alexis dallas : film + digital

Social tools roundup

alexis3907 — Fri, 07 May 2010 22:07:49 +0000

The proliferation of social computing tools continues to grow. Easy access to create an online presence and social media for your PR is what the indie filmmaker dreams of. But no more; consider these:

// Create a website with info, images, trailers, posters, etc of your film:

Wix – http://www.wix.com - elegant Flash-based sites
Wetpaint – http://www.wetpaint.com - your community members can contribute to the building of your site
Google Sites – http://www.google.com/sites - what would we do without Google?

// Allow friends and fans to get closer to the project with your own social network:

Ning (US based) – http://www.ning.com
Moonfruit (UK based) – http://www.moonfruit.com/
SocialGO – http://www.socialgo.com/

// Location-based social networks

Foursquare – http://foursquare.com/
Gowalla – http://gowalla.com/

// Wikis allow fans to actually contribute content about your project, aka. Pandorapedia:

Wikispaces – http://www.wikispaces.com/

// Discussion forums incorporating social features and embedding with other platforms

Tangler – http://www.tangler.com

// Social media

Twitter extensions and plugins – http://twitter.pbworks.com/Apps
Indiegogo: helping to generate film funding and audience engagement – http://www.indiegogo.com/

Not sure where to start?

Contact thirtynine to help you put together the right package of technology and social media to help your indie project.

Revisiting multiplatform

alexis3907 — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:36:23 +0000

Multiplatform is a relatively old term these days – coined from broadcasting to mean the extension of a brand or property across all entertainment platforms (film, TV, radio, online, mobile, etc). Organisations such as the BBC have pioneered this cross-collaboration for years.

So too is the gaming industry. At a recent seminar, TIGA, the UK gaming industry trade association, highlighted the need for gaming, film and television industries to work as one on joint projects, under the banner of a new TIGA/NESTA Creative Industry Switch. This initiative aims to cross-polinate talent from all the creative industries to create new commercial partnerships.

Jorg Tittel from Breakthru Films advocated that multiplatform these days is a given, but that ‘we’re all part of one common vision’. Yet an art project has taken this concept further steps forward.

Cape Farewell, founded by artist David Buckland, was created to highlight the issue of climate change. Wanting to move the discussion and debate away from just the political and economic arenas to engage the public, Buckland’s vision brought the arts and science together to create a single message and use all the art forms to communicate it.

Speaking in London recently, Buckland highlighted how the collaboration has, and continues to create thought-provoking and entertaining art surrounding an issue requiring urgent attention and action. In turn it has created a wider multiplatform experience than what we’ve been accustomed. Consider,

Music: Musicians including KT Tunstall, Jarvis Cocker and Martha Wainwright have collaborated on music for SHIFT Festival and tracks for upcoming albums.
Poetry: Southbank Poet-in-Residence, Lemn Sissay hit three minute poem What if? commissioned by Channel 4.
Popular fiction: Author Ian McEwan based his latest novel, ‘Solar’, using the scientific facts uncovered by the 2005 expedition with Cape Farewell.
Education: Postgraduate courses blending art and science are in development at the University of Liverpool and Open University, and numerous teaching resources for teachers have been created.
Performance: Comedian Marcus Bridgstock ventured on two expeditions and is using his experiences to base an upcoming performance tour called ‘Your Time is Up’.
Art: Numerous art installations created while on expedition and around the world.
Film: ‘Burning Ice’, a feature film documentary of the Greenland exhibition which has attracted the interest of Sundance but as yet no broadcaster in the UK.
Television: BBC documentary, ‘Art from the Artic’ aired on BBC Four in 2006 as part of the Climate Chaos series.
Fashion: Cape Farewell has collaborated with the London College of Fashion’s Centre for Sustainable Fashion with events to showcase the industry’s need to question processes and embrace innovation, ie. MA Fashion and the Environment.
Books: ‘Burning Ice’, photographing the experiences of those artists on board the Cape Farewell expedition.

And Buckland is collaboring further. All of this developed with not a scratch of what media organisations typically budget for their multiplatform productions.

What both of these instances highlight is the need for creative collaboration right from inception. The TIGA session heard from Ubisoft which worked with James Cameron three years before Avatar was released, to make Avatar, the game. Developers were able to reuse thousands of digital assets from the film to create the game environment.

