Amplified 08 – connecting the dots in the social media maze

Yesterday I went along, like the rest of the Twiterrati, to Amplified 08 at the HQ of NESTA. Amplified is the new brain child of NESTA and Toby Moores (founder of Sony game Buzz whom I recently interviewed for a fascinating piece ‘in the mind of the serial disruptive innovator’ for a project for Creative Sheffield). It bills itself as a ‘network of networks’ that connects people from around the country who are developing leading-edge thinking in using social media technologies.

Around 200 people were there from a surprisingly broad range of disciplines – teachers, media producers, techno geeks, citizen journalists - a mix of ages and personalities but with a strong male bias. A fairly lose structure of discussions made for a somewhat chaotic space – having been to the OneMedia open space conference recently I found the sheer volume of people here a bit unwieldy to really have useful conversations – but in general the spirit and the ideas were full of vibrancy and excitement to connect and share ideas, and it was nice to put some names to faces and meet new folks outside of my usual digital media bubble.

The sessions were as diverse as the attendees, but tended to focus on changing the world a bit by changing a bit of the world, and what web tools can do to enable that. I popped into quite a few – some were really useful like Online Video, others a bit unstructured and meandering so I think it pays for session curators to be a bit better prepared to present their ideas to help focus the discussion. There’s probably a learning curve here and some delegate education needed on how to successful do open space or semi-curated events like this so people get the best out of it. We were all told to tweet after each session so there are heaps of tweets you can trawl through here.

On the whole I found it probably a bit too ahead-of-the-curve for my own more commercially focused practice (yes, me is un-cool consultant) – and sometimes I wonder if it’s best to go to ‘what you know’ where you can contribute and learn more or to throw yourself into the least relevant and known subject to see what you can learn. I did a bit of both – maybe at the next one I’ll throw myself into the deep end and go to more of the blogging-will-change-the-world instead of is-home-taping-killing-music sessions I usually choose.

I bumped into Toby then next morning at Tuttle London – many of the Amplified Individuals were somewhat muted after a night of boozing. Whereas I went over to a church hall in Leytonstone to film a pop video dressed as a school mistress (I kid you not – coming soon!) til the wee hours instead. Toby says the next step is to hold regular networks across the country to start to connect the dots – with sessions in the Midlands, South Coast, London, the North and maybe other places too. Hopefully the Amplified network will somehow will feed into my own plans to improve the connectivity and networking of creative thinkers in my hometown of Nottingham.

Future of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Nov 20

De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies, lead by the rather wonderful Sue Thomas, a visionary digital narratives Professor, hosted another conference shindig this week focused – the Future of Creative Technologies.  Quite a few big name academic speakers here, like Lev Manovich and Howard Rheingold.

Sadly, I found the debate this time just too academic and too technology focused rather than focusing on the aspirations and business opportunities of new technologies, which was a shame as the IOCT seminar in June on the future of social media was really quite visionary.   Perhaps not for me – I was suprised that the delegates were almost entirely academics, and mainly from De Montfort itself thus not particularly great for networking.

A few take outs:

Content Workshop

Sue Thomas discussed her theories around ‘transliteracy’ – literacy across multiple channels, platforms and time scales beginning with Socrates who believed writing was an aid not to memory but to reminiscence.  Transliteracy looks at how networks and individuals connect using different forms of media, but is also concerned with the ‘gaps’ between the networks where people are not connected to any specific groups.   There is a role here perhaps for ‘amplified individuals’ (yeuch term…loudmouths perhaps?) to be allowed through the door to join the dots between groups, like old inter-tribe rituals.

Our attempts at drawing our own networks were hilariously messy and diverse – mine had arrows everywhere, linked by cities or ‘objects of interest’ as I believe all networks and groups of people are.  We discussed that information supply isn’t as much a ‘data overload’ as a filter failure – we need guidance from authorative and trusted sources in our network.

This was taken up by Jim Hendler’s talk on Web 3.0 – semantic search based around creating data sets and open APIs to allow collaboration, giving the example of a user-created wine recommendation list mixing up catalogues of wine with guidance.  Or DVPedia - a mashup of Napster data on song and artist titles in a wiki format.  In an era when more pictures are already uploaded to Flickr than all catalogued objects in all of the world’s museums, we are now creating an open archive of billions of cultural objects – but to be useful they need to be well catalogued (particularly through better meta-tagging) and openly available for re-use.

