Hello again,
writing this post via notepad and then uploading directly:
In South Africa and heading off via Land Rover into Kruger park for a few days.
I’ve been meaning to update sooner,
slight hitch.. Bandwidth and access is more limited here than otherwise thought.
Will expand on the following when able to (think late July when I’m back in Natal)
1. I’ll be covering the importance of bandwidth (24kps atm on dial up… argh) and
optimizing for other markets.
2. A review of a South African peridocal AdReview 2008 which I happened to glance at
in a bank today. They focused largely on advertisting but had an interesting piece on
the new media in South Africa.
I have to say that I’m in large part impressed with the advertising here, the print ads for
VW are something to marvel at.
3. I’ll also be attempting to attend and cover a film festival in Cape Town the name of
which escapes me, hopefully I’ll run into some of the University of Cape Town’s media
students or professors and be able to converse with them on the state of the industry here.
4.At the moment one of the most highly rated shows on SABC is a soap opera, we’ll have to
look at that. How dramatic narrative can be translated to an online medium, perhaps
something in the pattern of 30s/40s serials.
5. I have some related book reviews forthcoming, but in all liklihood only after I’m stateside
again.
6. As I’m going to be franticly looking for employ when back in August I think I’ll explore
some venues and career options in the new media.
Traditional broadcast channels and New Media producers are having to answer a very important question; How to generate income. With the rise of DVRs and the resulting ability to skip past advertisements companies are losing market share to rating methods that have fallen behind in the face of new technology.
Online content producers have to navigate a labyrinth of differing views on making a profit. Greg Goodfried of the now infamous Lonely Girl 15 has an extremely insightful write up on Brand Integration. Below is an excerpt that I used in a paper on the history of Distribution channels, (which I’ll be referencing in future posts) .
We tried using services like Revver and we do receive some revenue from YouTube because they show display ads around our videos. However, as many of you know, these services pay VERY little. It’s not nearly enough to sustain our production budget.
So, what are we left to do? We try to come up with creative brand integrations that accomplish two things: 1) entertain the community and 2) make the brand feel like they are getting good promotion for their product.
I used the article in a paper on the history of Distribution channels, which I’ll be referencing it in future posts. Film has relied heavily on product placement as a supplementary source of funding since E.T but for TV it’s a bit of a return to the old days. For independent new media enterprises product placement is a viable source of income. Greg continues to list the companies that have paid for sponsorships.
Lonelygirl15
Hershey’s Icebreakers Sours Gum
Neutrogena
20th Century Fox – “Jumper”
KateModern
MSN
Orange Mobile
Gillette
Pantene
Tampax
Disney – Hallam Foe, Enchanted, Ratatoulle
Paramount – Disturbia, Transformers, Stardust
There are already companies developing technology that will allow viewers to mouse over an item in a video and link to said advertiser (for compensation of course!). We as audience members are pretty used to product placement and not resistant to it in moderation. Producers still face the challenge of integrating said products in a way that won’t distract from the story or foster cynicism. The 2003 movie National Security with its shoot outs in a soda warehouse comes to mind as an example of avoid. Spiderman’s use of a Dr. Pepper can is a bit dubious but still is within the realm of the acceptable.
At some point I’ll cover alternate reality games, online properties that have been picked up for production, and other options to pay the bills. I’ll be leaving shortly for a two month trip to South Africa. In the midst of seeing family and gallivanting around the places I knew only as a child I will try and do some posts on the industry there. I’m also in the process of building my website www.radial-sprite.com and will likely be posting less in the forthcoming days anyway.
My younger brother certainly falls into our target demographic and spends a fair amount of his free time browsing internet videos. The band Wheezer put out a new video for their song Pork and Beans. The video incorporates viral stars and incorporates reproductions of several famous scenes. Ladies and gents we have ourselves a feedback loop. As my friend Ross would say “That’s so meta!”
Video Clips Review has an article breaking down some of the references and has links to the original content.
There have been several instances of videos being removed because of copyright disputes, recently I’ve seen fan slide shows of Billy Joel’s We didn’t start the fire removed for said reason, but I’ve seen evidence of 15-20 year olds using online videos as an alternate means of previewing albums. I’ve yet to check the ratings but I maintain a hunch that traditional music video channels such as MTV, and VH1 have had a marked decrease in broadcast ratings (likely partially offset by their web channels). At least in my brother’s case the online availabilty of the video resulted in an album purchase.
This is the final migratory post from my facebook account,
The Cornell Daily Sun has an article about Kevin Spacy and Dana Brunetti’s venture into Viral Videos. The piece I found the most interesting was their take on eyeballs, the conventional wisdom seems to be get your video out to the most possible viewers and it will be noticed, they want to take a more focused approach and act as a filter for industry people.
MP: What are some of the “dos and don’ts” of using the web to get your work out there.?
DB: What you want to be careful of are sites where you lose all the rights to your film. You don’t want to upload to a site where they own it and profit from it, and you can never do anything with it. Most sites don’t do that anymore, but they used to. Now any legitimate site just has rights to use your film in the form that you upload it. Also, get it on as many sites as you can. Granted, YouTube has a different mission than Triggerstreet.com, but they’ve got a lot of eyeballs. So you might get the right kind of eyeballs there, too. Triggerstreet.com is obviously more focused than the YouTube crowd, so you’re probably going to get better exposure in terms of the type of industry people you’re trying to target. YouTube, Break.com, and even MySpace aren’t necessarily geared towards short filmmakers although they’ve tried to be. They’re more about the guy getting kicked in the nuts, or crashing his truck while riding on the hood. It’s all about getting your name out there and displaying your talent: That’s what TriggerStreet.com is.
I can see the logic in wanting to have a channel devoid of clutter and serve as a showcase but studio executives are still going to want to see mass appeal, and forgive the cliche but to see how people in Kansas city react. Displaying content through both means seems like a reasonable alternative one to act as a virtual pitch site and the other as a means of evaluating reaction.
Continuing my migration of relevant Facebook posts, I’d like to point out a showcase piece from BBC2.
The piece really highlights how technology has enabled small groups of content producers to film scenes that would normally require vast costuming budgets, hundreds of extras, and elaborate set extensions. I’m still a proponent of getting as much done in camera as possible but instances such as these highlight how the industry is changing.
My DVX and standard resolution doesn’t really afford enough picture information for effective or at least easy compositing, and even some forms of HD lack the proper color space. Which is another reason why I’m so excited about the Red Scarlett. Check the video out.
It offers a great access to public domain works, including of course several Kurosawa pieces! It’s kind of nice being able to get copyright free material that isn’t on a cheap compilation DVD in a bargain bin. Check it out.