I don’t know how to describe Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Empac, except as a Giant Media Toy. The New York Times article had many more eloquent words to describe the 220,000 square foot center, which not only serves as a performing arts space, but is also where a bunch of researchers hope to create a Star Trek-like holodeck, and train doctors to perform surgery using virtual models that they can see AND touch.
This project brings up a host of questions: How do science research institutions contribute to the production of art? How do artists drive scientific inquiry? Are big-scale virtual experiences still as relevant now that we have so many small-scale virtual experiences in our own homes (Nintendo Wii, iPod tours, etc)? What stories would you want to tell using a giant 3D theater that simply can’t be told on a regular old screen?
Image from Cheryl’s PhotostreamI used to be a pretty big Family Guy devotee (back in that golden age when it was only shown on Adult Swim). While I’ve personally gotten a little tired of the manatees-with-idea-balls approach to storytelling (just watch the South Park episode), I think that MacFarlane’s talent for tapping into everything from Victorian literature to modern art and coming up with a poop joke is kind of impressive in its own way.
And that leaves us with MacFarlane’s latest venture, Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. These are mini episodes (1-5 minutes a piece) that seem like deleted cutaway scenes from Family Guy.
Now, if you read the URL in that link, you’ll notice that you can find this Cavalcade at www.youtube.com/user/bk – Burger King’s YouTube channel. Every episode is branded with the Burger King logo and a snippet of an animated version of BK’s King character. That is in addition to the regular YouTube logo that plays in the lower right corner of the clip window.
The Cavalcade is branded in three ways: (1) Seth MacFarlane, (2) Burger King, (3) YouTube. It’s an innovative approach to producing web media, but one that was phenomenally popular in the early days of TV and radio. Comedian Jack Benny was sponsored by everything from Canada Dry to Lucky Strike cigarettes, and the show was labeled as the Canada Dry Show, The Grape-Nuts Show, etc. Philip Morris used to sponsor “I Love Lucy” – and characters, or animations of those characters, actively hyped their cigarettes on screen before the show. This level of corporate sponsorship, in which the sponsor’s brand is equally or more visible than the brand of the show itself, might be exceedingly valuable to indie and mainstream producers trying to get their shows on the web. It also creates some problems.
Up until now, the internet has not been an epicenter for high-quality, original, intentional humor. “Charlie bit my finger” was and is much more typical of online comedy than, say “Nobody’s Watching.” But well-established celebrities producing web exclusive content is going to mean higher production values, actual scripting (gasp!) and possibly even some steady camerawork. This means that maybe, just maybe, your well-scripted, innovative comedy has a chance to shine out there too.
However, while Seth MacFarlane can get away with a foul mouth when he’s sponsored by a “hip” brand like Burger King, I’m sure a sketch about transfats and obesity would not be welcome. Finding a patron if you are not already on the inside will be an uphill battle. And patron-sponsored content may mean sacrificing some ideas to preserve an overall brand image.
Would you go the patron route with your own web TV series? Or would you rather get your content out there, and find funding later?
Here’s what we know so far. DECE will announce details at CES in January. The general principle is something along the lines of a digital rights locker in the cloud that keeps track of what content you have purchased and have rights to play.
Image from Night Star RomanusThe major goals of the project are interoperability, allowing users to copy content onto household playback devices (as opposed to streaming only) and to enable writing to physical media.
Sounds like an ambitious project, and maybe a pipe dream given the walled garden approach that most content providers have been pushing thus far. But with a list of players that includes most major media corporations, some serious technical expertise, the device manufacturers of both HD disc technologies (and then some), and at least one major retailer, this might have a chance to get past the conception stage.
The list of companies signed on so far is Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, Fox, HP, Intel, Lions Gate, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Paramount Pictures, Philips, Sony, Toshiba, VeriSign, and Warner Bros.
What does this mean for indie producers? That remains to be seen, but for most of us, there’s already an alternative. What else supports interoperability and portability of content to offline and physical media? What lets viewers watch what they want, where and how they want to? Anything without DRM. Just sayin’.
