Idea IS the format

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2008-10-29T12:34:00.001-07:00

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“Hey, can I call you Joe?”

2008-10-04T02:36:00.000-07:00

So it began, the battle for middle America. Senator Joseph Biden flashed a smile of assent, and moved to his podium. Sarah Palin looked confident, assured, enthusiastic, a long way from the nervous wreck she ought to have been. Whoever pepped her up for this pep rally, they did a damn good job.

Biden and I weren’t the only people worried about falling under her spell.

Others had already succumbed. I’m talking about the kind of wholesome, patriotic, all-Americans she's been selected to hold a mirror up to. Except that hers is a special mirror, one that only reflects their better angels, against the backdrop of a country occasionally glimpsed in their wholesome, patriotic, all-American dreams.

Even those of us on foreign shores probably see in Palin a flash of something we’d like to believe in, of a nation founded on hard work and good intentions. We certainly voted with our feet on Thursday night, making up what was (allowing for internet audiences as well as the 69.9million viewers who tuned in in the US) the most watched debate of all time, vice-presidential or otherwise. And rightly so. Anybody thinking they won't be affected by the outcome of this election would need to have left planet Earth some time ago.

That being the case, the result of the election may still be decided by a few hundred thousand people, in each of half a dozen states. These are the people for whom Palin is positioned as a natural friend, confidante and kindred spirit, someone who sits around a kitchen table bearing the weight of the same concerns on her broad, maternal shoulders.

This, of course, is bullshit.

The reality is that she’s the worst of both worlds, with more skeletons in her closet than your average Stepford wife, yet the vanity to have been persuaded that she should be just a heartbeat away from running the country. This, on the strength of having done little more than muddle her way through the same challenges many of us face trying to keep control of our cut-throat careers and fucked-up family lives.

It took only a few well-chosen words for Joe Biden to remind us that Sarah Palin has by no means a monopoly on hardship and adversity, or on the tenacity required to turn these to your advantage. On the contrary, Biden gives us a glimpse of a life less ordinary, delivered with a candour and honesty far less contrived than that of his opponent. He looks like a man who's learnt enough things the hard way to be tasked with making decisions on behalf of others. He gives us the credit for having been around the block a few times ourselves.

Biden's was a message of hope and encouragement, acknowledging the epochal importance of this election, and unchallenged in bestowing a damning verdict upon the last eight years. It was as much as Palin could do to keep distance between her ticket and the many manifest policy failures of the incumbent administration.

And, despite all her 'say it ain't so, Joe' protestations, it was Palin who ultimately invoked the message of fear and intimidation so fundamental to the Bush Doctrine, reasserting the facile and insidious mantra that it is the essential liberty of the American people that gains them so many enemies overseas.

It looks ever more as though only fear can win this battle now for John McCain. I'm talking about the fear that flows as an undercurrent through American society, occasionally swelling to the surface and erupting into outrage when a certain type of pressure is applied. This is the fear that can divide a nation along the fault-lines of race, religion and economic viability. This is the fear that still grips a significant proportion of the electorate when they consider voting for Barack Obama. Perhaps this is the fear that he will actually deliver on the promise of change, and that there will be no place for them in his America, a country unified by hope, and given strength in self-belief.

Whatever the case, it's going to get worse before it gets better. As the momentum shifts left, the more authoritarian McCain's candidacy can be expected to become, bullying the media and smearing and discrediting his opponents. Expect the rhetoric of intimidation, tapping ever deeper into these fears and anxieties, sugar-coated with the folksy familiarity, unblinking loyalty and saccharine certitude of his supposedly home-baked running mate. She has shown us, at the very least, that she can be well programmed.

But then again, I'm just a blogger.

What the fuck do I know?

100% District of Columbian

2008-10-03T05:14:00.000-07:00

When news breaks on Twitter's election channel, you get more than just the facts.

That's how I heard that the GOP had just given up any attempt to turn the great state of Michigan red come November 5th 2008.

They'll tell you that it wasn't a key state for them, but it must have mattered enough for them to decide that it was worth spending some money there in the first place.

And that's part of the problem, right there. By accepting matching funds, McCain is having to deal with the campaign spending restrictions that go with them. If he needs to spend more fighting battles in supposedly safer states like Indiana and Virginia - and he does - he has to start cutting losses elsewhere. Even Rove can't spin that to make it look like a good thing.

Meanwhile the Obama camp, having eschewed federal assistance, are now free to spend as much as they can raise. They were busy launching an Obama '08 iPhone application. Might sound like a gimmick, but Twitter quickly came alive with positive feedback, reporting that the app makes smart use of the iPhone platform to engender greater awareness of Barack Obama's.

All of this just a few hours ahead of the vice-presidential debate, and a chance for Sarah Palin to stop haemmoraging credibility (or, according to one CNN closed caption, 'edibility') after a week in virtual freefall. The sense of anticipation on Twitter was palpable, with the left-leaning crowd quivering at the prospect of yet another own-goal from the free-scoring hockey mom.

At the same time, some armchair commentators were counselling caution, noting that Palin's currency had nowhere to go but up. Her performance would need to be little more than polysyllabic to be championed - on Fox News at least - as a shock victory for the little guy.

Let's get it straight right now. News 24 is for wimps. I've been mainlining this Twitter shit for days, carried through the veins of netroots political activism, pure, uncut, 100% District of Columbian.

My iPhone sits here, like a drip, feeding it to me intravenously, a steady unrelenting trickle of quips, commentary and outright provocation, filling me with the lifeblood of a good old-fashioned down and dirty god damn important presidential election campaign.

And the best thing about it? Well, every now and then, if you watch closely, and check your sources, you get to see that most wonderful of things.

A pissed-off Republican.

Billion Dollar Maybe

2008-10-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

So it’s welcome, one and all, as we go head-to-head here tonight, with Senate heavyweight and Democrat candidate for the Vice-Presidency Joe Biden taking on self-styled ‘Joe Six-pack American’ and Republican VPILF Sarah Palin.

We’ve already witnessed a thrilling first bout in the 2008 series. Somewhere between the irritable accusations of John ‘McSame’ McCain and the conciliatory counterpunches of Barack ‘Osama’ Obama each camp claimed a victory.

In the eyes of this pundit at least it was McSame who came off worst. Looking more war-horse than war hero, he was ultimately driven to behave like a low-ranking monkey. Never a good look, for a man who would be king.

And now comes the turn of our candidates for the Vice-Presidency, in what is surely the most tantalising and eagerly anticipated encounter of the series so far.

In the blue corner, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942, we have a man who became the fifth youngest senator in US history when he was elected to represent the state of Delaware in 1973. A long-time member and current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with 25 years of service to the US Senate under his belt, it's Joseph “Joe” Biden!

And in the red corner, born in Sandpoint, Idaho in 1964, we find a woman whose rise through the ranks of Alaskan local government has earned her a reputation for strong-arm tactics and intimidation not just of her political opponents, but also the diminishing population of polar bears. Yup, it’s the hard-working ‘hockey mom’ from Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah “Caribou Barbie” Palin!

And it’s Palin everybody’s talking about in the build up to fight night, as she continues her seemingly implausible progress through the ranks of American party politics. Were she to make it within a 72-year-old’s heartbeat of the country’s highest office, surely this would be the greatest story ever told, and the ultimate triumph of the American Dream over the tedious trappings of reality, pragmatism and plain old common sense.

She’s certainly come out fighting. It was Palin who used a public appearance to stir up a war of words with Biden, seeming to suggest that the 65-year-old’s age might be an issue for his candidacy. “I’m the new energy”, she declared, drawing attention to the fact that while her opponent was passing throw-away legislation across the floor of the Senate, she was debating the ethics of moose-hunting at Wasilla High.

Small matter, it seems, that Palin’s own running mate is seven years Biden’s senior. Small matter, indeed, that the GOP ticket represents the most convincing evidence ‘palintologists’ have yet discovered that humans and dinosaurs ever peacefully co-existed on God’s earth. Meanwhile Palin herself pushes on, sensationally claiming that one of her best friends is gay, and that Vladimir Putin’s head can occasionally be seen from the shorelines of Alaska.

With Biden keeping his own counsel in the build up to fight night, all this talk from the Palin camp has left pundits (some of them staunch Republicans) openly questioning whether these two fighters even belong in the same ring.

Certainly, it’s hard to see how a political featherweight like Palin could ever get the better of a seasoned pro like Joe Biden. In this pundit’s opinion, however, Biden needs to be careful.

Palin’s might have her detractors among the educated liberal classes, but she's been 'awful busy' winning over hearts and minds throughout the mindless heartlands of middle America, and is not without her sympathisers among the mainstream US electorate. Biden has to find some way to land enough telling blows, without ever being seen to strike the lady.

Palin, on the other hand, has nothing to lose. Expectations are so low, all she has to do last a few rounds, go the distance even, and she gives herself a fighting chance of claiming victory.

Fight fans, whatever happens, just remember this. It isn’t down to Fox News to tell you who won. We’re the judges here, not just some unwitting audience, herded towards somebody else’s conclusion.

Maybe, if we judge for ourselves, we'll see that Palin's candidacy is just a cynical sleight of hand, seeking the right person for the ticket, at the expense of getting the right person for the job.

Right now, that’s a billion dollar maybe.

Quick word of thanks to KidRobot23 and Annie Ok for some eleventh hour help with this one.

Saying "No" to the Yes Man

2008-09-12T19:29:00.000-07:00

This found its way into my email inbox over the weekend:

It's a poster for the new Jim Carrey movie, YES MAN, with one or two minor alterations. The original looks like this:

I'm guessing it found its way to me on the back of this tweet of mine on Friday morning:

I made this suggestion as a response to reading the first few paragraphs of an article by George Lakoff on The Huffington Post, in which he identifies some mistakes he sees the Democrats making with Obama's campaign.

Lakoff starts by examining Obama's post-RNC 'No Maverick' commercial, in which the Democrats confront McCain's attempt to position himself as a 'maverick', ready to confront mistakes and repair damage done by the current administration.

Lakoff's view is that negating what he refers to as the 'Maverick Frame' actually serves to reinforce it, and that the Democrats should instead be focusing on establishing a new frame for McCain, one that puts him on the defensive.

Highlighting McCain's record of voting with the current administration over 90% of the time, Lakoff suggests that he could be presented as a 'Yes-man', a characterisation originally used by Howard Dean in his speech to the DNC.

Over the course of Friday I saw a few other Twitter users picking up on this, culminating in the appearance of http://the-yes-man.com/

It's an unelaborate site, concentrating on the key reasons why we should understand John McCain within this frame; his Bush-friendly voting record; his close association with 'Big Oil'; the fact that his campaign team is haemorrhaging lobbyists, locking him into the traditional Washington political machine of which his presidency would undoubtedly be a willing and compliant extension.

Then, within the last few hours, a sign that the meme has crossed media:

At the same time that this is unfolding, it is being suggested that 'the liberal bloggers have become McCain central', and that this is playing into Republican hands. Writing on the Daily Kos, thereisnospoon mounts a compelling response to such claims:

"It is difficult for Republicans to turn on a dime, and there's very little creativity to come out of their collective establishment. If the campaign and the RNC doesn't push a meme, it doesn't get pushed. That has forced Republican candidates to largely have to own the slimy attacks put out by their own people."

"We, on the other hand, have no such obligation. The Obama campaign has been successful largely because of its inspiring "new brand of politics". Unfortunately [...] that makes it somewhat difficult for the Obama campaign to get quite as nasty with the opposition as it might need to. But that's OK--because that can be our job."

"It's our job to push memes the campaign can't. It's our job to focus on Republican chicanery that would waste the time of an Obama campaign that needs to be focusing its messaging on core economic issues. By talking about McCain's egregious lies and horrible personal ethics, we can help push the press to cover stories that the Obama campaign can't seriously push themselves."

"Everyone has a role to play: ours is to play hardball, to hit where it hurts, and to force the traditional media to cover what it might be uncomfortable covering otherwise."

The post as a whole reads as a manifesto for negative campaigning among the 'netroots', inciting Democrats to leave the moral high-ground to the above-the-line campaign, and to get busy with the nuts and bolts of slinging enough muck to stand a chance of actually winning the election.

I haven't figured out exactly where I stand on this, although I guess by posting on the subject I'm giving the Yes Man Frame a little bit more oxygen, and nailing my colours to the mast in the process. This in itself begs a number of questions, the most obvious of which is...

What the fuck does it have to do with you (i.e. me) anyway?

Isn't it arrogant not to mention presumptious of me to try and perpetuate this meme in my own small way, with the intention of interfering in and seeking to influence an election taking place in a country of which I am not even a citizen?

Well, I don't think so.

I've held the view for a while now that this is by far the most important election to have taken place in my lifetime.

I base this principally on the extent to which the Bush administration has damaged the global geo-political climate generally, not to mention the skepticism his stolen elections have inspired as regards the integrity of American democracy itself.

It also seems pretty clear to me that, though the outcome of this election will (hopefully) be determined by the will of the country's citizens, the impact will be felt throughout the civilised world.

This is epitomised in relation to the issue of climate change. I meet more and more people sharing my view that the adverse effects of global warming are upon us, and that we may find ourselves being forced to change our way of life much sooner than previously imagined, on a genuinely global scale. On this basis alone, the governance and energy policy of one of the world's largest polluters is of excrutiating importance to us all.

Beyond this and plenty of other practical considerations, there's a more abstract reason why I feel such a significant stake in this election.

I still believe that if any country in the world could ever claim to carry a flag for human civilisation as a whole, it is the United States of America. I still find substance in the idea of an American dream, albeit that this has been systematically subverted by those with an interest in repackaging it as a crass consumerist call-to-arms. I still have faith in the principle of democracy, and the idea that governance should be designed to best serve those being governed, smiling most kindly upon the least fortunate of us.

I think that now may be a tipping point for the meaningful survival of these values. I'm not sure they it can survive four more years of the incumbent regime, and the defeat of by far the most exciting presidential candidate since JFK.

Like Kennedy, in Barack Obama we find a candidate who seems to articulate and symbolize the libertarian ideals upon which the United States of America claims to be founded, at a time when the country itself and the world as a whole needs so desperately to be reminded what those are.

Contrast this with Mr McCain.

I watched closely as he accepted the nomination at the Republican convention, weaving his rhetoric into a mandate for the continuation of the Bush Doctrine, and it looked like more of the same.

I watched his choice for vice-president condemn 'unprovoked' Russian aggression whilst simultaneously endorsing Israel's right to judge for itself what steps were necessary to defend its borders, and it looked like more of the same.

I'm watching a campaign unfold that's permeated by double-standards, half-truths and plain, good old-fashioned lies, and it looks like more of the same.

As if that isn't enough, I just keep picturing the scene, a few months into a McCain presidency, when the first of the calls comes in from Dick, or George Sr, asking after a juicy little piece of legislation, or sowing the seeds of some profitable new foreign intervention. Every time I play it through, I just can't see John McCain saying "no".

That's why I'm hoping the American electorate do, while they still have the chance.

* * *

Postscript:
I just got in after a long weekend ready to put the finishing touches on this post and I found the following unsolicited message in my normally spam-free Gmail inbox, under the subject line 're: Important':

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who Is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are."
Henry Louis Mencken

Damn right.

"It's like a really bad Disney movie"

2008-09-10T17:50:00.001-07:00

I'm in the office late working on a major pitch, in that kind of precarious tired strung-out work situation where you can lose perspective. Then I watch this, and it's puts everything back in perspective, and I realise that I'm not alone, and that I'm right to be scared.

I tweeted this, I'm blogging it, I want to spread it as far and wide as possible. Because the next eight weeks are eight of the most important weeks in my life, and probably yours too.

Screen/life balance

2008-09-08T22:54:00.000-07:00

I found this great little animation on Paul Isakson's blog. I have no idea who he is, but I've seen his posts recommended on Twitter more than once, and I've always enjoyed them.

There's a sweet little website that goes with it encouraging you to 'send an intervention email to a screen addicted friend'.

It's actually a very gentle advertisement for a site called Meetup, which provides people with a few simple tools to help them form groups and arrange meetups around local common interests. Their mantra is use the Internet to get off the Internet. So, nothing oxymoronic about that then.

Seriously, the more I see a career in interactive media stretching out ahead of me, the more I find myself trying to find ways of working without a computer, dodging the increasingly frequent distractions of email and that distraction from distraction, Twitter.

I think maybe this is part of the reason I'm getting busy in the garden, taking the chance to be truly creative, and to produce a few of the indivisible raw materials of day-to-day subsistence.

I guess It's not so much about finding the right work/life balance, as finding the right screen/life balance.

Of course, I'm telling you this sitting here in front of the computer at eleven minutes past seven on a Tuesday morning, having already checked Twitter umpteen times and picked up my first wave of daily email. So, nothing oxymoronic about that then.

Indivisible processes

2008-09-07T15:23:00.001-07:00

I was due to spend this weekend in Southend on my brother-in-law's stag weekend. Instead, after a 72-hour round trip to LA for the Virtual Worlds Expo, I decided to spend the time at home with family pottering around in the garden. Sitting here on Sunday night, feeling nourished and well-rested on the brink a hugely important working week, it feels like the right decision.

Lola and I were down at B&Q by about half nine on Saturday, and spent a happy half hour trolleying around picking up this, that and the other, including this odd little impulse purchase:

Food's a bit thin on the ground for birds at this time of year, so it seems like a good time to do a bit to help. We have a nice view of the box from within the kitchen as well, so hopefully Lola will enjoy keeping an eye out for any regular visitors.

From the picture below you can see that the kitchen garden is now clear, except for some spinach still going strong in the far left and four French raspberry plants over on the right gifted us by my mum and dad. (They went away with a banana plant that's apparently thriving in St Vaast La Houge in a way that it never really looked like doing in Hackney.)

I also put a fresh bag of chipped bark down just to cover up a couple of spots where it was looking a little patchy, and I planted those three lovely looking plants in that bed over on the right. Two of them are spotted laurels, 'an extremely robust, variegated shrub', and in the middle there's an evergreen azalea, 'a small, hardy evergreen shrub producing salmon-coloured flowers'.

I have no idea what the garden's going to end up looking like, or how long we're going to be around to enjoy it, but I do enjoy the time I spend pottering around out there, especially when Lola comes and joins me, giving me the excuse to witter on endlessly about what it is I'm doing at any given moment.

When I finally sat down to deal with some of the work I have to do in preparation for next week, I started by drawing up a things-to-do list, most of which related to business we have to win. In my own mind I had a couple of other things to do as well, one of which was to write up a post about my LA trip, and another of which was to post these photos. Plus I had a backlog of articles and links people had sent me that needed following up.

The conceptual model I initially created for these tasks was one based on mutual exclusion - if I was reading the articles, I wasn't preparing a pitch document, or working on a blog post, and vice versa.

Inherent within this was a fairly rigid chronology - I would do one thing, then another, then another. That said, even though I was trying to itemise and prioritise, the to-do list as a whole was now looming over me, a single insurmountable obstacle.

I contemplated abandoning these efforts entirely. Fortunately, rather than doing so, at this point it registered that this methodology for managing my time and effort really sucked, and that I ought to try and improve on it.

I tried to look at the things I needed to do in terms of the core processes they incorporated - what I'm referring to as 'indivisible processes'. I could see that all the pitch documents would be driven by the same essential argument, even though this would subsequently be structured in a different way. A cursory look through the links and articles revealed that these would inform this argument. It also occurred to me that the LA blog post would sit most naturally off the back of all of this, albeit that I would be forced to publish it later than I might have liked.

