Audiences eh. What to call them?
‘Audience’ just doesn’t cut it when the projects are designed to interact and encourage engagement. Participant is too easily confused with the people helping to make the project/up on the stage/running the workshop/delete as applicable.
I’ve just spent a very clunky and irritating 3 hours writing a funding application calling them ‘audience/participants’. Helps my words per minute stats, but surely I can do better than this.
Hmmm. Audicipant?
Anyone?
I don’t know why I spent so long thinking about terminology and sector-specific phrasing yesterday ahead of last night’s event. There was a woman there who sets mathematical models to music.
This afternoon I’m going to an event put on by Creative Works to introduce their voucher scheme and to talk about the consumer (audience) as co-creator. Looking at the attendee list, lots of forward-thinking people from the arts sector who want to discuss how to better involve their audiences in the development of their programmes- which will then of course lead to increased audiences for their programmes. It felt that only a year ago the arts world were only thinking about using tech to create innovative marketing campaigns, now it seems like people are really engaging with the possibilities around creating content with audiences.
I’m very excited. Lately I’ve been so frustrated that there’s this hugely exciting explosion of people making crossplatform stories, yet theatre makers don’t seem to be in that first wave- they seem to be entirely left out of the dialogue. Despite there being quite a few brilliant interactive theatre shows that explore the audience as co-creator, and often use technology to take those audiences on journeys as participants, I don’t see the creators of those shows at transmedia networking events, where everyone tends to have a background in the audiovisual industries. I’ve never met anyone else from the theatre sector there, and it’s been a lonely experience!
So I want to think carefully about what language I’m using when I talk to people this afternoon- I’m concerned that the word ‘transmedia’ is a huge turnoff in the arts world (it has the word ‘media’ in it for starters)! I talk with ‘transmedia’ people about making immersive stories that are ‘platform agnostic’ (i.e story comes first, decide on platform afterwards) and how audiences can interact and direct the story- both of which are increasingly concepts the theatre world can get on board with.
So I guess all I need to do this afternoon is talk about how I ‘make immersive stories that engage the audiences as co-creators’, and I’m essentially spanning sectors. And more importantly, hopefully engaging people in the idea that the mistakes and successes currently being made in transmedia has a lot to teach the arts world.
Wish me luck.
An attempt to take an old and popular format- Pitch Up! (complete with peppy, unsquashable exclamation mark) and make it work for the crossplatform storytelling world. Imaginatively titled ‘Cross Platform Pitch Up!’
I ran this event at BAFTA last week. The format needs some tweaks but there’s potential to take it further.
What I’m really interested in doing is providing a pitching competition for people who are at an earlier stage in their careers than those who pitch to Power To The Pixel. I am also really interested in making sure that people from the immersive theatre and arts/tech worlds get involved. Such inclusiveness will all come down to the marketing.
It’s been 2 days now since *that* bodyform video, when a random (we assume) member of the public Richard posted this on bodyform’s faceboook page, attracting thousands of likes and comments, and Bodyform responded with this excellent video.
Id be interested to know if Bodyform’s hand was forced (seems unlikely since it was not a real criticism of the brand, just what looks like a man in a mischevious mood and a spare 5 minutes), or whether they felt that that number of likes and comments encouraged a response from them.
Whichever it was, what I find really interesting about this response is that they seem to have decided to use it not to just show that they a) read their social media pages b) engage with their customers and c) can have a sense of humour if it seems necessary for them to do so.
Instead they went with d). Use the moment to invoke an about-face in their brand’s tone and approach.
Because I’m both an optimist and yes, a feminist- I like to think that the recent slow snowball of generally discontented, cool and funny women breaking open notions of ladylike behaviour and dominating the dialogue around abortion rights, paternity leave, etc etc, has been a factor in Bodyform’s decision to release this, now. Perhaps they saw Richard’s comment as an opportunity to launch a change in tone that had already been approved at the highest level.
Because after all, this video response is getting so much attention because it’s so unexpected, and I’m not convinced that this much change in their brand’s ‘tone’ would have been decided in a day, or however long it took to turn around their response.
It’s interesting to consider, perhaps, that Bodyform knew that this kind of change was necessary in the way they spoke to women (and men by proxy), and used the social media response tradition to launch it. It makes sense- much more attention than simply putting out a very different TV ad- there’s a story here. A narrative. And in response, they can be much, *much* wittier in 1 minute than they could have been in a standard TV ad that has to stand alone, without context.
I would be fascinated to have been a fly on the wall at Bodyform HQ when this was happening. But just looking at the result, kudos to them for playing it so well.
Posted in Social media marketing
Tagged feminism, marketing, social media strategy, video response
For fans of Coney, and particularly for fans of A Small Town Anywhere (and I know there’s quite a few of you out there) here’s an opportunity to see how a new Coney show gets built.
Coney is currently making Early Days Of A Better Nation (it’s a new development on from the successful A Small Town Anywhere)
Being an audience led- show, it can’t be developed without the audience. So we’re creating events to do that, and we’d like you to come along, play, and give us some feedback!
First, come to an informal ‘playtest‘ this Thursday 26th at Stoke Newington International Airport. It’s free and we’ll be testing some of the game -like structures that push you through the narrative.
