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.

Social growth

Within the first month or two, Hemlock Circle saw significant growth across platforms:

• YouTube: subscribers from 23 to 1,082; views from ~500 to ~85,000; watch time from 8 hours to over 5,400 minutes
• 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 show the pull of short, emotionally charged, visually striking slices of a cinematic universe.

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.