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I am helping a friend who wishes to start an anime club in Rockhampton, Australia, and would appreciate some advice from those who are part of, or manage, an anime club, especially from forum-posters who live in Australia.

1) What would be the best legal way of showing new-release anime shows? How does the difference between licences in America and Australia affect what shows can be shown in Australia?
2) What is the legal position of showing anime released on DVD at an anime club? Is there a difference in airing a show that has a R1-only release and an R4 release? Do we need to ask for permission from the company that released the DVD in order to air it at the club (which I am presuming is a public venue)?
3) For those with some knowledge of running an anime club, what sort of problems have you encountered in setting up and running the club, and how did you go about solving them?

Well, the licensing differences in AU only have an effect on what Madman can offer, it has no effect on what DVD's a person can have (Importing form the US for commercial resale isn't legal, but its completely legal for private use).

The other difference is, of course, that many of the legal streaming sites will have region blocks on their content, so there will only be so much available. The best thing to do would be to just have members alternate bringing in their physical media. For the REALLY new shows, Madman will stream a few of them, but for the most part you'll just have to take your chances with crunchy roll.

I question whether a club is regarded as a public venue. When your showing it en masse it obviously applies, but showing it in a small group, where it would be no different than if you invited people over to your house, will not be in breach of the law. Even if it was, to be honest, i doubt many companies would care unless you where making significant money from it.

All that I can tell you based on my own experiance is Good Luck-you're gonna need as much of it as you can get.

zrdb wrote:

All that I can tell you based on my own experiance is Good Luck-you're gonna need as much of it as you can get.

Would you mind telling me about your experiences with anime clubs so that I can learn from you what worked and what did not?

I've had some experience being in an anime club although not running one. I'd say organization is definitely key. Such as having an idea of what you want to do during club and the future goals and hopes of the club as a whole.

Definitely get to know the people in the club and their interests. Do you have anime newbies in your group? Hardcore mecha fans? Shoujo lovers? It's very possible you may have a lot of anime newbies in your group. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it just means they maybe better off exposed to some anime that a lot of long time fans have seen already before jumping into new stuff.

Obviously a big thing of an anime club is well... actually having anime to watch Wink

.

Also if you're in a college or something see if you can get funding! Sometimes schools will give clubs money which you can use to get anime.

I've been in charge of our college's anime club since 2004 (I'm faculty, not a student, so no comments on the time I've spent here Wink

), and I have a few things that seem to be working for us that I'll just throw out there.

First, I feel it is important that we watch entire series, or at least complete seasons, of titles. At the beginning people would bring titles and we would watch a few episodes of each but never really go anywhere with it. So we started watching full series. At one point I was choosing these based on what the group seemed to enjoy. Eventually though I felt it needed to be more democratic. Our current method is this: During the month prior to a semester beginning, I have the students submit titles that they are interested in watching and feel like the group will enjoy and I'll create a page with embedded youtube videos of either a trailer for the show or its opening animation. Based on this limited introduction to the show, members vote on which shows they would like to preview. Then after the semester begins, and usually after the Club Fair (where we recruit new members), we'll preview the first episode of the top 7 vote-getters and then vote again as to which series we will watch. This will be anywhere from 3-5 depending on the length of the series in question.

Once we pick shows I try to set a schedule which works for most people. For us, since many students work part time, I've found that Thursday evenings work better than other days. Also a number of them don't have class on Friday. Another aspect of our club is most of the women only stay for roughly half the meeting, and toward the end of the night it's mainly the guys, so this affects how I set the order in which we'll watch our shows.

Beyond watching our series, we have several Theme Nights each semester. In the Fall we always have the Halloween and Christmas (end of semester) parties where we watch episodes of various shows that fit the holidays. Other theme nights we've had are Music Night and Comedy Night. We also have Movie Night every so often where we'll watch two movies or maybe throw in a short OVA series. This coming semester we'll have Mecha Night, and for our final meeting I'm going to try a Summer Vacation theme night. I've been mentioning a Shoujo night but that idea hasn't gotten a lot of traction in the group.

