Kid Helios

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about storytelling for several reasons. Firstly in the day job we are doing some investigation into new ways of telling stories and new narrative forms as a means of reaching new audiences. Over the past year I’ve looked after a few projects that have taken storytelling in different sorts of directions. These kind of stories are exactly the sort of things that I think we should be doing at the Castle and I plan to blog about them separately in more detail. One project uses in car GPS to deliver stories to families on the move. Another drama ‘Over the Bridge‘ presents a forty part fragmented narrative to a younger audience via bluetooth to their mobile phones, and invites them to share, collect and watch the material (video, txt and voicemail) to make sense of the story.

The second reason is that I’ve started to write again after a long break - I have an idea for a book that I’ve begun to get down, and in thinking about it, I’m beginning to realise that my sensibilities around storytelling have now changed - and that in fact the opportunities that transmedia storytelling could bring to my story, could change it into something different entirely. I think that the evolved story is actually the one that I want to tell. The narrative will still have to work - even better than it would have before - but the approach will be more playful and that playfulness is liberating and is really the thing that has made me want to come back to doing some creative writing in the first place.

The starting point for the musings on transmedia storytelling were some thoughts around ‘the book’ itself - the traditional physical structure that encloses the story - the portable object that contains pages, text, pictures and information - the books I’m addicted to buying and that I can never throw away. I love the fact that books don’t need plugs or power cables - you can read them in bed, on the beach and in the bath. Books smell nice and bookshops and libraries are places of discovery - I would rather spend an hour on my own wandering around a good bookshop than almost anywhere.

A couple of years ago I was doing some early stage research into the idea of a classroom based ARG. I’d seen Elan Lee give a talk at ETech and one of the projects that he’d profiled was ‘Year Zero‘, an ARG on behalf of Nine Inch Nails, which had culminated in a secret gig, armed SWAT teams and generally the sort of full on adult ARG experience that you might expect in support of a Trent Reznor concept album. I asked Elan how he thought an ARG could be configured for a younger audience and he suggested a text book as a starting point. This seemed to be a very interesting idea and one that I’m still very keen to explore, where the book becomes the rabbit hole that propels a school class into a story. What appealed to me the most was an idea that developed over time - which was that the classroom teacher (who would initiate the ARG) could direct the student who most ‘needed’ to find the book towards it - that the book itself would be hiding in plain sight within the school library - and that within the fabric of the book would be all of the clues and structures necessary to start a group of students on an adventure that none of them would ever forget.

So back to the book - and the cover of the book. I love the artwork on bookcovers - you might not be able to judge a book by the cover, but who cares when you see something that tickles you into a bookshop to pick up and buy. When I was a kid I loved the artwork or Edward Ardizone, Charles Keeping, Arthur Ransome, E. H. Shepard - but what if the cover of that book could become alive. Memoires was a situationist collaboration between Asger Jorn and Guy Debord in the 1950’s. The cover of the book was made of heavy duty sandpaper, and the idea was that over time the book would have a destructive effect on the neghbouring books on the shelf. The naughty situationists imagined a passive aggressive book-cover - something that wold scratch the bourgeois coffee tables. Now we have book covers that can talk directly to us - A recent edition of Esquire magazine featured an augmented reality cover - that brought cover star Robert Downey Jr perkily to life.

So maybe now you can judge a book by the cover..?

I recently went to see a panel discussion at the Encounters short film festive, entitled ‘Pimp Your Story: Amplifying Your Film Online’, which featured my friend Hazel Grian who is a writer, performer and ARG creator, who works on very large scale commercial projects, as well as other more publicly orientated projects such as the British Red Cross ‘Traces of Hope‘. Alongside her on the panel was Matt Golding from viral agency Rubberduction and Ben Dowden who is a filmmaker with real experience of what works and why out there in the real world - more of that later. The audience was predominantly short filmmakers looking for insights into how to make the internet work for them as a means of distributing their films, reaching an audience, breaking through and doubtless making some money. It was a useful panel that made me want to capture the thoughts of the contributors as well as some of my own conclusions - so here goes…

The big question for traditional media outlets with public service at their heart, bottom line on the mind or earnest art movie makers is what is the magic formula to make the internet work to your benefit? Is there a lotion that when applied to a product acts like a viral pheromone to arouse and attract an online audience? In other words - what are the ‘Viral Secrets from the Ancient Transmedia Masters of MuMu’?

