Category / Essay

by steelef

With Apologies to Nike…

…Just Do It

If any of you listen to How Did This Get Made?, you’ll be more than familiar with the film above. Directed by James Niebauer, starring Gabrielle Niebauer, and produced, financed, and crewed/acted by numerous friends and family, it has been roundly mocked as the next The Room. You can find it for free on Amazon if you have a Prime subscription so you can make your own assessment, but before we go any further, I want you all to watch this trailer and marvel:

Watch Governor Gabbi Online | Vimeo On Demand on Vimeo

Now, you may be thinking that I’m going to jump in with the chorus and mock this flick. Far from it. In fact, if you have ever wanted to make it in the film industry, I would recommend you study this film and its creator. Were there mistakes made? Sure. But I can highlight dozens of multi-million dollar supposed “blockbusters” that made just as many mistakes, tanked, ruined studios, caused controversy, or otherwise were massive disappointments. All of those were made by supposed “seasoned pros” backed by “smart money” who “knew what it took” to make it in Hollywood (whatever that means). Even the best filmmakers lay a stinker every once in a while.

The point here isn’t to mock those filmmakers, or the Niebauers for that matter. I’ll admit, it’s all fun and games when you log on to RiffTrax or stream Mystery Science Theater or download the latest episode of Jason, Paul, and June’s podcast…

Let’s be real; this is a masterpiece of humor.

…but if you’re struggling but serious about making art, of creating film, of writing the next big thing, of getting your vision out into the world, I want you to reevaluate just a bit.

What’s the difference between you and those filmmakers listed above?

They went out.

And.

Got.

It.

Done.

Unfortunately.

Take this from James Niebauer’s IMDB page, when he was speaking about his film Heart KPop: “When interviewed about this film, Niebauer mentioned that the film was completed on an “indie” budget and rather than with the goal of making it big off of the film, the young director and cast were most interested in building their knowledge of film production.”

That is, the Niebauers and their allies didn’t expect to make it big. They didn’t expect this to be a smash hit on the indie scene and win them oodles of awards. That wasn’t the point. They understood that they were still learning and had a ways to go. But rather than focusing on theory and dreaming, they got together to actually make something. There will be those of you reading this who will go their entire lives dreaming of making a feature film and never getting their; James and Gabbi Niebauer, et al, will never be those kinds of people.

And speaking of “people,” it’s critical to understand that the Niebauers didn’t do this alone. They surrounded themselves with doers. The talent level varied, but guess what? So too does it out in the regular industry. You saw all those box-office bombs linked above. A lot of people on those sets took their work seriously, and a lot of people phoned it in. All of them went out and proved themselves beforehand.

Like the Niebauers, I want you to surround yourself with do-ers. Instead of staying up late and re-watching the entirety of The Office for the tenth time, schedule a session with some potential collaborators to talk through pitches. Instead of getting drunk and watching the game, get drunk at a writer’s group. Make groups. Make dates. Make art. But if you want to “make it,” you’ve got to actually make it, whatever that it is.

In that light, I want you to consider Governor Gabbi and other Niebauer works.

Instead of dreaming about it, do it.

Instead of getting writer’s jealousy, build your craft.

Instead of “putting it off,” create a plan.

No. Seriously. Do it. Create a plan. Right now. You want help? I’m here for you.

  1. What is one aspect of production that you can bring to increase its value? That is, does your aunt have a cabin way out in the woods where you can shoot? Does your grandfather own a vintage restored car that you may be able to borrow? Do you work at a convenience store where you can film overnight?
  2. How can you get people excited to work on your film for next to nothing? Maybe you’ll promise to work on their own production, in-kind. Perhaps you’ll hire a cadre of their friends/family/allies to bring costs down. Or possibly you’ll raid the local university and pay people in experience on set.
  3. What is one other way that you can keep costs down? You could do worse than look for grants based on your personage. Maybe you could cast your crew in the film, or else have your cast work the equipment when not on screen (a big’un in today’s limited-crew Covid environment). I’d also recommend shooting a proof-of-concept short film that won’t tie you down in cost or time but will potentially get you interest from financiers and other backers.

