Shortly after the blog’s relaunch, I posted about my discovery and attempted embracing of zen and its philosophies.
Many people think of zen as some weird mystic mumbo jumbo and don’t put much truck in it, which is fine.
For me, though, zen isn’t about meditation and ‘ohm-ing’, about converting to Buddhism and shaving your hair off, about throwing away all your possessions and living like a minimalist nomad.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out the value of “Event TV”. Take last night’s Superbowl: people all over the world tuned in and felt compelled to take part in the chatter, bantering back-and-forth with friends, followers and random strangers.
In the age of the DVR ((be it TiVo, Sky+ or whatever the dominant service in your area is)), VOD and online catch-up services ((like the BBC’s iPlayer)) more and more of us are watching our TV content time-shifted to suit ourselves. But if you want to be part of a conversation – if you want to experience the feedback as it happens – you need to be watching live.
The LOST finale is the obvious fictional TV reference ((just check out the spike in Twitter traffic as recorded here by the NY Post)). Although it’s easily dismissed as a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence for fans of one particular show and thus something of an exception, it’s still worth noting that the LOST team had spent 6 years working up to this moment, carefully building their following and fanaticism to the point when it became not only “must-see TV” but “must-see-at-the-same-time-as-everyone-else TV”, the very definition of “event TV”.
Can we, as independent filmmakers and creators, produce the kind of content that is best experienced live and as it happens? Can we create “event” content?
The closest we have to it right now is probably The Production Office Live and Film Snobbery, shows that are available almost immediately after airing on the ‘net for anyone to view it at their leisure, but which the vast majority of the audience wants to see live so they can engage in the chat and discussion, whether on the website chat or via Twitter. Even this, though, is factual content rather than fictional.
If they key to it is interaction and immediacy, is it possible – or even realistic – for us to create “event TV” in a fictional format? Or are we foolish to even aspire to such heights? Do the indie forms of distribution (VOD, digital download etc) inevitably mean it’s beyond our reach, or can we create content that will get people buzzing across platforms as they all watch our product together?
What do you think?
It’s not up as quickly as I hoped it would be, but here for your delectation is the Day 1 video blog from the London Screenwriters’ Festival hosted by the ever-present Chris Jones.
Enjoy!
This is the place in a park in the middle of Hungary, about an hour outside of her dad’s home town of Budpest, where K and I got engaged. Amazing isn’t it?
For those who want all the details, here’s the rub:
We were over in Hungary on my first ever visit and K’s first for over 20 years, for the wedding of her cousin, Àgi, to the lovely and wonderful Tibi. In truth, K and Àgi are more like sisters when they’re together, slotting back in wherever they left off and having a ridiculously good time. So it was wonderful to be invited over to share in their big day with them, loving them as much as we do.
Having been with K for over 4 years now, I think it’s fair to say I’d been thinking about proposing for a while now, but wanted it to be right. I’d found a ring I really liked, but the band was in yellow gold, which K doesn’t really care for, with a white gold design on top. Having met her mum’s jewellery-designer cousin a few weeks ago, I realised the perfect thing to do would be to get him to make a white gold version of it with a few tweaks here and there. All of which meant, of course, that I didn’t have a ring for Hungary.
The lack of ring, however, couldn’t take away from the perfection of the timing or the location of the wedding and as soon as we arrived with her parents in Budapest, I realised that I couldn’t pass the opportunity up. Like the old romantic I am, I took K’s dad to one side and asked his permission on Friday night, which he gladly (I think…) gave.
On Saturday we arrived at the stunning location for the wedding, which was in the chapel – the last standing part – of an enormous castle that had been razed to the ground by the Soviets during the revolution. The grounds where the castle stood are now what we in the UK would call a country park and Àgi and Tibi encouraged all of their guests to get out and explore the space, which is what we did.
On a wander around the grounds we found the nice quiet spot you saw above. Like all good romantics, I then stole K’s existing ring from her right hand, got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. And she burst into tears. Luckily, it turns out they were happy tears and, with the refrain of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” being sung by Tibi’s sister in the marquee across the gardens, she said yes! It seemed like one of those elusive perfect moments we all plan for, but that only ever happen with a swirl of serendipity.
And that, as they say, is that. It’s not 100% how I planned it or expected it to be, but I couldn’t have found a better place or time to do it. And just to prove it, here’s K’s hand with her non-engagement ring sitting on her ring finger. It’s official! And we couldn’t be happier.
Apologies for my tardiness on getting this up on the blog, but here, as promised AGES ago, is the Lowdown on Search Engine Optimisation.
Here’s the original Lowdown video from The Production Office and below it you’ll find a more detailed look at SEO with links to the resources I used to put this one together. Any questions, please feel free to dip into the comments section.
Search Engines
We all know about search engines like Google and, well, Google really. But how do they work? Very simplistically, Google sends little bots, like computerized robots, out around the whole of the world wide web to see what’s out there. The information they gather from various parts of all of the world’s websites are then pulled together by Google so that when you type in a search for something like Chris Jones, it can tell you about all the places you can find references to those words on the ‘net.
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO, then, is a way to make sure that those little bots scouting around the internet will pick up on your site. But more than that, what SEO does if you use it effectively is to make sure that your site and your pages are right at the top of the listings so that when people come looking for you they can find you quickly and easily.
But there’s no point being the top of the listings for a search term that no one is searching for; you’ll get no traffic! So check the Google external tool or Wordtracker to find some words you can be top for, you know, the ones that people are actually searching for.
• http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (make sure you select UK if you’re in the UK) also through AdWords
• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
The Four Golden Rules
One: Have a keyword strategy. There’s no point competing for hugely common or popular search terms like “DIY” or “Hollywood”, but you may have more luck driving your site to the top of the list with more appropriate keywords for your audience. You need to target the right searchers, not just any searchers.
Two: Have a well-structured website. The structure of your website can play a key role in how easily the bots can pick up on your site and bring the information back to the engine. But structure also means the “visible” part of your site – after all, an ugly, hard-to-read website makes click-throughs from Google useless if people leave your page straight away.
Make sure your site structure contains categories & page names with keywords in them. That way Google picks up your content and themes it under your keywords, so your content gets found in the search engines.
<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/red-widgets/i-love-red-widgets.html”>www.mysite.com/red-widgets/i-love-red-widgets.html</a>
<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/red-widgets/i-dont-like-blue-widgets.html”>www.mysite.com/red-widgets/i-dont-like-blue-widgets.html</a>
Three: Have good content. It seems like a given, but we’re not just talking about interesting and compelling copy for people to read when they get there.
You need quality content that adds value to the searcher’s experience, not just good content. Google loves that stuff!
At the very least for super basic SEO:
1. Have a descriptive title tag for every page on your site and put your popular keywords in there. This appear at the top of each listing, so make it catchy.
2. Have a meta keywords tag with about 10 keywords separated by a comma that describe your page. Don’t stuff all your keywords in there!
3. Have a meta description tag which briefly summarizes your page. It’s used for the search engine listings, right under the title.
4. Sprinkle a couple of your keywords in the page copy, but don’t over do it.
Four: Promotion. One of the key ways of boosting your ranking is having other pages on the web linking to you. So it’s time to leverage all those social media contacts you’ve made on Twitter and Facebook since these Lowdowns and get people linking to your site from theirs. Here’s a tip for free: it helps if you reciprocate.
Linking is known as “off-page optimization”. Just make sure when people link to you, they put your keywords in the anchor text of the link like this:
<a href=”http://www.applelover.com/types-of-apples.html”>i love granny smith apples</a>
“i love granny smith apples” is your anchor text and gives you a better chance of ranking for ‘i love granny smith apples’.
More Than The Basics
As the video says, this is only the briefest of overviews to the SEo process and its capabilities. For more information, check out these resources:
I was asked to an event at City Hall in Cardiff by the CF Trust this week, to provide my usual context for the evening’s fundraising efforts.
The night was truly astonishing, raising over £10,000 for the Trust in an economy where people just don’t have spare cash lying around. What’s more it was from ordinary people affected or touched by CF and not a room full of the high and mighty of Cardiff or millionaire businessmen.