Howard Rheingold’s presentation on the Social Media Classroom I think deserve study for another day or at least a homework class.  He is developing an online classroom resource and teaching guide to enable teachers to teach participatory media literacy – which usually just happens after school.  The pictures of a huge hall full of kids on laptop is awe-inspiring; sadly I think the reality given limited ICT budgets in British state schools means that chalk and learn teaching is likely to continue for some decades to come.

EM Media Producers Forum 20th Nov – Uncovering Digital Distribution

It’s unusual that an event on cross-platform and digital distribution takes place on my doorstep, and more so in the very lovely surroundings of The Walk Cafe, Nottingham’s creative-friendly answer to The Ritz for tea and cake served with a knowing old fashioned charm.  And so to The Producers Forum, part of a series of events aimed at East Midlands film, tv and digital producers organised by screen agency EM Media.

A gathering of a few dozen producers – mainly film types but a few advertisers, games developers and consultants too – discussed the changing nature of distribution in the digital age.  Lisa Trnovski (2am Films) and David Shear (Revolver) discussed their new horror Brit Flick Mum and Dad – apparently the first film to be released simultaneously on all formats – cinema, TV, DVD, digital download and pay-per-view -(although I seem to remember the same claims levied about Road to Guantanamo) which has caused some consternation amongst indie cinemas who see digital as cannibalising their pay-to-see local business – including the present Chair of Nottingham’s Broadway cinema.

Shear claims the strategy makes sense for the indie distributor in allowing one ‘hit’ to promote the film in all formats to achieve significant scale from a small promotion budget – and allows the producer to get paid quicker.   Landmark deals from big studios like Harry Potter’s simultaneous cinema launch with Sky on pay-per-view (ONLY $50!) are closing the typical 16 week cinema to DVD/digital window.  Yet it’s small indies who are able, partly through necessity, to push the envelope in developing innovative and immediate forms of distribution – particularly for niche audience films.

Up next, Joel Kemp from Outso, a true success story of redundant ex-Climax studio developers making good by moving into outsourcing and recently the creation of virtual worlds, including Home for Sony Playstation.  MixM8 is their own in development virtual world for music, where artists can create fan zones, give live concerts, and even create unique MP3 tracks and virtual items for sale.  They’ve already got the ultra-hip Scroobius Pip and War Child on board. This is an exciting development and opens up genre and sector specific activities within virtual worlds (which are currently something of a scrum ground for unfocused selling of tit-tat and hard to target consumers) which is quite possibly the (long-term) future of social networking.

I was somewhat disappointed by the general discussion from the panel (which also included Michel Peters from Content Republic, Jason Burrows from Together Agency and Suzanne Alizart from EM Media) which took a somewhat narrow film-maker focus as to the limited possibilities of self-distribution.  It’s a subject I’m currently researching for my Masters, but Michel Peters in particularly adamantly believed there was little possibility in producers to self-distribute and aggregation was the way forward – believing that even all the major UK cinema chains working together would be unlikely to yield a profitable digital distribution business as a web-based model needs to have global scale and negotiate at least rights across a continent.

This certainly seems to have been the case so far with the music industry where major retailers have failed to launch viable digital businesses.  Yet I felt the panel failed to grasp that digital does mean direct contact with your customers, where aggregating data can be a long-play but can lead to greater independence and sustainability.  I certainly know from my days at an indie TV producer than we were able to sustain a seven figure e-commerce business through early investment in online through creating our own community.

Jason Burrows believed the challenge is maintaining interest in the ‘information economy’ where the new buzz and product finds it harder than ever to get noticed – guerilla tactics are needed to reach the multi-tasking generations.

Andrew Cooper, chair of Broadway, believes we need to capitalise on the ‘zeitgeist’ Nottingham now has for film makers – where some producers claim they can noticed more becuase they are from Nottingham, in much the same way bands from Sheffield benefit from the ripple effect of The Arctic Monkeys et al.

I found the discussion high level and useful, but the network needs to start bringing together other senior media practitioners other than film people to move the discussion up a gear to get really interesting.

But of course, most importantly, cake…

Em Media cake

EM media cake going...

EM Media cake going..going...

Onemedia unconference Nov 13-14, London

Onemedia logo

This week I headed down to innovation quango NESTA’s space age HQ (resplete with break-out rooms with circular board tables) to join in the first Onemedia ‘unconference‘.  This was basically an open space workshop where the 50 or so participants from a range of media industries – including web, digital, music, film, education and TV – gathered together to set our own agenda and form break-out groups to discuss the hot topics of the day and form our own solutions.  The attendees were a jolly nice bunch, mainly indie producers and consultants with a few biggers orgs like ITV represented.

