People used to create their own entertainment. After dinner, they’d gather around the piano and sing. They’d make up stories to tell their children. They’d play sports and cards and board games. They’d knit and sew and crochet.
Then along came radio, television and film turning entertainment into a one-way street. Professionals entertained you and you sat back on the sofa with a bowl of chips and paid attention (or fell asleep, as the case may be).
Media that require passivity on the part of the audience aren’t new. Many are great art forms in the hands of great artists. You’re supposed to sit quietly in a theatre, at a concert, while reading a book. The experience of sitting back to be entertained can be wonderfully delicious. There’s nothing quite like gaining access to a rich story world and having its wonders play out for your pleasure.
People want more, at least some people do. I see this very clearly. People want to create and participate. Not everyone, but lots of people. Go to a knitting event. You’ll see hundreds of women buying yarn in order to explore colour and texture and make unique and beautiful things with their own hands. Look at YouTube and all the videos people have made. Look at how many zillions of blogs there are.
Yarn and needles are cheap easy ways to create. Computers and the web give us tools that allow anyone to be a creator/producer/publisher.
TV has dominated North American life for about 50 years. Maybe all this creating and participating is a kind of backlash to media telling people to sit quietly and listen for so many years. Maybe it’s just human nature.
I find the idea of telling stories in a medium that allows me to interact with my audience very exciting, but daunting as hell at the same time.
Yes, I want to know what my audience is thinking and how they’re responding to the story. But the next step after listening to them, is finding a way to invite them into the creative process. That is a scary thought.
Working on a television series you learn how difficult it is to create a story world when a committee is involved. In TV, the committee members include not just the writing team, but also the network, producers and directors. The actors often have something to say as well. It works best if one person has a strong vision and can get everyone else to buy into it. That’s the showrunner’s job; getting the entire team to visualize the same world and built it together.
Only the best and most experienced showrunners do it really well. And they are working with a team of experienced professionals.
My knee-jerk reaction is to say, you don’t. They can’t. I’m a pro. You’re not. Sit and watch. I’ll tell the story. But then I’m back to the TV experience.
The guys creating Purefold have an interesting model that maybe could work. It certainly takes you a step closer to involving the audience in creation. They are creating a story set in the future. The venture is branded entertainment. Advertisers are paying and their products are part of the story. You can learn more about Purefold in a variety of places around the web.
Their idea for involving audience in creation works like this. They are sharing the research that the writing team are using with the audience through FriendFeed groups. As an audience member, you have access to the same articles, videos and so on that the writers are reading to inform their story telling.
You can participate by commenting and rating articles. The content that most interests the audience will rise to the top and that informs what the writers write.
This is all still theoretical as far as I can tell. There are no Purefold episodes kicking around yet and there doesn’t seem to be a community rating articles yet either. Although I have found a couple of FriendFeed groups with Purefold in the title: Purefold Discussion, Ten Pilot and Directory of Synopses . None of these seem to have much activity in the way of commenting, rating or contributing content.
The Purefold method doesn’t let audiences in on the actual process that goes on in story rooms — the breaking of stories and creation of character — the really fun stuff. But it does allow their choices and interests to inform the direction the story takes, which means its more closely tailored to their interests. If you’re in the employ of ad agencies, brands or networks this would probably give them a sense of comfort. It’s like advance focus testing.
But in the real world of creating entertainment, will it help create entertaining product? We’ll see as Purefold emerges. One thing I can say about this is that when people become fans of projects they are always hungry for more and this gives them more. Plus, the writers are still free to do what they want. They can create their stories however they think they’re best created, taking the audiences’ whims into account or ignoring them, which I think, is the environment a creator wants to be in.
Another thing it does is give audiences some of the tools that the creators have. Maybe they’ll use it to build onto the story world the creators are making. Maybe they’ll make their own episodes or create characters of their own.
One of the things I like best about the Purefold plan is that they are doing everything under a Creative Commons license which means that you — no matter who you are — can take the content they create and build on it, play with it, reshape it, mashup it. You can use it in anyway you choose to fuel your own creative endeavours and not only that, you can profit from doing so. That’s very inclusive and foreward thinking.
This is an emerging art form. I find it fascinating.