Hemlock Circle Productions

Our mandate was twofold: win their Dallas International Film Festival opening night with a data-driven campaign, and build Hemlock Circle into a true studio brand that grows an audience between releases and carries fans from film to film.

We focused on four tracks:

Studio hub & list building. Rebuild the website as a studio home, not a static brochure, and launch Club Hemlock, an opt-in club of behind-the-scenes content, sneak peeks, and updates that turns visitors into subscribers.

Social channel upgrade. Turn teasers, trailers, and BTS footage into short, platform-native pieces for YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X that show off the studio’s tone and cinematic world.

Festival campaign. Promote the opening-night screening to the right Dallas-area audiences with organic and paid social, driving qualified traffic to a dedicated ticket landing page.

Content repurposing & creative support. Act as a post-production partner when their bandwidth was maxed, cutting the trailer and teaser into social “snacks” and producing professional crew interviews for video and press.

We took on the channel in April 2026, ahead of the theatrical release of Last Shot, and made it the film’s home on YouTube and the studio’s audience for what comes next. Over about six months we cut and published 15 long-form videos (trailers, featurettes, behind-the-scenes and Q&A) and 24 Shorts, optimized every upload for search, and ran YouTube ad campaigns that put the trailers in front of the right viewers.

• 13,054 net new subscribers, taking the channel from a standing start to just over 13,000
• 344,672 views and 3,410 hours of watch time across the channel
• 327,200 views of Last Shot videos, 95% of everything on the channel
• The official trailer: 182,758 views, with viewers watching about two-thirds of it on average. The teaser added 103,440.
• Shorts kept the film visible between pushes: about 31,900 views across 24 Shorts, led by “Baron Davis Brings the Heat” at 21,421
• The strongest featurette, Jaime Pressly on the film’s mother-and-son story, held viewers for three-quarters of its length

By August, 53% of the channel’s watch time was happening on television screens rather than phones: people were sitting down to watch the trailers and featurettes, not scrolling past them.

Together with the Meta campaign, which reached 1.83 million people, Last Shot reached an audience of more than 2.1 million, before counting organic social posts. Most of the YouTube views came from the promotion we ran; what the studio keeps is the 13,000 subscribers, ready for whatever Hemlock Circle releases next.

Google’s results pages are increasingly built from video: a video shelf, a short-video shelf, and an AI summary that reads everything on the page. A YouTube channel that publishes steadily, titles every upload for search and keeps viewers watching is how a small studio claims that space, and it’s the reason the channel sits at the center of our SEO and AEO work.

In August 2026, a search for “Last Shot movie” returned almost nothing but our work:

• Google’s AI summary described the film and cited lastshot.movie, the release site we built, as its official website
• lastshot.movie outranked IMDb and Deadline in the top card, two months after it launched
• The top two video results were Hemlock’s official trailer and teaser, above Sony’s similarly named One Last Shot
• The whole short-video shelf was Hemlock clips, from YouTube and Instagram side by side

Search “Hemlock Circle Productions” and 10 of the 11 page-one results are properties the studio owns, from the site and its YouTube channel to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn. Every future release launches into a search result Hemlock already controls.

For the theatrical run we built two sites around Last Shot. lastshot.movie tells the film’s story and cast, then switches to a theater finder at launch, so every ad, poster and press mention leads to showtimes. booking.lastshot.movie gives exhibitors and bookers one place for key art, story materials and direct contacts.

Social growth

In the first month or two of the engagement, Hemlock Circle’s social channels grew quickly:

• Instagram: followers from 988 to 1,143; reach from 77,000 to 412,000; profile engagement from 1,200 to 12,870
• Facebook, from essentially zero: ~500,000 page impressions, 22,000 profile engagements, ~1,250 people reached, 24 new followers

Early numbers, but they showed the pull of short, emotionally charged, visually striking slices of a cinematic universe, and set up the YouTube growth that followed.

The Dallas festival campaign

For DIFF, Hemlock Circle had an opening-night red carpet screening in a roughly 700-seat theater. We cut the teaser and trailer into vertical and square social versions, ran a Meta campaign targeting Dallas-area indie film lovers, festival-goers, and arts audiences, and sent traffic to a focused ticket landing page. The outcomes:

• 12,500+ landing-page clicks on a total ad budget of about $2,500
• Reach of about 285,000 people in the Dallas region
• Link click-through rates consistently above 3.5%
• Around 400–450 tickets sold for a 700-seat opening-night theater (roughly 60–65% capacity), a result the Hemlock team was thrilled with for a first run at this scale

Website & Club Hemlock

We overhauled the website with a cinematic, studio-forward design, launched Club Hemlock (an email insiders’ club with BTS footage, sneak peeks, and early access to new projects), and drove site traffic up more than 600%, giving the studio a fast-growing pool of fans it can reach directly, independent of any festival or platform.

The work combined creative support, paid media, and owned-channel infrastructure:

• Squarespace for the new site, with custom landing pages, Club Hemlock opt-ins, and analytics
• YouTube for trailers, shorts, and long-form content; Instagram and Facebook for Reels, posts, and stories; TikTok and X for short narrative beats and quick updates, all tied to the studio brand
• Meta ads with geo and interest targeting, creative tests across trailer and teaser cuts, and optimization on CTR, CPC, and landing-page behavior
• Trailer-to-social repurposing for different aspect ratios and hooks, with copy tuned to each platform’s culture and format

Hemlock Circle Productions is the kind of studio we love working with: ambitious, craft-obsessed, and as serious about marketing as about their films. Together, we’ve begun to prove you don’t need a massive studio machine to generate buzz, grow an audience, and show up strong at festivals. You need a tight strategy, cohesive branding, and a team that moves quickly on the right levers.

For other indie filmmakers and studios, the lesson is to treat your studio as a brand, invest in social channels that compound, and use festivals as springboards for audience growth, not just prestige moments. When your creative and marketing pull in the same direction, every release gets easier to launch and harder to ignore.