I’ve been to several open space conferences, particularly during my days in Bristol developing projects with Watershed Media Centre.  Although you don’t always feel like you get the ‘top down’ knowledge you would from a speaker-led symposium conference, it really allows you to contribute and benefit from the wealth of knowledge of others – paticularly those working in parallel or complimentary fields, and it’s a cheaper and more accessible ways of organising an industry event – particularly in a smaller town or city.

And the best thing about open space is that it works on the ‘law of two feet’:  it’s OK to walk away from a session if you’ve said enough or just want to move on.  It’s a great way to get live feedback to test the waters with radical ideas.  But I forgot how tiring it is – so much talking and even more listening!

We self-secretariat-ed all our session – Mel @ Media Sauce has the un-enviably task of gathering and sorting through all our disparate notes – but some of the key thoughts and ideas I heard in the sessions I attended:

Branded and advertiser-funded content
There was much discussion from the indie production community on the return, 1950s soap-style, to the advertiser leading the production of quality content, from interactive drama through to James Bond heavy rotation product placement.  Many discussed the difficult of getting air-time with the major brands; without the gatekeepers that were broadcasting commissioners, the environment to get commissioned direct is impossible to navigate for the micro-indie, and in the case of the telecos, we need them more than they need us.  Another example of the ‘flatter’ media landscape being easier to cross the terrain for big players than the many small, yet Magic Lantern played upon the creative vanity and budget crunches of brand managers to deliver interactive content direct to online audiences, cutting out the perplexing range of ‘middle men’ in the current advertising market including buyers, ad agencies and producers.   Those established in the ‘old media world’, like Buffy creator Joss Wheedon’s Doctor Horrible or Radiohead’s In Rainbows, mean reaching existing fans with the benefit of years of TV or major record label investment is that much easier to profit from digital-only distribution and to acquire the investment in the first place.

Taste makers
Conversely, there is a key role for ‘taste makers’ like Last.fm and Hype Machine to help users connect with the influencers – be it Nike bribing cool kids to wear their trainers in the playground, or user recommendation and aggreation technologies.

Narrative
Understanding narrative was a key theme in several sessions – web producers need to understand narrative in the user experience journey as much as the many types of narrative forms which can be applicable to everything from a traditional storytellers to a console game.  The digital world has much it can learn from those from the film and TV industries – be it how to tell compelling stories on a budget or lighting design.

Universities may be churning out graduates with interactive productions skills ten-to-the-dozen, but those with the intelligence to be trained in the ‘art’ of media production, or the work training to do it, are lacking, yet a lot of the old training from the film schools isn’t needed in the YouTube and digi-camera age where accessibility and story are more important than framing each shot.  Budding film-makers can just learn by doing, and start to engage with an audience from day 1.

New skills
Training and skills are paramount to allow people to compete in this shifting landscape – but the significant majority of freelancers in the industry don’t have access to professional development – or even know the question to ask they need the answers for.  The project I am working on with White Room for North West Vision is an interesting take – getting ‘traditional media’ freelancers and getting them placed into digital companies in a unique cross-industry experiment.

Writers, producers and directors still largely ‘don’t get it’ when it comes to creating the cross-platform worlds where audience expectations, aggregated by social media, are either enhanced or dumfounded by writers and the opportunities and limitations of each medium are best exploited.

Collaboration
Collaboration between different writers, producers and technical geeks is a necessity in the cross-platform world – and we just aren’t used to getting stuck in together or finding shared languages and commonalities.

Digital distribution
Overall, getting paid and finding the right business models from digital distribution is the crucial hurdle which inhibit development with the professional media community – although there is a necessity for new talent to ‘just f***ing do it’ – prototype your idea, get in online and start to build an audiences rather than chasing the golden commission.

I facilitated an interesting session on digital music distribution and what lessons other industries could learn from the bit-torrented collapse of the conventional music business.  Some key findings were that bands and artists have been successful when engaging with their audiences through making it very personal – using social media – like video, blogs and giving a bit of it away for free – were seen as winning tactics for musicians to build direct relationships and acquiring the data of fans which everyone from film-makers to indie games developer could benefit from.

We concluded the old structures – major labels, distributors and retailers – were largely redundant, but have been replaced with other corporate funded spaces like MySpace and Last.fm who act as gatekeepers and curators between content creators and audiences.

