For our Future Issue, we asked three moviemakers of TikTok with large followings — Elise Schatz, 23, Ben Christensen, 27 and Danni Juhl, 28 — whether they see TikTok as the enemy or evolution of movies. Today you may know them by the handles @elise.mov, @dangerbean55, and @dannijuhl, respectively. But perhaps soon you’ll see their names in lights.
All three see themselves as filmmakers first, though they debut some of their best work on Instagram or TikTok rather than the festival circuit. Online, the feedback can be immediate, intense, and, as is rarely the case for creators of short films, profitable.
Schatz, based in Los Angeles, primarily makes music videos, and has recently worked with artists including Rehma, Hyra, Alex Banin, Rhea Raj, and Trevor Spitta, and documents her filmmaking process with TikToks. Her most-watched video — which shows her squeezing what looks like a real cheeseburger, but is in fact a foam prop on a film set — has more than 38 million views. Her second-most watched video, with more than 6 million views, is a moving story of how she carved out her own path as a director after film school rejection. She collaborated with friends while attending community college and working a 9-5 job.
Juhl, a graduate of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Film & Television Production Program, is a New York City writer, director and editor who makes what she calls micromovies on TikTok. One, “The Girl in the Oxfords,” has roughly 800,000 views. In it, Juhl daydreams about reinventing herself, imagining who she would be if she wore different shoes. Set to dreamy music, it’s both tranquil and thought-provoking, like a contemplative moment in an indie film. Juhl also makes longer- form short films on YouTube in which she blends narrative and documentary styles of filmmaking, including “How To Disappear Completely” and “The Grief Tape.”
Christensen, who is Vancouver-based, has several TikTok shorts with millions of views, but his most memorable may be “Missing Socks.” It tells an Interstellar-style story of two friends who travel to another dimension to find the socks that get lost in the dryer, then discover that only one of them can return. In keeping with Christensen’s style, it’s full of more than one satisfying twist, and surprisingly emotional dialogue. Leveraging his large and enthusiastic social media following, Christensen recently crowdfunded a $40,000 budget to make his upcoming short film, “Kill Space.”
Here’s our talk with Christensen, Juhl and Schatz about where all this is going.
Young Moviemakers of TikTok
MovieMaker: How much value do you all place on the traditional route of filmmaking? Do you care about your films screening in theaters, or are you more interested in being your own distributors?
Danni Juhl: There are a lot of scary headlines out there about how no one’s working and film is dying and all this stuff. I think that’s just a sign that a rebirth will probably be happening. That’s the positive spin — things are definitely changing and during that period, there’s going to be a lot of turmoil. But I think that something better is hopefully going to come on the other side of it. I have a strong feeling that it will have something to do with what we’re all doing on the internet, and artists taking their work into their own hands.
Ben Christensen: I like the optimistic note at the end of that. I like the rebirth idea. … I wouldn’t hate to be a TikToker or Instagrammer forever, but ideally, I’m not doing this when I’m 50. I could rock it. But I kind of look at it as a portfolio, similar to you guys. And there have been a few instances with indie filmmakers — I’ve co-written a few projects now just through people reaching out and being like, Hey, I’d love to have you co-write on this or direct this. Sometimes they don’t work out, but it is a cool jumping-off platform to meet other creators.
Also Read: A Talk With Four Moviemakers, Ages 18 to 22, About the Future of Film
MovieMaker: How do you think TikTok has changed the film industry, and how do you feel about it?
Elise Schatz: The studio side hasn’t been super receptive to TikTok or giving the filmmakers opportunities, because with film there’s so much risk. These are millions of dollars being invested into series or movies or TV. But it has allowed for a completely separate entity of independent filmmakers to really survive, or at least express themselves. And I’m grateful to be a part of that.
MovieMaker: What are your predictions for where the film industry is going?
Ben Christensen:Comedy movies are virtually dead. In the early 2000s, there would always be five or six big comedies in theaters. Now there’s not, and I think that’s because comedy actually might work better in short form. People get so inundated. You wake up in the morning, go on TikTok, and you’re gonna see sketch comedy.
I don’t know if we’ll see the return of comedy movies. There is so much good content and people are spending a lot of time on their phones and their computers instead of in theaters. The movies we see that do go to theaters have to get better and better. The quality has to be so high if we’re gonna pay the money to go.
Danni Juhl: There’s just so much fatigue from the hyper commercialized films that have been coming out. We’ve reached the end of our tolerance. I think that the pendulum is going to swing in the opposite direction. I think the most important aspect of a movie is going to be the artist’s connection to their audience and the community that builds around a film. In-person screenings are going to become way more important because of how much choice we have.
Elise Schatz: In terms of the future of the film industry, when I really think about it, I definitely think a film’s success is going to be dependent on their marketing campaign and where they’re actually able to push the movie after the fact.
MovieMaker: How do you monetize your following? Can you do this full time?
Danni Juhl: I’ve always been a freelancer, so it’s a little bit easier for me to juggle both. So I’m not full time at the moment. I’ve just started taking my first brand deals this year. It’s been cool, but it’s not reliable. You just don’t know when it’s going to happen. I edit a podcast, I edit short films. I’m an assistant editor as well. So that’s kind of how I make my consistent income.
I have only just started doing brand deals this year, so I’m not sure how it will pan out in total income by the end. I’m still figuring out how to make earning money through social media sustainable for me, and how to balance the commercial side with the artist side. But I will say I feel that the money from brand deals so far, where I make all of my social media income currently, has already changed my life and allowed me the freedom to make choices that are moving me in the direction of my goals.
Elise Schatz: I mix a couple avenues. I have social media, which is my own brand deals. … I also do content creation with agencies as well as independent clients. … Directing, when you get the proper budgets, sometimes I could take a cut from that, as well as working on set.
Ben Christensen: I am reliant on paid posts on my IG and TikTok for roughly 90% of my income. The other 10% I earn from traditional acting gigs and the occasional freelance videography job. This year will be my first entire fiscal year running ads since I signed with my agency; it’s looking to work out to somewhere around $85,000. Rates land anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 per contract, depending on the specifics of what the brand is looking for (syndicated posts, static posts, stories, UGC, et cetera) and I typically land a deal on a monthly basis. …
Ads are tough, because you don’t want to do too many. I don’t know what your guys’ following is like, but… when I post an ad, people are like, “What are you doing posting ads for big corporations?” I wouldn’t have time to make the videos that I do if I didn’t. I’d be working a 9-5 and probably going to bed when I get home.
MovieMaker: Do you think TikToks can be considered films in and of themselves? Like Ben’s “Missing Socks”?
Elise Schatz: That one’s very good.
Danni Juhl: So good.
Ben Christensen: Thank you. I got a lot of comments on that one. The most common ones were, “This should be a movie,” which made me think, “Oh, shit, should I have saved this idea and made it a proper movie? Like, did I just throw that away?”
It begs the question of what do you want — do you want more people to be affected by your thing, or do you want to make it more artistic, production-value wise?
When I first went on TikTok, I was like, “I gotta be doing trends. I gotta be doing stupid videos.” I tried that for a long time, and it was only when I started treating it with the same gravitas that I would treat writing a short film script — that’s when they started to blow up. That made me realize, oh, people actually want interesting things. They don’t want trends. They want something they haven’t seen before.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of MovieMaker Magazine.
Main Image: Elise Schatz courtesy of Schatz, Ben Christensen by Kristine Cofsky, and Danni Juhl, courtesy of Juhl.