I was privileged to be there and to meet some truly remarkable people. I also gave a speech, which received the best reception of any talk, speech or presentation I’ve ever done. I was truly humbled by the reaction.
I don’t speak from notes, but thanks to the ever-wonderful K who supported me last night, here’s a (rough) transcript of the speech:
“Hello, thanks for having me here tonight. I’m here to tell you that CF is rubbish. That’s pretty much my job.
I have to say this is much better than my only other visit to Cardiff, which was rubbish. I think that had more to do with Southampton losing 1-0 to Arsenal in the FA Cup final at the Millenium Stadium than the city itself – turns out it’s a lovely place when football isn’t involved.
As I said, I’m here this evening to provide a bit of context for tonight’s event, to talk about what life with CF is really like and why it’s so important that you give as generously as you can this evening. I can see you all thinking “he looks pretty well for a sick person”, but I’m only this well because someone took the decision to allow me a second chance at life after they had lost theirs.
I used to do a lot of these talks when I was ill and it was so much easier. I’d drag myself up onto the stage, lumbering my oxygen cylinder behind me, nasal specs in my nose, probably struggle to actually get up onto the stage and just have to stand here looking like death and say, “It’s rubbish”. Everyone sitting out there where you are would look up and me and think, ‘Wow – that looks rubbish,” and my job would be done. Now it’s a little trickier.
I was diagnosed with CF at 18 months, which is pretty late by today’s standards. It’s thanks to the pressure from the CF Trust, CF is now tested routinely through the heel-prick test at birth, which makes a huge difference in allowing early intervention. I went through 18 months of hell which, luckily, I don’t remember, but my parents do. They had no idea what was wrong with me and anything they tried to do was almost certainly the wrong thing because of that.
Once diagnosed, I lived fairly well for the first part of my life – right through my teens to my early 20’s things went pretty well and stayed pretty stable. Things really starting going badly in my 20’s when I got stuck in Texas.
You may think that getting stuck in Texas isn’t that bad, and you’d be right, it’s not. But the reason I was stuck there was because I’d had a very small lung collapse. It sounds very big and scary, but this wasn’t one of those full-blown collapses with tubes being stuck in and all that TV medical stuff, it was much smaller and less impressive than that.
The trouble with lung collapses, though, is that the doctors tell you if you do get on a plane to fly home, there’s a very high chance it will go completely and – at 30,000 feet – I’d more than likely die. So I kind of figured that not flying made sense.
The trouble with staying in Texas, though, was that you have to pay for your healthcare, especially if your insurance company tries to claim that a collapsed lung is a pre-existing condition. This meant I had to go with out my regular preventative antibiotic courses that were designed to keep me as well as I could.
I went to Texas for two weeks over New Year and came back at the end of April, by which time the infections had scarred my lungs so much further than they were already, I started a steady and fairly rapid decline. It’s not fair to blame it all on Texas, my lungs had been declining for a while, the trip just sped things up. The following winter I had one of the hardest conversations I’ve ever had with my doctors, where they essentially told me I had two years to live if I didn’t get a transplant.
The next two-and-a-half years that I waited were the hardest two-and-a-half years of my life. I – and my family – ended up living from event to event in my life. At the time I got my transplant, it was November and we had all been looking forward to Christmas, although it seemed a long way off. New Year was only a week later, but that seemed even further. My brother’s birthday is at the end of January and I know my family were trying to work out whether or organize a party at home so I could be there or a party at the pub because they knew I wasn’t going to be with them.
Obviously, it all ended happily for me. But I’m here to tell you that transplant isn’t a magic bullet. Yes, I’m better than I’ve ever been in my life: I feel amazing, I can do things I’d never dreamed of doing. But it comes with downsides. I’ve just been diagnosed as diabetic because the anti-rejection drugs I take to stop my body attacking the new lungs have fried and destroyed my pancreas. I know that eventually, the same will probably happen to my kidneys. I wouldn’t change it for the world, but I’m aware that the CF Trust can help stop people going through what I’ve been through.