Then, pay what you can (and a pound would do it) to come to the first public scratch, i.e work in development, at Battersea Arts Centre in south London.
I’m currently writing a proposal for an ‘enhanced eBook’ for children. Or perhaps just an eBook; has there been collective agreement on when an eBook becomes more enhanced than usual? Anyway. I found some interesting statistics compiled by Christopher Maselli. Thanks Christopher, I didn’t have to go far to find out a lot:
Ebooks:
Amazon:
The iPad:
The iPad statistics are particularly interesting at this point as we conceived this book with that device in mind- what else can offer web connectivity, apps, games, video etc etc. Actually, I hear the Kindle Fire can at a much lower price.
Geekdad in his Wired column articulated something that’s at the core of it for me- the independence of thought that these new tools could afford our children:
But, an eBook can go a ways toward helping children develop frameworks for exploration and help them learn the art of problem solving and information seeking. If books have traditionally nurtured a love of stories and words and knowledge, I want eBooks to empower my children to tell their own stories, to make up new words and definitions and to recognize and embrace knowledge in a way that is dynamic and creates a love of life.
Which is exactly what we want to embody in our eBook- playfulness, curiosity, exploration, an unwillingness to accept dogma (Ive just realised that Steve Jobs’ Stanford speech covers pretty much all of these)
Posted in Scratch Interact
Steve Jobs died 2 days ago, and I remembered where a lot of his most famous quotes came from- his 2005 Stanford speech. I remember a friend sent this to me before I even knew what Apple was!
Posted in Ongoing thinking & learning
Talking with the lovely Alison Norrington last month, we talked about the genesis of transmedia projects. Of the projects being created in my wider circle, the transmedia creators are often producing their own projects too, and I wonder about this – as quite often the person with the story is not the person who wants to do the hustling. Hmm- I guess I define ‘producing’ as ‘hustling’.
Many brilliant people can create a compelling storyworld and also be more than able to pinpoint the opportunity to get it made, and bring on the people and the resources to make it happen. But that’s so rare because it’s very difficult for any individual to get their own stuff made- in any media, but particularly true when it’s an individual trying to seed a story across multiple platforms.
So who are resourced to produce the transmedia stories? Well, there are the PR/Marketing/Ad agencies working with a brand’s marketing budget, and the dedicated cross-platform production companies.
Lately, though, there’s been a critical mass of indications that both those crowds are seriously lacking great content.
Firstly, there was my cup of tea with Alison, who related her experiences talking to some self-made transmedia producers- smart people who’ve ‘spotted the next big thing’ and set themselves up with a ‘transmedia’ company- and then come to her, looking for advice on where to find content.
Then a few weeks ago I had a meeting with a cross-platform production company who are so keen on finding the next great transmedia writing talent that they’re spending considerable time and energy on training events to develop ‘old media’ writers into transmedia ones.
And this week I met with a world-leading PR agency, who are marshalling top cross-platform production companies so that they can get in on the ground with transmedia talent. But what they really want is to access content (and the whizzkids with the instincts to exploit it best)
It seems to me that there are a lot of people circling each other and not getting very far.
Alison’s view is that its a collaborative process. That’s one that I’m used to. Coming from a theatre background, I’ll keep in touch with many theatre-makers and often we’ll develop ideas together. Perhaps some agencies and production companies will be doing just this in the future, if they can find the resources to.
Posted in Transmedia
Last month I made a little trail of digital breadcrumbs for my boyfriend in honour of our anniversary- a rabbit hole for him to jump into and find a little treat at the end of.
I ‘d like to share it in full, but of course it was personal. So instead I’ll outline it and share a few screengrabs.
The invitation:
I emailed him this image and a link to…
Breadcrumb 1: Xtranormal This is a fantastic digital filmmaking service. You choose the characters, you write the script, direct the camera angles, and they render the film. I had two characters talking about how we got together, and the disasters along the way. It was very funny, but you’ll have to trust me on that. At the end of the conversation, one of the characters turned to camera and told him to go to….
Breadcrumb 2: Tumblr. A great base platform for the trail because I could embed and link various media into it. On this page you see a welcome message and an embedded digital scrapbook which I made using Smilebox. This was the real heartstring-puller, as Smilebox allows you to set images and text to music of your choosing. It was a symphony of slush. A link was etched into the final page, which led him to:
(That’s an image of just out of shot, with a link to The Wilderness Downtown video, which had nothing to do with us really, but I just loved it and wanted to share it)
This tumblr page then led him to:
A song. Which he was to play whilst he read this:
A cartoon,which is very amateur as I am no artist, and the fact that it makes sense at all I owe entirely to the cartoonish instincts and generosity of @FollowEllie.
To finish the story, the cartoon told him that I’m taking him away glamping by the sea. That was the little treat at the end.
I had such fun making it, and it was received so well, that I’m inspired to do more- so I’m looking out for an opportunity to make another, this time for someone else’s special occasion. Get in touch if you want me to make one for you….
For the purposes of this blog though, making it took a good 12 hours, and much of those hours were trial and error as to which tools and platforms allow the user to truly create content- which allow HTML tweaks, embedded media, re-skinning etc. So I think I’ll use this blog to record what I found out in a future post.
samhoweynunn 