Get Your Degree in Second Life

skribe — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:08:07 +0000

Manchester Metropolitan University have announced that they are planning to deliver an entire module of their Film and Media course through Second Life. I wonder if they need a machinima lecturer =).

Just Say No

skribe — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:05:51 +0000

This is one part of the marketing display for the Warner Bros. film, Yes Man. After seeing it I immediately had a few questions for Warners:

Is it really so hard to print up new posters and displays when marketing to foreign audiences?
Is it really necessary to ignore local customs and just assume that the locals will understand what you mean, just because you’re a multi-national, multimedia corporation?
Is it worth the risk that the locals might not understand your notation?

Click on the image to see what I mean. What do you think?

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.

Skribe Productions » film

Get Your Degree in Second Life

Just Say No

Corporate Piggybacking Ideas for Film-makers