Skribe Productions » film-making

Corporate Piggybacking Ideas for Film-makers

skribe — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:45:19 +0000

Telstra have hit upon a brilliant marketing strategy for expanding upon their current Bigpond ‘Rabbit’ campaign. You know the one, where the kid asks about the Great Wall of China and his dad tells him that it’s to keep the rabbits out. Well, word has leaked that Telstra are considering making a film featuring those characters. The basic plot is that the kid searches the Internet – Bigpond, no doubt – for a wife for his dad. It’s corny. It’s cliched. It may just work. And even if it doesn’t then Telstra may not be too much out of pocket if they get the Australian federal and state government film funding bodies to pay for it.

Of course if it happens that way there’s likely to be a very loud cry complaining about how wrong it is for a corporation earning billions of dollars in net profit each year to dip its hand into the government coffers to make, what essentially is, an advertisement. But is what Telstra is doing any different from major foreign studios having their productions subsidised? What counts is that a film gets made, film-makers get employed and the movie actually gets seen. That last part is often missing from many of the films usually paid for by the funding bodies.

Given that there’s likely to be a major slowdown in film production due to the current economic downturn – money is about to become very scarce all round – maybe there’s an opportunity for innovative film-makers to develop an alternate market. I’m thinking along the lines of approaching corporations to use their current or abandoned marketing characters to create new dramas. They could be serious or spoofs. Either way the corporations could benefit by increasing their exposure, especially if the movies were aimed at the podcasting market. In fact the podcasting offers them not only a very subtle viral marketing campaign, but are likely to be lower in cost too.

Why I Work in Second Life

skribe — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 01:58:08 +0000

Recently a few people have been wondering why I made the shift from doing real world video production and take the incredible risk to move into making machinima, mainly in Second Life. Well here’s something I wrote 3 years ago that is kinda indicative of what real world video production had become for me:

You know you’ve made the right decision to turn down a job directing a commercial when:

It’s exactly the same people that screwed up last year’s attrocity.
One of the producer’s ideas for Harmony Week is a scene involving a burning flag.
The 1st AD doesn’t know what a call sheet is.
The DoP doesn’t think they need a call sheet on a project that is shot over three days using seven locations and a cast and crew of ten.
None of the actors have done any acting before.
The script involves a sparking electrical cable.
The power company doesn’t want to be involved.
One of the actors pulls out six hours before principal photography is due to start due to a religious belief.
The grip has pulled out, because he hasn’t been paid by the producer for a past production, and hasn’t told anyone on the production team.
The commercial was designed by committee.

The choice was actually kinda easy.

His Masters Voice

skribe — Sat, 19 May 2007 04:47:45 +0000

Probably the most problematic issue when making movies in Second Life is coordinating the troops. With the User Interface (UI) turned off – a necessity when doing a capture – it is easy to miss messages from cast or crew. One of the ways around that is using Skype thereby removing the need for Second Life’s chat/IM interface. But not everyone uses Skype and so sometimes it is necessary to coordinate everyone using an assistant director, who is hooked up to the director through Skype and then relays the instructions via chat/IM. This can be exceedingly slow and arduous, and on complicated shoots it becomes hellish. Fortunately a solution to remove many of these issues is about to reach fruition: Voice in Second Life.

We’ve covered the concept before in our short film, appropriately named Voice in Secondlife, which dealt with some of the difficulties that the Second Life sex industry may face with the introduction of Voice. However, Voice will bring benefits to broad sections of the Second Life community, especially with regard to business. The amount of information that can be conveyed through the spoken word is far greater than what typing can convey. Both with what is said and how it is said. As we’ve stated previously in our Aspects of Business article there are some disreputable people in Second Life, Voice will hopefully make their attempts to lie, cheat and deceive all the more difficult. Voice should also speed up meetings – which are currently limited to the speed of the slowest typer – and remove many of the ambiguities that occur when relying solely on the written word.

But Voice will also bring with it several challenges. Not everyone speaks the same language, and while English is the dominant language in Second Life not everyone speaks it as well as they can write it. Accents can also become a problem, even between native english speakers. There are times when the apparent gender of the avatar may not match the gender of person controlling it. This may become a problem. Added to all this is that currently there is still no talking gesture available for avatars – although there is a Linden-run competition to find one – which makes it difficult knowing who is speaking in a crowd.

Voice offers a whole new set of opportunities and difficulties for Second Life residents. Having tested it on the beta grid I have to say I can’t wait for its introduction. It will make film-making so much easier and will hopefully make meetings with our clients far more productive. Bring it on!