Eventually I had a far more holistic model of my 'workload' in mind. Other things began to happen. I started to form a much clearer sense of priority, weighing the primary and secondary value of individual acts against their capacity to deliver the various necessary outcomes.

I also abandoned the model of mutual exclusivity, unless it was the nature of a particular task that it need to be approached in complete isolation.

I detached myself from my computer, and started to work on paper. This is something I've been building up to for a while. I'm starting to see how limited and labour-intensive computers are as a way of completing complex tasks, and am starting to use mine on a far more task-specific basis.

Though I have very little to show for it, I'm certain that the hour that followed was by far the most productive I've spent at my desk in some time. My dissastisfaction with the the things-to-do model has been growing, and I can see that this alternate approach has the potential to be massively liberating, far more enjoyable, and much more consistent with the nature of the tools, media and ideas that form the basis of my working life.

With all of this in mind, I made a first pass at re-envisaging my life in terms of indivisible processes. It brought me here, to the end of this post, in which I've given those dearest to me the chance to catch up with what I think they're most interested in hearing about, and I've taken a first step in arranging my evening's revelations into a form that can be shared and expanded upon.

As a final aside, I'm completely convinced that I wouldn't have reached this interesting place if I hadn't permitted myself a two hour nap earlier on today, at a point at which I was struggling to concentrate on anything. Indeed, now that I think about it, sleep is perhaps the ultimate indivisible process - it has no output within itself (except, in my case, sound waves), but it is the foundation of everything we do in life, and influences our productivity and effectiveness very directly. With that in mind, and an exciting week ahead of me, I bid you goodnight x

Misoverestimating Dubya

2008-09-01T15:41:00.000-07:00

Viewed from afar, it's hard to imagine a more one-sided US presidential election.

We ought to have learnt from the last eight years that the president of the United States of America is, first and foremost, a spokesperson. It turns out that this is as much as we could have expected from Dubya, and, even then, we may have misoverestimated him.

Great presidents can distinguish themselves as great spokespeople, when they speak for an idea, giving the citizens residing at the heart of any functional democracy a moral voice, as well as a political and economic one. Occasionally politics produces a man with the potential to deliver this kind of inspirational leadership, fronting an administration more broadly schooled in 'the art of the possible'.

I'm watching closely, hoping that this US presidential election can deliver such an individual, and such an administration, and that the electorate will be ready to vote for their better angels, rather than yielding once again to the politics of intimidation. Please. For all our sakes.

WATCHMEN Simpsonized!

2008-08-29T02:55:00.001-07:00

LOVE this. Check out all six here.

[Update (about 5 minutes later):

Just occurred to me that this is a Fox/Warner Bros mash-up, coming at a time when the two continue to wrangle over the rights for the movie.

My guess is that we won't be seeing Rorschach haunting the streets of Springfield any time soon.

That's probably for the best. I don't think the world's quite ready to watch a masked sociopath splitting Spider-Pig's head open with a rusty cleaver.]

The thing I hate the most about advertising...

2008-08-25T00:13:00.000-07:00

Checking into the Love Hotel

2008-08-17T15:00:00.001-07:00

The building absorbs the force of yet another blast, and the light of the neon flickers back into life. My eyes fall open, as I list like a drunk, soaking up the aftershock. All around me I can see bodies, soft pale bodies, writhing in ecstasy all over the dirty dusty dance-floor. I can see friends, drawn together from across the decades, finding each other just for tonight, and losing it together once again.

For a derelict farm building, the Love Hotel makes one hell of a club. The dance-floor is small enough to fill, large enough to lose yourself on, and has nothing but night sky for a ceiling. Walled in by the hard-working bar and a host of bunker-like boudoirs, each furnished with faux antiquities and decorated with a better class of graffiti, it looks like everybody here is on their honeymoon.

Me, I’m bouncing round the dance-floor like a spaghetti pinball. Looking up, I can see the DJ dropping bombs from atop of his towering scaffold, musical hand grenades for us to jump on as soon as they hit the floor, sending limbs into the dirty air, slamming bodies against the bare concrete walls. I can see one of the 'wasabi peas' up there, bobbing around behind the turntables. There are five of them, at the last count, scattered around the grounds of this 16^th Century Hertfordshire manor. They’re wearing green one-piece speed-skating outfits and scandalising passers-by with the unnatural contours of their drug-addled genitalia. Like the eighteen hundred other people who made it along for the weekend, they’re bringing their own little piece of Japan to the party.

We may be in costume, but this is no dress rehearsal. It’s Standon Calling, one of the smallest most perfectly formed festivals here or hereabouts. By which I mean on this planet, or any that happen to be nearby. Some take the view that it’s nothing more than a glorified birthday party, one that’s spiralled wilfully out of control ever since the young and impetuous Alexander Trenchard Esq. turned twenty one, seven long years ago.

I’m here to tell you that it’s very much under control, executed with the discipline and military precision you’d expect from somebody whose great grandfather founded a little flying outfit some of us know as the RAF. What would the late Viscount Trenchard think, were he here today? Surely he’d like our fighting spirit, we flying aces, who go up tiddly up up, and down diddly down, but never, ever say die.

He wouldn’t have been crazy about Marko. Not because Marko’s housed inside the flame-licked exterior of a Japanese fighter plane, with a Tesco carrier bag tied bandana-style around his head and a yellow kimono hanging from his comically elongated body. Not because Marko’s looking to go kamikaze on some poor unsuspecting Tokyo schoolgirl, with a wildness in his eyes promising dishonour before death. Just because, beneath all the bodywork and bravado, Marko’s French.

He’s just one of the stray dogs, the kind of gifted degenerate it’s good to swim with on days like these. We’ve been mooching around since midday, kicking our heels and catching up with one another, here to meet the people we’ve become. We’ve gotten our bearings, blown away the cobwebs, and charged our glasses with the choice of a thousand poisons.

Now we’re tearing up the script on the dance-floor, scribbling out our own impulsive little libretto, orchestrated in the moment. I can feel the music in my bones, this soundtrack to my life, a roadmap to the memories it recalls. Each song belongs to a time, a place, a person, some of whom are here to share it with me, one of whom has been here for as long as I have, even though I only got to know her ten happy years ago. Every time I look into her eyes I see a kaleidoscope of memories, stretching back over a decade. Deep brown eyes, smiling like rubies, full of light and colour stolen from the lollapalooza of life.

This post was supposed to be about Standon, but really its about her. In a way, they all are. She's the energy and the inspiration, the muse to whatever artistry there is in me, and the colour on my palette. I’ve made my share of mistakes in this life, and I’m sure I’ll make plenty more, but whatever words I found ten years ago to convince her that I was worth being with, worth staying with, were the most important words I’ve ever spoken, or written down. It was the rightest thing I've ever done. It got me a room at the Love Hotel, and I’m never checking out.

Emma and I met ten years ago to the day, and have been married for exactly five. I’m not sure I’ll ever find the words to tell her - or you - what she means to me, but I’ll keep looking.

Life's a beach

2008-08-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken a couple of weekends ago, when my dad's side of the family got together for a seventieth birthday party in Porlock. We didn't see them as much as my mum's side when we were growing up, and it was great to be reminded what an unusual and interesting group of people they are.

Lola and I went down to the beach, with a few others. My sister was there, she took this photo. It reminds me of pictures I've seen of my dad when I was Lola's age. As a family we spent a lot of time at the beach, all along the English coastline, pottering around.

It was somewhere we all seemed to be able to find something to occupy ourselves, but often that would be no more than to sit around together turning over rocks, looking into pools, talking things over.

To a passer-by might have looked as though we were just passing time. But we were in a tidal zone, where the water meets the shore, waves washing over rocks, teeming with life. It was where I saw my family come alive. Now I get to see it all over again.

Death of a door-to-door jumble salesman

2008-07-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

I started twiddling the idea of anti-social marketing between my proverbial thumbs a week or two ago.

Anti-social marketing is television commercials.

It’s advertising hoardings, bus sides and posters on the underground.

It’s direct mail, leaflets through your letterbox and flyers underneath your windscreen wiper.

It’s banners, overlays and pop-ups.

It’s spam.

Some anti-social marketing thinks that by being creative and clever it can become artistic and intellectual and, ever so occasionally, it’s almost right.

More often anti-social marketing’s about people finding ways to interrupt our sentences in order to tell us about something we weren’t talking about, aren’t interested in and have no pressing need for.

The fact that we’re being interrupted may even predispose us negatively towards something we would have otherwise had a genuine interest in.

Instead we’re subjected to a process that’s as profligate in its indiscrimination as it is prescriptive in its approach, telling us what we should and shouldn’t think about something and why it is or isn’t of interest to us.

Anti-social marketing operates on the basic principle that our time and attention can be bought and sold in the marketplace. It does so with a brazen indifference to the question of how we might feel about that.

It’s a bit like being at a jumble sale.

(I think Americans call it a ‘yard sale’.)

There may be a few items of genuine interest kicking about. Maybe we’ll even buy something (even though it may well turn out that we didn’t really want or need it after all).

Most of the stuff will be junk though, of little more than curiosity value. We’ll peer down our noses at it for a little while then wander on.

Anti-social marketing is actually worse than being at a jumble sale. At least if we're at a jumble sale it's because we probably chose to be there, because we didn’t have anything better to do, and we had some time to kill, and we felt like killing it digging through a huge pile of vinyl on the off-chance of discovering a pristeen signed copy of Pet Sounds.

Anti-social marketing is more like a door-to-door jumble salesman.

He figures just because I have a door that gives him the right to knock on it. He knows that I’ll have to answer the door in order to find out who’s knocking, and that this will create a tiny window of opportunity in which he may be able to seize my attention with some random trinket.

He has to knock on a lot of doors, and he has to drag his box of jumble around with him. It’s hard work, but it’s all he knows, and he can always rely on the fact that if he knocks loud enough and long enough on enough doors sooner or later he’ll sell something to somebody (even though it may well turn out that they didn’t really want or need it after all).

He doesn’t really care how much of everybody’s time he wastes in the process. As far as he’s concerned his time is at a premium, and nobody else’s is. This is anti-social behaviour, and he is an anti-social marketer.

For a long time anti-social marketing was pretty much the only way anybody tended to find out about things they might want or need.

The only other way we’d find out about anything was word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth was great, in that the person telling us about something was probably a friend of ours, who knew us reasonably well, and had our best interests at heart. The problem with word-of-mouth was that we could only have one conversation at any one time, in the pub, on the telephone or gathered around the office water-cooler.

Then we invented the internet. We invented email. We invented ICQ, and forums and notice-boards. We invented instant messaging, chat rooms, blogs and social networks. We invented a thousand and one ways for us to connect with like-minded people, and to effortlessly express our enthusiasm for something some of those people might want or need. Word-of-mouth became word-of-mouse, and we began to have a thousand conversations at once.

At the same time, the advent of interactive media created a problem for the door-to-door jumble salesman.

We could see him coming.

It became our new surveillance system; a network of platforms and media empowering us to filter out the noise. As we continue to engage with these tools, and the greater control they grant us, our mindsets change. We no longer accept the door-knocking as a fact of life. Some of us don’t even notice it, subconsciously blinding ourselves to banner ads on web pages, or using Sky+ to very deliberately skip the ads every time a commercial break comes on.

Instead we’re busier than ever talking to each other, about the things we love, the things we hate, the things we want and need. All around us ‘social marketers’ are igniting conversations, fanning the flames with genuine care and attention, and fuelled them with fresh content and collaborative creativity, growing colourful communities around the campfires of our bright ideas.

Who watches the Watchmen? We do ≠)

2008-07-04T08:16:00.001-07:00

Here it is. It might not be the chock full of content right now, but just look at how many days we've got left to fill it with all manner of Watchmen goodness!

The beautiful word

2008-07-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

Click on this to enlarge. More info here. Thanks Sizemore.

Starting early

2008-07-01T15:36:00.000-07:00

I spent this morning at the Cast & Crew screening of Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging, at the invitation of director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham, Bride & Prejudice). I met her and her husband Paul on Thursday to discuss the forthcoming development of her own website, and she suggested that I toddle along to the screening this morning. So I did.

We've been working hard on the movie's marketing campaign over the past year or so, so I'd already glimpsed quite a lot of the characters in some shape or form. I was even fortunate enough to spend a day on set back in November of last year, filming a selection of original scripted material for use as part of our campaign. I blogged about the experience at the time, acknowledging how unusual it is for marketers to be given this kind of creative latitude so early in the process.

The film's still not out for another three and a half weeks, but we can already see our approach paying off in terms of the momentum the campaign has built up, at a point in the process where some online campaigns are still only just getting going.

Our long lead destination was an official Bebo profile we created for the character of Georgia. Bebo is traditionally very strong for exactly the same demographic as the book's core fans; teen girls, basically. Our intention was to harness Bebo's social networking tools to build a micro-community of fans and early adopters around the original content we'd produced, released over the course of the campaign as webisodes. Last time I looked, six months on, Georgia had over 4,000 friends, and the profile had been viewed almost 60,000 times.

Our strategy for the latter stages of the campaign has been to look at how we can widen this core awareness and anticipation into mainstream appeal. Certainly the official website we developed - one of my favourite examples of PPC's work from the seven years I've been there - is seeing levels of traffic suggesting that we've already succeeded in doing so.

Add to this the official widget (up there at the top of this post), a MySpace page for the band in the movie, The Stiff Dylans, and the forthcoming online advertising campaign (including a direct spend on Bebo) and you have the key constituents of what I immodestly consider to be a hugely progressive online marketing campaign.

What it really reinforces for me, which may seem blindingly obvious but is so often forgotten, is that online isn't something to sit behind the more traditional strands of the marketing process, such as the production of the trailer, or the design of a poster.

As a director who is prepared to entrust her movie into the hands of the distributor - and their agency - at an early stage, Gurinder is in good company; both JJ Abrams and Zack Snyder have shown that this can be an effective approach when applied to major Hollywood releases. As their currency continues to grow, and a generation of more traditional directors fall away, expect more online campaigns to start the moment a movie goes into production, and end only once the last sequel has been made, and the last DVD sold.

The truth is in here...

2008-07-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

So this is new. It's the brainchild of Seesmic, Fox and Gia Milinovich, the latter being a blogger friend and collaborator on the Indy 4 video junket:

The embeddable version of Seesmic is a bit clunky generally, but what does that matter? What's of interest is that this is a smart little mash-up of that stalwart unit of movie marketing currency, the trailer, and the current trend for (pseudo-)threaded video conversations.

From what I understand the plan is to release a series of X-Files video clips and to drive online conversation and community around these through the player. It will be interesting to see how many 'X-philes' feel compelled to join the discussion, but from what Gia says this has already been embedded over 2,000 times, and I know from our own experiences working with movie widgets that this is a very respectable number, especially after such a short space of time.

CORRECTION: This stat actually refers to the text chat widget shown below, and the total figure is 2,300 at present, apparently:

Gia's been doing some very inventive things in the social media movie marketing space for some time, as you can see from her blog; she manages to keep a foot firmly in both camps, which is not always an easy thing to do. I've never been a major X-Files fan, but I still get a major kick out of seeing how the web can bring people together around a common interest, and create a new medium in which for them to share ideas and forge friendships.

That, for me, is what social media is all about.

Introducing... Goldberg

2008-06-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

Goldberg looked out from beneath the brow of his denim sunhat and quietly contemplated the Adriatic. In the very periphery of his twenty-twenty vision he saw that the tranny had just arrived for breakfast. Delicately adjusting the low slung hat, pulling the brim a fraction further over deep-set eyes, he had ever more the air of a man entered into a conspiracy with himself.

The dining terrace was already buzzing with activity. Shards of sunlight cut through the blinds and canopies, drawing acute triangles of heat and light across the floors and starched white tablecloths. Olive-skinned staff went to and fro between the tables delivering pots of tea and coffee to the guests, some of whom appeared to be doing a far better job than others of coming to terms with the whole business of being awake, alive, anew, atop the ski-run of yet another day in their many indifferent lives.

Goldberg took up his newspaper and permitted himself another look. She wore a lilac blouse, a white chiffon scarf twirled once around her neck before sweeping down between breasts the ampleness of which she could only imagine. Her skirt, a knee-length number with lace trim, served only to accentuate the workman-like musculature of her legs, stacked on top of some wildly ambitious heels. Where others present looked as though they’d fallen out of bed onto the awaiting chairs, she alone had the appearance of having come direct from yet another gala luncheon.

He found himself wondering why it was that gentlemen drawn to transvestism, however tender their years, felt compelled to dress, decorate and upholster themselves in the style of women with at least three children behind them, and not much to look forward to beyond the next Felicity Cummings novel.

Her make-up was a masterpiece of over-compensation. Alongside lashings of concealer, blusher and eyeshadow, her strawberry red lips were drawn into an exaggerated purse, by which she looked as though she was forever on the brink of taking umbrage at some mischievous remark. In spite of it all, an ominous shadow still fell over the lower portion of her face, the likes of which no razor could remove, nor foundation conceal.

Goldberg had first spied her at dinner the evening he arrived; she was fingering a prawn and dressed for bingo. It was buffet service – Goldberg loathed buffets – and he was already smarting at a reprimand from a Cretan waiter per se the fact that he was wearing a pair of shorts; as if it were possible to apply a dress code to an all-you-can-eat dinner service. It had only exacerbated his indignation to note that the tranny was sporting a pair of chartreuse yellow culottes, apparently without reproach.

At the time she’d been wearing a pair of hoop earrings you could have dunked a basketball through, conceived no doubt to deflect attention away from her broad shoulders and prosaic neckline. Today a pair of tapering silver shards flashed and flickered in the morning sun, in concert with the gentle bobbing of her Adam’s apple as she ordered breakfast.

Methinks, thought Goldberg wryly, the lady doth protest too much.

___

Regular readers of my blog may have noticed that it's been a while since I posted anything of substance, or born of any real endeavour. That's because I've been busy creating Goldberg, who I'd promised to unveil to a few of you once he was ready.

The Learned Mr James Scudamore, a trusted friend and published novelist, advised me against pursuing my plan to publish an entire first chapter, on the basis that any feedback I received - good or bad - would distract me from the more pressing business of writing chapters 2, 3, 12, 19 etc.

As such, I decided to put these opening few paragraphs out there, and will be largely disregarding any feedback I receive, unless it comes in the form of earnest encouragement to press ahead.

Those of you who know me well, among whose ranks I count myself, will now be watching with interest to see if Goldberg ever makes another appearance, or if he becomes yet another casualty of my congenital inability to stick to one particular task.

Whatever the case, he has become another creation of mine of whom I am already peculiarly fond, and, for the time being at least, continues to serve as a very satisfying outlet for my urge to write, and to fantasize.

Kung Fu Panda Widget

2008-06-27T05:18:00.001-07:00

Neil Diamond

2008-06-22T08:54:00.001-07:00

This was taken at the start of the Neil Diamond gig Ems and I went to on Saturday night at the O2 Arena. You should be able to click on it to get the full size photo. It's just a camera phone picture, and you can't really get a sense of the size of the 15,000-strong crowd, but the moment was electric, and I think that comes across somehow.

At 67 it's just incredible how well-preserved Diamond's voice is, and how energised a performance he gives. Ems and I have also seen both Elton John and Brian Wilson perform live in the last couple of years, but this was the stand-out gig for us. We both grew up listening to Neil Diamond, but neither of us had realised what an incredible showman he is.

The O2 Arena itself (formerly the Millenium Dome) is a great venue for live music, although maybe it's testimony to Diamond that he managed to make such a huge space feel so intimate. The concert area is encircled by a complex of bars, clubs, restaurants, shops and even a cinema, all of which looks slightly like something out of crap seventies sci-fi, especially when its populated by 15,000 Neil Diamond fans all trying to roll back the years.

