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Writing an Online Series
Here is an interesting article about writing an online series.
http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/innovation/laurie-hutzler_blog-debut/
There is one section I would like to quote, just in case you can’t be bothered to read the whole article (which, lets face it, happens to a lot of people a lot of the time).
Laurie Hutzler:
The opportunity for online entertainment is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that the barrier for entry is very low. You can do this for not much money. My computer has a webcam and I can film myself doing anything — and people do. I read somewhere that the amount of the material uploaded on YouTube each day is as much as the entire history of film since the beginning of time.
But the bad news is if that because you don’t need high production values online, the writing has to be extraordinary. The key is that you have to get people to follow you, you have to develop word of mouth, and you can only do that by appealing to a specific audience’s interests.
This is very true. Its all very well having a good idea, you also need a lot of energy to develop it, write it well, get some investment behind it (both financial and emotional), then to get it made, then to keep it going…. but if you’ve got a great idea, and (importantly) you think some other people will share your opinion that its a great idea, then why not?
Hutzler’s quote is mainly talking about scripted drama – that what she means by ‘extraordinary writing’, but it also applies to factual and documentary series’ online. However, is it really necessary for every online series to be ‘extraordinary’? There are plenty of films that are ‘ok’, plenty of television series that are ‘watchable’. Can this be attitude be applied to online content as well?
One possible answer: Not if you want to get people’s attention. With television, even though we as viewers are starting to be more in control via video on demand services and PVR’s, we are still in a habit of watching whatever people give us, and sometimes, its nice to just veg out on the sofa and watch something you wouldn’t normally have watched, just because its on. With film its slightly different because its more of a ‘go out and find it’ entertainment, but once you do get that seat in the cinema, or the DVD, its still more of an event and there are less distractions.
With online, there will ALWAYS be more competition for your time. If you want to make a series that people will watch, interact with, and come back for more, you’ve got to give them a good reason to.
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Everybody Else is Talking About it, so Why Can’t I?
Yes, it’s the Rage Against The X-Factor.
I have been reading the newspapers, the blogs, the comments on blogs, and listening to the radio… and there is one thing about this whole ‘issue’ that annoys me slightly (and I am not easily annoyed). Why must everyone accuse people of being sheep all the time? Is it not possible that people are joining the facebook group and buying the RATM single because they think it’s a good idea? I’m trying not to take it personally. Yes I’m in the facebook group, and yes, I will probably buy the single (even though I already own it), but not because someone told me too. In fact, nobody has told me to buy anything. I saw the group, thought it was a good (or at least interesting) idea and joined.
I also am a bit of a RATM fan (I didn’t quite know what I was buying when I bought their CD when I was 13, but I liked it, and a couple of years ago I enjoyed hearing the opening riff from Sleep Now In The Fire every time my phone rang. But I although I don’t watch The X Factor (not out of protest, I just have other things to do) I don’t hate it. In fact, I always respect a good business idea. Its manufactured pop and it does well for a certain audience – Who am I to judge what they enjoy?
But what I don’t get is their choice of song. Do you remember when Will Young won Pop Idol or when Girls Aloud won Pop Stars The Rivals, or even the first Hear’Say single. Didn’t they all release original songs, not covers? Ok, so Will Young’s Evergreen (I think it was Evergreen, or maybe that was the B Side – I was only vaguely more interested back then) wasn’t the best or most catchy song (neither is The Climb, in my opinion) but now with all the money that The X Factor makes, surely they can get a top song-writer in to write a top pop song or ballad and top the charts with a top track. But they always go for a cover. The safe option.
Sheep accusations and song choice aside, I’ve found it very interesting to follow this story. I can’t even remember now where I first heard about it, but I’m pretty sure it was BEFORE I saw the facebook group. Maybe I read about it somewhere. I joined the group at about 100,000 people and watched it grow to 800,000. I also watched the hype and the publicity grow around it. I also try to imagine what Jon and Tracy Morter are thinking right now.
Then I got into a, well, I wouldn’t say argument, but a discussion with my mum when I tried to explain why someone trying to beat The X Factor has a better chance with a Rage Against The Machine song than the new Terry Wogan Christmas single. My mum claimed to have ‘never heard of’ RATM, but in my head I was saying, ‘you may not know the name, but you probably know the music since I used to blare it out of my bedroom all the time’. My mum used the old ‘Sheep’ argument with people just doing what people tell them to, and she seemed to take it very personally, as if buying the song was a vote against
Wogan, so I encouraged her to make a facebook group to get Terry for Christmas No. 1 to try and mobilise the Radio 2-6 crowd. I think she was referring to 2008’s Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth with Aled Jones.I just did a quick facebook group search for ‘Terry Wogan No.1″ , and there were 3 groups, with a combined membership of 420. Hmmm. Not sure if thats going to get it back into the charts this year.
