More Food For Thought: Improving VOD

Check out this open letter to VOD services by the NYTimes Engadget blog, advocating increased information sharing during live film streaming. More so than the recommended films feature on the Netflix website, a plug-in that would allow viewers to rent other films by a director, or with a specific castmember while watching the initial film would give VOD companies (and subsequently, the films' distributors) the ability to profit from a movie watcher's ADD and generate new revenue.  This may raise the question, "why don't I just pull out my laptop and find out what else the director has done?".  Although it would take a minimal amount of effort to do so, what happens once you find what you're looking for on IMDB?  Is there a big shiny "WATCH NOW" button to push?  No, I have to waste more time and go through more steps to decide which of the director's movies to rent, and then decide the best way to view it.   This is where VOD services has the upperhand.  Not only does it let you watch Arnold on your big Panasonic TC-PV10 instead of your little MacBook Pro, but the plug-in would also tell you which films to watch next and give you the way to watch them.  For a film nerd/lazy bum like me, this is a dream come true.  Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon anyone?

Food for Thought: More on Transmedia Storytelling

Reading Ted Hope's blog this morning I came across a really interesting article on Transmedia Storytelling by David Bordwell, the well known film academic out of the Univ. of Wisconsin.  I used to refer to Bordwell's website from time to time in college, but haven't really looked at it since, so it was really fortuitous that Ted Hope linked to it, and even more fortuitous that it was to an article on my new favorite trend in filmmaking.  Among other things, Bordwell does an excellent job differentiating transmedia storytelling from your typical franchise:

Some transmedia narratives create a more complex overall experience than that provided by any text alone. This can be accomplished by spreading characters and plot twists among the different texts. If you haven’t tracked the story world on different platforms, you have an imperfect grasp of it...In most film franchises, the same characters play out their fixed roles in different movies, or comic books, or TV shows. You need not consume all to understand one. 

While I don't really agree with his assertion that transmedia storytelling is more difficult to realize with a film as opposed to a serialized form of entertainment like television, generally I found his observations to be dead on.  To read the rest of this essay, click here.

He Lived To Comb Grey Hair: Senator Ted Kennedy Dies

Although it was expected, it's no less shocking. The last prince of Camelot is gone. Rest in peace. I hope with your passing we begin to heed your sage voice on healthcare.

From Around The Internet: Mickey Rooney Staying Relevant

Haven't had a chance to watch this yet (damn the no headphone policy at work) but I plan to when I get home. Hope it's funny.

Say What? Transmedia Storytelling

Ever since DIY Days Philadelphia I've been thinking a lot about Transmedia Storytelling and how when employed skillfully, it can generate a constant and varied stream of revenue for the players involved. For those of you new to this buzz word, Transmedia Storytelling is "storytelling across multiple forms of media with each medium making distinctive contributions to the audience's understanding of the story" (thanks Wikipedia!). Pioneered by indie mavericks like Lance Weiler and the Blair Witch team, the Transmedia approach has slowly been entering our collective consciousness, evolving in tandem with the way we receive and perceive information in the digital age. Unlike in traditional unidirectional storytelling, where the audience receives the given information for a fixed period of time, this new media process is multi-directional, with multiple authors and architects helping to build the new fictional reality in which dynamic new narratives can play out over an indefinite period of time.

And with multiple points of entry (read: distribution outlets), there are multiple points to eke out a couple bucks. With the potential to create revenue streams through providing premium content, early access to new story developments, events and merchandise (to name only a few), transmedia allows a single product--whether a movie, a toy, a novel or a song--to be profitable long after the intial buzz has died down. Or in the case of television, keep viewers tuning in season after season.

Take the Star Wars franchise. The feature films alone have generated a cumulative worldwide box office of more than $4 billion. That doesn't even begin to factor in the novels, videogames, and toys that provide a constant stream of ancillary revenue. Then there's the Clone Wars cartoon feature and subsequent TV series. I know it's taken a beating in the press, but when viewed within a transmedia context, it takes on new significance. The Clone Wars reintroduces that original product from 1977 to a new Y2K audience. To the middle-aged geeks who grew up with the original trilogy, this new venture may seem abhorrent. But to the generation of pre-teens who were born after Al Gore invented the internet, The Clone Wars represents an exciting new world of sci-fi lore that started on the big screen and continues on multiple smaller screens.

This exciting new approach to storytelling is the wave of the future. Born out of the internet and a growing tech-savvy population, transmedia storytelling provides an alternate digital reality for people to connect with each other. It replicates in the online space the shared cinematic experience of a packed movie theater, or that of a story being told around a campfire and sustains the audience's interest long after the intial content has been consumed. Hopefully, opportunities to build these new complex alternate realities will continue to grow and when the time comes for me to look for my next career move (only 6 months from now!) a job working for a company like Starlight Runner will be waiting for me.

Back in the Saddle Again

It's been a long time since I've written a post and frankly, I'm feeling a little hesitant starting back up. The blog world is cluttered with chatty cathys gabbing about everything from what they ate to where they shit. So how do you get heard in a room with no walls and a million people shouting? Most likely, you don't. And frankly, that's okay. Long tail theory be damned, no one is going to read this. But if nothing else, its a place for me to clear my mind, hone my skill, and document my thought process.

Last night I went to a packed screening of Blade Runner at the MOMA and I'm really glad I did. Seeing that movie on the "big screen" was a completely revelatory experience. A lot of the film's mood and tone is lost when watched on a television or worse, a computer screen. Blade Runner is a slow, deliberate, thoughtful science fiction film with details that are easy to lose when watching at home with distractions such as phones, computers, friends, food, etc. It's a movie that demands concentration for proper digestion. To give it less than that is to lose some of the subtle details of the marketplace where some of the film's best scenes occur, the elaborate noir costumes, and even the plot. The images and their aural counterpart are designed to overwhelm the viewer, and its power to do so is greatly diminished when consumed incorrectly.

With the visceral power of the four-wall experience, I think its important for filmmakers to not to just harness the power of the internet, but harness the power of the theater as well. Sure, this isn't cheap and it's a headache to figure out on your own. But isn't this part of the reason why we make movies? Otherwise, what's to distinguish film from the larger more amorphous label "content"? I like to think of the content/film distinction as being similar to a rectangle and a square. Film is content, but content is not film. Look at your average Youtube video, webseries, or comedy short. While these can all be well-written, funny, brash, true, articulate and the like, they're not "Blade Runner", and for the most part, they don't aim to be. While internet distribution is a key tool to gain awareness, funding, and fans--it's all still second to a true theatrical experience. This is why I want to make movies. This is what I am striving for. The opportunity not only to share my work democratically, as the internet allows, but also to experience the joy of seeing film projected as it should be -- on a 50ft screen in Dolby 5.1.