inside OTV | 2020
BY AYMAR JEAN CHRISTIAN
OCTOBER 26, 2021
2020 was a year that proved the sustainability of the OTV model. We started our season in February facing a global lockdown less than two weeks before our biggest event of the year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Undeterred, we shifted the program to a livestream co-hosted by the MCA’s social media team where we premiered four pilots and short films from Black trans/women from Chicago, Detroit, Berlin and Johannesburg.
2020 was OTV’s first full year under new leadership, Executive Director & Co-founder Elijah McKinnon, who formally started the role in late 2019. Co-founder Aymar Jean Christian transitioned out of leadership to advise and support OTV as Head of Research & Organizational Development. In 2021, OTV is now supported by two full-time staffers, Sarah Minnie as Head of Artist Development & Production, and Chris Walker as Head of Exhibition & Marketing.
Elijah was the perfect person to lead OTV, given their focus on building a culture of wellness and trust that helped sustain and grow our organization during a global crisis, alongside their experience in unscripted and scripted production, event production and online marketing.
OTV learned our team is resilient and our company culture is liberating, as we performed all grant activities during the pandemics of COVID-19 and racism. As an organization run by a team that shares identities with the community we support and represent, we were able to hold each other’s complexities and present a full season.
PRODUCTION & ARTIST DEVELOPMENT
In all we premiered 31 projects in 2020, slightly fewer than the average of 20-24 given that several series had to delay production because of the shutdown.
HIGHLIGHTS
2020 saw some delays in our distribution of new stories, as the pandemic caused delays on a number of series that were supposed to premiere.
Nevertheless, OTV hosted 13 livestreams in 2020, seven of which were premieres of new content. Most of our new programs were pilots and short films, which had the effect of us offering more experimental work. We premiered Rebba Moore’s Conspiracy Theorist and Ahya Simone’s Femme Queen Chronicles, two pilots showcasing very different perspective on Black/trans womens’s experiences in Chicago and Detroit, at our premiere event OTV Tonight, which the team produced virtually in the early weeks of pandemic.
Our biggest series of 2020 were Elijah McKinnon’s Good Enough and Hannah Gamble’s Choose Me: An Abortion Story, the latter was nominated for a 2020 Streamy Award for Best Indie Series! Both series are queer to the core and beautifully filmed.
Toward the end of the year, we premiered the long-awaited comedy series from OTV Fellow Karan Sunil, Code-Switched, which we initially previewed in 2018 at OTV Tonight. Code-Switched generated incredible interest on YouTube (with over 100,000 views on the pilot so far) and we were proud to exclusively premiere this work.
PROGRAMS & ORIGINAL PRODUCTIONS
Brave Futures Film Race (https://www.weareo.tv/bravefutures) – Elijah McKinnon produced and OTV presented five iterations of this 48-hour intersectional film competition, the first of its kind focusing on creativity and creation rather than all-nighters and who has the best camera. It was held in Germany and South Africa abroad and in Atlanta, Oakland and Brooklyn in the United States. The program expanded awareness of OTV outside of Chicago and diversified our programming with stories from around the world (Funded by the MacArthur Foundation).
#4theQulture (https://4thequlture.com) – Elijah McKinnon produced and OTV presented this 3-day virtual celebration of 50 years of Pride in Chicago by working with over 50 Black queer and trans artists to present community talks, live music, video art and sketch comedy. This program was the soft launch for our app and, while free to the public, earned us our first group of 250 member-subscribers. (Funded by the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, Howard Brown, Red Bull and Equality Illinois).
Study Hall (https://www.weareo.tv/study) - We shifted our film courses from in-person to online in the Spring, inviting applicants to our Fellowship program to take classes for free. The shift to virtual allowed us to increase the number of people in the class to over 100; our most popular class included 125 individuals and 60 of them completed all 8 courses. Courses covered the entire life cycle of making an indie film/TV, including a number of classes on fundraising and the business side of things that are not available anywhere else, including most film schools. The courses are now available for free on our website an accessible resource compared to local (e.g. Chicago Filmmakers) and national (e.g. Sundance Institute partnership) offerings. (Funded by Pop Culture Collaborative).
Fellows (https://www.weareo.tv/otv-fellows) – This program identifies and supports promising Chicago based talent within the OTV community to support the development of a new project. We admitted our second class of Fellows in the spring. This year we experimented by selecting Fellows with a broader range of experience. The first cohort targeted individuals who already produced a project and paid them to develop a long-form pitch. The second cohort had some Fellows with production experience but more with experience in theatre, novels and video art. Our Fellows love this program and all are using the funding to film proofs of concepts and develop their series, to premiere in 2021. In addition, Kristiana Rae Colon, found a manager and was staffed on The Chi on Showtime. Another fellow, Grace Tran, is submitting her feature to all Sundance feature labs/fellowships as part of an invite-only process OTV was invited to support. Terrence Thompson developed a script and proof of concept for his series, views the programs as a vital source of creative fulfillment, and acquired some industry mentors through a retreat hosted by Pop Culture Collaborative, the primary funder. (Funded by Pop Culture Collaborative).