Overall, it was an enjoyable event if not a tad long – an intensive, bigger one-day event would I think have worked better.  It was a great way to meet people from different disciplines with granularity, but the wealth of indies/consultants compared to brand owners and major media players probably limited the impact of change the conference set out to make.  Sponsors NESTA and Pact are interested in the findings so let’s see what next.

This is Playful – London Games Week, Conway Hall, Oct 31

“To thine own self be true” read the inscription above the stage of the humanist community venue of Conway Hall in Holborn – an appropriate epitaph for an era where user-generated content and the collaborative nature of web 2.0 is pervading computer game technologies, and new forms of playfulness emerge from the fusion of game play with toys, theatre, web and movement – as explored at this one day event as part of London Games Festival games fringe week.

Organised by my fellow conspirators Pixel-Lab from Derby, This is Playful was a very chilled out laid back event full of interesting talking and stuff followed by a few light ales, and generally a good sense of community. A lot of the technicalities went over my bear-like-brain-when-it-comes-to-games, but a few talks stood out:

Chris Delay from Introversion talked about building high production values in graphics from a micro-indie’s budget using procedural generation – that is using patterns of nature in a generative progam to produce patterns – like tree branches spreading outwards, or even city scapes spawning more and more detailed roads. This can be split into everything – even building floors and windows on buildings, producing exterior textures, or internal building scapes to produce desks, computers and objects. This cuts out the handmade time of game artists, and would seem to be the future of much CGI and games generation in the increasingly expensive era when users demand higher-level graphics.

Kars Alfink from Leapfrog in Utrecht – the Netherlands’ epicentre of game design – talked about playing with form using the example of the Z-Boys from the film Lords of Dogtown, who formed what became now skateboarding technique from experimenting with their surroundings of disused swimming-pools. Now skate parks take the form of extreme hollowed-out bowls that were originally just the functional spaces available.

We consume media but we use tools – so game media is about creating tools for functional uses. Habbo Hotel, the virtual world for children, has very ‘underspecified’ tools – like rooms where children play at ‘horses’ – despite the fact that it’s not a stable and there are no horse-specific objects there – rather like kids will play at anything with a few limited props in the ‘sandbox’ of a garden or playroom.

Tom Armitage from Headshift talked about the Obama 08 campaign manager software for iPhone, and how you could rate your performance as a campaigner against others – a multiplayer game (of sorts). Everything is now a multiplayer environment – enabled by web 2.0 thinking and technologies. We all have ‘rings’ between us, our closest allies, friends of friends then everyone else; social media platforms ape this – e.g. email/SMS/IM for close contact, Facebook next, MySpace for the semi-unwashed and open spaces for everyone else.  Yet social networks are not merely spaces, they consist of people who are connected by a shared object or interest – like World of Warcraft for gamers or Flickr for photo lovers.

Armitage believes multi-player can take the form of differing contexts – not just MMO or simultaneous multi-player forms but a “super context” – shared information and shared fun asyncronously, in close but not necessarily simultaneous timespans – like sending links and sharing comments on Facebook or by email.  This also gives you more to talk about AFTER the event.

Eric Zimmerman from GameLab spoke about games being about rules and maths.  The play is the free movement within rigid structures – be that skateboarders in swimming pools or playing within the mathematical rules of the game. Gamestar Mechanic is his new venture allowing users to create their own user-generated online game to share and play with others, an interesting combination of web 2.0 and game technologies.

Lots of other interesting bits and bobs including a very interesting presentation on realism and expression in high-end games design from Jolyon Webb from Blitz Games using the example of how getting it right with teeth affects how you feel and interactive with the characters, and a very silly Singing Sock Puppet linking up Last.fm with, er, a sock puppet.  A fun end to the week.

Going Apprentice at High Growth Coaching weekend

Last weekend I had an intensive time on a training course. I’m doing a Chartered Management Institute High Growth Coaching Diploma, which is being run by Exponential as part of a programme sponsored by the East Midlands Development Agency’s High Growth Programme to support regional businesses with potential. I was hoping for a bit of a jolly in a nice hotel in Northamptonshire, but of course our public-funded sponsors duly put us to our paces in a 48-hour workathon not unlike an episode of “The Apprentice”.

Placed in a five-person team, we had a series of challenging business modelling exercises to grow a telecoms company, competing with three other teams for market domination. That in itself was a spreadsheet-from-hell exercise, but as the Board of Directors we had to set our code of conduct and strategy. Sesssions were fast-placed and taxing, but half-way through John the course leader announced that as this was a coaching programme, we’d be tested on how true we were to our strategy and conduct – not solely on the bottom-line. The challenge was keeping our nerve and balancing strategic and human relationships with operational ‘get it out the door’ delivery.

