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.

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.

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.

Interactive Drama: The State Of Play

“Movies, television, DVD, internet. It’s all the same thing, just different configurations…it’s an incredible landscape.” Quincy Jones, Film Producer

Described by The Simpsons creator Matt Groening as “a funny film-making genius”, Hazel Grian, Creative Director of Licorice Films, has been at the sharp end of cutting edge new forms of interactive content, including Alternative Reality Gaming and online drama. In November 2007 I caught up with Hazel in Bristol to chew the fat on her involvement in KateModern, the first drama commissioned by a social network, and the state and future of the strange-shaped genre known as interactive drama.
(NB: This is a bastardisation of what was originally an academic essay so forgive the over icing of the digital cake.)

Convergence of television and the internet

Marshall McHuhan, the guy who dubbed the wired world the “global village”, believes the content of any new medium is actually from an old one. This certainly applies to the recent phenomenon of online video and the convergence between broadcast television, digital television and online content.

Television has become a predictable, institutional ‘old’ media – but its original ambitions were akin to those of interactive media today – immersion, extension and communication. Its form has evolved through its history – a storytelling medium enabled by technology. Television is considered a ‘push’ medium – like print and newspapers – whereas the internet is a ‘pull’ or search medium, its take-up dominated by communication over publishing.

Convergence disrupts the tripartite relationship of print, telecoms and broadcast. Broadband offers the ‘multiplexing’ of TV, potentially an additional video platform (e.g. 4oD, iPlayer) but also an enriched, additional experience.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s audiences became more active, critically aware and discriminating. This has led to a rejection of television in favour of genres exploring interactivity, niche interests and virtual reality where viewing is replaced by active participation.

Cross-platform content creates permeable boundaries and intertextuality between forms, blurring the boundaries between producer, distributor, consumer and reviewer. Content is not always top down publisher-led, but blogs, chat rooms and message boards create a market for perishable, instant content. Interactivity also allows for emotive, collective participatory experiences.

Also dubbed “transmedia” storytelling or “polymorphic narrative”, multi-platform creates different entry points into the product’s heavily franchised world. And many platforms equates to more cash – there are more platforms for a brand than ever before. But it’s not a noughties phenomenon: “Wizard of Oz” was a book (1900) then a stage play (1902), then a film in 1910 and 1939, which spawned variations like “The Wiz” and “Wicked”. The heavy corporate hand has been a part of transmedia rich history; the first Broadway production of Oz featured its own sponsor placement content: the Irish wizard sings “Budweiser is a friend of mine”.

Interactive drama – a brief history

Online interactive drama is a synthesis of broadcast drama, live role play, game play and interactive social media, relying heavily on a sense of user engagement, interactivity and playfulness. However, interactivity creates a dilemma of intellectual property – who ‘owns’ the content, therefore who can exploit and monetise it? Fan fiction – cultural fan production – especially creates added dilemmas. Harry Potter Puppet Pals, a totally unauthorised puppet response to the films and novels of JK Rowling, is gathering quite a following of its own thanks to bottom-up user platforms like YouTube.

Interactive drama is an evolving phenomenon, relatively immature in its development. The first experiments (2001-5) were single platform with “Wheel of Fortune” (2001), broadcast simultaneously on Radio 3, Radio 4 and online where viewers were told to ‘bet now’ to access 90 million possible permutations of the story. This complex, futuristic approach was later replaced with the controlled and easily understood method of voting – viewers chose between three ‘voices’ in Radio 4’s “The Dark House” (2003) voting on a love triangle on Five’s “Family Affair” (2004) and a life or death ending in “Casualty” (BBC1, 2005).

The next wave (2005-7) productions were more truly interactive, exploiting the nuances of the internet. Nickelodeon’s CGI animated “Jimmy Neutron” was an early 360 degree cross-platform application – existing on TV, video, comic, internet and film. BBC’s “Jamie K” and “Wanabees” (2006), both aimed at teens, could be seen as the first interactive dramas – ‘broadcast’ online, allowing the characters’ ‘friends’ (online viewers) to vote and build up ‘friendship scores’.

