Information Onslaught

Last Tuesday I had a drink over at my neighbor’s house and saw that they had their television set to Obamas State of the Union Address. I offered to come back later or listen to it with them.  We ended up chatting while there was a long segment of congress people and senators walking into the room and greeting each other and by the time I left the President had only just started speaking. I thought to myself, that they should have started the program and timed it to start with the actual address.  

I was little surprised when the next day a poll showed that most viewers didn’t stay on the channel long enough to listen to the speech.  Of course not!  We have 8 (!) seconds (!) in a YouTube video to engage our audience, then they’re gone.  TV shows might get a whopping 90 seconds.  

There are too many things tugging at our sleeve to pay attention to things at length anymore and I’m not talking about children or attention seeking pets and husbands.  When I try to settle into a longer article I actually get a bit jumpy and page to the back to see how long my commitments is going to be and if I want to even start to engage.  Books for fun (and I used to be a voracious reader) have been relegated to the vacation back burner and even then I have to make a time commitment to read a few books.  

The other day I heard an interview on TV (while I was either cooking, exercising or cleaning up social emails) where Tom Brokaw (I think) was talking about a new book and said, that today it’s not enough anymore to read the local newspaper and a few trade magazines and listen to the radio on the way to work and watch the evening news.  We ALSO need to plow through a plethora, or should I say onslaught of information form the net.

I WISH I had time to do all the things Tom Brokaw listed – I’m glad if I manage the New York Times and my Swiss weekly newspaper and the morning news. The blogs I subscribe to get a quick glance and I have an ever growing list of blog entries I have to read, I WANT to red, but oh, so little time. 

We thought reading and writing was dead! Social media has changed that to a certain extent; even if the social media prose is not what we (old people) learned in school. I’m reading a New Yorker article (yes, I know) about the kid that was spied on by his roommate in college and committed suicide after the roommate blasted the internet with the news that he was gay and showed video of him engaging with another man.  The article shows excerpts from the texts that went back and forth between these college freshmen and their friends. I’m reading “IDC”, what?  IDC? I don’t care.  My favorite was that the article was full of “WTF”.  We can now officially use the “F” bomb in a reputable magazine because it’s not spelled out, just WFT.  But, I digress.

So, where does this leave us? In a world where we need to be ever more expert at what we do and retreat into a smaller niches to then find out that we have kinda lost the bigger picture (think onion peel) of your work world, your kids world, your community world, your country world and let’s not forget, art, literature, the latest food fad and the newest technological advances, what your phone can REALLY do and you had no clue?  This morning on the news (NY1):  the app is dwindling.  Today the average user uses less than five apps in a week. They didn’t say how much that’s down from before but my guess is SIGNIFICANTLY.  At some point we have to do the dishes and get some work done. 

I circle back to an earlier post on: Curation and the Human Algorithm. I think curation of information will become ever more important to help us manage knowledge without going under in a sea of distractions and inert information. 

How do YOU manage your information flow?  How have your habits change since the first onslaught of social media and blogging?  Are you digging out from under?

Visual Education

I was talking to a client and a DP (director of photography) today and we discussed how to present learning content for a young audience – an out of college sales force let’s say - and at the same time get the suits that make the buying decision excited about the presentation too.

In an earlier post I talk about the future of storytelling and how there is no linear story telling anymore as we knew it only a few years back (OK, many years back). To expand on that discussion we should also look at the way we have learned to “read” and understand visual material, especially if it moves.

When I started working in film production some 20 years ago (I was VERY young) the images we produced where clean, clear and crisp. We told stories literally and linearly. Transitions where hard cuts and fade in and out or a dissolve where major effects and placed thoughtfully. Voice over and graphic cards underscored what we felt was visually not absolutely crystal clear. We left breathing space so everybody could “read” along with us.

Enter digital filmmaking, YouTube, Flip cameras, iMovie and Final Cut Pro. Everybody is a filmmaker. Picture quality declined both in the literal, technical sense and in terms of story-telling. Out of focus was art, so was off-kilter framing. Fragments of story lines, slice of life vignettes emerged (some fascinating and many of them truly dull). Stories were told faster, more effects where used sometimes to enhance the message, more than not however ‘because they could’. Audiences learned to read imagery, quicker, more intuitively; they understood what was said even if it wasn’t.