Or maybe you’re a narrative-first person and you can’t conceive of a plan until you get the story down. That’s fine, too! Consider these prompts:

  1. No more than six primary actors. Fewer checks, fewer schedule conflicts, fewer mouths to feed… but more focus on interpersonal conflict!
  2. No more than one location (meaning one principal locale, outdoor and indoor, where you’ll be filming), perhaps with some pick-ups at other locations to help mask this. Still, you’d be surprised how many angles you can get to make your film seem bigger.
  3. No more than 90 pages of a script. Keeping it short, simple, and to the point will be cheaper AND force you to think about what’s really important in your narrative.
  4. A high-concept idea that can sell the film easily: two people try to escape across monster-infested desert.

As you can see, many, many, many people have crafted compelling content with less. Write a dozen pitch paragraphs and see the recurring themes, even. What are the stories, characters, questions, and motifs that occur, again and again? How can you combine that which you can give to the production with your love of the art form? You can have your sci-fi epic in your back pocket when the ultimate opportunity arises, of course, but this is the kind of stuff that gets people noticed, gets people experience, and gets audiences intrigued.

Most importantly, it’ll turn all of those terrible films and shows on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc. into fuel. Every time you watch a terrible movie and think, “Why can’t I do that?” push yourself to go and do that. Write a little bit more. Draw a little bit more. Record a little bit more. Take down notes on what you hate as much as what you like and promise yourself that you’ll never make those same mistakes. Continue to build on your craft until you get to the point where you can go out and make that sucker.

If you’ve ever shivered at the thought of marching toward mortality without achieving your dreams, I’m exhorting you–YOU, THE PERSON WHO IS READING THIS RIGHT NOW–to stop being a dreamer and start being a doer!

They did it, so why can’t you?

by steelef

The Five Commandments of Fan Service

Today I’m writing about fan service, and by that, I mean the “fan service” that has become meme-ified on the internet. These aren’t intertextual references that continue or resolve plot lines. I’m also not talking about the titilating sexual reveals that dominate anime. What I mean by fan service is the “material in a work of fiction or in a fictional series which is intentionally added to please the audience,” as defined by Valérie Inés de La Ville and Laurent Durup in their study, “Achieving a Global Reach on Children’s Cultural Markets: Managing the Stakes of Inter-Textuality in Digital Cultures.” In other words, these are the shout-outs, references, and callbacks to the previous work that created a fan base to begin with.

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by steelef

How to Beat the Nazi Narrative

This piece is inspired by the artwork above, a parody of the famous Norman Rockwell triple self-portrait. This satire, like the original, speaks to the glamorized self we see in the mirror, demolishing and lightly mocking (respectively) their subjects. The depictions are not truth. They are the stories that people share in order to maintain illusions. And, like all stories, they are dependent on audiences in order to maintain their meaning.

Note first, however, that I am not a politician or a social scientist. Thus, any commentary on the mechanical issues that are devastating our society—namely, a failing educational system, a prison-industrial complex that favors punishment over rehabilitation, and a drug war that overwhelmingly castigates the poorest and most vulnerable citizens—would be purely opinion based. Get enough liquor in me and I’ll share them with you.

DrunkMan

All the political commentary you can stand!

That being said, I am a narrative designer who has come to specialize in demographic analysis and story-sharing. I’ve worked with organizations, universities, and nations to help build narratives to embolden people and change lives. I’ve seen how people intertwine their personal stories with those of a larger group, for good and ill effects, as well as how to make sure this remains a conversation without turning into propaganda (more on this in a second, I promise). I’ve worked with people who have had their tongues torn out because they spoke the wrong words to the wrong people.

It is the lessons I learned from them that embolden me to say that we can assuredly beat the Narrative of the Nazi. If we can couple that with the physical means to make sure that Nazis can’t gain a new foothold, we can make that ideology so untenable that all but the barest few crazies remain, so few that they cannot make any meaningful change to the world.

