Deep Media

New from Columbia: Why I'm offering a full-day program in Digital Storytelling Strategy

On Tuesday, October 21, I'll be partnering with marketing and communications expert Paul Woolmington to offer a special one-day program in Digital Storytelling Strategy. Co-sponsored by the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Columbia Business School, the full-day session is designed for business executives who need to know how to get their message across in a world in which the way we communicate is being totally redefined. Why is digital forcing a trans­formation in the way we tell stories? How can marketers, producers, and strategic planners lev­erage these changes rather than be left behind? That's what we'll be addressing. 

Grammars have rules—so what are the rules that will determine how brands tell their story in the 21st century?Obviously much of this was inspired by The Art of Immersion, the book I published in 2011, but we plan to go considerably further than that. The book was largely anecdotal—a series of stories from movie directors, television producers, game developers and others that sought to describe what I saw as a newly emerging grammar of storytelling for the digital age. Over the past year or so I've been working to develop a much more systematic ap­proach—one that not only reports how narrative is evolving and gives it historical context but explains how we can put it to use. Grammars have rules—so what are the rules we'll use when telling stories in the 21st century? Well, to a large extent they're still being made up. But that's what I'm working on today. 

Why blockbusters are not the wave of the future

Summer is now officially over, and for Hollywood the results were not good. No, the industry didn't suffer a repeat of the string of debacles that hit last year, when one mega-budget picture after an­other—White House Down, The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, Turbo, R.I.P.D.—unceremoniously tanked. In fact, the news was actually worse. 

Last year at least the hits made up for the misses. This year the North American summer box office was down 15 per cent overall. Movies like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and the latest Transformers installment drew crowds to the multiplex, but smaller crowds than in the past. And there are signs the core audience is losing interest: According to the MPAA, the number of frequent moviegoers (once a month or more) last year fell in every age demographic between 12 and 49, with the biggest drop coming among 18-to-25-year-olds. It's not hard to figure out why: As producer Lynda Obst put it recently, “How many times can you see the same cities destroyed? How many ways are there to destroy them?”

Smartphones, journalism, and an elusive golden age

Can the smartphone really save journalism? Can anything save journalism? Both those questions have been raised in response to my essay in the current issue of Wired. Titled "Immerse Yourself: Why the smartphone means a golden age for journalism," the piece makes the case for the smartphone as a perfect device for getting the news—including the kind of longform journalism once thought headed for extinction.

It's a counterin­tuitive argument, which is why it appears in a slot labelled Argument, and it's generated a lot of comment on Twitter, almost all of it positive. But Dan Mitchell, who has written about such issues for Fortune and other publica­tions, wanted to know how I could be claiming a "golden age" when statehouse news bureaus around the country are all but empty. It's a fair question: Newspaper ad revenues have been plummeting for years, and papers have had to cut back severely. And while there are a number of answers, the simple one is this: Journalism and newspapers are not the same. 

I'm not arguing that all journalism's problems have been solved—far from it. But it's clear that there is a market for serious online reporting, a market that's now making the crucial transition to mobile. Just last month, for example, The New York Times reported that one of The New Yorker's most successful articles online was a 25,000-word report on Scientology, and added that mobile users are among the fastest-growing segments of the magazine's read­ership. This kind of thing is crucial—because where there's a market, there's a way. 

The Kaltura Hackathon: What's next for video?

When Kaltura, the company whose open-source video platform is used by everyone from the World Bank to Columbia Business School to HBO, asked me to be a judge for last week's Video Experience Hackathon, I was quick to say yes. With $50,000 in prize money, it was a sure bet to draw people with some cool ideas. So last Wednesday, on the final day of the annual Kaltura Connect conference in New York City, I sat down with IBM cloud services CTO Mac Devine, Sherpa Digital Media's Ben Chodor, and Zohar Babin of Kaltura to take a look.

