Archive for February, 2009
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!
