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.
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.
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
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.
When it comes to the television industry, the area I know a (little) bit about is drama. And I’d guess that drama is the genre that will be seeing more and more transmedia approaches to its content.
I’m wondering how the commissioning process will accommodate these entirely new propositions. Take the traditional model of commissioning. The first time the broadcaster gets first sight of the story, it’s usually via a pitch document- anything from 1 to 10 pages. If they like that, they commission a full treatment. If the treatment passes muster, a script is commissioned. That script will go through X number of drafts, all with the broadcaster breathing over the writer’s shoulder. (The writer is contracted to complete 2 drafts- after that, the commissioner can draft in a new writer).
Its a process that guarantees, as far as possible, full commissioner control.
Perhaps transmedia producers will be coming up against this sooner rather than later. When a transmedia project is often (some would say always) interactive, and much of the story will be led, and written, by the audience, then the transmedia producer is not going to be able to go in with that many guarantees- only a sense of the general direction. I’m curious as to how that’s going to go down with commissioners used to fail-safe processes.
If there’s a clash of expectations, how is the infrastructure and process going to reform itself to accommodate this?
And if transmedia projects don’t make commissioners feel safe, what are the parameters that can be put in place to encourage faith in transmedia projects and smooth the way to commission?
Posted in Ongoing thinking & learning
A bit of an attempt to map how digital tools have influenced the theatre ecology, bringing in the film, broadcast and games industries. Click through to read….
With the explosion of digital into arts and entertainment, affecting content creation, marketing and distribution in all industries in myriad ways, my visual brain needs a mindmap to encompass the whole- and this barely scratches the surface.
It’s been an interesting exercise, not least because I can quite quickly see that all the company names that spring to mind are in the pervasive games/immersive theatre corner (top right), not least because this is the work I have been involving myself in for the past few years. As I extend my knowledge and skills horizontally towards the left of the map into transmedia, I’ll be populating that side soon enough.
samhoweynunn 