In a crowded digital landscape, breaking through takes more than luck — it takes strategy, vision, creativity, and dedication.
We spoke with Jamie Wrench and Josh Turner of CinemaHow, the film education Instagram channel which has exploded to 700k followers in less than a year, to find out the secret formula behind their growth and how they are turning a university side hustle into a long-term career.
The pair met when they were placed into shared student accommodation together in Exeter University, in the south west of England, less than two years ago, with Jamie a film student and Josh studying economics.
After trying various other entrepreneurial pursuits together, they turned their attention to becoming Instagram creators last year. The explosive rise of @cinemahow began in September, when they began to focus the page entirely on film education. By mid-October, an old Dark Knight camera breakdown that "started climbing views out of nowhere" had propelled them to 20,000 followers — momentum that carried them to 50,000 by Christmas, and then rapidly to 150,000 by the end of January.
They are now at 700k followers, and count A-listers including Justin Timberlake and Channing Tatum among them, as well as Oscar-winners including actor Jamie Foxx, director Sean Baker, and cinematographer Greg Fraser — who commented on their analysis of his own work. Other legendary cinema talent who follow the page include Black Swan creator Darren Aronofsky and It director Andy Muschietti. Jamie admits the attention “properly blew my mind.”
Here’s how they did it...
1. Find Your Niche
For Jamie and Josh, their breakthrough came from consistently providing film education content that wasn't widely available on short-form platforms — but it wasn’t their first idea.
Josh: “We have a lot of free time at university, and were looking for something entrepreneurial to do. We’ve tried all sorts of mad stuff! We’re both into the gym, and originally we tried to start a supplements company, but that didn’t make it off the ground. Then we tried some crypto trading, but that didn’t go too well either!”
Jamie: “Then last summer, I found some creators on Instagram in the film niche that were super-inspiring. But there weren’t many other pages doing the type of content that we are putting out in shorter-form reel formats. There were a few other iterations — I tried some different niches of film clips first. We’ve changed our username 17 times before landing on CinemaHow. I remember my first five videos got 20 views, then my sixth one got 150 views, which was the first film breakdown I did, and that was the spark. Since then we've been knuckling down on that style. In early September it became CinemaHow and focused on the film education. We try to be the home of breaking down cinema, like it says in our bio, but also appeal to the mainstream, people who aren’t film students, and just want to learn a bit more about it."
2. Prioritize Follower Conversion
High view counts and likes aren't the only metrics that matter — the content must compel a user to follow. For CinemaHow, educational content proved far more effective for follower conversion than general film clips.
Josh: "We did some videos with behind-the-scenes clips, one got 60 million views, one got 50 million views — but the amount of followers that came from it was next to nothing. Whereas if they can learn something from the breakdowns, the follow rate is so much higher. In terms of building an audience, people follow when they can learn something. Formats like color theory and camera breakdowns do really well. ”
Jamie: “That was a real breakthrough for us. Digestible education is what has built audience for us, and what we’re specializing in.”
3. Consistent Quality
Consistency is key for the algorithm. CinemaHow found success with a schedule of 10 high-quality posts per week.
Jamie: "A lot of our time is spent on the research to make sure everything we put out is the best it can be. Our actual output has decreased a little bit, from posting twice a day to ten times a week, and that’s deliberate to make sure whatever we’re putting out is as high quality as possible. It’s a balance of repeating consistent and successful formats and trying new things to find new breakthroughs.”
Josh: “Posting regularly massively helps. And falling back on formats of past successes. Doing what the audience would like to see, and doing it consistently. The Dark Knight scene that first took off was a camera breakdown reel, and we came back to that for more content, like The Godfather reel which was another big one for us.”
4. Ruthlessly Analyze Post Performance
When content underperforms, or really takes off, work out why. Jamie and Josh attribute success to taking accountability and deeply analyzing the presentation of their videos, understanding that the algorithm makes judgments based on various visual and audio factors.
Josh: “If a video doesn’t do well, look at it to see why you think that is, whether it was the lighting, whether it was the way that the text came up, whatever the formatting issue may have been, because there would be a reason for it — and just build on that".
Jamie: "It’s about putting emotions aside and just taking full accountability. If a post does well we will literally go into our software to map over it, and go down to like the nearest half second in terms of the timing and the pacing to do that again".
5. Select Collabs With Audience Value
Maintaining brand integrity and audience trust is paramount when choosing the right brand partnerships, and they are now opening doors for themselves and their community as Tongal Creators.
Jamie: "We’ve turned down a lot more money than we’ve made because we really want to focus on what our audience will be interested in. There have been lots of sponsorship opportunities that don’t resonate with where we want to go. We want to build authority and establish ourselves within the community. We’ve turned down an awful lot of potential partnerships to focus on what our audience actually cares about. What partners will keep the page authentic and offer some value to our audience? Collaborations have to align with your content and values. That’s the first thing that we think about and why we wanted to work with you guys at Tongal. I’m surrounded by up and coming filmmakers trying to make it, so that bridge between creators and companies is a perfect fit for our audience.”
