News
Never Mind the Interactivity | Rik Lander | U-Soap MediaFor the first month or so I've been coming up with format ideas aimed at different demographics, various levels of interactivity for home audiences and dealing with things like TV's aversion to liveness. The more I have thought about the task I've set myself, the more I realise how far out most of these ideas seem. TV is hardly doing interactivity and I'm constantly tempted to make the formats less interactive and more 'televisual'. So for our testing regime were concentrating on individual games rather than the bigger picture. We're going to reverse engineer this one.
Meanwhile, Greg has been thinking through the testing plans and getting quotes from potential venues, kit and so on and Ruth Farrar, who works with Greg, has been doing research into how TV game, quiz and panel shows are constructed time-wise. It has been very useful to see the different rhythms game shows employ. The example below shows how the rounds in Never Mind the Buzzcocks get successively shorter.
Interactive TV shows | Rik Lander | U-Soap MediaOur Sandbox project is to create a TV gameshow format which audiences can play along with on their laptops - kind of like the pub quiz you're allowed to cheat in. Sandbox provide 'industry advisors' and I had my first meeting with one this week. Gavin Henderson is from RDF media with particular interest in cross media production. I outlined some of our ideas so far to him and got some very valuable feedback from a TV perspective. I'm starting from the point of view of wanting to create a new form - a collision of TV and web or passive viewing and active participation. My urge is to create something very new and original. His viewpoint is that TV feeds off other media like the web, but emulating it's interactivity isn't necessarily of interest to audiences. TV is essentially a passive experience and interactivity can break the bubble of immersion. There are few successful interactive TV formats - eg Big Brother. It was a very valuable conversation and a useful reminder of how conservative TV is and how slowly it evolves. We'll have to gently bring our audience to the act of switching on their laptops and interacting and at the same time make sure it's a cracking TV show in conventional terms.
Viral Spiral - the unravelling begins… | Rik Lander | U-Soap MediaOr are we ravelling? I had my first day in the Pervasive Media studio and it is going to be a great environment to work in. So far all I've done is create a logo, always a good place to start - no idea what viral spiral is, but do have a logo. Jon, Greg and I have our first blue skies session this week.