I have some other photos, but I need to get them into Photoshop before I post them. I'll try and add them as an update over the next day or two.

Requiem for a Day Off

2008-06-19T23:18:00.001-07:00

Two great movies. One of my favourite mash-ups:

Jesus and the Dinosaurs

2008-06-17T07:32:00.001-07:00

There are many things to enjoy here, but I think the thing I love the most is how beautifully coloured-in it is.

Saturday

2008-06-15T02:40:00.000-07:00

These two photos ought to tell the story of a pretty perfect Saturday. An afternoon at the Natural History Museum...

...followed by an evening in the garden preparing lovely fresh mackerel, barbecued and served up with some of that pak choi you can see growing in the background, seasoned thai-style and wok-fried by the infinitely versatile Mrs Light.

I love days like these, full of things that come naturally. I hope I can raise my kids to appreciate them as much as I do, and I hope they have the opportunity.

WIDGET DO AGENTE 86

2008-06-11T08:37:00.001-07:00

This is taken from the Brazilian version of the Quest for Global Domination, created for Warner Bros International to promote the forthcoming release of GET SMART (to be released in Brazil under the name "Agente 86").

I created this agent ID for little Rubes, who is a KAOS agent. When I get the chance I'll sign Lola up to CONTROL, and they can have their own little Quest for Parental Domination.

Radishes

2008-06-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

These are just some of the lovely flavoursome beauties I plucked from my patch last night, mixed up into a wonderful salad along with thinning from five varieties of lettuce and served within thirty minutes of leaving the ground.

Cracking episode of Hackney Garden on the way, showing the extent of my kitchen garden goodness, just as soon as I manage to find one of the several hundred firewire cables currently hidden around our home.

The Choice Is Yours

2008-05-23T10:33:00.001-07:00

The first of five great little mini-games we're producing to promote WANTED, a new movie by Timur Bekmambetov starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman and loosely based on the excellent graphic novel by Mark Millar:

Han & Dan

2008-05-21T07:11:00.000-07:00

Another bit of multimedia memorabilia from the Indy junket, courtesy of Mike:

Seesmic du jour 149: Indiana Jones 4 in Seesmic

2008-05-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

Seriously doubt I'll be able to improve on this, however long I spend in Windows Movie Maker - Vinvin from Seesmic on the Indiana Jones gig:

Indiana Jones and the Online Video Junket

2008-05-19T04:22:00.000-07:00

Much to report on the Indiana Jones film-maker interviews we posted to Seesmic from Cannes on Saturday, and not much time to do it.

Want to post some of my favourite bits of video from the event, at the very least:

Steven Spielberg rules out ever making an Indiana Jones movie without Harrison Ford:

George Lucas talks about the breadth of the franchise's appeal:

Harrison Ford talks about his favourite stunts:

Karen Allen talks about her favourite movie soundtracks:

Shia LaBoeuf talks about his favourite Indiana Jones movie:

Cate Blanchett talks about being a baddie:

Everyone involved seems to agree that this last question represents the real high-point of the event, insofar as we succeeded in taking a question from a Seesmic user via Twitter during the course of the event and putting it to a film-maker - much harder than you'd think when you consider that we only had ten minutes with each of them.

This has already been picked up by a number of pretty high profile blogs, the pick of which I'll post here (if you find anything that I've missed pls post it in a comment):

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/05/spielberg_pops_up_on_seesmic.html

http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/17/celebrity-tipping-point-on-seesmic/

http://mashable.com/2008/05/17/indiana-jones-goes-seesmic/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/17/dont-screw-your-partners-over-a-marketing-promotion/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/seesmic_goes_hollywood.php

http://www.behindthebuzz.com/indiana-jones-on-seesmic/

http://www.techmeme.com/080517/p14

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/05/spielberg_on_seesmic.html

http://bernardmoon.blogspot.com/2008/05/seesmic-spielberg-and-ford.html

http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/05/steven-spielber.html

http://www.thebillblog.com/billblog/index.php/2008/05/17/steven-spielberg-interviewed-on-seesmic/

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/indiana-jones-and-friends-take-to-the-web-on-seesmic.php

I'll post more fully on this at some point, and hopefully address some of the considerable amount of misinformation kicking around about this event (not least the suggestion that it was initiated by Seesmic themselves, or that money changed hands between Seesmic and Paramount), and why it played out the way it did.

In the mean time I have to thank Dom, Gia, Saf and Mike for each having crucial input into the planning and execution of this; Vinvin at Seesmic for fighting our corner at his end on this and other projects; and Heath at Paramount Pictures International for giving it the green light in the first place.

(updated 19/06/08 - I realise this isn't the bloody Oscars, but it would be remiss of me not to add in a little big up to John, who met us at the eleventh hour in the foyer of the Carleton, and was bloody marvellous, and found us a great little bar, and fed us beer, and told us exactly how we should do things, and was completely right.)

Finally, a little excerpt from the preparations on the morning of the event, courtesy of Mike:

Start getting ready for WALL:E

2008-05-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

We've been preparing for the arrival of WALL:E for a while, and I know Pixar are second to none in terms of bringing non-human characters to life, but I still wasn't ready for this:

If seen a little bit of WALL:E so far and he looks like a lot of fun - I can't wait to see the little guy working the red carpet.

The Dark Knight: 40 hi-res stills

2008-05-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

Just two of forty hi-res stills on slashfilm. None of them are spoilers as far as I can see.

Alan Moore reads Rorschach's Journal

2008-05-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

For anybody wondering what to expect from WATCHMEN (recently wrapped by Zack Snyder and co. and due out on March 6 2009) here's a glimpse of where it begins; with the unfathomable mind of writer Alan Moore; with the classic style of illustrator Dave Gibbons; and with the initial unravelling of a mystery pursued to it's epochal conclusion by the disturbed and poetic vigilante Rorschach:

The Dark Knight returns

2008-05-08T23:47:00.001-07:00

I'm about a week late with these, but hell, I can't be everywhere at once.

I love the way the fire brings a warmth to this piece of artwork, writing destruction upon Gotham in Batman's own motif, supplemented by a pleasingly unostentatious copy line. There's a real ambiguity here - the bat-sign feels like an open wound in a city where true heroism sometimes requires you to amputate a limb in order to preserve the body.
___

Batman almost looks as though he is on horseback here, reminiscent of the original American vigilantes, bringing rough justice to a wild, lawless and amoral west. This one-sheet is also scarred with a little heat and warmth, emphasising it's otherwise gothic feel.
___

Here they are - the triumvirate of moral misdirection. I love the way we're seeing them like this, shoulder to shoulder, each with something to hide. Each character has been so strongly developed through the campaign, I'm already seeing past the players who portray them, and into the world they inhabit.
___

This echoes one of the earlier teasers in terms of how it situates Batman. It's a strange, bold piece of artwork, seeming to capture a moment in isolation, putting Batman at odds with Gotham itself.
_ _ _

Disclosure: there are a lot of big movies coming out this summer, and I'm lucky enough to be working on most of them, including this one. However, as I've said before, if anybody thinks I'm blogging this for any other reason than because I'm childishly excited about The Dark Knight, they should come say it to my face. Between The Dark Knight and Watchmen, now is the time for the genre of comics in film to mature in the same way the printed equivalents did back in the early eighties. That's what I'm gunning for. And it has fuck all to do with marketing.

Another brick in the wall

2008-05-08T01:10:00.000-07:00

I first heard that Lego were creating a virtual world of their own - Lego Universe - about six months ago, and I knew then that it had MASSIVE potential.

Now I see this concept art on the blog of friend and collaborator Annie Ok, originating from an article on Reuters announcing that Lego Universe will be launching next year, letting players 'create online versions of themselves and interact with each other'.

I often cite Lego as the point of origin for my career as a web develop and interactive marketer. Even as a child I had an innate appreciation of its integral fusion of aesthetics and narrative, and the freedom this gave me to unleash my imagination in colourful and compelling ways. Truth be told, my inner child is pretty damn excited about Lego Universe, and can't wait to introduce my actual kids to what I hope will be a world of consumate creativity and user-generated story-telling.

Higher Faster

2008-05-05T14:15:00.000-07:00

In spite of a contentious choice of soundtrack (Apply Some Pressure from Mark Ronson's excellent VERSION) and some less than crisp slow-mo (paying homage to one of my favourite directors, Wes Anderson) this is definitely one of my favourite adventures with the DV Cam. It was seriously fun to make, I learnt a few new tricks in the process, and it sent Lola to bed tonight with a big smile on her face. Enjoy!

Hancock International Widget

2008-05-02T16:45:00.001-07:00

This is the first time I've seen a widget with the various language options built into it. Figured I'd make a note of it.

Bush League TV

2008-04-30T07:38:00.000-07:00

Watch some ubernerds LIVE as they go for a Guinness World Record by playing GTA IV continuously for over 25 hours:

Something about this is brilliantly banal - the sheer pointlessness of it really captures the spirit of the could-do-but-can't-really-be-arsed generation. I salute them.

Quantum of Solace widget

2008-04-29T16:25:00.001-07:00

I grabbed this not because it's the nicest widget I've ever seen, but because I'm getting it MONTHS out from release, and I'm expecting it to give me all the juice on a movie I'm VERY excited about. Reinforces two things I already kind of knew - movie widgets are driven by video content, and 99% about turning up on time.

Weeds, warning shots and well-wishers

2008-04-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

The kitchen garden's pretty much planted. Over on the left there I've got four rows of spinach, eighteen sprouting broccoli plants (rescued from B&Q's bargain bin for the princely sum of 50p) and three rows of Swiss chard. Next along is a few rows of carrots at the back, and some beetroot at the front. The big middle berth has now fewer than five varieties of lettuce at the back behind three rows of onions, then further along we've got radishes, pak choi and spring onions.

I've used an assortment of garden netting and permeable mesh to provide the necessary protection while the seeds germinate. Between that, a healthy sprinkling of chilli powder and a load of bamboo canes poking out of the ground I can hopefully persuade the local cats to go shit on somebody else's parade. If not, I'm going to get me an air rifle and spend the whole of next weekend camped up in the bedroom with a hip flask and half a dozen scotch eggs, in the hope that I can plant a couple of warning shots on the backside of anything foolish enough to fuck with my greens.

Last year what did for me wasn't feline - it was the sycamore overhead and that nasty looking stuff you can see growing over the other side of the wall. It took a matter of weeks for last year's patch to be overrun, so I'm very conscious that I need to get out there once a week and weed, come wind, rain or shine. I'm also told the sycamore is due to come down pretty soon, and I might hop over the wall and deal with that other stuff myself. If it gets away from me this year I don't think my dear old dad will ever let me forget it.

Big thanks to Canadian Mike, who came over on Saturday and gave me some very timely tips, along with a fair bit of graft - I was happy to be able to offer him the pick of a pretty tasty barbie we rolled out on Saturday night. A shout must also go out to Gordon and Matt, the copywriters, for encouraging me to keep my multimedia gardening experience on air. And congratulations to Carlos - a fellow vegeculturalist - for whom nature's bounty has just extended to a second sprog.

Sorry mum, but I AM Iron Man

2008-04-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

Last time I posted on my blog about a work project it was the faux torture we created in Seesmic to promote the release of UNTRACEABLE. I got a right ticking off from my mum next time I saw her, so I’ve since been reticent about posting anything work-related.

Dr Jan Light notwithstanding, I can’t resist posting an amalgam of stuff we’ve created for what looks like one of the movies of the summer. Such is my anticipation of IRON MAN that I declined the opportunity to attend a preview screening this morning, in order to be able to share the pleasure of watching it with Ems at Mile End Genesis once it’s out on general release.

Any self-respecting comic fan will tell you that Iron Man is simultaneously one of the coolest and one of the most complex superheroes. As a character he expresses a potent fusion of strength and speed, power and grace – made of iron, but powered by rocket fuel. His alter ego on the other hand, arms dealer Tony Stark, has traditionally been depicted as a symbol of human frailty as well as fortitude, through his battles with alcoholism and other personal difficulties. This being the case, Robert Downey Jr has always looked like an inspired bit of casting, and everything I'm hearing at the moment appears to confirm this. In fact, what I'm hearing is that it's just a GREAT movie, and that it should be right up there with the best of the Summer '08 blockbusters.

As far as our work on the campaign goes, there have been two principle strands; a widget, and a Second Life avatar. The widget is right here, and gives you an immediate opportunity to get a piece of the trailer:

In a few days this should automatically upgrade to the Mark 2 widget, currently going through the final approval process. This includes a bundle of movie content and a very cute little puzzle requiring you to assemble Iron Man’s electromagnetic battery in order to access some exclusive content we’ve created.

The avatar compliments this beautifully, being another way in which we’ve used social media to forge a stronger connection with fans. The avatar is currently being dispensed on PPC's Second Life island, Silverscreen, as part of a contest giving anyone the opportunity to win their share of L$125,000. That’s Linden Dollars by the way – the native currency of Second Life. It works out at about US $500.

Fans can enter the contest by creating a piece of jaw-dropping fan art, the only pre-requisite of which is that it must feature the avatar. What I love about it is creating an opportunity unique to this medium tapping into the relentless creative energy of typical Second Life residents, at a time when the hype bubble has undoubtedly burst and many of the early adopting corporate players have abandoned offices in virtual worlds shortly after their much vaunted arrival. I also love the fact that we got to create something that ROCKS this much.

We’re now working with the immensely affable Annie Ok, the ‘multimedia artist, video director and metaverse evangelist’ who has agreed to produce a machinima short showcasing the av. Annie is also bringing all sorts of extra value to the party on account of her many connections in this space, including the tantalising possibility of Iron Man writer Matt Fraction (currently working on the new Invincible Iron Man series) being on the contest’s judging panel.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve become very personally involved in some of the work we’ve done in Second Life over the last couple of years. It would have been difficult to avoid doing so, given that our promotions for 300, DIE HARD and TRANSFORMERS came virtually back-to-back and each required a fortnight of 18-hour working days to execute, punctuated by some moments of bewilderment and abject terror.

As is invariably the way, they are the projects that have truly defined my growth – and, I would suggest, the growth of our department – during that time. I like to think that PPC is now recognised as an agency ready to take on the challenges and realise the opportunities presented by social media, be it web 2.0 or web 3D, and that we’ve managed to become more relevant in the process. Insofar as that keeps things interesting and keeps me on my toes, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

___

DISCLOSURE: In case you've somehow managed to get through this entire post without digesting some fairly key details, I should point out that I'm working on the marketing of this movie in behalf of Paramount Pictures International, and that this may colour my judgement in terms of what you can expect. I haven't seen it though, so I'm going on my instincts as much as the next guy. Frankly, If I didn't think Iron Man was going to ROCK, I'd probably just blog about something else instead.

A king of bad

2008-04-20T02:31:00.000-07:00

Another gem in the spam poetry series, this time from one Ed Shook:

* * *

Girls like when it big

Your armis too small.

Tired of loosing control in bad.

Do not worry we know the solution of this trouble.

Try our product and you will become a king of bad.

http://jaueigne.com/

* * *

I like it. The unorthodox use of language and grammatical structure challenges the perception that we must simply accept the order of things as they are, rather than seeking to change and improve our lives - and our 'arm' - in order to lead a more purposeful, pointed existence. Truly Shook is a visionary, and a master of the form.

Back in the Hackney garden

2008-04-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

It's been a little while but Dad and I made it back out into the garden today. The area we're planning to use for the kitchen garden down at the end has now been dug over to a depth of about two feet. The pile of bricks and rubble over on the right-hand side is just part of what's come out of there since I first broke ground over in the far left-hand corner about a year ago.

The compost bin is starting to fill up with a mixture of kitchen and garden waste, and now plays host to some lovely red worms. The bark chippings have settled down nicely, and the way is clear for the introduction of a shed.

You can see from the photo that the kitchen garden still needs to be levelled, and we need to introduce a shitload of compost to replace the four or five cubic metres of rubble we've excavated. Once that's in it will be time to start thinking about this year's crops. I'm thinking lettuces, spring onions and radishes, for starters, so that the least we get out of it is some lovely fresh salads.

Anyone got any other suggestions?

Oh, and by the way, I cleaned up these pictures using Adobe Photoshop Express, a free web-based service featuring some quite advanced photo-editing and sharing functionality. All very nicely put together. I'll be using it again for sure.

What's Next in Marketing + Advertising (according to Paul Isakson)

2008-03-23T17:08:00.000-07:00

Found this through Twitter:

| View | Upload your own

Wanted to keep a note of it, not just because of the content but also because it uses something called slideshare, which looks pretty cool.

It came from here.

Gary Vaynerchuk's 80/20 Business rule

2008-03-20T21:23:00.002-07:00

I like this:

Not only does it make a lot of sense, but I appreciate the spirit and the sentiment behind it. It ties in very nicely with the second installment of my SXSWi retrospective; working title - The value of FREE.

SXSWi 2008: We, the people

2008-03-12T21:47:00.000-07:00

A COMMUNALIST MANIFESTO

In many parts of the world, communalism is a modern term that describes a broad range of social movements and social theories which are in some way centered upon the community - Wikipedia.
_ _ _

Just arrived home from South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), a 4-day coming-together of bloggers, geeks and new media mavens in and around the convention centre in Austin, Texas. My mind's still buzzing and I can't sleep, so here it is; my SXSWi.
_ _ _

What am I doing here?
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SXSWi 2008

Saturday morning. I have little or no idea what to expect, beyond a long queue to register. As it is I find time to get my pass, smoke, get coffee, defecate, say hello to CC Chapman, smoke, collect my freebie bag, empty my freebie bag onto a nearby table, smoke and get coffee, before ducking into the first of the panels that catches my eye.

It used to be that if you ran a bad ad campaign and everybody hated it you could just pull it. These days, just when you think the inferno of negative blog coverage is finally dying down, you’ll end up featuring in The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007 watching the embers of your humiliation fanned back into a roaring flame by such denizens of interactive media as Steve Hall (Adrants), Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine) and Rebecca Lieb (ClickZ).

The panel is a lynching, albeit an entertainingly insightful one, and, as it happens, just a foretaste of what’s to come at SXSWi 2008. It opens the programme by firing a warning shot across the bows of marketers like myself who feels compelled to venture into the undiscovered country of web 2.0; do so with caution, and respect for the natives. They have sharper spears than you do. And they have more of them.
_ _ _

Following the morning’s bloodlust and a lunchtime burrito I settle down by a power point in Ballroom A for the day’s keynote, with Henry Jenkins. I do so with absolutely no idea who he is. It doesn’t surprise me to learn that he’s an academic and an author. It doesn’t mention in the programme notes that he is also a man of visionary brilliance.

‘I’ vs ‘we’
HENRY JENKINS ON COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Jenkins introduces many notions throughout his Opening Remarks, but the point at which SXSWi really starts for me is when he first presents the notion of ‘collective intelligence’, using it to describe our increasing capacity to process information in ever closer conjunction with one another, making use of the rapidly widening array of social networking tools at our disposal.

Jenkins sees collective intelligence driving change and convergence in the areas of education, politics and entertainment. He cites the example of the Harry Potter books, seeing a generation learning not only to read, but also to write, socialise and become political through Rowling’s work, articulated and aggregated through blogs, online communities and other social networks.

He also discusses the television series LOST, strands of which are more fully realised and developed through websites and other interactive channels, by which individual ‘pathologizing’ creates a communally realised narrative. And, looking within World of Warcraft, Guild loyalties are understood as a new, wholly legitimate form of ‘civic connection’.

