Original Programming

July 2011 I wrote about how we watch TV, the title:  I Don’t Have a TV.  I recently read Outside the Box, by Ken Auletta in the New Yorker, an article I highly recommend and decided it was time to revisit the topic for a bit.

 

We know that “TV” has changed.  What has changed as well, is who means what when they use the word “TV”.  That’s what my blog post from nearly three years ago was mostly about.  This time around, I’m more interested in the programming aspect of TV; that is content, not context.

 

Television today faces two major threats: advertising models and streaming services.

Context - Part 3

A guest post Leadership Unplugged on Brian Solis’ site (yes, again) started out being about leadership and then went into context and content.  Written by Roland Deiser and Sylvain Newton the article makes some very relevant points about an ‘unplugged’ and less perfect leadership style in a fast changing and moving world.  What struck the nerve for me were the following paragraphs:

Content Delivery

Back in 2011 I wrote a post about owning a TV.  This week my friend Gary Delfiner posted an article about the future of program delivery and I agree with all he observes, but that the water cooler effect is gone. It’s not it’s just different.  And before ANY water cooler talk with colleagues about a TV show you do have to set some spoiler alert rules; that’s all. I actually found it very helpful to be a season behind with Scandal in a recent situation as it gave us a much needed opportunity for a bonding moment when I finally caught up to the final episode of season two (OMG!). 

Crowd Funding – Where the Hell is my Gift? – Part 10

I feel like a three year old: I want my gift and I want it now.  Now, now, now!  

So, I did a bit of research and after I’m feeling more like a ten year old. Intellectually I understand the fact that instant gratification is not always possible and that a reward waits in the future, but I still want my gift now, darn it.

I have invested in three projects on Kickstarter, a book, a cultural center and a film. Of course I have not invested in either, I have invested in PARTS of either:  small parts.  And herein lays the problem.  We (the Kickstarter community) invest in our friends’ and colleagues’ projects, or causes we are passionate about and more than not they are asking for donations to cover parts but not all of their funding needs. 

If I fundraise 10K for research of a documentary film I would be foolish to promise the finished film. First off, the delivery would be a few years from now and secondly I would not be able to guarantee delivery to begin with, because too many things can happen from research to finished film.  This seems too basic to have to mention, but I guess I do: make your pledges such, that you can deliver and do so on time. And in the interim: communicate!

There needs to be as much thought given to the fundraising part as to the delivery.  The goal is not only achieving our monetary goal by a certain date, but also - and equally important if not more important - the goal has to be to deliver on your pledge promises.  The dates for delivery have to be realistic and the goods or services to be delivered have to be realistic. And in the interim: communicate! (No, not a mistake – I just want to make that point again).  Shit happens, if it does: communicate.  Things get delayed:  communicate.  The creative process is a slippery one:  if it takes a lovely detour: communicate. 

I give you the three examples of the projects I have supported.  I did re-read and watch each of their pitches and here’s what works and what doesn’t.

Although I have waited the longest for Clouse’s Houses, the author Carol Clouse did a fine job managing expectations, explaining plan B upfront and keeping her backers up to date throughout the year she said it would take to finish her book.  Her fundraising goal was $5,000 which she reached June 22, 2011 with $5,055.  I pledged $25 to receive the book and an art card and to support (most importantly) the editor of the book for whose professional services the fundraiser took place. Needless to say, the editor, Barbara Fischkin is a friend of mine.  It’s a bit over a year, but the last communication to backers was six days ago and I’m apparently getting a 2^nd edition (after mistakes where discovered in the first) and it will be shipped to me by August 1^st.  

Good job: A. Why: Communication throughout the process.

The feature film Mulligan set out to raise $10,000, which it did by December 31, 2011 with $11,528. I pledged $50 to receive a golf ball and tee, both branded with the Mulligan logo, which I received promptly, but I am waiting on the digital download of the film and the score (both promised for May 2012).  

I just mailed with David Mandel who wrote on this blog about the behind the scenes launch a Kickstarter campaign and he says “they’re on it”.  Last Kickstarter communication: April 9, 2012. 

This would seem to be a quick and easy fix. You’re finishing a feature film, you don’t have a professional staff and you’re probably juggling a few new projects to keep paying the rent.  Make sure you make one person responsible of posting updates on a regular basis and everybody is going to be happy.  But you NEED to update.  And: if you think you’ll be done by May 2012 – add three months to be safe.  

Fair job: B+. Why: they did a partial delivery early on, but then got sloppy on their communication and delivery.

Now, on to the outfit that will make a Kickstarter success harder for the rest of us who come after.  Last summer I supported the cultural center Park51 (NYChildren Exhibit: Let’s open Park 51’s doors to the world!) for many reasons, one being that I was going to show my film there in conjunction with the exhibit NYChildren which ties in nicely with my film Abraham’s Children and the cultural center itself.  Park51 reached their fundraising goal of $70,000 on August 10^th, 2011.  