Still a barrier, however, is the cost of musical licences which prohibit their use in a lot of cases. Max Scott-Slade from Johnny Two Shoes, developer of a host of successful online games, suggested that with exposure to audiences of over 100 million people for their games, partnerships with independent musicians, and other creatives, proves an attractive win-win situation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Getting the basics right

alexis3907 — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:11:58 +0000

A new year brings good intentions to close the door on the last 12 months and set a new profitable year in our sights. With hopes of a positive 2010, delivering an exceptional online user experience should be at the top of that list. And with so much aflutter in the rich world of social media, it’s easy to jump right in.

Social media is the greatest engagement tool to have come about and it should be grabbed onto with all your might. It should integrate with corporate strategy and extend the mission and brand of the organistion. It should not confuse users with irrelevant tangents so as to only provide a few minutes of entertainment, only to be forgotten in the marketer’s crush for your user’s next nanosecond of concentration. It should drive users back to home base – your corporate website – where all their questions are answered and their online experience fulfilled. Only, what will they find when they get there? Will they be surprised, their expectations surpassed? Or will it lead to a lack-lustre, out of date and clunky site?

Get the basics right. If your website is not a professional and complete statement of who and what your organisation is, then in your rush to reel in those social media wins, you might be hard pressed to succeed in keeping your users where you most need them. Is the content current? Is it presented simply and without jargon? Is the information easy to find? Is content grouped together logically?

Web usability expert Jakob Neilsen has extolled these simple facts for well over 15 years but it is still as relevant and current today. Who is your target audience and what do they want? Building a sound foundation from which to further explore and exploit new ideas can capitalise on what social media can do for you. And used to help gauge what your audience is doing and thinking, to help further shape and growth.

For the novice, the jump into social media will take time to nurture. There is inevitably a cost and resource issue in setting up and maintaining these tools successfully. Starting simply and deliberately can reap bigger benefits than trying to do, and be, everything.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Latest online happenings

alexis3907 — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:27:19 +0000

The activity online in offering services for independent filmmakers is hotting up. YouTube has announced their Screening Room where a selection of four films, chosen by an expert panel, will feature each week. But it’s not quite a free for all to post your films up on the site.

But if chosen, the benefits are immense. As well as the prestige of being selected and sharing screen space with Oscar winners, ie. “I Met The Walrus” from Josh Raskin, there are the financial rewards.

In a similar fashion to Bebo, YouTube will share the advertising revenue generated by a film’s popularity. So it pays to exploit the established YouTube audience to make a few extra dollars. Quite a few dollars more actually; YouTube quotes that a million viewers could generate a few thousand dollars a month.

Additionally, filmmakers can opt in to sell DVDs of their films from the YouTube profile page.

Mydeo.com, founded by Cary Marsh, offers high quality video hosting for films up to 90 minutes in length. They differ from YouTube in that they are not an entertainment channel but offer a service for private or business users to share video. From her LinkedIn profile, Marsh states the benefits of Mydeo as:

They offer statistics in order for you to see how popular your videos are
Videos can be played in widescreen format
There is no additional compression so the original video quality and resolution is retained
Your film appears in an advertising-free zone
No Mydeo-branded content appears on the video

There is however a charge for this service; around $15(AUS) a month to stream videos of 90 minutes duration.

For those in need of good quality music for your production, US musician Moby is generously offering royalty-free compositions for independent filmmakers and students. For commercial releases there are different licences which apply. But what a breakthrough for acquiring rich and professionally-produced music for your next project. See the video at YouTube.

Lacking a production management space? Then LoftCity might be your answer. This online film studio is a community where you can find cast and crew, collaborate with the inbuilt script and storyboard tool, build your project profile by adding production schedules, scripts and other materials for the crew. The showreel showcase space could facilitate pre-release audience feedback as well as gaining exposure. The exciting feature is the distribution channels on offer. They have already garnered distribution agreements with Buzzwire, providers of media content to US mobile carriers, Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless, and Joost, an internet TV platform. LoftCity is still in its infancy but has 5000 filmmakers from around the globe. Not bad for five months’ work.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

To Twitter or not to Twitter?

alexis3907 — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:12:30 +0000

The rise of social media tools and their application to TV and fiction should make a broadcasters dream complete.