Today no one shuffles their feet in a client meeting when an image starts with a slow focus pull that throws the background out of focus and the fore ground into focus, or if we start on a partial frame or an empty frame. We create three ring circuses with three emerging story lines simultaneously developing in one frame. We have learned to read all three and put them together. We read a wallpaper video in the background and a content video in the foreground and listen to a voice over (often competing with music – which always drives me nuts as a producer) and ‘get’ the message and think nothing of it.

We’ve also learned that we’re not being spoon-fed a linear story. It all happens NOW or it unfolds backwards, or in pieces, or entire chapters are left out – we can fill them in surely – just a waste of time to show it all and be linear, because time is what we do NOT have.

We have learned to “read” movies very fast and if the tempo is not fast enough we move on to the next clip – there are so many of them after all. The smallest common denominator is the fastest paced movie – as we all seem to have come out with attention deficit disorder.

But I’m still a sucker for linear story telling… I’m all for innovation and ‘not so perfect’ and artsy new ways of telling the story, but I want to have a beginning, middle and end. Call me old-fashioned.

Things that Operate 24 Hours a Day

What do we take for granted 24 hours a day? In New York, the city that never sleeps (unless it snows real hard or Irene passes by) nearly everything and the subway system is one. Tropical Storm Irene is probably the only single event that has brought the entire system to a halt last fall.

Now repairs to the system shut down entire lines for five nights in a row leaving commuters in the 10 or even 100 thousands stranded for a week if they work night or early morning shifts. For most of us a 10 PM to 5 AM closure is merely annoying and might result in a big taxi bill for a night or two, but what if you are one of so many people who offer services and goods the “other 16 hours” of the day and depend on night schedule from public transport, to shopping, customer service and recreation? How many percent of the working force are they? What support do they get to get to work in time to serve us our first coffee at the deli when we run to the subway, or relieve us from a midnight craving of sushi? Pick up our garbage and prepare the morning news?

One thing we always can count on is the internet – at all hours, all the time, and (nearly) everywhere. That is: until now. I just goggled Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)  and Protect IP Act (PIPA) and as you might have noticed I hyperlinked them to Wikipedia. If you click on those links as of midnight tonight (1/18/12 and for the next 24 hours) they will NOT be operational. Incidentally Wikipedia will suspend operation to protest SOPA and PIPA. And Wikipedia will not be alone Reddit, MoveOn, BoingBoing, the Cheezburger Network, and FailBlog among others will join in the black out. Both SOPA and PIPA are bills slated to be passed (or not) in Congress. The New York Times has a very relevant article on the topic should you need some freshening up. The key sentence, a quote from Erik Martin, general manager of Reddit: “[…] it’s not a battle between Hollywood and tech, its people who get the Internet and those who don’t.”

Ok, so back to things that operate for 24 hours. We tend to think we need to always be available. Response times have to be under an hour. With email, text, Skype and face time (phones are now near antiquated), and our many “i ”Devices we connected at all times. I find myself hanging my head off my bed in the morning after turning off the alarm clock to totally sleep drunken look at my iPad or BlackBerry I left on the floor besides my bed (and it also gives me the right distance to read without my reading glasses), to make sure I haven’t missed anything while sleeping.

Do we really work more and are available more, or do we just push our work around the work week or calendar year to end up doing maybe even less than when we showed up at 9 AM and left at 5 PM and had worked with less technical distractions? Where is our focus? How much time do we have to dedicate to one task without interruption?

My sister said to me the other day: “I’m open for business from 7 AM to 8 PM”. I thought she was kidding until I realized that those were her hours of operation as mother, daughter, and employee. After 8 PM she wanted to be left alone, kid in bed and no more work or planning sessions – “CLOSED” sign on her forehead. Might not be a bad idea to set boundaries where there are often none (especially in the mother and daughter category). I solved the issue differently – I moved a six hour time difference away from my family and that decimates the family-operating hours. As for the vendor, friend and buddy-hours – I’m working on those.