I pledged $25 to receive the book of the NYChildren exhibit, which was available for purchase at Park51.  This was September 2011. The last communication to backers on Kickstarter was posted on October 4^th, 2011. No book, no explanation and this organization has professional staff.  

Failure: F. Why: no delivery, no communication AND the book exists. Double boo!

This is the moral of the story: if it weren’t for the fact that I was supporting FRIENDS I’d not go back on Kickstarter to support a project.  I think the Kickstarter model is awesome and I hope one day to be one of the successful fundraisers to be added to a list of great creative projects at exceeded fundraising goals, but without delivery of pledges it doesn’t work and will increasingly work less, if potential backers, other than your parents, siblings and spouses, shy away after being ‘burned’.  Set realistic delivery goals and keep on communicating – it takes so little to do so, so do it!

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.

The Big Unfollow - For All The Idiots (Keep Reading)

A few weeks ago Chris Brogan posted a story on being “unfollowed”. I read it, thought it was very interesting (as I think about 98% of his writing is and I have no clue where all his information and ideas come from; he’s either got a huge head or very dedicated and smart people working for him).

A few days later, as I’m preparing to write an email to a friend I’ve not heard of in a long time I go onto FB to make sure I have his new (and ever changing) physical location right, not to ask him how Florida is when in effect he’s moved on to California. I type in his first name, and…. nothing. Strange I think. Type his name again … nada. YIKES. He’s un-friended me! I have a bit of a gut reaction and think immediately: “what have I done wrong”?…. “is he mad at me”? Alas – it turns out he’s un-friended us all – no more profile on FB. Uff.

Chris Brogan unfollowed everybody on Twitter to take care of a spam issue. The reactions he writes where at times visceral, even hostile and some just plain strange. I’ve noticed that I have about the same amount of Twitter followers every time I log on, which is three to four times a week (I know not enough, or too much – depending on who you are), but I do average a new follower daily. That means seven people think I’m boring enough to drop me from their Twitter list every week. That’s a sobering thought.

When I started my Twitter account I would follow everybody in an account that was similar to mine, hoping I might find an audience (back then mostly for my film Abraham’s Children). It mostly worked like a charm until I went to unfollow the lot to make space for new conquests. “Retaliation” was often very swift.

I use FB, LinkedIn and Twitter to reach out and to communicate my thoughts on what I think is newsworthy. News coming to me: I’m not so good with. With (still) only 24 hours a day is there ever enough time to digest but the tip of the social media iceberg, let alone interact and react?

What are the rules of politeness around a friend or a follower? How do people see themselves in the numbers of their friends and followers? Who is actually reading Tweets and status updates of all their followers? Who even notices if you ditch them? Are the numbers of followers and friends the currency of our social networking self-worth? Are we all communicating out but not across or between? How much are we taking IN?

In the old days of email marketing (about a month ago), a 15% click rate was great. With Twitter and FB I think we’re not even touching 1% but racing right into 1 per-mille. In every one in a thousand follower I have a potential customer or client. That’s another sobering thought.

Dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t. Read: time-sink-run-with-the-crowd-idiot if you do and dinosaur if you don’t. I choose idiot. And you? (If you’re reading this my money is on idiot…).

The Future of Storytelling from a Documentarian’s POV

Chris Brogan’s series of posts on the future of media, work, marketplaces and community got me thinking about the future of storytelling.

The future of storytelling is non-linear (sadly, as far as I’m concerned), media centric and for that reason flexible, I would venture to guess also more fragmented and modular. Storytelling will be increasingly interactive, in cases even crowd-sourced, free and digital. Copyright will get a run for its money and will need to reinvent itself. Curation of content will take on a big role. I also think the message of the story will become more important.

The message has always been the core for documentaries; and maybe I’m co-mingling message with truth. As documentaries will have to adapt further to non-linear, media centric, flexible, interactive and free – how does that change the story? Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message”, says that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the medium by which people communicate than by the content of the communication.

Where IS the message? Where IS the story? What story does the medium itself give us and how will it shape us into the future? How will eternal story lines of Romeo and Juliet, Pygmalion and the Iliad come to us? Is the internet the message or the medium or ultimately the meta-medium. I would suspect all three.

“I don’t have a TV”

I love when people tell me they don’t watch TV, or they don’t have a TV. TV zaps your time like nothing else – well maybe a child (any age) will too, but I always think that people who tell me they don’t own a TV or they don’t watch TV are trying to go the high-brow route of not wasting time with “that stuff”.  For full disclosure: I own a TV and I watch TV.

Here a scientifically insignificant study on “watching TV”:

Case Study #1:

My parents, (in Europe), pay a state mandated TV tax for each TV in the house (two), they have a cable box and have dinner at 6:30 PM so they can watch the 7:30 PM main news segment on public television. The exact same news segment will be shown on an alternate channel at 8 PM, but my father favors the ‘freshness’ of the 7:30 PM news, not to mention that the 8:00 PM news interferes with the movie shown at 8:15 PM. If I call from New York – which I seem to always do during the news – I’m being told to call back – after the movie. The toilet probably flushes at the same time in all of Switzerland during the only commercial break in a 90 minute movie.