Like every other media-and-pop-culture-obsessed feminist out there, I’m wondering why I hadn’t already heard of the “Bechdel Rule” (also known as Ripley’s Rule, the Bechdel/Wallace Rule, or any number of other variations the internet has yet to confuse us with). Kudos to my housemate and her friend for explaining it:
Back in the day, Alison Bechdel made a cartoon in which a character won’t see a movie unless it:
1) Has two women in it 2) They talk to each other 3) About something other than a man
Just recently, the NPR blog picked up on this phenomenally simple, phenomenally telling way of classifying movies and tv. Since some folks at NPR put the story on the radio, everyone’s been buzzing about Bechdel.
If you want a more personal account of how the Bechdel Rule plays into screenwriting, I suggest this post from a former UCLA film student.
I’m more interested in the way that the Bechdel Rule creates a measure of how woman-y a movie or TV show is across genres. It doesn’t specify whether the women are talking about destroying aliens (which is where the “Ripley” reference comes from) or about the perils of balancing children and a career. Of course, this is not a perfect measure – I think that there’s room in this world for all kinds of movies and all kinds of audiences – but I think the Bechdel rule helps me articulate why I feel warm or cool toward a certain piece of fiction (e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer v. Angel).
Image from KWC’s PhotostreamRemarkably, despite what NPR blogger Neda Ulaby says about science fiction being the “traditional fortress of geek-maledom,” modern science fiction shows pass the Bechdel test at a pretty decent rate. Even shows that sexualize their female characters (say, Battlestar or Star Trek: Voyager) actually give them lots of scenes to talk to each other about things other than men. Weird, isn’t it? Is that because directors are trying to make up for their smart women with some sexiness? Or is it because the ensemble casts now popular with science fiction shows leave enough room for female characters to have a wide range of scenes?
I have also been enjoying this easy-to-read list of Bechdel winners and losers. Are there any movies or tv shows that are surprises? I, for one, am shocked that not a single recent animated Disney movie makes the cut. Who knew?
Image from elvissa…if you believe the Amazon reviews. Out of approximately 1400 reviews, over 1,300 rate the game with 1 star, most complaining of draconian DRM. Electronic Arts’ DRM for Spore prevents users from installing the game more than 3 times (even on the same computer, after upgrades or HD crashes, for instance) without a call to EA support, and possibly purchasing another license.
At this point in the digital age, how can EA not understand that DRM is a bad idea? If you don’t give fans content in the way that they want it, they will go elsewhere for it. EA is shooting itself in the foot and turning one the most anticipated games of the year into a potential PR debacle.
Game pirates in the UK face penalties of nearly 10 times the cost of the games (£300, about US$525) to settle out of court or risk a repeat of the £16,000 (about US$28,000) decision handed down to one unemployed mother of two.
While I don’t advocate piracy, there must be a better way for the industry to deal with this problem than extorting court settlements from their fans or imposing unreasonably limited DRM.
Image from Brandon Cirillo’s PhotostreamBy now you’ve probably already read the Wall Street Journal’s take on the state of independent film in Hollywood. If you haven’t, I’ll sum up: Hollywood studios are finding that lower budget indie flicks are not paying off at the box office. No matter how many movies you make (and it looks like they’re making quite a lot of movies), there aren’t any more screens to show them on than there were before. Small movies, no matter how star-studded, aren’t inspiring people to amble on over to the multiplex.
As someone pointed out at the always fabulous Boston Media Makers session Sunday morning, the movie industry is just catching up to the same issues that have plagued the music industry for years.* I think that’s a pretty fair summary of the situation. The old ways of doing business are not as profitable as they used to be. The WSJ focuses largely on the financial problems this creates, but I’m also wondering how this will change the storytelling landscape.
If funding is drying up for people who want to make small family dramas and slow-paced coming-of-age fables, where else will they go? Are viewers genuinely uninterested in smaller stories, or are they just getting their fill elsewhere? Television seems to be flush with nuanced drama, and fascinating things are happening with graphic novels these days – not to mention the rapidly evolving universe of web-distributed film. Is the feature-length indie film never again coming to a theater near you, or is it just in hibernation?
