I’m very grateful to the producers of Vauxhall Crossed for allowing me to publish the work I did at the end of last year and to be able to show where we are now.

Let me say at the outset that I do appreciate that in an ideal world of transmedia storytelling, no media is of lesser importance than the other. However, right now I’m working with people who have an existing property – usually a movie script – and want to make that their priority. Hence you’ll often find me referring to comic books and games as though they’re subservient to the feature film. I know that they needn’t be but that’s the situation I’m dealing with most often.

Purpose

The purpose of this blog posting is to show how I’ve been using transmedia for audience building and to welcome comments from others who can suggest points for improvement. You might also like to check-out what’s been implemented and give it a whirl!

I’ve also mentioned a few cool sites that you might use to implement your own projects.

Digging for Oil

The diagram below illustrates my usual analogy for growing a fan base. The principle is that you have to start by reaching out to people who are most receptive to your idea. Others might say to go fishing where the fish are.

The oil analogy is a good one because the early stages are quite tough. It takes a concerted effort to get that initial traction. It’s a bit like developing your feature film: it feels like an uphill struggle in the beginning – you’re trying to get either finance or cast to fall into line when they’re both dependent on each other. But then when finally someone gives you a break everything starts to fall into place and all the barriers start to melt away.

So it is with audience building, it takes time and hard work to get those early followers but once you do the project starts to get traction and everything gets easier little by little.

Background

Vauxhall Crossed is a family, action-adventure feature film about an MI6 agent called Daisy Scarlett (think female James Bond).

If you pop over to my site at http://zenfilms.typepad.com you’ll find the full report that was presented to the producers. It describes the state of play as of December 2009 and details my advice.

What I’d like to focus on here is the transmedia extension I suggested and then later implemented.

Implementation

Working from the Vauxhall Crossed script, I proposed the idea of establishing a fake Chinese take-away (take-out restaurant) and using this as an “unofficial” or rather secret home of Daisy Scarlett fans.  Given that our target audience is fans of spy movies I thought the opportunity to become involved in some subterfuge would appeal to them. It also creates audience “insiders” and “outsiders” which would reward early adopters and strengthen the bond among the most enthusiastic fans.

I reasoned that the audience would fall into three camps:

• Those who really like to play spy games (hardcores)
• Those who just think it’s fun to fool their friends
• Those who think this is all a cute idea but don’t have the time or can’t be bothered to play along (casuals).

I also wanted to allow the hardcore spy enthusiasts to directly contribute to the experience. This would be fun for them and alleviate some of the work from the producers.

Hence there will effectively be two-types of game. The first is based on the premise is that it’s fun to trick your friends. In this case, it’s fun to trick them into believing that this is the best Chinese food ever and they really must place an order. Of course, the food never arrives.

The second game will be more involved and based on a stronger role-play of pretending to be a spy. This has yet to worked through fully because it’s more demanding on the producers’ resources.

The diagram below shows a four-tier website trail:

• The main movie webpage promotes the movie in the usual way, providing information about cast and crew etc. But there’s also a small advert for our Chinese take-away.
• The Chinese take-away looks like a real restaurant website except for a few tell-tale clues that this can’t really be real. For example, I made the service delivery times and the concept rather eccentric!
• If someone is brave or mad enough to become a fan of the take-away then they’re rewarded with a secret page! This members-only area reveals the secrets of the scam and tells people how to take part in the fun. Part of that fun is keeping the Facebook page alive – writing fake reviews and uploading photos of friends eating the take-away food.
• For those that really want to dig deep, there’s a hardcore site at Ning where the members can create their own spy games for the others to play.

Facebook is also important because that’s where everyone’s friends are: It’s easy to upload reviews, video and photos and of course everything is visible to your social network.

A Twitter channel is used to convey game updates, missions and clues to members.

Both Facebook and Twitter are explained further in the report at my site.

The Story So Far

At the time of writing the basic building blocks are in place so it’s easy to see how the concept should work.

I implemented the restaurant using www.moonfruit.com because it’s very quick and easy, it’s free and allows members-only pages. It’s especially cool because it’s possible to use Facebook Connect. The screenshot below shows the website but I encourage you to check it out at http://wingtip.moonfruit.com

You’ll notice that there are five tabs on the website. If you become a member then a sixth tab becomes visible, marked “Confidential”! The image below shows the message you receive.

And finally, this last image shows the Ning hardcore members page.

At this time there’s no mention of the Vauxhall Crossed movie but we hope to add that at a later date.

I should also mention that to manage all the Twitter streams, we’re using HootSuite – a great application that allows us to track spy news, see who’s into James Bond and Jason Bourne etc. as well as message and retweet information we think might be interesting to our audience. In this way we hope that the movie communications form a valuable, useful part of the target audience conversation: we’re not constantly tweeting about how the movie is progressing (which would be tantamount to spam).