Twitter, yet another one of these – referred to as micro-blogging – allows people to let all their friends and interested others to know what they’re doing and where they are. Think the status update in Facebook. Why a separate utility to just MSN your friends, who knows?

The Guardian stated that “critics say it is another pointless distraction in a world already suffering information overload, and wonder how users manage to keep tabs on what they’re really up to.” But before long the journalist was hooked.

Recently in Campaign, the magazine for the UK communications industry, a report documented the online flurry during the Euro 2008 matches. Fans and viewers chatted and texted their friends during the match with opinions, comic relief and such. So, reality television programs can get a slice of online action through these tools also. Of course, nothing new here: MSN and Yahoo Messenger have been doing that for too long. But now, you can do twitter online or by mobile and publish your messages to a blog, a website or your Twitter page. How much more would online traffic increase if fans of Big Brother could ‘twitter’ with their friends and their ‘twits’ posted to the Big Brother website instantly while they are actually watching the show on TV? Hmm.

And how do these apply to online fiction? Recently, as part of the Penguin Books’ ‘Six Authors. Six Stories. Six Weeks.’ a story was created using Google Maps. Author Charles Cumming’s story ’21 Steps’ takes readers into the protagonist’s plight as he traverses across the world, virtually.

So what if a writer did the same thing via Twitter with a fictional character? It’s already been tried and tested. In December last year, Twittories, began an online collaborative writing project via Twitter.

Or what about Socialight.com? When a reader is physically in a place where part of your story unfolds, they receive messages to their mobile phone regarding the location or the characters.

What will be next?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Mass participation collaboration

alexis3907 — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:02:45 +0000

There’s an interesting change in the air as to the state of play between user created content and professionally produced content for online audiences.

On one hand there’s the recently launched Nokia Productions spearheaded by none other than director, Spike Lee. Lee calls the project the ‘democratisation of film’. This may be true. The way in which the film comes together is through the submission of user-generated material – text, images, video and music – shot on mobile phone to the project website. All submissions, either original or mashed from others’ work, are moderated and narrowed down to the Top 10 as voted on by the community. Lee will then select the final three videos – one for each act – and cut together into the final film. This initiative will be a fascinating observation and will provide valuable learnings for the Great British Film. At the outset, it appears that the Great British Film takes a few more ambitious steps of enabling one of the content contributors a production role, the opportunity of being mentored by an industry professional and working on a real production set.

Collaboration is nothing new; it is the basis upon which the process of filmmaking lives and breathes. It seems more and more want a piece of the mass participation film collaboration – online. Last year MySpace held their Movie Mashup competition, which has resulted in ‘Faintheart’, also backed by Film4. Voting has just recently closed on the MySpace community choosing tunes for the movie’s soundtrack. And long before this there was the creative commons project, A Swarm of Angels. What is interesting to note however is on the back of the YouTube generation, the filmmaking process is opening up and becoming more inclusive of creativity in whatever form it takes.

Lee has written in his blog that he firmly believes filmmaking an artform which anyone can embrace and that film school is not necessarily for everyone pursuing a professional career. Certainly filmmaking has been a hard nut to crack for a lot of hopefuls and funding is scarce.

Simon McPhillips, UK producer of recent feature Jack Says agrees that mass participation has ‘allowed the gradual dismantling of the elitist system that Hollywood has built its foundations on’.

However social networking giant, Bebo, are moving the other way. At last month’s MIPTV conference in Cannes, Bebo President, Joanna Shields reported in a keynote address, Bebo’s move away from user-generated content. Research has shown a more sophisticated Bebo audience and changing consumer tastes. Hence the rise in media companies such as Endemol co-developing webisode series with Bebo and reaping the huge financial rewards. Shields furthered encouraged media companies to harness this shift and jump on board; ‘this is your time’, Shields promised. A very lucrative proposition when a brand can attain ready access to over 40 million Bebo members.

So what is exactly happening out there on the webosphere? If it was at all possible to poll how many online collaborative filmmakers there are out there compared to Bebo’s growing family. And what are their preferences – passive or collaborative? Now is an incredible time for content creation and distribution. The next 12 months, probably less, will show yet another shift.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Published in IF Magazine

alexis3907 — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:55:57 +0000

I’ve had an article about web-based television printed in the April 2008 issue of Australia’s IF magazine. Go buy it!

