Hot hot news from the transmedia world: Christy Dena has launched a new transmedia focused website called You Suck At Transmedia. What are you still hanging around here for? Go take a look!
More Coffee!!!
There is so much to do. No time for sleeping. I’m at my desk till late and back at it early, swilling coffee. It’s 10:30 and I just brewed a second pot… all right, not brewed, french pressed with organic beans from The Green Grind. Mmmm. I’ve been thinking of putting a logo on my site that says powered by The Green Grind. I digress.
Yesterday, as you may have noticed, we posted a casting breakdown. Submissions are pouring in. I have to stop myself from looking at photos and resumes. I have other things to do and a time set aside for that in the company of Kerry and Kelly. We’ve distributed the casting call in a variety of ways. Because we’re looking for some teens, we’ve posted the call at some acting camps and schools and passed it on to the acting teachers we know. We’ve also posted on sites dedicated to casting and good old Craig’s list. And we’ve pumped the link out to our own social media networks. Between us, we have some serious reach in that department, verifiable by the bit.ly stats and the incoming traffic on the site.
I’m psyched to see how we can build a community for Ruby Skye PI using social media tools, given that individual members of the team are starting out with know how and cred. I’m not just talking about Karen Walton here, who is clearly a genius in the social media space. One member of our team I haven’t mentioned yet is Dorice Tepley. Dorice has awesome social media skills to contribute to the project.
Building out our social media strategy is part of tomorrow’s agenda but we know that creating assets for the web and providing a deep experience for our fans is an essential element. We plan to offer a deep “backstage” experience, meaning that we’ll pull back the curtain and give you access to lots of the action behind the scenes. To that end, we’ll be inviting different people to help document our production especially when we’re shooting. Mark Montefiore, who all of us adore, has agreed to come do some documentary shooting during production and we’ll share his footage with you as we go along. I’m so excited by this idea!
All right, gotta refill the coffee and start in on the to do list which involves getting the REAL website jump started. Can’t wait!
The Effect of Social Media on Advertising
Mashable has a cool piece by Hank Wasiak on how social media is changing advertising. I love this graphic.
Marketing has traditionally focused on the four “Ps”: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Social media has morphed into the fifth, and possibly most important “P”: People. A people strategy is at the center of today’s dynamic and fluid social marketing mix. John Janitsch of Duct Tape Marketing has another take on the four Ps, and has turned them into four Cs for the social age: Content, Context, Connection and Community.
A people strategy is much broader, deeper and more profound than consumer targeting. It involves listening to and engaging with everyone who can touch or influence current and potential customers at all stages of brand interaction. Jeff Pulver is a savvy guy who has had his finger on the pulse of this dynamic for some time. “The social media revolution is less about “we the people” and more about “me the people,” Pulver said.
Ah, people. How did we forget them for so long?
Production Journal – July 14, 2010
We’re rolling and… is it a ball or is it a rock? Whatever it is, it is picking up speed!
The fabulous Kelly Harms is on board to direct. He has got a positive energy that I love, a spark in his eye and a quick smile. We are very sympatico on the story and our approach to it. The collaboration couldn’t feel more natural.
We had a tremendous story meeting yesterday and the notes from Kerry, Karen and Kelly (the K Collective) were fantastic. I can’t wait to dive back into the script.
From here on, the project will be called Ruby Skye P.I. We changed it from Eye to Eye With Ruby Skye right around the time I started setting up social media accounts. When I realized what an endless handle that would be on Twitter, I consulted the team and bought a new a URL. In fact, if you type in any of these URLs:
rubyskypi.com
eyetoeyewithrubyskye.com
you should get to our temp website. I’m starting to fill that in slowly between other activities and late at night. Our Twitter account is live and lightly active. Accounts on other social sites are set up and awaiting attention.
We’ve been passing a casting breakdown back and forth this morning. I hope it’ll go out later today or tomorrow. I’ll post it here too. There are also lots of volunteer positions available on our crew, production staff and social media team. Let us know if you’d like to help.