To me, the whole media frenzy is a good thing – people are rediscovering one of my favourite bands, people are standing up for something, and for the first time ever, I will be listening to the chart show on radio one. Actually, I won’t be, because I’m taking my 7 year old cousin to a christmas party. But I would listen (especially since Scott Mills is doing it this week), if I didn’t have something better to do.
My favourite part of it all, apart from the support Shelter are getting (http://www.justgiving.com/ratm4xmas) is RATM’s appearance on BBC Radio 5 Live - They were asked not to swear during the line ‘Fuck you I wont do what you tell me”. Really, what did they expect?
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E-docs – the future for niche factual content?
I’ve never really hear the phrase ‘E-doc’ before, but I found it in one of the links posted below and I quite like it – It has a nice ring to it, so I thought i would use it in this blog. Although it could also be called i-doc if Apple hadn’t already cornered the market with the use of the lower case ‘i’.
Oxfam have released a new online-only interactive documentary called ‘Gabura: Daily life and Disaster on an Island in Bangladesh’. Details can be found at http://www.nma.co.uk/oxfam-produces-first-online-only-documentary/3006380.article?nl=DN, but its basically a documentary series about life and disaster on an island in Bangladesh as an example of the problems caused by climate change. (the Disaster bit is Cyclone Aila that hit the island in May 2009). The documentary crew were already there making a documentary about the subject when the cyclone hit. Lucky for the documentary crew, very unlucky for the Island and everyone who lives there.Now, I’m not knocking the work that Oxfam or any other charity do, or the documentary itself, but I am wondering what the definition of interactive is. I went to the Oxfam website t0 look for the series, and after a few clicks, managed to find a link to it through the press release. (I doubt I would have found it as a casual browser). At the time of writing, there was the opportunity to watch a video, then take action in the usual, write-a-letter or donate way. I couldn’t post or embed the video here (which I normally like to do on my facebook page to help spread-the-love) but the page can be found here:
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/campaign/climate_change/gabura/edoc-flash.html
Am I just expecting too much or does this class as being interactive? When I think of an interactive documentary series, I think of ways in which I can get involved, not just in the cause, but in the documentary as well – maybe click a few bits of a map, make a few comments, learn more about individual people, share with friends, post responses and suggestions, even upload my own content.
But maybe I’m just getting ahead of myself. What Oxfam have done is be in the right place at the right time to get some exclusive video footage of life struggling to cope with climate change. Its still early days, maybe the main interactive stuff will come with their bloggers and social network connections, but it may take a bit more research to hunt these down.
This does raise another issue – how do you get people to watch/use your documentary series without a TV plug? Well, getting it mentioned in The Guardian will probably help. Its all about marketing. What point is there in making something groundbreaking, moving, shocking or world-changing, if hardly anyone sees it?
I think online documentaries, when marketed and delivered in the right way, are definitely a good way for charities and non-profits to go – especially when television is becoming more about X-Factor-type ‘Event TV’ and less about ‘important’ social and global issues. Just remember to keep production values high and offer quality content – just because its not on TV doesn’t mean it can be lower quality. In fact, I would argue it has to have extra qualities because it has to work harder to attract and keep viewers/users.
That being said, what I don’t want to see happen is charities and non-profit or niche causes are pushed from mainstream media (such as TV) into obscurity (on the gloriously over-crowded internet). It shouldn’t have to be an either/or situation, but an informed decision on what is best for the product.
It is my campaign to raise the bar when it comes to online content. The internet is a great place to start when you are trying to make the world a better place. They say a picture speaks a thousand words, but how many words do you get with video, sound, words, photos, drawings, animations, communication, interaction, and the sense that you are really doing something good?
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Online Drama from the East End
The BBC have announced a web-drama spinoff of Eastenders, to be launched in January 2010. It will be a stand-alone series based on other characters in Albert Square but will have crossovers with the television series characters. There is an article here that goes into more detail-
Having researched web dramas recently for a dissertation, this obviously caught my interest – it’s certainly not the first web drama to come about, but could it be a turning point for web dramas in general, taking them from niche obscurity to mainstream glory?
Firstly, the BBC are launching it with an existing audience base from the television soap. This will help massively with getting an audience, since the problem with most online dramas is that not many people know about them outside of the industry. But whether the audience will stick with the online version of the soap depends on other factors, such as quality of writing, acting, and interactivity.
Lets start with the writing – there have been perfectly good concepts ruined (or at least inhibited) by poor writing. In the case of E20, the writers are all 17-22 year olds and I wonder how original or clever the stories and dialogue could be from writers with less experience – when I think back to the stuff I used to write when I was 17-22, I cringe at the cliché’s and lack of originality. But then, these writers have won a writing competition to get the job, and my writing was never intended for public scrutiny, so there is hope.
