Archive for the 'The End is Nigel' Category
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
Follow ‘THE END IS NIGEL’ to win £30 of HMV vouchers!!
I am currently plotting and writing a pitch for a much larger version of online comedy apocalypse ‘THE END IS NIGEL’ . So to take a little break from harping on about the other script I’ve been struggling with (which is going much better now btw) I wanted to get some constructive feedback so I can really take this project to the next level.
So, while I hope you enjoy the experience, to add extra incentive for you to follow Nigel through to the End, anyone who leaves feedback on the Nigel facebook group between now and the end of April will be entered in a draw to receive £30 of HMV vouchers as a thank you from me (unfortunately, I’m afraid this applies to viewers in the UK only).
If you haven’t been through the project before, ‘The End is Nigel’ was made for a mere £840 from Screen Yorkshire’s MOViES scheme. It combines video, blogging, webcomics and dummy websites to follow film student Verity’s online quest to prove if local nutter/doom-prophet Nigel was right… that the End is indeed Nigh.
I’d like to take this chance again to thank the brilliant cast and crew who worked on ‘The End is Nigel’ and hope that, if you haven’t already, you enjoy watching what we did or even enjoy watching it again. If you want to know any more, please follow this blog back to the beginning for the project’s origins. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
Online Audiences
This will probably be a recurring topic as it’s something I’m greatly interested in. While ‘The End is Nigel’ has had a great deal of online traffic, it’s fair to say that I could probably trace at least 70% of the audience finding the site back to either being friends, friends of friends, on facebook, message boards, twitter etc where I have mentioned the project or through other direct contact. (and a big hello to you all, you lovely people!)
This interview with ‘Lost’ exec producer/showrunner Damon Lindelof got me thinking about the nature of viral marketing as he looks at what happened with Watchmen and and prepares for the launch of the new Star Trek movie (to which was recently announced he will be co-scripting the sequel to).
Lindelof raises an interesting point – one that cuts the heart of most cult-mainstream hybrid offerings, especially his own. Traditionally the whole idea of advertising has been to make potential buyers aware of a product in a positive light. But as Lindelof points out, “”The people who are most into the movie or going to be playing these games, are already buying tickets.”
When it comes to viral marketing, are you only succeptible if you’re already interested in the product? Was the The success of the ‘The Dark Knight’ and its I believe in Harvey Dent campaign only so huge because the film itself was always set to break box office records?
In the case of Watchmen and its online marketing at The New Frontiersman, I actually found myself enjoying the texture of the online world more than I did the finished film (which I didn’t actually dislike btw - I just felt it lacked all of the brilliant little moments that made you care about the big bits). But the excellent campaign added all the texture and world but I wondered if it would make more sense if audiences had only already read the book or would have seen the film first, then looked at all the online material available.
So I’d love to know which marketing campaigns have completely snared you, especially ones where you knew little to nothing about the film/project beforehand. Please vote in the poll and leave any specific answers in the comments box below:
Loading ...Sunday, February 8th, 2009
7 things I learned about online-storytelling… (that you probably already knew)
Feedback for The End is Nigel has been exceedingly positive and supportive; but my own inner critic will always be grumbling about something. So, in case anyone else out there is thinking of creating their own similar online project, here is the first part of a few things I either learned along the way, thought I knew already or would have done differently if this were a ‘live’ ARG/online drama. Some of them might seem bleedin’ obvious but they are all things I’m definitely going to make sure to impliment in future incarnations of this or other projects. Hope it’s helpful.
1. THIS IS NOT WATCHING TV ON THE INTERNET.
But make sure it isn’t ‘reading a book’ on the internet either. Introduce your balance of text, video and features early on. While the balance could still be more refined, with ‘The End is Nigel’ I wanted to make sure that by the time you get to the end of Day One of Verity’s blog you had seen a flash animation, the introductory video, the style of text in Verity’s journal and the break-out site of the Saxophone Deity webcomic. Show off the variety up front. Keep the audiences moving and clicking around your site…otherwise, they’ll just start clicking around someone else’s.
