Social media tools can be a tremendously valuable means of connecting with your customers, but you can’t just throw money at Twitter, Facebook, and your blog and expect to get any real benefit.
I spoke with a client yesterday who wanted me to create a social media strategy for his company. I impressed upon him the importance of authenticity. Sure, I could write his blog posts and tweets for him, but I don’t have his professional expertise. At the end of the day, I’d be merely adding to the chaff created by countless other inauthentic bloggers for hire, and doing next to nothing to advance my client’s credibility.
He would have to get involved. He would have to write.
Unfortunately, writing takes time. Whether you’re tweeting occasionally, posting religiously to a blog, or weighing in with comments on other people’s sites, there is an opportunity cost to social marketing. If you’re busy writing, you’re not busy billing.
Determine how much time you really have to devote to social media. Then think about your writing style. Those factors will help you determine which social media tools are right for you.
I like Google Analytics. It’s a solid, useful application that when used properly can provide a wealth of useful, actionable information. But the way Google uses green in comparison graphs bothers me.
Here’s how Google displays a traffic comparison. The blue line represents the current time period, while the green line represents the prior period.
Green represents both a time period and a traffic increase
This may seem incredibly picayune, but I frequently find myself looking twice or three times at the graph, trying to determine whether green represents the current time series or the time series it is being compared against. Why? Because green is used to delineate the prior time series, and it is also used to indicate an increase in traffic.
In this instance I see the 11.3% and get confused, because although there is an increase of 11.3%, the number is shown in green, which makes me look at the prior time series, rather than the current time series. Yes, I’m smart enough to eventually figure out that the traffic represented by the blue line is the traffic that has gone up by 11.3%, but it is confusing.
If I could, I’d change the green to a different color, something like this:
Gold rather than green for the prior time series
Presto, no more confusion. Green now unequivocally represents an increase in traffic. Red represents a decrease in traffic. Blue represents the current time series, and gold represents the prior time series.
Since its public unveiling at Google I/O, Google Wave has generated tremendous buzz. The newest Google project is a blend of instant messaging, email, and collaborative document creation. It is an ambitious undertaking, and grokking it fully takes some time. This video of Google Wave’s unveiling is over an hour long.
It is a video worth watching, because it shows the breadth of Google’s vision. I am reminded of the early days of the Web, when explaining technology we now take for granted required lots of metaphors, hand gestures, and labored explanation. Then, as now, the best way to explain a new technology is to show it in action.
What is most impressive about Google Wave is its scope. While the application itself garners the most attention, the real power lies in the foundation. Protocols are the vehicles by which messaging on the Internet takes place. For example, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is used by web servers. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is used to send email. The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an extension of an existing protocol called XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) Core. Google’s intention is to make this protocol the foundation of a new class of messaging systems, and their patent license is explicitly designed to keep competing users of the protocol honest (my italics):
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
A set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) sit on top of the Google Wave Federation Protocol. They allow developers to build new features into Google Wave applications and extend Google Wave functionality to other apps. This is where the magic happens. Google, as powerful as it is, doesn’t have an infinite supply of developers. They also can’t anticipate all the things end users might want from Google Wave. But an army of motivated third-party developers will take the APIs and create all kinds of interesting and useful new services, the way they have with Google Maps and APIs from Amazon, eBay, Netflix, and other savvy companies.
Many tech observers are making the mistake of focusing on the latest web applications, rather than on the APIs. Twitter is perhaps the best example of this: A minority of Twitter traffic moves through the Twitter website. Dozens of Twitter clients and mashups account for the majority. Because Twitter made the API available early in the game, it captured developer mindshare. A thousand flowers bloomed, and now Twitter is on desktops, laptops, Blackberry handhelds, Android devices, and iPhones.
Email has become unwieldy, particularly in business settings. Instant messaging is hampered by conflicting standards and limited extensibility. Document collaboration systems are fast improving, but they require initial intention; a Google Wave can effortlessly morph from conversation into document. The Google dev team also paid attention to making Google Wave play well with existing technologies. Developers and end users won’t have to shift over to Google Wave wholesale in order to start benefiting from it.
I expect to see a broad range of Google Wave applications not long after its official launch. Some of them will incorporate all or most of the platform’s capabilities. Others will be more lean and focused. There will even be Google Wave applications that provide interface polish and capabilities the Google Wave team hadn’t even considered. And that’s exactly why Google Wave will be a success.
The adulation of Google long ago reached fever pitch. I’d say it may have even peaked. But never one to undersell the wonders of technology, Wired this month published an article by Steven Levy which explains the auction mechanism behind Google’s phenomenally successful advertising platform. It is truly a wondrous vehicle for moving money into the Bank of Google.
But Google is also tremendously reliant on advertising. Imagine a world in which Google doesn’t dominate the online marketplace. Or, if you want to get really radical, imagine an alternate reality in which online advertising is no longer the only big game in town for companies seeking online exposure. There are already signs that while online advertising is a moneymaking machine for Google, despite the brilliant algorithms and economic efficiency, it has weaknesses.
A recent New York Times story highlights the nervousness some companies and investors feel about ad-supported revenue models. OpenTable recently went public. The company relies on referral payments from restaurants, rather than advertising. To pull in revenue, companies like Wetpaint and Pandora are trying a variety of methods beyond advertising.