The hackathon had taken place over a 43-hour period the previous weekend. By the time we got there, the 12 teams that submitted working applications had been narrowed down to four finalists. We were asked to judge them on four criteria: innovation and creativity (how original is the idea? does it offer a real solution in the market?), polish (does it feel hacked together, or is it well thought out?), design and user experience, and use of software tools provided by the sponsors—Kaltura, cloud hosting company Rackspace, and automated voice transcription outfit VoiceBase.

 

High Valyrian, anyone? What the 'Game of Thrones' conlangs tell us about language and world-building

Behind the savage bloodshed, naked power lust, and epic betrayals that make HBO's Game of Thrones so enthralling to watch are the languages created for the show. The Game of Thrones conlangs—short for "constructed languages"—were developed by David Peterson, the 33-year-old linguist who co-founded the Language Creation Society, an organization based in Orange County, California, not far from Disneyland. Aside from devising Dothraki, the native tongue of the nomadic horselords of Essos, and Valyrian, the family of dialects based on the language of the lost empire of Valyria, Peterson is best known as the linguist and "alien culture consultant" for Syfy's Defiance. So far, however, nothing he's contributed has matched the use of Valyrian in the stunning scene at the finish of "And Now His Watch Is Ended" (season 3, episode 4), when Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen—she who hatched the fire-breathing dragons—takes command of the Unsullied, the 8,000 warrior-eunuchs of Astapor, from their slave master, Kraznys. 

Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor: “A dragon is not a slave.”

Want to try it yourself? Later this month, Peterson leads a workshop in language creation at the first annual Filmatic Festival, an exploration of the future of movies at UC San Diego, the school where he earned his masters in linguistics. Thanks to an introduction by Rebecca Webb of ArtPower!, the campus arts organization that's sponsoring the festival, I was able to put some questions to him by email. Here's what he had to say about Dothraki, Valyrian, and language in general: 

 

What if TV networks themselves go over the top?

For years, people have been speculating about the day when viewers would go "over the top," cutting their cable or satellite connections and getting TV online. It hasn't really happened, since even with Hulu and Netflix, there was no viable Internet alternative—no way to watch Girls or Game of Thrones, for example, because HBO Go is only available to people who get HBO through cable or satellite. The first suggestion that this might be changing came last summer, when a top analyst, Craig Moffett, reported that US cable and satellite companies lost more than 300,000 subscribers between June 2012 and June 2013. But in the past two weeks, it's started to look as if the television networks themselves might cut the cord: 

• Two weeks ago, on March 3, Disney—which owns ABC and ESPN—announced a deal with Dish Networks to offer its programming via Internet, not just to Dish's satellite sub­scribers but as part of a separate, over-the-top subscription service. As part of the deal, Disney agreed to let Dish deploy its AutoHop ad-skipping feature on shows three days after they're broadcast. Disney had been suing Dish over AutoHop; now the litigation has been settled, leaving CBS, NBC, and Fox to cut their own deals. The three-day window protects the Disney-owned channels during the period advertisers are actually paying for. Still, as Michael Wolff observed, "Finally, a major network has bent to the obvious—people expect to be able to skip ads." His conclusion? "The sky is falling." 
• A couple of days later in the UK, the BBC announced its intention to stop broadcasting BBC Three—the digital channel whose shows include Being Human, the series that inspired the Canadian remake that's shown in the US on Syfy—and relaunch it online. This was billed as a cost-cutting move, but it makes sense for a channel whose target audience is people 16 to 34. 
• Last Tuesday, the head of CBS, Leslie Moonves, threatened to take his own network over the top if the networks lose their court battle against Aereo, the startup that wants to stream broadcast channels to subscribers without paying the channels. "If the government wants to give them permission to steal our signal, then we will come up with some other way to get them our content and so get paid for it," he told CNET, the CBS-owned online news service.

Social Media Week 2014: Human in a digital world

The Official Guide to Social Media Week New York 2014

How can we regain control, establish balance, and preserve what makes us human? This is what we will be exploring during this year's Social Media Week. 