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by steelef

Video Games Are Stories

This essay was inspired by this piece by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic, the title of which reads: “Video Games are Better Without Story.” I encourage everybody to read that piece first before continuing. As always, I will be leavening the serious stuff with funny pictures. I apologize in advance.

McCloudPiece

Sorry for the bad quality; I am but a poor man with a bad scanner.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud discusses (among many other topics) the aforementioned gutter. It is here, between the images, that sequential art separates itself from other media. The white space holds the imagination of the reader. It makes that person complicit in the narrative. The creator(s) has done the heavy-lifting but the burden of filling in the blanks is on the part of the person holding the book.

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by steelef

Why People Never Turn Off Their Phones

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual.”

Aristotle believed in alchemy, geocentrism, and flies having four legs, but he had it nailed with the human condition.

Aristotle believed in alchemy, geocentrism, and flies having four legs, but he had it nailed with the human condition.

If you’ve ever been to a movie or a show on Broadway, you know what I’m talking about with the title: people’s seeming inability to turn off their phones for two-to-three hours while they take in a bit of Kylo Ren or Mufasa. For the most part, these are tiny indiscretions: a few blips, a mild (or moderate) expletive, a couple seconds of fumbling, and then blissful silence just as Alexander Hamilton is about to lay down a few choice rhymes regarding fiat currency. At other times, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling’s journey in (and out) of love seems to be set to the tune of a “Kim Possible” ringtone.

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by steelef

The Evolution of an Idea, Part 3

We rejoin our narrative after two previous installments for this penultimate episode, in which we discuss my show, Queens of the Sapphire Sea, and how it went from nothing to something. And it only took five years!

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Fun times.

Things came to a head last summer after a reading of radio shows between myself, Tyrant Rex, and Adam Lance Garcia. These two rapscallions and I put on a small performance in Park Slope, Brooklyn, of some of our work. Wouldn’t you know? It went over really well! The fact that it was free didn’t hurt, but hey! We thought we had something. So we began brainstorming and came up with what would become Radio Room.

Now, how/where/when/why Radio Room came together could be a whole series in and of itself, but–in short–it would aspire to be a writer’s room for our various projects: Rex’s established Tales of the Halloween Team, Garcia’s anthology series Smoke Without Flame, and my own…

…whatever that might be.

I had dozens of ideas, of course, but something about Queens stuck out to me. It was adventurous, fun, and featured the kind of stylizations we were looking for. Radio Room was to be a loving homage to serials of the 40s and 50s, but with updated storytelling techniques. Romance, patter, a focus on thrills… Queens seemed to fit the bill, and when I pitched them the logline, they wanted to see more.

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Which required a whooooooole lotta work.

 

The first thing that was required was a mini-bible. Not only would this sell my partners on the idea as well as it’s potential for longevity, but it would function as a foundational piece for their own writing. I don’t recommend writing a mythology or bible for every project that you work on–there’s always the opportunity that you’ll never stop world-building–yet when you work with others, there should always be ground rules. This includes:

  • A basic overview
  • A rundown of the characters, particularly with regards to personalities
  • A pilot episode treatment
  • Springboards for future episodes
  • Other extra stuff (locales, magic, etc.) that feature heavily into your property.

That’s it! Don’t go nuts! You’ll overthink it. Your producers will change it. Your actors will finagle it. And you’ll have spent a lot of time hammering stuff into stone that could emerge organically!

This was then workshopped outside of the group. I feel that this is an important step that not enough writers get: go to someone outside of your social circle for advice. They won’t have the same kind of connection to you, personally, that might temper their opinion. It might not be nice (in fact, it shouldn’t be). It might not be fun. It will show you what’s wrong before you get too far down the rabbit hole.

Next came the recrafting of the property. This was done in a series of emails and in-person meetings, in which Tyrant, Adam, and I honed the episodes. From my work before, I knew what I was trying to say with the piece and what couldn’t be changed. At the same time, I was willing to allow the guys to shift the tone and characters so that they would find a spark that would inspire them. This was to be collaborative. I had to allow them to collaborate on this.