I expect this trend to increase as the effectiveness of ads continues to diminish. No matter how effective the targeting and placement of an individual ad, the gestalt effect of being overwhelmed with text ads, banner ads, Flash ads, et. al. is that users become immune to them. The lowest allowable ROI is different for each advertiser, but if all boats are sinking, more than a few Google advertisers may jump.
This represents a threat to Google, and an opportunity for a new breed of intermediary that can match content providers with companies that are currently using web ads to market their products and services.
Today marks the unofficial start of summer in the United States. But it also is a reminder of the terrible price so many Americans paid generations ago in the worst American war, the Civil War.
According to Professor David Blight of the Yale University History Department, the first memorial day was observed on May 1, 1865 by liberated slaves at the Washington Race Course (today the location of Hampton Park) in Charleston, South Carolina. The site had been used as a temporary Confederate prison camp as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who died in captivity. The freed slaves disinterred the dead Union soldiers from the mass grave to be inhumed properly reposed with individual graves, built a fence around the graveyard with an entry arch, declaring it a Union graveyard. On May 30, 1868, the freed slaves returned to the graveyard with flowers they had picked from the countryside and decorated the individual gravesites, thereby creating the first Decoration Day. Thousands of freed blacks and Union soldiers paraded from the area, followed by much patriotic singing and a picnic. [Wikipedia]
Since then the observance has expanded to incorporate remembrance of those Americans who have died in the wars that followed.
This is part 3 of a three-part interview with fan film writer and producer Carlos Pedraza. In part 1 we discussed how he became involved in fan film and how that world differs from Hollywood. In part 2 we talked about keeping hard core fans happy, and about the mainstream potential of fan film. Now Carlos turns his attentions to creating a new industry around independently produced films for the Web.
The Interview, Continued
There’s a vacuum in Hollywood. There are stories that are not being made in Hollywood because the Hollywood model makes them so expensive to produce that they can’t be produced. Our model is, let’s find a way to make these stories, because we know there are people out there who will watch them. And if you can figure out how to make them more cost-effectively, less expensively, and distribute them to people less expensively through advertising support, through $2.99 purchase versus a $10 movie ticket, if you can provide your DVD extra features digitally instead of having to do it on a physical medium, you have ways to create added value for people and all those possibilies are out there now.
We have to figure out a way to figure out a way to turn that into an industry that has rules, that has some order, that has venues. Basically, we’re at a point where anybody can produce whatever they want today, but you still have the challenge of getting it to an audience. If we can figure out different ways to do that, if we can create online networks that people trust, that people can go to to seek out this other content that’s not Hollywood content, then we’re moving into a new era.
It sounds like you’re saying that there’s potentially a role for a vetting mechanism, for some intermediary who, like you said, is sort of either filtering or somehow collecting together the best of what’s out there.
The reality is we’re always going to have that. Human beings rely on filters. Whether it’s other people, or computer-assisted filters. Take Netflix for example. Netflix doesn’t make their money from just providing people with DVDs to all the latest and greatest movies. You’ll run out of them. There’s only so many of those. But there are so many movies made that Netflix has an algorithm for recommending them to you. If you liked this movie, chances are you’re gonna like this movie, too.
So we have these engines out there that are exposing people, in a very targeted way, to content they would never have found through any of the traditional means, because they’re not movies that would have come to their hometown theaters. They’re not movies that are being shown on cable, or if they are, they’re showing at 2 o’clock in the morning. It’s just a title to you. You want to know what they are. This algorithm that Netflix uses does that work for you.
You can click on it and see a trailer, see a synopsis of it, see who is in it. All the things that trailers in regular movie theaters used to do for you, but only in a very general way, now it’s gonna be in a way that’s completely targeted to your particular tastes in film. That is a great opportunity.
That subsititutes for traditional advertising, traditional trailers. That doesn’t mean you don’t need to make a trailer; you still need to make a trailer. You still need to produce the content, but the way it’s being delivered and connected to your audience is much more efficient now, or can be much more efficient now than it traditionally was. So we need a way to hook this new content that’s being produced by people like us into that infrastructure, that recommendation infrastructure that places like Netflix are bringing.
One of the interesting possibilities that raises is, if there were some sort of consistent format for metatagging content that is being produced in this way that could raise some really interesting possibilities, not only for finding it, but for reviewing it, plugging it into other things. There are some interesting things there. The fascinating aspect of that too is that the studios so rarely cooperate with each other, and the distribution players seldom cooperate with each other, because they’re all in competition with each other, but indies are still in a phase where they’re all trying to figure out what works, and they don’t have themselves in those established positions.
Right, and what we’re finding is that there are some online networks supported by major studios, actually. Sony has an online network called Crackle that produces Web series that frankly hasn’t been terribly successful yet, but I think they’re sticking with it, because they’re trying to figure it out for the long haul. They understand, or at least they’re willing so far to put enough money into it to keep it going while it finds it footing, finds its voice, finds infrastructure, establishes an infrastructure that is going to have the product meet its market in the most profitable way. They’re still looking for that.
We secured the Internet, DVD and other rights for Buck Rogers, which is kind of a languishing brand, but it’s still well-known. So what we’re doing then is taking our production infrastructure that we built for Star Trek, and turning it now to a known brand that is ready to be re-imagined, revitalized, and bringing this same kind of approach and quality that now we know we can make.
I wasn’t at the meeting, but two of my colleagues where in a meeting yesterday with folks from Sony, where they would put up the money for us to produce this and then it would be distributed through Crackle. It’s an upside for them because it is an established brand. It’s gotten some buzz.
