FYCIt Wants to Help You Keep Up With Award Season Events

Ryland Aldrich’s helpful and free app FYCit was born from his awards-season stress a few years ago: As a producer of independent films and member of the Producers Guild and Television Academy, he found himself struggling to keep track of all the For Your Consideration events. 

“I was always invited to so many screenings during FYC season and tried to, like a good voter, see as much as I could, especially in theaters,” he recalls. “It was just so hard to find screenings that worked for my schedule, without spending hours browsing around all the different studio sites. There wasn’t any kind of centralization of that information.”

His wife, top publicist Emily Lu Aldrich, founder and owner of Accolade Publicity and Consulting, knew the FYC space very well: Her past experience includes leading the Bohemian Rhapsody craft awards campaign, which yielded three Oscar wins. 

She suggested: “Wouldn’t it be great if it was all on an app?” 

“And we were like, ‘Yeah, that’d be great. Someone should make that,’’” Ryland Aldrich recalls. 

Then Covid struck, and pandemic lockdowns gave him some downtime to reflect a little more.

“I’d been relatively busy doing indie features up until that time, we had just had our first kid, and I was kind of looking at what else was out there, besides trying to get features going, and putting your whole life into something for years,” he recounts.

“I said to Emily, ‘Remember that idea you had about the app? What if we just built it?’ 

In-person screenings weren’t happening, because of pandemic restrictions, but they knew they would come back sometime. So he asked another question: “Okay, well, how do you build an app?” 

Voter First

Aldrich had a good tech foundation: Growing up in the Seattle area, he built and fixed computers in high school, and worked at Microsoft while studying computer science at the University of Washington. 

Eventually he left school to do some traveling — including to Japan, where he spent a year snowboarding full-time — but then turned to another lifelong interest: He attended UC Santa Barbara as a film major, which led to his producing career. His credits include producing the films Enter the Dangerous Mind (2013) Folk Hero & Funny Guy (2016), and It Happened In L.A. (2017), and A Hard Problem (2021).

Creating the FYCit app turned out to be the perfect way to marry his interests. He began to search for an app developer, and found one in Liam McMains — a friend’s son who was in college at the time. 

“The two of us worked really closely designing all the functionality. I tried to really take a voter-first mentality to designing: If this is the app that I wanted to use, how would I want it to work? And so we really just focused on bringing in all this information and presenting it to the voter in a really streamlined format, where you can search for the movie or the studio or the filmmaker, or you can just look at a chronological list of all of the screenings happening and say, ‘Look, I want to go see something on Friday. What is out there that I can RSVP for now?’”

Viewers can also search by location and venue. If you’re in Santa Monica, for example, and want to see everything at the city’s beloved Aero Theatre, you can use FYCit to track events there.

The app started with a limited public release in the 2021 FYC season — “and kind of caught fire right away,” says Aldrich.

“A lot of the really hardcore people who are going to a lot of FYC screenings saw the value of something like this.”

The goal of the app is to become indispensable to FYC voters everywhere, an idea encompassed by its motto, “Award Season Starts Here.” 

How FYCit Members Can Get a Free Subscription to MovieMaker Magazine

The app, which is free to users, is open to all members of voting guilds such as the DGA, PGA, and SAG, as well as such organizations as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Television Academy, Film Independent, the Critics Choice Association and more.

It now has roughly 10,000 users and adds thousands with each award season. 

FYCit allows users to seek out screenings and other events in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London — Aldrich estimates that about 60% of FYC events are around Los Angeles, and 30-35% are in New York. 

He also plans to expand to other U.S. cities that are hosting more events, like Atlanta and Denver, as well as to Europe and Australia — an expansion that reflects the increasingly international scope of awards season.

Given that the app has no cost to users, it makes money through partnerships with studios and others vying for awards. They can pay to upgrade their visibility or add bonus content. But Aldrich stresses that the app lists all available events, “regardless of whether they’re a partner.”

“Our North Star is really to make this as useful as possible for the voter, and we’re committed to always keeping it free for voters,” he says.  

The app is constantly evolving, and recent innovations include adding guild verification for members of the TV Academy, which will allow TV FYC events to give them special attention. Additional guild verifications are coming soon. 

As an added incentive, TV Academy members who sign up for verification this Emmy season will receive a free subscription to MovieMaker Magazine. 

“So users can go to their profile tab, and they’ll find a verification section there. They can upload a screenshot of their TV Academy card, and then they’ll get a little gold checkmark,” says Aldrich. “That allows us to then offer networks a way to invite specifically verified TV Academy members to events. Eventually, these verified members will either get early access or exclusive access to certain events.”

The app also offers a wide range of interviews, featurettes, and behind-the-scenes accounts to help voters make decisions. 

“You can sort those by peer groups — like all the costume design featurettes that have been released, or the VFX reels. And watch those right there on your phone,” Aldrich adds. 

FYCit also offers a detailed newsletter, and uses it to share interesting data about trends that it notes in FYC screening patterns. Aldrich can see, for example, when there’s a lot of interest in seeing a particular film in a particular region. He said that the recent Oscars didn’t hold many surprises for him, because he could pick up on what films seemed to have the most heat.

“It’s not a science for sure, but there’s some interesting insights, and we try to share some of those in the newsletter each week,” he says.

The app doesn’t offer screeners, since other companies are already deeply embedded in that area — and FYCit wants to celebrate the in-person awards-season experience. 

“The ethos of the app is that you should try to go see things on the big screen,” says Aldrich.

Still, he knows some people prefer not to go out. FYCit recently started a very detailed podcast, called The Season, that features interviews with filmmakers, artisans, journalists and more. One lightning question posed to guests is whether they prefer to watch on the big screen or at home. 

“It seems like a no-brainer that almost everyone would say the theater, but interestingly, about a quarter of the people say that they prefer to watch at home. And I can understand that. I wish I could see absolutely everything in the theater, but it’s just not possible during award season — and if you have a nice setup at home, sometimes it’s a great way to watch a movie.

“But,” he adds, “I wouldn’t extend that to watching on your phone.”

Of course not: Thanks to FYCit, your phone is for finding screenings. 

Main image: The FYCIt app, courtesy of FYCit