Lime off to Cannes …

alexis3907 — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:18:48 +0000

The intention was to add here the highlights and learnings, etc of preparing for an international pitching competition at MIPTV, Cannes. As one gets their head filled with the potential prospect and the act of assembling something into order, good intentions go flying. So I will pick up from where I left off, or rather, where we’ve just come from…Cannes.

Phil and Jon in the Content 360 Corner, MIPTV, 7 Apr 08

So, we had a great idea:

‘The Great British Film made by the Great British public’.

We submitted the idea to Content 360, MIPTV’s cross media pitching competition. The category: BBC’s mass participation fiction and entertainment.

The weeks following the announcement that we hadn’t been selected and then we had (woohoo!) were filled with meeting past winners, industry practitioners and my colleagues at the BBC. Simon, JQ and Ed were immensely helpful in giving us direction to define how The Great British Film concept would play out across media – television, online and radio. The ‘mass participation’ angle remains the underlying distinguishing feature and requires the most consideration. Our challenges and the central questions continue to be:

How does the idea continually engage a mass audience?
How does the online community not just be the accompaniment to the television broadcast and not simply be a repository of user-generated content?

Being an interactive agency with the expertise in building online platforms, we had to partner with a television production partner. Efforts to get together beforehand with Glasshead Productions had ran aground. However I did catch up with Tom Dolan, Glasshead’s Head of Interactive, at the Monday night’s welcome drinks at the very nice Majestic Barriere hotel, while Jon and Phil slogged it out back at the hotel polishing their 5 minute pitch for the next day. After a quick and harried description of the project, we were soon discussing diagrams and timelines to help put the concept in perspective. Glasshead were well on board as television production partners.

Tuesday morning and a few niggling details remained. A last minute meeting between Tom, Jon and I helped incredibly. With a significant amount of experience in pitching to the BBC, Tom was able to hone in and give precise notes as to what needed to be said: Don’t postulate on what an audience of commissioners would already know about the social media / cross media environment, tell them the idea straight up front, kill the superlatives, no need to justify why you’re there; the idea will do that for you. And jump quickly into describing how you would make it work. Poor Phil was back at C360 Corner finalising the Powerpoint presentation unaware of the wave of changes about to descend. Jon and I both agreed that we should have meet much earlier.

Waves soon became trickles as the essence of what we needed to say was already there. We huddled around Phil’s laptop putting the right words and phrases in the right order. Rehashing right up until the last moment and over to the Palais we went.

The pitch went well.

Questions from the audience were a good guide as to how the concept presented itself. The key questions from the commissioners were: how would it all hold together and who offered the guiding hand? And of course, the inevitable, ‘who pays for it?’ Fortunately there was no short answer to that … good thinking Phil. A debrief ensued, although short. The consensus was that we needed to clear our heads and subconsciously reflect on proceedings.

Wednesday, the big day: The closed-door pitch with the BBC Commissioners, Martin Trickey and Nick Cohen. The organisers had told us beforehand that the closed door session was all about ‘talk, talk, talk’. No visuals or gimmicks to get your idea across. The commissioners after sitting in the 5 minute pitch the previous day already know the idea and will have pertinent questions. It is important to help them fully understand the idea, to have them see us as a possible team they could work with and make them feel comfortable with the idea of collaborating with us.

Phil and Jon were in the hot seat and our preparation beforehand with Tom provided well-considered answers to the hard questions. Funding? Check. Community involvement? Check. How the online audience is engaged? Check. How the television audience is engaged? Check. Budget? Check. They emerged from the room looking happy and relieved.

From this point on, the hard work was over and actual networking could begin. Wednesday night, the C360 networking dinner was held at the La Mandela restaurant on the beach. Sponsored by Singapore’s Media Development Authority (MDA) it was a good opportunity to meet some of the other C360 finalists. I sat next to fellow Aussie, Rachelle Boyle, who won the Ogilvy category – Using the Power of the Brand for the Power of Good for her concept, ‘Fanta’s Likely Heroes’. A good story … only just joined CumminsNitro in Brisbane as a copywriter and was now in Cannes.