But it is something that a studio wouldn’t necessarily want to spend the time and energy on, because they couldn’t do it at the cost you can do it at.
Right. Universal has the motion picture rights, and that’s supposed to be moving forward with, at this point Frank Miller has been identified as the director for it. And it’s gonna be its own thing. The only rules we’re operating under is that as long as ours isn’t the same thing, they’re fine with it. What they also understand is that part of the reason we were able to get the rights was because we can cross-market, having a theatrical version and a Web version of the same property.
And so when you’re writing the episodes that you’re writing, are you hewing to that?
Yes, we are. Partly because we’re modeling it on a television show from the 60s, so that means we maintain the same act structure that they did. Not religiously. We’ve gone longer thay would have in a couple of instances, but in general, yeah, we have a teaser, four acts, and a tag. Syndicated shows, even today, have upwards of seven or eight acts, because of the way that they package their show for syndication. So you may still have the same total amount of minutes – 42 to 44 minutes, but the commercial breaks come more often. So you have to write the story so that it proceeds that way.
So what we’re seeing now on the Web is that effective web series keep to about 12 to 15 minutes in their episodes. Because ultimately if you want to monetize this, and you want to do it via advertising, that means you want as many eyes on your product for as long as you can, so that every opportunity for advertising is being greeted by the largest number of eyes that you can provide.
That means then that we have to adjust the way that we’re creating content that respects the way we know human beings are consuming that content on the Web. Rather than just putting on a traditional TV show on the Web, we need to be more respectful of the way that the audience on the Web wants to consume their media.
That’s how you can increase your viewership and get them to stay. And get them to come back. Ultimately when advertisers finally wake up to the reality that this is where they need to be spending their advertising dollars - that’s the missing link in terms of monetizing it.
For a product we’re working on at productOps, I was looking at the numbers for online advertising versus television advertising, and the amount that advertisers are willing to pay for online video is still substantially lower. The amount they’re spending on Hulu, for example, nobody knows how much Hulu is making, but everybody knows that advertisers are paying. The funny thing is that when I’m watching Hulu, I actually watch the ads.
They only do one per commercial break. As long as it’s not the same one, as a consumer, I’m fine with that. Because it’s done in 15 seconds and I’m back to the show.
So less is more. You mentioned there are different business models people are going to find around this. You also mentioned that advertising is the elephant in the room; advertising is what people are going to be trying first and foremost. Have you seen any business models that make sense to you that are built around, for example, sponsored content, or a single advertiser buying all the advertising rights around a particular show or episode and doing it in a different way, almost like the sponsorship model that NPR has? Have you seen any of those that seem to be working?
I think it’s still all too new.
I think there are some people who are doing that. There’s a Web series called The Guild. They’ve got a sponsorship deal from Microsoft. It might be exclusively Microsoft. So now they’re not on YouTube any more. They have their own website, sponsored by Microsoft, that pays for this to be presented. Microsoft gets their viewers, and they get their production money and make a living. And that’s great, but there’s not a lot of Microsofts out there.
But there may be. Eventually they’re gonna have metrics for this, and eventually maybe other companies will do the same thing. Again, as long as they’re targeting the right market and the numbers are right. But what we don’t have is an infrastructure to support the way that advertising is sold.
Microsoft found The Guild easily because it’s Microsoft. I mean, probably the same people who work at Microsoft are watching The Guild. They know that’s their target audience, geeks who like watching The Guild. So it was a pretty easy leap for them to make.
It’s a bit tougher if you’re Hoover vacuum cleaners.
What show am I gonna sponsor if I’m Hoover? If I’m GE, who do I choose? I don’t know! For TV I know who to ask. I have agencies I can go to. They can provide me with data that helps me decide. OK, I want to sponsort this show. There is none of that yet, in any coordinated way, for advertisers. Until there is, we’re not going to have a model that works.
But the more experimental models that happen, like Microsoft and The Guild, the more companies are going to be willing to do that. But they don’t want a hundred million independent video producers on YouTube knocking on the door and asking them to sponsor their show. So there are still going to be gatekeepers.
Someone at Microsoft or someone at the agency that helped put together the deal with The Guild, or someone who works for the website that runs The Guild, or one of the producers of The Guild is going to realize, “Hey, I’ve learned how to do this. I know what needs to be done. I’ve got the contacts. That’s the business I’m going to go into now.” And they’ll split off on their own.
So it will happen organically. But I don’t know how soon and I don’t know how well, but I’m certain that it will.
I was reading an article recently, in which the author wrote that television had been around for something like 17 years before the idea of paying to watch television came around. He was basically saying, “Look, we’re still early in the Popular Web era. Don’t write off the idea of people paying for content on the Web.” What do you think about that?
I haven’t written it off. But it’s got to be clear what it is you’re buying. I was reading an article the other day about the impending death of newspapers and how newspapers are scrambling to find out if there is some way they can make micropayments the answer. The problem is that when people buy something, they’re usually buying it to keep it in some way. Why should I buy the Washington Post’s version of the Secretary of State’s visit to China?
It’s an account of something that is happening out there in the world.
Someone is going to find a cheaper way of getting the information than you are.
The repeat value of that news is…
Once it’s gone, it’s gone. I’m not going to keep it. Unless you’re selling me the ability to in perpetuity be able to retrieve it from your archive, maybe, but probably not. News is so ephemeral. That’s why it’s news. So I just don’t know that that’s necessarily what people are going to pay for. So you need to be clear about what it is you’re going to have people pay for.