I personally have a hard time with the “all or nothing” stance that I still see a lot in Europe even in management positions. I never forget the German producer who announced, as we were wrapping out a 13-part series of one-hour TV show, that she would go on vacation the next day for three weeks with no access to phone or email. I don’t think I’ve ever wrapped a job faster and gotten the final invoice for her approval submitted that quickly.

I’d rather check my email daily while traveling and spend a few hours a week taking care of some of the email bulk so when I get back I’m not buried in a sea of emails and pending potential disasters. Being a small business owner of course also means that I can’t disappear for three weeks without any knowledge of what’s going on at the office.

So, for now I’m open 24 hours, but will be sleeping for seven of those and as I don’t have a home phone and turn off the cell phone at night, all hell can break loose and I will be oblivious until I turn on the cell phone or check email hanging off my bed. But I’m open for business 24/7 – theoretically.

Crowd Funding – Done – Part 9

In our second to last part of our 10 part series we ask David Mandel, Co-Producer of Mulligan some more questions about their very successful crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter:

1. After you reached your goal of 10K so fast did you refocus on keeping up the momentum for further funds and if so what did you do?

We thought about this for a little bit. To be honest, I think the relief at reaching the goal so quickly transformed into focusing our energies more on the stuff the money was for: festivals, sound, and color correction. We made sure to keep in contact with our backers and to do what we could to encourage more donations, but primarily we shifted back into post-production mode.

It would’ve been nice to raise more money, but ‘mo money, mo problems.’ We had some brief discussions about where such ‘overflow’ money might go, and it quickly spiraled into all sorts of further questions and issues. This is why it was good to spend a lot of time thinking about our needs before we launched this Kickstarter project. Once we reached our $10K goal, we were able to pursue what the money was intended for.

2. What goal would you have set in hindsight?

Hard to say. We’re too close to it to have full hindsight. The important thing is that we raised $10,000, which is exactly what we needed. Note that I say $10,000, when the number on Kickstarter shows $11,528. That’s because Amazon and Kickstarter both take a cut that comes out to about 10%. So what we actually wind up with is just over $10,000.

Maybe a month from now, if/when we get into a bunch of festivals and have to think about travel, accommodation, and stuff like that, we’ll wish we had set the goal higher. But when we discussed this before launching, it seemed too far off and ambiguous to put down as an expense. In the really unlikely (and unpleasant) possibility that we don’t get into a single festival, we’d be sitting with extra money in our pockets, looking silly to our supporters.

We made this movie on an incredible shoestring budget, and so we know what we’re capable of and how little we need to accomplish it. This Kickstarter campaign reflects that mentality, and we’re once again just super proud and grateful to everyone for that final result.

3. What are the next steps for you?

We’re going to keep uploading clips for our backers on the Kickstarter page. We’ve already started the sound mixing with a very talented sound mixer named Alex Inglizian out in Chicago. We’ve also reached out to a post house and are coordinating the color-correction process. And we’ve been submitting to a few festivals and hope to hear back within the next couple of months - our Kickstarter backers will be the first to know when we get in.

In addition to all that Mulligan work, we’re all busy prepping for our next feature, which we’ll be shooting in March out in LA. Same team, same budget, and everyone’s just as excited and working just as hard. So, quite busy!

4. How are you organized for the ‘goodies’?

Pretty good. In a few days hope to have some pictures of the ‘prototype’ golf balls, pencils, and tees to show to the backers who’ll be getting them as a reward. I’m unfortunately a little behind on making the thank you e-cards, so that might be a full day’s work for me once I get back from vacation. Funnily enough, some of the rewards all rest on writer/star Jonathan Eliot’s shoulders - he’s got to leave voice mails in his creepy voice for several donors, as well as ship some of his drawings that he made for the movie. But he’s a graduate student and has loads of time. :)

The movie itself and soundtrack we’re still working on, but that should be ready by the date we gave on the Kickstarter page - May of this year. If we’re lucky, we’ll get those rewards out sooner, but the current workload is pretty overwhelming as it is.

Of course, our biggest “goodie” is sharing clips and news from the movie with our backers, and we’re very committed to keeping everyone informed and engaged with our progress. Hopefully we’ll have lots of happy news to share over this coming year, and if not, we’ll make sure to keep them entertained - we’re pretty good at that.