Ephemeral Media Workshop, 23-24 June

I was lucky to be invited to a seminar principally for academics about ephemeral media, at University of Nottingham. I’d never heard the term ‘ephemeral media’ before, which in this context was used to describe short-form, fleeting media often overlooked by academia – but which plays a key role in understanding how media is evolving particularly through immersion with social media. This event looked particularly at new forms of online video.

Rather than being full of (my worst fear) incomprehensible academic musings, the event was actually full of useful theoretical ideas and examples of how e-drama and media content is evolving, where it came from, and what it all means.  Here’s a taster of my highlights from two days worth of very informed and interesting papers from the workshops entitled: “Internet Attractions: online video and user-generated ephemera“

Barbara Klinger – fan re-enactment

Barbara Klinger (Indiana University) showed many examples of fan re-enactment in relation to fan fiction and film including ‘movieocke’, originating from the ‘Den of Cin’ bar in New York where people get together to re-enact favourite scenes from movies, a ‘re-play’ of movie culture.  This has been professionalised by some, e.g. Charles Ross – One Man Star Wars, where Ross, a professional actor, plays all characters and hums the music and FX in a show which is part parody, part homage, part spectacle.

Chris Strombolis and friends re-enacted the whole of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” over many years, originally bootlegging early screenings in the days before home video.  The film later gained many cult screenings.  Fan re-enactments often have comic and parodying effects through its low-tech bricolage.

Re-enactments often use their original locations e.g. The Blob at Phoenixville, an annual re-enactment as patrons flee the Colonial cinema in the 1950s horror flick, or Lebowskifest , a homage to a recent classic film celebrating the culture of the drop-out and misfit hero.  These couldn’t help to me bringing to mind Stewart Lee’s fantastic parody of Del Boy falling thorugh the bar in Only Fools and Horses translated into a folk fayre legend.  The re-enactment movement is led by men; female re-eanctment is usually associated with female led films (we can also see these trends in role play and gaming more widely).

Klinger views ephemeral media as fragments, fleeting, not treated seriously as academia but it de and re-contextualises media and is fundamental to an understanding of intertextuality which allows works to survive and develop outside of conventional releases.

Hugh Hancock, Strange Company – Machinima

The inimicable Hugh Hancock, one of the world’s leading machinima makers (indeed he even coined the name), who I enjoyed working with recently on the “Education for Leisure” machinima production, delivered his usual high-energy romp through machinima past, present and future.

Whilst the internet is primarily driven in innovation by porn, machinima is another innovation of pushing existing technology forward in new and unexpected ways.  Machinima began with Quake c.1999, the first game to incorporate a sandbox for, with difficulty, playing and editing scenes. It is defined as computer generated animation using existing virtual platforms e.g. console games or virtual worlds.

Theoretically using machinima it is possible to create film works with one person, or certainly a  small production team, which increases the artistic independence of the director. Academic theorist Michael Nietsche recognized two types of machinima:
‘Inside-out’ – fan movies made by gamers, often about the game
‘Outside-In’ – filmmakers use machinima as a new tool for animated drama

Machinima has since fragmented into many different sub-genres specific to different games e.g. Sims 1999 site – all use different editors, voice actors and production studios.  Rufus Cubed’s World of Warcraft inside-out games attract 10M viewers.  These are huge communities with economic power – but they quickly dissipate as the game ages.

In 2006 machinima got noticed by the industry: there was a rush from games producers to hire the best machinima makers.  Many went inside and produced segments for games but didn’t go back to making machinima.  Often their work can only be seen by playing hours of the game up to different levels of game, becoming ephemeral due to the limited audiences who can see it and replay ability reducing viewing access.

Machinima makers face a glass ceiling: they can’t break into traditional media due to big games makers e.g. EA denying permission to produce series and DVDs or negotiate royalty splits, e.g. 2006’s Male Restroom Etiquette by Phil Rice which never made it through to a series despite a commission offered. The big crux: machinima has yet to have a big court case determining rights and usage. Could machinima be covered under ‘fair use’ copyright?  Machinima is not ‘copying’ but photographing characters. But makers need to challenge and negotiation more with the industry. Hugh survives as a machinma maker because he doesn’t have an allergy to talking to lawyers.

