cinema therapy is you've got a really cool studio setup that you put together. It looks like it's the two of you in a home theater. You've got the great movie seats, and in fact, you've got a nice way of doing center shots where you're both in there, but you can also do almost the diagonal camera view of it. And probably some of that comes from your professional filmmaking background, but how did you come up with that as a good way to demonstrate the dynamics of it?

Alan Seawright:
It does. So the home theater looks like a home theater because it's literally in my basement. It's right through this door over here in my house. And for a while, when we first started the show, we were actually shooting in a mutual friend of mine in Jonathan's. He has a great home theater in a house that was built in the fifties and has the wood paneled walls and everything. It just feels like your mom's basement kind of, but then he converted it into a home theater. And from the very beginning when Jonathan approached me with the idea for the show, I knew that we should probably do a multi-camera show. So we actually have three cameras, like you said, we have a center to see both of us and a guest when we have a guest. And then we have, it's one for Jonathan and one for me looking across.

And to do that, I already owned a Blackmagic Pocket Camera. They're relatively cheap. Blackmagic Design also sells a little mini switcher, so we can plug all three cameras into that little switcher. Our director of photography can just look on a monitor and see every camera and what's going on and make sure that everything is looking good. And then beyond that, lighting it and recording the sound and everything is just from my 15 years experience on film sets and working in television. We want to make the show look like the most cinematic version of two dudes hanging out in the basement chatting that we possibly can. We don't want it to look too professional because then it won't feel like YouTube anymore, but we want to get just right up to that line of, it's cinema, but it's two dudes in a basement bro-ing out about movies.

Brian Keller:
It works really well. And you have these moments that are the quick bursts of animation or something you're doing that accentuated on the graphics, but also you both have a knack of you turn to the camera, you get that nice zoom in, looking straight at it. I think it works really well together.

Alan Seawright:
Thank you. Yeah, and that's actually something that, again, going back to the analytics, we have better engagement when we're talking directly to the audience. So when we're talking to camera, we get better engagement than when we're talking to each other. So we very purposefully changed after we had shot the show for a couple of months, we changed the way we do it to talk to the audience more than to just each other. So pay attention to your analytics, creators. They'll tell you what to do.

Brian Keller:
Totally. Well, let's talk about the Patreon part of your journey as well. And one of the things you've said is you actually had in mind to do membership on Patreon really from the beginning and were starting to build towards that as you built up your audience. So how did making that decision really starting with membership on Patreon, how did that change the way you thought about production, your content, and your community?

Alan Seawright:
From the very beginning, I had a fairly good idea of what the YouTube show should be, and I also had a bunch of ideas of other stuff, and Jonathan had a bunch of ideas of other content that we wanted to make that wouldn't necessarily make a ton of sense on YouTube. It just wouldn't perform well. And unfortunately because on YouTube, you have to play to the algorithm because if you release videos that don't perform very well, it actually brings all the views down on your entire channel, which is extremely frustrating. But that's the world we live in.

Because of that though, Patreon gave us a great outlet for that. And we actually, I squatted on the name on Patreon. So we launched the channel in April of 2020, and I squatted on the name in June or July, I want say, and this was long before we had — we had 800 subscribers, and I think we had just topped 10,000 total views, and we were over the moon. It's like, "Woo, we're in five figure view territory." So we weren't really aggressively like, "Oh, we need a membership site because we need to figure this stuff out," until later when we blew up. But I knew it was going to be part of our long-term plan, and I just wanted to make sure that we wanted that or that we had that, that we were sitting on it.

And then once we did blow up, we had discussions with — so Jonathan and I are actually partnered with our wives. Jonathan's wife is a sort of business consultant and has done a bunch of stuff. She hasn't done a ton of work in content creation and media. And then my wife is a communications director for a political advocacy nonprofit and has done a lot of social media and that type of stuff. And she also co-writes with me when we write films and television. We write together.

And so after a bunch of discussion, we decided to experiment with a different platform first, and we did that for a year, and we're on Patreon now. So it was a good learning experience and we're already significantly bigger on Patreon than we ever were on our other site. And part of that is just the brand recognition. People understand what a Patreon is, they know what that is. It's much easier to, I don't want to say sell people on it, but convince people that, "Hey, it's okay to come over here and give your credit card out." People trust Patreon, which is great.

And it's also, it's so much simpler to run from our side because the other platform we were using, we had to do webpage design and we had to figure out exactly how our programming was going to work with all of the stuff that we were doing. And there were a lot of backend expenses that we had to take care of, and just a lot of time that we had to invest into it, which was, it wasn't as easy. It wasn't as seamless as Patreon has been. And so when we launched the Patreon, which was just, what, five months ago, we actually took a bunch of the content that we had made for that website and just sort of immediately uploaded it so that when we launched the Patreon, I think we already had over a hundred pieces of content. So on day one when people were signing up, it's not like, "Hey, welcome to this brand new Patreon and eventually there'll be stuff." It was like, "Here, drink from the fire hose."