It's also good to get together to do stuff outside of just watching anime all the time. We've gone bowling, played mini golf, gone to the movie theater, and seen plays. We tend to do that more in the summer. Around Halloween the past two years we've also visited some local corn mazes to get lost in the dark.

At the beginning I used to write to companies to get permission to show their series, but this was very difficult because only two (Funi & ADV) ever cared to respond. In retrospect, Geneon had other more important issues to worry about at the time. But we weren't very organized as to what we were watching and this became a huge time drain with not a lot of cooperation on their part. Ultimately I just stopped doing it. I feel a little bit guilty, but at the same time our group is not particularly large (less than 20 most nights), we don't have any dues or take up any money other than for food & drinks, and when we watch licensed stuff it's on R1 DVDs.

By the way, we don't get any funding from the college. I have my own immense anime collection to draw from as well as the collections of the club members. On rare occasions we'll rent a DVD from a local video store, or stream via ANN or Crunchyroll. For our meetings we use one of our classrooms that has a computer with a DVD drive hooked up to a projector of reasonably good quality. Because a fair number of the group members prefer dubbed anime, we'll tend to watch some series dubbed and others subbed (maybe a 40-60 split...)

All of that said, probably the most important quality other than organization is just having someone willing to take charge of the group and run the darn thing.

Show them things they'd normally not watch ie. genres they've never tried.

For instance, most of the members in my club only ever watch shounen stuff and some shoujo stuff. So I ran Mitsudomoe for them. They loved it!

Ordering in food (pizza seems to be especially popular) can attract/retain members too. Smile

That's one thing we did in college.

rojse wrote:

zrdb wrote:

All that I can tell you based on my own experiance is Good Luck-you're gonna need as much of it as you can get.

Would you mind telling me about your experiences with anime clubs so that I can learn from you what worked and what did not?

I will definitely echo the sentiments of "Good luck - you'll need it". I ran a club in high school from '00 - '02 and organized a few anime viewing nights at University between '03 and '06. larinon has some excellent advice but I am going to grab some snippets to illustrate some points.

My overall advice is going to be this - Every club is different. There are some universal truths, like that I've found the success of the club is just as dependent on its membership as it is on its leadership. But, because the make up of the club can vary widely, some things that worked for me may not for you and vice versa.

Also, since your initial questions deal heavily with Australian law, don't take my advice as qualified but when it comes to presenting to a small, private group, you can probably get away with the fact that anime's niche audience and no one will actually care.

rojse wrote:

3) For those with some knowledge of running an anime club, what sort of problems have you encountered in setting up and running the club, and how did you go about solving them?

It may be just me but I see this question as being really broad. Starting and officiating an anime club takes a lot of work. You and a couple mates probably got together and said, we like cartoons and there are other people that like cartoons, we should all get together and watch cartoons! Which is an awesome start. But, what do you want the end result to be? Determining the initial officers is usually easy but how do you determine who succeeds you? Are you limited (like, how long you are a student somewhere) or is it feasible that you can declare yourself Dear Leader President For Life?

Or, are you just talking about an operational sna-fu? Like, Joe forgot to bring the tape [DVD/laptops/etc]? I encountered this a couple of times in my high school days. The first time I was completely caught off guard and had to stall the start of the meeting while the forgetful person had to go home, get the tape, and come back. Every time after that, I had a back-up (usually something the scheduling committee agreed upon but just didn't make the final cut) so the meeting would go off as normal, only prompted with an apology that we were watching something else.

Sometimes, what seems like a huge mistake can actually turn out being a success. We scheduled the entirety of Giant Robo: The Animation one year. It was rare because it was one of the few times we scheduled an entire series and the OAV itself can be pretty slow in spots. But we persevered. Up until the last couple episodes, we'd lost most of the club; they'd show up but never pay attention, until a very gripping scene (Murasame reveals his powers) and everyone was hooked on it for the end.