Fortunately, my team got on very well – we were blessed with a wealth of experience in marketing, operations and technology from Diane, Mike, John and Adrian – quite literally, as one of the team was a Reverend. As the least skilled member of the team, I was duly elected MD and it put me through my paces (as the youngest coach on the course by the best part of a decade), and tested my mettle in establishing collaborative leadership and focusing on our goals.

We actually had a lot of fun. And we came back with the booty – we won the greatest market share, greatest profit (*grins smugly*). And we were voted the top team who stuck to our conduct and strategy. Woop! I think the key to our success was having shared goals – and I learnt a lot from the course as to how clients need to have a shraed focus, values and to continual evaluate what they are trying to achieve and measuring performance. Having a good sense of humour and fun, being amendable and flexible in attitude, also helped a lot. We benefited from diversity in experiences within our team and it made me recognise that in this context, very much away from the creative industries bubble I work in, my approach was actual quite innovative, risk-taking and radical compared to my peers from more steady-state industries.  The yin-yang combination in this kind of bootstrapping environment is a lot stronger than mono-cultures many businesses (especially creative ones) envelope themselves in.

I enjoyed our winning bottle of wine at home, after two crashed wedding parties, a muddy walk thorugh the country and sauna later. Shame to let those lovely facilities go to waste…

4Talent Interactive Drama Inspiration Session, Oct 23 @ Hello Digital

I am the 1 in 10, declared Birmingham’s UB40 to describe the hollow emptiness of Thatcher’s long queue of the unemployed. History may be repeating itself as the long dark shadow of recession bites, but in happier news I was in Birmingham today investigating a brighter future as part of Hello Digital, the curiously schizophrenic festival/media conference mash-up, to attend a 4Talent Inspiration Session on Interactive Drama, where I was lucky enough to be selected from the 10 to 1 applicants ratio to 20 places.

The Inspiration Session format is basically a small seminar with the opportunity to listen to and have a chat with leading experts in the field at close quarters. This session on interactive drama pushed my buttons as I’ve previously blogged on the subject and I’m intrigued about how online brand-sponsored content, factual and fiction, can be used as a model to counteract the two entwining death curves of declining TV advertising revenues, and the shifts to audiences from broadcast to online viewing.

The experts of the day were Dan’l Hewitt [what is that apostrophe hiding?] (Bebo), Luke Hyams (writer of Dubplate Drama and Kate Modern), David Bausola (AG8, producers of ‘Where are the Joneses?’ for Ford), and Robert Wulffe-Cochrane (Channel 4 Drama) Those nice folks at 4Talent have podcasted the best bits online so go hear for yourself. My general thoughts on the day:

Interactive drama is still a bit about the gizmos, the product placement and dumming down to the micro-attention spans of the teen and youth audiences, who for now are the only viable market for commercial sponsorship in this new found revival of brand-sponsored content. Along with music branding deals, like Groove Armada’s partnership with Barcardi (though I was sad to hear that my musical pals The Red Stripes, a White Stripes tribute band in a reggae style, got a cease-and-desist order for a proposed sponsorship deal with Red Stripe beer), interactive drama is seeing a return to the 1950s days of soap suds sponsored domestic dramas, which came to be known as soap operas. Of course, brand placement is nothing new, particularly in cinema, but the de-regulated nature of online drama provides more scope for new forms of business models in addition to formats and production methods.

Luke Hyams, a seminal legend in interactive drama, showed that the vision of writer/director is not diminished by the micro-screen: he referenced Francis Ford Coppola’s immersive journey in “Heart of Darkness” (the making of “Apocalypse Now”), as similar to the process of adaption and iteration which makes the spontaneous nature of online drama truly work – perhaps making it the potential to be a deeper and more emotionally connected drama through the levels of engagement between audience and character – the believability of getting a private message in your Bebo Inbox from your favourite hero or heroine can surely only increase the engagement.

Interactive drama spawns from breaking the ‘rules’ of television. Early protagonist Miles Beckett, the creator of ‘is it real, is it fake?’ YouTube hit LonelyGirl17 used to be a plastic surgeon – deep pockets but with no preconceived idea of what makes a film or production, so created his own rules.

