Archives: Television/TV

If you follow me on Twitter, you can’t have helped but notice that it’s been a very busy week, with no less than five pieces of media telling my story during transplant week. (Links to follow).

Transplant week is always a special week for me, for very obvious reasons. It’s a chance to harp on about the miracle of organ donation and for me to tell my story to inspire people to have difficult conversations with their family and sign the Organ Donor Register to record their wishes.

It’s also a challenging week. It forces my life into a spotlight, not just in the media, but in my own head as well.

Talking about the difference between pre- to post-transplant me shows just how far I’ve come, but also challenges my perception of my life and what I’ve achieved. It challenges my understanding of the world I live in and it challenges the decisions I’ve made in the years since my transplant.

And here’s what it all comes down to:

I feel a pressure to “succeed” and make a difference that my donor would be proud of.

The funny thing is that I know this is silly. I know there’s no reason for me to feel this way, or for it to leave me feeling inadequate if I haven’t achieved what I feel is “success”. Yet it’s a feeling I can’t shake.

As one very good friend said to me during the week when I voiced this to her, “Your donor will just be happy they’ve allowed you to still be here, regardless of what you’re doing and how successful you are.”

The problem I face is that I don’t know that for sure. Yes, it makes sense. Yes, I can see the logic. But I’ve never met and will never be able to meet my donor, so I don’t know what they think.

That’s why I’ve been so busy this week. That’s why I remain so willing to talk so openly about my transplant journey. That’s why I’ll always take advantage of transplant week. Because it’s the one chance I get to demonstrate just how much this all means to me.

To that end, I’ll be sharing links to the various media hits I had this week here on the blog in the next few days. If you’ve heard them already, thanks for listening. If not, perhaps download them and have a listen in the car or when you’re out for a walk. The two radio interviews are the most in-depth I’ve ever done and in both of them I share some thoughts and stories I’ve never shared publicly before.

And, of course, if you haven’t already, please sign the Organ Donor Register.

This week is National Organ Donor week, or Transplant Week if you’d rather the shorter version.

It’s a massive week for me, a chance to talk about the thing that I am most passionate about and, hopefully, to inspire people to sign the Organ Donor Register.

It’s only Monday morning, but already I’ve had three pieces go out: a short news piece on BBC Radio Northampton, a 3-minute news piece on ITV Anglia and a 15-minute chat on BBC Three Counties Radio yesterday morning.

Whenever I speak about cystic fibrosis or organ donation I know people listen. I’m blessed with both a compelling story and the means to express it. I’m not very good at identifying my own strengths, but I know communication is definitely one of them.

However well I speak or write, though, I know that most of my friends have heard this stuff a million times. Most people I’m connected to on Facebook have been with me throughout my whole journey and know exactly how I feel.

Despite this saturation, and to my surprise, they are still listening to everything I share. I’ve had more engagement on Twitter and Facebook in the last 24-48 hours than I’ve had for the last couple of weeks combined.

Why? Because I’m speaking with passion.

To listen to someone speaking with passion is to hear their words pour from their heart like a dam bursting to give way to the floods behind it. Regardless of whether you agree, more often than not you’ll listen to their arguments because of the force of feeling behind them.

Passion is honest. It’s almost impossible to fake passion, which is why politicians so frequently fall foul of the trap; they try so hard to sound passionate, but the effort always shows and comes across as a lack of sincerity at best, straight-up emotional manipulation at worst.

There is a rawness, a freshness, an authenticity to someone who speaks with passion that can’t be bought or faked. It’s naturally compelling and our ears tune into it without any conscious thought on our part.

I don’t like to bombard people with calls-to-action to sign the Organ Donor Register and talk to their family about their potential death. I recognise that it’s not a subject people much want to discuss. But weeks like this give me a chance to speak with passion about the thing I care most deeply about. So I’m grabbing this opportunity with both hands and I’ll be shouting from the rooftops all week.

You can help by simply sharing this post, or the organ donation link, with your friends so they understand just how important it is for us to stop three people every day dying while they wait for a transplant that doesn’t come in time.

(By the way, have you signed the Organ Donor Register? Do it now!)

On Saturday, K and I travelled down to Covent Garden to help out some friends who’ve been working on one of this year’s Battlefront campaigns about organ donation.

Both of the girls concerned have siblings who have been saved by a transplant, so it’s hugely personal to them and one of them, Hope, is looking likely to see her mum go through the same thing soon.

Sarah has covered things in far more detail (and with many more pictures) on her blog, so I won’t rewrite the wheel (no, hold on…), but rather just say that for two young women to achieve what they did this weekend is remarkable in so many ways.

Both of them have been through huge amounts of emotional trauma with their loved ones in recent years and both would be forgiven for packing it all away in a mind-cupboard at the back of their brain to sit in storage, untouched for years to come. But instead, they choose to fight, to promote organ donation to as many people as possible and to set a new world record for the biggest number of sign-ups to the organ donor register in one hour.

I wrote last week about remarkable women I know; you can certainly add these two to the list.

This week I have been engaged in numerous discussions of the organ donation system in the UK, mostly spurred by my appearance on Channel 4’s 4Thought.tv strand which asked, “Should Organ Donation Be Compulsory”.