So ends a series of recent posts by Social Media Week founder Toby Daniels on The Next Web. Back in November, Toby asked, "How much power do you have over your tech obses­sion?" (Spoiler alert: Not much, as evidenced by that couple at the next table—we've all seen them—who spend the entire evening gazing into their smartphones.) A couple of weeks ago he asked, "what would happen if we lived with more intention—tried to be more human in this age of digital technology?" And in one of the videos embedded above he explains that this winter's Social Media Week—which begins on Monday in New York and seven other cities around the globe—was designed to examine "the idea that there are two sides to technology: the positive impact of how technology is shaping our lives, but also a negative aspect as well. What we wanted to do really during Social Media Week was to explore both sides of this argument." 

The big question at the Future of StoryTelling summit: What's the audience got to do with it?

After last fall's Future of StoryTelling summit in New York City, founder Charlie Melcher asked me to write a short essay summing up the experience for a book that would be sent to attendees. As a member of FoST's board of advisors, I was happy to do so. But since the one-day summit featured nearly two dozen roundtables headed by people ranging from Robert Wong of Google Creative Lab to Shannon Loftis of Xbox Enter­tainment Studios to Eddy Moretti of Vice, it was impossible to sum up the entire thing. So here's what struck me: 

Every successful conference puts an idea in play. For me, the second annual Future of Story­Telling Summit was all about rediscovering the audience. During the last century, mass media—news­papers, magazines, radio, television—forced audiences into an increasingly passive and marginalized role. To the extent that audiences mattered at all, it was as consumers—“eyeballs” to be lured to some destination, sorted into demographics, packaged by the thousand, and sold to advertisers. Those days are ending—and one of the most important things we can do is explore the im­plications. 

Behind the immersiveness trend: Why now?

When JWT Intelligence announced its "10 Trends for 2014 and Beyond" recently, trend #1 was "immersive experiences." Certainly you can feel this in New York: From Punchdrunk's Sleep No More (now running for nearly three years) to MoMA's Rain Room to Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room, people are willing to pay top dollar or line up for hours to experience something all-encompassing and beyond the ordinary. But why? 

JWT: 10 Trends for 2014 - Executive Summary from JWTIntelligence

The new report—based on a survey of Internet users in the US and the UK, on as­sessments from JWT planners around the world, and on in­terviews with outside observers (myself includ­ed)—lists six key reasons. Interestingly, only two have anything to do with advances in technology or production techniques. The re­maining four stem from broad societal shifts—shifts that are tied to, but in many cases a re­action against, the always-on nature of the digital world. 

 

From 'Oliver Twist' to 'Game of Thrones': Six serials and how they've deepened the art of storytelling

For a couple of years now, “transmedia” has been the buzzword most people use to define story­telling in the digital age. But while telling a story across different media formats (video, text, game, what have you) can be an effective way to engage people in a narrative, it's not the only way—nor is it necessarily the best. One of the most effective means of creating an immersive narrative is in fact one of the oldest: by serializing it. 

I was reminded of this recently when I went to Turin to speak at the Scuola Holden, a “school of storytelling and the performing arts” founded 20 years ago by the novelist Alessandro Baricco. Named after that world-class narrator Holden Caulfield, this unconventional institution (no teachers, for a long time no tests, and certainly no phonies) was intended to be a place where young Caulfield might feel at ease. Instead of hiring professors, the school brings in professional storytellers; and instead of focusing on technical skills like journalism or filmmaking, it tries to foster an aptitude for telling stories in any medium. 

Nonetheless, students are expected to spend about half their time during the two-year program in one of six “colleges”: Scrivere (writing), Filmmaking, Series, Crossmedia, Acting, and “Real World”—that is, stories inspired by actual events. In the first month of the school year, people like me were brought in to describe what these different disciplines were all about. I was asked to talk about Series. Then I was handed this map, which I decided to redraw a bit. The point was to show how serialization can create a sense of immersion.