Machinima, as a form of immediate animation, can, like other types of social media, be used as a force for community and political change. Stealth Legislation was made within 48 hours to show the effects of EU immiment internet legislation.

Microsoft’s Project Natal is a new Xbox motion capture suite under £500 which could revolutionise machinima, particiularly if it becomes linked to Second Life, plus a £100 facial recognition software could mean avatars represent people in real-time triggered by real-life actions.  This could have big effects for both social and business e.g. virtual conferencing, and also benefit indie film-makers by rapidly creating sophisticated graphics e.g. animated characters mapped onto real people’s movements. Machinima and performance capture are on a colition course to mesh into one media.

Tracy Harwood (De Montfort University)’s  machinima study discussed definitions of co-creation (participation) and co-production (collaboration on the project), describing the medium as about socialism and the social, concerned with collaboration and sharing within the community.

Daniel Ashton (Bath Spa University) believes machinima is in a transition form from amateur to professional, or “cresting the Horizon” (Hugh Hancock, 2007).  Limitations are often to do with the framing of its creators;  Lowood believes players should express their work as content developers rather than players, where hacking mixes technological mastery with subversion.

Quality machinima worth viewing:

‘The Stolen Child’ – a Second Life created film by Lainy Voom (aka Trace Henderson)
Bloodspell – Hugh Hancock’s fantasty machinima feature film
‘The Journey’ – Appears as a 2D animation through post-production effects
Red v Blue “Going Global” – commission of the original and most famous machinima serial for Machinma Europe festival as a  critique of European film genres

Rebekah Willett – camera phone, production and identity

A study of camera phone production – why people do it and what they film, which is an interesting but little studied area. Camera videos are ephemeral in the nature of what’s recorded – yet little is deleted from servers – but its symbolic value is more important than its legibility.  Statistically:

1/3 make personal documentary – e.g. family, friends
¼ make non-personal e.g. weather, landscape
¼ make public performance e.g. recording gigs

Sam Coley – online practices of david bowie fans

Coley, a radio documentary producer, discussed interactivity and fan culture from a producer’s perspective. He produced a documentary about the 25^th anniversary of Bowie’s 1983 concert, New Zealand’s biggest ever gig, which you can listen to here.  It includes a charming original recording of a short song Bowie wrote for his Maori hosts.

Fans communities are reshaping documentary production, offering feedback mechanisms to benefit the producer in pre-production but also give a life to the documentary extending far beyond broadcast. YouTube Insight is a fine-grained analytics tool which allows producers to analyse how users are interacting with the video or audio content and who the audience is.  Audio clip shows, taking advantage of the screen for radio on platforms like digital TV and YouTube, is a new way of re-imaging what radio looks like and placing audio within a multimedia context.

Jon Dovey (University of West of England) – Archeologies, Economies and Ecologies

We’re in the grip of a second dotcom boom: plenty of hype and money thrown at unknown entities. But what is the value of user-generated content: Democratic?  Economic?  Political?

Echoing my own views that social media et al is nothing new: the 1970s Bay Area ‘radical computing’ movement predicted the power of information over land. Today Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Fake and Butterfield (Flickr) and Matt Mulanwey (WordPress) all emphasise the  importance of allowing users to create without technical skills, so creating and accessing media becomes something normal than eventually everyone can do.

The utopia of access for all through the internet is perhaps a Victorian, elitist world view: globally only 17.4% of people can access the web (70% in the developed world). Barabasi looks at the topology of the web, like an aerial view of the rainforest we only see the tops of trees, or a snapshot of all the billions of pieces of information available. Relationships are critical to navigate this forest: comunity management is the starting point of online marketing.

