A Twitter buddy of mine this week posed the following question:
Would you use [product placement] to fund / part finance a film?
Followed closely by this Tweet, which makes no secret which way he’s leaning.
All this is, of course, highly appropriate just now with the UK about to start allowing product placement for the first time.1
I do think product placement has a place in helping to fund the TV and film industry over here. Apart from anything else, who are we to turn down sources of funding to get things made – not just for us but, potentially, more and better off-the-wall, risky TV drama and other formats it may help fund?
The issue for me always comes with the compromise that a filmmaker or an artist has to accept in order to allow for product placement. If you have to change elements of your script to accommodate a product you need to take a long, hard look at the reasons behind it and not fool yourself that it’s a “creative” decision.
That’s not to say all changes in the name of placement are a bad thing2 but I would always shy away from placement-based rewrites that affected anything more than a passing glance or irrelevant detail.
The key decider for any product placement-based changes has to be this: if someone were offering you the same sum of money without a product to push, would you make the changes they’re suggesting just because they’re giving you the cash?
If the answer’s “yes” then either a) they’re surprisingly good story analysts and you struck luck or b) you’re a sell-out and I wish you a long and happy career. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re making great art as you pander to the the money-men’s whims.
It’s entirely possible to incorporate product placement in a creative and ethical way, but we should all beware of those people who will become slaves to the product, rather than serving their story.
The BBC have got a great article on it and its perceived impact here [↩]
you wouldn’t see a huge amount of harm in switching a character’s car from a Ford to a Seat, for instance, as long as it says the same things about his life, social status etc [↩]
Welcome to another new LOWDOWN, that part of the Production Office that brings you tips and tricks on all the tools you need to enhance your career as a filmmaker and creative.
Today, it’s Productivity.
Anyone who follows my blog will know I’m pretty hot on productivity. For far too long I spent my days being busy, but rarely productive. Since harnessing some of the tools I’m talking about today and putting some best practices of getting things done into place, I’ve become much more focused, much more productive and much more successful.
Let’s have a look, then, at some of the tools you can use to make your life easier.
EVERNOTE
Evernote comes at the top of the list today for two reasons: number one, it’s the tool I was most recently introduced to and two, it’s the tool I now find the most invaluable.
Evernote is a desktop and web-based app that you can also get for almost all smart phones. It’s free to get started, but if you go over a certain storage limit you have to start paying. That said, I’ve used it quite a lot and still not exceeded my free allowance.
What Evernote does is to collect together all those bits and pieces of things on the web that you want to take note of, as well as allowing you to compile your own To Do lists, projects and other notes. It’s the simplest, cheapest and easiest way of keeping track of just about everything you need to remember. The Evernote logo isn’t an elephant for nothing.
THINGS
The second tool that works hard to keep you on time and on-topic is Things. The biggest down side? It’s Mac-only. So all you Windows dinosaurs can’t take advantage of it. You also have to pay around £30 for it, which puts it a step below Evernote to begin with.
Once you get past those elements, though, Things is brilliant for tracking To Do’s, project files, notes and reminders. Most usefully, though – and what helps to elevate Things to a point worth paying for – is it’s interaction and syncability1 with iCal and iPhone. If you use Apple’s MobileMe syncing solution to share your calendar across all your home computers, like I do, Things swaps and shares data seamlessly with not only all of your computers, but your phone as well. An invaluable way of keeping track of everything you need to know when you need to know it.
BASECAMP
There are numerous online project management tools that help you and all your collaborators to keep track of all the strands that make up your project, but the best one I’ve found (and used) is Basecamp.
Unlike other, equally useful online tools like Huddle, it’s Basecamp’s pricing structure that really makes it stand out. You pay a flat monthly fee from $24 (£15) and upwards that allows unlimited numbers of people to join your project and work on things with you. Huddle, by contrast, charges you per user per month, meaning a major film or creative project would quickly rack up sizable fees.
Basecamp2 is best used for sharing documents and keeping track of project timelines and goals in a way that everyone involved can see. Not only is that a great motivational tool – if everyone know what you should be doing, you’d better be doing it – but also a great way of making sure key things don’t get missed and that everyone knows the timeline their working to and the goals their aiming for.
