M-Dot Strange Finds a Way at Sundance

“M-dot Strange” is a 27 year old from San Jose, CA who has been making a movie titled “We are the Strange”. Before reading the article, the movie and the director had no relevance to me, but as someone who is interested in Sundance, I was introduced to both, thanks to the power of ‘Triadic Closure”. According to the Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan J. Watts article we disussed earlier this semester, Triadic or Cyclic closure is defined as the “probability that two previously unconnected individuals who are…apart in the network will initiate a new tie”.

The above New York Times article discusses how an unlikely candidate named “M Dot Strange” found his way into this year’s Sundance Film Festival. According to the article, over the last two years the self-titled writer, director, animator, and effects coordinator “has been posting a video blog on YouTube letting people know how the movie was coming along. And then two months ago, he finally posted a trailer, and almost immediately it was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.” Since the article was written in January, I was curious to see how many viewers there had been since it was written. What was some 648,000 at the end of January, has become 741,500, meaning that almost 100,000 viewers a month are watching the trailer to M-dot Strange’s movie. The vice-president of YouTube, Kevin Donahue is quoted in the article as saying: “The originality of the work is quite high, but he (M-Dot Strange) has also built a real rapport with his audience. He has an online film school and a very active community.”

The fact that one person with access to the Internet, in a matter of two three months has created a network with more than 741,000+members I find to be fascinating. I thought about how a network of this magnitude is established, and it occurred to me that the idea of Focal Closure was at the center. Obviously of the 741,000 views, a vast majority of the views were from people who had the common interest in movie or film watching (or at the very least online web viewing). Thus, because of focal closure, people who enjoyed watching movies found their way to this trailer. But if we think about how many different types of film genres there are, we have to realize that not all of the viewers were interested in freeze-frame animation, this movie’s genre. Hence, M-Dot strange must have realized that if he were to create a community with large numbers, then the possibility of his freeze-frame film being noticed by people in the general film-watching network would become much more likely.

I thought this story was applicable to our class and the idea of Networks because it shows how if someone (a node) is isolated from other networks, then their opportunities to be noticed in those networks will be quite difficult. But if that node’s personal network grows, the opportunities to be included within those networks will undoubtedly increase. This concept (and thus this story) outline the phenomena of ‘Triadic Closure’ as well as “Focal Closure” we have read in the Kossinets and Watts paper earlier in the semester.