Case Study #2:

I have a TV in my living room, a digital cable box with DV-R, a Roku box, and a DVD player. I watch the same four or five shows nearly exclusively because I stopped channel surfing since I have the DV-R. I have no concept of which show runs on which network at what time and what day of the week. I watch TV when I’m done with work, I fast forward through commercials, lest I disappear into the kitchen.

In real time I only watch NY1 while I go through my morning routine which makes me dip in and out of the living room. Occasionally I will sit down for an ‘event’ like the Academy Awards or a Royal Wedding (sorry to say, but I had a visitor who insisted).

Case Study #3:

My co-worker, a 26 years old recent college graduate, doesn’t watch TV – she makes a point out of telling me so. She watches Hulu, YouTube and Netflix – but her laptop is tethered to a digital monitor, the digital monitor is an old TV which stands across the sofa in the living room…. but she does NOT watch TV.

So, we all still watch something, be it life TV or canned goods; we call it ‘watching TV’ or ‘not watching TV’ – does it really matter?

My parents spend 2.5 hours a night between the news and a movie – their TV dictates when they eat and go to the bathroom.

I watch TV when I have “time” – some weeks more, others not at all – the shows are always there on my cable box. I want to believe that I watch more focused, however I do tend to watch ‘one more show’ because it’s there on my cable box and it ONLY runs for 40 minutes if I zap through the commercials.

My co-worker culls her viewing from many different sources and has left the structure of TV viewing behind her entirely.

How have YOUR TV consumption habits changed and how do you think it will affect the future of content production?

The Cyber-Gap

The internet has opened doors to an unimaginable wealth of information, education and commerce opportunities; it has enabled emerging pro-democracy movements in Egypt and Algiers, has empowered dissidents worldwide and is closing geographical and physical gaps around the world.

The Internet is hands-down a great enabler. At the same time the gap between educated and under-educated, poor and rich, rural and urban, empowered and disenfranchised is growing – rapidly.

How are people around the world going to engage when they have no internet access? No access to on-line education, commerce, potential jobs and clients, information, social exchange, passing of ideas, or civic engagement? The more our world moves onto the internet the wider the gap becomes between the haves and have not’s of internet access and economic power.

To this day 70% of the U.S. population visits the public library not only for their reading and research projects, but also for their computer and internet use, according to departing New York Public Library president Paul LeClerc. (NY1 “New York Times close up” edition with Sam Roberts).

Within the thirty-four OECD states the U.S. has fallen from fourth place in 2001 to 15th place in 2006 in broadband penetration. (See graph) . Availability is one reason, pricing another. Where today Ireland and Switzerland are the countries with the best price points in the OECD for adding high speed internet to an existing phone line, the US is in the lower third of that list.

If we want to keep up economically with the rest of the world (Asia foremost and Europe) we have to make sure that all areas of the United States have access to broadband internet; and soon. The lost potential of talent and the education gap are too great to ignore.

Taking off the Gloves

I’ve been writing for my blog over a year now – my audience, I imagine are a few friends and people who happen across my blog on the website to my documentary film Abraham’s Children. I’ve been keeping the blog on topic mostly writing about experiences in the independent documentary world and about Muslims in America and “Fear of the Other” – topics that interest me deeply and that I’m learning about as I go.

Each time I write I wonder how the reader will respond and how much of my personal self I should or should not reveal and how much of what I write is properly researched. “Properly” researched? I’m not writing for The New Yorker, it’s my blog with my name on it and it’s my opinion. Still, I’m not espousing my opinion as much as I carefully (more or less) write AN opinion slanted towards MY opinion.

I am part of a group of people who will – soon – publish blog entries about the future of the film business. It’s actually about a heck more: Quo Vadis: staying ahead of hindsight; our mission: Quo Vadis thinks ahead by asking the right questions about creation, distribution and monetization of media. Our members come from across the creative and professional spectrum. We think, we explore, we blog and we meet.

The questions we ask, other than the obvious: where are we headed? How do we stay ahead of the curve? How does content evolve on the internet? How do we monetize the internet? Where are the lines drawn between consumers, content providers, creators, producer, distributors and advertisers? Is there a need to draw those lines? What happens to copyright, licensing fees and royalties?

Why am I part of this group? Because I can. Because the paradigm shift we have seen in our business in the past 15 years is great and leaves some of us – me – with the uneasy feeling of a middle aged person about to miss the connecting train. The train of course, has left the station a long time ago – and I would like to think I’m on board – for now in the freight haul – I’d like to make it to 1st class – no, correction, I’d like to make it to the conductor’s cabin. And I know I can. Quo Vadis is one of many ways to get there with the help of my friends.

I’m not a natural writer – I’m a hands-on production person with an opinion. It’s my opinion – not researched, but lived. And it is that opinion I will have to learn to put forward. The gloves have to come off.

They will and this blog will be my exercise for the next few months until we go ‘live’. I want to know: how much do you hold back, research, evaluate and weigh your voice before YOU publish your blog entries?