January 13, 2010

 

The Virtual Connection

I had a meeting with some friends the other day who want to break into the new media, or at least the new version of the old media. One guy is trying to start a talk show on a regional radio station, the other is trying to build an FM radio tower, (and secure a new FM station license), still another was a producer for the big studios and wants to create internet content. I want to tell stories, one way or the other--variety shows here on the farm, living history webisodes, even novels and feature films.

George Will once wrote (paraphrasing) that a columnist is essentially saying "listen to me, I'm important." C.S. Lewis compared writing to an insistent need, an itch that needs scratching. The number of channels open to us now means that a lot of people are scratching, and the itch is spreading, but most of it, of course, is just a bad rash. When they first labeled the internet, 'the information highway,' John Updike predicted that much of the fiction written on that highway would be road-kill, and he was right, so the conclusion my fledgling media group seemed to reach was that it's better to put out a little bit of good, rather than a whole lot of bad.

I'm not talking, by the way, about all the really bad videos I do just to let you know the raspberries are in season. Some stuff will always be purely informational, and artless -- because art takes time. I'm still working on the film we shot (Courage New Hampshire) because we didn't take our time on the sound, and because I want the final version to be pretty near perfect.

So what I'm wrestling with is a sense that many of you farm guests would appreciate some daily, visual, narrative dose of the farm, but even three minutes of reasonably well produced drama would take (using "Big Fat Greek Wedding" as a cost measuring stick), $877.19 a second, or $157,894 dollars for a three minute webisode. (Of course, "Big Fat" grossed $368,744,044 world wide), so that would be a gross profit of $3.2 million per minute, but who is really paying attention to that? (Besides me, I mean.)

The point is that most ideas are bad, most execution is so-so, most acting is only marginally credible, and a really good finished story ("Big Fat" for example) is so rare it's something like pure gold.

The era of cheap digital technology and desktop distribution only appears to end a bottleneck. You actually can make a short film, or host a Youtube news show for almost nothing, but just because the train ticket is cheap, doesn't mean the train is actually going anywhere. (Look at network television.)

I've done enough of this now, in other words, and produced enough bad stuff that I'm ready to consider ways to make the process more effective. Here are the rules, as I see them:

1. Don't write for a cast of thousands. Write for two people -- or one person playing two parts.
2. Get to the point early.
3. Know what the point is.
4. Don't be too subtle.
5. Don't be too obvious.
6. Don't write a script longer than two pages. (You won't use what you wrote anyway).
7. Shoot every sentence from five different angles. (MTV ruined everything.)
8. People prefer music over the spoken word.
9. Reacting may be more important than acting -- and it's a heck of a lot funnier.
10. Leave room for a story told by action, rather than just words, (because people prefer music over the spoken word.)
11. Music, without the spoken word, is something like Brittany Spears, cute and cloying, so write something worth saying.
12. Always ask yourself the question -- "would I forward this to friends?"

Off to the gold mine...

 

More of the Farm Journal --January 11, 2010