Brian Keller:
And you actually have a lot of different benefits that I think are very clever that you come up with for your members there. You've got directors cut deep dives, you've got Q and As, grab bags, live chat voting, but I think that can also be very intimidating, all those things that you're putting together. How did you figure out what you want to offer and in putting it into your production schedule?

Alan Seawright:
Yeah. We wouldn't have launched, if we had started with Patreon at the very beginning two years ago, we probably wouldn't have launched with all of that stuff immediately, but because we were already established and we had our production team and our editors and we have a fully functioning show, adding that stuff wasn't as big of a deal. But really, we had also tested a bunch of different content on our previous platform that we were using, and so we knew what worked and what didn't. By far, the biggest thing that our fans engage with are the director's cuts, which are just the YouTube shows, but longer and with no ads, and generally more swearing for me.

But anyway, so we knew those were going to work, and then we've been experimenting with some other stuff. And frankly, some of those things may change at some point. The response so far to our grab bag videos, which are just whatever random idea, not just Jono and I come up with, but our whole team, we just had a video come out a few weeks ago that was one of our editors ranking all of the fan generated relationships from Avatar: The Last Airbender, and it was wild. It's just five minutes of pure insanity, and our patrons loved it. They're just over the moon getting to meet one of our team members and seeing inside his disturbed mind.

Brian Keller:
Yeah, I think it shows you there's so much behind the scenes content that just comes from putting together your episodes, just interacting, being involved in movies. Another thing you do is your watch list, your reading list for letting people in on what you're engaging with otherwise.

Alan Seawright:
Yeah. I've tried to, because I make movies and I don't make movies for a living. I'd like to make movies for a living. What I've made for a living is commercials and some television, but because I am so engaged with that, I've been trying for a long time to kind of journal. Every time I watch a movie or a TV show, I try to write down things that I picked up right after I watch it just so that it helps me retain what I'm trying to learn because this is my profession. And so it felt natural to just kind of put that up and see if people engage with it.

And we get dozens of comments on everyone. People are talking about the shows that we're watching, they're talking about what they're reading and watching and the video games that they're playing. And we get to just have this great dialogue with our patrons about all the stuff that we're consuming, that we care about, that's like these are the things that make us feel good. And it's a fun way for us to just, with our patrons, basically do what we're doing on the show, which when you boil it down, it's my best friend and I talking about movies, which is what we would do anyway. So yeah, it's great.

Brian Keller:
I'm curious about that comment about journaling. What's your process that goes from those ideas or those quick reactions? And sometimes they turn into episodes, maybe they go nowhere. How does it actually go from the journal to other output?

Alan Seawright:
Mostly that's just for me. The journaling stuff is just for me to learn and grow as a filmmaker so that I'm not just doing the same six shots in every scene, so that I'm thinking and trying to find different ways to tell stories and find different characters to tell stories about that, that kind of thing. But because I've been doing that, it lends itself pretty well to — my process for preparing an episode for the show when I watch a movie that we're going to be talking about on the show, is basically just what I have been doing, but instead of one to two paragraphs, and I have dozens of moleskin just notebooks, just full of stupid notes. So instead of one to two paragraphs, I'll have two pages, three pages of stuff, and then, yeah, I go through a lot of pens.

Brian Keller:
Well, in terms of that filmmaking that you're doing and want to get more into, one of the things I heard you talk about with some Patreon folks was the idea of cinema therapy studios where you actually could be making movies, creating in a way that is tied into your members and their ideas. I'd love you to share what you have in mind with that.

Alan Seawright:
Yeah. So we're still in the early stages of figuring this out, and it's going to be dependent on — I'm not sure if our audience is large enough to support this. I think that it is. I suspect that it is. But if we can get to a high enough number of patrons with enough money coming in on Patreon, basically instead of just taking our entire team on a vacation to Bali, we're going to make a ton more work for them. We'll take that money and we'll just turn it right around and produce films. We'll probably start with a couple of short films, like 15 to 25 minute short films. But I would love to get to the point where we're producing a feature film every year with our patrons.

So we're going to add additional, probably one additional backer patron category, like a higher tier category, where those patrons will get to be executive producers. They will help us decide, because it's Cinema Therapy Studios, we're going to be having characters that are dealing with a mental health challenge or potentially just a divergence or something. So we'll have them help us pick the character traits that we're looking at. We'll have them help us pick the genre. Obviously, we're not going to make a movie that's just like, "You pick everything, and then we'll try to write a movie around it." We'll have ideas so that it's not just mayhem, but I'm really passionate about this. Jonathan is really passionate about this.

