Emily Best Talks Seed&Spark,
the Distribution Playbook, and offers advice to creatives
Interview by Miles McKeller-Smith
March 8, 2025
In this interview, we speak with Emily Best, the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark. Emily discusses the platform, modern day film distribution, and the importance of maintaining creative routines despite the duties of life and work.
Emily, thank you for joining us. Let’s begin with an intro on who you are and what you do.
Yeah. Thanks. My name is Emily Best. My pronouns are she, her, hers. I am the mother of two elementary school children. My husband is an actor, and we live outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And I’m also the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark and Film Forward. Outside of all of those roles, when I get to make things.
My art is writing, so I make motion pictures. And I do like it, but my actual art form is writing. I actually finished the draft of a book this year. That is loosely a memoir and short stories. And that’s actually how I show up as an artist. When I make motion pictures, my favorite way to make them as a writer director is short form.
So web series or short films. And then obviously I support a lot of other projects, usually as a producer, executive producer. And I’ve done that in like every motion picture media except for TV. I don’t think I’ve ever produced anything for TV.
How did you come into writing?
Both my parents were writers. They went to grad school for writing. They met in grad school for writing, and they had this incredible community of writers around them. But both of them chose, like, sort of more stable careers instead of pursuing writing for their mama. And my dad was a journalist, so that is writing full time.
But, yeah, they went pretty far away from their creative writing, from a career perspective. And so I think I grew up naturally with the approach that like writing is something that’s always “on.” I was an avid journal learner and, you know, would write things for the school newspaper. And I went to a writers program for young creative writers at Columbia University when I was like 15.
Just were really, really into short form and short fiction. And, yeah, it was just sort of always on. What I love about it is that you don’t really need anything. I have a notebook and a pen and then I can be a writer.
That part is very satisfying to me. I still have not adapted my writing practice to the digital age. Like, my writing practice is still very much pen to paper, and my handwriting is terrible these days. But, but yeah, it just. And I fell away from it for a really long time building seed and spark. Then I came back to it through an absolutely amazing class that is taught by these two women wholive in Spain.
But the workshop is taught in English, and it’s called Write Where You Are. And for anyone out there who is interested in building a sustainable writing practice, I cannot recommend this workshop enough. They just really understand how to build a container for writers that can keep you going. So yeah, I’ve had to come back to it with workshops in order to maintain it.
Work always gets in the way. For people trying to establish a sustainable creative career – don’t do the thing that they tell you to do. Don’t just grind yourself to the bone and give up all of those creative habits. Because they’re really, really hard to bring back once you, let that time and space go. I think about how much more clear headed and capable I feel when I have even just an hour a week dedicated to creative practice. That doesn’t sound like a lot to somebody who’s got it. But if you have lost it, an hour a week seems insurmountable.
My big advice these days is don’t give up that practice for anything. Don’t grind over it. If you can avoid it.
I love that. Thank you for sharing. I’d like to just go ahead and get into Seed&Spark. What made you come to the idea of wanting to do this particular type of crowdsourcing platform?
Need. Necessity is the mother of invention. I was making a film with a group of friends about women, friendships, and we had enough connections that we were getting meetings with sales agents and distributors. They were telling us incredibly unhelpful things like, there’s no audience for a movie about female friendships. Or my favorite is if you could put some lesbian erotica in it, we could sell it.
Except they didn’t even mean lesbian erotica for lesbians. They were basically saying if you could figure out how to make women friendship sexy for men, then we would know what to do with it. And I was like, “Forget you guys.” We needed to raise funding independently. Kickstarter and Indiegogo were brand new and most people that we knew were actually not familiar with those platforms, except for the artists in our immediate circle.
Those were not the people that had money to spare. So, we built a little WordPress website with the help of my roommate at the time. We put a PayPal link in the bottom, and then we listed every individual item we would need to borrow or fund, in order to make the movie.
It was like a wedding registry. And we sent that link to every single person that we knew. Facebook used to have a function called notes. It was back when Facebook had a Substack. That’s what I like to say. You know, back then, this sort of thing was very novel on the internet.
We’re talking about the extremely early days of Twitter. Instagram was only still photographs; heavily, heavily filtered, still photographs.
So some of the tools and the way that we think about them today simply weren’t available back then. Part of the novelty we learned about the wish list is it gave people something to talk about and think about like, oh, I’m a nurse. I’m going to send them the first aid kit or oh, I’m a foodie.
