“We are really looking for people over projects.” Interview With Naomi McDougall Jones Co-Founder Of Constellation Incubator

I was able to speak with Naomi McDougall Jones, an award-winning filmmaker, actress, author, speaker, and women in film activist, about her part in a new filmmaker incubator, Constellation Incubator:

This is Kristy Strouse with Film Inquiry. Can you tell us what Constellation Incubator is? 

Naomi McDougall Jones: Yes! Constellation Incubator, presented by Avalon: Story (www.avalonstory.com), will bring together up to 36 feature filmmaking teams to participate in an 8-week incubator designed to scale innovation within the independent film industry.

This program was co-founded by four of us, myself, Abeni Bloodworth, Angela Harmon, and Liz Manashil, because we had each come to the understanding that the way indie films are made right now is fundamentally unsustainable and growing more so all the time. The problem is that, while many folks are trying to fix the issues around the edges, the reality is that our current model is broken at the center. What we need is nothing less than a complete redesign of the full indie film ecosystem.

During the incubator program, selected filmmaking teams will be lead through a Design Thinking process, targeting three key problem areas in independent filmmaking: Financing, Production, and Distribution/Marketing.

Design Thinking – which is all the rage at top companies, organizations, and industries – is an iterative process that seeks to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions beyond our initial level of understanding. Sound like about what indie film needs? We think so.

Abeni, Angela, Liz and I are currently receiving training as Design Thinking Facilitators – the same training offered at Stanford and other top institutions – and will serve as the guides for the filmmakers through the redesign process.

That’s really interesting! Can you tell us a bit about your history/career in the industry?

Naomi McDougall Jones: Yes! I’d love to give you an overview of all us co-founders.

Abeni Bloodworth is a writer and artist-activist and Co-Founder of Dry Powder Works (DPW), a multi-media production and distribution ecosystem powered by 3000 Black creatives throughout the diaspora. She has over 25 years of experience and, to date, has raised over $150M+ dollars to support transformative change.

Angela Harmon is an Emmy-nominated producer, storyteller, and creative with over two decades working in unscripted and scripted development for production companies and labs. Co-Founder of Chromatic Black Productions, Angela seeks to disrupt the master narrative through good storytelling.

Liz Manashil is a former manager of Sundance Institute’s Creative Distribution Initiative, an independent feature filmmaker (Bread and Butter, Speed of Life), and co-host of the hit filmmaking podcast, Making Movies is HARD!!!. 

And, lastly, I – Naomi McDougall Jones – am the founder of The 51 Fund, an equity fund to finance films by female filmmakers, a 13-time award-winning independent filmmaker (Imagine I’m Beautiful, Bite Me), and a passionate parity in film advocate. My viral TEDTalk and book (The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood) on the subject have led to a global outpouring of support and funding for the movement.

Amazing! How did you get involved, where did this idea come from, and what made you decide to launch this?

Naomi McDougall Jones: Liz and I spent several months last fall and into this early winter having one-on-one conversations with folks in independent film – filmmakers, producers, distributors, etc – about another project we were working on. We were asking people to brainstorm with us and share their thinking about how we could radically transform the indie filmmaking process. Over these tens of hours of conversations, we kept getting so inspired, but also depressed. Inspired because of the innovative thinking that is happening in certain pockets and in getting to think about how indie film could be if we weren’t trapped in current models. Depressed because, knowing from our own experiences how utterly broken those current models are, it can be so hard for any of us to really break out of thinking about what is enough to be able to imagine something genuinely different.

The idea began to emerge between us that what was really needed was a process that could help filmmakers who wanted to create radical new models, to expand their thinking enough to actually be able to break out of existing paradigms and do so.

Around that same time, we connected with Abeni and Angela, who had arrived at a similar conclusion in their own work of change-making. They were feeling frustrated by just how trapped folks in the film industry are by how they think things “ought” to function. Inspiration and excitement started to jet out of all of us when we began a four-way conversation about an incubator that could really break that open and create substantially new ideas.

When we learned about Design Thinking and were blessed to be connected to a professor willing to train us, we knew we’d found the right process to put at the center of Constellation Incubator.

I love that idea. What are your goals? What do you see this being able to do for the industry?

Naomi McDougall Jones: The goal for Constellation Incubator is not to simply come up with just one or two new ideas in each of these key areas, but for the process to generate 10-20 new models and ideas for how financing, production, and distribution/marketing might work – a “constellation” of possibilities. Ideas that are not only fresh and out-of-the-box, but which – through the Design Thinking process – have also been tested on “users” – whether that’s audiences, investors, film teams, etc.

Our hope is that this incubator will seed radical new models for indie filmmaking that will inspire innovation, iteration, and growth for years to come – not only for the participating teams but, by sharing our learnings publicly, with the entire industry.

Additionally, it is the value statement of the Constellation Incubator that the models and innovations resulting from the incubator should be sustainable, equitable, humane, replicable, and accessible to all creatives – particularly those whose voices have traditionally been excluded from our industry. So, we hope to ignite some radical change in those ways, too – by encouraging participants to design new models with those values at their very core. I’m sure we can agree that that would be different indeed.

With any luck, we will look back on this summer as a paradigm-shifting moment.

I hope you do! I know you’re on Film Freeway which has a lot of information, but what are you looking for in regard to those who are submitting to share with our readers?

Naomi McDougall Jones: We are really looking for people over projects. We’re not asking you to submit your screenplays – and likely won’t even ever ask to read them during the selection process. We’re asking teams applying to have a feature film (narrative or doc) in early – late-stage development so that they have a project they can apply the learnings of the incubator to in the near future, but we’re not going to be assessing the projects themselves.

What we care very much about is finding teams of filmmakers who are genuinely hungry for a new mode of independent filmmaking; who are ready to throw out absolutely everything they think they know about how these processes “ought” to work and get elbow-deep in inventing and testing new ideas.

It is the specific goal of Constellation Incubator to include a diversity of voices in the selected filmmaking teams – in terms of participants’ backgrounds and identities, but also their work backgrounds, experience in and outside of filmmaking, number of years working in film, and range of thinking with respect to innovation. We’re as interested in the seasoned, veteran filmmaker who has made five features and learned first-hand all of the ways in which the current system is broken as in the first-time feature filmmaker who spends 15 years as a marketing executive in corporate America and can bring that different perspective and experience to the process.

We’re asking that each applying project have 2-3 team members attached who are willing to go through the incubator process with the project – and we’re encouraging diversity in the types of roles those people represent, as well. Teams don’t have to be all directors, producers, and writers. If you have a cinematographer or actor or editor or composer or key grip who wants to participate in this process, that will be an amazing and useful different perspective to have involved!

If you’re interested you can find more information here, as well as the film freeway link here. The deadline is April 15th!

Film Inquiry would like to thank Naomi McDougall Jones for taking the time to speak with us.