Next Steps

The most difficult next step will be trying to get traction among the potential fan base. Without encouragement I suspect that the sites will stay dormant – a potentially good idea drowned in a sea of web sites. It might also be likely that we’ll need to better structure the fun so that there’s a clearer link between participation and reward. Right now the reward is just “fun” but it’s likely that we’ll have to offer some kind of prize which would mean determining the basis for measuring and awarding the prize.

We also need to make available for download the restaurant graphics so that members can download, print locally and use to fake the take-out boxes. Right now we only have the menu available for download.

For further details, please check out the full report and please do leave questions and comments below.

I’ve been working with two entertainment properties and a media start-up the past couple of months and I wanted to share the business models I developed to explain where we’re heading.

Here’s what we already know:  pulling in an audience is tough but pulling in finance is tougher.

The Old Days

In the “old days” – as shown in Figure 1 – raising finance was what you did first. You needed that money to make the movie and then you’d sell the movie to a distributor whose job it was to sell it to the audience. Hell, you might even get presales in which case you’d killed two birds with one stone.

The important point from this is that as the filmmaker you only had to convince a limited number of people (investors) that you had a movie worth making (because it would make money). You didn’t have to convince them it was worth watching.

One reason you didn’t have to prove you had an audience waiting to see your movie was because it couldn’t be proven. Instead, one might use (often bogus) comparisons with other movies and of course, whenever possible, outliers like The Blair Witch Project or Fahrenheit 911 or Sideways etc.

When the finished movie failed to find an audience it was the distributor’s fault. They didn’t know how to position the movie correctly. They didn’t spend enough money on P&A. The box art was crap.

Figure 1

"Old" Filmmaking Model

Having worked with our distributors in some markets and selling directly at some horror conventions, it’s very sobering to get a firsthand experience of audience expectations.

Me: It’s about love and sacrifice and how you don’t notice you’re onto something good until it’s gone.

Horror fan: Great. How much T&A is there?

The New Model

When MySpace, Facebook, YouTube etc. arrived it became possible to raise awareness of the movie and start building an audience before the movie was released. But still it felt like something peripheral to the marketing of the movie. The audience building was an industry-side activity that you could take to the distributor with your one-sheet and your reviews: look we have several thousand fans. Most of whom in all likelihood were other independents flogging a movie or a book.

Today, most filmmakers – maybe not Culture Hacker readers – but most filmmakers still have the mindset towards social media that it’s a new spam tool. Look, now I can pester people to be my “fan” and I can get them to pester their friends to be my “fan”. Please Digg me up. Please Stumble on me. It’s the worst kind of networking: “please help me” they bleat.

Worst still are the crowdfunders: “please give me money”.  I’m not against audiences paying upfront – as with the Kickstarter model – so it’s not the principle, it’s typically execution I have a problem with. And I totally believe in the power of social media but I don’t like it when it’s so often used in an unproductive, disappointing way.

So enter the new model of filmmaking as shown in Figure 2:

• there’s a genuine affection… nay, anticipation… between the audience and the movie
• the affection is leveraged to pre-sell to the audience while still raising finance in the traditional way
• when the movie is available for viewing, it might be that only a subset of the audience will pay for it. So they’ll be simultaneous free exhibition and sales.

At this time it’s hard to believe that serious money is going to be raised to finance a movie through crowdsourcing. Some money? Maybe. Millions? I doubt it. And so for expensive feature films there’s still a place for large-ticket or savvy investors.  Please forget about Obama’s fundraising blah blah blah. It’s an outlier. And where’s his socially networked audience when he needs them to fight for healthcare? They’ve gone missing. Maybe Obama’s massive email list isn’t really his personal fan base? Maybe the people on that email database were fans of his first movie but don’t like his second?

What this says as to us as filmmakers is that we’re going to be only as good as our next movie. Don’t expect your 1000 mythical spending fans to follow you from movie to movie regardless of what you propose to make.

Figure 2

"New" Filmmaking Model

My point is that independents are going to have to start audience building early and prove that there’s an appetite for their movie. And so this brings me to my final model.

The Transmedia Model

Raising awareness and audience building is tough. It’s tough enough when you have a finished movie but try doing it for a movie that’s yet to be made.

And that’s why I think we’ll move to a transmedia model for filmmaking in which the filmmaker uses his own money to make some (low-cost) content to build an audience ahead of doing anything else.