When I was put on the transplant list, I was told that there was a 50% chance of me getting a transplant, otherwise I would die. That’s quite a stark statistic if you think about it. In fact, I remember vividly a very close friend of mine getting her transplant about nine months before me and I was doing a speech shortly afterwards at another charity event. I was speaking without notes, as I usually do, and I suddenly found myself telling the crowd, “Because Emily’s had her transplant, statistically, that means I won’t”. And that’s the reality I faced.
Since I’ve had my transplant, I’ve lost four very close friends who were waiting for transplants, and that’s hard. Just six months after my transplant, while I was preparing to celebrate my 26th birthday – a birthday my family and I never thought I’d see – about a week before, my friend Sam died.
I’m not here to tell you all to sign the organ donor register – although I will tell you, now, that you should. I’m here to tell you that the work the CF Trust is doing will help make sure that no one has to go through what I’ve been through.
If the research the CF Trust is doing works, no one like me will have to wait two-and-a-half years for a transplant; no one will need a transplant. No one will have to watch their friends die like I have. No parents will have to watch their children die. If you dig deep tonight and do whatever you can to contribute, we can help the CF Trust make sure that we can stop people losing their loved ones.
I’m going to leave you to it now, but there’s an auction coming up. There’s an auction later on and I want you all to bid for things – even if you’re petrified you’ll win it – I want you all to bid to push those prices up. Empty the change from your pockets into the pots on your table.
You’re here to have fun and enjoy your evening, so go to the bar, get some more beers in, enjoy the band, have a giggle, but just remember that you have the power tonight to help make sure no one has to endure what I and too many of my friends have been through.
Thank you, have a great night.”
This week’s Lowdown for The Production Office was part two of our look at blogs and blogging, this time focused on WordPress – the internet’s most powerful blogging tool.
THE TWO TYPES OF WORDPRESS
So WordPress comes in two forms: wordpress.com and wordpress.org.
The .com side is the simplest and easiest, web-based version of the the WordPress system. It’s by no means as powerful as the other side, but it does everything you want an entry-level blogging platform to do, including offer a huge number of themes or skins to deck your blog out and an array of widgets you can apply to your blog to include your Twitter stream etc. All you have to do is to is go to the site, think of a name, register and you’re away.
WordPress.org is the complicated side of WordPress that requires a little more knowledge and dedication, but you can learn everything you need to know about it from the WordPress website or by using a Google search.
HOSTING
First things first, you need to find a webhost that supports the software and to buy a domain name for it. There’s all kinds of places you can find decent web hosting, but the WordPress site itself offers some options. Or you can try HostGator or a personal favourite of mine, NoWhereLand, which is run by a friend of mine who offers great rates and totally unrivalled support in case you have any problems.
INSTALLATION
Next up, go to WordPress.org and follow their “five minute” install instructions. They’re quite technical, but actually perfectly easy if you follow them step-by-step. Once you’ve installed WordPress on your host’s servers, you can access everything you need via the online dashboard, which is similar to the wordpress.com dashboard but with many more options.
THE LOOK
Then you’re going to want to go looking for a theme. Hit Google with “free wordpress themes” and you’ll get a load of quick results with an array of themes that you can then import into your wordpress. I’d advise going for one that’s been designed as “search engine optimized” as you then don’t need to worry about that side of things too much.
CODING & DESIGN
Once you’ve found a theme you like, you can either throw it up on the site and start adding your content or – and this is the best bit of WordPress – you can go learn the basics of HTML and PHP and start fiddling about with the look of your site.
Unless you’re an utter programming genius (or can afford to pay one), I wouldn’t recommend building your wordpress site form scratch, although you can. Much better to take a theme that’s close to what you’re after and adapt it to what you want from it – that’s what I’ve done with all the sites I’ve created with wordpress, including this one.
WIDGETS & PLUGINS
Next on your list of to-do’s on wordpress is going to be installing your widgets and plug-ins. We talked a little about widgets for blogs last time, which you can catch up with by watching back the last live show, or my previous post.
