Apr 22nd, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
After more than a year, an independent Web-based movie venture called Filmaka is finally out of “beta.” The project has a couple of high-profile backers: indie film producer Deepak Nayar (responsible for movies such as Bend It Like Beckham and Buena Vista Social Club) and former Fox TV network honcho Sandy Grushow, who gave the world shows such as The OC, 24, The X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Grushow was also one of the network executives behind American Idol, and says Filmaka is based on a similar premise.
The founders say they want to find young or up-and-coming TV producers and filmmakers and in some cases to help them get major studio or network deals. The site already has a stable of more than 40 Web-based shows that it plans to run on networks such as YouTube, and has been conducting a kind of Web-based talent search with a contest that ends on April 28 — the winner, who will be chosen by a jury including David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Neil LaBute, will get as much as $3-million in financing to produce a movie for theatrical release.
That’s not the only contest Filmaka has been sponsoring either: the venture has also been running a sitcom competition with the cable channel FX, which will see the winner get $40,000 to shoot a 15 to 20-minute pilot for a potential FX television show, and the site has a documentary competition and a “branded entertainment” competition. Fox ran a similar kind of contest with MySpace, but didn’t turn either of the winners into a pilot. Jerry Zucker of NBC has spoken in the past about how expensive — and in many cases, ultimately futile — the current pilot-oriented TV production process can be.
More than 3,000 submissions have been received from aspiring filmmakers in more than 90 countries, and all of the submissions can be streamed from the Filmaka.com website. Visitors can choose to see entries by category (documentary, TV, feature etc.) or only the ones that have advanced to the jury level. Submissions include everything from animated shorts featuring “claymation”-style characters to sitcom-style comedies, and at least one Canadian filmmaker has several entries in different levels of the competition: Terry Miles has submitted a feature film called Lost and Found and also has an entry in the TV-pilot contest called The Secret Life of Amanda Jones, about a twentysomething college student who is also a vampire.
In an interview with Wired magazine, Grushow said that after 20 years in the network business, he wasn’t sure that any independent or unsigned filmmakers could produce content that he might be interested in, but he says his eyes were opened after Filmaka started the competition: “I was astonished at the quality level people were capable of creating … at such a low cost. To me, that represented a game-changer.” In Filmaka, he said, the partners hope create what amounts to “a studio with essentially no overhead.” And there’s already Canadian content.
Jan 30th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, did the opening keynote at the National Association of Television Program Executives in Las Vegas and talked about how — surprise, surprise — the industry is “under pressure.” I’ll bet that got some big laughs. It’s probably also not that surprising that he didn’t spend much time talking about the writers’ strike and its effect on the industry, although he did drop in that old line about “trading analog dollars for digital pennies,” just for good measure.
The part that I found really striking, though, was near the end, where Zucker starts talking about how he thinks the system of making dozens of expensive — and ultimately futile — TV pilots is a dumb way to do things. And when you listen to the numbers involved, it’s hard not to agree: The big five networks spent $500-million last year on about 80 pilots, he says, of which only eight were brought back for a second season. And even among those, “none could be considered a big success.”
What kind of crazy business spends a half a billion dollars on 80 prototypes, and gets less than 10 per cent that actually work? That might make sense if you’re an experimental research lab — preferably government funded, so that your success rate doesn’t actually matter — but shouldn’t the mass-market TV business have a bit better idea of what it’s doing than that? I assume that every one of those was greenlighted by someone who hoped they would get a monster hit like CSI or Law & Order, and then they could afford to write off all the other losers.
If I were a TV executive, I would put down the crack pipe or whatever they’re smoking over there and put some small amounts of money into a few Webisodes, or maybe look around at what’s catching the eye of my target market at FunnyorDie.com or Break.com or places like that. Finance some things on the cheap and then turn them into something when they take off — flushing billions of dollars down the drain on pilots in hope that you’ll magically hit the CSI jackpot is insane.
Nov 17th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
There were rumours even before the U.S. writers strike started that it might lead to one of the networks picking up Quarterlife, the new Web drama about twentysomethings created by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the team behind Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, and now it appears that those rumours have come true. NBC, which like other networks is looking down the barrel of an empty TV season, said that it has picked up the show and will run it starting in January.
The show becomes the first to move wholesale from Web to TV, but I predict (as others have) that if the strike continues, Quarterlife will not be the last to make that jump. The major networks have a voracious need for content, and when the chips are down they really couldn’t care less where that content comes from, so long as it fills the airwaves. During the last strike it was reality TV shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted that filled the void for the networks — this time around it’s the Web.
