Beth Tanenhaus Winsten has ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. And they all seem to come from a restless "Why not...?" attitude about filmmaking, technology and the Internet.
"I'm really interested in the fusion of science and art, and how technology and storytelling can come together,” the filmmaker explains. It's an interest that has led her to create tinyBigPictureshow here in Ann Abor, a video production company that specializes in a short, story-based approach to Internet media.
An accidental documentary filmmaker, if ever there were a case for the virtues of networking, Winsten is living proof. A native of New York who attended the Sibford School in England and became the first American to be accepted to The Royal Shakespeare Company National Youth Theatre in London, Winsten washed up in Michigan in the late 1980s. Visiting her brother, who was on the faculty at Wayne State, she met her future husband and ended up sticking around, even after her sibling moved away a year later.
Winsten found work on a public relations campaign with legendary political PR guru Morrie Gleicher,and ended up being introduced to Ron Williams at
Metro Times. This landed her a gig writing about film. After praising the work of local filmmaker Sue Marx (who won an Oscar for her short subject film
Young At Heart), Winsten then found herself invited by Marx to help out on a retrospective documentary about the reopening of Detroit's Fox Theater.
"Sue said to me, instead of just writing about film and criticizing it, why don't you come help us make one?" Winsten recounts.
That invitation got her access to a backroom at the Royal Oak Music Theater, which served as a de facto archive for local historical theaters. "It was filled with boxes full of photos and movie cards, and it was fabulous. I was brought in to go through the mess, so I organized everything and was able to come up with a storyline for the documentary on the Fox."
"I was supposed to just come down for a day, and I ended up becoming a co-producer and winning an Emmy,” Winsten laughs. “And without ever having gone to film school!"
For five years Winsten worked with Marx, producing films for National Geographic Television and local PBS stations, among other clients. There she became part of a small but close-knit community of filmmakers.
“Film was very small and very specialized in Detroit back then,” Winsten explains. “It was tiny and isolated and everyone knew each other so we all worked with each other.”
Eventually, however, Winsten decided it was time to move on. She realized that because of the way she ended up in the industry, she actually didn't know very much about the technical side of filmmaking. When a project brought her to Ann Arbor she decided that if she was going to stay in Michigan, the college town was where she was going to make her home.
It was a fortuitous decision.
"I met Frank Beaver at U-M and they were trying to fill up the graduate film program, so he offered me a fellowship where I would teach screenwriting and then get to be at the school and make films."
Winsten went on to win the Major Drama Avery Hopwood Award. Her 1995 thesis film,
Body And Soul, won an Emmy, and screenwriter Kurt Leudtke (
Out of Africa, Absence Of Malice) mentored her on her script
Rock Garden, which won the 1999 National Festival of New Works Competition
At the same time, Winsten's writing was making the rounds in Hollywood. The response was good and interest was growing, "but when my son was born I realized I had no interest in moving to L.A. to live," she says. "As a kid I moved around a lot so I wanted to have a hometown for my son, and I liked Ann Arbor."
After taking time off to raise her son Max, Winsten says that when she did decide to go back to work the world of filmmaking had changed. The rise of digital technology, the Internet and, in particular, YouTube, had completely altered the landscape.
"I felt a little like Rip Van Winkle, with a set of skills that wasn't as relevant as it once was. So I adapted."
And for Winsten that meant networking. "I knew the Internet was a great medium for the kind of documentary storytelling I was interested in but I didn't know this world, so I started meeting with people I thought who did. I set up a bunch of lunches."
One of those lunches was with Catherine Juon and Linda Girard at Pure Visibility, who offered Winsten free space in their offices. It was a place where she could work on her ideas for how to present visual stories on the Internet.
"It was amazing, and so generous of them,” Winsten says. "I learned a lot about the web just by being there. I absorbed a bit about analytics and social media, and how that would impact video-making.”
Winsten realized that the net provided a whole new content medium and the way to design productions needed to shift, because people watch things on the web differently. Sharing her ideas with Daryl Weinert of U-M's Business Engagement Center at yet another lunch, he invited her to produce something for BEC.
"It's where I got the idea for tinybigpictureshows." Winsten saw that the nature of video content was changing, becoming more design oriented. It could include still images, flash graphics, animations, and alternative sources of visuals.
"I don't even call them videos anymore, I call them visual stories,” she explains. “But the writing is key. Anyone can get access to the technology but not everyone can write. Which is my strength, thank goodness.”
Invited by Weinert to give a talk to some marketing folks about how filmmaking has evolved, Winsten landed a few more jobs. Thus an idea became a business.
"A friend of mine who works in the venture capital world pointed out to me that really I'm just a content provider," Winsten explains. "He said, I'll never ever make any money if I don't have something that's identifiably mine. So I trademarked tinybigpictures as a specific concept: A three-act story structure in three minutes."
Last fall Winsten's BTW Films moved into a downtown space on Liberty Street, above Afternoon Delight. It's there that her tinyBIGpictureshows began attracting clients, investing in equipment, developing a stable of freelancers, and took on a full time employee.
Social media, Facebook in particular, has become yet another way to for Winsten to do what she does best - network. She's been friended by an eclectic mix of professionals and celebrities, and gotten both leads and jobs from those relationships.
"The head cartoonist at Hallmark Cards saw one of my videos and ended up promoting one of my videos,” she says. “That got me all kinds of notice."
And like most new businesses, the work has been a mix of small local jobs and the occasional client with deep pockets. In tinybigpictureshows' case that's meant developing video projects for the office of the Air Force Surgeon General and its involvement with future-based agile thinking.
"It's fascinating stuff, forecasting the future of military healthcare, imagining what it might look like in the year 2045. Things like that," she explains.
Yet, "The truth is, I've never run a business before and I'm still trying to decide whether I like doing it," Winsten admits. "Mostly, I would love to be able to keep young and talented people, designers, whatever, here. Eventually, I would love to bring together the right team and let them take over."
Though she believes it's an inevitable aspect of her industry, Winsten worries that young people aren't choosing to stay in Ann Arbor. "The young people I've worked with don't stick around. I think it would help if local companies got tax breaks for hiring people in digital media."
Montreal, Canada enacted a similar tax strategy for the video game industry and it has produced great successes. Winsten sees the approach as a way to help grow an otherwise small industry into something big enough to attract and retain talent. “I think it'd be a real incentive to stay. ”
Winsten also thinks that Ann Arbor isn't the place for artists it once was. "Things have shifted since I first moved here. People used to be more connected, less splintered," she says. "There were crowds of artists who worked together and kind of informally networked with each other. For instance, until today I've never met you. Fifteen years ago we would have certainly bumped into each other."
But her nature is to be upbeat and wide-eyed about the multitude of possibilities ahead for her business and artistic interests. So, she's off on another subject, talking about her collaboration with British film editor and documentary maker Rex Pyke to create a web-based series about writers. The topic drifts to why graphic artists are more suited to new media content than filmmakers. Then she's expressing her desire to work with more local artists.
"When I think about Andy Warhol's Factory in New York, I think that now that could happen anywhere!" she exclaims. "Google is here. Davy Rothbart is here... or, at least, he pops in and out. There are so many interesting things going on locally. We just need more cohesion. I mean, why not have a Factory here in Ann Arbor?"
Winsten is clearly bursting at the seams with interests and questions and ideas. All of it, no doubt, fodder for her next mini epic in visual storytelling.
Jeff Meyers is the managing editor of Concentrate and Metromode. He is also an award winning film critic for Detroit's Metro Times.
All photos by Doug Coombe