A while back Russell wondered why there aren't more case studies of failures. Case stumbles, perhaps. Crash studies?
So in the spirit of sharing, here's my contribution: a failure I prepared earlier. Four years earlier, to be precise. The fact that it has taken me this long to get round to sharing goes some way to illustrate what a fiasco it turned out to be.
The background was this. Confident that there is strength in numbers, I convinced a few friends that we should pool our various creative endeavours to make a single noteworthy confection. Like when the Power Rangers come together to make...Megawhatsit. It would combine elements of drama, music and design, all wrapped up in an online narrative extravaganza.
What we ended up with was a story wrapped round a story wrapped round another story (that was spiked for legal reasons). All of which were completely fictitious...but presented as fact.
The central narrative was a shaggy dog story about a (fictitious) lost Herbie Hancock score to Dog Day Afternoon. This was nixed by Hancock's lawyers, when I naively contacted them to get it cleared.
Around this was wrapped a story about J, a dealer who buys and sells "cool shit": 20th Century furniture, vintage haute couture, super-rare records (such as the master tapes to an unreleased Herbie Hancock soundtrack). We billed him as an Arthur Daly for the iPod Generation.
And all this sat within a behind-the-scenes depiction of an aspiring director, William Wilson, making a documentary about J and his globetrotting exploits buying and selling stuff. This was played out, in realtime, on the crew messageboard, which should have been password protected but - due to "technical issues" - was open for all to see.
As all these people were supposed to exist, it made sense that they had lives elsewhere on the web. So J was active on ebay, and his live auctions had links to the production company website. The production crew posted as themselves on Shooting People. And William researched the provenance of the "lost" soundtrack on the messageboards at imdb, Gilles Peterson's Worldwide/Brownswood and Straight No Chaser.
Confused? You won't be after...well, you probably will be. But here's the trailer for the documentary to get you started.
Untitled from patricksyms on Vimeo.
If it happened in 2008 it would probably be called an ARG (even though it's not a game), but this was 2004 and I didn't know what an ARG was; and there was an even smaller audience of people looking to decode and unpick stories distributed across the web. There was no YouTube, or user-friendly flash-based video utilities in general; everything was self-contained video files this, codecs that. Blogs and messageboard platforms existed, of course, but for a reason that must have made sense at the time but escapes me now, I chose to code a site to look like a messageboard. Sheesh.
So, yes, it didn't work. But in failing, I learnt. Specifically:
Lesson 1: keep it simple. The narrative I cooked up was too convoluted (a story within a story within another story?) and too complicated to have any hope of gaining an audience. Even our friends, who invested more effort than they should, were a little baffled. This contradicts the current vogue for pretty dense ARG structures. But an ARG - as a promotional vehicle for a self-contained piece of entertainment, be it a movie or TV series or book - can afford to be challenging: it's for the obsessive fans. If an ARG - or something akin to one - becomes the entertainment itself, then it needs a simple core. IMHO, as they say.
Lesson 2: DIY is great, but not if quality is compromised. Despite being a collaborative effort, I didn't collaborate enough. I ended up doing much more than I could cope with to the point where I was neglecting the quality, on so many levels. On any team project, half the challenge is assembling a group of talented individuals who can work together. We did get great individual talents. But I should've found another five, at least.
Lesson 3: get the seeding right. Whilst the messageboard approach was good, it wasn't enough. The whole thing was only ever going to have limited appeal, so it was important to expose it to as many eyeballs as possible in order to winnow out the few who might appreciate it. In fairness, we got a pretty global crowd from the links on J's ebay listings, but it wasn't enough by far.
Lesson 4: be honest. Today, this is online 101, but back then I was seduced by the idea that people might think these people really do exist and that their private messageboard could be accessed and read. Of course, what is important is that people are aware that they are are looking at a piece of fiction. Even if it looks very real, they need to know it's not. People don't like being hoodwinked and far prefer to feel they are in on the subterfuge.
Did we get anything right? Well, I'd like to think so. But perhaps that's for another post.
In the meantime, for those interested, the production company messageboard within which the above, and the other video clips sat, along with the various to-ing and fro-ing of the crew, has been dusted off and can found here.
As implied above, having taken on far too much myself, the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. Or, more accurately, I collapsed under the weight of what I took on, and never completed it. Hopefully, putting this here will shame me into getting it finished.
Lastly, I should credit all the fantastic individuals involved:
Seamus Hayes, frontman of the brilliant Shuffle, played J. (And Shuffle provided the music to the trailer, above.)
Monica Yam, ex-Shuffle singer and DJ (Cheeky Yam and The Hunter Gatherers), played Milla the journalist.
Ace designer Martin Kitchen created the beautiful William Wilson Productions identity.
Ben Beer, a very talented singer-songwriter, played the imaginatively named Ben.
And for now...that's all, folks.
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