In the case of fan fiction, for example, in the case of the Buck Rogers work you’re embarking on, let’s say you were providing it on the iTunes Store at 99 cents an episode. And they’re 10-15 minute long episodes that people can download. Assuming you had stellar acting and stellar writing, is that something you think people would pay for? Or is there still a feeling that people only want to pay for things that are produced by the big media machine?
No, I think Joss Whedon proved in Dr. Horrible, and he gave it away for free for first. For the first 48 hours it was free. That was super smart. It’s what’s powering the App Store for the iPhone. When people put out a new piece of software, they give it away for a week or two days or whatever, so that early adopters go in, they get it for free, and then they tell everybody else about it. By the time everybody else gets to find it, then they’re charging 99 cents or $1.99, and they’re willing to pay it, because someone they trust has spoken up for it.
Joss Whedon giving away Dr. Horrible for that first weekend for free was great. And then he followed it up by selling it up by selling it on iTunes, and it sold like gangbusters on iTunes. Then when he made a DVD available, it had the original plus an entire commentary track, called “Commentary, The Musical,” plus behind the scenes stuff, photos, interviews, different commentary tracks by different members of the cast. All these added things so that at each stage, you can buy in but you’re getting more each time. You’re not just getting the DVD version of the Web version of the online download version. And people will pay for each of them, even though at its heart it’s the same content, even though it’s not. These layers of content are building upon the core product. People are willing to buy, then.
For anybody who is in science fiction fandom, Joss Whedon is right up there in the pantheon. So people are going to be paying attention and following what he’s doing. But what I thought was interesting about Dr. Horrible was that he had these cast members who were world-class talents and well-known. It seems that they did it on the strength of Joss Whedon and his reputation and the idea itself.
His finanical backing was some dude in Silicon Valley. He did not go through the traditional channels. The story behind it was that it was during the writer’s strike, and Whedon wasn’t allowed to work as a writer for a studio. He said his two inspirations for doing Dr. Horrible was The Guild and Star Trek: Phase II. He said, people will watch this stuff on line, so I why don’t I make it for them? And he did.
One of the things he said in a Rolling Stone interview this month was, I’m not even a Trekkie, but I was really enjoying this fan-made Star Trek episode. So that was his inspiration to do this. The money guy gave him backing for the production. They rented some space on one of the studio lots, and they made it. The rest is history.
They pushed it through in a very short time and put it out there. So, yeah, it can be done. The fact that he’s Joss Whedon may have opened a door, but now that the door has been opened, anybody can look and see that if you make it right, market it right, distribute it right, and do it in a way that respects your audience, that makes your actors creative partners in the process, and business partners in the process, there is money that can be made.
They won’t be Hollywood blockbusters, but they don’t have to be. We’ll still have Hollywood for the blockbusters, but for other stories that want to be told, and other people that want to hear these stories, there’s a potential outlet for it. So let’s try to take what we’re learning on an ad hoc basis, whether it’s through Star Trek, through Buck Rogers, through Dr. Horrible, through The Guild, let’s create a system out of that. Let’s systematize what people are learning from that.
Let’s create new avenues for talented people to be a part of that system. Don’t come in with the Hollywood mindset that says we need a lot of money to produce something good. Instead say, what we need is some money and a lot of talent, and let’s open the doors to that talent and make stuff that people will buy.
In 2012, Carlos Pedraza is doing what? And this nascent industry of independent video producers is where in relation to that?
That’s a good question (laughs). These days I’m living sort of week-to-week on the way some things are developing, but I do feel like the reality is that there is a lot of potential energy and a lot of potential talent sitting out across North America with people who want a chance to make a film. Who want a chance to have their work out there. I would like by 2012 to have figured out at least one avenue for that talent to be harnessed, and to have done that successfully one or two times, so that people say, “Here’s a system. Let’s buy into it. Let’s refine it.” Let’s have some examples of how that’s being done effectively, and share that knowledge, because it shouldn’t be secret. Once someone figures out a system that works, it helps all of us to expand that system.
We may never make the kind of money that people in Hollywood make. But do you need to? There are plenty of people who are willing to earn the same amount of money they work for now, but doing something that’s a lot more fun. The thing that’s great about Hollyood is that because it’s mass market, if someone’s going to make that much money from a mass market vehicle, then yeah, that wealth should be shared amongst the people who helped to create it. So yeah, they deserve their big salaries. Great. But if that’s the only way, the stakes get so high that that’s the only way that creative content gets produced and distributed, then we have a problem.
Even today in 2009, we know there are other ways to get things out there to an appreciative audience. So let’s create a business model that will support that. I think by the time we do, we’ll have learned a lot more than we know now. We’ll have a lot more examples of successes under our belts. Hopefully some of those will be ones I’ve been involved in, and I’ll be earning money (laughs).
The other day while reading a story on MSNBC.com, I stumbled across ads from not one, but two people in my home town who were providing valuable information to MSNBC readers like me. The ads were delivered via the Pulse 360 ad network, which had entered into a big partnership with Microsoft some time ago.
The first link took me to “Alyssa’s Rachel Ray Diet Blog”. Alyssa, the mom in question, has found health bliss in the form of a wonder food that has apparently been praised by everyone’s favorite celebrity chef. Ah, but something is fishy here! Rachael Ray fans will quickly note the misspelling.