Dan’l from Bebo talked about the social network’s vision for drama. With 1 billion video streams per month, there was a lot of engagement but little storytelling – over 90% of page views were for self-generated content. The Bebo Open Media platform allows a current tranche of 500 content producers to create content, with deals in place for Bebo to promote and attract sponsors in an egalitarian revenue-share deal.

In addition, 9 online shows will be commissioned for 2009 in drama, comedy and music with healthy budgets of around £250K each. The big players are already moving in, with Gap Year, an Endemol production heavily sponsored by outdoor brands, yielding viewers. A Message From Earth, where Bebo users uploaded content for a time capsule blasted into space from the Ukraine really starts to exploit UGC and interactivity with the format for a magazine show. The funding model here is far more like a feature – Bebo won’t go into production until the production costs are covered, making it more profitable that Channel 4’s ‘serious’ dramas.

David Bausola from AG8 was easily my most inspiring speaker of the day. His company AG8 interface between brands and content production, cutting out the middle-man of television. With Henry Normal’s comedy production company Baby Cow he conceived “Where Are The Joneses?” an online drama series commissioned by Ford to rather than overtly product place, associate humorous content with the brand to start revamping the conservative image of the company. It’s all about making it more viral – no one shares TV ads (though I would contest this, Cillit Bang Man’s ad and associated mash-up has racked millions of views on YouTube) but people will share witty, shocking, funny or cute content.

AG8’s tactic is to engage heavily with the “first 100 passionate users” (I guess these are your super-fans and super-connectors) and diffuse it from there – rather than seed it surreptitiously. This works on a new model – rather than produce the ‘content’ (i.e the advert) cheaply and spend the campaign money on broadcasting it frequently, now you spend all the money on the content – a whole series worth – and seed it in online places where people are. However, the tale wags the dog as the series has been licensed for broadcast on Sky.

Interactive drama is all about transmedia – delivering a story across a range of media where UGC creates an environment where “mess is lore” and in a reversal of the 1960s our pop culture is injected with visions from abstract art. Russell Davies, advertising guru, reminds us “forget big ideas, seek rich ideas.” Art and culture bleed back into commerce, like The Simpsons taking over a Kwik-e-Mart with Simpson’s cereal and beer to promote the film.

It’s also less about engagement with the narrative as in traditional television and film, but measuring what interactions and info is being requested. The semantic web is like an innuendo – tags and sharing create different contexts and multiple meanings.

The weakest link of the day, and a particularly depressing take on the brave new world of online drama, was Robert Wulffe-Cochrane from Channel4, who told us all drama lost the network buckets and there is no future in pureplay online commissioning – only for content which supports a landmark show – Skins, Hollyoaks etc. Their budget slashes and 15% headcount death toll may create a dark cloud other its outlook and staff, but I did think that as licensed-funded BBC and even ITV are branching into online-only or initial/primary online broadcasting (with Universal Music co-pro “Britannia High”), the self-proclaimed disruptive broadcaster is in danger here of missing the boat – if it hasn’t done so already.

It’s clear that to succeed online, quality is not king, which is where the complex and high budget interactive drama can fall foul of user-generated content like the YouTube eye make-up video girl who’s been asked to launch her own eye make-up range. Despite ‘competing’ with professional online videos, people preferred her down-to-earth approach. And online content is often as much about the ‘use’ as the ‘entertainment’ value. Yet brand owners’ dollars, to date, have flooded into online – Seth McFarlane scored a $50 million dealth with Burger King to make just 50 x 2 min clips – that’s expensive even for a feature film.

Interesting discussions took place around the production tchniques of the show: Dubplate Drama had two alternatives filmed for everything, with points to weave in and out, and ambigious dialogue to allow for alternatives – (like “after what happened at the club”, where it could have been either a fight or a shooting). Like Choose Your Own Adventure books, it all seems a bit complex and ‘over prodcued’ to be viable in a range of different productions, although highly experimental and relevant.

Interactive drama plots need to appear fast-paced, but actually evolve very slowly and deliberately, ‘less is more’, as users are not always consuming stories linearly, nor are they soaking it all in, as they’re likely to be twittering, IMing, SMSing or listening to music while viewing (the average 30 minutes of online video is viewed in just 20 minutes).

In conclusion, there are I believe great opportunities in interactive comedy and drama for independent producers, but equally for intermediaries and connectors who can join the dots between the big brands and the storytellers. Advertisers, online marketers who partner with film creatives are well-placed to grow with this genre – which is slowly creeping out of the brand-pockets of tweenies and to a more mature and dynamic genre.