 

Most of all, I had to shift the property into something that worked via audio. Don’t make the mistake in thinking that your great idea can transfer media without work. There’s a reason why most video games-turned-films are terrible, and why most films-turned-video games are also just as bad. Interactive media has a whole different rule set than traditional media. Ignore these at your risk! If you don’t understand the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen platform, you’re doomed to failure from the start.

Auditory storytelling is the oldest form of art, and it is a mixture of both passive and active media. It is passive in that the audience listens to a linear story that is told to them. It is active because the audience must construct the world inside their minds and envision what is being told to them. That means you have to give the audience juuuuuuuuust enough to set the picture, but allow their mind to fill in the blanks.

For Queens, I had to do more spelling out than I’d like to do. A lot of subtlety that I had planned on was made more overt (again). Belle and the newly-renamed Madeleine had to play much more grandiose, much more like cartoon characters: the audience had to understand everything from their vocal range, since facial expressions and body language don’t translate to the airwaves. At the same time, I had to pull back the villains even more. They couldn’t become too outlandish, or else the entire piece would seem like a send-up.

The only problem was that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it until I dove in, head-first.

I’d written small bits for radio and audio comedy before and full television scripts, video games, and screenplays, but this was something entirely. My co-producers liked my pilot treatment but wanted to see it on the page. This was a gamble: I would have to produce 30-pages of material in the hopes that it would impress, but with the chance that it’d be terrible and I’d have to start all over again.

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I know, I know.

So, how did it all turn out? That’s for tomorrow’s installment, the first in Radio Room’s series on Show Notes. Tune in then!

 

by steelef

The Evolution of an Idea, Part 2

As explained in my last post, I’m doing a series on my series, Radio Room, specifically how the idea for my piece, Queens of the Sapphire Sea, evolved over time to the point where it could go into production. My first attempt at pitching the idea hadn’t worked, but I liked the core of the piece and wouldn’t let it go.

How long do you think I worked on Queens before it came up again? A year? Two? Try four… with another thrown in for writing and production. It wasn’t that I ever stopped working on it, but that it went into the background, along with my many, many other projects that will hopefully see the light of day but (as of this writing) have yet to emerge from the fertilizer that is my subconscious.

bull

And you know what fertilizer is made of, right?

I knew that something was there, but considering that it was so niche, where could I pitch it? I worked on versions that were designed to be YA fiction, a video game, a feature-length screenplay, and more. Each wasn’t really working, however, because I was so focused on the pitch that I’d forgotten about the fundamentals. For any franchise, those fundamentals come down to message.

I’m not talking about didactic Aesop stuff. I’m talking about the emotional impact that a piece has on someone who experiences it. What was Queens of the Sapphire Sea saying about our world? How were the characters going to express it? What was it really all about?

For me, that boiled down to the basic nugget of an idea: a tough-talking older woman and her wide-eyed young niece. Experience vs. youth. Pessimism vs. optimism. The past vs. the future. The natural conflict in each episode (or issue or whatever) would emerge from how these characters viewed the world, as well as how they dealt with each other in the process.

That meant that I had to explore who these characters were. If a whole series was going to be built on them, I had to know just who they were. I looked into Regina and Beatrice, and found them… not quite as deep as I needed them to be.

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This has more depth.

It wasn’t shocking (I was just pitching an idea at first) but if there was going to be growth, both characters would need a place to grow from. That is, they needed to be flawed and retain some of those negative attributes throughout the course of their adventures. Regina couldn’t just be the lovable cigar-chomping grandmother-type. Beatrice wasn’t going to be the sweet, capable, spunky young upstart with something to prove. I tempered the personalities of both so that I could bring other aspects to the front, fleshing them out so that there would always be something new to explore.