*I cannot recall who said this at the meeting, please comment if you remember!
Woman to Woman, Online, yesterday’s business section cover story, explores trends on websites targeted at women. The article notes the ways in which content and advertising have begun to run together, especially on blogs that feature fashion, decorating and style advice.
Companies are finally catching on that you can draw in potential shoppers by using interactive patterns that are native to the web: Viral videos, user-generated content, quizzes, memes and polling. But why do women gravitate toward all these blogs about clothes and apartments and boyfriends – and not to, say, women’s political blogs?
Lauren Zalaznick has an absolutely creepy answer:
“Time and time again, women are happy to see their relationship with their food, their clothes and their relationships externally manifested in entertainment and how-to content,” said Lauren Zalaznick, president of NBC Universal’s women and lifestyle entertainment networks, including iVillage.
Women are “happy?” A few dozen feminist bloggers would say no. . . The article misses out on something HUGE about women on the web: There is no information about how many women get their political news from blogs that don’t specifically target women. Just because women’s political news sites don’t find a large audience doesn’t mean women aren’t interested in political news (or science news, or business news). But what Yahoo “Shine” defines as “women’s news” might not match up with what women actually find to be relevant to their lives.
I took myself off of a prominent women’s news list because I felt the subjects of the articles were too narrow in scope. I happen to find many types of stories interesting: A story about advances in prostate cancer treatment might not have anything to do with “women’s” news – but I might find it interesting because I happen to like science.
Zalaznick also ignores the way that media influences and changes women’s expectations about their own lives. The media often leads or labels trends in how we consume products, and how we relate to each other, by incorporating them into entertainment (think of the rise of the phrase “he’s just not that into you”). Then, bloggers often parrot these trends right back to the media (say, on a your livejournal the day after a breakup).
On television, advertisers have about 20 seconds to sell a single product. On the web, companies can create immersion experiences that sell a full-blown lifestyle. Web advertising can occur 24 hours a day, and can be integrated with almost any web experience. It’s scary to think how often our expectations about relationships (with lovers, family members, friends) are influenced by a corporate conception of how we are supposed to live.
Michael Learmonth of Silicon Valley Insider, speculates that Hulu is selling ads at $25 CPM (cost per mille), and that their monthly traffic of 5 million viewers would translate to $125,000 after revenue sharing. He doesn’t cover what numbers he thinks Hulu has on the expenses side of the balance sheet, but does say that $1.5 million annually is not going to cover the costs of a venture valued at $1 billion.
Of course Hulu will probably gain viewers over time, but the catch is that, as viewers increase, so do the costs of bandwidth and marketing. Silicon Valley Insider has another post about why Hulu will fail. Both of these articles raise valid questions for anyone looking to distribute their own content. Even for people not hoping to make a profit large enough to live on, the requirement remains to have a model where you can increase viewership without incurring incremental costs greater than the returns.
Ken Levine, TV Comedy Writer, has a timely post called “If a major studio gave notes on JUNO.” This is a great humorous take on how a major studio would have changed the Oscar-nominated film from something fresh and poignant to just another stereotypical, bawdy Rom-Com.
Thoughts on why being independent, small budgets and all, is something worth being grateful for.
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” – Orson Welles
A huge budget and studio backing of your project does not bring you freedom. With all that money comes accountability to your investors. For the same reason that accepting venture capital as a business startup limits your control, getting financial backing doesn’t free you to do what you wanted to do with your film. It forces you to accommodate the opinions of the people who just bought into your film.
The drive to make your project financially successful can get in the way of taking risks with originality and stifle the art. Working on a small budget, and being forced to solve problems in the production of your film causes creativity to be a necessity. That creativity might just lead you into creating art instead of just entertainment.
(What is ‘Art’? That’s a bigger question. Feel free to sound off in comments.)
Slate has an old article (Neither the Power Nor the Glory, 2005) that goes into the economic differences distinguishing indies from studio films. There is one quote that pretty much sums up why I’m grateful to be involved in indie projects: “Studios…leave originality, and all the joy that comes from it, to the indies.”