Eventually Jenkins arrives at the question of how this cumulative creative energy can be harnessed to improve society. The closest he comes to providing an answer, and a clear manifesto for his ideas, lies in his observation of the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘we’.

Jenkins is ‘an Obama boy’, and believes that Obama’s campaign mantra, Yes we can, is symbolic of the fact that, in a world in which politicians still speak in the language of ‘I’, a generation of children are growing up defining themselves and their ideas in terms of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we believe’.

This isn’t presented as happening at the expense of individuality or self-determination. On the contrary, this is not communism but communalism, seeing the interests of the community best served by the divergent creativity and initiative of we, its constituents.
_ _ _

The AMD Bloghaus is to be found in meeting room 7 of the 3rd floor. I’m sitting in ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) and the Future of Entertainment when tweet comes through that beer is now being served in the Bloghaus.

Somewhat disenchanted by the fact that the panel’s only advertised member, Susan Bonds of 42 Entertainment, has been replaced by three ill-prepared substitute panellists, I withdraw. (I now note that the panel is not listed on the SXSWi website. Evidently I inadvertently strayed into some highly unsatisfactory alternate reality in which SXSWi panels are a bit of a waste of time.)

Creating we
THE NEW CONNECTEDNESS

I know who I’m hoping to find at the Bloghaus. I’m hunting down Hugh Macleod (AKA Gaping Void), blogger, cartoonist and designer of the SXSWi swag bag (pictured left – photo courtesy of Laughing Squid). I’m not doing it for the conversation. He doesn’t really seem to have conversations, at least not with me. He just draws pictures and makes connections, managing overflow by playing cupid.

About 18 months ago Hugh introduced me to Neville Hobson, a well-respected communicator, blogger and podcaster who has gone on to become an important collaborator, and a friend. Hugh made the introduction very much on his own initiative, and at the expense of his own time. Hugh can sometimes seem standoffish, but he understand the importance of connectedness as well as anybody.

Within minutes of locating him I’m locked in conversation with Damiano Vukotic, Head of Sales & Digital Strategy at RSA Films. We follow each other through Twitter, and have mutual friends back in London, but this is the first time we’ve met in the flesh. As we talk Hugh occasionally looks in, like a horticulturalist, checking the seed of yet another idea.

Hugh and Damiano are just two of the fifty-ish people I now follow on Twitter, most of whom also follow me. For the uninitiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging tool exquisitely fine-tuned to connect like-minds through the ongoing exchange of thoughts and ideas, expressed in 140 characters or less. It was the great success story of SXSWi 2007, and, frankly, looks like being that of 2008 as well.

Where Facebook holds a mirror up to my life and reflects all the relationships that are and once were through the simple binary of ‘friendship’, almost everybody I know on Twitter I know through Twitter, and each brings something different to the table. Twitter germinates, where Facebook merely incubates.

It seems to me that this is an important principle of creating we. It’s not enough to just connect – and certainly not to re-connect – people. You have to achieve a reaction, something new and full of promise; a co-incidence of chemistry and mutual empathy or understanding. Just as the value of money is wholly relative to that of what it buys us, a connection’s worth is measured in engagement.
_ _ _

Them and us
ZUCKERBERG & LACY ; THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WEST ; NETWORKED RELATIVISM

Anybody attending Sunday’s keynote by Mark Zuckerberg, 24-year-old Harvard graduate and billionaire founder and CEO of Facebook, likely comes away with their own version of events.

It's a debacle, whichever way you turn it, whereby the blandness of Zuckerberg and the flippancy of his interviewer, Sarah Lacy, coalesce to provoke exactly the wrong kind of reaction.

Lacy's undeniably flirtacious approach suggests that she was after an altogether different kind of engagement. She appears to have undertaken the interview with some very clear ideas about what's going to happen, and the many plaudits that will ensue. When things started to get away from her the best she can manage by way of Plan B is to bemoan how difficult her job is, and to begrudgingly declare ‘mob rule’. SXSWi 2008 won’t yield a better example of the arbitrary, single-mindedness of I being swept aside by the common interests of we, the unruly masses.

Unfortunately the principle offshoot of this is that much of what Zuckerberg actually said has been spared analysis. Of course, once you’ve heard Facebook described as a tool for “more efficient communication” for the seventh or eight time, you tend to lose the will to tweet. This was compounded by the fact that Lacy seemed ready to avoid just about any avenue of inquisition on the strength of his assertion that ‘we’re just not focused on that right now’.

Maybe I imagined it. Because it seemed to me as though, somewhere amid this evasion and awkwardness, the Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook had succeeded in opening up a new front in the war on terror. I must have imagined it. It hardly seems to have warranted a mention anywhere in the morass of resulting coverage.

As I saw it, he articulated the view that a generation of Lebanese students, using Facebook to follow the progress of friends journeying into the wider Western world, have now put aside some of the prejudices that might have drawn them into a life of Islamic fundamentalism. Terrorism, actually. (I’m pretty sure he used the word ‘terrorism’. It struck me at the time as a slightly awkward word for him to use, he being the CEO of a company in whom the venture capital division of the CIA has a pronounced financial interest.)

His argument seemed to be that Facebook has torn down the walls of censorship constructed by Imams in order to shield their students from the truth about the West. As I understand it the truth about the West – in this context at least – is that we’re an unholy quasi-religious Zionist alliance, united under the banners of greed and self-interest, crusading to take control of the world’s natural resources and spreading gambling, pornography and substance abuse to all four corners of the world in the process.

Looking at some of the most popular Facebook Applications (Mob Wars, Armies, Vampires, Zombies, Friends For Sale!, Texas HoldEm Poker et al) I can’t for the life of me see what Facebook does to debunk this point of view. On the contrary, I could list dozens of the most popular apps supporting the notion that all we do is trade in cheap thrills and human suffering. Spend enough time looking through them, and even Scrabulous starts to feel a tiny bit Anglocentric.

Maybe Zuckerberg would argue that Facebook is humanizing the students’ relationships with the wider world, creating an authentic sense of connectedness with a credible reality outside of that in which they are immersed, imprisoned even. That’s not the Facebook I use. My Facebook commodifies my relationships, templatizing my friends within its own arbitrary strictures of format and function. My Facebook puts up walls, more than it knocks them down.

Anybody trading in moral absolutes, be it Zuckerberg or the Imams he decries, is going backwards, at a time when we ought to be moving forwards into an era of networked moral relativism, originating from grass-roots and transcending personal, cultural and historical context.
_ _ _

I hadn’t heard of PostSecret until a few minutes before Frank Warren’s Monday keynote was about to start. I flicked through the weighty $40-to-replace festival programme and caught a quick summary before leaving Emma at P.F. Changs Chinese Bistro and bolting through heavy rain across Congress and into Ballroom A.

I only made it to the Monday keynote on account of a delay to our flight out of Chicago, and the decision to spend $100 pushing back our connecting flight until later in the afternoon. I had a good feeling. The feeling that it would turn out to be money well spent.

Getting to know we
FRANK WARREN & THE SECRETS WE KEEP FROM OURSELVES

PostSecret is a community art project started by Frank Warren as the basis for an installation in 2004, whereby he invited anybody to send him a postcard decorated with a secret that they had never previously revealed. He now curates over 2,500 original pieces of art sent to him from all over the world, and continues to receive new secrets on a daily basis, leading him to be described as “the most trusted stranger in America”.

Warren has a pastoral quality, free from religious rhetoric, openly pondering the ways in which this makeshift confessional has affected his life and those of his boundless flock. It’s seems pretty clear that he has addressed some of his own demons in the course of confronting other people’s, bringing him to the realisation that “the children most broken by the world become those most likely to change it”.

He also understands the power of a secret, and of sharing it. He cites the example of somebody emailing him to tell him that they’d written their secret on a postcard, but that the mere sight of it written down had led them to tear up the card, and to change their life irrevocably. This is what Warren is talking about when he refers to the second type of secret; not the one we keep from others, but the one we keep from ourselves.

Warren finishes speaking, and invites members of the audience to share their questions – and secrets – with the room. The first question is a simple one, a proposal of marriage. (She says ‘yes’.) It feels a bit Oprah for a moment, but sits nicely against Warren’s sermon. Questions and confessions follow thick and fast, until a girl takes the mike and opens up about the fact that her sister, a blogger, can’t be with her in Austin because of a life-threatening illness. She implores members of the audience to post a message of support on her sister’s blog then takes up Warren’s offer of a hug. The keynote closes with a standing ovation, and, for my part at least, a strong sense of occasion.

Whatever’s happening here, it’s been bubbling away under the surface for me since day one. It began to crystallize that morning around the point that Hugh, on the panel for Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing, made his closing observation that “a story without love isn’t worth telling”. He’s right. And somewhere beneath the surface of this convention – in the last place you might expect to find it – is a powerful shared emotional agenda, and an acute sense of intimacy.
_ _ _

Our little secret
AN EXPERIMENT IN INTIMACY

I’m going to tell you a secret. I’d like you to help me destroy it, both for my own sake and for the purposes of demonstration.

Take yourself back to the beginning of Saturday, my first day at SXSWi. I haven’t slept so well, and I wake up later than I would have liked. Stealing nothing more than a mouthful of granola on my way out the door, I make a breakfast out of vente latte and Camel Lights. After that it’s pretty much coffee and cigarettes all the way through to beer o’clock. I manage a cheap burrito some time around lunchtime. I drink no water whatsoever.

I pick up a headache, and someone doses me up with some weapons-grade painkillers, washed down with my first mouthful of beer. More beer. Cigarette. Across to the Seesmic party for one margarita (god that’s strong), a second, third one’s almost palatable, and hey, nice, it’s a rooftop bar, I can smoke freely. Cigarette. Cigarette. Emma arrives and we head downstairs for dinner, which, for my part, consists primarily of a bottle of red, with a few scraps of barbecued red meat for ballast. Cigarette. Cigarette. Cigarette.

Days like these. I’ve had a few. At some point it became my idea of fun. The next morning isn’t, but I make a fist of it, until I have to duck out of a panel to have a fifteen-minute chat with a toilet. By the time I’m done I can see flecks of blood in the bowl; fresh, red blood, so probably nothing worse than a grazed oesophagus, but it freaks me out. I find myself a corner somewhere in the corridor outside, and hide behind my laptop. My throat’s sore, my stomach is tied in a convulsing knot of emptiness, and my head and my heart ache from the truth.

At that moment I know for certain that if I don’t affect a change – a sea-change – in terms of how I live my life, I’ll never see my daughters grow into the confident beautiful young ladies they will undoubtedly become, like the one I was lucky enough to meet and marry. I just won’t last that long. I’ve had too much fun already, and I wasn’t made to do things in half measures. On the contrary, I’ve always preferred doubles.

This knowledge hits hard, and with it comes the realisation that part of me doesn’t want to care, and almost wants to create distance between me and the ones I love. Part of me will always be looking for a way out, an angle that will allow me to go on doing it my way. It’s a part of me I try to hide from others, and from myself. It’s a part of me inscribed here now, in these few lines.

There it is. A broken secret. If you’re wondering why on earth I’d share such a thing with the world, you’re slightly of missing the point. Who else would you have me share it with? Whoever you are, whoever I am, all that matters is that we’re talking.
_ _ _

So what are we doing here?
LAST(ING?) IMPRESSIONS OF SXSWi

Mass intimacy. In application, it means showing you my daughters, Lola and Ruby, come into this world, or sharing Emma’s and my many hopes and fears in the weeks and months before we first became parents. It means taking you on holiday with us, inviting you to commute with me, or inviting you to pick over the many other fragments. It means opening up our lives to others, and to ourselves.

Mass intimacy. Contradiction in terms? a paradox? If so, a paradox befitting of a movement of closet extroverts, marrying our essential insecurity with an urgent need to share our point of view. Together we pool our knowledge and destroy secrets in the course of creating our new morality of networked relativism, whereby our actions are conveyed through infinite time and space, so that we may understand them in the most intimate of terms.

Mass intimacy. Empathy through greater understanding. Love through the prism of technology, experimentation and desire. Sometimes we hide behind the minutiae, but it’s each other we’re contemplating, not the tangle of hardware and software in between.

Mass intimacy. Love and technology. Feels like a kind of paradox. So walk the halls of SXSWi. We are the paradox.

South by Southwest - PROLOGUE

2008-03-09T06:33:00.000-07:00

I'm still twenty-four hours away from publishing my South by Southwest write-up. It's already looking like my finest post to date, so I'm just not prepared to rush it. However, in the interim I'm posting a couple of video clips from Austin to tide you over.

The first is a Seesmic I posted on the first day. (The reference to a lynching stems from the UNTRACEABLE campaign, and the fact that Seesmic's principle moderator now refers to me as 'Tortureboy'):

The second video is the much-maligned Zuckerberg/Lacy interview. I recommend watching it for yourself, and taking your own view:

I'll be posting my own thoughts on this and all things South by Southwest asap.

Eight random things about me

2008-03-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

I've been tagged by Sizemore and Joshua March to write eight random things about myself. These are they:

1. I wear a glass eye, as a result of an accident that happened when I was four years old. Sustaining the injury is my earliest memory.

2. I used to be a fully paid-up member of the Young Herpetologists Club.

3. Whilst at school I wrote, directed, produced and starred in Sinderella, a playful re-envisioning of the traditional fairytale pre-dating Jim Davidson's production of the same name.

4. In my capacity as Edinburgh University newspaper's most prolific film critic I was once required to write a review of Fierce Creatures without having seen it. It was 500 words of utter shite.

5. I had to borrow twenty quid from an occasional shag in order to meet the cost of printing my English Literature dissertation. It was entitled Taking Liberties: Ideas of Freedom in the Graphic Novel.

6. I should have asked the last question on an edition of Question Time (from Nottingham) dating from circa 1994, but Dimbleby ran out of time.

7. I presented Second Life to Bruce Willis. He took the piss out of me, and people like me.

8. Last night I had a few drinks and passed out in the sixty-nine position. So did my wife.

I believe it's now customary for me to nominate eight people to participate in this cruel and unusual experiment.

Not sure if I know eight people with blogs who haven't already participated. Here are four to be getting on with: Neville, James, Saffron, Charlotte,

Everybody's watching WATCHMEN

2008-03-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

By 10.00am this morning I'd already been sent links to these WATCHMEN character shots by three different people.

The Comedian:

Rorschach:

Nite Owl:

Ozymandias:

The Silk Spectre:

Either people know that I'm a massive WATCHMEN fan, or this movie is already being brilliantly teased out into the public domain, exactly one year out from release. Or both. Probably both.

As for the characters, I think they're exceptionally well realised. I was one of 6,500 people at Comic-con who sat in the palm of Zack Snyder's prodigious hand as he explained some of the challenges he was trying to overcome in deciding how to make the movie, and why he had reached the crucial decision not to try and modernise the story in the style of his predecessors on the project. It felt at the time as though the greatest comic ever written was in safe hands. Seeing these, I'm feeling more confident of this than ever.

For anybody wanting further reading I heartily recommend Zack's own WATCHMEN production blog.

The friendly skies

2008-03-04T05:41:00.000-08:00

Currently in LA with Emma and Ruby. We had a great flight over - Ruby kipped and fed and kipped and fed the whole way.

Along the way we flew over Greenland, and saw some of the most incredible views I've ever seen from an aircraft. It was quite disconcerting to think that landscape so beautiful, on that scale, could be under threat from such a transient and ridiculous thing as humanity.

I didn't think to try and take a photo, but I did take this shortly before we landed:

Looks like Smallville on a Saturday night, right? That there is actually Las Vegas; that concentration of light and colour and lurid largesse under seige from the flawless emptiness of the Nevada desert.

We stole a few hours sleep once we'd checked in, but we're awake now, waiting for the sun to start rising. Between unfamiliar environs, jet lag, green tea and Orbital - Live at Glastonbury: 1994-2004 it feels a bit like the good ol' days.

Now all I have to do is play my caffeine right all the way through to the espresso martini firing me up for tonight's dinner engagement, at the end of what looks like being a day and a half.

Literally.

More THE DARK KNIGHT teasers

2008-03-02T17:40:00.000-08:00

I posted a pretty foggy version of one of these a while back, along with a couple of other teasers, but I just got hold of both of these at great quality, so I figured I had to post them:

I can't tell you how excited I am about this movie. That's not just a figure of speech; I really can't. I'm under one of WB's cast-iron NDAs. I'm probably violating it just by talking about it. I'll shut up now.

"Hateful", "threatening" and "obscene"

2008-02-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

This morning I got in to work to discover that Facebook had deleted the page we created to promote UNTRACEABLE (left).

This worked on the basis that we would show more of an extended torture sequence from the movie as the page attracted more fans.

We updated it late last night and sent a mailshot to the 300-odd existing fans to tell them that the clip had been extended.

When we got in this morning there was nothing left except a message explaining that ‘pages that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed’.

As a response to this we today issued this press release. The torture sequence can now be viewed here, and will be extended as this site receives more hits. If and when we reach 10,000 we get to show the first 10 minutes of the film.

The movie's out on friday. It's going to be fascinating to see what (if anything) happens between now and then. I'll keep you posted.

Nobody watches... nobody gets hurt (pt 2).

2008-02-21T15:09:00.000-08:00

Please note: this post includes further graphical depictions of violence and torture.

So, where was I? Ah, yes, the point at which Vinvin Skyped me and asked us to kindly stop posting faux snuff movies into their fun-for-all-the-family video blogging community. He was very charming about it, as you would imagine a proud Frenchman to be, and was kind enough to compliment us on a job well done.

It's probably worth explaining at this point that this activity had been undertaken to promote a movie called UNTRACEABLE on behalf of Universal Pictures, a movie in which a serial killer creates an "untraceable" website where he conducts violent and painful murders LIVE on the net.

It transpired that one of the Seesmic moderators had taken rather fervent exception to the nature of the content we were posting, and was threatening to delete both the videos and the account. Whether this was because she thought she was witnessing a genuine electrocution - or because she considered our script and special effects to be criminally awful - is not yet clear. Whatever the case, the situation had quickly escalated to the point whereby they felt compelled to act.

We've since had a good natter, and have some plans for next week, the nature of which will become clear as they unfold. At their heart: a shared interest in trying to understand what you have to depict in order to cross the line. Perhaps the Seesmic community holds the answer.

In the mean time, here is the last of the (not so) live webisodes, posted here for posterity, on the back of an agreement not to pollute Seesmic with any more of our horrorshow filth:

Social Media Cafe

2008-02-16T02:18:00.000-08:00

I picked up my twitter feed yesterday morning and spotted that @jangles (aka Neville Hobson) was on his way up to London for the 4th Social Media Cafe. This is an event that takes place upstairs at the Coach & Horses in Greek St, and serves as a coming together for some of the great and good from the UK blogging scene.

As soon as I arrived I recognised a couple of faces from Seesmic, particularly those of @sizemore (left) and @yellowpark (aka Mike Atherton and Chris Dalby). I gather that Mike Butcher from Techcrunch UK was also there, as was Lloyd Davis, the organiser of the event, who kindly took some time to talk me through the pub's notorious history as a sixties hangout for hard-drinking hacks.

I also had an excellent conversation with Josh March, commercial director of a specialist social media marketing agency called iNetworkMarketing, for whom this must have been an invaluable networking opportunity. It was great to challenge him on the question of whether Facebook is actually good for much of anything, and to find that he shared my evolving view that it best serves an increment of the relationships in your life that are neither the most nor the least familiar, but somewhere in between.

I understand that somebody was giving a demo of a site that hasn't gone public yet - I think it might have been called BuzzSpotter - that mashes up Twitter and Google maps to create a kind of conversation geolocator. I missed the opportunity to get a peek at that, but from what Jangles was saying it sounded pretty cool.