It turns out (you saw this coming, didn’t you) Alyssa’s blog has nothing to do with Rachael Ray. As for her origins, perhaps she lives in Santa Cruz, but Alyssa also seems to live in many other places simultaneously. The ad for her blog had gathered my IP address and inserted “Santa Cruz” into the text. Apparently that’s what Pulse 360 means by “highly targeted.”
To my profound dismay, the same was true of the Matthew Jales ad. Matthew was willing to help me make thousands of dollars by simply submitting links to Google, which seemed like a great idea. Then I got a bit suspicious that perhaps he wasn’t on the up and up. After all, why would ol’ Matt go out of his way to tell me he lived in Santa Cruz when he probably lives somewhere else?
I ran a WHOIS search and was shocked, shocked, shocked to find that the WHOIS info was protected by an outfit called WhoisGuard. So there is no easy way of finding out where the Mattster actually lives, or at the very least where he gets his mail delivered.
My sarcasm stems from the fact that these sorts of shenanegans have been part of the Web for many years, so it was no suprise to find that the Alyssa and Matthew ads were so dodgy. But this is a major news site. It was mildly surprising to find that a “real” news organization would be so careless with the truth.
MSNBC doesn’t seem care enough about its readers to vouch for the ads that appear on its pages. I’m talking about basics here. MSNBC doesn’t need to determine whether Alyssa’s wonder berries have any medicinal benefits. But the geo-targeted text is simply not truthful. It’s street-corner hucksterism.
While readers keep hearing about how important it is to have a thriving Fourth Estate, the people who run media businesses continue to treat ads and content as wholly separate affairs, even though the two are presented in an increasingly intertwined way.
Traditional journalists hold some real advantages over amateurs. They know how to check facts and obtain information from multiple sources. They understand the importance of subtle shadings of meaning. They work hard at their craft. But their work is undercut every time an ad for Alyssa’s Rachel Ray Diet Blog appears below a story.
When the next era in journalism finally gathers a head of steam, the winners will be those that deliver meticulous, credible reporting instead of infotainment. And they’ll make money at it, because they won’t be fostering mistrust between themselves and their readers.
This is part 2 of a three-part interview with fan film writer and producer Carlos Pedraza. In part 1 we discussed how he became involved in fan film and how that world differs from Hollywood.
In part 2 Carlos covers the variety of ways the canon (internal consistency in fictional worlds) can be handled, and I ask whether fan film will ever go mainstream.
The Interview (Continued)
Q: One of the qualities of science fiction in particular that has risen up over the past 20 or 30 years is the canon - the idea of the continuity of the particular universe in which the characters operate. There have been countless quarrels about who is violating the canon and whose canon really is the canon. That’s kind of fascinating trying to watch, because when the original Star Trek was written, they were not concerned with that.
They were making it up as they were going!
It was an era where there were no VCRs. After one rerun, it was never going to be seen again. So they didn’t worry about it! Now we live an era where people collect DVDs and they can actually say, “Whoa! Season 3 you did this, but Season 1 you did that!”
The canon is still important to people. They want a certain internal consistency to their fictional worlds or universes, but at the same time, I think we’ve seen that the market will bear multiple canons of things. We’ve seen it repeatedly. The Dark Knight is a different Batman canon than the Batman of the 80s. And everyone seems to be OK with that, because it’s made a billion dollars.
Q: It seems like maybe the owners of these creations are starting to come around to that idea that maybe it’s possible to iterate on these things faster, too. Batman is an excellent example of that. It’s been continuously revamped and redone, and everybody seems to be fine with that.
Alternate Batman realities
Yes. Ideas are still being generated at the original source, which is DC Comics. But there’s been a whole wide range of different iterations of Batman, for kids in cartoons after cartoons, some of which have been truly excellent, some of which I’ve hated, some of which I think have been truly inventive and have attracted major talent in terms of voice talent and writing talent.
X-Men has been like that too. But it exists also as a film series that’s its own canon, that violates the canon of the cartoons, that violates the canon of the comic books. In fact, Marvel Comics even has an entirely separate new canon for some of their major characters.
Their Ultimate series is a whole different set of X-Men. They’re the same characters, but they have stories that have gone in different directions from the X-Men that we’ve been reading, that became the new X-Men back in 1980. So I think people’s brains are large enough to understand that you can have multiple canons. It’s only a problem when you try to force them to fit into one. I think the smart people have figured out that as long as each one maintains its own internal consistency, you can have multiple versions of the same property.
That’s what we’re hoping for with Buck Rogers [ed: more on this in part 3]. People want to have fun with these things. They want to have their thinking provoked. That’s one of the things that makes science fiction so great. So that’s the niche we’re going to fill that won’t interfere with the film rights in any way whatsoever. In fact, it can aid in that marketing. It will hopefully generate interest.
Q: All of the things we’ve been talking about have been science fiction and fantasy. The first stories, the first fiction were essentially what we would now call science fiction and fantasy. Legends, Beowulf, all these things have been with us since the very beginnings of human storytelling. But somehow these days things that are fantastical, things that are conjectural, are not afforded the same level of respect as literary artistic works. Take, for example, the Academy Awards. Everybody who paid any attention thought the most recent Batman was a superlative movie. But everybody also knew there was no way in hell that was going to get best picture. Why do you think that this new method of storytelling with the tools that are available now has been pioneered by people who are interested in science fiction and fantasy?