Equipment – Thanks to funding from the Surdna Foundation, we purchased two cameras, lighting and sound equipment to be able to produce our own programs and offer free/discounted equipment to select artists in our community. (Funded by the Surdna Foundation)
EXHIBITION & MARKETING
We hosted five livestream premieres for those projects on our social media pages, reaching our highest engagement ever. Several of these premieres amplified the messages of arts & social justice organizations as we partnered with: the #LetUsBreathe Collective to amplify their work for a screening of our Black liberatory projects; 5018North to amplify stories by and about immigrants; and presented a program celebrating the power of Black community in response to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. (Funded by the Surdna Foundation).
OTV app (http://watch.weareo.tv) – We launched our app, available via browser and on Apple devices (iOS & Apple TV), Android (mobile and TV), Roku and Amazon Fire TV. The app streamlines our online exhibition, allowing users to save series, discover new programs through playlists, purchase video for download, and access live streams. The app also supports our membership program and we are currently approaching 500 members, our target. After reaching out to Aymar to give a lecture and workshop on intersectionality, Vimeo, who developed the app, and their Vimeans of Color employee group are now considering offering further discounts on the app. (Funded by the MacArthur Foundation)
Local Recognition – We were proud to celebrate Elijah McKinnon’s Leaders for a New Chicago Award this year, presented by the Field and MacArthur Foundations. In addition, co-founder Aymar Jean Christian was named to NewCity’s Hall of Fame for the local film industry alongside esteemed industry colleagues like Lilly Wachowski.
Industry Recognition – 2020 earned OTV some of its biggest recognition in years. The entire platform secured a highly competitive nomination for a Webby Award (the longest-running award for digital entertainment now in its 24th year) for Best Video Channel (Public Service), the first ever award nomination for the entire platform, and an additional nomination for Damaged Goods (Best Video Series). We also secured recognition for the fourth year in a row at the Streamys, the leading award for online/social video now in its 10th year, for our series Choose Me. This is in addition to nominations at Queerties and Best of the Midwest competitions, and exhibitions at leading queer festivals like NewFest. Lastly, our content continues to be in demand by our peers, and we started syndicating our shows to global distributors kweli TV and Exceptional Rights (for sub-Saharan and South Africa).
RESEARCH
Several peer-reviewed scholarly articles were published this year based on OTV data, including: an article in Social Media & Society called “Platforming Intersectionality,” which features the most in-depth analysis of how OTV artists have built community online; an article in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, “Organic Representation,” using OTV’s grassroots development process to theorize how to repair historical harms in media; an article in New York University Press’ Race & Media anthology on “Intersectional Distribution;” and an article featuring interviews with OTV’s peer independent distributors, “Beyond Branding,” that elucidates the challenges and possibilities of intersectional distribution in further detail. We also published our usual annual reports based on interviews with our artists (Artists on OTV 2019) and two reports on community feedback (Chicago Community on OTV 2019 & Chicago Community on Video Art vs. Narrative Series 2016-2019). (Note: now that OTV is its own non-profit, it is no longer an experiment under Northwestern University; data collected going forward will be determined by a Data Sharing agreement made between OTV and Dr. Christian, who will continue to serve the organization as a part-time consultant and advisor).
ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
OTV started its transition from an experiment at Northwestern University to an independent non-profit in late 2018 and early 2019. By late 2020 OTV had secured multi-year funding from the Surdna Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pop Culture Collaborative and Cinereach. Elijah used this funding to gain perspective and insight in what value OTV serves in our marketplace and how to optimally structure the organization for long-term sustainability.
To support this transition, Elijah, Aymar and Strategic Planning Consultant, Kamilah Rashied, spent a weeklong retreat reviewing the first four years of OTV, our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and brainstorming for the future. The three of us then met biweekly throughout 2020 focusing on how to maximize organizational capacity and effectiveness to serve our mission of serving intersectional artists and community. The result is in the attached Strategic Planning Report. All activities below fall under the MacArthur grant.
Revenue Strategy – We refined our strategy for revenue, focusing on 1) membership to our app, 2) sponsorship from mission-aligned institutions for programming, 3) direct sales of programs and film classes through the app, and 4) consulting services to help institutions better serve and reach historically marginalized communities. We piloted all of these strategies in 2020.
Organizational Structure – We refined our organization chart, initiating two director-level positions, one in Development to support artists and another in Exhibition to release their programs. We released our current team from their contracts and conducted an open search for these positions. Given the high degree of complexity of our work and the limited number of peer organizations with similar missions and visions, we re-hired and promoted two current team members to these positions. We also developed a 3-year plan to add additional roles to achieve growth necessary for sustainability.
Organizational Compliance – We completed our non-profit charitable organization registration with the state of Illinois; started payroll and benefits; and completed our first audit (covering 2018 and 2019).