I want to make sure they have good coffee or. And so we started to see people contributing to projects in ways that they personally identified with, even if they were not filmmakers. And it made what we did kind of legible to the people outside of our direct industry. We needed to raise $20,000 in cash in a pretty short period of time so we could, like, get to set. We raised $23,000 in cash and literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans and gifts of locations and goods and services.
My favorite example was because we had this list of items that we needed. I was doing all sorts of interesting outreach. I reached out to all of the local car dealerships where we were going to film. This used car salesman got back to me and asked to read the script. He read the script and recommended the two cars that he thought our main characters would drive. We agreed with him, and he gave them to us for free for six weeks.
That is incredible. I think relationship building is one of the special elements found in using a platform like this. And, of course, being able to raise money for your project.
That’s right. Yeah. So once we had that experience, filmmakers from all over the country started reaching out to me to ask me how we did it. That was when I thought maybe there is a place in the market for creators who need to build audiences as a part of their craft. I mean, every creator needs an audience in order to build a sustainable living.
What was very interesting about what happened to us is those sales agents and distributors who initially told us there was no audience, came back around and said, wait, how many email addresses do you have? How many people got involved? We already saw that we could influence the gatekeepers if we had the information. And we had a direct connection to the audience. Maybe they weren’t making such smart decisions around how they were keeping the gate.
Numbers talk. Speaking of numbers, Seed&Spark boasts an 82% success rate. That’s incredible. What do you think contributes to projects being greenlit so frequently on this platform compared to others?
Two things. We provide a ton of upfront education. The vast majority of creators who end up crowdfunding on Seed&Spark, at some point, have taken a workshop from us. We teach about 100-150 live workshops a year. And we go to a lot of film festivals, especially regional film festivals. We really try to get into the communities where creators are both getting their career started or sustaining them. We’re there to make sure you have all of the resources that you need, no matter where you are. So the education is one and the feedback is the second.
So we have a real live human expert review every single crowdfunding project that comes through the platform and give targeted feedback to ensure you’re set up for success. And just to be clear, I recently crowdfunded for my feature film Ratified, and I got feedback and she was right. And I’m considered one of the world’s foremost experts on film crowdfunding.
I also deeply benefited from the feedback. It’s not that we’re going to prevent people from launching without taking our feedback, but what we see is they’re usually in the 18%. Because a lot of our feedback just has to do very simply with an outreach strategy and goal size. And what we really try to do is set with creators that if you have done a ton of audience building in advance of crowdfunding, you can be really aggressive about your goals.
If you are brand new to audience building, you either need to take the time to do some audience building before you crowdfund, or you need to understand that you’ve got to level set your goal and maybe engage in stage two financing. So part of what we’re trying to do is partner with creators to make sure that they can take the next step, wherever they are in the journey.
What we don’t want creators to do is try to launch a $100,000 crowdfunding campaign when they’ve never done a day of audience building, fail miserably, and feel bad about it. That’s not the goal. The goal is to make crowdfunding surmountable for literally anyone.
That is super important. And as someone who has crowdfunded on Seed&Spark, I can attest to the fact that we received the same notes that you mentioned. And our reviewer wasn’t harsh with her critique, just gave us honest feedback for us to consider before we launched our campaign.
On the note of marketing and distribution, I’d love to kind of transition over into the Distribution Playbook. I believe this is going to be a gamechanger for indie filmmakers and content creators. Can you give us a just brief summary about what that is?
So back in 2019, really end of 2018, we started to hear from creators that the the dramatic shift in the landscape of distribution that was being brought about by streaming was both making people feel like, gosh, maybe there’s more opportunity than ever, but I’m less clear than ever about how to capitalize on it. And it was changing the way festivals were programmed.
It was changing the way distributors pick things up, changing windows – just changing everything really fast. The question that we kept getting in our crowdfunding workshops was like, “Can you do this same workshop up for distribution?” So we went and we worked with a bunch of subject matter experts on things like theatrical distribution, television, etc. and we put together a comprehensive workshop called the Distribution Downlow.
This workshop was like 65 slides, 2.5 hours on the high side, and was hard to teach at best. But the same amount of change that had happened in the previous five years that was making people really anxious has happened in the last five years.I spend a lot of time with Christie Marchese, who was the founder of Picture Motion, one of the most remarkable impact distribution consultancies out there.
She also went on to found Kinema, which is a platform that I am using right now for my film. That makes it super easy to book non theatrical, private screenings, and organizational screenings. We spent a lot of time talking about where the market was going and how quickly it was shifting and how much time we were spending in private and workshops on panels talking about this.