There shouldn’t be a problem with acting, with such a high profile project from the BBC, with young actors alongside mainstream television soap actors, the BBC are going to have to make sure they get people who can live up to the job or risk coming across as a poor amateur version of its older sibling, and until we get more casting information from the BBC, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
The BBC also haven’t mentioned how interactive E20 will be, but it looks as if it may follow a traditional television format than other online dramas – with episodes between 6 and 12 minutes long, it seems that the perceived ‘1 minute attention span’ of teens on the internet is starting to be disputed. Bebo have already made the move from daily, 1 minute episodes to 2-3 episodes per week of 3 minutes each (in the case of Sofia’s Diary). Could this be a sign that the shorter episodes are just not working, that you need more time to get into a plot line, or characters, or get a feel for a place?
One minute may be enough for short funny videos of people falling off treadmills, or cats doing the funniest things, but for scripted drama it can feel disjointed – it’s bad enough when you get an advertising break on tv, but to get a couple of minutes, then have to wait a few days for more can be really annoying for a viewer (if the story is good) or really bad for the programme makers (if the story isn’t good enough to bring people back)
There are two solutions to this having to wait problem (and I am a big fan of not having to wait) – either wait till the series has finished and watch it all at once, or keep yourself immersed in the story by taking advantage of all the interactive features – like competitions, games, blogging, chatting, contributing, sharing and commenting, as well as content extras, behind the scenes and interviews with the cast or characters. Obviously, waiting until the end could seriously restrict your level of interactivity, but if you are just interested in consuming, this probably isn’t going to bother you too much. But if you are just interested in consuming, why bother with an online drama at all when you have television? It comes back to the story.
E20 has an interesting and promising premise… A soap opera is, by design, inbred – there are a limited number of characters that have a higher-than-normal level of interaction with each other – at least higher than any community in real life would have, but this if fine because it drives the plots – people expect soaps to be more exciting than their real lives, otherwise, whats the point? But I have often wondered, and I’m sure other people have too, about all those other people who live there – Albert Square is always busy, so what do the other people do? What do they think about people fighting in the pub, all those dead bodies that keep popping up, or the annual Christmas disaster when all they want to do is have a nice, family dinner? I for one, will be logging on to see how its handled.
One of the things I will be looking at, is whether E20 becomes an online version of Hollyoaks Later or Hollyoaks in the City, or whether it will actually take advantage of its position on the internet to make it something much more fulfilling for the audience. If this takes off, it should make it easier for smaller independents to get similar projects off the ground. If it fails miserably and becomes a laughing stock of bad acting and bad scripting, then people will probably start questioning where the future lays for online drama.
So, BBC, please make it something amazingly good and ground-breakingly different, and not just another spin-off.
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Three days, Two Coreys and a Laptop
Last weekend was overtaken by a desire to watch one particular programme.
It started Friday night. I was flicking through the numerous channels on Sky looking for something to watch. It was late, I wanted something that wasn’t too challenging and that I hadn’t seen before. I came across the channel Bio, and watched a semi-interesting biography of Mathew McConaughy.
But what interested me was a programme due on a bit later - a biography of Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. I watched License to Drive and The Lost Boys back in the day, and I knew about their rocky careers and drug problems, so I th0ught I’d Sky+ it. (I also thought to myself that I shouldn’t use the phrase ‘to sky plus something’ too often in case someone thought I was actually promoting Sky).
So I set the recorder, went to bed, got up and watched the biography of The Coreys the next day. I found out about their semi-scripted reality tv show called The Two Coreys, and thought to myself ‘thats a little bit sad, but maybe I’ll watch it’.
Skip ahead to Sunday evening after a weekend working hard, while at the same time trying to battle a cold. In between phone calls and ‘working hard’ I had been googling The Coreys, and now was very interested in watching The Two Coreys.
I like the way ‘to google’ has become a verb, but should be cautious not to overuse it and in BBC fashi0n, other search engines are available. But I digress. (Its a symptom of living in a world that encourages a short attention span)
10 years ago, if the thought of watching an obscure television programme occured to me, I probably would have just put it to the back of my mind – after all, it wasn’t on television now, I wasn’t desperate to see it, and I didn’t know anyone who owned it to borrow it from. I certainly wasn’t going to buy it just to try it.
But today, I am very thankful for the internet. I tried some video streaming websites (I can’t wait for things to download – too impatient), but the ones I used to use to satisfy my addiction to watchin US television programmes before they come to britain (another subject really) but they had either been shut down or they didn’t consider The Two Coreys to be ‘worthy’ of hosting on their sites. So I went to plan B – the lower quality, but reliable, youtube.
There it was. The Two Coreys, season one episode one. And there began my obsession with Corey Haim.
