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.

Social networking tips for creative freelancers and media

Last week I gave a talk in Manchester as part of the DMEX training programme I’m working on which upskills ‘traditional’ (strange term in itself!) media professionals from TV, radio and film to work in digital environments through a series of work placements, mentoring, an online network (email me if you’d like an invite to join), a collaboration project (we’re currently making a machinima film) and a series of workshops.

This one was on the mixed subjects of pitching (with Stuart Nolan from Hex Induction), multi-platform commissioning (with Mario Dubois from BBC Multiplatform) and I gave a presentation of using social media for benefiting your freelance business.  (The full write-up of the event is available on the DMEX Ning website – email me if you’d like an invite to join).

Here’s my presentation with some videos and links to case studies:

Dmex 04 02 09 Blogging And Social Networking

View more presentations from susioneill. (tags: social media)

It was a fun, practical session with a lively group where I did a lot of “show and tell” and created a live blog post to show how easy it is to get going with publishing and connecting your ideas to the wider business community.  I’ll no doubt be writing more on this subject soon, but some key points to take away:

All networks are social

Online networks are much the same as real world networks, you need to feed your network and nurture it for it to bloom, but online networking, rather than just time-wasting, is like the telephone and email – just another new form of conversation so treat it as that – immediate and rich with an equal mix of great ideas and bullshit.

Start with the end in mind

Decide on your goals in advance.  It could be to gain profile because you’re new to freelancing or new in town – in this case a frequency strategy of short but high volume “presence” on blogs and other social networks is effective.  You may want to position yourself as an expert – you’ll then need to define your subject and think of carefully crafted links, comments and posts that define your specialism.  Maybe you want to use social networks to further your own knowledge – in which case you’ll do this by becoming a ’super connector’ giving advice and ideas to others in return for a piece of theirs.

Have fun and value your time

I’ve just started to use the rather excellent CreativePro Office (it’s free and let’s you track projects, milestones, invoices and time spend on projects) and now I monitor how much time I spend as part of my business development on Twitter, RSS and Facebook.  Decide on your goals and don’t let social networking impact on your workload – it takes a while to “work” for you in terms of bringing in work, so I prefer a little but often frequency to avoid internet addiction.  Keep it light and make it fun – you could make deeper relationships between you and your prospective clients, collaborators and peers.

I noticed my old colleague Dave Harte also did a talk recently on social media for business success, so check that out too – he has some interesting complimentary examples.

Hi to everyone I met at the seminar, it was great for me to help other people get a bit de-mystified and fired-up as to the why and how of social media for business.  If you’d like me to give a talk for your group or business on social media, please get in touch.

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.

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…