A Little Bit Reimagining the Movie Experience

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Rian Johnson, the writer/director of Brick, has a new movie out called The Brothers Bloom, and it comes with a pretty neat idea:

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I’ve never heard of anyone doing this before, and Johnson admits the same at the beginning of the commentary. But for the man who came up with the idea to make a movie cocktail out of mixing film noir with a high school flick in his first feature, doing something new is the name of the game.  In fact, at Brick’s opening night screening, at the Arclight in 2005, Johnson gave out little “Brick Talk” booklets that provided a glossary to guide viewers  through the movie’s particular slang world:

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Also something I’ve never seen done before, or since.

The director’s audio commentary for The Brother’s Bloom is essentially the sort of thing you’d expect to find as a DVD bonus feature, and the idea is, of course, that you’re not listening to it the first time you watch the movie. Johnson jokes that it’s all just a ploy to get you to pay your admission a second time, but really, this idea has the potential for something much more. After all, interesting though it may be to listen to the director divulge all the subliminal symbolism and literary allusions embedded in the movie (hey, what can I say, I was a film student), it’s just a starting-off point for what this sort of audio “bonus track” could really be.

Think of it like 3-D (which is, in its 21-century digital reincarnation, once again all the rage) an extra “dimension” to how a movie can be experienced. It could be a supplemental soundtrack, or a character’s voice-over adding new meaning to the action, or even a layer of hidden clues — or puzzles — in a larger Alternate Reality Game around the movie. Who knows?

In the commentary, Johnson even toys with a social experiment: to see who else in the theater might be listening to the commentary track, as you are, he suggests all listeners cough on his cue.

Ok, so it’s probably smart to keep the encouragements for vocal “outbursts” in the theater setting to minimum, but this idea certainly presents a lot of possibilities in terms of how the traditional movie experience — which has more or less been the same for the past, like, 80 years — can be expanded and reimagined.

    



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today’s awesome ad award goes to:

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I noticed this last night in a window of a corner store in my neighborhood and thought it was great. I’m not a native Spanish speaker but English wasn’t my first language either, so I understand what the message means beyond simply understanding what the words mean.

If you don’t know Spanish, what “Te extrano” is trying to say is “I miss you.” But it’s spelled incorrectly. It’s spelled in English. In Spanish it would be “Te extraño.” The little mark on top of the N, the tilde, turning the n into a letter that doesn’t exist in English, not an N but an Enye.  With the ñ the word sounds like “extranyo.” To say it otherwise just sounds like a strange, foreign mispronunciation–a mispronunciation you experience often if you’re Hispanic in the US. “Sin la ñ no es español” means: “Without the ñ, it’s not Spanish.

What I seriously dig about this message is that it manages to capture and reflect the experience of a particular population, a particular identity, and says “We understand.” That’s what the best advertising does.

    



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“Taking Woodstock” Trailer

Lemme tell you…. If you’ve ever put on a music festival, you will appreciate this:

“You have a permit, right?”

    



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Boldly Going Where…. Culture Would Eventually Follow

It first occurred to me as I was watching the trailer for Star Trek: First Contact, back in March. The cast seemed so typical of the racial and ethnic diversity reflected in the TV shows we’ve all been watching for years now, like Lost…

and Heroes…

It seemed completely natural for 2009, and yet what occurred to me was that this movie was based on a TV show that  was decades old–I wasn’t even entirely sure how many. Thirty? Forty? When I looked it up, I discovered that the original Star Trek series had first aired in 1966!

This seemed utterly amazing.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation in schools, public places, and employment, had passed just TWO YEARS prior. Bussing (to desegregate schools in reality vs. just in legislation) wouldn’t even begin until 1971. Had it lasted, Star Trek would have been in its 5th season by then. More than a decade after the show premiered, the reality of the social response to racial desegregation all too often still looked like this:

soling of old glory

The cultural conflicts that raged in the 1960’s extended beyond racial divides, beyond even national boundaries, into outer space itself. When Star Trek first aired–nine years after the Russians had been the first to launch human beings outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, and still three years before Americans would first land on the moon–the Space Race between the Americans and the Soviets was an integral part of the cultural, technological, and ideological rivalry that defined the Cold War. After all, advanced space technology was more than simply a pissing contest, it had blatant military applications for the two adversarial nations, should the Cold War actually heat up.

But just three years after Martin Luther King had described his dream of a future where blacks and whites, and all races, could coexist harmoniously as equals, Gene Roddenberry’s futuristic vision, that beamed into living rooms all across America, looked like this:

…and it included an American, a Russian, an Asian, a Black woman, and even a biracial (bi-special?) alien all working together for the purpose of scientific exploration and peacekeeping efforts.

To put how insanely revolutionary this really was in 1966 into more perspective–since I’d only seen the episodes as reruns when I was a kid in the 90’s–Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, was one of the first black women featured in a major television series who was not playing a servant EVER. Her prominent supporting role as a female black bridge officer was unprecedented in the history of television at the time. In a recent interview in Hyphen Magazine, John Cho, who plays Sulu in the new Star Trek movie, described the experience of watching George Takei embody the role in the original series: “It was stunning. He was just alone on television as an Asian American.” And as for the idea of a half-human/half-Vulcan hyphenate…. when Star Trek first aired, interracial marriage was still illegal in 16 states! It wouldn’t be until a year later, in 1967, that these “Anti-Miscegenation” laws would be declared unconstitutional.