15 episodes broken down into 3 parts each later, and it was 4am. I was tired, hungry, and had a massive headache from watching poor quality video (even on the HQ setting) on my laptop. But I had to force myself to stop watching The Two Coreys with a couple of episodes left to watch, and go to bed. Afterall, I had stuff I needed to do. Thank You Youtube. After being rudly awakened by the telephone a few hours later, I was ready to finish off The Two Coreys and see if anyton had commented on my facebook statuses.
Ok, so why bother sharing a story about something as common as watching a television programme online?
Its partly about access, partly about money.
I suppose I would have preferred to watch it on the televisi0n, but I’m not quite sure how my experience would have differed – maybe it would have seemed less personal, or perhaps more ‘televisiony’ (i.e. its just watching a tv series with no other interaction expected or required) Or maybe watching Corey Haim meltdown on a 42″ screen would have been a bit too intense, or even a bit embarrassing? Not embarrassing for Corey, but embarrasing for me to be watching it and enjoying it. On my laptop it was just me and The Coreys. My personal choice, my personal experience.
I want to point out that this ‘embarrassment’ has anything to do with The Two Coreys. This feeling that my viewing habits are being judged by others come from years of my viewing habits being judged by others. The number of times I have had to justify spending a week holed up in my room watching seven box sets of Buffy and Angel back to back, or hogging the tv in the living room to watch One Tree Hill series 1 and 2 on DVD, or going back even further, having to defend my choices of watching what my dad would call ‘crap’ american sitcoms. This is why I try not to judge what other people watch. Even if its football.
Back to Corey. Watching The Two Coreys online also gave me the chance to post my favourite bits on facebook and allow me to update my facebook status with comments like ‘I am so loving Corey Haim right now’. Its amazing how easy it is to switch from a ‘personal, secret’ experience to a very public declaration of your madness. Its all about selective exposure. I can’t contr0l people’s judgement, but I can control what they are judgemental of.
Would I do this if I wasn’t watching it online? Can I interact and respond to a television programme if I’m just watching it alone on TV? The answer is yes, but not as easily and I would still need my laptop out so I could do both at the same time. This makes me think that television alone can’t be interactive. There are probably dozens of theses on this subject, and although a Phd is glimmering in the very back of my mind it supressed by a dislike referenceing and having to use academic vocabulary, so I leave this to the social scientists.
Interactivity aside, as a viewer/consumer/interactor/whatever, its all good – I get what I want, when I want it, for as long as I want it. As a programme maker, its more of a mixed bag.
A lot of effort and money goes into making a television programme, and the people involved should quite rightly get something back from it, otherwise we’d all be working part time in a call centre to pay the bills.
In The Two Coreys, both Coreys were executive producers, and they sold the programme to an american broadcaster A&E. The obviously got money from it – series one Haim was broke and unemployed. By series two he had enough money to rent a house in LA and hire an assistant, alth0ugh I am not going to comment on how ‘real’ this was (thats a whole other topic for another time). Maybe the production company paid for it, I don’t know because I haven’t asked. Either way he seemed better off.
In addition Haim and Feldman both got extra exposure as actors, and Haim has had several small movie parts since (compared with no work at all pre-reality tv show), so its obviously done him well.
But what about A&E? They bought this programme, probably sold it on to some other people, got some advertising money back… and then someone recorded it and uploaded it to youtube for everyone around the w0rld to see for free, minus advertising. How much money did they miss out on because of this? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I just haven’t done the maths and the figures. Are they missing out on anything anyway? They got their product, they used their product, then it got recycled.
Ok, there is the problem of selling programmes on to international markets, and broadcast liscense limits, but thanks to broadband and the kind people on the internet, things are changing. The questions is, how much is it going to change and how well are we (as a society, as an industry, and as individuals) going to adapt? On Demand services from broadcasters are a good start, but they’re still time and location restricted, and I don’t like to be restricted.
While all this gets figured out (and there are already solutions being trialed and debated) I am going to take advantage of living in a world where we choose what we want to watch and get it all for free. Because it might not last forever. As a professional trying to make a living out of all of this, I’m going to thinks about what people like me want, and find away to keep us happy.
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Interactive. Multiplatform. 360 media. [insert latest buzzword here]. Whats it all about anyway?
Hello there.
Interactive storytelling is a challenging new area – how do you make something truely interactive and unique? There are so many multiplatform stories out there where the ability to comment on a video is considered interactive. I would say this should be standard. True interactivity is something extra.
I plan to crack this, my coming up with a brilliant, new, and ingenious idea. In fact, I may already have this idea. In the meantime, keep reading, watching, listening, participating, interacting and various other buzz words ending in -ing. It might be worth it.
Thirty Ten Media is a new company based in the South of England. It has been born out of a desire to do something different, memorable, experimental and profitiable, that helps somebody somewhere in some way. Ambitious? No, not with all the shiny gadgets and whizzy technology we have these days!