There’s long been a school of thought that says to get finance for your feature you should shoot the trailer or shoot a short film based on the feature. I know this can work but I’ve never been a fan of this approach if only because I know finance is most often raised without it. Amazingly though this week, as I write, this short film Panic Attack secured a movie deal.

What transmedia storytelling offers however is not the  Cinderella story of “big investor swoops to finance movie” but a genuine, low-cost, grass-roots audience building.

Right now, (online) comic books seem to be the order of the day – offering an excellent way to engage audiences in the story and show some visual flare or at worst nice eye candy to grab attention. But there’s lots of untapped potential for simple social games utilizing Twitter and social networks without the need for coding:  we just don’t have enough reference cases to illustrate all the possibilities yet.

A small word of warning: the content has to have value. It can’t be a trailer or marketing fluff – you have to produce the real McCoy if you’re going to capture audiences.

Transmedia Filmmaking Business Model

In the transmedia filmmaking model, the financing, exhibition and fundraising work together in tandem with the potential for the feature film to become self-funding. Remember that it’s not all for free! Free is your loss-leader to generate the money. Even if it’s “real content” you might still effectively look at it as a marketing cost – it can help to position it in this way to investors. And note that what’s free and what’s paid will be in flux – maybe changing over time and from media to media.

So in the ideal scenario the filmmaker bootstraps the movie with the low-cost media, the website, presumably some merchandise but then it’s up to the audience to decide what happens next.  The filmmaker will use a basket of financing initiatives: free, pre-paid, paid, paid+, investment and sponsorship (including brand integration/product placement) to finance the movie.  [Paid+ is where buyers can opt to pay more than the base price – usually via a drop-down menu of price points.]

This model has several implications:

• If you do it right they’ll be demand for more content… which maybe you can’t afford to make in the early days. Or at least can’t afford to make alone. And that’s why collaboration of all kinds is important to the indie – with audiences and with other filmmakers.  Collaboration platforms like Wreakamovie are going to save the indie.
• Sponsorship in the form of cash (rather than products for free) from brands won’t solely go to properties with big audiences. If your story reaches the audiences that other marketing finds hard to reach then that’s going to work too. The one significant problem I can see is that few brands want to be associated with edgy content… unless it’s “edgy” in the Green Day plastic-punk, manufactured sense rather than the raw, authentic Poison Girls/Flux of Pink Indians edgy. Counterbalancing this is fans who may appreciate that you’ve rejected the brands… maybe
• Filmmakers are going to become familiar with audience needs and they’ll learn how to captivate them. It won’t be anyone else’s fault that you don’t have an audience. There’s no opportunity to finish the movie and then throw it over the wall to someone else to find the audience for it
• Free media is a feeler gauge: collect comments, listen to feedback, evolve the feature to meet the audience expectations
• It’s going to be a long commitment to the audience so be sure you pick a story you really want to tell.  Indies that follow this transmedia model will be offering an evolving service rather than a one-off product and that means audiences become customers that need to be listened to, responded to, cared for and managed
• If you perfect this evolving transmedia ecosystem you may ask yourself if you still want to make a feature after all.

A final sobering thought: I know we’d all like to believe that story is king but audiences will only discover the story if you hook them in. Don’t expect anyone to delve deeply into your storyworld looking for brilliance. You have to provide “satellite media” that orbits the core: it’s easy to digest and looks cool or fun. Celebrity cast or crew and genre are going to get attention and convey credibility – just as they always have.

I’ve illustrated this in the figure below where I’ve taken the sales funnel model and used it to illustrate how you want to pull in audiences, turning casual interest to hardcore repeat purchases.

Matching Content to Audience Commitment

To summarize then, filmmakers will move to transmedia storytelling because it’s going to be the way you build audiences. And building an audience will unlock the financing – either from fans, sponsors or investors. But it’s going to demand new skills.

Rob

For my inaugural blog posting here at Culture Hacker I’d like to discuss the issues of collaboration.

Although audience collaboration may not be a prerequisite for a transmedia project, I think we’re at the point where the benefits of encouraging collaboration outweigh the problems. The benefits I see relate to the fact that we now work in an overcrowded, competitive and often free content marketplace. Hence, collaboration for me means an opportunity to:

• test ideas and gauge support as early as possible and hence optimise investment of time and money – or give up early
• attract skilled, creative people to ambitious projects too big for either of us to tackle alone
• attract like-minded enthusiasts to help spread awareness in a win-win relationship rather than pestering friends to spam their friends.

There’s a Lack of Transmedia Tools

What becomes apparent very early on for anyone attempting transmedia storytelling, and particularly one that seeks collaboration, is a lack of the following:

• tried and tested practical templates
• reference tools, processes and project structures.