The discussion at Encounters started off with the observation that the traditional filmmaking industry is still a bit scared of the internet. Distributors of short films might demand exclusive rights and there’s the old chestnut of certain competitions also insisting that submissions are exclusive to their site. I’ve talked on panels at documentary conferences in the past and a few years ago there was a type of xenophobic fear radiating from some of the old media outlets. The filmmakers themselves often felt that they would end up signing rights away, and the already very tight margins would shrink as they inevitably ended up being squeezed out. The truce between old media and filmmakers signed in the no mans land of multiplatform led to the creation of a number of publicly and privately funded initiatives that tried to persuade an online audience to pay for factual content. The view was that these freakish on-demand TV hybrids would satisfy distributors, filmmakers, advertisers and audience. In the real world it didn’t work, and the search for the formula continued.

The big shift in those few years has been from a ‘bums on seats’ approach to an ‘eyeballs on screen’ one. Now the instinct to engage with the internet often comes from within the marketing department, where there is a realisation of the power of the web to reach distributed audiences, and through the social aspect of the web also to engage with the audience on an intimate level. This potent understanding of the audience is great for filmmakers in helping to make their work better, but is also clearly intelligence and access that is worth its weight in gold to advertisers.

At Encounters Matt screened some movies putting forward Black Hole as an example of one of those breakthrough films that sets the internet alight. Sitting within the Futureshorts YouTube channel this film runs at around two and a half minutes and has had to date enjoyed an eye watering five and a half million views. It’s clever, elegant, (probably) low budget and well acted. It has no dialogue which gives it an international transferable appeal. I watched it, liked it and immediately thought about people who I know who would also like it. It is - and here is the first ‘Viral Secret from the Ancient Transmedia Masters of MuMu’ - authentic. It is it’s authenticity that makes it work so well. As a viewer you have a relationship with the film that is genuine. It does what it does very well, and invites you to read it for what it is. It’s not selling you anything, pretending to be something bigger or more clever than what it is. Most audiences and in particular young, engaged digital natives can spot a pup when they’re being sold one.

Ben talked about his art and films - he uses a single locked off camera - and he lets the performers that he films speak for themselves. He’s uncompromising on the image and sound quality - watch Dub FX on Ben’s YouTube channel.

‘Love Someone‘ has been viewed two and a half million times. Structurally the films are shortish in length without complicated edits and because they are reasonably locked off they work well on the small screen.  Because of the number of views that he gets YouTube phoned and offered him a share of the advertising revenue and a funkier microsite. He’s stripped most of the ads off his films, because compromising his art isn’t what he’s about. He has a partnership with the artists that he works with - and the work that they produce together is a quality product - and quality is the second ‘Viral Secret from the Ancient Transmedia Masters of MuMu’. Make something good, and people will want to see it - simples…

Hazel’s approach to ARGs is to regard them as another way to tell great stories - she’s a writer and a filmmaker - and she screened You Suck at Photoshop as an example of a weird hybrid that works and works very well. What is there not to like about seeing a fragmenting marriage through the lens of the instructional video - genius. Hazel made the point that new artistic forms are emerging all the time now, as new technology and mediums bang up against one another. New platforms can link across the web, allow performance, improvisation, role playing and engagement outside of the window of viewing. But to do that well, you need to take secrets one and two of the ‘Ancient Transmedia Masters of MuMu’, and merge them seamlessly with an insightful understanding of the most important of all of the secrets - the audience. Knowing your audience, anticipating their reactions, and now more than ever entering into a dialogue with then through the medium of your authentic, quality product is the recipe for viral nirvana.

Over lunch with George, the discussion turned to the interestingly auspicious day next year of October 10th 2010, or in other words 10/10/10. In binary 101010 is 42 - which as everyone knows, is the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Gasp…

That got us thinking about whether October 10th next year could be used as a day for a positive celebration of the web. A ‘Wonderful Web Wingding’ Day - or hopefully something better titled - you get the gist.

The feeling is that the web is pretty wonderful and transformative, but that it gets routinely kicked by a combination of lazy journalism, negative hype, deliberate obfuscation or plain old evil regime. It can be used for nefarious purposes, but it can also be used as a tool for real positive change - so why not have a day to celebrate all the good things about the web, and to ponder how it can be even better in the future?

Who’s with us..?

From the beginning of October I’m going to be starting a new job at the BBC. It’s all very exciting, and I hope will build on the development work that I’ve been leading for the BBC Learning Development team over the last two years. I’m going to be setting up a development unit within the Vision MPP products department (breathe) - doing rapid development of new ‘of the web’ products. I’ve been sporadically blogging for the last few years - most recently I started to collect AR links and videos here - but I’m now going to make a real effort to collect thoughts and findings as I go here, on this very site.