Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Film Friday: How to Listen to Your Audience Online

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In digital filmmaking, you have many tools at your disposal to help better-understand the work you create.  The Internet offers an unparalleled platform for distribution and audience feedback. It is easier than ever for audiences to actively and passively communicate what works and does not work about your film.

A under-utilized and invaluable tool for filmmakers looking to grow through their body of work is YouTube Hot Spots (available in the insight section for “My Videos”). These graphs map audience attention to your videos throughout their duration by tracking drop-out rates, mouse clicks and rewinds. You are able to pinpoint moments in your video that are more or less successful than others.

A year ago, I posted a comedy music video called Cocaine Crazy. While it only has 8,000 hits, those impressions shaped an extremely informative portrait of successful and unsuccessful aspects of the video.

 Cocaine Crazy Hot Spots

  • The opening skit was the least successful attention grabber (a large mistake considering the opening is key to hooking web audiences from frame one).
  • The choruses became redundant as the video went on (except for the second half of the third chorus when cocaine started to fly everywhere).
  • The joke and rhyme-packed verses anchored the video and had high rewind power.

Self analysis is invaluable. No where else have I seen a tool that can tell you when moments are dragging, redundant, funny, not funny or downright failures. More often than not, this data will merely support intuition. But in a few instances in my career, this data has redefined major structural changes to development material.

Pay attention to your audience.

What Happens When You Don’t Have Enough Time?

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You prioritize. You cannot make more time, time is finite. You chose what to do with your time. If working a day job to make money is how you chose to spend your time, so be it. But you are the only one accountable for that decision. Do not complain. If you feel like complaining, it is time to get creative and find another way to accomplish your goals. Find a better way to spend your time.

Easier said than done when you are too busy to think – too busy to prioritize. But that’s another blog post altogether.

The Easiest Way to Get a Job

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Announce that you will work for free.

Check out Vladimir – this guy is a genius. I was seduced into his offer to web design for free. I clicked his link and read his offer. News aggregators will get a kick out of this and plaster his link around the interwebs today. He will get a job.

Offering your skills for free is not the same as asking for an internship. Internships have you do whatever the company wants you to do, no better than an entry-level job. Donating your skills can place you higher in the company where you can leverage your talent and demonstrate niche value. The more specific your announced skill set, the less room the company has to ask you to do things outside of your interest range.

If you offer to work for free, you have to be willing to work for free. But I bet you will not have to. People will be attracted to your résumé and realize you are a strong candidate for their team. They will pay to buy you away from other companies pouncing on your offer.

Can Newspapers Survive? Bring on Newsographics!

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It is official: more people consume news online than from newspapers.  Print is failing to compete with the saturated blogosphere. While the value of digital media is evolving, the blog network is still disorganized and fragmented.  The need for staffed, credible and organized newsrooms has never been higher.

Print outlets have not sufficiently adapted to the Internet.  It should not be as simple as porting text to a webpage – your platform (the computer monitor, mobile device, etc.) is completely different than newsprint. Few people enjoy reading on their monitors, want to load full paragraphs of text on mobile, or feel sufficiently engaged by content on the ever-interactive tablet form factor. The format of digital news presentation needs to be completely re-imagined.

USA Today became popular because it had a higher volume of images than other newspapers. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, it lacks quantitative and qualitative information essential to quality news reporting. Incorporate graphical representations of story information and a healthy dose of interactivity into images and you could have something really special.  I call it the “Newsographic.”

I have been very impressed with the New York Times coverage of Japan’s tragedy. On top of diligent email updates and consistent reporting, they continue to introduce extremely informative interactive features and multimedia presentations that paint a more vivid picture of the event.  You can find some of their newsographics below:

Data visualization hit the Internet mainstream with a vengeance. Unlike text blocks, infographics are more inviting, quicker to consume, and can help make complex information easier to interpret. Bringing imagery to life with a layer of interactivity enhances the reader’s engagement with the material tenfold. Top a visualization off with live updating power and you have yourself a very powerful news medium. 

Newsographics are the future. Unlike most individual blog authors, larger news organizations have the talent and resources available to generate these presentations.  I am convinced rich multimedia will be the only way major outlets can stay competitive in this arena. The tablet is a perfect opportunity for newsographic-only sources to stake major claim in the news market. I still think major news companies have a place in the media landscape – but they cannot rely on the written word alone. They must evolve.

3 Things You Must Remember About Every Person You Meet

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  1. Name. First name is necessary. Last name helps when looking the person up afterward.

  2. Preoccupation. What he or she does with most of his or her time (usually a career).

  3. Situation. When and where you met.

As long as you remember those three things, the rest should come back to you. Mention all three in your next exchange together and you can win the person’s respect.

