SPAA Fringe: be prepared for anything
by: Tina Kaufman

Screen Hub
Monday 19 October, 2009

The official focus of this year’s SPAA Fringe was on collaboration and pitching projects, but I realised that because of the sessions I’d chosen, my focus could really be called `be prepared for anything’.

And being prepared for anything could mean, as Kelly Chapman said in her keynote address, recognising that everything is changing, that audiences, have really changed, and that `we need to change to both make a sustainable living, and to tell the stories that we care about.’

It could also mean recognising that all these changes - to the way filmmakers can work, to the way films are distributed, to the many ways that audiences connect with that work - can provoke this advice: be prepared for anything.

While Peter Giles and Gary Hayes, from LAMP at AFTRS, conducted a workshop aimed at helping producers reach out to new audiences in new and diverse ways and across a range of platforms, Kelly Chapman took her audience on a quick but entertaining tour through her recent production history, and then outlined some of the very intriguing projects she’s currently developing, in sessions that showed how much the future is filled with both opportunities and challenges.

Keynote speaker Kelly Chapman once thought her future was in front of the camera, and started producing short films as a way of filling in time while she waited to be discovered, but by the time she was approached by Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield of Hoodlum to join their team of technical and creative producers in developing multiplatform content, she had already produced work in film, television, music video and online.

Transmedia entertainment, she explained, uses many different formats, and is designed to be spread across the web. She demonstrated different examples; webseries (which can be similar to television, but the length of episodes is different, as is the way they are shot, and they’re aiming for niche audiences), teaser campaigns for games, fictitious websites, Ridley Scott engaging audiences in contributing to his possible prequels to Bladerunner and Alien. There’s no hard or fast recipes; as she said, `the only limit is in our imagination.’

Narrative extensions, extending the fiction of already existing stories, became her work at Hoodlum. First up was Emmerdale online, which supported the long-running British soap - it was incredibly labour-intensive, and lasted 22 weeks.

They had to collect content while the soap was actually shooting, and were aiming at an audience of over-35 women, not very web-savvy, using characters that they loved. But online forums gave immediate feedback, `so we could shape the experience to their comments’, and establish a direct relationship with the audience.

Next came Spooks interactive, a narrative extension of the British spy drama - `it was classier, with a longer lead time, and not keyed to immediate broadcast,’ she explained. `We had a small team working on it in the UK, and a huge team in Australia.’

Then came the project Hoodlum developed with the producers of Lost, Find 815, which allowed audiences to interact with the series in the eight month hiatus between series four and five. `We were so successful that the Losties were hacking onto our site ahead of time, and downloading stills to put on their blogs.’

She added that while all of these projects engaged with audiences across different platforms for already existing TV programs, `more and more we’re being asked to think about something like this really early in the development of a project.’

`And what about feature films?’ she asked. `Views are polarised about whether this is the end of the independent feature, but as the four-screen audience grows up, we need to work out ways of engaging with them. I’m an optimist – I think we need to get experimental and clever, play with ways of getting our films out there, take responsibility for getting our stories out there.’

She is an optimist – her next project is a feature film Jucy, a `womantic’ comedy she’s developing with director Louise Alston. Kelly created her own company KCDC last year, to work on her own projects as well as collaborating with producers to extend their productions into digital space. For Jucy, she says `we do know our audience well, and we’ve started strategising a strong online presence and blogging about the film’s unique elements.’

As Gary Hayes explained, outlining the format of the workshop he and Peter Giles hosted, one of the current challenges for professionals is `the noise that’s being generated online’.

With 79 percent of people now active online using social media, 33 percent reading online forums and 18 percent contributing to them, it’s obvious that using all that online activity to your advantage rather than trying to compete with it is the way to go, and the workshop provided both a quick and comprehensive run through of many of the tools available and a crash course in working out how to use them.

Providing everyone with a (non-exhaustive) list of the key attributes of `transmedia storytelling through playful social activity’, they did a quick rundown, illustrating each component and explaining how it could be used; the list included such items as the fictional web, the chat bot, flash mobs, the joy of chat, and the character journal. It was all much too detailed and complicated to try and convey here (and, frankly, I’m not too confident of my grasp of much of it).

We were then divided up into groups of five or six (although a few audience members did hurriedly leave the room as this was happening), given a recent Australian film and asked to work out how to use what we’d just been introduced to in reaching new audiences or adding to existing knowledge.

In only twenty minutes each group came up with some really interesting and creative ways to use these new tools: for Lantana, there was the use of a fake website for the psychologist who is missing, the sending out of invites to her book launch and the leaking of video clips from her client interviews.

Simultaneous flash mob events (with `dead bodies’) in different cities were also proposed, as were the use of You Tube clips of detectives talking about the mystery and inviting people to take part in the murder investigation online; for Kenny, stickers on portaloos would send people to a website with Kenny’s thoughts on a range of subjects, where they could ask a Kenny-bot questions, as well as encourage Kenny to become an ambassador for recycled water (`a rich community experience, especially working towards more acceptance of recycled water,’ commented Peter Giles).

For Balibo, presenting the news story as current through press releases, with a website, encouraging people to investigate and protest, was the proposal, and Gary Hayes commended the more serious approach, `setting up a framework to make it more contemporary and introduce it to a new audience.’

For Australia, participants recommended using a two-pronged campaign to drive people to the cinema and tourists to Australia through Bluetooth pranks at airports and having chat bots with cast members online – `good to see a treatment that’s real-world-based’ was the comment.

This new digital workspace is a wonderful and scary place, but the sort of information and enthusiasm and – yes, optimism – shown in these sessions should help filmmakers meet the challenges they offer. And be prepared for anything.

Tina Kaufman
Tina Kaufman is a freelance writer on film and media issues who was editor of 'FilmNews' for seventeen years. She is now an Honorary Life Member of both the Sydney Film Festival and the Film Critics Circle of Australia.

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