There are hundreds of different tools of productivity for you to explore, but I’d suggest you limit yourself to trying one or two at a time, otherwise you risk undoing all their good work by spending all day getting to know them and setting them up as opposed to using them to help get your work done.
For more o productivity, keep an eye on my blog here, as well as checking out the99percent and lifehacker, my two online bibles of productivity tips and tools.
Starting a debate is a great way to engage your creative muscles. Not only does it force you to examine your own perspectives, it also opens you up to taking on board new ideas.
Great debates create new angles to examine problems and new ways to solve them.
As a writer, stirring debate can also help you to write both sides of an argument. I frequently start writing scenes between two characters and realise that it’s totally one-sided because I agree strongly with one of the characters. By entering a debate with my friends and Twitter buddies, I can get different views and arguments that help me round out my characters in a much more successful way.
What debates have you used to aid your writing or creativity? How did you get them started – is the interactivity of Twitter the best way to go, or the public discussion of Facebook?
This week I discovered the many pros and the major curse of staying regular.
Since re-branding my blog1, I’ve been blogging to a steady schedule of Monday, Wednesday, Friday for new, authored content, with Pick of the Web linked-content on a Tuesday and Thursday.
Last week, I didn’t blog on Thursday and Friday as I was busy taking stock of things in my life. In those two days, my readership on the blog halved. Just three days when the blog was devoid of new content.
But worse than that, it’s stayed at a lower ebb and is only now (after 3 days back on the regular schedule) starting to pick back up towards its previous numbers.
Blogging regularly is great in terms of building an audience; if people know when you’re posting, they know when to come looking and they know what to expect from your blog. But beware of committing yourself to a schedule of posts you can’t sustain.
Much better to follow a simple, one-post-a-week formula (such as that employed brilliantly by Clive Davies-Frayne on Film Utopia), than it is to attempt daily posts that you can’t keep up, or to release new blog content in a scattershot manner whenever you feel like or are able to write it.
Work out what you can realistically achieve, define your schedule and stick to it. Staying regular is the key to creating value for the people who read your blog as religiously as you write it.
I opened up my TweetDeck this morning to find a tweet from Jon Reiss who, you’ll remember, featured in this PotW post a couple of weeks ago. His linked through to a TechDirt article about building audiences and why those who think it’s too much time and effort are misguided at best.
The salient point, for me, is the following:
while building a loyal audience and community may take time and effort, in the long run, they provide you with the ability to actually focus more on creativity.
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 DVR1, VOD and online catch-up services2 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 reference3. 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?
be it TiVo, Sky+ or whatever the dominant service in your area is [↩]
Lucy V Hay, of Bang2Write fame, then goes a little further in her post, which references Daniel’s, talking about the paradox of the lucky/unlucky writer:
You’ll get no argument from when if you’re of the belief it’s TOTALLY about hard work, first and foremost; I think it’s important to recognise our own success as a writer will come as a direct result of that. However, I also think it’s important to realise it *could* have worked out very differently, despite our best efforts.
My most productive time of day is very early in the morning. I’m used to being up at 6.30am to take K to the station for her commute to London and I know I work best in those 2-3 hours immediately I get up.
I have another burst of focus around the 5-6pm mark, where I tend to push myself into completing things before calling it a night.
Finding these productivity peaks not only helps you be more productive, but is much less likely to allow you to become distracted by other things. Just remember to close down Twitter and Facebook while you’re trying to make the most of your peaks.
My increasingly awesome Twitter-buddy Tyler Weaver posted this great article on his website today. I don’t know why, but I love peeking into other people’s work spaces, although Tyler’s minimalism puts my crazy-chaotic office/corner desk bombsite to shame.
I remember an old adage I used to try to placate my parents with at home:
A creative mess is better than a tidy idleness. Anon
I clearly just need to learn how Tyler manages “creative tidyness”.
For a superstition, the muse certainly needs structure. You’ve got to tell it where and when to show up, or else it’ll become an excuse for you not to do your work. Tyler Weaver, tylerweaver.com
Good, smart, fun and relevant content should be at the core of any social media strategy. Great content should reflect your brand and give people a reason to stay engaged.
A Twitter buddy of mine this week posed the following question:
