For the moment, I’m posting the short version of the article I’m working up:
TV shows are copyrighted works (Salon, view ad to read) . You need express permission (in the US) at least to record stuff – technically that makes VHS recorders illegal! So, from what I’ve researched, reproducing and distributing shows that you receive free-to-air, that you don’t pay anything for is against the law.*
However, once something has been broadcast, what the consumer does with it is out of the broadcaster’s control. A network, production company or union can discourage re-distribution by imposing legal penalties and using anti-piracy technology (NY Times, registration may be required). Discourage it, but not eliminate it.
Why would you download a TV show? For starters: you can’t get a show in the country you’re in or the way it’s translated into a foreign language is terrible. Or the free-to-air TV network doesn’t treat the show you’re interested in (say a genre show like Buffy or a difficult to sell comedy like Arrested Development) with any consistency or they even cancel it. Maybe you want to watch a show back-to-back because the continuity works better that way. You could even be interested in something your free-to-air network will never show.
The biggest reason though: you've heard about something that's on in the States and is great (for instance, Lost) and you want to join in the on-line discussions, be part of that 'global' experience. In that case, there may be an argument that downloaders are the pivotal opinion-influencers that broadcasters want watching their shows. They'll tell their friends, encourage other viewers.
However, to encourage downloading is to shoot myself in the foot as a creator. One of my motivations for the work I do is to make lasting items of intellectual property that can independently generate revenue for me.
But this monopoly-to-one-to-many distribution model means a business can only count on making a profit on IP once (whether its by DVD sales, subscription or advertiser dollars). After that initial broadcast, a show is re-distributable forever. … And only one person needs to fork over money.
Click for Alternate Broadcast Models
The two conventional models for making money that come to mind are:
1) Subscription TV; and
2) Advertiser funded TV.
Advertiser funded TV comes in the form of commercials you must be forced to watch. The effectiveness of advertising has anecdotally been questioned before. It can also look like product placement that's built into the show.
Cable shows have a more interesting kink when it comes to developing new shows. At the moment they’re hiring diverse talents but many of the teams are ‘knowns’. Say you paid on a show-by-show and download-by-download basis. Paying after a show has been created and shot is okay. A show can still become a hit that way*.
Paying before a show has been created and shot is okay – not so much. This is called the Hostage model – only after enough money has been gathered, does the product get shot / released. People might be fine about contributing to a Hostage funded show (or pilot) from known creative teams, but almost certainly not from unknowns.
Therefore a 3rd stream of TV show creation could emerge. No-budget groups of friends and family creating their own stuff, controlling their own distribution and merchandising, developing their own rep. Homestarrunner.com is a great example of this already happening.
I’ve got lots of links for this post. Over the next few days I’ll build them into the article.
* I've found one dissenting opinion so far, but it's anecdotal and without citation (read OmegaHack's comment on this thread)
** I've speculated elsewhere that they might lack the critical mass to break through. See The Death of Pop Culture.
Sociolotron – the adults only MMORPG is starting to attract attention. If you're interested, check out Game Girl and Greg Costikyan (the creator of Paranoia) for some commentary and follow-up links.
Episode 5 mined sex education, pornography, academic cheating and tear-jerking sob-stories for comedy. It also highlighted the producers’ philosophy of keeping in all the moments where their great actors look dorky. The sight of the gorgeous Linda Cardellini spraying snot and saliva all over herself as she can’t help laughing at Danny’s sob-story might possibly be my series highlight so far.
The show continues to prove itself as great on well-motivated characters within episodes but it lacks all but the vaguest of continuity between episodes. Despite Danny having sex in their kitchen last ep, the Weirs acted as if they were meeting him for the first time this ep. Despite thinking their daughter’s fallen in with a bad crowd, they act surprised when she’s accused of cheating.
Compare and contrast this with Everwood where you know that even the tiniest of hints about changes in characters’ situations will eventually be followed up with amazingly fresh storylines.
Wow. Again, this pitching process reveals more about how to present the story in the final film. Here’s the basic situation we start with: Taine’s adoptive family realise that the biological father, a criminal, wants Taine back. The tension for the first 10 minutes is that this is a simple movie about the crim hunting the family to get what he wants … but I didn't realise that tension existed until working on it this morning.
I got some nice feedback about this set-up from Ed. He felt that it was very clear in suggesting what people might do and why they might do it.
So that's good. However, I’m suffering from a slight case of First Day Back [FDB] Syndrome again. At the end of the first 10 minutes, the stakes rise enormously. While the pitch currently is good for the purpose of timing, I have to accept it doesn’t plausibly convey this sudden shift. So I have to re-write it so it does.... and that's made me stall out.
It’ll be hard work but probably not anywhere near as hard as I’m imagining. In fact, I’ll probably spend longer procrastinating than I will in re-writing it.
A film has a distinct identity. You could say “a film has [this] sort of character.”
This expresses itself in at least three ways: its Genre, its Premise [as defined by Egri] and its Style (what is unique about the feel and vibe of your movie).
Once you’ve figured out these 3 elements, you need to make sure you put ‘moments’ into your story that establish and re-inforce that. What will that do? It’ll: a) reward the audience, b) create consistency, c) keep the film on track, and d) remind people what they’re watching …
It's pretty basic stuff really: a horror movie needs horror moments in it (Genre) but they need to be what you define as horrific for the movie you're writing (Style) and they need to be specific to the themes of your movie (Premise). The idea of 'moments' is to make your story unique.
So: identify what your ‘moments’ are, then create them … and then make sure they’re spaced just frequently enough.
Just got back from acting in Danyl and Andrew’s script read-through. I may have more thoughts to post on this over the next couple of days but overall I think they've succeeded in writing an easily filmable low-budget movie that people are going to enjoy, argue about and have to see.
It’s a satire of the legal system. That’s all the plot detail I should go into.
After about 2 hours of conversation between the actors, now it’s all back on Danyl and Andrew. They have to go away, digest our points, figure out what they do and don’t agree with, then figure out what they have time to change and what they don’t. They have to decide if the things they’re changing are the most important points that were raised and finally submit the redrafted script to 2 different organisations (Project Greenlight and Headstrong.co.nz).
Their deadline’s 2 weeks – which I think is do-able but I probably won’t be seeing much of them till late February.
There’s a new thread about our Roger Rabbit / LA Confidential game at the Forge. This one’s discussing what to do in a Contest of Wills. I’ll also be posting some new material to the original Sorceror freaked us out thread in the next couple of days.
Yesterday was a write-off due to seeing the Phoenix Foundation, making some new friends and getting very drunk. Now it’s time to become obsessed by whether I’m getting the emotions of this pitch across.
Act 3 feels like it’s achieving this but the earlier stuff feels plain, descriptive. Insight: I have to figure out the emotion that I want each sequence to convey. Then, change the pitch’s language so it’s not so much about what’s happening but how I feel about what’s happening.
Best episode yet. The 4th episode shows us Kim Kelly’s trailer-trash home life. It also has the series’ second fully-fledged action sequence – escaping from Kim’s step-dad, who’s acting like a rage-infected 28 Days Later extra. But the comedy mostly comes from the Weirs' suburban normality slowly being invaded by Lindsey’s new Freak friends.
Potentially this creates a change in the basic situation: now her parents realise their daughter’s fallen in with the wrong crowd. However, I don’t put much faith in that. So far Freaks & Geeks hasn’t shown much skill (or more charitably, ‘much interest’) in dealing with continuity in a systematic fashion.
Highlight: I finally ‘got’ Nick’s character – a total stoner who'll always try to hit on and/or comfort Lindsey in the worst possible way at the worst possible moment. This episode he met her parents for the first time and wanted to impress them. Don’t know if he succeeded or not; I was too busy being crippled with laughter.
Terra Nova explores the issues surrounding MMORPGs – huge subscriber-funded virtual worlds like Everquest and World of Warcraft. Fascinating stuff from academic disciplines like anthropology and economics, as well as the general interest of seeing what happens when a bunch of computer-savvy gamers with no respect for authority try to hack reasonably authoritarian VWs.
Here are 2 threads I just noticed: this one deals with the onset of sexism in A Tale in the Desert (read down, the interesting discussion happens in the Talkback), and this one has a look at what racism means in a virtual world.
Found a couple of early views about the Academy Awards. Here’s a bitchy look at the Oscars noms from the LA Weekly.
Roger Ebert goes a little more matter-of-fact, but also points out the strategising that’ll happen between Jamie Foxx (competing against himself in Ray and Collateral), Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorcese.
Episode 2 showed how easy it is to introduce doom and social embarrassment into a TV show: Serve a keg of non-alcoholic beer at a Freak party. It also had the series’ first moment of plotting genius, involving Lindsey getting spaded by two guys she doesn’t like, straight after each other.
Ep. 3 was more conventional. The Turning Points for its A-plot (Lindsey trying to be a rebel) were very clear. Still, it deepened my appreciation for a lot of the characters: Bill (“I’ll drink anything”) Haverchuck, Mum & Dad and the terrifyingly beautiful Kim Kelly.
However, Ep 2 felt better because all of the action was driven by strong and clearly portrayed character motivations. Ep 3 used at least one coincidence (the person that Lindsey eggs) to advance the plot. Also, Freaks & Geeks' continuity may be a bit lacking - the consequences of Neil's ridiculously clumsy pass in Ep 2 isn't very clearly dealt with, not even in the subtext of Linda Cardellini's performance.