Over the week, the show has featured a variety of views both for and against presumed consent and organ donation as a whole. One of these was Derek House, a Jehovah’s Witness who believes that all organ donation is fundamentally wrong.

While his views raised ire among the transplant community, it struck me that Mr House isn’t the man we need to be targeting. His religious beliefs preclude him from supporting organ donation: we’re not going to change that.

If we want to see the number of organ donors in this country increase, we need to tackle the vast disparity between the 75% of people who say they would be willing to donate their organs1 and the 26% who have signed the organ donor register. Those people don’t need convincing of the merits, they just need to be drawn out of their apathy.

Focusing our energies on a battle we’re already winning seems like a better use of resources than fighting one we will inevitably lose.

The same goes for any kind of battle you may be facing as an artist or entrepreneur: look at the fights you face and work out which ones are worth your energy.

Picking your battles is not the same as taking the path of least resistance. It’s about using your focus and energies on strategies and tactics that will make a difference, not banging your head against a brick wall.

1. the oft-quoted figure of 90% is, infact, the people who support the idea of organ donation; 15% of people support the idea, but say they wouldn’t donate their organs [↩]

I don’t want to pour more scorn on the much-derided Spider-man: The Musical, enough of that has been done by commentators and citizen reviewers across New York, the US and, increasingly, the world. I make no comment on its artistic merit; I’ve not seen it and therefore am in no position to judge.

I did, however, see a lesson for all artists and creatives in the development and re-development of the show following this piece in the New York Post this week. The key phrase for me:

[Phil] McKinley’s going to turn the show into a shorter, special-effects-driven family spectacle more suited to the world of Steve Wynn than Steve Sondheim.

Michael Riedel, nypost.com

For me, if you’re creating a musical from a comic book, the tone and the feel of the show needs to reflect that of the book itself. The same holds true for making movies and TV shows of comic books, too.  What I don’t understand about Spidey is why have a short, special-effects-driven family show is a change of direction – that’s exactly the sort of show it should have been in the first place.

As any social media and marketing expert will tell you, knowing your audience is key. And the audience for Spider-man: The Musical surely wants to see something breath-takingly spectacular with a simple, familiar storyline that they don’t have to concentrate on too much.  From the reports abounding on the ‘net, that’s not what they’ve got.

Knowing your audience and knowing exactly what it is you’re making is crucial to the artistic and commercial success of any artistic project. Even for little indies who don’t want to think about “commerce” and “business”1, it’s vital to understand who is going to consume your eventual product, even if they’re not paying for it.

What else would you want from a Broadway/West End show based on a comic book? I can’t think of anything other than good fun and spectacle. It’s the old K.I.S.S. message: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

1. as misguided as that is [↩]

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.

1. The BBC have got a great article on it and its perceived impact here [↩]
2. 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.

1. new word alert! [↩]
2. and, in fact, all online project management tools [↩]

This weekend, I caught up on the BBC’s awesome BTS doc on COME FLY WITH ME, the new series from LITTLE BRITAIN creators Matt Lucas and David Walliams.

One thought from an interview with Matt Lucas really struck me. Inevitably, there was a question about how you follow up a series as successful as LB was1. Lucas commented, on topping LB:

Can we do something as big as that? No. Can we do something better than that? Certainly.

And there’s the rub: whatever we’re setting out to create, the aim should never be about creating something bigger, simply creating something better.

Striving for size and reach will bring pressures and compromises; striving for quality will not only better ensure excellence, but also come with its own–much wider–rewards and may end up being both bigger and better.

1. and love it or hate it, you can’t deny its success [↩]

Sky Atlantic, the brilliant new HBO-inspired channel from Sky, is currently running a number of great, classic shows from the beginning. Last night, I caught up with the Pilot and first few eps of ER, a show I used to adore but only started watching from around Season 4 or 5.

The pilot isn’t anything all that special: there isn’t much in the way of plot; it’s just a random collection of traumatic events and an introduction to the characters. I’ve seen many better pilots in my time.

What’s easy to forget some 17 years on from that first airing is just how revolutionary and innovative E.R. was at the time.

Never before had a medical drama been shot in such a kinetic, absorbing style. Never before had a show allowed its characters to speak “normally”, without qualifying what “O2 sats” or “insanelylongmedicallynamedthingy” was. Never before had a show stretched its character’s personal arcs across more than a few episodes before nicely tying them up.

Now TV can’t get enough of the verité style; the best shows all worry more about the characters than the events; our favourite shows stretch character arcs and storylines across entire seasons1, without wrapping things up nicely at the end of each episode.

It’s easy when we look back at our old favourites2 to see them in the same light we see things now. But if we’re going to continue to innovate, it’s vital that we don’t forget what innovation looked like in the first place.

Remembering how someone set about doing things differently can inspire us new creative heights, allowing us to see how people looked at things from new angles and created something fresh, exciting and–ultimately–hugely influential.

What innovations did your favourite films and shows introduce? How did they change the landscape and inspire other creators to go further?

1. or even longer in some cases (LOST) [↩]
2. be they TV shows, films or any other artistic or creative endeavour [↩]

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?

1. be it TiVo, Sky+ or whatever the dominant service in your area is [↩]
2. like the BBC’s iPlayer [↩]
3. just check out the spike in Twitter traffic as recorded here by the NY Post [↩]