2. RE-WRITE YOUR LAYOUT - NOT JUST YOUR SCRIPTS.
(scribbles from my Nigel notebook as I plotted how to break the story down across the blog - complete with squiggles and notes to myself to double-check any dietary requirements for the cast & crew while on the shoot)
Despite my constant pre-plotting of how to spread features and plot points between each of the sites and then each different web-page, I did most of my re-writing once I had my first draft of everything up online. Pictures and links were oiked back and forth to balance pages about and paragraphs, regardless of content, were constantly re-written just because ‘they didn’t look right’.
3. MAKE IT BITESIZE…
Admittedly, it was something of a Herculean task to follow ‘The End is Nigel’ from beginning to end in one sitting (assuming that Hercules took roughly half an hour to do one of his tasks). To make the next stage of this project more digestible, the idea is that you would subscribe to a mailing list (as well as befriending characters via twitter/facebook etc) and would then receive emails or links from the characters that you can follow up on at your leisure. eg-
- One day you would just receive an advert linking to the Rainy Day Corporation’s site
- A few days later, Verity’s blog would update with today’s entry (maybe a few pics or a vid).
- In between, characters would interact on message boards, update their own profiles, flickr accounts etc (but those would be for you to find whenever you wanted
…BUT LABEL EACH BITE.
I’ve been told by some people that they skim-read some of Verity’s blog but also told by others that they really enjoyed the extra human dimension that Verity’s blog gave the project. Hopefully neither audience type is wrong, but to cater for them both, use titles, sub-headers and bits that stand out from the main body of the text. Ideally, audiences should be able to just quickly scan the webpage and from just a few prominent phrases and pictures, be able to instantly tell what is happening like with headlines in a newspaper (then if they’re interested, they can read the full story).
4. DON’T SAVE THE GOOD STUFF ‘TIL LATER.
(The link to the Rainy Day site - but did the viewer only get that far ’cos they stopped for coffee?)
Undoubtedly, one of the most popular parts of ‘The End is Nigel’ is the Rainy Day Corporation’s personality test. The stats show that viewers are going through the test an average of three times each so has the highest hit ratio of the project - yet the Rainy Day Corporation site itself has fewer different audience members than Day One or Two of Verity’s blog. Was it a mistake to not put it earlier in the blogs?
5. BRINGING UP TO SPEED SLOWS EVERYTHING DOWN.
As I am using ‘Nigel’ as a pitching document, I have tried my best to make sure, to put it frankly, that it is idiot-proof (can there actually be such a thing? :/ ) so I admit that Verity et al sometimes repeat plot points when I should have been adding new ones. This is a fast-paced medium that will lose bored audiences quickly. But remember that - unlike TV (unless they’re watching a DVD or using Sky+) - audiences can go back and refresh their memory or re-read something themselves. Plus you can still help people out by re-linking to something a character is referring to. ie-
BAD:
As we saw in the Saxophone Deity web comic, the saxophone-wielding god character was leaning against a poster which he then revealed, providing the name to go with our mysterious logo: The Rainy Day Corporation.
BETTER:
Thanks to Saxophone Deity, we now have the name to go with our mysterious logo: The Rainy Day Corporation.
6. CHARACTER/AUDIENCE PERSPECTIVE.
Reading this? Chances are you’re at a computer too (if you’re not…well, frankly, I’m impressed 
As opposed to films and even novels which have to show you the action over the shoulder of their protagonist, the beauty of the internet as a medium is that we go online to find out about stuff we missed. In terms of creating your story, a strong element to create empathy is that you character doesn’t know what’s going on either - but is doing something about it! While a greater diversity of character-led ARGs is developing, following a character playing detective (and where you can ultimately help spot the clues) as part of a bigger mystery is certainly a strong sub-genre within online narratives.
7. YOU CAN WRITE AROUND (almost) ANYTHING!
When it comes to the text, it really is the mortar between the bricks (ugh - lame metaphor!) We had our fair share of technical issues for one reason or another while shooting our video segments. But if any of them had come out as completely untransmittable and you couldn’t see or hear what was actually happening, we wouldn’t have used them. But DON’T make the mistake of trying to just describe what happened in that missing film. Remember there was a reason you were going to present it visually in the first place!
The text itself is only there to join the dots. But don’t go overboard. Remember to also let the audience join the dots themselves. If they wanted it spelled out, they’d be watching one of those delightful entertainment formats where they remind you what happened before, after and during the advert break (then remind you what happened earlier, during the reminder. Then during this one).
These are just some very basic things to consider when planning your own online stories. I have tried to be as general as possible as no two online dramas are the same. But then… surely that’s the fun! 
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
Hits
Well, The End is Nigel has been online for public scrutiny for a week now. We now have over 200 people in our facebook group and the web statistics are showing healthy activity all the way through the project. Looking at the web statistics, as you could probably imagine, a fair sized chunk of the hits on the sites come from my own IP address (partly as I double-check stuff and partly because just because I like doing the Rainy Day quiz) but audiences show over 300 different IP addresses have accessed the site, most of whom have then stuck around for a while too.
Feedback has been brilliant and really encouraging with the only real recurring comments being that there wasn’t more or that it wasn’t as complex or puzzling as it could be. The first comment is usually answered when I tell people our budget but I will admit that I deliberately tried to make this pilot as simple as possible with the idea of easing people in to what I hope would be a more complex and interactive fuller product at a later stage. In other words…this is the easy bit.
But, for me, it’s also the hard bit. As this is just a rough, lower-budget pilot, I need to think about what I would do differently next time so I will soon compose a little list of things I’ve learned doing this project.
But, despite its foibles and my own mis-steps, the main thing I’ve learned is that I want to do more!
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
Welcome to the End…
Weird. After updating this blog for several months, writing this entry seems much scarier as there’s a chance you’re actually out there reading it…(shuffles awkwardly from one foot to the other then uses nice polite speaking voice)
Hello! Welcome backstage to my production blog for ‘THE END IS NIGEL’
This project was my first crack at exploring how to write an online narrative so thank you very much for clicking your way through to find me. As it was an online venture, it seemed a good idea to blog as we worked our own way through so please have a look back at this project’s development since Summer 2008. (Click here to read the blog in chronological order) Having enjoyed writing this blog, I am now going to keep writing it so please feel free to leave comments or ask questions.
Originally this project was commissioned as a two-minute film for mobile phones so I want to give massive thanks to commissioners Screen Yorkshire and Andrew Wilson at Blink for allowing me to stray so far from the brief. But while the project expanded, there was no way to make the budget any bigger so I also want to thank the fantastic cast and crew for giving me their time and talent on a very reduced rate. (Do have a nose around their links and websites on the credits page)
But before this sounds like an Oscar speech (thanks Mum and Dad!! x) my plans for this blog are to keep you up to date with what happens next as I try and develop this and similar projects further, as well as looking back at the project itself now that I’ve gotten to the end this first chapter. For example, I still can’t decide whether to beam proudly or cower apologetically for the pun-worthy title! (although the award for most cringeworthy gag definitely goes to:)
Ideally, I’d like to have this project or a similar one running live, ie - happening over a specific, finite period of time. This way, I could ensure the project was far more interactive and could give all of the characters their own facebook or myspace profiles as well as the audience being able to communicate with them directly via txt and e-mail so that if it were Tuesday 13th June in the story, it were Tuesday 13th June in the real world too. Ultimately, audiences need to be able to influence the outcome of the story - like this were some kind of online choose-your-own-adventure book. I really only consider what’s online as ‘the little scary teaser-bit before the opening credits’ in an episode of ’The X-Files’ in terms of how much story I still have and would still like to tell.
But first things first. Thank you again for following your way through ‘The End is Nigel’. I have had a lot of fun and learned a great deal producing it and really hope this isn’t the End.
John.
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Aftermath
The scary bit. Having got the project to a point where I am happy with it, I sent it off to our commissioner, Andy, at Blink. Way back into the middle of last year, Andy and I had a big chat about all of the wondrous creative possibilities achievable with an online project. And yet I wrote something about some nutter predicting the end of the world. But with a quick e-mail back and forth, Andy has said:
Well done, that is excellent. It’s just what I’d been hoping you’d come up with.