RS Production Journal
Cal asks:
What I’m curious about is if/how you are going to script/employ other forms of media and interface around the main plot line and if so, are you building it in at this stage. In other words, is the format actually going to revise how you tell your story? Or will it be closer to a number of short episodes of a single series? Are you planning to tell some parts of the story with clips and then augment it with text or some other material? It seems to me you could tell a much more efficient story by leaving out all those scenes where detectives regroup over details and just jump to new and interesting scenes which further character plot and theme, sort of like voice over does in traditional noir films. Also, are you planning to let the user have any control over the story telling? Will there be any way they are able to adjust how the story is told or unfolds? If so, is this altering your traditional writing process? Curious minds need to know about this interesting stuff.
Good questions… but no. I’m not leaving out the good stuff. This isn’t that project.
Ruby Skye is a linear video series — one long story told in twelve episodes. The audience will not be able to alter the plot or the presentation of the story although they can interact with Ruby on her blog. This will be quite traditional in many respects.
Which is not to say that there aren’t exciting and novel elements to both the storytelling and the project as a whole.We’re trying to build a transmedia franchise from the ground up. Even as we blast toward production on the web series, we’re actively pitching and planning other elements one of which will be an interactive mystery for mobile platforms. That will include more of the elements Cal mentions and will give the audience the opportunity to search for clues, determine which trail to follow next and generally participate in the investigation of the mystery.
There are a number of reasons for taking a more traditional approach with the web series itself. One is that innovation and making money don’t always go hand in hand and we really want to develop a strong business model for this that generates some revenue for our team and our highly valued investors (have I thanked the IPF today?). If we do something experimental or cutting edge, it becomes difficult for sponsors and other partners to understand what we are doing and find value in it.
Also, interactive fiction tends to work more like a stage play than a television series, in that it has to be experienced live. That is, we’d release an episode and the community would interact and help determine the next step. But if you started watching a week later, then you’d still be able to watch that first episode, but you’d miss the interaction around it. Stand alone traditional video has a better replay factor and can be more easily distributed to other platforms than a narrative that involves significant audience interaction.
Then there are the budgetary considerations around interactive fiction. I have a number of project concepts that do involve the audience as a collaborator, where they can have significant impact on the story. In those cases, you have to keep a writing staff on for a long run and have the facilities to shoot new material every week. The only way to be truly responsive to an audience in your storytelling is to write on the fly. I haven’t been able to finance that… yet. But I have the budget, the team and the concept if anyone out there has the money.
But back to Ruby Skye, along with drafting the scripts, I’ve been sketching out plans for the web site. It will have tons to do on it and lots of cool ways to interact with the characters, the story and the franchise.
On today’s agenda: big production meeting when we’ll start to lay down a schedule and a critical path for the entire web series; a meeting with a potential director; another writing session; a get together with the Tights and Fights team to celebrate our mutual good fortune and figure out ways to collaborate.
The Latest in Cat Toys
iggy investigates an ipad
Toy Wire
Toy Wire
Writing Ruby
Although I plan to blog a great deal about Ruby Skye and share the process with you, I will not be providing a lot of detail about story. I won’t be posting outlines or scripts. We want that to be a surprise. Hopefully though, the process will be of interest.
On Saturday the 26th, Julie Cohn and I sat down to do some writing. Two scripts and a season arc were part of the IPF proposal, but now we had to take the season’s story line and break it into episodes.
Eye to Eye With Ruby Skye is a detective series and the season will be a single mystery told in twelve episodes. It’s kind of like a Murder One or 24 in that one story arcs out over the full season of twelve episodes. Each episode needs a killer cliff-hanger to end it so we’re very definitely writing to act breaks.
At this point the plan is to have episodes of approximately five minutes in length… or less. Why five minutes? It feels like the length that the story wants. We don’t have broadcast constraints to predetermine how long each episode should be. We could try to use stats, experience or conventional wisdom to choose an episode length, but everything changes so quickly in the digital space that just because it worked last week doesn’t mean it’ll still work this week. Instead, we’d plan to let the story shape its presentation.
I want the episodes to be long enough that there is an opportunity to build character. I want there to be comedy and action in as many episodes as possible. Julie and I have sketched out a story with many plot threads running through it. We are trying to hit as many of the sub-plots in each episode as possible.