And then the films will be in early release on Patreon for our patrons, but in addition to that, we'll be able to make a ton of behind the scenes material where Jonathan is doing deep dive research on the mental illness that we're dealing with or the neuro-divergence that we're dealing with or whatever the topic is. And we'll have lots of research where he's going and interviewing experts and interviewing people in those communities and really getting a feel for it. Obviously, I'll have a bunch of deep dive stuff on the filmmaking process and how we're doing each individual thing for the movie. But yeah, with Jonathan, he'll be co-writing and producing with my wife and I, who will be writing and producing, and I will be directing most of these probably.

I think this has been the dream for a lot of filmmaking creators for a long time, to build an audience that allows them to not just do the thing that they're known for as creators, but do the thing that they would like to do. And I love being a creator. I'm passionate about it, and that's amazing. The thing that this allows me to do is get back to what Jonathan and I were doing in college, which was we made films together, and it was kind of a hobby. We got to do it for fun because we were college students and nothing really mattered, and we're going to be able to build a studio where we do the same thing. We get to make movies, and it's just kind of for fun because the real work that we do is being creators on the platforms that we're on, and Patreon seems like such a great — listen, it's all theoretical at this point. None of this is real yet, but if we can make it work, I think it opens up a lot of really interesting doors.

And then one of the things that we want to do too, obviously it'll be an early release and available on Patreon for our patrons who are the people who funded the films, but then we're going to — I've been working in the industry for 15 years. I know people in distribution, I know people at theaters, I know people at streamers and stuff, so we will see if we can get distribution deals with, not necessarily a studio, but if we can get theatrical distribution on a couple hundred screens around the country, and then we're live on Amazon Prime or on Netflix or whatever. It'll be a real movie. It'll just be available for our patrons first. They get to be Hollywood insiders. I don't know. It's all theoretical at this point.

Brian Keller:
It's a really cool vision, and I also love that you're sharing about it in this stage, to keep brainstorming, working on it and give people a little bit of a taste of what you have in mind there.

Alan Seawright:
Well, it's a fun idea that I have, but I only know what I know and I don't know what I don't know. And so, so many people, especially in the entertainment industry, try to keep everything a secret until they actually have a real thing. And I don't want to make promises that we can't keep, but this isn't a promise, this is a dream. It's a plan, but it's also sort of a dream, and I don't want to do it if people are going to be like, "Yeah, that sounds dumb." So I always err on the side of let's put ideas out into the universe and let people tell us if it sounds like a good idea. If we get lots and lots of people who are really excited, then great. If we get lots and lots of people who are like, "That sounds like it's not going to work," maybe we pivot to something else, but we'll see. The response at when we were talking to people at Patreon was over the moon, so that's 300 people or 400 people.

Brian Keller:
Well, it's amazing and a great way to wrap up. So some of the things we covered, dig into your analytics, look at what works in terms of topics, hosts, everything you're covering there, even the camera angles that you cover. The algorithm is tough, but find a way to take your back catalog, the other things you're making that could be amazing content to put on Patreon and with your members there. And there's so many things around behind the scenes. Use your journaling. Use these other elements to make it part of your community and what you're offering there. And I love that we ended with this dream that you have of getting to make the content that you're so passionate about with your community and building towards that. So Alan Seawright from Cinema Therapy, thank you so much for sharing these insights and experience with Backstage with Patreon.

Alan Seawright:
Thank you, Brian, and thank you Patreon creators. Get out there and make cool stuff.

Brian Keller:
Tune in next week to Backstage with Patreon where we'll be recapping the Creator insights from a live event for Patreon creators. The workshop series is called Hot Topics, where we tackle the spicy and timely issues at the heart of being a professional creator. This workshop dove into doubt, how to recognize, handle, and thrive in the face of uncertainty. We get into how to shift to a positive mindset, commit to your craft and wellbeing, and stay accountable along the way.

To catch every episode of Backstage with Patreon, follow or subscribe in your podcast app and leave us a review. We also have transcripts available at patreon.com/backstage. You're growing as a creator by listening to the show, so why not share the insights from this episode with another creator on Patreon or who is running a creative business? We'd love to have you as an active collaborator with Backstage with Patreon. Come join the discussion in the Patreon Creator Discord. Follow the link in the episode notes and you can get answers to your follow-up questions directly from the guests and weigh in on what topics we'll be covering next. Editing by Tyler Morrisette. I'm Brian Keller. See you next time backstage.