I’d argue that this is an issue that every creator deals with. Like in life, we all want our heroes to be perfect. Like in life, this is does a disservice to them and to us. The people we look up to–our parents, political idealists, sports figures–are not superior because they never make flaws but that they can grow from their flaws. From a narrative perspective, this makes them interesting. From a human perspective, it makes them believable.

Because I wanted to focus on this believability, I dropped the high fantasy angle. It was a bit too off-the-wall anyway, and besides, there are real eras in history that were just as fun to explore (and didn’t require nearly as much world-building, to boot). I tamed the villains, roped in the overt themes of sexism, and focused on airplane combat rather than grandiose political intrigue, too. All of those elements are still there but they are much less on the nose. Like in life, the more insidious aspects of them are those elements which are unspoken, that people can pretend to ignore.

When I say believability, I don’t mean hyper-realism. I still wanted this to keep the swashbuckling adventure that bent the rules from time to time. I chose to keep a certain rose-colored romance and humor because I simply didn’t have the time to do as much in-depth research into pre-WWII France as I would have liked. It also allowed for emotional exploration and a reflection of that conflict between “idealism vs. realism” that I was talking about earlier.

Finally, I tapped into this via the framing device: having Beatrice reflect on her past by telling stories to her granddaughter, decades after her adventures in France. It allowed for a little fudging of the facts–is this real or just her memory of the event?–and gave a mirror for the older/younger dichotomy that was central to the story.

With that in place, I finally had something that I felt could hold together over the course of a series. You can find the near-final logline here:

The French Riviera is protected from high-flying brigands by the finest seaplane bounty hunters in the world: Belle Bernassi and her niece, Beatrice. The pair escaped the suffocating social mores of Paris to set up shop with the rest of the oddballs that roam from Genoa to Barcelona, but trouble is afoot. Suitors, mercenaries, the mafia, gun runners, and the rising tide of Fascism all threaten to rob the Bernassis and their comrades of the freedom and peace they’ve found in the air, but if there’s anybody who can stave off war, it’s the Queens of the Sappire Sea!

There were still issues that needed to be ironed out. I wound up renaming Beatrice (her name was just too similar to Belle) and would touch up some of the history as I worked on the actual stories, but the touchstones are all there. Adventure, society vs. individualism, romance, a hint of outlandish humor, and a real world setting that reflects bits of our own without being a direct mirror. Plus, I managed to keep the sky pirates.

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Because who doesn’t like sky pirates?

Did I manage to pull it off? Find out this week, as I continue this series and head towards April 15th and the release of episode one! Next up: construction of the series and scripts themselves!

 

by steelef

The Evolution of an Idea, Part 1

As some of you may have gathered, I have been working on an audio drama. You can find it here on iTunes, or here on Soundcloud, or here at its own website. You can also find it on Pocket Casts and Stitcher and a whole host of other podcast catchers. But you didn’t hear about it here, because I’m lazy.

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Very, very lazy.

So, in return, I’m going to be doing a series on the evolution of my piece, Queens of the Sapphire Sea, which is being broadcast on April 15th. This is an old, old idea of mine from back in the Antediluvian Era, so I figured it might be fun to show you how it transformed from a seed of something into a full-fledged thingiemawhatzit.

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That’s a technical term.

Here is the original pitch piece I did for it, back when Starlight Runner was first accepting ideas for the development of internal IP.

Queens of the Sapphire Sea

Trouble is brewing on the Range Territory, but it has nothing to do with the criminals and outlaws that waft on the breeze this far from law and order. After all, none of them are a match for seventy-five year-old Regina Oliotone or her teenaged grand-niece, Beatrice. The two of them control the Range Territory from the sights of their seaplanes’ gun scopes. They’ve become the two best (and richest) pilots along the Sapphire Sea.

All of that is about to change.

The Commonwealth of Liberi is set to annex the Range, and bring with it its code of laws, including a prohibition against women from legally owning property. What has taken a lifetime to build up may be washed away with a signature from the High Council. Suitors are lining up outside Regina’s door just as political machinations threaten to rip the Range apart at its seams.

