Pixel Lab Diary - Day 2

TUESDAY 6th July 2010

Hit the ground running again.

Plenary Session: "The Cross-Media Challenge: How to produce content for different platforms" - Nuno Bernado, creator of many successful web/TV crossovers talked about his projects: Sofia's Diary, Flatmates, Beat Generation and Final Punishment.

Some wisdom from Nuno:

• Remember the audience have different levels of obsession/interest
• Find out when your audience are watching – tailor your delivery to them
• Plan with military precision
• Initial story is broken down between video episodes and interactive activity
• Remember a terrible TV show starts with an audience – the best web show in the world starts with none

Nuno’s projects are interesting - not to my taste stylistically but his franchise is on fire with and he repeatedly sells the formats internationally.

Plenary Session: "Shattering the Fourth Wall with Social Media - How the future will tell stories" - Steve Peters talked about his own ARG projects - Why so serious?, Vanishing Point, Dead Mens Tale and Six Minutes to Midnight - then he outlined some golden rules for what the audience want and need.

How to connect-reach-interact with your audience in a meaningful way:

• Let the audience touch the story
• Let the audience find you – discovery = ownership (but not too stealthy)
• Surround the audience – push the story into their lives
• Get Bloggers onside
• Design so the audience always wants more
• Stay out of audience space – let them have ownership
• Keep audience interactions positive
• Maintain low barrier to entry
• Let the audience tell the story to each other
• Let the audience feel like they live in the same world your story does
• Don’t betray the audience’s trust
• Setup the update schedule and maintain pacing, momentum and focus
• Let the audience feel smart by letting them do it themselves
• Balance the reward with the ask
• Let the audience see themselves in the story
• Build in viral potential
• Keep the essence of the story simple
• Voyeurism creates a strong emotional connection with the characters (character blogs etc)
• Build in opportunities for UGC

Brilliant stuff – these are great pointers for anybody creating content that will be delivered online or via social networks - please post a comment if you want further explanation of any points.

Also – did you know – Facebook accounts for 25% of all web page views in the USA – that means a quarter of the population only go only as far into the web as Facebook…

Then a group session with Nuno Bernado - Project planning, workflow, schedules. Nuno's background - business models etc. Nuno had the same problems with our delivery schedule as Christy did – uh oh!

Then group session with Jeff Gomez - Creating story universe. Really liked this and got to quiz him a lot - very cool chap. Did Jeff have a problem with our delivery schedule? Yes!

Then Plenary Session: "Transmedia Production - New models and New Possibilities" - Jeff Gomez took us further into his world.

Later, an individual meeting with Steve Peters - great guy – gave me lots of useful tech tips, ARG rabbit hole techniques and more besides...

Ok - so by this point AWP is getting a fair amount of criticism for the proposed schedule - the fact we have put material out already and the way we intend to reversion the material for a feature film version.