They tend to be forward thinkers. The New York Times the other day ran a really interesting article that basically said, except in the occasional case, the Academy has always been out of step with what popular culture has preferred. Paul Blart Mall Cop makes more money than The Reader. I mean, clearly we’re talking about different definitions of what success is.
My whole thing is, we don’t need to make the Academy happy. That’s not the objective. It’s one of those things that if it happens to go in that direction, fantastic. But the fact of the matter is, look at Dark Knight and it is successful where success matters. It’s made a billion dollars. The fact that it’s made a billion dollars means that other Batman movies and other movies like it, other movies that appeal to this same audience, are going to continue to be made. Ultimately the respect that you get from the Academy, that’s gonna change too. It’s all demographics. We’re in a transitional period demographically, where the people who are the maturing voters at the Academy level are older, and they prefer certain kinds of movies that focus on certain kinds of themes. Those are the ones that tend to get more attention from them.
My response to that is, fine. Let them. It’s who they are. It’s who they want to recognize. Why not? I thought we had a really great crop of movies in Best Picture this year, and I enjoyed them all. I didn’t see Doubt, I think. I don’t remember. Anyway, my point is that it’s not the only definition of what success is. Anyone who makes a film has to decide how they’re going to define the success of that film.
Q: Let’s say someone wants to make a fan fiction piece - not a fan fiction piece, but something from a wholly new cloth. Or maybe they want to re-imagine some movie that they really liked from years ago that has nothing to do with science fiction or fantasy or any of that stuff and has no special effects. And they manage to find enough people who are going to work with them on it. Is that something, when you talked about broadening earlier, is that something that you see happening, a sort of broadening of interest?
I think you’re going to see more different memes, because it’s a different medium. If you look at webisodes, the pacing of how a story is told is defined by the medium. There’s, if you look literally at the viewing metrics behind how people consume a streaming webisode, and you graph it, you have a drop off in your audience. For a half-hour long episode, about half way through the episode you have lost about half of your audience, and that’s considered pretty good. That’s considered success for a thirty-minute episode.
But if you keep it at 12 to 15 minutes, you can retain about 75% to 80% of your audience. So you have 50% more people watching your entire shorter episode than you would if you had tried to package it as a 30 minute episode.
Q: So the medium really is the message.
The medium is the message. People want their stories shorter. And that’s fine. That’s the way TV works. A movie has three acts. A regular TV show has four to seven acts that are determined by commercial breaks. That means that the way you have to write the story has to respect the fact that every 12 to 15 minutes you have to have some kind of a cliffhanger.
As with so many other pursuits, the relentless march of digital technology has transformed fan fiction. Originally the fan-produced stories that took over where books, TV shows, and movies left off were distributed in an almost samizdat-like fashion. I vividly remember the thrill of encountering photocopied Star Trek stories at a science fiction convention in the late ’70s. Fast forward 30 years, and fan fiction has gone video, gone digital, and gone global.
Star Trek: Phase II (originally known as Star Trek: New Voyages) is the latest of several increasingly sophisticated fan film shows being distributed solely online. Written, acted, directed, and produced on a purely volunteer basis, STP2 and its kin are labors of love. They are also profoundly altering the media landscape by creating new relationships between the goliath traditional media players and consumers. As consumers become co-producers of content, how will content creation, distribution, and monetization change?
A few weeks ago I sat down and chatted with Carlos Pedraza, who in addition to being a close friend, co-produced and wrote many episodes for the long-running Star Trek: Hidden Frontier show. This is the first of three posts stemming from that interview.
The Interview
Q: How did you first get involved in fan film?
I started almost seven years ago now. I read an article about this fan film that had been created by these two brothers from Minnesota. It had taken them probably seven years to create this one hour episode that was set in the same frame as the original series of Star Trek, and on a different ship and a different cast. And apart from a couple of very cheesy things that they admitted were just technical obstacles they weren’t able to overcome, it was a really well done recreation of the original series, in terms of tone and mood and such.
So I watched it and thought it was pretty good. And the article made mention of the fact that there were other Star Trek fan films out there, and that there was this one based in Southern California that was set in the Next Generation era, in the 24th Century. I looked it up on the Web. They were at that point in their third season of making the show. They were at that point making nine episodes a year. So they had created close to 30 episodes at that point, which was pretty impressive.
Writer/Producer Carlos Pedraza
Its first two seasons weren’t terribly good, but they were clearly making it with a lot of heart, and they were learning a lot and they were improving. I checked out their user forums, which were very active. They had a pretty rabid fan base that liked to talk to one another and liked the fact that they could interact with the creators of the show and some of the actors and so forth. So it really became more than just a show. It was really a community of people.
I noticed, back then they were taking submissions for story ideas from fans. So I lurked for a while, just getting a sense of who these people were, and how they interacted, and what the process was for submitting, and who the right person was to submit to and so forth. Then when I felt like I understood that well enough, I worked on the story I wanted to pitch. I came up with this story idea that was based on the war crimes trials from Bosnia. So I did sort of a Star Trek version of that and pitched the idea and they really liked it.
It was called Grave Matters and it was about the discovery of a mass grave of Bajorans who had been put there by Cardassians. The main character, the villain, was based on a Bosnian woman who was completely unapologetic about the fact that she had been involved in this genocide.