Plugins are extensions created by people independently of WordPress, so it is worth being a little careful with them, but usually the user reviews and star ratings are a good guideline. There are plugins for just about anything under the sun – if you can think of it, chances are a Google search or WordPress search will find something that’ll do it for you.
That’s a VERY quick run down of WordPress to get you started, but by far teh best thing for anyone to do is simply to go and try it. Get an account and see what you can do with it.
As Chris would say, onwards and upwards!
This weeks Lowdown for The Production Office was Part I of a 2-part special focused on blogs and blogging.
PLATFORMS
There are 3 main blogging platforms out there, although you’ll be able to find many more if you search around. The most well-known and easiest to use are Typepad, Blogger and WordPress. Wordpress is, I believe, the most powerful, versatile and useful of all the blogging tools on the web and because of that, part two of this Lowdown next time will look at WordPress as a standalone platform.
There is a fourth platform, Tumblr, which is a micro-blogging site design for short, concise updates of anything from text to pictures to video. It’s a great site and could be really useful for you if that’s the sort of set-up you want, but most bloggers prefer a little more space to ramble (more on that later).
THE LOOK
All of these sites allow you to customise your pages to differing degrees. At the very minimum they allow you to change the background and colours of your blog, but can also let you delve deeper into the construction of the blog to rearrange the layout and other elements.
WIDGETS
These sites also all allow the addition of widgets. A widget is a small application that runs in a sidebar or on the main part of your website and – most commonly – connects you to other place. Twitter and Facebook are the two key widgets for most blogs, directing your site traffic over to your other online presences and encouraging them to get in touch. Most bloggers receive far more blog feedback through social networking sites than they do through comments on the blogs themselves.
DOMAIN NAME
It’s really important to your brand as a filmmaker, producer, artist or whatever you may be that you purchase yourself a domain name. There are various sites to do it at, I usually use 123-reg, and they’re usually fairly cheap. You don’t necessarily need hoting for your blog (unless you’re using WordPress.org – of which more in part II), you can simply redirect the domain to go to your blog home page using something known as “masked web forwarding”. That means that all your visitors will type in yourname.com and see that in their browser window, but they’ll actually be (secretly) directed to yourname.wordpress.com or yourname.blogspot.com.
Why spend your money on something so seemingly insignificant? Two reasons: 1) It’s really not that expensive and 2) It just makes you look more professional. You’re not just some chump who’s thrown up a blog, you’re a serious blogger/filmmaker/whatever with something to say to the world. Even if you’re not.
POSTS
The key thing about blog posts are that they are there to engage and entertain. That doesn’t mean you’ve got to be hilariously funny on every page, just that you need to know what it is you want your blog to achieve. Unless you know that, your blog will rapidly descend into random ramblings that no one is really interested in.
Invest your posts with a little bit of your personality – even if it’s a corporate blog. Keep them light and, preferably, short – under 500 words if you can – so that people can pop in, have a read and shoot off again.
And lastly, but definitely not least, make your posts regular. Yes, you’ll be pimping your new blog posts through all your social media outlets (won’t you…?), but you want people to come back because they want to read what you have to say next. The more regular your posts, the more chance of a regular, returning readership – any blogger’s ultimate goal.
Next time, I’ll delve into a full break-down of WordPress and how you can get started with the internet’s most powerful blogging platform.
The last week or so I’ve been in a bit of a whirlwind and have therefore utterly failed to keep the blog up-to-date, including uploading my new Lowdown for Chris’s live show last week (which was the best so far, and can be seen again here).
The culprit is our new house. K and I have thrown our money into bricks and mortar and are now officially on the property ladder – and much higher up than we first thought.
It’s a great house, a lovely village and is perfect for our needs: a study for K to, well, study in and lay out all of her papers somewhere other than the living room floor and a separate study for me to work in, where I’ll have room to write, edit and store all of my various bits and pieces.
But it’s also got enough bedrooms to have people over to stay and enough room for great house parties.
It needs a lot of work to bring it into the 2010’s, being as it is slightly stuck in the 70’s, but that’s all worked into the budget and reflected in the brilliant price we got it for.