During this period, broadcast drama became increasingly cross-platform e.g. “Dr Who” (BBC) online games relating to plotlines, “Hollyoaks” (Channel 4) enhanced content on mobile phones and “Skins” (E4) mini-‘webisodes’ available online. Interactivity allowed for deeper character development and for users to interact more intensively than in the weekly broadcast of a typical TV soap opera.

“Dubplate Drama” (2005), commissioned by E4 and MTV Base, was an interactive format for TV, similar to the 1980s publishing phenomenon of Bantam’s “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. A six-part gritty urban drama about grime musicians, it starred urban celebrities Miss Dynamite and Rodney P (So Solid Crew) and was available on 3 mobile network and Sony’s PSP. Each episode ended in a dilemma cliff hanger, encouraging viewers to text in what they should do next. The producers believed the social element of the drama as a means of getting teenagers to discuss complex social issues.

Kate Modern – drama played out online

KateModern is an online, interactive drama commissioned by Bebo – the UK’s most popular social networking site with 31 million users, predominantly youth and teen. Bebo proves a great proposition for marketers: users spend on average 41 minutes online, making it a more “sticky” platform than television, and a means of reaching the lucrative teen market, turning off their TVs in droves.

Aimed at teens, it is part-comedy, part-drama, part-mystery (described as “a kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Skins”) telling the story of troubled art student Kate and her three friends. Running from July to December 2007, users can send messages to the characters, help solve puzzles, vote and generally participate in the story. The interactivity is principally through the Bebo network rather than the ‘vote now’ model, however, few episodes are shot at a time, allowing for user feedback to be accommodated within a defined plot arc. This is a revolution from the pre-digital means of influencing drama where a letter to the editor or BBC’s “Points of View” (featuring the ever-youthful Anne Robinson and her infuriating wink) would be the primary form of viewer feedback (other than voting with the off switch).

KateModern is produced by the team behind the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon – the most subscribed YouTube channel showing the diaries of an attractive American teen who becomes embroiled in cult activities – which intrigued and frustrated new media exponents and marketers, and was later revealed to be staged.

Set in London and boasting a cast including Ralf Little (“The Royle Family”), it combines the inter­activity of social networking – where fans can do everything from commenting on episodes to interacting with characters – with scripted “webisodes”. It is a UK sister series to Lonelygirl15 - aping its ideas of an undercurrent of horror, cult themes and humours – but KateModern stays in the realm of fiction, encouraging the intense quasi-realistic relationships between viewers and makers in soap operas.

Live events including concerts and “flash mobs” link the real with the fictitious world. Actual up-and-coming band, “The Days” feature in the plot, with the intent of leaving viewers guessing what is real and what is fiction.

With a speculated £1 million budget – similar to a comparable terrestrial drama series – KateModern is commissioned by Bebo and financed by sponsors including MSN, Pantene, Gillette and Orange who have difficulty reaching a youth market on TV. Unlike typical film and TV product placement, the brands are integrated into characters’ dialogues and plotlines. This links with recent advertising trends of integrated marketing, brand profile and below-the-line marketing e.g. ‘seeding’ discussion of brands in internet chat rooms. Paramount Pictures UK used the drama to get characters to discuss plotlines from their new horror film “Disturbia” and episodes mirrored the film’s plot and themes.

The writing team behind KateModern are Luke Hyams (“Dubplate Drama”) and Hazel Grian. Hazel has a varied background as an actress, writer and director in TV, theatre, short films, animation and radio, working particularly in improvisation, comedy and science fiction. Prior to KateModern she created MeiGeist, an Alternative Reality Game, collaborating with HP Labs and Watershed Media Centre, which was the first to use video in addition to actors, live events and online game play. Regular short-listing in Watershed’s Depict! 90 second film challenge was a good learning ground for things to come.

Luke and Hazel’s writing process started with a sketch of characters and the same genre and rules as LonelyGirl15. Unlike TV soaps, each episode was micro, condensed and variable length, running from one to four minutes (15 to 20 minutes of content a week). The narrative presents a single vision (i.e. each episode is self-contained) and linearity but recognising it may be experienced in non-linear fashion, and to appeal to the ‘YouTube generation’ who prefer short bursts of activity and will likely fast-forward what they see as ‘the boring bits’.