This Seesmic by Sizemore gives a pretty good sense of proceedings. For my part I could have happily continued pretty much every conversation I had through lunch and well into the afternoon; some have already carried over into Twitter and Seesmic. All in all it was great to see some names, voices and faces crystallize into such an amiable and energetic occasion.
___

The photo above is taken from this set by Thayer18 - aka Thayer Driver - a lovely young lady who gave me both a delicious rum truffle (which, technically, was breakfast) and a hug through the course of the event. It is reproduced here without her kind permission. Sizemore has already described it as looking like a shot from the production of a social media Lord of the Rings. I can't improve on that.

Nobody watches... nobody gets hurt (pt 1).

2008-02-14T17:00:00.000-08:00

Please note: this post includes graphical depictions of violence and torture.

I've just come off a hastily arranged Skype call with Cyrille de Lasteyrie - a.k.a. Vinvin - VP of Seesmic inc. Alongside Loic Le Meur, Vinvin is one of the co-founders of Seesmic, an invitation-only video blogging community looking set to become a serious force in 2008.

Loic's just published a tidy summary of the story of Seesmic so far, including details of how they've managed to raise $6 million in initial funding. All this with a user-base of little more than a 1,000 viewers, and approximately 200 regular contributors, of which I am one. [UPDATE 15/03/08: Turns out these stats are way out of date - Vinvin has been kind enough to post the latest figures in a comment on this post. 8,000 viewers, 800 very active!]

I first spoke to Vinvin a couple of weeks back, after emailing Loic to find out about opportunities for PPC to promote films within Seesmic. I had one particular campaign in mind, and even went so far as to outline a couple of ideas we were playing around with. I wasn't looking for any explicit endorsement; equally I didn't want to act without giving them the heads-up. Vinvin promptly gave me his blessing, and he was kind enough to throw in a few invitation codes for good measure.

A few days later a new member joined the Seesmic community, going under the name of Sharpeshooter. This was one of his first posts:

In the days that followed Sharpeshooter posted a few dozen times, initiating some discussions and contributing to others, touching on everything from politics to prostitution.

Just before last weekend, Sharpeshooter went quiet.

On tuesday the following clip appeared, posted using his account:

This was just two days ago. The following morning, the hooded figure was back:

Then, last night, Sharpeshooter suddenly reappeared, albeit under duress:

All through last night and this morning clips like this appeared within the public timeline. Then, at around 6pm this evening, the situation started to change rapidly. The clips were posted, about 30 minutes apart:

It was at this point that I received a very polite email from Vinvin, asking if I could jump into Skype for five minutes...

TO BE CONTINUED

MyCBBC - 'Facebook for kids'

2008-02-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

Diligent as ever, The Lorries have asked for another opinion piece - this time they're after a response to the news that the BBC is launching a social networking site for kids called MyCBBC, filling the gap left by sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo who set their lower age limit at 13.

Marc Goodchild, head of interactive and on-demand at BBC children's, is bullish about the opportunity here for the BBC: "There is a commercial market failing in the children's space because they don't want to take on the responsibility for younger users. The only player which can do this has to be a public service broadcaster."

This may be true, but the BBC will need to move beyond this traditional remit considerably if it is to succeed in delivering a genuine social networking experience. It will be interesting to see whether they can overcome their instinct to broadcast and embrace the aspects of the web that best characterise social media; aspects that differentiate it from their traditional haunts of television and radio?

I'm talking about personalisation, at the expense of brand integrity; user-generated content, at the expense of quality control; and, most importantly, using the web as a medium for the free exchange of ideas between 'audience' members, rather than as a mechanism for their delivery from a single, central point of origin.

It would be easy to imagine that this somehow doesn't apply for kids, and that they will settle for less. Less freedom, less creativity, less of a platform for their imaginitive energy. Yet when is your creativity less inhibited, and your urge for self-expression more exuberant, than when you are a child?

Bebo recently declared itself a 'social media network', and, with reality shows like The Gap Year, appears to be moving inexorably in the direction of becoming a web-only broadcaster. As reality TV and interactive media blur at the edges, it will be fascinating to see if the Beeb is capable of moving far enough fast enough in the opposite direction.

Graze

2008-02-01T17:12:00.000-08:00

PLEASE NOTE: This post was heavily updated a couple of days after I first published it. With everything I've added, I'd like to think that it deserves re-reading.

After keeping his cards very close to his chest for the last few months Tommy P finally spilt a handful of beans on the new venture he's going to be involved with in 2008 - www.graze.com.

The site currently consists of little more than a mailing list, some nice sweeping images of greenery and healthy goodness and the promise of 'nature delivered'. Nice to see that it's already showing some class - the data capture is carefully graded, allowing you to leave as much or as little useful info as you want, accompanied by the promise that 'we hate spam'.

I haven't been able to prise out of Tommy exactly how Graze will work, but it's looking like some sort of online grocers. The venture is the brainchild of a former colleague of his from Lovefilm, which offers some clues as to the business model behind it. As with Lovefilm and the home entertainment industry, the internet undoubtedly has the potential to revolutionise the mechanics of grocery shopping, through the creation of more efficient mechanisms for ordering and fulfilment. Unlike Lovefilm (in its current incarnation at least) fruit and veg aren't about to be rendered redundant by people downloading their nutrients on demand.

Several of the established supermarket chains are already well underway with the process of adapting their business models to begin realise this opportunity. As of 2007 the online grocery sector was still dominated by major supermarket chains including Tesco, Sainsbury's, ASDA and Waitrose, of which Tesco is a comfortable front-runner. The closest thing to a successful internet-only brand is Ocado, a warehouse-based retailer partly owned by The John Lewis Partnership, which is steadily expanding its area of geographical coverage and has become another leading player in this sector.

Whatever headway has been made in fulfilling demand for online grocery shopping, the extent of the demand will always dictate the pace at which the opportunity can be brought to fruition. Consumer behaviour can be influenced by advertising, marketing and public relations, but any internet business forgets at its peril that the foremost casualties of the dotcom bubble were businesses failing to account for the extent to which we consumers are irrational, creatures of habit, not about to change our habits overnight for the sake of raw fiscal or logistical incentives.

A recent report found that 15.9% of respondents purchased groceries via the Internet at least once in a year, with 3.2% making online purchases at least once a week and 2.7% making them two or three times a month. The largest proportion, 4.5%, purchased groceries online one or two times a year. The UK Internet grocery market, considered to be one of the most developed in the world, is expected to increase its current value by 80% within the next 5 years. When one considers how uniquitous a requirement groceries represent, these must be regardeded as nascent levels of demand, leaving plenty of grocery shoppers whose allegiances to their local supermarket chain are there to be tested when they make the transition to ordering online.

Indeed one wonders how much of a hurry established chains are in to see their customers drifting online. An internet shopper is less likely to make impulse purchases outside the scope of a shopping list; less likely to buy weekly magazines, and certainly daily newspapers, as part of a fortnightly or monthly order; less likely to buy music and DVDs from an outlet who can't compete with Amazon on price; less likely to buy clothes without being able to try them on; less likely to be seduced by point-of-sale leaflets advertising loans and other financial services; and far less likely to buy fuel for their car when they no longer need to make the trip. No, the chains will always prefer their customers in-store rather than online, for as long as their core business isn't being threatened by upstart start-ups offering an improved, exclusively online alternative.

There's no inherent reason why the chains shouldn't be challenged in this way. Amazon itself has succeeded in establishing itself as an online retailer leading multiple markets ahead of existing businesses who've attempted to make the transition from high street to information super-highway. Seth Godin examines Amazon's success in his latest book, Meatball Sundae, ascribing it to the very fact that Amazon was built from the ground up, conceived for the medium of the web and free from the baggage of an established bricks-and-mortar business.

Certainly anybody wanting to compete in this space faces some substantial barriers to entry. These include high start-up costs, efficient stock-picking and replenishment systems, comprehensive delivery networks and user-friendly website design, assuming the start-up adopts the same basic business model. Of course, every now and then some bright spark affects a paradigm shift, re-envisaging the way a service is offered and a need fulfilled, and managing to clean up off the back of it. I'd love to think that Graze is about to do just that, but until I hear otherwise I'm assuming that they'll be competing with the big boys on roughly the same terms. If so, the key to their success will be the little differences, and how they communicate them to make one big one.

Indeed, I think there is an important opportunity here, growing from a grassroots disillusionment with the chains. There is a strengthening consensus that a steady decline in UK food standards - and the corresponding woes of British agriculture - can be ascribed to disproportionate influence exerted by supermarkets over customers and suppliers. I can't help feeling that they're well overdue a comeuppance in this respect - the kind of sudden, sweeping retribution that only this new industrial revolution can inflict - and I think that Graze will quickly engender some precious goodwill if it's seen to be reasserting the primacy of the relationship between consumer and producer.

The tyranny of Tesco was one factor in Emma's and my decision to start having a box of organic veg delivered by The Organic Delivery Company. This comes once a week, and contains a selection of stuff selected by the delivery company based on what's in season. Putting our current raw beetroot surplus to one side, this is a great way to get your veg. It reminds of a comment Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy made in his presentation at The Media Summit a few weeks ago, to the effect that people have been found to be shopping for organic food because there's a smaller selection to choose from, and in this context choice is sometimes perceived as burdensome. I think Graze would do well to consider how they can enable time-starved grocery shoppers to relinquish this burden, putting it in the hands of a responsible supplier using technology to better understand our needs and act on our behalves.

It will be interesting to see how Graze unfolds, but it certainly looks like a project Tommy will be proud to be a part of. We've worked together building websites and interactive applications since 1998, most notably developing Ploggle together from the ground up, and collaborating on all manner of ground-breaking projects for PPC. As developers go he's a natural, and as hard-working as anybody I know, which is a potent combination. I hope this venture allows him to finally turn these talents into wealth beyond his wildest dreams, but, more importantly, that everyone involved has a blast making it happen. For my part, I'll keep tapping him up for titbits, and I'll keep you posted.

another Jumper widget. not one of ours either!

2008-01-30T17:15:00.001-08:00

but cool anyway :) very interested to see this movie.

Makin' pants

2008-01-30T01:36:00.000-08:00

Another night of less than five hours sleep. Normally I can take one or two in my stride, but it feels like I've been doing them back to back for at least a couple of weeks, and it's definitely starting to take its toll.

The rididulous thing is, it's not even because of Ruby. She sleeps WAAAAAY better than I do; she's sleeping as well as you could hope for a newborn. The problem is fitting in all the other stuff. As well as working through a full roster of existing work we're pitching for multiple campaigns through Q1 and Q2 '08.

Now's the time to get the work in, if you want a nice busy summer. You can't just sit around until spring has sprung before you start asking after the tentpoles, not any more. Not when a stand-out online campaign needs to run for 2-3 months, rather than the traditional 2-3 weeks.

On top of the work, I've got a wife, two kids, a garden and a blog to look after. Or thereabouts. The reality is that Ems pretty much looks after me; she was back on her feet within about 15 minutes of Ruby's arrival, but that's just the way she's made. Lola is increasingly learning to look after herself (She just marched into the room wearing a pair of knickers back to front and proudly announced that "Lola makin' pants"). And my dad's brought some much needed backbone to the garden, as you'll see from the latest installment (below).

So, in amongst it all, I'm just about finding the time. It makes me realise that in this day and age, more than ever, time is of the essence. But that's for another time. For now it's just a case of don't worry, don't hurry, and don't forget to smell the flowers.

Hackney Garden - Compost Bin

2008-01-30T01:09:00.000-08:00

Oranjeboom is not the only fruit

2008-01-24T14:19:00.000-08:00

PPC's impressively proactive PR firm, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry (AKA "The Lorries"), have been back in touch. Turns out they quite liked the last opinion piece I posted for them, so I'm doing another one.

This piece is about 'mobile social networking', whatever that is. It seems to pertain to social networks that are only accessible through mobile devices. That seems a little odd to me. Why would you do that? It would be like only drinking lager out of cans, standing on street corners.

Reading on through the notes they passed on I found a reference to some 'thriving mobile-exclusive social networks'. I'd never really come across such things, which I found odd and slightly alarming, given that my endeavours in international movie marketing have required me to acquaint myself with pretty much all of the world's most popular social networks. A quick trip to Wikipedia yielded the names of two such mobile-exclusive services; Jumbuck and airG.

Cue a trip to the Jumbuck homepage, and the immediate realisation that Jumbuck isn't so much a social network as 'the world's largest provider of mobile community services', offering white label products including Power Chat, TXT Chat and Fast Flirting. I'm thinking I've got their number (and, thanks to a drunken run-in with The Flirt Hotline, that they've got mine). The realisation that I may be one of their 15-million-strong global user base - and that until a few seconds ago I wasn't even aware of it - undermines the suggestion that they are a social network, in any useful sense of the term.

Further examination does yield Chat Del Mundo, a 'dedicated mobile chat and picture community for Spanish speakers in the South and Central America, the USA and Spain, with over 1 million active users', owned and operated by Jumbuck. Reading about Chat Del Mundo I was reminded of a presentation at last week's Media Summit, at which one of the speakers noted that, globally speaking, far more people have internet access through mobile devices than via PCs.

The speaker was Bob Greenberg, Chairman of interactive agency R/GA. Anticipating that 2008 would see the 'third screen' (by which he meant that of a mobile device) well on its way to becoming the first screen, surpassing PCs and television along the way, Greenberg called upon various statistics to illustrate the accelerating proliferation of mobile devices. One stat I do recall is that in the UK there are more mobile devices than people. Greenberg himself professed to carrying three mobiles about his person 'at all times'.

In defining the difference between the three screens Greenberg argued that television was a medium designed for the delivery of narrative, that PCs are best suited to interaction, and that mobiles are defined by context. This was a theme that was later picked up by Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy, who saw mobile media as defined by its location-specificity, 'much like Pernod. Outside a rustic French cafe; heavenly. Inside a small London flat; piss.' Indeed, beyond greater levels of global accessibility, this is where I could see mobile social networks offering something extra to the end user.

Suppose I'm in LA. I'm out and about in Venice Beach on a friday night and I want to settle in at a decent bar. I could try and find something searching listings through WAP, but that's not going to give me any real indication of quality, or whether it would be my kind of place. How about if instead of that I could pose the question to friends of mine - and friends of theirs - using Facebook mobile, even providing them with a map using GPRS to pinpoint my exact location at the time?

If you take my 150 'friends' and, allowing for overlap, reckon that each of them brings a further 50 uniques to the mix, I have the potential to hit 7,500 people, each of whom would know me, or someone who knows me. Filter that down to people living in LA, and you're probably still in triple figures. A few of them are probably going to know somewhere decent to drink in Venice, some of them might even be out in the area and up for meeting up, and, who knows, if I wasn't happily married I might even enjoy a night of consequence-free sexual intercourse with one of them. A long shot, perhaps, but I'd take my chances over The Flirt Hotline.

This is just one scenario in which mobile could add real value to social networking for the end user. And this is the problem I have with the idea of a mobile-exclusive social network. Restricting access to any service to mobile devices can only really benefit the service provider, by enabling them to drive more revenue through reverse billing and micro-payments. Where mobile social networking can succeed is by recognising and monetising the opportunities created by context for yours and my benefit, not at our needless expense.

Something for the weekend?

2008-01-22T13:45:00.000-08:00

PPC's latest widget, promoting Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd for our friends at Warner Bros:

This is the third of the widget's we've created for WB, following on from Beowulf and I Am Legend. One nice touch is that the people who grabbed the widgets for these previous titles can update them to feature content for new movies.

Looks like Depp can sing a bit, and I never tire of Burton's style. Looking forward to watching it.

Seesmic shift

2008-01-21T03:52:00.000-08:00

In amongst visiting family and parental duties I spent much of this weekend tinkering around with Seesmic - a new invite-only video blogging community I've been given access to. On Saturday I decided to combine this with my new found culinary ambition, and cooked up the following posts:

[ Time passes. Dan moves onto The Red. Pies cook. More time passes. ]

Given that the laptop is my recipe book, and sits on the ironing board in the kitchen when I cook, it was quite easy to create these. I've never video blogged before, but it makes it very easy, at a purely logistical level. You just hook up your webcam and microphone - turns out my laptop has both built in - and record.

It's more challenging in terms of what it requires of you as a communicator. You have to organise your thoughts and have a clear sense of what you're going to say in advance, in order to avoid ranting interminably and getting drawn off on innumerable tangents.

Where the real value lies is that it represents true communication, harnessing speech and body language. It's amazing how much extra information your face and hands deliver when you speak, orchestrating the emphasis and emotional tenor of what you have to say.

I've since posted my thoughts along one or two of the discussion threads happening within the Seesmic community, particularly in relation to the fall-out from the now notorious Facebook article the Guardian ran last week (referenced in one of my recent posts). I managed to run over the ten-minute time limit, so it comes in two parts, which can be found here and here. Somehow I manage to acquire a newborn baby at some point in between.

As with the best of the sites and services emerging in the space, the character of Seesmic is being defined by that of the community it supports. By operating an invitation-only policy the Seesmic's developers can have it alpha-tested by the early adoption crowd; extrovert geeks, sympathetic to the realities of software development, creating experimental content through Seesmic then driving conversation about it through other channels. This approach also has the happy benefit of making it far more intriguing and aspirational from the outside, as well as controlling bandwidth costs.

Overall I'm very excited by Seesmic. It's a very well engineered interface orientated around allowing me to do one thing easily and enjoyably, rather than being a broad set of imperfect tools reaching an equally broad and disparate audience. And, rather than merely incubating my established relationships, it offers the potential for me to connect and develop relationships with new, like-minded individuals. That's what I understand by 'social networking'.

Hello Seesmic. Nice to meet you.

2008-01-17T15:35:00.000-08:00

I managed to get hold of an invitation code for Seesmic. This is my first post:

The Media Summit 2008

2008-01-16T16:03:00.000-08:00

I was at The Media Summit today at the British Film Institute on Southbank. With 12 unmissable speakers it was a bit of a marathon, but immensely valuable, and a great opportunity to put Twitter through its paces. Here's a transcript of all the day's tweets, starting on the train in:

Reading in Metro that Hasbro and Mattel now threatening to sue Facebook if Scrabulous is not removed. PR suicide.

At Media Summit. Loving the way Ben Pyne (President of Global Distribution, Disney) calls it 'iToons'.

Lyne: 'digital natives' - generation of consumers fluent in tech, fragmented by preference and cultural origin

Joanna Shields (President, BEBO): Kate Modern massively popular, but no-one likes Kate. Solution: kill her off. (seriously. they're killing her off.)

Shields: UK online ad spend to exceed television within two years

Shields: 'hard to track impressions on first series of Kate Modern.' WHAT?

Ultimately Shields frustrates. BEBO still comes across as a Facebook-style friendship incubator.

Wish these people weren't so intent on selling their own story at the expense of insight and objectivity. Bit of a kabal atmosphere emerging.

Bob Greenberg (Chairman, R/GA): content creation AND distribution being democratised

Greenberg: third screen (mobile) becoming first screen

Greenberg: television - narrative; pc - interactive; mobile - contextual.

Greenberg has 3G 'on two of my phones'. He carries three with him 'at all times'.

Scott Cohen (Founder, The Orchard): 'people will not pay for digital content'. His solution - 'collect at the connection'.

Cohen: if we're all criminals is there a problem with the people or a problem with the law?

Cohen: music industry has enjoyed 50-plus years of 'unsophisticated business'.

Cohen: networks providers are like gyms. They don't actually want you to use them, just to go on paying the fees.

Jeremy Allaire (Founder, Brightcove): 'reach consumers where they are, not where you want them to be'.

