Hemlock Circle Productions

Social growth: early days, big movement

Even within the first month or two of working together, Hemlock Circle saw significant growth across multiple 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 (starting essentially from zero)

• ~500,000 page impressions

• 22,000 profile engagements

• ~1,250 people reached

• 24 new followers

While these are early-stage numbers, they show what happens when a studio starts feeding platforms with the kind of content audiences actually want to see: short, emotionally charged, visually striking slices of a cinematic universe.

Dallas International Film Festival – Opening Night Campaign

For DIFF, Hemlock Circle had a prime opportunity: an opening-night red carpet screening in a roughly 700-seat theater. Our job was to help fill as many of those seats as possible, while also amplifying the studio’s profile.

We:

• Converted their teaser/trailer into multiple social-native cuts optimized for vertical and square formats, each with a strong hook.

• Designed and ran a targeted Meta campaign focused on:

  • Dallas-area indie film lovers

  • festival-goers and arts audiences

  • additional interest overlays aligned with the film’s themes.

• Directed traffic to a focused landing page for ticket information and sales.

Campaign outcomes:

• 12,500+ landing page clicks on a total ad budget of about $2,500

• Reach of approximately 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 genuinely thrilled with, especially for an indie studio and a first run at this scale

Website & Club Hemlock

On the owned-media side, we:

• Completely overhauled the Hemlock Circle website with a cinematic, studio-forward design that better reflects the quality of their work.

• Introduced Club Hemlock, an email-based insiders’ club offering BTS footage, sneak peeks, and early access to new projects and announcements.

• Drove overall site traffic up by more than 600%, giving Hemlock Circle a rapidly growing pool of fans they can reach directly, independent of any one festival or platform.

This combination — strong social presence, effective ad campaigns, and an owned audience — is what starts to shift a studio from “unknown indie outfit” to “brand people recognize and seek out.”

Hemlock Circle Productions is exactly the kind of studio we love working with: ambitious, craft-obsessed, and ready to treat their marketing with the same seriousness as their films. Together, we’ve begun to prove that you don’t need a massive studio machine to generate buzz, grow an audience, and have a strong festival presence. You need a tight strategy, cohesive branding, and a team that knows how to move quickly on the right levers.

For other indie filmmakers and studios, Hemlock Circle’s early results show what’s possible when you:

• treat your studio as a brand, not just a logo at the end of the credits

• invest in social channels that can compound over time

• and use festivals not just as prestige moments, but as springboards for long-term audience growth.

This is only the beginning for Hemlock Circle, but the trajectory is already clear: when your creative and your marketing are pulling in the same direction, every new release gets easier to launch and harder to ignore.