Transmedia is complicated stuff. It’s difficult enough to develop a movie script so that it hits all the right buttons at the right time for a passive 90 minute experience. Now the transmedia evangelists are telling us to throw away the Syd Field and Blake Snyder templates and go non-linear, cross-media, interactive and collaborative. It’s an alluring and exciting prospect but where do I begin?

In launching my open-source, collaborative transmedia project Parasites, I wanted it to be ambitious enough that collaborators and I broke new ground and could use it as a vehicle to develop these tools and templates.

The two primary umbrellas under which these tools and processes could be discussed are:

• Storytelling – how to develop a plot and characters across media (as directed by the original storyteller/writer)
• Collaboration – how audiences and creatives contribute to the storytelling with ideas & media.

Storytelling Problems To Be Solved

Most of the established work I could find by searching the Internet revealed not really tools or templates as such but insights or suggestions into how one might develop a transmedia story. I crunched this together and created the diagram you see below. It’s a just a start at a possible development process and there may be others, but at least it’s a start.

In the upcoming November issue of Indie Slate magazine (#59) I present some concrete steps that one might take in evolving an existing feature script or new idea into a transmedia project. I discuss in the article that too much of what some are presenting as transmedia storytelling is just boring exposition or tedious detail: they might argue it’s immersive but I’m saying it’s not entertaining.

Anyway, in true transmedia fashion, the printed article references two online, downloadable tools created in Powerpoint & Excel to help with character and story development across media in a way that aims for increased engagement. After the 60 days exclusivity period has expired I’ll present the article here too. But if you’re reading this before Feb 2010, check out the Indie Slate website once issue 59 is out.

I’ll return to this subject area again in future posts.

Collaboration Problems To Be Solved

I’m aware that there are different levels or types of collaboration but for the purposes of this post I’m thinking mostly in terms of active contributors to an emerging or developing storyworld.

Anyone that went to film school is sure to be familiar with those shoots where “collaboration” was taken to mean “everyone tries to do everyone else’s job” – which of course results in conflict and disaster. Collaboration ought to mean me doing my job and trusting others to do theirs. But that involves appointing people in clearly defined roles with clearly defined responsibilities. The issue with audience collaboration or open participation is that it can become a free for all. Clearly, to prevent chaos there’s a need for collaborators to have some form of guidelines and a structure for how and what they can contribute.

A great insight to these problems can be found in the presentation below, by David Bausola from Ag8, in which he discusses the aims and needs of the Purefold project.  David’s collaborative transmedia framework has four pillars:

• Editorial: how the story develops with time and with collaboration
• Commercial: presumably how to meet the needs of the brands financing the project
• Technological: how the project is implemented
• Operational: how collaborative input and responses to it are managed. Which for Purefold they hope to be close to real-time.
David Bausola (Ag8) on Emerging Technology
View more presentations from Canvas8.

Another way to break down the problem may be to say that the four cornerstones to be defined for a successful collaborative project are:

• the process, which describes how contributors can participate
• the business model, which describes the financial incentives & rewards, if any, for collaborators
• the legal framework, which describes the contributor’s rights and the project’s rights
• the platform that supports the above.

One collaborative project worth checking out that has addressed these issues is a multiple media fantasy world called Runes of Gallidon. The project clearly defines and explains:

• the process: contributors (Artisans in their world) must submit work for approval. Submissions are known as  “Works” (complete standalone entities, like a short story, say) that contain “Ideas” (elements of the Work, like a character, say, or a location or spell). Only a Work counts towards the revenue share, Ideas are free for all to use
• the business model: if Gallidon makes money it’s a 50:50 split for the contributor, if the contributor makes money then Gallidon takes 10%
• the legal framework: Creative Commons +
• the platform: email for submissions, a dedicated site to showcase contributions,  and an online forum for discussions.

Another example to check out is Wreckamovie.com which has a bespoke platform developed to support its collaborative process. It’s cornerstones are as follows:

• the process: project owners pitch tasks; collaborators can “take a shot” which means submit an idea or the piece of work
• the business model: not immediately clear but I think no profit or revenue sharing is assumed
• the legal framework: select one from three Creative Commons licences
• the platform: bespoke collaborative online software that accepts uploads, commenting, notifications and so on.

While it seems that a Creative Commons license will solve most people’s legal issues, in future posts I’d like to address the other areas of process, business model and platform.

In fact I’d be interesting to hear if there’s any support from readers for forming some kind of “alliance of collaborative projects” that could share insights and develop these frameworks to support this emerging and fast-growing area.  It would have to have a snappy name though, like the Collaborative Open-source Project Alliance (COPA). My only stipulation is that is operates with full transparency because there’s nothing worse than a bent COPA. Boom boom

Er… did I really just finish on a bad joke?

Rob