Henry Jenkins believes fan fiction developed into YouTube, though the platform will lose $470M in 2009 – parallel with loss-leading web 1.0 (1999-2001) hype and speculation which leads to the hollow speculative incomes for developer-entrepreneurs.  KateModern, a new form of interactive drama content, only attracted 25M views, 150K per webisode, and that resulted from involuntary pop-ups on users profiles. Bebo sold for £850M and immediately its user-base declined.

Bauwens, a web1.0 entrepreneur who went on to establish the Peer-To-Peer Foundation,proposed three types of P2P networks:

1) Capitalist- e.g. crowd-sourcing around a commercial product
2) Sharing economy – expression, e.g. YouTube
3) Peer production proper – collaboration to create social artifacts, though business may profit (e.g. advertising)

William Merrin – Understanding Me-dia

In the first reformation, the printing press liberating text from purely spreading the word of god.  Today is the second reformation, liberating producers from established publishers and markets. This presents challenges: volume, dispersal, ephemerality (devices, meaning) and access (e.g. network owner control) and needs a new form of analysis – a ‘Media Studies 2.0′: traditional media studies focus on broadcast era, we now need to look at post-broadcast ecologies as a new entity, not just as a continuation of fan culture.

Elizabeth Evans: Kate Modern

Kate Modern, the social media online soap,  is actually anti-ephermal content – 14hrs of content, continually available as a permanent, virtual object. Participation from engagement in the content is only truly possible within a few days of broadcast before the story moves on.

Various interactive exhibition structures were use like marathons (12 films distributed in 12 hours), quizzes (like ‘where is Kate?’) and live events – a live filming which took place on Carnaby St 10am, encouraging audience to participate which leads to deeper engagement and more viral activity.  This was a great analysis, and extends the article I wrote about Kate Modern while it was original broadcast.

Rik Lander – www.u-soap.com

Lander, as a producer of seminal e-drama, offered an interesting practitioner and historic perspective on the form. There are various funding methods for e-drama:

DIY parody
Showreels – to gain professional work
Corporations
Sponsored
Un-funded pure creativity

And many forms of e-drama:

Tv on the web
Linear webby
Interactive
Participatory

It requires many different questions of production like, who is holding the camera? Not a concern of TV but its imperative to internet drama

Lander’s first production was Magic Tree (2001) using text and web (HTML/Flash) as the options available for bandwidth. Viewers were sent a box with chocolate twigs and a magical growing tree, mixing the personal with the consumable. Video is now the currency of e-drama, although potentially e-drama becomes an extension of film and TV rather than a mixed media production.

Lander went on to produce Wannabes for BBC, a teen drama which works on creating friendship ratings and giving advice from characters using video within an interactive database.

Together Alone is a pilot project using actors, crowd-sourced from a talent show format, all over world directly virtually by Skype and montaged together in edit, which gives an endearing inconsistency as settings differ and objects interface from one ’set’ to another.

For e-drama, production viability for acquiring funders is 250,000 viewers, though Bebo et al will claim to sponsors that 20M or more will view it.  Only a fraction of users are likely to be participatory but  they are critical for the development of the production. The web is platform for something ground-breaking and innovative, but not necessarily for producing the highest quality or longevity in film works.

Claire Wardle (Cardiff University)– UGC at the BBC

As part of an AHRC extensive study into user generated content across several BBC departments, Wardle’s study look at its use in news (download the report here).  Its a small minority who submit UGC who are not representative of the whole audience. 90% of contents is thought to originate from 1% of users.

There are many barriers to participation: technological, impetus (why do it?), perception of those who contribute – plus the digital divide. UGC works best with specific calls to action –  say what news gatherers want to know about rather than just asking people to have their say (as this parody website testifies, the results of user’s views can be absurd to the extreme). UGC has the benefits of networked journalism: audiences knows more on subject as ‘lay experts’.

72% of people have never contributed material to a news organisation, though interestingly the most popular contributory media is newspapers (17%), radio (9%), tv (7%) and finally websites (4%).

Moderation of UGC is still valuable: Sky i-News allowed people to upload whatever news they want, assuming the community would extract false news but after eroneous news of Steve Jobs’s death caused shares to drop they realised the need for curating/policing.