Allaire: establish managed syndication with major partners, as part of blended distribution strategies.

Allaire: empower consumers to become distributors.

Just got told off for taking a photo of a slide about user-generated content. Is that ironic?

Vue Cinemas see live concert, sport and comedy broadcasts - using Digital 3D - as a major revenue stream. Kylie signed up for 2008.

Vue Gaming also piloted well in 2007, with a multiplayer and multi-venue opportunities.

Vue trialing a concept 'Evolution' cinema (in Thurrock?!) with a bar and licensed auditorium, enlarged seating, bean-bag seats and 'sofa pods'.

Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy: 'post-scarcity economics'. Read-write culture not read-only. No IP on jokes. No knock-knock mansion.

Sutherland: if web is anything it is half a million peculiar acts of generosity every day.

Sutherland: advertising must embrace 'big ideal, not big idea'

Sutherland: adult film industry being destroyed by volunteerism

Sutherland: chips - food 2.0 (made to share)

Sutherland: some people buy organic to reduce choice and simplify process

Sutherland: more contextual (location-specific) media emerging. Like Pernod. Outside a french cafe, lovely. In a london flat, piss.

Sutherland: new media is pinball, not ten-pin bowling.

Lost my notepad. Thank f!@k for twitter.

Henrik Werdelin (joost): entertainment is social. It's about more than just watching.

Yair Landau (President, Sony Pictures Digital): you believe and feel as much in a great CGI moment as you do in a live action moment.

Landau: if you can imagine it, it can be created.

* * *

This is the photo I got slapped on the wrist for taking. It was a slide that struck me as really capturing the opportunities social media present for marketers and distributors. It reads as follows:

Embrace end users as:
viewers, fans, critics, programmers and producers

Support media and brand exposure in their online homes
blogs; social networks; communities of interest; RSS readers

Allow end users to become programmers
Favourites; playplists; viral sharing; embedding; social bookmarking

End users as producers
Simple: allow end users to upload video to you
Powerful: allow end users to remix and refactor your brand

Citizens of the web, FRAGMENT!

2008-01-14T14:55:00.000-08:00

I've spent much of the last twenty-four hours chewing over two articles twittered by friends of mine, each of which has accelerated my growing disillusionment with Facebook. Indeed, as I will come to explain, I have decided to take action.

The bigger picture
The first of the articles, entitled With friends like these…, is written by Tim Hodgkinson, and ran in The Guardian’s Technology supplement. It’s a long piece, and well worth reading in its entirety, but for the purposes of this post I’ll offer the following précis.

Hodgkinson starts by making the point that, far from connecting people, Facebook is increasingly responsible for isolating us in front of our computer screens, on the pretext that conducting relations through their site can be construed as socialising.

On the contrary, he asserts, we are being commodified, and the relationships we individually cherish are being intensively harvested so that the economic value can be extracted out of them and made available to the highest bidders, be they corporations or governments.

This in itself is nothing exclusive to Facebook. Their only distinction is that they’re currently the market-leading exponents of this dark art. However, having established this, Hodgkinson examines who’s behind Facebook’s operation, financially and ideologically, and challenges us to evaluate whether these are people fit to be in charge of what is effectively their own country, ‘a country of consumers’.

In terms of the key players, we’re talking Mark Zuckerberg, the geeky front man given to appearing provocatively self-assured about pretty much everything; Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist, libertarian, neocon activist, futurist philosopher and chess master who recently pledged £3.5m to a Cambridge-based gerontologist searching for the key to immortality; and a host of investors, including In-Q-Tel, the venture capital wing of the CIA. Yes, that CIA.

I don’t know about you, but I’m edging towards the door the minute I find out that the guys who put one in the brain of JFK have a stake in my social calendar. Already I’m think that, just because I’ve gone and said something not-so-friendly about them, I’m going to start landing really crappy Scrabulous hands. Bringing me neatly on to…

The killer app
The second of the articles is a piece on CNNMoney.com by Josh Quittner entitled Will somebody please start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous? At least a dozen people have, include one the logo of which combines that of game manufacturers Hasbro and that of the Nazi party.

This is a response to the news that Hasbro have finally decided to acknowledge the existence of Scrabulous, a Facebook application recreating scrabble tile for tile for a user base of approximately 2.5 million people, a quarter of whom use it every day. Indeed, they’ve announced legal action against its developers, two guys from Calcutta named Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla (aged 21 and 26 respectively).

I can’t summarise it better than Quittner:
If I were an evil genius running a board games company whose product line spanned everything from Monopoly to Clue, I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win! If I were compassionate, I’d even cut in the guys who did all the work for a percentage point or two to keep the site running.

Scrabulous is my only remaining reason for signing into Facebook on a regular basis. Without it, I’d probably lose interest altogether. Not because it doesn’t offer me anything of value, but because, following on from my realisation that social networking is actually more akin to social publishing, I’m embracing tools like Blogger, Twitter, and Google Mail (whose spam filtering seems to have suddenly gone up a gear), all of which give me more freedom to express myself, and offer more back in return.

I use these tools and services, not the other way around. They are genuinely vibrant and community-oriented, igniting exciting new relationships, as opposed to incubating existing ones or rekindling old flames (flames that generally burnt out for a damn good reason). It occurs to me that there’s actually very little that’s creative about Facebook – it’s far more about logistics.

So, could I do the unthinkable? Could I leave Facebook?

Probably not. Two reasons. One, I have an intractable professional need to be familiar with Facebook as a marketing medium, and on that basis alone I will probably never be able to bow out completely. Two, it’s practically impossible to delete your account. Steven Mansour seems to have gone to hell and back in the process of trying to do so, and with only limited success.

I have to do something though. More than ever I see myself as a citizen of the web, not as the subject one particular service layered over the top of it. So I’ve decided to try something different. I’m going to start removing the people I really care about (or people I'm already connected to through other better channels) from my friends list. Not all at once, but every time I realise that our relationship doesn't need to be defined in such narrow terms. So, if you really like me, and you hope that I like you too, let’s de-friend.

* * *

Cartoon reproduced from GapingVoid.com without the kind permission of the author.

A bar called 'Daytime'

2008-01-11T20:12:00.000-08:00

I hurried through Lower Clapton, fleeing from the clutches of someone. Or something. The night was cold, dark, full of strange metallic objects, and I had none of the direction or purpose you would expect to assume as one in flight. The scene stole from Graham Green, and owed much to Fleming.

I ducked into a nightclub, tucked away in a basement decorated by nothing more than neon light and exposed brickwork. It was as much bar as nightclub, hell, I can't tell the difference any more. Unusually for whatever it was, everyone was up to their knees in water.

I waded up to the bar, and took a hard fast slap in the face from the price list. It's no wonder everybody's on the gak these days. It's not cheap, but at least you get to piss your money away in the privacy of a toilet cubicle.

I gradually became aware of one particular group of punters over in the corner. They were being increasingly vocal about one another's various moral shortcomings, and how these blended into one moribund morass of deceit and sexual deviance. Everybody could smell blood; it was going to spill over into violence at any moment. We were spellbound.

At one point, just as they were starting to get somewhere, a barman leapt up onto the bar, kicking a couple of his customers' overpriced drinks into their laps. He lobbed out some provocative pronouncement, an observational hand grenade, and sent them back into a dizzying nose-dive of acrimony and mutual recrimination. He was a cocksure character - in fact he oozed cockcertainty - and had a mean streak a mile wide. The best you could say about him was that he seemed to have a decent sense of dramatic timing.

We all frowned and appeared to disapprove, but none of us wanted it to stop. The water level wasn't rising, and the place would have quickly grown tedious without them, this bar called Daytime. They were awful people, and no-one really understood why they had decided to parade this fact for our edification, but it certainly made us feel better about ourselves. By the end we were all patting one another on the backs. "We may be bad, but they're much, much worse," our faces said to each other. For once, our faces were right.

I woke up. I had fallen asleep on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon. On the other sofa sat Emma, buddha-like, breastfeeding and watching The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Eco-economics?

2008-01-10T11:35:00.000-08:00

I watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Chicken Run this week, and am giving my wholehearted support support to his CHICKEN OUT! campaign. For the last few years Emma and i have bought free-range chicken when we've been planning a roast, but I dread to think how much of the no-range variety has slipped through in some processed form or another. Not any more.

One of the things that really caught my attention was the meal he managed to put together using the remains of a roast. I opted to try and do the same with the leftovers from a bird we cooked a few days ago. I picked over the remains and mustered a good plate of scraps, and put the carcass to one side for the stock.

I googled for recipes, and found both the risotto and a stock on a cracking little blog called The Cottage Smallholder. I'd noticed that Whittingstall had included sweetcorn, stripping it straight off the cob, so I searched for tips on how to do this and got some indispensable advice from another blog - Something in Season - as to how to ensure that you don't lose any flavour. These are the type of blogs that I tend to get excited about. They show little pretence of being anything more than one person's perspective, but with information and insight of potential value to a broad audience.

The risotto was bloody delicious - as my own addition to the recipe, I found that a little fresh lemon juice added to just before serving sharpened it up to taste, and played well off all the ingredients - so I decided to prepare food again tonight. As a result I have a jumbo fish pie downstairs in the fridge, ready to be cooked and eaten tomorrow. Buying the fish for the fish pie, I was careful to select an alternative to cod and haddock, both of which are currently severely overfished. I ended up buying some fresh coley (part of the pollock family) as an excellent alternative.

It's not in my nature to do little more than sit around watching The Jeremy Kyle Show all day. Cooking is proving an excellent way to keep myself busy during paternity leave (above and beyond the rolling nappy changes, and the inexpressible nirvana of drifting off on the sofa in the middle of the day with your assorted progeny curled up next to you). Apart from anything else, the need to procure fresh ingredients has made for some nice local excursions with Lola, and has really got me thinking about consumer ethics. Emma and I already relish the fact that we live in a borough where recycling is mandatory, not least because this seems to me to be the exactly where local government can make a difference, and are making an earnest effort to start growing some of our own produce, but it is undoubtedly as paying customers where we can exert the greatest influence for good.

I know that the well-trodden response of the intensive farming apologists (of whom I'm certain that Kyle, below, is one) is to point to the fact that this approach makes chicken affordable to a large number of people on extremely tight budgets. For my part I can't help looking at the number of large people taking advantage of Tesco's two-for-a-fiver chicken offer and wondering whether actually they're simply eating two whole chickens where they might have done quite well to settle for just the one.

Part of the problem seems to be the perception that the only alternative to the two-for-a-fiver option is a twenty quid free-range bird that's spent its long and happy life attending gala luncheons in Kensington Gardens. Well, galvanised by Whittingstall's endeavours, I made a fist of Jamie's Fowl Dinners earlier tonight, and (amidst Oliver's trademark melange of inarticulate smugness and self-aggrandisement) was pleased to learn that there is a very viable halfway house - the 'higher welfare' chicken. These cost about a pound more than the cheap-as-chips bird, in exchange for which the chickens have a roomier environment with objects to clamber over and balls to play with; think The Great Escape rather than Schindler's List.

Ultimately the onus is on the consumer to show that he or she is prepared to fork out the extra cash. Change isn't something that can be led by the British farming industry - this would merely open the way for importers to satisfy any continuing demand for ultra-cheap meat. And, even though supermarkets have a responsibility not to endorse unethical farming methods, they're also answerable to consumer demand. It ought to be tremendously liberating for this power to so clearly reside in yours and my hands, but the reality is that we human beings seem to have a phenomenal faculty for cruelty, especially when we get to enjoy the benefits without having to witness its enactment first-hand.

On wednesday my father and I were lamenting the fact that some of the poor choices we make as consumers may stem from the decline of home economics as a subject taught within schools. Being that the human ecosystem appears to be under greater threat than at any stage in recent history, and that many of the problems stem in one way or another from the methods of mass production we embrace as capitalists and endorse as consumers, is there perhaps an argument for reinventing home economics as 'eco-economics', and getting this back onto the curriculum?

I have no idea what they teach in schools these days, or whether something so subjective could be approached in an objective way, but I wouldn't begrudge someone the right to spend a couple of hours each week trying to encourage my children to explore the choices they can make in seeking to recognise their responsibilities as a consumer, and paid-up resident of planet Earth.

Me and my girls

2008-01-10T07:10:00.001-08:00

Hackney Garden - Rubble Run

2008-01-10T05:25:00.000-08:00

Note that I've added a little theme tune for this series, courtesy of none other than Mr Rolf Harris. Also, more experiments in subtitling. Not sure how soon I'll be back in the garden as of Ruby Tuesday, but dad's up on monday so I daresay we'll manage something.

Meet Ruby

2008-01-07T19:47:00.000-08:00

Update (08.01.08) - Several people have commented to me about the music on this. It's No Surprises, taken from the album Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of Radiohead.

I googled for it in order to give you the link and discovered a whole page of different albums of a similar ilk, with lullaby covers of bands including Metallica, Nine Inch Nails and The Ramones.

Seems to me the least I can do is plug them thus, given that I shameless stripped out the DRM from the version I bought on iTunes, then infringed the associated copyright with gay abandon.

Update (10.01.08) - You can download this by right-clicking on this link and saving it to your desktop.

Ruby Rose Light - First pics!

2008-01-07T17:14:00.000-08:00

The Scrabble Series Part 1: Playing the Board

2008-01-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

This is the end result of one of the oddest games of Scrabble I've ever played. It's one of a few dozen games I've enjoyed on Facebook, pitting myself against Walter, an old friend of mine, and a masterful opponent.

Neither of us set out to use only half of the board - it just happened that way. It didn't limit our scoring either - 674 is a still a perfectly respectable combined total.

Scrabble has been Facebook's killer app for me. It accounts for about 95% of my dwell time, the rest of which is spent trawling for curiosities in my news feed and messing with my status. I only started playing the game at all regularly a year or two ago, at the behest of my visiting father-in-law, Big Mike. In a series of encounters over a series of single malts he took me to pieces. It didn't take long to work out why.

When I played, my first instinct for each new hand was to check my pieces in search of a seven-letter word. Nothing wrong with that, except that most of the time I wouldn't find one, so I'd see if I could find a six-letter word, and failing that a five-letter word, and so on and so forth. Only once I'd found my longest word would I consult the board, looking for somewhere to place it. If I couldn't find anywhere, I'd go back to the hand and resume the process. Taking this approach, I'd be happy to consistently score in double figures.

Big Mike saw things differently. He started by analysing the board, finding the opportunities; not just open letters leading to bonus squares, but what he could scrounge from high value pieces already played. Once he'd mapped the board's potential he started looking for the strength in his hand. He played through a process of ongoing reconciliation, punctuated by flashes of inspiration.

You'd be forgiven for wondering where I'm going with this, beyond drafting a possible introduction for Scrabble for Dummies. Well, I spent friday afternoon going through one of our clients' 2008 film release schedules. There were all sorts of different movies represented therein, from the tentpole summer blockbusters through to bread-and-butter spring and autumn thrillers, dramas and romcoms. Some promise high-value talent and expensive visual effects, others offer subtle and engaging narratives, and one or two even look as though they might manage to combine the two. I've seen what pretty much all the major distributors have to play with next year, and at first glance it looks like some have better hands than others, but in the end what's going to separate them in 2008, more than ever before, is how well they play the board.

* * *

This analogy extends much further than you might imagine, certainly beyond a single post. Hence, The Scrabble Series. I'll put together Part 2: What is the Board? in due course, if I receive the faintest indication that anybody would like to pursue this further.

All 'friends' are not equal

2008-01-03T12:14:00.000-08:00

PPC has recently appointed a new PR agency. They contacted me recently to ask if I would contribute some ideas for a potential opinion piece on social media, so I agreed to post a few thoughts here, for general reference.

These are the questions they wanted me to address:

- Should companies develop their own social networking tools? Are they better off trying to exploit existing networks?

- How should companies go about using social networking to promote their film/game/brand? What are the issues they need to be aware of? Are certain kinds of brands or products better suited than others?

- What effect will the opening up of sites like Facebook and Bebo to third parties have on social networking? Will it be beneficial to brand owners or cause more problems?

Well, let me begin by taking you back, if I may, to life before Facebook, to life before MySpace, before Friend Reunited or Classmates, before Instant Messenger or Hotmail, before you even knew how email worked or what the internet really was. That's about a decade for me, I doubt it's much longer than that for many of you.

You probably had just about the same number of substantial relationships in your life as you do now (and maybe more, given that life didn't seem to be lived at a pace that starved you of every spare waking moment). You would have expressed these relationships through interaction, over the phone, by writing letters, and by meeting up. And, generally, the more established and unconditional the relationship, the less often you'd actually need to see or speak to each other to remain connected. This was your social network; the people in your life that mattered, for whatever reason. It still is. All that's changed is the tools at your disposal to maintain and develop it.

The reality is that services like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook are just a souped-up rolodex. If you want to communicate one-to-one through any of these social networks you still have to use email-style messaging, phone-style VOIP or IM-style text chat. There seems to be this misconception that social networking sites have enabled us to somehow grow our circle of friends - that we now have the means to form and maintain hundreds, even thousands of relationships, because of these miracle tools that have enabled us all to become such good 'friends'.

I would argue that, beyond the fifty or so people you have meaningful relationships with (a high proportion of whom are probably the same people you had meaningful relationships with over a decade ago), what you have is an audience. An audience consisting of friends, family, acquaintances from school, college and university, work colleagues, clients and suppliers, maybe even some people you can't remember ever having met but who you've agreed to be friends with because they asked and it felt rude to decline.

Furthermore, when you scrutinise the tools and features that define the social networks, beyond email, chat and telephony services (all of which pre-date the social networks considerably), they are orientated towards communication with an audience. Take the Facebook wall - the essence of which is that you're choosing to make a supposedly one-to-one correspondence visible to everybody you both know. Facebook status, one of my favourite features, is also totally indiscriminate in its reach, within your established sphere of influence.

Hugh Macleod is a well-known cartoonist and blogger whom I was fortunate to meet off the back of some screenings we co-ordinated for David Mackenzie's movie HALLAM FOE. With over 1,200 friends he is what Facebook themselves now refer to as one of their 'whales', among whose ranks you will also apparently find Jimmy Carr, Russell Brand and Stephen Fry. By Hugh's own admission, "I don't go around looking for friends, but it seems kind of rude to say no to somebody."

Hugh was recently described in an article in The Guardian as 'Britain's most successful Facebooker'. This label does Hugh a substantial injustice, insofar as it puts the cart of his Facebook following before the horse of many years establishing his reputation as a prolific original thinker in the spaces of marketing, social media and, through his cartoons, life in general. This plaudit is also interesting in the choice of term used to define his popularity; success. If social networking is about success, and we're playing a numbers game in terms of how we choose to measure it, then we're surely back in the dark ages of web v1, and the mentality of the playground. If web 2.0 has been about anything for me it must be the growing acceptance that all hits - and, by extension, 'friends' - are not equal.

At another level, Hugh's popularity on Facebook is genuinely indicative of success, since he engages this following as an audience, as he does his readership on Twitter, and that of his blog. In this respect Hugh uses Facebook not so much a social networking tool as a social publishing tool, as, I would suggest, do many of the rest of us, albeit for the benefit of a smaller, more familiar crowd.

Re-reading this post I can see that I haven't answered any of the questions I was charged with addressing, but that I'm on my way to doing so quite definitively. I can see a couple I can take now before I go, and I'll come back for the rest.

"Should companies develop their own social networking tools?" Depends entirely on the type of company, but, for the most part, good god no. "Are they better off trying to exploit existing networks?" Maybe, but only if they quit trying to be my new best friend, and start getting to know my audience.
___

Interesting factoid: The first 3D movie from a major studio (Warner Brothers) was HOUSE OF WAX (1953) directed by Andre de Toth. Unfortunately de Toth was blind in one eye, and could only see in two dimensions. History records that he would consistently come to the rushes and want to know what everybody was so excited about.

Make an exhibition of yourself

2008-01-01T13:25:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of my blog - last time I checked Google Analytics there were about a dozen of you - may have noticed that I'm now displaying Ploggle updates as well as Twitter updates at the top of each page. Some of you may have wondered what Ploggle is. This post has been written to answer that very question, for you and anybody else who cares to wonder.

* * *

WHAT IS PLOGGLE?
Some time in 2002 my good friend Tom Percival and I started playing around with camera-phones, after I managed to get hold of a camera attachment for my Sony Ericsson T68i. It was a ridiculous little appendage, and took incredibly poor quality photographs, but that wasn’t really the point. We were spellbound by the idea of being able to post photos and video from your mobile phone direct to the web. So, Tommy being Tommy, he developed a web app enabling us to do exactly that.

Around the same time we got talking to a friend of a friend, Alec Hendry, who was working at MTV at the time, and had written some fairly unusual video codecs. He agreed to let us use them, and pretty soon we were posting mobile video clips as well as pictures, converted into dinky little flash movies. I’m not 100% certain, but I’m pretty sure we were using flash to serve user-generated video years before Youtube started doing it.

It’s worth making the point right now that we weren’t trying to create a bulk video-hosting site like Youtube, or a digital photo-hosting site like Flickr. Our focus right from the start was enabling people to post lightweight pics and clips straight to the web using email and picture messaging. This oriented it towards a rapidly growing audience of camera-phone users wanting to post on the move, and made it unsuitable for anybody wanting to post hundred of hi-res digital camera pics or huge 5-minute video clips.

We favoured this approach for several reasons:

1. The slightly pretentious reason
The arts graduate in me was fascinated by the day-in-the-life aspect of camera-phone photos, as opposed to the too-good-to-be-true pictures people tend to take with normal digital cameras. Camera-phones tend to be used more spontaneously, in situations where people wouldn’t think to have a normal camera handy. Even now when Sony Ericsson are offering 3.2 mega pixels of detail you can still see the difference, and for me that lack of ‘quality’ adds a precious measure of realism and narrative.

2. The eminently practical reason
We were very fortunate to have a friend in Barney Sowood, who was able to host the site for us, but we were conscious from the start that there would be restrictions on how much data we could host and serve. We didn’t want to position this as somewhere for anybody to store loads of high resolution photos, requiring terabytes of bandwidth and server space. We’ve both since questioned whether we were right to be so conservative, or if we should have gone for broke and solved these problems by monetising usage. Answers on a postcard pls.

3. The real reason
It was more fun.

* * *

DESIGN & BUILD
Once we’d agreed on what we were doing, we needed a name. We’d be touting names about from the start – ‘Snapbook’ was an early favourite, but the domain wasn’t available. In the end we settled on Ploggle. It seemed natural to us that a blog driven by pictures instead of words should be called a plog. The name also alludes to Google, which we considered to be the ultimate example of commercial success driven by good programming and usability.

In terms of how the logo evolved, the font currently doing the rounds in the studio we were both working in was VAG Rounded, which had a nice soft, playful simplicity to it, so we used that. We knew from the start that we wanted the logo and the site as a whole to use blues and greys off a white background, primarily coming off the back of having just designed a site for a friend of ours with an antiques business. The similarities between the two should be blindingly obvious; I like to think of both as being good examples of early graphics-light, information-rich web 2.0 design.

We divided labour along pretty simple lines; I focused on design, layout and usability, and Tommy made it work. Occasionally we’d plan the development of some major new component, but most of the time there was just a rolling list of features we wanted to add and experiment with. We spent two years stealing evenings and weekends for Ploggle, off the back of working together full-time. Our long-suffering other halves probably only put up with it because they thought that one day it would make us all rich.

* * *

MONETISING PLOGGLE. OR NOT.
The question of Ploggle’s business model was debated long and hard. The main streams we had to consider were:

Advertising
This forms part of the revenue portfolio of most commercial consumer-facing websites, but sites achieving profit through advertising alone are few and far between, especially good ones. We were very conscious that we didn’t want thumping great adverts sitting on our own personal plogs, and were pretty certain that our users would feel the same way, so we decided to ban advertising entirely.

White labelling
For the uninitiated, white labelling is when you re-brand and redeploy a web app as an integrated part of another site’s offering. The problem with white labelling is that you have to be able to show that you’re going to add genuine value, and its very hard to make it happen without being available in office hours. We took the view that this was something we’d get into to once we’d strengthened our proposition by proving another revenue stream and going full time.

Subscription
This is the basket we ended up putting all our eggs in. We decided to allow anyone to post up to 100 pics or clips in up to three different plogs, after which you were required to pay a one-off upgrade fee. We felt that this gave anybody ample opportunity to try Ploggle out, and to decide for themselves whether it was worth paying for. Unfortunately in the huge majority of cases the answer was apparently ‘no’.

* * *

THINGS WE MIGHT HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY
Ploggle currently has 2,800 registered users, based in over 100 different countries. About 650 of those users have seen the upgrade screen at one time or another, resulting in 13 making the decision to subscribe, generating a total revenue of £120 and €18. In strictly commercial terms, by anybody’s standards, Ploggle has failed. Quite spectacularly.

Remove the profit motive, and it’s a different story. The ancillary benefits of having developed Ploggle are manifest; for our friendship, which has grown through all the late nights and long weekends at the coalface; for our skillset, which has also grown, making Tommy a better developer and me a better marketer; for family members and friends, who have been able to watch my daughter Lola grow from a bump into a beautiful bubbly young girl. In strictly non-commercial terms, Ploggle has been all about growth and development.

Whichever way you choose to see it, there are some things we might have done differently. Lots of things, in fact, but these are some of the more important or interesting ones:

Develop the community
For a site with so many great features, it’s criminal that so little of it is orientated towards letting people share their photos with each other. We have a Friends list allowing users to associate themselves with each other, but no easy overview of what all your friends have been posting recently. Everything was oriented around the plogs, not the people. It’s easy to say it retrospectively, but if Ploggle had been more of a mobile multimedia Twitter-style app, it might have flown off the shelves.

Carry advertising
It was naïve and unrealistic to rule out advertising outright in the way that we did. What we should have done is to run some banner advertising in the plog and account management screens. By targeting users of Ploggle on pages generating a large number of impressions we could have identified a clear opportunity for mobile phone manufacturers and networks. Instead, when we did finally dip out toes into advertising, we ran Google Adwords across the top of each plog. The plogs were tarnished, most of the ads ended up being irrelevant, and the click-through rates were insignificant. It was the worst of all worlds, and lasted about six weeks.

Speak with our own voice
As two guys in two bedrooms, we focused on trying to create a site that looked like an established – table – online brand. It was like a Porcupinefish, inflated to ten times its actual size. Unfortunately the analogy goes further than I’d like, insofar as I think we ended up scaring people away as much as gaining their trust. If we’d spoken to our early adopters with natural tone of voice, telling the story behind Ploggle as it was unfolding, we could have given them a greater sense of belonging, and found some valuable advocates and ambassadors in the process.

* * *

TAKING A BREAK
After about two years of development it had become clear that we wouldn’t be able to get Ploggle off the ground commercially simply by developing it as an application. It needed marketing and business development, and we didn’t have the money or the raw will-power to make that happen. I think it’s fair to say that we were pretty burnt out at this point, and that we both retreated into making more of a success of our day jobs.

All around us Web 2.0 brands were bursting onto the scene, and we learnt something from each of them. Youtube, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook et al; each of them has shown us where the value was in Ploggle, and where else it might have been.

Meanwhile the site itself has just ticked over, attracting new users from here and there, and quietly passing the milestone of 100,000 pics and clips posted. We’ve noticed that it’s proving particularly popular with parents, leading to talk of some sort of Sproggle spin-off. And, as with my own little one and her plog, we’ve gone on using Ploggle, even if we aren’t still developing it. With that in mind, here are a few of my own favourite plogs:

LightJunior

This is the plog that makes it all worthwhile. We set up LightJunior the day before Lola arrived, and there were pics of her posted within about an hour of her arrival into this world. Since then its been one long rollercoaster ride, brought to courtesy of the girl with a thousand (well, three hundred at least) faces.
http://lightjunior.ploggle.com

TravelLight

Subtitled ‘the continuing global adventures of the family Light’, TravelLight currently documents trips to Morocco, Croatia and Thailand. Travel Light is a true plog as well, the vast majority of the pictures having been posted minutes after being taken. In the case of the Morocco trip I piggy-backed on a local network offering GPRS and ended up receiving a colossal mobile phone bill. Worth every penny.
http://travellight.ploggle.com

JoePlogs

My plogging alter ego since day one, Joe plogs anything that piques his interest. Joe even managed to plog his Sony Ericsson T610 – the camera-phone of camera-phones in its day – moments before he lost it in the underbelly of some dubious Parisian nightspot.
http://joeplogs.ploggle.com

Underground

I started Underground as a way to test that Ploggle was working every morning, and have ended up with hundreds of posts telling the story of life as a subterranean commuter in London town. Full of buskers, advertising and stolen moments, posted as soon as I get back above ground.
http://underground.ploggle.com

Sticky

Another plog I set up just to experiment with the form, this came into its own when I started walking into work. You see a fair amount of everything decorating walls and lamp-posts between Hackney and Soho, especially around the old street area, the pick of which are plogged here.
http://sticky.ploggle.com

Soho

This was a pet ‘phoetry’ project lasting a week or so. I went out at lunchtime and walked around Soho, making it up as I went along. Judging by the comment on the last picture, at least one person liked it.
http://soho.ploggle.com

These are the plogs you’ll most often see me posting to in the photo feed I’ve added to my blog, along with a few others I’ve set up recently. Adding the feed has already sparked a mini-renaissance in my thinking as regards Ploggle’s future, typified by my decision to draw this line under the story so far, and exacerbated by some of the conclusions I’ve reached in the course of writing it.

One such conclusion is that it’s high time we published the second edition of Unplogged, our (exceptionally) occasional newsletter (we published Unplogged 01 in November 2004). Another is that we’ll need a good reason to do so. Fortunately we’ll have one, in that Tommy and I yesterday agreed to ditch the subscription model, and to give all our users, new or existing, unlimited use of Ploggle.

Maybe this is a last significant act, maybe it’s the start of a second wind. Whatever the case, I’ll keep you posted.

Hackney Garden - An Introduction

2007-12-29T19:00:00.001-08:00

Shot and cut this today. It's hardly Gardener's World, but it's nice to have a record of the starting point for project Hackney Garden.

I had particular fun with the subtitling. Started by downloading some freeware called DivXLand Media Subtitler, then I had to go off in search of a couple of codecs to give me the finished product. I can see myself having some fun with the subtitling from here on in, but for now this is probably (hopefully) the clumsiest and most humourless installment in this growing series.

Chicks joke at me. Apparently.

2007-12-28T04:38:00.000-08:00

This just dropped into my Gmail account from one 'Dr Spencer Moreno'.

* * *

You Dont please with your male organ size.

Chicks joke at you.

It is time to solve this trouble.

Try our machine enla;rgement and Girls will love you promptly.

I changed my sexual life. Today it is your turn.

http://floparfold.com

* * *

Stepping back slightly, I can't quite believe that the web has arrived at a place whereby I receive an email, bang in the middle of a perfectly nice day, from a man claiming to have achieved the highest level of academic qualification available, criticising me for being satisfied with the size of my penis. Adding insult to injury, he's actually got me wondering.

Hackney Garden - Boxing Day '07

2007-12-28T00:47:00.000-08:00

This was all shot on Boxing Day, as the title suggests. It's a bit flabby, the sound isn't great, and I'm not sure how much interest there will be in submerged walls and Pyrus Katsura, but I like the idea of documenting the work we're doing on the garden in this way. It's giving me some nice material to play around with in Movie Maker, and making me more comfortable operating a camera.

That's not me in the cover image by the way. That's my Dad. He always has at least one 'project' on the go, typically involving boats or gardens. One day I daresay he'll try and combine the two into some sort of boat-garden. Rest assured reader, when he does, I'll be there, and the camera will be rolling.

UPDATE:

Googled 'boat garden' and found this.

I LOVE the internet.

Homework

2007-12-25T04:32:00.000-08:00

A while back I posted an opening sequence for a short film idea I'm playing around with, with a view to getting some feedback from a few friends of mine.

I was particularly interested in the question of whether short films need to follow a scaled down version of the Basic Film Paradigm, a model advocated by Syd Field in his book Screenplay as being the essential basis of any film script. The feedback tended towards the affirmative, in accordance with my own natural inclination.

As such, I've since spent what little time I've had to focus on the project remodelling my script to bring it into line with the paradigm. Before I go into that, I'm going to define what I understand as being the key tenets of Field's model.

PAGECOUNT
A standard length for a feature length screenplay is 128 pages. This equates to roughly two hours and eight minutes, since a page - of dialogue or action - should equate to a single minute of film.

SET-UP, CONFRONTATION & RESOLUTION
A screenplay breaks down into three main phases - the SET-UP, lasting approximately 30 minutes; the CONFRONTATION, lasting approximately 60 pages; and the RESOLUTION, lasting a further 30 pages.

PLOT POINTS
These parts are delineated by two plot points, marking the transition from one phase to another. The first plot point is the point at which a dramatic need of one or more protagonists becomes clearly discernible. The second plot point is the point at a major corner is turned in the fulfilment of that need.

THE ENDING
The ending is the first thing you need to know before you start writing. Your storyline must have direction, following a path of development along which the ending lies. Furthermore, the ending comes out of the beginning; someone, or something, initiates an action, and how that action is resolved becomes the storyline of the film.

TWO INCIDENTS
The inciting incident is that which sets the story in motion. The key incident is a dramatic visualisation of what the story is about (and is often plot point one). These two incidents provide the foundation of the storyline.

SCENES VS SEQUENCES
A SCENE is where something specific happens. It is a particular unit of dramatic action - the place in which you tell your story action. A scene must move the story forward and/or reveal more information about a character. A SEQUENCE is a series of scenes connected by one single idea with a definite beginning, middle and end. It is a unit of dramatic action unified by one single idea.

These are the main elements Field establishes before he starts to write about how to build your storyline. He richly illustrates each point with examples, but I guess the real value for me has been taking on board the extent to which screenwriting is a literary and creative discipline of its own.

With reference to my script, it has helped me in the following ways;

I've chiseled out plot points one and two. I was pleased to discover that these were already present, in roughly the right place, in a version of the script predating my exposure to Field's views.

I've realised that the film probably needs to be twice as long as I previously imagined. I had it down at fifteen minutes, but its looking more like thirty. This has much to do with the need to establish and develop the unfamiliar social context I am inventing.

I've added a great action sequence, to redress the balance between dialogue and action. It will be totally devoid of dialogue. I'm very excited about writing it.

I've focused on the ending. I'm still refining various details, but it's now clear enough in my mind for me to try and finalise the storyline.

I'm now using a technique Field described to work with the storyline, before I try and write again. This involves writing my ideas for each scene or sequence, along with a few brief words of description, on a series of 3 x 5 cards - by his reckoning fourteen cards equates to about thirty minutes of screenplay.

By arranging and rearranging the cards, you can use them to play around with your storyline, and view it from different angles. I was doing precisely that this morning whilst lying in a lovely hot bath, and switched two of the cards into a deliberately unintelligible configuration. A couple of possibilities occurred to me, and rippled through the rest of the cards, until I found myself looking at a significantly new arrangement. I feel certain I'm going to follow the new structure.

I guess I can see where Field is coming from with this. A basic framework exists for any workable screenplay, but within that, you are master of all you survey. Invent problems, then find solutions. Conjure up the unintelligible, then redraw reality to make sense of it. Doing so causes you to examine the questions of 'why?' and 'how?' - questions that need to be addressed before you can even begin to embroider your story with language and imagery.

Fairy Elf Lola

2007-12-23T18:05:00.001-08:00

Presenting the second of our festive features:

Chocolates & Tangerines

2007-12-22T18:40:00.000-08:00

Woke up this morning and decided to can my plans to buy myself a PS3, in favour of a Mini DV cam two thirds of the price. Lola and I went up to Angel first thing, and eighteen hours later here we have our first production, cut using Windows Movie Maker, and posted to a cool little video hosting site called Vimeo.

In Rainbows

2007-12-20T16:15:00.001-08:00

This is pretty cool. Been listening to this for a while, on Mr McMaster's recommendation. Blogging the widget for further examination.

Birthday treats

2007-12-18T15:41:00.000-08:00

Ems' birthday. Lovely trip to our favourite cinema - the Genesis, on Mile End Road - to watch THE DARJEELING LIMITED. We make it out to the cinema so rarely these days, it was a real treat to watch such a delicate and entertaining movie.

I took this photo at Mile End tube waiting for the train down to Stepney Green. I used to take mobile phone pics on the tube every day, when we first set up Ploggle, sometimes just to check that it was working properly - you'll find a hundreds of them at underground.ploggle.com.

Ems took the picture below on Saturday before the baby shower. Lola was having a spot of lunch with her cousin Amelie at 'Lola's table'. I'm posting it in the hope that I'll look at it a bit more often. When you see kids this happy, all your troubles turn to dust.

WHY SO SERIOUS?

2007-12-15T00:13:00.000-08:00

So there I am, minding my own business on a friday morning, trying to get everything pointed in the right direction, then somebody says something about DARK KNIGHT teaser posters, and my ears prick up. That's the thing about this whole fanboy malarkey. There's no shortage of stuff to get excited about.

This could so easily be a comic book cover, especially close-up. Batman looks very lonely and forlorn, his back turned, his head slightly cowed.

The parellels between this and the first poster are pretty obvious, although it's anybody's guess what's on the Joker's mind, and exactly what it is he's planning to do with that brutally prosaic switchblade.

This is a great treatment, blurring the lines between the two characters. Anyone else noticing a crucifixion pose in the lips? Please tell me it's not just me.

I couldn't find this as a straight one-sheet, but I have Dark Horizons and whoever that is you can just make out reflected in the glass to thank for this pic of a fourth teaser. For me, this is the closest anyone's come to showing me my Joker. The crude and unnatural positioning of the head and body, all detail concealed by the mists of moral ambiguity, left to our virulent imaginations.

And the punchline. That's no 'crazy-looking' typeface, created by some font technician in Seattle who turned up to work in a funny mood. That's real blood, sweat and tears, scrawled across the page with a child's paintbrush, resolving into a deranged smile.

"Why so serious?" Good question. But quit looking at me funny.

CLOVERFIELD & JUMPER widgets

2007-12-14T03:20:00.000-08:00

These aren't two of ours - want to get that clear straight up, so that nobody thinks I'm claiming them. Not too proud to admit that there are other people out there producing visionary grabbable goodness :)

The CLOVERFIELD widget is nice and simple, and, crucially, offers a really juicy five minute excerpt from the movie, along with a simple, clearly communicated incentive for people to spread the word.

It's just a shame for the rest of us that the chance to host an advance screening of the movie in your hometown is only available to "legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding the province of Quebec)". Damn those guys in Domestic have it easy.

The JUMPER widget also looks like part of the domestic campaign, although these things always spill over into international regardless. It's much simpler, but the point is it's out there early and grabbing eyeballs. Who knows what's to come as we get closer to the February release?