The only downside is that it’s starting to feel like we might be proper growed ups now.
Nah, that’s never gonna happen.
The Lowdown is a new segment on The Production Office, a weekly live show on LiveStream: LiveStream.com/guerillafilm. The show is broadcast live by Guerilla Film and Chris Jones on Thursday nights at 7.30pm GMT. You can also catch up with the show on VoD on the site.
Twitter is one of the most useful marketing and networking tools for filmmakers out there. Here’s a quick guide to how to make the most of Twitter:
It’s all about you
Twitter is the perfect place to build your brand as a person and a filmmaker. You can use whatever screen name you like: I use my own name – @olilewington – but Chris uses his company name – @livingspiritpix – and Judy uses @applestax, which is neither her name nor her company, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that all three of us have our full names and links to our sites on our Twitter profile pages.
People want to connect with YOU as a person, not an abstract notion at the end of a computer, so make sure you include your full name somewhere on the profile and a link to your sites. Using a good headshot of yourself as your Avatar is another great way to establish a quick connection with people.
It’s not all about you
Your page is all about you, yes, but what you do on Twitter isn’t.
Twitter is a community and that’s how you need to treat it. If you keep plugging your own stuff constantly you become the social networking equivalent of a guy walking into a party and just handing out fliers; no one wants to be that bloke and, more importantly, no one wants to follow that bloke.
Get involved: take part in conversations, discussions and post links to interesting things you find on the ‘net. They don’t even have to be film-related – on Twitter right now there’s a lot of people sharing stuff they’ve found on the elections happening in a few weeks in the UK. If it’s interesting and worth sharing, share it.
RTs
The letters RT are something you’ll see a lot on Twitter. It means Re-Tweet and is usually done by a click of a button next to a Tweet from someone you follow.
If someone says something interesting, funny or just something you want to pass on, hit the RT button and let all of your followers know about it. It’s a really easy way to support other people in their campaigns, whatever they may be.
Gary King, a filmmakers based in New York has just rasied nearly $3000 in two days largely down to the fact that the community around him RT’d his updates as he drew frantically close to his fundraising deadline. Never underestimate the power of RTs, because when your Tweets are RT’d you know about it, so people can see that you’re supporting them.
Hashtags
Twitter also uses a great little resource called hashtags. This is where you put a hash mark (#) with a specific word after it, like #prodoffice for The Production Office. That then enables any Twitter user to search for that hashtag and it’ll come up with a constantly updated stream of tweets from anyone who puts that hashtag into their messages.
It’s a great way to hold a conversation over Twitter and connect to people you wouldn’t normally see Tweets from.
For screenwriters, there’s a great example of this every Sunday night where #scriptchat takes place, for people to discuss issue with their current projection and seek support and advice – I’ve connected with loads of writers who’ve helped me out through the #scriptchat hashtag.
#ff
Once you start using Twitter you’ll also see the hashtag #FF come up every Friday.
The FF in question stands for Follow Friday and is a way of Twitterers recommending people they follow to others. So this Friday I may decide that Chris and Judy have some interesting stuff going on, so I’ll add #FF to a Tweet and include @livingspiritpix and @applestax, which is a shorthand way of telling everyone who follows me that they should also follow them.
It’s like a personalized Amazon system where you can say to people: if you like me, you might like to try this person, too.
Making the most of Twitter
Twitter is undoubtedly one of the best ways to find and support filmmakers around the world. Watching other people pushing their projects forward and pushing themselves to be the best they can be is utterly inspiring.
Filmmakers of all kinds, from the top directors and celebrities to people scratching out no-budget shorts all come together to help, support and drive each other.
Be part of the conversation – get involved, offer advice, offer opinions, get into the debate and get your ideas across. Like a lot of things in life, the more you put in, the more you get out.
Twitter is what you make of it – it can be all about your breakfast or it can be all about what you have to offer. Just don’t make it all about you.
The Lowdown
That’s this week’s lowdown – if you have any ideas for topics you’d like to see covered here then leave me a comment and we’ll see what we can do. You can also find me on Twitter @olilewington.