At that point they were writing their scripts a full year in advance of production. So I thought it would be a year before it would get made. It turned out that, because of one of the story elements that I’d created, they moved it up in the production cue. I think I submitted it in March, and we ended up producing it in September of 2002, and it was released in early 2003. I just thought it would be kind of a one off thing, but it turned out to be probably one of the most popular episodes up until that point.
The producer of the show, who had written a lot of the scripts, asked me if I’d be interested in writing the teleplay from treatments he’d already written. Some of them were more detailed, some of them were just really story outlines. I basically fleshed them out and wrote them into teleplays. The episodes were running about 25 minutes, and I began pushing for longer episodes. We made it up to about 30 minutes an episode, with an occasional one that went 35-37. One of the last episodes we did at 42 minutes long, which is basically the same length as a network episode. We were able to produce a network hour’s worth of an episode in the same time frame it used to take us to do a 20-25 minute episode.
Q: Was that improvement primarily due to technology or to improvements in your production process?
It was both. Technology is obviously the thing that makes this possible. The fact that you can, with only a small financial stretch, afford a camera and software that can produce this, is revolutionary. I think we’re really just at the beginning of that revolution. We’re seeing it spread now. So if you look at it in terms of a direction, it’s moving forward, but right now it’s also more moving out than moving forward. We’re at a place right now where nobody knows where it’s going to go, other than they know it’s forward, and out. More people are going to do it and its going to keep gaining momentum.
Q: So by “out” you mean broadening the scope of offerings.
Right. There are more people out there doing it. You have venues like YouTube where people can actually display their products, and where you’ve already had some people do it well enough that they’re making a good living just on the advertising revenue from YouTube.
We’re still a long way though, from knowing how to properly monetize all of this. And that’s a real challenge. We’re in a position that because we’re making fan productions that the informal agreement we have with the copyright owner is that we aren’t going to make any money on it. So that has the upside of giving us an instant fan base and a platform for promotion that a lot of independent video producers who are trying to get things on the Web don’t necessarily have in terms of getting an audience. But we also can’t earn a living from it.
So one of the things we’ve been trying to do is to look at what is it we’re learning about this process, both in terms of the technology we need to be cost-efficient about it, but also about the people that we need to find at every level, from actors to editors to CGI artists to set construction people and writers. Everything you need for a production you still need. So we have one foot in the old style, the traditional style of doing things, and the other foot in a very fast-moving, technologically-driven style that creates a dynamic for us that is very educational but also very challenging.
I look at the creative challenges as a good thing. The fact is, when it comes to dramatic video productions on the Web, we’re still in the Wild West. We’re still staking out claims and understanding how to apply technology in new situations. So it’s a very exciting time, but the fact that it’s still an uncertain time makes it difficult to come up with a business model that will cause us to say, “Oh, great! We’ve got a way to earn at least enough to cover the costs.” We don’t yet, but I think we’re getting to that point.
Q: Fan fiction creators such as yourself are starting to develop your own fan bases. Initially you are piggybacking off the success of Star Trek, but as you move into things that are no longer derivative, do you think you might be able to have a bit more leverage?
For me it’s a career shift from what I used to do, so part of it is about building the skills that you need in order to be an effective producer, because one of the things we’ve found is that for independent productions that need to be cost-effective with the Web as their venue, you can’t afford to stratify your crew. You can’t have people who are “just” writers, or “just” producers, or “just” directors. Obviously you want skilled people filling those shoes, but you you also want people who are willing to pick up a hammer if you need to finish a set because it’s running behind schedule, who if the water main breaks, are going to help. We’ve actually had that happen. You have to have a flexibility that frankly Hollywood doesn’t have.
We’ve worked with Hollywood people who come out, and they flounder a bit in the production situations that we have, because it’s not a perfect production situation. We don’t have a sound stage that’s literally sound-proof.
Q: There’s no catering truck.
There’s no catering truck. We have a studio that, when it rains, you hear the rain! But we also have an incredibly skilled sound designer. Unless it’s a huge hail storm, he can handle it. I could go through some of the episodes we’ve produced, and you’d be amazed how many scenes I could point you to and I can tell you there was a huge rain storm going on. You could hear the pounding on roof, because it’s a tin roof! We’ve added some insulation so it’s not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still quite audible.
And he can salvage audio that would make Hollywood sound designers cringe. And this guy does happen to work in Hollywood, but that’s what he does. Everyone has to put up with situations that are more difficult than you would ever have to deal with in Hollywood.
Q: From the beginning you’ve had people involved, particularly in special effects and things where people can work remotely, who are are professionals.
We have had professionals who have helped us. Where the professional connections that we’ve had through Star Trek have been really helpful is for people on my level. We’re not trying to break into Hollywood. We’re trying to make a new market for video productions. But obviously I have a lot to learn. There’s a lot I’ve needed to learn about production, direction, art direction, set construction, sound design. I’ve been able to do it watching the Hollywood professionals who’ve contributed their time and their effort and some of their resources in the production of our show.
So I’ve been able to interact with professional Hollywood writers who need to do on-set rewrites and I’ve seen how that works. I’ve worked with professional script supervisors and learned how to do script supervision from professionals who’ve come out and contributed their time to us. Same with sound design. Same with cinematography. Every production aspect has had some of that; we’ve had more Oscar and Emmy-winning people on one of our productions than probably any science fiction show Hollywood has ever had, working on a single episode.
Q: And the motivation for a lot of these folks is…
They love Star Trek!
Q: And that’s why you got into it in the first place.
Exactly.