Thursday I was able to pick up the sessions from conference program. It worked out well that the focus for the day was on social media. Key notes from Bebo, MySpace and Creative Commons kicked off the day, followed by sessions including how UGC is breaking down the traditional paths into filmmaking, using social networks to highlight social causes, and how broadcasters are extending television programmes into the online world to involve existing and new audiences. At this final session, I got my chance to pitch a 30 second idea to Simon Nelson, Controller, Portfolio & Multiplatform for BBC Vision. He was interested and I have his business card. Watch this space for news on that.

The day culminated with the C360 Zapping Show, an unusual name for announcing the winners.

Alas, our chance was not to be. The accolade going to Poltergeist 360, an online drama game narrative controlled by the actions of its online users. It is always a point to say at this stage of proceedings that it was an honour just to be nominated. Quick words afterward from Martin Trickey suggested that the project need not die there. With some refinements we could have a chance to pitch again and get a slice of development money after all.

From my point of view, it was an honour just to be there and observe the mass machine of the global broadcast industry at work.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Who’s the audience?

alexis3907 — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:53:53 +0000

Imagine being able to watch the lives and goings on in a New York apartment building unnoticed? Watch Big Brother? Nothing different then.

Ok, how about watching four more apartments across the city? Hmm, yeah, so what?

Now imagine each of these lives are inextricably linked to each other in mysterious ways and it’s up to you to solve it before anyone else?

Sounds like Big Brother can finally take its bat and ball and go home? Yay !!!

HBOVoyeur (HBOV), a dark, complex and multilayered creation from HBO – known for their obscure and rich character depth, nuances and eccentricities, think, ‘Sopranos’, ‘Carnivale’ and ‘Six Feet Under’ – is their dip into the multiplatform. It drew in a fascinated and salivating online audience wanting more. The use of past tense will become apparent.

True to its voyeuristic nature, there is no dialogue to scrutinise. The sometimes over-animated performances of the actors the only clue to deduce what’s going on in each apartment and their spill-on effects. Like an anxious woman meeting her lover in the stairwell as a fire alarm is trigged, water from the sprinklers raining down and the arrival of the fire brigade.

But what is it all about? Perusing through the users’ blog is an interesting start to this baffling concept. The creators were purposeful as to not give anything away like instructions or where to start. A HBO-hired blogger, Kesu, ran regular project updates from before the launch at thestorygetsdeeper.com. Reading through these posts, it’s uncertain whether Kesu was an independent or a HBO insider cleverly steering viewers through the story.

HBO launched the project in New York on 28 June 2007 with the teaser short film ‘The Watcher’. The film was only available to subscribers through HBO On Demand but later from thestorygetsdeeper.com. Advertisements for HBOV appeared in print, on radio, tv and in cinemas. The HBO creatives then sat back and waited. Perusing the user forums is a good gauge of its success.

In the beginning, the posts were vague to say the least:

Longlashgirl at 3.54pm launch day wrote:
When does this show start on HBO? The previews aren’t very informative. Will this only be shown on HBO ON DEMAND or on the regular HBO Channel? And is this an actual series or just a one time program?

Viewers were required to collect clues or ‘character artifacts’, described by Kesu (thestorygetsdeeper.com) as ‘ … fingerprints that the characters from the stories have left behind to show that they’ve been there or done that. I don’t know the exact number of how many artifacts there are or how deep they go, but I’ll keep linking to them on this blog as I find out more.’ Users were led to online classifieds, Flickr sites, YouTube, blogs and social networks. HBO Mobile content carried 30 second CCTV footage from within the apartment building.

A little further on the forum posts showed some pennies had dropped …

elserod at 3.51pm 2 July:
I thought it was extremely creative and original. HBO is moving into unknown territory and it’s very exciting but I have a problem, not with the concept but the content. … These stories are just as detailed but I think that maybe they are too detailed. I think that if the actions were more subdued we as an audience would be more engaged. The director talked about how he wants us to get around and debate what took place across the way in this apartment building but there’s nothing left to debate. It’s all spelled out quite clearly.

Admiration turning to obsession:

85intrigued at 11.10am 28 July:
I am surprised that more people aren’t commenting about this project. I found out about it through an email from HBO… I sincerely hope that HBO continues the project. I, too, have been checking the voyeur site as well as Kesu’s site daily just hoping that something new will appear. Come on HBO, give us more!