Clinton R. Nixon of Anvilwerks Online, the writer of Donjon and Shadow of Yesterday, has just revised his essay on how to publish an RPG on the cheap. Lots of details on how to save money at every point. Makes me want to figure out a way to balance working on The Limit's pitch and redrafting Astral.
Hal Hartley, director of Trust, Amateur, Henry Fool and Unbelievable Truth, has written, directed, produced and self-financed a new science-fiction movie, The Girl From Monday. And he’s going to distribute it himself too, via his website.
You're looking at at least one direction the next indie-film-making boom will come from.
The following events take place in real time:
9.30 am: Stop mucking round on internet. Today I’m going to work on shortening the timings on this pitch, then go for emotions.
9.40: 1st Reading: 12 m 55 s … so, that's good. Whispered the whole thing, focused on the words, not the emotions or performance. And I can see lots of places where it could be tightened. Going to focus on 4 scenes now.
I think I can easily get this down to 10 minutes – maybe even 8 or 9. And I know from my speech at the premiere of hopeless that I can hold 9 minutes of speech in my head (especially if I've got the pitchboard to prompt me).
10.36: These 4 scenes, removing finicky amounts of time.
11.08: The Goal: finish reducing all the sequences today and do a timing. So I’m blowing off my routine for the rest of the day and focusing on this.
1.50 pm: So tired. Want to stop and snooze.
2.00: Now I’m working in order through the movie and I only have 8 more sequences to do. Some of them are very short but it seems daunting. Must press on.
2.05: 7 sequences left. 6. Muck around on the Internet for a long time. 5. Going through these scenes fast, not fine-tuning or timing them. There’ll be a bit of fat to trim off them tomorrow if the pitch duration is too long. 4. 3 (that one went quick). Do 2 & 1 in a single burst.
2.53: Finished! Now to immediately rip in to a timing.
3.05: Nine minutes and fifty seconds! It is accomplished! I even got some bursts of emotion from this reading, especially around the end of Act 2. There’s more to cut (especially in the early sequences where the story-telling feels all choppy) but I think I can ease back for today.
3.12: It turns out that entertaining someone for 10 minutes is hard work. Good to know.
Just added a lot of links to the sidebar. A couple of note-worthy current articles :
On her blog, Game Girl gives an overview of 24 from the perspective of a computer game designer.
Something I found via the 20x20 Room, Patrick O'Duffy has an essay-thinkpiece-diatribe on his LiveJournal about White Wolf's Pimp: the Backhanding card game.
And here's a panel discussion about redesigning Superman over at Silver Bullet.
Next up for this site, inserting some code to show when people have made new comments - but before that I should really get back to working on the pitch.
Started watching this series last night. So far, all I can tell is I like all the characters (especially Seth Rogan's deadpan guy) and the specific lines of dialogue are nearly always smart, funny or character-specific.
Freaks & Geeks' story-telling was okay. It's a low-key kind of show that deglamourises standard TV teen dramas (a genre I have a real fondness for) so I'm enjoying that aspect. But it means that its act breaks were usually just setting up the main characters for further embarrassment.
One line from the directors' commentary I thought was true is that on a TV show, ideally you're going to be working with the actors you've cast for 5 or more years. So you adjust the script towards them. You want to have fun with the actors, explore the little moments in their character relationships and most of all make them feel comfortable so they can bring a bit more realism to their roles.
Ainsley just got nominated for an Oscar (Best Short Film - Live)! This is awesome!
I love this letter from Lisa Henson. It's about Dave McKean & Neil Gaimen's new movie, Mirrormask, but really it's about the nature of puppetry.
The idea of controlling 3-D puppets via computers - which we've seen developing through Sheep in the City to Gollum and Kong - just reminds me that as long as the audience for something is human, human performers are what we're going to get a buzz out of watching.
Anyway, you'll have to scroll down a little bit - it starts at the second block of bold type.
How to waste time: Watch The Hidden, Aeon Flux, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (my first time!) and the first half of Space Hunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone which features the screen debut of Molly Ringwald. Try and get up five hours later to work on The Limit pitch.
Yeah, yesterday got off to a slow start.
Circled around working for most of the day. Even tried to scare myself into it. Finally, I took all the action sequences I’m confident about performing and squeezed them down. Halved most of the timings and now (I'd estimate) the pitch is down to about 14 minutes.
Plus, massively re-edited ending. This simplification may end up in the film; replacing a fight with a single word.
4 minutes left to cut. The process, well it's going slower than I wanted but the end result's getting better. Now if I could just combine ‘better’ with ‘fast’.
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