Conclusions

Overall this was a fascinating and insightful event, thanks to Paul Grainge from University of Nottingham for organising it and letting me observe it. What was key to me was that online media is far from ephemeral – prolific and difficult to decipher with new rules of symbolism and engagement which defies the usual structures of broadcasting and intrepretation typical of academic media studies.

How we made “Education for Leisure”, a Moviestorm machinima film

I’d be really pleased if you have a look at this film that I’ve been involved in producing since February this year, a machinima interpretation of Carol Ann Duffy (the recently appointed Poet Laureate)’s controversial poem “Education for Leisure”.

Education for Leisure from The White Room on Vimeo.

With a group of six TV and film-makers from the Northwest, it was part of the DMEX programme I’m working on, training media freelancers with digital skills through work placements, seminars and collaboration. We produced this short film using Moviestorm, a very new free software tool which was launched in the last year or so. The Moviestorm blog explains a bit about the process and team.

My role was effectively as a project manager, acting as the ‘boring glue’ to let everyone else be creative.  The twist with this project: it was a ‘virtual collaboration’ – we only met twice in person, all other production meetings were held using weekly Skype text meetings, and all shared resources and tasks were assigned and monitored using Huddle - two free resources I would heartily recommend for eryone from a voluntary group to an international project team.  Huddle particularly may lack the features of a most sophisticated bespoke system but actually it’s simplicity means it’s so much easier to use.

Our group was made up of writers, producers, editors and researchers – primarily use to working in the hectic environment of TV production offices, and some were self-confessed technophobes.  We split up tasks between more traditional roles (like script writers, editing, or sourcing and recording actors) and two brave Directors who learnt out to use Moviestorm to create film-like scenes.

The beauty of Moviestorm is, unlike typical machinima using existing console games, it’s designed to be copyright free for users to create their own actions using the simplicity of computer game tools and it’s leagues easier to learn than learning animation from scratch.  It’s also sophisticated in enabling directors to effectively ‘draw’ expressions on characters with fairly subtle nuances (even using ‘angry’ ‘happy’ sliding faders!), again, not typical of computer game machinima.   The downside: it was actually a far steeper learning curve than we may have thought with lots of annoying technical glitches (not to mention being epically processor and file-size hungry), but perhaps future releases of the software will be more feature rich and versatile – it’s early days.  There were plenty of limitations too, as Moviestorm to date doesn’t have so many costumes or sets – so we had to be creative in the sets, script and change a few things on the way.  Having to infer a goldfish was being flushed down a toilet (without a toilet, bathroom or goldfish on set) was a slight challenge!  But then again, aren’t all budget films intrinsically creative through such limitations?

I’m pleased with the final film, not least because I know how much hard work has gone on behind the scenes from the team – Harvey, Karen, Lee, Frances, Pawan and Jim.  The team, unlike many machinima makers, come from a traditional film-making background and I think have given the short a more cinematic feel than many other examples of this emerging genre.  And dialogue from real local actors – plus a composed sound-track from my old time musical collaborator Dave Fox – gives it a really distinctive edge.

For me what made it especially rewarding was how readily everyone took to using digital tools for production, communication, and even making decisions – and how, a lot of the time, it made the whole process easier and more democratic (we didn’t have a budget and everyone was doing it in their own time). And it’s always great to work with such creative people who can do such magical things with a limited amount of time and cash!

Please let me know what you think of the film.  We’re holding a premiere on the big screen event on July 2nd at Cornerhouse Cinema in Manchester to preview the film and talk a bit about the programme and how it was made.  Email me (susi@digitalconsultant.co.uk) if you would like an invite.

The next DMEX Labs project is called “The Mill” and will be a ’social media soap opera’. A similar team will create a drama distributed through social networks about the lives of a group of young creative types in Salford’s Islington Mill. I’m currently putting together the project team and formulating the brier with exec producer Carlton Reeve.  Very excited to get it moving, which I think will be a really cutting-edge production in its own right.  I’ll blog some bits about it as we go along. The production will be launched  in early September.

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...