Our theory is that really strong curtains on an episode will make viewers want to see the next episode. So we spent a couple of days working through the story finding the most exciting moment. These have become our episode ends. The beats between them will form the episodes themselves. The number of beats aren’t always equal and the scenes certainly aren’t going to play to the same lengths. So they won’t yield twelve episodes of the same length. In fact, they may be quite different in length. They may vary by 1 or 2 or even 3 minutes… nothing when your episodes are half an hour long, but when they are in the five minute range, 1 and 2 minute differences start seem significant.
Or maybe they won’t. We’ll see, won’t we?
When we drafted the first two episodes, they came in longer than I had expected. First drafts were about 8 pages and have ballooned up to 11 pages what with punch ups and all. But that’s a function of starting out. Early drafts are often long as you try to find the characters and the tone of the tale. By the time we’ve written all twelve and rewritten them many many times, I’m pretty sure they will be a lot shorter. I’ll keep you posted on that front.
We’re not there yet. We’ve spent a couple of days breaking the arc into episodes. At this point we have a big paragraph written on each of the episodes. Our next session was devoted to the villain of the piece. Detective series are often about unravelling the bad guy’s story. So Julie and I went through the events from the villain’s pov one more time, adding detail and colour to that story and making sure we know it very well. This will inform our writing as we set out to write the rest of the episodes and then to rewrite them as much as time will allow.
In our next session, we drafted Episodes 3 and 4. I think the pace will pick up now and we will get the next 8 episodes drafted fairly quickly.
As we go, we’re discovering a lot — emotional lines, important clues and motivations. The world feels like it’s coming to life. It’s getting to be quite exciting, but truly what I am looking forward to is the second draft. We’re learning so much about Ruby, her friends and how we want to tell this story as we go along. I can’t wait to have all the learning from a completed draft of all the episodes in mind to use in a rewrite.
Just Think About This
“…the secret to the future of all Content and its value as an investment vehicle, lays in age old tradition of compelling storytelling.”
The above quote comes from Gerson Lehrman Group. It is part of the summary of a much longer analysis; a rebuttal to an article by Ethan Smith in the Wall Street Journal about streaming technology. Gerson Lehrman’s piece is entitled Be Careful How Fast You Give Away Your IP and it…
…challenges entrepreneurs to see that the world of Media and Content need not be wholly controlled by the big Six Media conglomerates: Disney, Time Warner, Viacom/CBS/Paramount, Sony, Fox and Comcast/NBCUniversal. Their monopoly is primed to get taken down. It also infers that the secret to the future of all Content and its value as an investment vehicle, lays in age old tradition of compelling storytelling. Technology cannot take the lead, it can only be an exquisite partner to those who tell stories people want to see.
At Wednesday’s Digital Dialogue mounted by the OMDC there were a lot of calls for more capital in Ontario for the creation of digital content. This article gives investors good reasons to meet this need.
A few more quotes:
If there’s a bet to be made by entrepreneurs in the Content space, it would be to invest money directly into the hands of storytellers and create transparency in their backend upside. If you do that you control Content that people want, and then they have to come to you to experience it.
The upside of entrepreneurialism is in the looming million “channel” world the Internet resides in and controlling the Content for the ravenous nature of those URL’s that are available. The mistake, more a byproduct of limited technology to date, is to think Content for the Web only comes from User Generated uploads, niche topics or pornography consumed in 30 second to 3 minute bites. The phenomenon of those has been more a byproduct of an audience impatient with the sketchy viewing experience they are subjected to on the myriad devices they view their Content on. Because of those inconsistencies, Content has been relegated to short windows of expression and therefore has little, if any upside value for the suppliers.
Content is still king and the final stages of pristine streaming technology will auger the end of the television networks as we know them, forcing them to be more facile with Content and more streamlined with their infrastructure while creating opportunities for thousands of new “networks” to emerge.
For the first time, Private Equity, Venture Capital, institutional investing or just opportunistic monied people will have a shot to create true ROI in the Internet space because they will no longer be reliant on someone else saying “yes” to their ideas. They can now dream, commit funds, build a production apparatus, shoot their Content, Post it on a Mac and Upload it at a fraction of the cost of traditional Content. That doesn’t’t mean it should be cheap, because cheap Content is disposable. It means redefining what Premium Content, streamed pristinely and for 15-30-60 minutes at a time will cost. The x-factor related to what the true cost of Premium Content will be is the level of talent associated with that Content; the greatest game changer in terms of who decides what gets made.
Enough quotes. Go read it for yourself.