I'm pretty excited about both movies. CLOVERFIELD has always been pitched as a working title, but given how much buzz there is already around the movie I think they'd be crazy to change it. As for JUMPER, I'm really looking forward to seeing Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell and Samuel L. Jackson under the direction of Doug Liman (THE BOURNE IDENTITY).

What doesn't kill you makes you... stranger

2007-12-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

Not many people can claim to have written 10,000 word dissertations based primarily on Batman. I am one of relatively few. Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and Grant Morrison's ARKHAM ASYLUM were alongside Alan Moore's WATCHMEN and Neil Gaiman's BOOKS OF MAGIC as the subjects of the long essay I submitted as part of my English Literature degree. I can't remember the exact title - only that it was a contrived but sincere attempt to understand the peculiar social, political and cultural context that gave rise to a rash of quite brilliant graphic novels through the 80s and 90s, of which these are only four.

The dissertation as a whole is lost now. By the time I'd scanned in my quite glorious selection of full colour appendices, harnessing the extent of the Edinburgh University Library computing facilities, the document as a whole was immovably large. The cost of printing a single copy was so substantial I had to ask a girlfriend of the time to send me money in the post. I submitted the one hard copy to my faculty, and the one soft copy was customarily deleted from the library file system a month later. Ask me today and I'd happily see my degree severely downgraded in exchange for a copy, but that's academic.

I saw the 7-minute opening sequence of the new Batman movie, THE DARK KNIGHT, at the London IMAX this afternoon. Warner Bros screened it seven months ahead of release for an agency of journalists and marketers, followed by a Q&A with one of the producers. On account of my excessive fondness for cheese and wine my colleague and I left an opulent Christmas lunch in Soho with 15 minutes to get to the Imax on the South Bank. We ended up running the length of Waterloo Bridge dragging our laptops and arguing over who was Batman and who was Robin. We eventually collapsed into our seats at the top of the ludicrously precipitous auditorium just in time to see the first few frames beginning to roll.

It starts with a slick bank heist, organised by some guy who thinks he can take a share without turning up. "No wonder they call him The Joker" quips one of the gang. No prizes for guessing who has the last laugh.

Straight away you know you're a long way from Jack Nicholson and some hare-brained henchmen clowning around in an art gallery. A LONG way. This is more Michael Mann than Michael Keaton, a polished set-piece reminiscent of the rhythmic and precisely orchestrated bank job in HEAT. I'm also reminded of Roger Avary's KILLING ZOE - the robbers' masks serve to disguise them, but also expose the grotesquely amoral creatures hidden within. Here each of the gang falls principle to the old adage that there's no honour amongst thieves until only the Joker remains. Heath Ledger's Joker is the clown you have nightmares about, scruffier than Nicholson's, more viscerally scarred inside and out.

A flurry of further glimpses of the new movie follows, culminating with Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) on a Gotham rooftop destroying the Bat Light with a fire-axe. Then it's over. I haven't calmed down. I'm breathing heavier than I was when I sat down.

The Q&A starts. Pretty soon I hear this word. Hyperrealism. I heard it a while back, from our Second Life architect, describing the style he used on the Die Hard builds. Wikipedia tells me that "Hyperrealism has its roots in the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, the simulation of something which never really existed. As such, Hyperrealists create a false reality that is a convincing illusion; one based upon a simulation of reality.”

This is Nolan's Batman. If he hinted at it in BATMAN BEGINS, it looks like he's got it figured now. Gotham is not some accentuated gothic fantasy shrowded in perpetual darkness - it's a real city, in a real world, one in which 'convincing illusions' can be all the more compelling for being framed within a familiar context. This is a world in which Batman and The Joker are not agents of the simple binary of good and evil, but complex individuals operating outside the law, connected by fate, driven by torment and alienation.

The comic world is all the richer for an established tradition of reinvention and reinterpretation, and few series have lent themselves so readily to such radical re-envisioning as Batman, not just for his own depth and complexity, but for that of his nemesis. Bryan Singer's Lex Luthor wants real estate. Nolan's Joker wants to sit back and watch a city burn. He might be robbing banks now, but something tells me he's not just in it for the money.

Disclosure: My employer Picture Production Company works for Warner Bros Pictures International marketing their theatrical film releases. However, if you honestly think anything I've said here is coloured by this fact, you don't know me from Adam West.

High water marks

2007-12-03T14:35:00.000-08:00

My time at PPC - 6 years and counting - has tossed up a few projects I've managed to get pretty excited about. I wasn't much of a Wes Anderson fan when I first heard of THE LIFE AQUATIC, but by the time we were done creating PIRATE PANIC! and I'd had a chance to feast on the movie's beautiful audio-visual aesthetics he'd become one of my instant heroes of cinema.

PIRATE PANIC! was very much the inspiration behind the considerably more successful CHAINSAW MANIAC! This was definitely a better fit for the audience in question, a beautiful nostalgia piece paying hommage (i.e. ripping off) Nintendo's single-game consoles of yesteryear, supporting the main RESIDENT EVIL 4 microsite (dubbed an 'iTrailer' by yours truly, on account of its ground-breaking focus on video-rich interaction).

As an aside, Resident Evil 4 is the first computer game I've played to a finish since completing The Legend of Zelda on the first-generation 8-bit Nintendo. Resi 4 coincided with the arrival of my daughter Lola, as a result of which many of her formative first nights were spent asleep in my lap, blissfully oblivious to the bloody path I was carving through the rich and deadly landscape of a truly great game.

When I first became aware that SIN CITY was in production, and that it would be distributed by (what was then) Buena Vista International, I was resolutely determined to ensure that we worked on it. Off the back of the RESIDENT EVIL 4 iTrailer we were commissioned to develop a SIN CITY equivalent. It's hard to be objective about how well it turned out, but it was undoubtedly one of my favourite projects to be involved with, and meeting Frank Miller himself at the UK premiere after-party was the icing on the cake.

With SIN CITY under my belt I probably ought to have taken the view that I'd been there and done that with Frank Miller. I didn't. Earlier this year we pitched very aggressively to create a presence for the movie 300, directed by the inspiring Zach Snyder, within the 3D online community Second Life. This included a virtual press conference and movie expo, the inner workings of which need to be read to be believed. This was the single most demanding and rewarding project of my working life. A Second Life junket for Transformers followed. My inner ten-year old would never forgive me if I didn't rate that as another highpoint of my career.

All of which might seem like a rather self-indulgent trip down memory lane, if it wasn't for the fact that the next 48 hours is going dictate my chances of working on another project with a very special place in my heart. I can't spill the beans quite yet, but this is a must-have from where I'm sitting. I'll keep you posted.

More widgety goodness

2007-11-29T04:33:00.000-08:00

We've just wrapped another of our grabbable widgets - this one's to promote I AM LEGEND, and will be available as an automatic update for everybody who grabbed our BEOWULF widget.

Personally I hate the word 'widget', but it's rapidly becoming part of the lexicon of online marketing to describe these kind of embeddable applications. If you want one of the earliest examples of this kind of thing, and a strong indicator of how successful it can be, the proliferation of Youtube videos in their early days was driven by precisely this principle. In an age when everybody has their own little piece of screen estate somewhere on the web, all you have to do is give them something cool or useful enough and they'll do your advertising for you.

Meeting Mr Tumble

2007-11-27T15:57:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to be on set down at Ealing Studios on monday, overseeing the filming of some extra web-only material on a movie currently in production. Lucky, both because it was a huge eye-opener to see the business end of the business, and because it was a far better place to nurse a BAFTA-winning hangover than the orifice (PPC picked a second BAFTA up on Sunday night, this time for our RECOLLECTIONS DVD-ROM, created in conjunction with Film Education and the SHOAH Foundation).

Meeting Justin Fletcher (AKA Mr Tumble) at the Children's BAFTAs

I can't go into too much detail, not only because what we're doing is still under wraps, but also because it's late, and I need to sleep. What I can say is that in my experience it's unprecedented for an entire extra day of shooting to take place on a movie capturing material purely for use as part of an online marketing campaign. As marketers we're being permitted to extend the narrative of the film forwards onto the web, giving the world their first glimpse of the characters in question. Kudos to the director in question for letting it happen.

As for my first experience of a working film set, it may have been cold and confusing, but it certainly made a nice break from being bent double in front of a computer all day. I could definitely get used to it.

A million audiences of one

2007-11-19T21:51:00.000-08:00

Met up with pre-eminent bloggers Neville Hobson and Trevor Cook for a bite of lunch yesterday. Neville worked with us on the virtual press junket PPC co-ordinated for "300" back in March (up for a BIMA in the category of Innovation a week on Thursday) and was up in town to speak at an event organised by Mantra, my sister-in-law's PR firm, seeking to understand the nature of Web 2.0 in relation to corporate communications and public relations.

The lunch was the first time Neville and Trevor had met in the flesh, despite the two of them having a digital friendship extending back over several years. Both of their blogs are far loftier and better travelled than mine, but I enjoyed being able to use the example of WEATHERMAN to illustrate how blogging had worked as a way of sharing an idea with a specifically chosen audience of six. The web is often seen as a great way to reach an audience of millions, whereas - as somebody at yesterday's event pointed out - Web 2.0 is all about communicating with 'a million audiences of one'.

Another blogger acquaintance, Hugh Macleod, has been experimenting with social media as a means to raise the profile of a wine label he is involved with - Stormhoek - to good effect. I managed to find their Pinotage in Tesco on Sunday, and picked up a couple of bottles. With my palate it's much of a muchness whether I drink one £4.99 bottle of wine or another, so it was great to be able to try a wine I had a relationship with, however obscure. I'm thinking this is the essence of what Hugh is driving at when he talks about social objects, conversation and decommodification (which he does. A lot.) As my friend James will surely testify, after despatching an unholy amount of unusually fine and criminally surplus burgundy on Sunday evening (I suggested that he bathe in it) there can't be many objects more 'social' than red wine.

2am eternal

2007-11-13T17:59:00.000-08:00

Brandon Bird: "The Last Supper"

2am. I awoke suddenly and utterly a few moments ago, after just two hours sleep, neatly exiting a startlingly vivid dream into which one of my most notorious ex-girlfriends had just assuredly introduced herself. Still, nice to know the old ejector seat is still in good working order.

A couple of days ago I posted the first sequence of the first draft of a screenplay I've been working on, called WEATHERMAN, with a view to answering a few questions, specifically in relation to Syd Field's Basic Film Paradigm. I subsequently circulated the link to the following sprinkling of friends and acquaintances:

Dan Outram - writer and director of numerous short films and commercials
John Donnelly - writer and director of numerous stageplays
Kate Solomon - associate producer on UNITED 93
James Scudamore - author of The Amnesia Clinic
Dane McMaster - colleague, serial west coast technophile and screen guru
Emma Light - critic; therapist; confidante; wife

By the time I got up a few hours later I already had some good feedback. Dan was quick to set me straight on a fundamental tenet of screenwriting technique, asserting that "you shouldn't write anything other than that which is seen or heard. Only that is allowed to tell the story. Otherwise the audience will not know it." I've already taken that on board, and the updated version is available here.

Dane picked up on the question of whether short films need to conform to the paradigm: "Yes, in this matter at least, syd field is correct. a three act structure such as this should be adhered to as closely as possible. once you've mastered this you can destroy it and begin to build your own form of... well, form. Kubrick's 2001, for example, does not follow this structure. Nor does Full Metal Jacket. But he's one of the few directors who can stray from it and make it play. David Lynch actually adheres quite strictly to this formal structure... even if the elements that form his 3 parts are in a somewhat abstract form. David Mamet is another huge supporter of this form."

Set-up, confrontation and resolution it is then I guess. I like the idea that it has to be mastered in order that it can be transgressed. It's a fascinating point about Full Metal Jacket as well. Though I may have lacked the 'education' to put my finger on it, I always knew intuitively that there was something unusual about the form of that movie.

Dane also advised me to change the title. "Nicolas Cage got there first. Nobody needs to be reminded of that movie." For the uninitiated (which, in the case of this movie, will be most of you) he's talking about The Weather Man. He's probably right, but I don't need to start worrying about that quite yet. When I was a kid I'd spend days dreaming up great titles for my first novel, avoiding the trickier business of actually writing one. Speaking of which, in the words of the late Clarence Boddicker, "Sayonara Robocop." [stabs Robocop in the chest with metal rod].

The Basic Film Paradigm

2007-11-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

This is a diagram of Syd Field's Basic Film Paradigm - he presents this as the required format of any successful screenplay.

This has raised a number of questions in relation to WEATHERMAN.

Does the paradigm apply to short films? Does it scale from a 120-page screenplay down to one consisting of only 15-30 pages? Can the current draft be remodelled and transposed onto this paradigm? And, if so, is that what I should be doing? Is a short film adopting this paradigm even the right format for this idea? If not, what is?

In search of some answers I went for a drink recently with an old schoolfriend - Dan Outram - who has some experience working as a director of commercials and short films. I pitched him the concept as concisely as possible and he was quick to draw my attention to a number of issues, the foremost of which is that a screenwriter has to be constantly aware of what the audience doesn't know. 15-30 pages (i.e. minutes) isn't a long time to deliver a complete narrative, particularly one that is established in an unfamiliar social or cultural context.

Maybe that's why I've decided to post the first few pages of the current draft here, for whomever finds it, and cares to read it - in the hope that any comments will help me gauge what you know; what you want to know; what you need to know. You don't have to post them below - you can always email them to me. Anonymously, if you prefer :)

the 'bad' photos

2007-11-07T13:57:00.001-08:00

About two hours ago Ems and I discovered that my laptop is bluetooth enabled. We've since dumped about 300 photos onto it, almost every one of which is of our Lola, dating since her first birthday (you can see her complete history, from bump onwards, here).

Watching back through the pictures, with some sweet sounds on iTunes and the slideshow feature gliding through chronologically, there wasn't a dry eye in the house. It wasn't just the pictures where she stopped and smiled, it was all those 'bad' photos in between, the flurries of colour, the flashes of happiness, the whirling inquisition binding it together into a year in the life of...

I think that's part of the reason, when Tommy and I set up Ploggle, I was so obsessed with the cameraphone angle, albeit at the expense of steering our venture to commercial success. I love the narratives cameraphones explore, going places you wouldn't necessarily think to take a regular camera.

I decided to pick one photo and post it here. One that you won't find on LightJunior, or TravelLight. It was taken today, just as Ems embarks on maternity leave for the second time, and can spend an afternoon with Lola sweeping up leaves in the back yard. As it came up she apologised. "They're all fuzzy, she just kept moving."

Sounds like a pretty good design for life. Stay fuzzy. Just keep moving.

Like it? Grab it. Share it!

2007-10-31T16:57:00.000-07:00

This is something we've been working on at PPC lately, recently pushed live. It's been once of those projects that's really stretched a few of us, but everybody - including the client - is really made up with the end result:

The content may seem like fairly obvious stuff, although the choice of backgrounds is a nice touch. But in terms of how far we've travelled since the days of the campaign microsite, this feels like a real milestone, and we have a nice slate of projects coming up where we should get to play with the format. Hope you like it. Hope you grab it. Hope you share it!

"either you do it or you don't"

2007-10-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

A few of my nearest and dearest know that I've been working on a short (12-15 minute) screenplay. The working title is WEATHERMAN. (It's already changed a dozen times, so don't hold me to that.)

The root concept can be traced all the way back to a poem i wrote as part of a creative writing course while studying English Lit in Edinburgh, some time around 1999. I think I eventually called it 'Alien', forming part of a fairly slapdash body of work submitted to a suitably indifferent reception. I still have it on a disc somewhere, formatted for the Apple Mackintosh Classic I was using at the time (see below) - if I manage to resurrect it maybe I'll try and get a copy up on here, for posterity alone.

'Alien' came back to mind about a year ago when I was out with Ems, wheeling Lola around Downs Park. I was trying to explain what Second Life was, how it worked, what mind-bending possibilities existed beyond it's immediate limitations.

I started playing around with the script during a week in France earlier this year. We had a blanket week-long ban on blackberries, mobiles, laptops, but on the first day we went down to the local village and I bought a typewriter in a bric-a-brac market for 10 euros. It was pretty cranky, but it basically worked ok.

The great thing about writing on a typewriter is that you don't tend to get bogged down the way you do when you word process. With a typewriter, you maintain a certain amount of forward momentum, rather than endlessly chewing over your work until the spirit and spontaneity of what made you sit down and start writing in the first place is no longer recognisable.

I came back from France with a first draft, if you could call it that. I stole the occasional moment to type it up a little, but for the most part it stood still. I picked it up again in Thailand, made some real progress thinning down the dialogue, and developed a stronger sense of how it might be structured. Of course, one step forward is so often ten steps back, and I came back from Thailand knowing that there was still a hell of a lot of work to do.

The reason I'm posting about it now is that Kelly O, a friend of mine from LA who does some work with Fox, met me for breakfast at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica on Saturday, walked me up to Barnes & Noble, and found me a copy of Syd Field's 'SCREENPLAY: The Foundations of Screenwriting'. I started reading it on the flight back and it's already clear to me what a cruel and necessary and illuminating process it will be finding out exactly how much I have to take on board.

There was one quote that hit me square in the face the first time I read it, right at the end of the introduction: "Talent's is God's gift; either you've got it or you don't. But writing is a personal responsibility; either you do it or you don't." I like that. When I go too long without making the time to write, I feel like I'm neglecting a responsibility. I hope I go on feeling that way.

happy endings

2007-10-22T17:43:00.000-07:00

i have 9% of battery to try and capture the essence of yet another trip stateside. i hit LA wednesday night, Fox on thursday, Disney and Warner Bros friday. I ate a whole lot of sushi, the ultimate stack of blueberry muffins and one incredibly fine fried breakfast. england lose the rugby on saturday, west ham beat sunderland on sunday morning. swings and roundabouts from start to finish.

you can be lonely as hell, then find yourself surrounded by a throng of new friends and new possibilities. the west coast might be bad for my health, but then a lot of good things are. ups and downs, but always something new, moving forward, toward the happiest ending of all - going home :)

* * *

chronological 'big-up-yourselves' to:
- Be, for tipping the Monaco
- Rossanna, for knowing that there exists such a thing in this world as an espresso martini
- Kelly and Charlee - much needed retail orientation
- Dougal and Amanda, for the last of the Patron (and the first).
- Mary, Amy, and Hannah and Lucas, official Club Penguin consultants
- Mr Clayton and the Sunderland keeper, for the sunday morning recovery
- Brie, Mai and Jiang Xin Yi, for some much needed inspiration

thailand

2007-10-09T14:09:00.000-07:00

Just back from three weeks in Thailand with Ems and Lola. Thought I'd post this pic, since it pretty much sums up the trip, much of which was spent in a bungalow on Koh Samui getting to know a kid who's just starting to learn how to talk to the world, and is generally captivated by what it has to say back.

You can see the rest of our pics from the trip on Travel Light.

The idea IS the format

2007-09-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

This came up in the course of preparing a presentation for a company strategy day last week. I wanted to identify how the interactive division differs from the parts of the company producing audio-visual and print material, dvds, that kind of thing.

At the heart of any movie or game is a narrative concept. Through the production process that concept is developed into a finished product. Through the marketing process, that product is propagated into lots of smaller ideas, packaging it for market and seeking to engage the target audience. These ideas are conceived to work across certain formats - a trailer or tv spot, a poster, a standee, whatever it may be. The idea is developed creatively, then adapted to the format, within a familiar set of constraints, which stay relatively constant.

Interactive is different. Because our medium is constantly changing, as are the habits of the audience we're seeking to engage, our creative concepts are now inseparable from their interactive context. Furthermore, imaginative use of that context often becomes the driver behind a great idea, and a compelling campaign. The idea IS the format.