Changemaker Q&A
Elliot Kotek - A Nation of Artists
We’re excited to be kicking off our new Changemaker Q&A initiative with industry veteran Elliot Kotek, founder at The Nation of Artists.
JF: You’ve had quite an exciting career. Give us some of the highlights, and what led you to Nation of Artists.
EK: Thanks, Jon. I started The Nation of Artists as a side project when I was still running various media publications. It was my personal vehicle through which I could curate exhibitions, interview people I found interesting, and produce feature documentaries like Yaniv Rokah’s festival fave “Queen Mimi,” Frank Kelly’s “140” (the world’s first ever user-generated feature film), as well as Scott McDermott’s Nelson Mandela photography project, which became the short film “Raise My Hands.”
For the past 8 years, it’s grown into an impact-centered, uber-collaborative creative agency and production company of which I’m super proud - we’ve worked directly for brands and major non-profits, and also for other media companies like Participant and CNBC - our motto is “Ideas + Empathy = Impact.”
DP Eve Cohen near Keonjhar, India
Though we’ve managed to continue to invest time and talent into traditional documentaries, primarily, we’re helping tell the stories of impactful innovation and inspiration that are supported by brands like AARP, Accenture, Aflac, Amgen, California Almonds, Campbell’s Soups, CDC Foundation, CNBC and McKinsey & Company, the Fair Labor Association, FIRST Robotics, Hyundai Motor Company, LEGO Education, New Balance, Qualcomm, Walmart Health & Wellness, and Whirlpool & Habitat for Humanity.
JF: Please share more about the organization and your short term goals, and a vision for the long term?
EK: Our goals are fairly simple, and best summed up by our attitude of “More, Bigger, With Good People.” We love what we do, we just want to do more, with increasing levels of impact, and we only want to work with others who genuinely share that outlook.
We’ve made everything from 6-second YouTube pre-roll clips about where teens find their place of belonging, to feature documentaries about grassroots innovation. We’ve made animated shorts about the relationship between honey bees and almond trees, and virtual reality / 360 projects highlighting the introduction of human-centered technology with indigenous communities in Asia and South America.
We love collaborating with other creatives, too, and have worked closely with Sid Lee Montreal, with Carol Cone’s Purpose Collaborative, with Porter Novelli and Cone Communications, Stir Strategy & Story, Lightsail VR and with Freethink Media, with whom we worked on short form docuseries for the likes of National Geographic, Facebook Watch, FastCompany and others.
JF: Can you share some project highlights, from your work with The Nation of Artists.
EK: Oh, man, those are fighting words - what are you trying to do to me!?!?!
There’s been some projects, e.g. Aflac’s My Special Aflac Duck, Amgen’s Webby-nominated “Innovation Squared,” and “for Tomorrow” with Sid Lee Montrea for Hyundai and the UNDP, that have stood out for their longevity - each of these projects have spanned about three years, which is a rare gift in a world where marketing execs only last an average of two years in their roles.
With Aflac, as part of the team that launched the My Special Aflac Duck, a social robot duck for kids going through cancer treatment - the innovators we worked with at Sproutel (now named Empath Labs), the comms and social responsibility teams at Aflac, the hospitals and professionals we worked with at Childrens’ Healthcare of Atlanta and across the nation, the families (especially kids) we met who helped provide feedback on the development of the robot, and all the agencies who contributed their talents to making this as powerful as possible, made this one of those super special projects that made a massive impact directly in kids’ lives, and also delivered the Cannes Lions, TIME Inventions of the Year, SXSW Innovation Awards, Top 25 Campaigns of the Decade, CES awards and other accolades that enabled the corporate case to also claim success.
JF: You’ve created quite a unique campaign for your latest project, Unzipped, which had a good festival run and is about to be released wide on streaming platforms. Tell us more about it, how you came to this project and your goals for impact.