At the end of Star Trek’s first season, Nichelle Nichols says she’d wanted to leave the show. Gene Roddenberry urged her to reconsider, but she told him she was planning to return to theater. That same weekend, at an NAACP event Nichols was introduced to Martin Luther King, Jr. He told her he was a fan, and praised the importance of her role in the show as it was part of the first fully integrated cast that portrayed men and women as equals. Star Trek, it turned out, was one of the only shows his children were allowed to watch. When she told him she was planning to leave, he replied, “You can’t do that! Your character is the first non-stereotypical [Black] role on television, and is in a position of authority. People who don’t look like us, see us for the first time as we should be seen: As equals. Don’t you see? Star Trek has changed the face of Television.” Needless to say, Nichols told Roddenberry she would stay on the show.

What’s fascinating to me is that what Star Trek did, with its deliberate emphasis on diversity and equality, was not only change the face of Television, but, in fact, shape a cultural vision of what the future would be expected to look like, in its own image. “I am a first-generation ‘Star Trek’ fan,” declared Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, and co-director of the MIT comparative media studies program, in a recent Salon article entitled, Obama Is Spock: It’s Quite Logical. “And I’ve long argued that many of my deepest political convictions emerged from my experience of watching the program as a young man growing up in Atlanta during the civil rights era. In many ways, my commitment to social justice was shaped in reality by Martin Luther King and in fantasy by ‘Star Trek.’”

Premiering five years before the first pocket calculator, the Star Trek world wasn’t simply a glittering science fiction, it actually primed a whole generation to demand that the future keep its promises.

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Do you know what you’re saying when you say “Social Media”?

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Suddenly everyone wants Social Media.

While traditional media budgets have kept shrinking in the wake of the recession, according to recent Forrester Research, “53% of marketers are determined to increase their social media budget, and 42% will keep it the same, a total of 95% of marketers are bullish on social media marketing.” Just two years ago, “Social Media” was still something that most marketers felt needed to be  justified. The absence of a simple answer to the complex question of “how to measure the ROI of Social Media,” was consistently invoked as a means to dismiss it. (As if the effectiveness of traditional media was oh so much more trackable in contrast.) But times are definitely changing. Speaking at Ad Age’s Digital Conference last month, Unilever CMO, Simon Clift admitted, “I’m convinced fat media budgets help make people lazy,” adding that he encourages thinking about what could be done without a media budget altogether to inspire alternative, social media ideas.

While some companies are clearly on the right track, lately I’ve been seeing how that dismissive attitude of two years ago is being replaced by a new frenetic trendiness. With everyone rushing to get this latest campaign accessory, it seems “Social Media” has become the new “Viral“–a term that gets thrown about much more frequently than what it actually means  is understood. Everyone just knows they need to score some “Social Media”…. Whatever it is.

The problem, of course, is that “social media” is not just a new flavor of media, it’s not even really MEDIA, in the way we think of the word, as just another channel to push messaging through, at all. When you’re saying “Social Media” what you are actually referring to are:

  1. SOCIAL NETWORKS / SOCIAL NETWORK SITES / SOCIAL PLATFORMS
    Think: Online destinations where people connect, communicate, and share with their friends.
    Example: Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
  2. BLOGS / BLOGGERS / THE BLOGOSPHERE
    Think: Just like “The Press.” I.e. Writers, video-makers, podcasters, and other content creators, as well as the websites where they post their output.
    Example: You’re at one right now.
  3. SOCIAL TOOLS / SOCIAL APPLICATIONS:
    Think: Digital tools that facilitate the sharing of content and help drive adoption.
    Example: Embeddable video players, embeddable music players, embeddable widgets….pretty much ANYTHING embeddable, really. See also, the “Forward to a friend” button.
  4. COMMUNITY WEBSITES:
    Think: Any website that helps support a specific community by enabling connection, communication, and sharing between its members. Community websites function in many ways like social networks but are usually centered around a specific community focus.
    Example: Nikeplus.com, Mystarbucksidea.com, TheShadowbox.net, Ted.com,
  5. COMMUNITY FEATURES
    Think: Interactive features that support online communication, sharing, and community connection.
    Example: Comments, forums, profiles, video sharing, photo sharing, content rating, Facebook Connect, etc.

Thus, when you’re saying something like “We’ll do Social Media outreach,” what you actually should be saying is “We’ll do blogger outreach.” (Which, by the way, is called PR.) When you’re saying something like “We’ll promote it on Social Media,” what you actually should be saying is “We’ll promote it on social networks.” And when you’re saying something like “We’ll just add some Social Media,” what’s actually important to realize is that Social Media is not just a budget line item, it is now an integral component of strategy.

Joe Rospars, the man behind Barack Obama’s election campaign’s new new-media effort, explained in an Ad Age interview that the campaign succeed not because it used the latest technology, but rather because of its “holistic approach that integrated digital tools into the overall strategy.” That Ad Age entitled this approach of mixing the old media with the new, “The Secret” to the campaign’s success, is telling of where the industry’s understanding of what Social Media is and how it works is at. The most effective social media strategies do more than just utilize newfangled networks, features, tools and whatnot, they absolutely incorporate the digital resources into the complete, overall strategy.

So, forget the word “media.” Think of Social Media like messaging tone or demographic research–a critical element in the way a campaing is planned and in defining the direction it will take. Approaching it as something that can just be added on at the end is like building a house without electrical wiring. And tacking on a generator at the end is as pretty lousy substitute. Social Media isn’t just the wiring for one house, it is the whole electric gird, and you need to be putting a plan in place for how your campaign will plug into it from the very beginning. That’s what you’re actually saying whenever you say you want to use “Social Media.”

    



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