Interactive

by jenks

Why Limited Commercial Interruption Works

hulu

To the extent that any advertising works, the model in place at websites like Hulu and Fancast, that offer commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies, is pretty damn effective. Unlike the 3-minute average TV commercial break, which most people Tivo past or click away for or simply go to the bathroom during, the 30-second “limited commercial interruption” on your online machine gets you to pay attention. 30 seconds isn’t enough to walk away for, after all. Sure, you can pause to answer nature’s call or email’s or SMS’s or whatever, but the remainder of the ad will play when you unpause. You can, at most, surf over to another browser tab, but nevertheless you’re still listening to the ad’s audio, and on several occasions I’ve gotta admit this was intriguing enough unto itself to get me to tab back. (The lazer-bassy sounding Asics ad with the Asian male model dude running through psychedelic milk formations is coming to mind).

At the same time, because the commercial interruption really IS limited — one ad per break — and often Hulu even offers a choice as to which ad you’d prefer to see and in what sort of format (a long-form ad before the program starts, with no breaks later on is also an option), it doesn’t feel nearly as offensive and imposing as the ads that you DO have time to walk away from on the teevee. The one thing that’s missing is a feature to click to see the ad directly, replay it, and embed or share it. Right now you still have to go over to youtube or elsewhere if you want to find the ad you just saw on Hulu (counter intuitive, no?) and sometimes you can’t even find the ad anywhere (the Timberland Earthkeepers ad where the sole of the shoe keeps morphing into all sorts of things like an eagle and a tire, etc, is coming to mind. I STILL can’t find that shit, and it was hella cool.)

As Hulu’s brand keeps growing — it overtook the big broadcast networks that own shares of it (ABC, NBC and Fox) in web traffic for the first time this past June — less, it turns out, really is more, paricularly when it comes to commercials. Now, how long until Hulu starts producing its own original content, you think? Let’s just hope Netflix (whose Red Envelope Entertainment division, responsible for licensing and distributing films such as Born into Brothels and Sherrybaby expanded to produce its own original content in 2006 only to close down just 2 years later in part to avoid competition with its studio partners) isn’t necessarily a permanent precedent.

    



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by jenks

A Little Bit Reimagining the Movie Experience

http://movies.apple.com/trailers/summit/thebrothersbloom/assets4/images/logo.gifhttp://movies.apple.com/trailers/summit/thebrothersbloom/assets4/images/poster-area.jpg

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

http://movies.apple.com/trailers/summit/thebrothersbloom/assets4/images/commentary.gif

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:

http://i3.ebayimg.com/04/i/07/9b/8a/3a_1.JPG

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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by jenks

y2k12-compliant

I noticed something interesting the other day in the trailer for the forthcoming 2012 movie. At the end of the trailer, (which–though the movie stars John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, and Thandie Newton–doesn’t include a single star, instead giving off a distinctly Baraka-like “documentary” feel, depicting only Buddhist monks and a typically Emmerich-ian, visual effects-heavy apocalypse sequence), in place of where you’d normally expect some URL to the effect of “www.2012themovie.com,” there appears, instead, a google search instruction:

What’s more interesting is that the google results for the term “2012” do not turn up a website for the movie. The closest you get is the IMDB listing, which is, like, half a dozen items down the list anyway. Meanwhile, the results do include such options as: “2012 – End of the World?” “Survive 2012: Ancient Mayan Doomsday” “Year 2012 Predictions” “No Doomsday in 2012” “2012 – The Future of Mankind” and so forth.

In case you’ve managed to escape having heard about this latest trend in end-of-the-world prophecy up till this moment, according to Wikipedia:

2012 is claimed by some with New age beliefs to be a great year of spiritual transformation (or alternatively an apocalypse). There is disagreement among believers as to whether 2012 will see an end of civilization, or humanity will be elevated to a higher level.

Many esoteric sources interpret the completion of the thirteenth B’ak’tun cycle in the Long Count of the Maya calendar (which occurs on December 21 by the most widely held correlation) to mean there will be a major change in world order.

Astrologer John Jenkins has determined that on this date, there will be “an extremely close conjunction of the northern hemisphere winter solstice sun with the crossing point of the Galactic equator and the ecliptic”, an event that will not be repeated for thousands of years. 

Several authors have published works which claim that a major, world-changing event will take place in 2012:

  • The 1997 book The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin claims that, according to certain algorithms of the Bible code, an asteroid or comet will collide with the Earth.
  • The 2006 book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck discusses theories of a possible global awakening to psychic connection by the year 2012, creating a “noosphere.”
  • Riley Martin claims that Biaviian aliens will allow passage aboard their ‘Great Mother Ship’ when the Earth is ‘transformed’ in 2012.
  • Terence McKenna’s numerological novelty theory suggests a point of singularity in which humankind will go through a great shift in consciousness.

And so on.

Clearly, there’s quite a good deal of differing speculation going on, all of it perfect subject matter for the creator of such cinematic fare as 10,000 BC, The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, and Godzilla. By offering a google search instruction instead of a url, the film avoids narrowing such a broad, hot-button topic down into a typically useless movie website, and, instead, capitalizes on the full breadth of the phenomenon that is 2012.

For people who’ve never heard of 2012 before, this is a great way to add an unbeatable, real-world level of intrigue to the promotion of a Summer Action Disaster flick. For those that have, it’s a great way to leave all the contested options (Armageddon? Enlightenment? Close Encounter?) out on the table.

Creating a real-world narrative that can be used to expand the promotion for an entertainment property is what Alternate Reality Games are based on. What’s interesting in this case, though, is that the movie takes advantage of a back-story that already exists, and, furthermore, has been defined not by ARG designers, but by an open-source kind of process. The phenomenon behind the movie is whatever reality google says it is.

For context, imagine a remake of Waterwrold, where at the end of the preview, the instructions would read: “Google Search: Climate Crisis.”

    



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