Remember someone and they will work harder to remember you. As I always say: it’s not about who you know, it’s about who knows you.

An Interesting Statistic About iPhone Users

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While backing up my BlackBerry yesterday, I analyzed my SMS history and discovered something noteworthy.

91% of my texting contacts with iPhones (76 total) take an average 48% longer to respond to my texts than the rest of my texting contacts.

I blame this on iPhone’s notification layout or AT&T’s service.  I’d rather not blame my friends for being lame.

Film Friday: How to Enhance Jokes in the Editing Room

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It’s time I start a weekly blog series – lessons from my experiences in the film industry. We can call it “Film Fridays.”

I’ve been in and out of the cutting room for the last five weeks on our latest web series, Talent.  Every time I oversee editorial on a new project, I learn a lot.

Lately, we spent a big chunk of time tweaking scenes for comedy. Now, I have never been a funny man. I guess I missed the comedy gene my brother inherited. After weeks of shifting edits here and trimming shots there, I have a much better understanding of the temporal mechanics of comedy – at least in the motion picture form.

Want your joke to play better on screen?  Try letting it breathe.

Comedians pause after they deliver a funny line. They don’t pause to wait for the audience to stop laughing; they pause to illicit laughter in the first place.  Watch Australian comic Steve Hughes.

The same tactic works on screen. After a punchline, leave some air – make sure there’s a moment without dialogue, without busy sound effects, and without domineering score notes. Your viewers need time to process and react. If you cut to the next line of dialogue immediately, your audience might not have time enough to think the joke is funny. A loud sound effect or music cue following the punchline will compete with laughter, or worse, deny laughter altogether.

It is frustrating when an audience’s laughter drowns out the dialogue that follows. Information is lost and you feel like you missed something. But I can’t blame the audience for being loud; I usually blame the filmmaker for not understanding the moment he or she created.

Air is not a magical cure-all for comedy – the joke still needs to be funny. But air can help you preserve a joke. And if you’re lucky, enough air can create an awkward silence that twists a lame beat into a funny one. You have to try it to find out.

I suspect the air trick works in other forms of comedy as well.

Full-time or Freelance?

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The gamble of finding day-to-day employment or the gamble of being trapped in the cycle of a 40-hour workweek?  Too much free time or no free time at all?  Steady paycheck or unsteady paycheck?

What are you now? Freelance or full-time? Which would you prefer?

If you prefer the opposite of what you are doing now, welcome to a very crowded club. The grass is always greener on the other side. Full-timers want more time to do what they want. Freelancers want steady work and more security. Both lifestyles suck and rule for different reasons.

It boils down to personal aptitude. Some lack the agency to survive freelancing on their own. And some cannot sit still in one job to save their lives. You have to try both to appreciate both. Only then can liberate yourself from the cons of both.

Freelance or full-time? It’s a trick question for me. I want to find balance between the two. The grass may be greener on the other side, but I prefer the high ground – atop the hill separating both sides. Better tactical advantage.

Pays Versus Plays: The Future of Digital Residuals

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My MP3 play count for “I’m Not The One” by The Black Keys:  43

My MP3 play count for “Down for Whatever” by Ice Cube:  2

Who deserves more money, at least on my behalf? Well, obviously The Black Keys.

The way things are now, they each get the same. I purchased both MP3s for 99 cents and each artist collects a whopping 9 cents of that. Not fair, huh? The Black Keys should definitely get a bigger chunk of my money than Ice Cube (and a bigger chunk of that 99-cent MP3 sale, but that’s a different point). If an artist earns more plays, he or she should earn more dough. But it has never worked that way for consumer media ownership – pay for the album once and never have to pay for it again.

Artists theoretically collect more money per program their songs are used in. Current performance rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and SoundExchange) use abstract systems of surveys and credits to track television, radio and public space plays to determine artist payments. Their systems are just as arbitrary and myopic as the Nielsen ratings. Needless to say, artists’ residuals are not accurate and cannot reflect the actual popularity of their music.

As digital space envelopes us, tracking is becoming easier and easier. By the end of the year, I predict that our entire music library can be synced to the cloud (Grooveshark has offered library uploading for a long time and Google Music sounds like it will be a formidable competitor in this space). Eventually, all music will be trafficked through the Internet. When this happens, play count data can be synced and shared. Artists and record companies can finally get accurate reporting on their play counts (and even more accurate insight into audience reception). Artists can get paid the portion they deserve, at least next to other artists. Plays will become more valuable than pays.

The trick is getting money into the system. I don’t think Google will have a problem with that, though.