Find Your People: Marketing That Builds a Crowd Around Your Story

Last weekend, Reframe Collective co-founder Iris Lamarr delivered Find Your People: Marketing That Builds a Crowd Around Your Story for Animation Matchmaking Online 2026.

Audience, positioning and marketing are very much Iris’s wheelhouse. Across our work at Reframe, we see the same problem again and again: filmmakers can spend years developing a project and still struggle to answer three basic questions clearly. Who is this for? Why will those people care? And how are they actually going to find the project?

That uncertainty causes problems long before release: pitches drift, marketing becomes generic, teams start chasing broad appeal. By the time somebody decides it is time to “build an audience”, the project may already be finished. This session is all about starting much earlier, and getting a very clear picture of who the audience really is.

Find Your People is about figuring out who will care about your project first, what they respond to, and how to keep that audience in mind from development through to release.

“Families” is not an audience

One of the central ideas in the talk is that demographics rarely tell you enough.

“Families”, “women 18 to 35” or “people who like animation” describe very large groups of people with wildly different tastes and behaviours.

We need to be more interested in what people already watch, follow and seek out. What are they coming for? Humour? Recognition? Thrill? Comfort? Belonging? And what does your particular project give them that another project does not?

Once you can name their hunger, the audience becomes much easier to picture, research and eventually reach. In this session Iris goes further to make reaching your audience possible: she breaks audiences into three layers - core, adjacent and reach. Your core audience is the group that already understands the signals and needs the least convincing. The adjacent audience needs more proof, perhaps a recommendation, festival selection, strong trailer or familiar performer. Wider reach tends to come later, once the project has momentum around it.

Trying to speak to a wide audience from day one usually makes the project harder to recognise, and it definitely makes it more expensive to market.

Find the people who are already there

Most projects connect with something people already care about: a community, an identity, a genre, a profession, a subculture, a sport, a mythology, a fandom or a particular kind of experience. Somebody out there is already having that conversation.

Your job as the filmmaker is to find the strongest genuine route into it and work out where those people actually gather. A particular festival, creator, newsletter, club, podcast or community gives you somewhere concrete to start.

All of this feeds directly into a wider point we make across Reframe Collective’s work: marketing needs to begin during development and continue through the lifecycle of the project, with a different job at each stage.

A Maker’s Perspective

David Duke, a Wellington-based puppet maker, creature and modelmaking artist whose work spans stop-motion, animatronics, miniatures and practical effects, came to this talk as well. David currently works in Creatures at Wētā FX after 13 years at Wētā Workshop across animatronics, props and 3D printing. His screen work includes stop-motion puppet work on the award-winning New Zealand short Blankets, modelmaking for Thunderbirds Are Go and miniature effects on Blade Runner 2049. Earlier this year, his piece Omnipede was exhibited as part of Wellington’s inaugural M.D.M.A. Modelmaking, Diorama & Miniature Arts show at Fishcube Gallery. David's feedback on this session:

“In just an hour, Iris delivers a masterclass in how to market your film and hone your audience. I can't recommend it enough.”

Now available for bookings

Find Your People is now available as a standalone one hour session (45-minute talk plus Q&A) for festivals, screen organisations, studios, filmmaker programmes and creative teams. The session gives filmmakers a practical framework for identifying the people most likely to care first, finding where they already are, and building audience thinking into the project early enough to influence what happens next. It is ideal if you want to know how to not only find your audience, but make them your allies and ambassadors.

Find Your People: Marketing That Builds a Crowd Around Your Story is available online or in person through Reframe Collective.

Get in touch with us to book the talk for your organisation, programme or event.