Phew. As you can imagine that came as quite a relief. He did have a few suggestions about breaking up the text of Verity’s blogs which I had been umming and aaahing about myself - for example, the quotes from other characters now appear in those colourful boxes which they didn’t this morning. I think the pages now scan much better.
Right, the next thing is to actually launch this properly online so that everyone can see it.
Ulp.
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
The End is ACTUALLY nigh.
Sigh…oh the fun of the Post Office at Christmas. Director Chris had mailed a dvd of the last video edits the week before Christmas which never seemed to turn up. Now in early January, he dilligently sent over another copy which arrived the next day…along with the one he’d sent two weeks earlier. Like a little time paradox had occurred in our letter box 
But we have now the finished videos and are so very nearly there with the whole project. One of the last things we’re doing is the credits page and I really like the brick background we have for it. It is actually the same wall that Verity’s intro video is set against. I liked the idea that red brick walls signify the borders of the story. Once you click ‘Enter’ from the first brick wall, you’re into the story-world and everything’s played real. Once you get to the brick wall with the credits page you know you are out the other side.
It’s these sort of little details that I’ve really enjoyed on this project. In researching other online ventures, the plots have always been pretty basic - deliberately so - and the real joy has been in the little nuances and details that a film or tv program would have to lose but which suits the online audience perfectly.
Having shown all of what we’ve done so far to my friend Tom (who has married the lovely Lynsey since this blog started and who foolishly also appointed me as his Best Man) has, off his own back, made me this picture.
Innit brilliant! I sent it to actor Chris who played Nigel who also thought it was fantastic. I was thinking ‘ooh, I could use that as the cover of any promotional material when pitching the project’ when it occurred to me that I wanted it in the project. Moving things around slightly, I thought it only appropriate to have the character of ‘Tom’ provide it within the world of the story.
Other than that, Heather has done her final mixes for the fake teaser-trailer on the Apocalypse Nige site and we are realising that this project is practically ready to send out to everyone. Perhaps I’d better go and tweak the blogs one more time…
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
Mist Opportunity
Christmas is over. Hope you all had a very merry one! It’s now New Year’s Eve and (to quote Sinatra) the weather outside is frightful. While this may be a good excuse to stay indoors and contemplate January’s inevitable detox, I took it as an opportunity to go galumphing round the hills behind my flat as a really eerie mist has swept along and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Even from my windows I could see it was the perfect backdrop for what I wanted for the Apocalypse Nige site. 150 photos and 10 severely chilled fingers later and these are my favourites:
Typically, the shot we’re going to use that was so obviously perfect to have a bunch of Warren Chambers running around within was discovered by accident. I’d wandered across a field trying to get a spooky shot of a tree in the mist but couldn’t get it right. But when I turned round to go back across the field, behind me all along was the perfect shot as the spooky mist followed me along the path.
As it’s New Year’s Eve, I’m reminded of the way I felt at the turn of the Millennium. Even though I didn’t believe in the Y2K Super-Computer Virus bringing civilisation to an end, the same way I didn’t believe that the Large Hadron Collider was going to destroy the universe (ie - by listening to the people who know what they’re talking about) there was always a slight feeling of excitement that made me think ‘oooh, but what if it did?’. Of course, it didn’t. A no-show for the apocalypse. In fact, as the clocks started chiming midnight at the end of 1999, I was banging on a toilet door at a party to make sure that a friend hadn’t passed out inside. Maybe there’s more insight there into why I’m writing this silly little project than I’d care to think about. Ho hum.
Oh well, Happy New Year and see you on the other side…
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
Christmas Online Presence 2
Having spoken about the web aspects, Heather has persuaded me to put all my initial sketches for web-design online. You can see now why I didn’t draw the Saxophone Deity strip myself
Despite my innate inability to draw, I did have specific ideas for each web-page not just in terms of design or style but also usability. I’m sure we’ve all experienced very clever web-sites full of bells and whistles but that are a riddle in themselves to navigate. I also had to bear in mind that this is a promotional tool so I don’t want to lose anyone along the way because of design fault.