Regina and Beatrice aren’t giving up, though. The two each have a plan to save their business, their farm, their nation, and their way of life. It will take daring, but if there were ever a pair of bounty hunters that could topple a nation, it would be the world-famous Queens of the Sapphire Sea.

I was rather proud of the piece back then, and there are certainly elements to it that strike me now. It was steampunk fantasy set in a different world, with engaging and unusual characters that weren’t TOO off the wall. It had easily recognizable goals with plenty of room to grow, too. In fact, as you will see if you listen in…

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Please, please listen in.

…the main thrust of the piece hasn’t changed all that much.

That being said, I can understand why it was turned down at the time:

  • It’s too niche – As that pitch stands, it would appeal to a sub-demographic of a sub-genre, and was written by an inexperienced and unknown writer. I’m not saying that this kind of thing shouldn’t be written, but I’ve learned a lot in the five years since I first wrote this piece. Stuff like it has to be grand slam material or, at the very least, come from a recognizable name that people will be willing to follow to an uncertain place.
  • It’s too expensive – With something as fantasy-driven as that piece, it would have had to function as a comic book or piece of animation. Even then it would have been too expensive to produce. I was imagining water colored pages, farflung locales, and high-flying action. It would’ve required top-end talent to pull off and that doesn’t even get into the actual hard costs of production. I probably could have gotten away with a novel, but then again, I was too inexperienced to get it picked up.
  • It’s too on-the-nose – It seems to me that the themes were too direct and overt, particularly for something that was supposed to be all about the fun. You can chalk this up to changing tastes but back then, I wanted to make deliberate statements that could not be misconstrued, whereas now, I want more moral ambiguity. My opinions haven’t changed all that much but my dedication to allowing the audience to pull the themes they find has.

I didn’t expect to create something that–out of the blue–would wow my bosses (there are some quality issues there that you can definitely tell could use a bit more thought), but still, I felt disappointed when this came back with a “pass,” but it was a learning experience nonetheless. I could have tossed it aside. Instead, I realized that there was something there. I just had to think it through more. It was also a little similar to another property I was working on, so I decided to differentiate it a bit more, as well.

That was the key for me, and what should be the key for you, the creators reading this. Don’t throw anything away. Keep it socked in a drawer if you must, but better yet, get a Mega.co.nz account and store everything there. Who knows what amazing stuff you’ll find there when you’re cooking your way through in prep for a pitch years from now? Your patience, aided by experience, will show you the why’s and wherefore’s of your previous struggles to set you up for the successes of tomorrow.

Failure is the fire that tempers our talent. Or, it can be, if you don’t let it get you down.

 

by steelef

Platform Atheism

When I was a kid, I saved up a lot of money to buy a crappy Samsung handheld camcorder with which to shoot my high school movies. The battery barely ever worked. The onboard mic sounded like it was caught in a rainstorm. The video screen gave everything a greenish tint. The final product always came out looking like some Indonesian Soap Opera due to the frame rate.

boom_mike…as well as my storytelling sensibilities at the time.

My new Samsung Galaxy S6 can do the following things:

  • Play video games (just downloaded Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic)
  • Shoot movies and films
  • Play/download music
  • Control a GoPro
  • Record sound
  • Edit together visual and audio media
  • Save things automatically to the cloud.
  • Display directly to my television or computer
  • Schedule my air conditioning cycle

external_heat_pumpYou can tell where my priorities lie.

In short, it’s a one-stop-shop for all things entertainment and/or comfort related. A smartphone allows anybody with an internet connection to create content that can reach billions of people. That this has happened alongside the rise of the YouTube celebrity is not a coincidence: people are seeing themselves in the PewDiePie’s of the world because the set-ups are almost exactly the same. Quality means less than the expression of ideas.

Some people would say that this is platform agnostic-ism taken to the consumer extreme. That is, it ignores the platforms for which elements of media and temperature control were created. Software integration is so widespread, now, that anything from a Keurig to a music editing suite can talk to one another. Developers have designed code that runs equally well across multiple distribution channels so that the consumer can access it regardless of their preferred device.