The directing is intentionally lo-fi ‘guerilla’ style, with no ‘hidden cameras’ but video diary style, with characters seen reportage recording on mini-DV cameras and mobile phones, with intentionally staged ‘pieces to camera’ rather than the usually ‘fourth wall’ theatre or television drama approach. The production is more similar to user generated content video uploaded to YouTube than “Play of the Day”.

Hazel’s greatest challenge as a writer was working with sponsor brands to make product integration fit with the show’s dark material – like reflecting Ralph Little’s excitement at installing a wireless router and integrating references to Tampax (‘What, is she on her period again?!’). Hazel believes:

“The advertiser dominated framework made me experience what it was like to work in 1950s television on the original advertiser soap operas.”

Some product placement worked better than others as a natural synergy between brands and actions e.g. Live Maps and MSN Messenger – but the constant ‘name checks’ can grate on the viewer. The character Charlie works in PR and creates viral adverts for brands within the narrative, making the advertising self-referential.

Hazel believes interactivity creates a richer user experience – a role play between audience and producer. It creates a new dimension and depth of exploration with a story, from ‘lurkers’ to active participants and hardcore fans. It also creates a complex relationship – Babylon 5 producer J Michael Straczinski went online daily responding to fans posts. Hazel posted ‘in character’ as Kate, responding to fans posts and messages (she later trained a junior web producer to do this). Interactivity and reaction is essential to the dramatic believability of the form. Hazel believes that future audiences:

“…will not simply be ‘viewing’ or ‘watching’ interspersed with an injection of hated, in your face advertising. What you will be producing for your audiences must be commissioned and sponsored ‘experiences’. Film and television will have the feel of live theatre. Cinema and radio with the feel of a conversation.”

The show’s Executive Producer, Miles Beckett, believes “viewers interact with the characters in a way which is impossible with television.” Yet the rules of ‘old media’ drama are still tightly obeyed: “We have very consistent conflict, resolution, cliff hanger at the end of the week, A-plot action, B-plot character and interpersonal development.”

The jury is out on the popularity of KateModern. Although scoring three million views in its first eight weeks, in interactive media, the depth of interaction is more significant than numbers and viewer’s belief in the show’s authenticity could be compromised with its overt in-your-face productisation. All sponsors have signed for a second season, indicating they belief the association is boosting their brand. KateModern is a microcosm of contemporary entertainment convergence –interlinking localisation (based in London), regionalisation (a UK version of a US format) and globalisation (distributed to a potential global audience).

Hazel believes the future of interactive drama will be a TV-style model of broadcaster fee with core sponsors, not product placements. She is currently working on a production with Henry Normal/Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow productions sponsored by Ford. Rumours of a MySpace interactive drama at $400,000 per episode may be greatly exaggerated, but Bebo have already commissioned its next online hit: “Sofia’s Diary”.

Hazel believes comedy and parody work best for online drama – serious online drama doesn’t yet work yet as the medium itself is not yet considered serious. Interactive drama is still seminal and embryonic – investment and publicity is skewed more in its innovation than in meaningful content. But she remains optimistic of the future: “New roles are emerging from new forms of entertainment; I feel I am not at the forefront at an exciting time.”

The jury is likely to be out for some time on the uptake of interactive drama. The non-linearity of interactive drama may encroach a dramatic vision and never step out of the deepness of Hollyoaks. However, rich integration of character, personalised responses and the ability to influence action may in time prove a more rich medium, closer to emulating the emotive responsive of theatre than television or film. Many computer games already combine live action film or humanistic CGI characters within sophisticated interactive platforms, shaped by the user’s vision and their unique exploration of the game’s virtual world.

The trend for users migrating their time away from broadcasting and onto interactive platforms is likely to continue, and so will evolve how new hybrid medias work with audiences to create collective dialogues (e.g. MMROGs, social networks) and new interpretations of dramatic forms.