EK: I’ve known the director of “Unzipped,” Colin Keith Gray, and his sister/producer Megan Raney-Aarons, since their amazing doc “Freedom’s Fury” premiered at Tribeca back in 2005 or thereabouts. I was running Moving Pictures magazine at the time, interviewed them at the festival, then bumped into Colin at a Ralph’s supermarket in Venice Beach when I moved West.
You can’t not like Colin & Megan - they’re talented and kind - and kinda Canadian.
We’d all lived in Venice, Cali for a good while, and I can’t recall how it happened, just that at some point after they’d already done a fair amount of filming, we started to talk strategy. I have been fortunate enough to have found avenues to impact for a lot of our work, and to have collaborated with distributors and curriculum developers and, of course, brands, and just started to pull in as many pieces of the puzzle as I thought could be helpful.
For instance, I intro’d the team to Lindsay Guetschow and the Raben Group to help pull together thought leaders and stakeholders from the affordable housing community; I brought in the motion graphics firm And/Or to help with some of the visual language of the film; I brought the film in to Cargo Film & Releasing to rep the film’s sales; and brought Michael Kuehnert’s Video Project in to the mix who then brought in the curriculum writers. Obviously, my history with the Newport Beach Film Festival came in helpful for that screening, my relationship with Laemmle made our week-long run there super smooth and rewarding, a friend - Jillian Dunn- at CharityBuzz meant that a conversation with them on another activation made sense, and when I met Julie Davitz of Plus Media Solutions on one of Jared Ruga’s Impact Guild zooms, I just knew her Impact Plus hub would provide a super great solution to something we’d been looking to accomplish on the “Take Action” side of the project.
The Impact Hub came together super quickly and was customizable for the different communities seeing the film at different festivals, and was then able to be provided to Waterbear to accompany the launch on their platform. There’s a QR code at the end of the film that also takes people through to the Impact Hub. Colin was really intentional about wanting people in all zip codes to have a way to access housing solutions in their area through the amplification of this film - and that came together so seamlessly through Julie and her team.
While that sounds like a lot - remember with these kinds of projects - you’re doing what you can when you can over a span of years - and my small part is nothing compared to the relentless pursuit by Colin, Megan, producers Jamila Fairley & CJ Gronner, editor Davide Fiora and his wife Chiara, and the other myriad day-to-day’ers who have never stopped ensuring that “Unzipped” reaches as many relevant audiences as possible.
JF: TIPS: Any tips for filmmakers looking to create social impact films or series?
EK: I have a process that I call “Internal. External. Eternal.” when it comes to maximizing impact around your projects:
Internal: Come to a consensus internally about what’s important for your project to achieve. And who can you bring into the team to ensure you have the right combination of allies on the project to drive it in the right direction.
External: Start creating lists - who are the external stakeholders who could use your project as a powerful asset. Let them know about the project. Empower them to identify the role they might want to play over the project’s lifecycle - when should they come in - do they know anyone who could be a great fit to be a subject in the film, a subject matter expert in the film, a financial asset for the film, an audience builder for the film…the more you can communicate with them during the project, the bigger allies they’ll also be in the film’s amplification; and
Eternal: What kind of sustainability can the film have? And how can you put tools in place to measure the ongoing role the film plays in various communities once you’re done with production. Where will it live? How will you track its success? How will you stay involved with the people and organizations who were a part of creating the film with you, and what legacy and impact can the film have… on people, on policy, etc.
JF: MOVIE PICK: If you had to pick a movie(s) to recommend to our readers, something that really inspired you, what would it be?
EK: Oh wow - As a kid, those movies that made my mind explode were Luc Besson’s “The Big Blue,” and Denys Arcand’s “Jesus of Montreal”; as a young grown up it would have had to be Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream” and Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers”; and as an adult, I was floored by Kurt Kuenne’s documentary “Dear Zachary” and everything by filmmaker Steve James.
Is that one? I’m not great at counting :)
JF: I’ve seen all of these Elliot. Good taste, as to be expected.
Thanks for taking the time to share more about your projects, your words of wisdom, and this list of movie picks:)
We will be sure to remind our readers about Unzipped hitting platforms June 1!
To connect with Elliot, you can reach out to him here.