When Niccoló Messina changed the corporate name of his film and documentary studio from V-Channels Media to Insurgence, he wanted to convey a message to the industry at large. Said Messina, “The word ‘insurgence’ means an act of revolt. Our revolt is against those who say that everything is dead. The industry is not dead, but it’s changed. And unless we accept the change and act accordingly, a lot of companies will disappear. Insurgence is our act of revolt as it relates to the traditional independent producer-major studio dynamic, that everything is over. It’s not over.”
In the years since Messina launched his indie studio — first in Europe and then establishing a U.S. foothold in Los Angeles — he has financed nearly 200 feature-length movies and 80 documentaries.
“Insurgence represents our mission to give a voice to the future of entertainment, which is at stake. And when things are at stake, we can’t play by the rules. We need an insurgency to happen. And that’s why we changed the name of the company. Insurgence serves as a fully integrated media company that goes from production that we finance, to providing data, providing software to our filmmakers, to full distribution,” he said.
Messina is one of the pioneers who turned YouTube into a significant platform for entertainment. While his YouTube V Channels, such as V-movies, V-horror, V-Español, V-Portuguese, and V-sci-fi, house each of his indie films and documentaries, many of them are also licensed to streaming platforms in the U.S. and internationally. V Channels will continue to remain the name of his YouTube channels. “And we’ll soon launch our FAST channels: V-movies and V-Español. Our idea is to start with our alien and mystery documentaries. We have produced more than 150 original hours of alien documentaries, and this year we are producing another 80. They are in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and we are going to dub them in Italian, French, and German. So, basically three channels, same content, three different languages,” he said.
He added: “Our future plans are to produce more movies and two different levels of features — one for the digital ecosystem and the other for theatrical distribution — because we believe that some of our movies have the capabilities for a premium distribution path. So, our future is to keep producing in mass, industrially, and then take the ones that work better, to a premium distribution.”
About his AI services, he explained: “In my opinion, most of the industry doesn’t understand AI. It’s very hyped. We got to approach AI in a completely different way. We have never seen such a large consumption of content ever in history as we have today. So, we need to find a way to produce more movies at a much more contained budget. We need to provide filmmakers and producers with software that allows those with lower budgets to deliver better products. And this is why we are creating a set of software that leverages on the power of AI. One software allows our filmmakers to understand what could be the potential distribution of their movie, so they can deliver us a plot, and our software is able to tell them which, if the plot has to be modified or enhanced, if the plot is too much drama and the data says that that doesn’t work, if the title that they choose will work. We tell producers which might be the platforms that could find their movies interesting.”
For Messina, the future of his independent filmmaking will be built on technology developed by Messina, who comes from the world of technology.
He continued, “There is an obligation by distributors to provide transparency because platforms are not known for being transparent. Any distributor that does not provide a dashboard to their filmmakers is destined to fail. I see a future where middlemen are not needed anymore. A future where we can use data to select a movie that we want to produce, to help the screenwriter write the script via AI, to produce it, to dub in 50 languages via AI, and being connected to platforms all over the world and release the movie globally and localized to everyone.”
Insurgence will attend the L.A. Screenings at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, where the studio will screen two recent original movies, including House of Ashes, which has been selected for screening at the Glasgow Fright Fest, and Blow for Blow, a project about the comeback of martial art movies. We created a cast of six MMA and UFC fighters. We put them in L.A. and we shot a very entertaining martial arts action movie,” concluded Messina.
The audio version of this interview is available as a VideoAge podcast here.
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