This is just the beginning, though, because of that last issue of preference. Some human beings will always prefer their films on the big screen. Some will always want to game with a keyboard and mouse. Some will always want their books made from pulped wood. These are not just people who grew up with that method of media delivery: Urban Outfitters is the number 1 venue for vinyl in the world, and I doubt their target demographic is aging music lovers.

Of course, most people aren’t lovers of all media. We are alternately film buffs, hip-hop heads, cookbook collectors, and air conditioner . Most of the time, however, we want to be entertained, and if we are not an aficionado of a particular artform, we’re okay with basic service, so long as it has decent quality.

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Hulu HD? Not sure I need that for The Bachelor.

This also has an effect on our buying habits. Why spend $21.99 on a Blu-Ray/DVD combo of Monsters University unless we’re desperate to complete our John Goodman voice-over collection? We all know consumers are switching over from physical goods ownership to subscription-based models. This is a solid play for the average audience member and for producers of content: the former pays less for more content, while the second gets a steady stream of income.

Meanwhile, producers of traditional media are getting back to the roots and language of what made their platform unique in the first place… even if the old platforms are having to adjust. Radio channels are struggling, but radio dramas are hotter now than they’ve been since the 50s. Movie theaters are having to justify $20 ticket prices with spectacle… or they’re going the customer-first route by providing higher quality food and beverages in order to make the evening a “night out.” Comic books are reaching out to audiences that have traditionally been underserved, while the split between Indie Games and AAA-titles grows ever larger by the day.

Some people bemoan this split. Somehow, they argue, we’re losing out on the magic of a certain kind of mass experience while shackling ourselves to contracts that sell our information to third-parties via EULA’s. There’s definitely an element to consumerism and corporatism there that is too deep for this particular essay to handle, but I think if we put aside the “ownership v. leasing” argument for the moment, this is not necessarily a bad thing. For less than $30 a month, people can get a Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime membership: all the couch potato fertilizer you could ever want. This model is forcing producers to compete, to produce better ideas. Some of us want spectacle, but most of us want fun, regardless of how we get it.

Our phones are leading the way, but soon, even that delineation is going to fade. What makes a phone a phone except it’s ability to call? My computer does that. When I can fling from my iPhone to my Mac to my Apple TV to my tablet, the distinction is largely academic.

Modern consumers want experiential entertainment rather than ownership. This generation is loaded with debt; we’re shifting our priorities to accommodate this. We are buying fewer cars, houses, and extraneous “stuff.” We’re buying more trips, time shares, and entertainment packages. We want something that speaks to our ideas, and when we find something we love, we’re willing to go the extra mile to hold it in our hands. Otherwise, a screen–any screen–will do.

We don’t believe in platforms because, ultimately, they don’t affect us unless we choose to allow them that access. We have agency in our choice of media. We control how we want to participate. So, for the most part, we are platform atheists.

acfujitsu

Except when it comes to climate control. That platform is immutable.

by steelef

Leave the Door Open

Did you watch that? Not only does it (thankfully) conclude my three-part sojourn into the realm of horror, but it showcases how seeds turn into oaks… or rather, alien skulls into crossover franchises. That forty-second clip created a host of novels, comic books, films. I’m not going to pass judgment on the quality of all of those. But hey: for less than a minute worth of cinema, that’s a lot of quality spin-off content.

I’m not saying we should all ape Predator 2 (though, truthfully, it’s not half-bad for a sequel) but here are lessons to be learned from that one segment. What started as an easter egg in that film turned two franchises into one. Does your work have such open nodes to extend your content? I’m not talking about cliffhangers or branching storypoints. I’m talking about those throwaway, cast-off, blink-and-you’ll miss it points that expand the universe in ways you couldn’t possibly perceive. Well, that is, you can’t perceive them, but fans? If you leave room for their questions–if you open the door to their imaginations–they’ll clamor for more.

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