As I noted in this post about the writers’ strike, it’s more than a little ironic that while the Web is the hot-button issue in the strike — in terms of the revenue share that writers want for online content — it’s also the place that writers are going to get their message out, and it has also now become the source of content that is replacing their traditional TV work. As my friend Tony Hung notes, these are interesting times.
Oct 22nd, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
The vision of social media as a vast, harmonious collective that both generates and consumes “user-generated content” is mostly a straw man set up by Web 2.0 critics so they can demolish it (yes, I’m looking at you, Nick Carr), but there’s no question that social media is built on the idea that there’s plenty of talent out there that traditional media isn’t letting you see.
But what if people don’t want to see some unknown singer or musician, no matter how talented they are? What if they really just want to see “celebrities,” regardless of whether they’re talented or not?
That’s the somewhat disturbing implication (to me at least) of ManiaTV’s decision to forego the “user-generated content” and go back to the site’s original model, which was distributing video that featured recognizable names and faces, including Canadian-born Tom Green (who later left the site to go solo from his living room, and recently signed a TV distribution deal).
According to Mania, the site’s user-generated content didn’t really drive much traffic. What people have really been coming to see, CEO Peter Hoskins says, are the “celebrities” — and that’s what advertisers wanted to be associated with as well (he likened user-generated content to “dumpster-diving for gold.”)
“People liked good quality entertainment and advertisers liked quality branded entertainment. Advertisers wanted to distance themselves as far as they possibly could from the user-generated content.”
This is one of the knocks against YouTube and similar sites, that advertisers won’t want to have their message appear alongside a clip of some kid hurting himself on a skateboard. The argument in favour has always been that such sites get so much traffic that advertisers would effectively have to put their ads there or risk missing a key demographic.
So was it just that ManiaTV’s content wasn’t any good, or are people not really that interested in user-generated content? There’s no question that plenty of content on YouTube gets viewed by millions of people, but perhaps they are the exception. What I find depressing is that people would prefer to watch “celebrities” like Tom Green and Dave Navarro instead of some more talented unknown.
Sep 28th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 2 Comments
While most of the major U.S. TV networks are struggling with the idea of YouTube and dipping their toes gingerly into new areas — such as streaming their new shows over the Interweb — CBS is pushing the envelope in a number of different ways. For example, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the network is setting up a site just for short-form video “mashups” and other content created both by CBS staff and by viewers.
The site, which is to be called EyeLab, is designed to appeal to Web surfers who have grown used to watching and sharing YouTube video clips or user-generated tributes to various mainstream shows — such as the collection of corny one-liners from CSI: Miami that a fan going by the name stewmurray47 put together and uploaded to YouTube. The clip has gotten more than a million views, which is enough to get a network executive drooling.
Steve Safran, who writes for the excellent TV blog Lost Remote, describes the conversation that he imagines taking place at CBS after someone mentions the David Caruso clip:
Executive Three: “You mean the thing I wanted pulled down from YouTube?
Executive One: “That’s the one. Anyway, it was a big hit.”
Executive Two: (Suddenly interested) “Oh. Really?”
Executive Three: How big?
Executive One: About one million views and counting.
(Executives Two and Three actually have $$ signs light up in their eyes)
According to the WSJ story, CBS has hired half a dozen video-editing twentysomethings to create mashups like the CSI: Miami clip — and the network also plans to find and distribute similar clips created by users and viewers as well. Hopefully CBS has contacted stewmurray47 about a job, since it was his clip that more or less gave the network the idea.
If CBS is looking for ways of using video clips to build audience interaction or interest in a show, it should take a look at what actor Adrian Pasdar is doing with behind-the-scenes video from the TV show Heroes. The actor, who plays one of the leading roles on the show, has uploaded to YouTube (using the name “buckshotwon”) dozens of clips of his fellow actors goofing around backstage, and each one gets between 15,000 and 20,000 views.
Whether CBS’s effort will be successful or not remains to be seen, but I think it is an interesting idea. Building a community around your content — or making it easy for people who enjoy that content in different ways to share it with each other — is one of the few tools that the TV networks have left (hopefully CBS will find ways of aggregating that content from wherever it is, rather than requiring everyone to sign up with yet another site).
Hat tip to LAist for the info about Pasdar and his video clips.