Since I mentioned scheduling committee, the high school club was officered at first as a triumvirate and it evolved into a Gang of Four. Since we met at a school, dues were collected annually and we never had to scrounge for a TV and VCR, the main priority of leadership was schedule planning. And, since we didn't start club meetings until a couple weeks after school started, we took a couple weeks to lay out the entire school year's schedule. The club's bylaws were written that we were a social and cultural organization and we had appropriate-ness ratings to abide by, which limited what we could pull from. Since anime was still pretty niche, we opted for all ranges of genres/demographics and showed what we could. Having the entire schedule planned out ahead of time paid off a lot in the long run. We took requests from members, too.

larinon wrote:

First, I feel it is important that we watch entire series, or at least complete seasons, of titles.

As I noted, every club is different. My group all had very diverse tastes, so we would try and cater to those, which meant sticking with two hours (or so) of a given piece. Short OAVs and films would be shown in their entirety but TV series were usually just the first few episodes. One of our goals was to spread the breadth of Japanese animation available. A lot of people liked that philosophy, a few didn't.

larinon wrote:

Eventually though I felt it needed to be more democratic.

Every club is different. Democracy, in my experience, was not successful when it came to running an anime club. My members were, for the most part, terribly lazy. They wanted to come and watch cartoons and joke with people. A lot of times, they would request things that we simply couldn't show (school restrictions) or continue to request them after being turned down. Getting assistance from members that wasn't "on the spot" sort of stuff was like trying to pull teeth from a herd of cats. larionon, it sounds like you have a good bunch of members, it's good to hear.

I have found that the best way to successfully organize and run a club like this is a lot of benevolent dictatorship mixed with a nice dose of nepotism. Fortunately, my earliest dose of "anime fans are lazy sacks of shit" came my first year running when 2/3s of the leadership abandoned me early in the year. The following year when I recruited from the member base via elections for the open leadership positions, taught me that nepotism was a better method for selecting leadership. It worked for the most part but that may just be as much a mixture of the membership and the times.

rojse, sorry for the wall of text responses. It may sound like the whole thing has left a bitter taste in my mouth - it hasn't. It helped me a lot with organizational skills, managing processes and people. I learned a lot about marketing and advertising. And I learned the satisfaction of working hard, being dedicated and achieving goals. If you have any additional questions or specific questions, there'd be plenty of people to help.

SalarymanJoe wrote:

Democracy, in my experience, was not successful when it came to running an anime club. My members were, for the most part, terribly lazy. They wanted to come and watch cartoons and joke with people. A lot of times, they would request things that we simply couldn't show (school restrictions) or continue to request them after being turned down...

This had been my experience in the past as well. About 3-4 years ago I'd decided enough was enough and rather than worry about finding a president willing to take charge, I took charge myself. Our group is democratic in the way we select what titles we're watching, but in all other ways I guess you could consider it a sort of dictatorship. We do have a good group of core members that are always present among the others who seem to drift in and out.

SalarymanJoe wrote:

I have found that the best way to successfully organize and run a club like this is a lot of benevolent dictatorship mixed with a nice dose of nepotism. Fortunately, my earliest dose of "anime fans are lazy sacks of shit" came my first year running when 2/3s of the leadership abandoned me early in the year. The following year when I recruited from the member base via elections for the open leadership positions, taught me that nepotism was a better method for selecting leadership. It worked for the most part but that may just be as much a mixture of the membership and the times.

Definitely I would agree with this based on my experience. The members know they want to do something, but they don't ever really say what they want to do, or they may be unable to actually describe what they're looking for in the group. For me it's just a matter of figuring out what most of them will enjoy and be satisfied taking part in, and certainly this is not the easiest of tasks.

I still occasionally have the same problem that you mentioned, members present but not paying attention and possibly being disruptive to everyone else. You just have to have someone willing to take charge and get people to quiet down. It doesn't have to be absolute silence, and I don't mind people making comments every once in awhile during the screening, but there has to be someone there to keep it to a minimum.