I always had the moody photo at the top of Verity’s blog (and the parody at the top of this one) in mind but it took a lot of looking at other blogs to see what I liked best that led to this sketchy looking thing. Colour-wise though, I think it sets the right tone for the ominous air and makes the break-out sites like Saxophone Deity and Rainy Day seem all the more colourful.
Here’s my sketch for the Saxophone Deity design. Webcomics are becoming an increasingly popular and viable thing -Not only in terms of self-publishing but also the big names in likes DC’s ingenious Zuda Comics. Despite my best efforts, I have often had trouble trying to convince Heather to read comics and graphic novels - not for the obvious reason that she’s just plain cooler than me, but because she has trouble with following the panel order. Director Tim Burton quite famously had similar issues and was always finding himself peeking ahead to the bottom of the page before he’d read the top.
Even though the panel-by-panel structure meant more work for the Saxophone Deity comic zsite as it would require more pages, I knew I’d hit the right design with the scribble below as it converted Heather as the reader, once in the thick of the story, never even has to move the cursor. Making the colours and buttons so vivid and cartoony again seemed the good contrast to Verity’s blog but it didn’t hurt that we had such vivid pictures to work with to begin with!
In designing the Apocalypse Nige site, it would have been easy to just do an over the top explosive James Bond layout type thing but the involvement of the Rainy Day Corporation made me want to provide a sinister edge. Having taken a million and one pictures of Mike/Warren Chambers in his last visit, I really wanted to do the multiple version of him all photoshopped together as a tribute to one of my favourite onscreen villains.
(I don’t want to start a Matrix-related debate, but whatever your opinions of the sequels, I hope we can all agree that 100+ Agent Smiths all looking pissed off in slightly different ways after Neo has cheated and flown off is a good moment).
Without spoiling anything, in the big picture of ‘The End is Nigel’, I had planned to develop the Warren Chambers character as a Smith-esque wild card in the ongoing plot. Waitaminute…is John saying that the Rainy Day Corporation aren’t the big bad guys in this plot??? Bwahahahahaha.
Anyway, having looked through all of the photos I’d taken, this was my original design:
In particular, and with such good winter weather available, I wanted to add the elements to anything to do with Rainy Day (for example, all of the cloud shots in the movie posters and on the Rainy Day sites are genuine snaps we took of the sky ourselves). I guess all the study of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ at school has instilled me with the romantic notion that anything dramatic happening must always be accompanied by moody weather.
Saturday, December 20th, 2008
Christmas Online Presence
The videos are all nearly done so I am just praying for the Christmas post to be merciful and deliver them to my door. But Heather has already done a fantastic job on the music for the opening video and, little by little, everything is slowly heading online. I still have a few changes I want to make as well but the blogs are getting good feedback which is a relief.
In writing (and endlessly re-writing) Verity’s blog, I think I finally got her voice to a point I was happy with by tapping my own annoyance - but then laughing at it - from when I was her age. Despite all the apocalyptic nonsense going on in this project, I have really worked on making Verity’s story recognisable and universal. This is a note I originally wrote myself in the front of my notepad while we were filming:
Leaving university, the world Verity knows is ending. The world she now faces is broken. When any young person grows up and leaves the safety of home, they realise it’s going to be a fight to make the world what they want. Verity’s blog is her journey making that decision to fight and leave a mark…only with an apocalyptic conspiracy thrown in for laughs.
I’d have been less grandiose if I’d thought ahead about putting it in the blog but it’s pretty much the little mission statement I’ve been referring to whenever sitting down to write. However, this project is also above all else meant to be fun so I was worried about launching in with Verity’s intro video which could come across as a bit heavier. As I was so pleased with the flash animation at the beginning of Rainy Day, I decided to open the whole project with another flash animation (as you’ll hopefully have seen already by the time you read this). It’s terrible to laugh at your own jokes but I think Nigel’s quote about the Norse Ragnarok followed by the silly visuals of Nigel in his sandwich-board and Heather’s melodramatic (but deliberately so) music really sets up the tone of the whole show and I can’t stop watching it. We spent a long time getting the timing right on that flash to make it as funny as we could (it’s always so oddly obvious when it’s just right) and, even though it takes a few seconds to load, I think it’s worth it and provides a good launch pad into Verity’s video and the project as a whole.