Q: Do you feel there’s sort of a nascent core of people who have been involved in the most serious forms of fan fiction video production who are developing what might be called a new set of skills that are derived from those original Hollywood skills?
I think they are. It’s really, truly independent. Independent studios today aren’t really that independent. They know that they have avenues through the traditional studios and their distribution capacity to have a venue for their work. We’re not in that position. We have to create our own venue. We talk to each other. We haven’t done a lot of work hand in hand yet, but we’re seeing more of that happen internationally.
There are a couple of people who have made some phenomenal Star Wars fan films whom I’ve met at conventions and sat on panels with and stay in touch with who are moving into more professional aspects of their work. And I think one of the tensions in this field is that there are some people there who want it as a stepping stone to a career in Hollywood, which is fine.
Personally, I’m not going to say no to a Hollywood opportunity, but I really feel like the excitement for me is about creating this new venue, this new way of distributing these materials. What I want to do is see how we create a way for talented people who are not connected to Hollywood but are are out there. There are so many film schools in North America alone, not even talking about the UK, France, and other places, that are churning out film students who are skilled and know how to do these things, but don’t have a big chance of making it being in Hollywood. But they’re out there, and to me, if there’s a vacuum, let’s fill it.
“Twitter Sucks!, a Good Times article by Alexander Zaitchik, paints Twitter as a sort of Bird of The Apocalypse, a harbinger of ruination and unmitigated ignorance:
What was once just a colorful special-needs classroom on the Internet is starting to look like a steel spike aimed at the heart of what remains of our ability to construct and process complete grammatical sentences and thoughts.
That’s right, folks. A protocol for handling 140-character chunks of text is going to be our undoing. What makes Twitter so evil, you ask?
For one thing, Zaitchik says Twitter supporters make outrageous claims about the value of the service. He rightly points out that while Clive Thompson talks about “ambient awareness” and “shared understanding”, Twitter is full of pointless, vapid narcissism. But what if Twitter were a complex system - full of useless chaff but also capable of enabling useful communication? Isn’t that what most of us have learned about blogs? How is Twitter different?
Zaitchik seems to be using a different service than the Twitter I know. For one thing, he refers to it consistently as a “site”. Twitter is really a protocol. The underlying technology that powers Twitter is used by all kinds of applications, and nobody who uses Twitter on a more than casual basis bothers with the website. While Zaitchik mentions TweetDeck, he doesn’t mention that there are dozens of twitter applications, and that each of them provides its own user experience. For example, I used to use TweetDeck, but I recenty switched to Nambu. I find it gives me much more control over incoming tweets, and allows me to pay attention only to the messages that are important to me.
This brings me to another flaw in Zaitchik’s argument. Like a bee drawn to honey, he can’t help but hold up insipid (”At the park - I love squirrels!”) tweets as evidence of the impending collapse of civilization. It’s as if we’re all going to be strapped down and made to read line after line of banality until we go insane. Maybe he doesn’t realize that you can follow as many or as few Twitter users as you like. Don’t like @lancearmstrong’s training updates? Unfollow him. All it takes is the click of a button. Or don’t follow him in the first place. You can do it. You have the power.
Zaitchik also can’t help but draw conclusions about the psychology of Twitter users:
But nothing reveals age more than being terrified of being thought old, a fear that is obviously driving so much uncritical Twitter praise.
Obviously. Why would anyone find value in Twitter unless they were afraid of being thought uncool? But while Zaitchik points out that the average Twitter user is 31 years old, his blind spot about the opt-in nature of Twitter keeps him from admitting that users tend to follow users who share the same interests, from #deathmetal to #knitting. How do you impress the cool kids with your youthful Twitter vigor if they never see you because you’re too busy sharing tweets with other geezers?
People use Twitter for a variety of reasons. There are plenty of sales folks carpet-bombing their followers with get-rich schemes, and marketing wizards trying to out-tweet each other with social marketing tips and tricks. Every flavor of geek imaginable can be found on Twitter. But Twitter can also serve as a way of staying connected to a community. Plenty of @santacruzgeeks members use Twitter, which creates a sort of virtual water cooler for brief conversations. It is also a handy way of staying in touch with friends, knowing what they’re up, what they’re thinking about, and what they find interesting. Sharing links and photos is a huge part of the Twitter experience.
One of Zaitchik’s final Twitter gripes is that it is time-consuming:
Worse, the constant posting and following of these snapshots takes up lots of precious time, sucking up and fracturing the dwindling number of solid blocks of minutes that remain after checking email, Facebook, MySpace and other now-routine diversions.
I’m not sure what to make of this assertion. Zaitchik is a self-professed Twitter hater who has “followed the site since it was still crying blind in the nest.” So for two and a half years he’s been checking in on Twitter. Why? If he hated it from the get-go, why does he torture himself by returning to the Gates of Hell?
And what is this about “email, Facebook, MySpace, and other now-routine diversions”? Perhaps Zaitchik’s real target is information overload. Twitter is just the latest in a string of enticing but dangerous technological diversions, and the sustained weight of all that distraction is too much burden for any human to bear. Maybe he isn’t aware that many see an impending fight between Facebook and Twitter, or that MySpace is fast becoming passe, indicating that perhaps only a finite number of huge social networks can coexist.
These rivalries are beside the point, though. Ultimately we all make our own decisions about whether a particular technology is useful or a waste of time. If email, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo, YouTube, and the rest are taking up too much of your time, maybe the problem isn’t with the tools.