And I said, “I wish there was a way to just make the Distribution Downlow available to everyone.” We settled on what a resource it might be if there was like a totally open source distribution playbook that everybody could not only pull from, but contribute to because of how fast the landscape is shifting. If you were to write this down in some sort of static form, like a book, it would be worthless, almost like three months from now.
So Christy and I just sort of set a deadline for ourselves that we would launch this thing at Tribeca and we converted. We use the Distribution Downlow as a framework. And then we built everything, using this platform called notion, which is just like a, you know, it’s sort of perfect if you’re going to build kind of a brain, like an institutional brain.
And what we’re hoping is that the Distribution Downlow kind of operates as this institutional brain for independent distribution. But I want to be really clear about something, because I get very agitated when people compliment the Distribution Playbook as if it is a solution. It’s not. It is a resource.
People are like, “Oh, you’ve democratized distribution.” No, we created the right to vote. Think about the right to vote. The right to vote itself is not democracy; exercising the right to vote is democracy. You can abstain from participating in democracy. Sure – and that’s up to you. But, the resource itself is not the solution. Using it and sharing what you’ve done and building new infrastructure with it, that is the democratization of distribution.
So I always just caution people to say, like, the fact that this thing exists doesn’t mean anything if we don’t use it. So I’m really hopeful that creators can navigate their way through it easily, can build really interesting distribution plans, and then contribute back, their learnings and their infrastructure because I think there are so many new ways to distribute.
“I make art for connection…I’m focused on who this art is for in the real world
and not inside Hollywood or the film industry at large.”
– Emily Best
I’ll use my own film as an example. So Ratified is a feature documentary about the 100 year struggle to enshrine the Equal Rights Amendment in the US Constitution. The US Constitution is the only constitution without protections for gender equality. The only modern constitution and the Equal Rights Amendment is the only amendment we have ever fully ratified as a nation that has not been published in the Constitution.
Extremely infuriating. That’s why we made a movie about it. There are myriad organizations across law, politics, activism, and education that are excited to use this film as a tool to talk about gender equality in their specific category. And this is a network that we’re building that is really doing a lot of work for us in terms of distribution.
And they are hungry for more things like this, because once they use this tool in a certain community, well, they’ve used it, right? They can’t use it. Again, it would be really nice if we could point to something else and be like, we’ll use this one next. And so what I’m doing is I already have a succession plan in terms of like, who are the creators that I am passing this infrastructure off to so they can use it next?
And I think if we start doing that as independent creators where like we build something that’s really working and then we don’t just walk away from it or like guard it to ourselves because it’s going to be too long before you make your next film for it to be relevant. We pass it around right the same way that we’re all passing around the same $25 and everybody’s crowdfunding campaigns, like we just have a lending circle going.
I feel the same way about some of these distribution connections and, and, strategies. And so we can pass them around and really build infrastructure that way. But we have to do that work like nobody’s going to save us. Nobody’s going to come do that work for us. And it’s why I just say, like the Distribution Playbook is not a solution, but it is a resource for you to participate in the solution that we collectively will benefit from.
Generally speaking, what advice would you pass off to indie filmmakers, about making their projects?
I’m going to say this, and I’m going to say maybe it doesn’t apply to everybody, but my experience in every kind of project I have been involved with, whether it’s narrative, documentary, feature, short, whatever. When we have been incredibly focused on the audience that we want to reach, everything around the project becomes fun and exciting and creative and generative.
As soon as we focus on the industry, it becomes hard and onerous and like Sisyphean. So I would just say that I think some creators are sort of raised with this idea that “I’m special enough for them to come down on high and pick me.”
Maybe. But so what? Like, what does your work matter if just some people in the industry like it? It’s really only interesting if audiences are moved. So I would just say that in my personal experience, when I have focused on the audience, everything breaks open and becomes the thing that I look for. I make art for connection. That’s why I make art. I’m focused on who this art is for in the real world and not inside Hollywood or the film industry at large.
And the other thing I would say is nobody’s coming to save us. We are going to save us. And that can seem sad, or we can feel mad about it, or we can be excited that at least like for the most part, we’re sharing a value system. That’s going to help us move forward together.
Last thing, what’s next for Seed&Spark?
Oh, man. We’re so excited about the work. I think you’re going to see us doing a lot more, community gathering. Because I think if we are all in this together and we all sort of agree that we have to save us, then we’ve got to hang out together and swap ideas. So a lot more of that next year.
This interview was featured in Issue 5 of crEATe Magazine.