But suddenly, over at thestorygetsdeeper.com:

Due to a corruption of administrative privileges this web log has been archived by HBO ADMIN VP.
TheStoryGetsDeeper.com is no longer live, all content is frozen, and comments have been disabled.
Visitors can view archived posts by clicking under recent entries or by searing for a particular term.
HBO VOYEURS should refer to HBO forum for most recent discussions about the HBO voyeur project.

A ploy? A marketing stunt? Technical glitch? This sent the community into a frenzy.

craftylildevil at 10.55pm 31 July believed they’d made a connection between Kesu and one of the character artifacts:
… Shortly before Kesu ‘disappeared’ from thestorygetsdeeper.com I had written a couple of posts. … Not long after this was sent to him he stopped blogging. I would like to apologise to Kesu if I caused him any grief … it was never my intention to freak anyone out. I was merely playing along and trying to figure out clues.

Had the community crossed the line from fiction to fact and turned their mice at Kesu?

Latlu at 11.26pm 31 July, commiserated:
I really doubt that Kesu was really creeped out by anything. His comments were over dramatic about ‘weird s**t going on’ and invading his personal life and such.

Believers hung in there,

85intrigued at 10.40pm 31 July:
I think, at least I hope, that we haven’t gotten anymore updates on the characters or on Kesu, for that matter, because it’s a ploy to whip up more interest in the project. I really don’t think that HBO would sink as much money as they have in the project and then just pull the plug. HBO puleeze give us more!

An intriguing coming together of story-telling and user-generated content. But interactive drama? As disembodied as it was, users went from the voyeur world to the forums to discuss characters and artifacts, information which was not able to be collated or analysed within the drama to change or alter the course of the story. What was it all about?

Ever-knowing Wikipedia had the go all the time. An article from Hollywoodwiretrap.com stated the project was ‘a strategic marketing move.’ (HWT.com):

At a staggering cost estimated between 7-10 million, HBOVoyeur was designed to ‘reinforce our brand image of being the best place for storytelling.’ (HWT.com)

bossanovaville at 10.12pm 17 September:
Well, I stopped in to see if anything new has happened. Apparently, nothing has changed. Seems so lame that HBO would not develop anything worthwhile out of this “project”. It has a lot of potential to become something really unique. Shoot, HBO could even keep this project running without any official television production going on. Keep it mainly online…

Oh who am I kidding. That sure was a lot of money to spend on a marketing ploy. It didn’t even work, really. I’m still sticking with Showtime and all this project succeeded in doing was frustrating me to the point of wanting to buy a pair of binoculars and camping out at my own window for a bit!

So what did that huge chunk of marketing expenditure prove?

Online audiences are different beasts and want something more? If there’s a well-constructed game or drama some will want to spend hours of the day and night solving it. Take that opportunity away from them and they’ll lose interest, fast.
That promoting one’s storytelling talents in an incomplete format is frustrating and defeats your purpose?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

360 degree Heroes

alexis3907 — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:26:40 +0000

BBC has created landmark content to accompany their Heroes website and the TV series, in the same way creators of 24 introduced new characters and plotlines for mobile.

The Heroes Interactive introduces lawyer Bridget Bailey whose emails to Mohinder drop relevant clues to help users in an online game. Bridget is only available to UK audiences at present, although she is fast making her way across the Atlantic.

“Such has been its popularity that users in the UK are emailing their peers in the US (who are unable to access the games) and the investigation has now become a global collaboration. Fan sites such as 9th Wonders are alive with discussion, fan-fiction stories and there’s even talk that Bridget Bailey might make the transition from the internet to our television screens.” (BBC press release, accessed 13 September 2007)

Not being a BBC property, the concept required careful planning with the NBC creators.

“The character of Bridget Bailey was developed specifically for the site, and we had to run the storylines past the scriptwriters in the US so that we didn’t interfere with any of the existing or future mythology of the show,” explained BBC Drama senior content producer, Sarah Clay. (BBC press release, accessed 13 September 2007)

“As well as consulting with the script writers over potential conflicts, games, storyboards and concepts had to get sign-off from NBC Universal.” (BBC press release, accessed 13 September 2007)

BBC is to bring online more content tied to the show, including a radio show and mobile content.

A concept such as this will help to “deepen the viewers’ engagement with the programme,” Clay said.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.