You've already had some good replies, but I'll throw my experience onto the pile in the hopes that the more information you have, the more prepared you'll be.

First: timing, or length of meeting. We only meet once a week, but do so for around 6-7 hours on an evening so it's a bit of a long haul. Some people may not have the patience for this, so I guess it's up to you to gague your members and decide whether a long single meeting or a couple of shorter meetings per week is most suitable.

Second: schedule. During a meeting, we'll watch four episodes of three different series (so three blocks of 2 hours) with a break in the middle for pizza/chinese/whatever, during which we'll usually have AMVs, episodes of Robot Chicken or something else on in the background whilst people mill around, chat and eat. The three blocks all have different 'themes':
1. Slice of life/comedy
2. Action
3. Psychological

Which helps to ensure that there's usually something for everybody.

Third: series selection. The members make nominations towards the end of the semester. Each person can make as many nominations as they want in each of the three categories, but we have a rule that we won't watch anything that the club has already watched in the last three years to stop a constant Code Geass-Death Note-Ouran rotation. After everyone has made their nominations, the committee will, in a most undemocratic but completely understandable way, create a shortlist of about five nominations per category. Usually they'll whittle out the silly stuff (eg. Haruhi season 2), shows that take too long (eg. Naruto) and shows that are unsuitable (very strong ecchi). The shortlist is e-mailed to everyone in the club, with a one week deadline on replies for votes. The most popular series are shown next semester.

Fourth: administration and the boring stuff. Really, this needs to be sorted out first. Before you go selecting series and worrying about being sued by distributors, you need to sort out all the dull, background work that no-one will ever notice or thank you for. This may include, but is not limited to: organising a room or location, organising a projector and DVD player/computer, gaining college or university approval for your club (this may not apply), organising chairs, sofas, bean bags or hay bales as something to sit on, organising a way to inform people about your club and getting the numbers and menus of local take aways (seriously, people always forget this one!). Also, definitely find other like minded people to help you out. This is NOT a one man job, or even a two man job, and you will regret it fast if you don't rope as many people in to help you as you can from the outset.

One half of running a club is dealing with constant questions and running after issues that have to be resolved, and the other half is delegating those questions and issues to someone else so you can actually sit down and enjoy some anime. Best of luck! Smile

SalarymanJoe wrote:

rojse, sorry for the wall of text responses.

I love text walls. It shows that the poster believes they have something important to say and have put some effort into their response, and there's a lot more information for me to learn from. Not that shorter responses aren't of use, but good, lengthy explanations are often more helpful.

I would like to say thank you to everyone who has been considerate enough to respond, especially those who wrote a lot and obviously put in a lot of time and effort into their responses. I found this all quite helpful and I'm sure it will of great assistance when I do my small bit to help create this anime club.

Start it out of you home if possible with people you trust. The one thing I hated about college clubs was bringing my stuff to meetings. It's best to keep everything safe at home.

EventHorizon wrote:

You've already had some good replies, but I'll throw my experience onto the pile in the hopes that the more information you have, the more prepared you'll be.

First: timing, or length of meeting. We only meet once a week, but do so for around 6-7 hours on an evening so it's a bit of a long haul. Some people may not have the patience for this, so I guess it's up to you to gague your members and decide whether a long single meeting or a couple of shorter meetings per week is most suitable.

Second: schedule. During a meeting, we'll watch four episodes of three different series (so three blocks of 2 hours) with a break in the middle for pizza/chinese/whatever, during which we'll usually have AMVs, episodes of Robot Chicken or something else on in the background whilst people mill around, chat and eat. The three blocks all have different 'themes':
1. Slice of life/comedy
2. Action
3. Psychological

Which helps to ensure that there's usually something for everybody.

Nice, nice. Smile

PM me if you want free (legitimate Madman copies) of Takahata's Only Yesterday.

When I find them, I'm hoping to donate 100 copies to Justin Sevakis so he can spread the Good News in the West. Anime hyper