Today I write about a personal (non-budget) passion project, that is online now:
dieehrlichen.com is a fictional storytelling plattform about people sharing a very intimate concern honestly to the web. It is also an actors lab, that empowers actors to play a role they dream about.
For this Project I teamed up with filmmaker Jan Georg Schütte and his actors ensemble. Together we wish that 'dieehrliche.com' will become an incubator for new transmedia ideas and experiences beyond sci-fi or conspiracy plots.
The plattform-title "Die Ehrlichen" is German for 'The Honest'. And at the moment the plattform is in German because it makes content production a little easier. Nevertheless we want to switch to english in the future.
Until then this slideshare presents our idea and our strategy for the next couple of months:
<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_5712605"><strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px">"dieehrlichen.com" - An Indy-Movie Transmedia Experiment</strong><div style="padding:5px 0 12px">View more presentations from Christian Riedel.</div></div>
Furthermore you can follow the story of "Bernd Schildknecht" - a school teacher who stumbles upon a very strange guy on youtube, who spreads satanic thoughts and looks exactly like Bernd.
The idea for dieehrlichen.com started about a year ago. Back then I met Jan Georg Schütte at the Digital Film Camp in Hamburg. We shared a common interest in transmedia storytelling and started brainstorming right away.
Since then I have been introduced to Jan's awesome actors ensemble. The call themselves "Die Glücklichen" (German for "The Happy"). And under Jan's direction they have already realized two feature length indy-movies and a TV-Mini Series. Currently they are working on Jan's new movie "Leg ihn um!" ("Kill Him!"). All their work is mainly based on improvisation.
And improvisation is also one of the greatest things about 'dieehrlichen.com'. It gives actors the ability to produce content fast, to react to the audience and most importantly: it is something that most actors enjoy to do (even without payment :-) ). We have discussed a lot of approaches to use the web for storytelling. We started with a complex conspiracy plot, thought about a series based on a screenplay while the actors tried out characters on youtube. In the end we decided two things: That improvisation is the most authentic way to work for this team. And that we need more feedback to get better.
So now we present our work so far in public. We think of it as a lab-experiment. And we hope to get a lot of feedback to build on and to attract actors, writers and others to support or join our lab.
So what do you honestly think of it?
An older blogpost of mine got some attention on twitter a couple of days ago. In "Agile Strategy, Tactics an the Story of a DJ" I argued that we should not prefer doing over planning because they always inform with each other. My post was a response to the Agile Strategy Manifesto by Justin McMurray.
I guess the new attention for my article was driven by a little flamewar on the german account planning group's website. The debate was triggered by an insightful post from Nina Rieke (Strategist @doubleshift). In her post "Always in Beta" she writes that brands have to be as agile as the world.
Our articles have one thing in common: we looked at software development for inspiration.
In the software world the "always in beta"- discussion frames a shift in paradigm: From the linear waterfall-model to a more complex thinking in loops that incorporate early prototyping, testing and feedback.
Waterfall
http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/creativeglasses/himCjCsjrdhh...
Managers loved the model, because it looks simple and controllable. And most of the agencies, I know are organized similar: Strategy, Art-Direction, Implementation, Measurement. But a waterfall can't cope with (user) feedback. Acknowleging this blind spot means to chance the hole line of production, breaking down processes, silos and hierarchies.
Loop
Today a lot of software is developed in a looping process of doing and planning, or planning and doing. Doing is needed to test things out and planning is needed to make things better and learn from mistakes. The loop resembles every creative process. Mangers had to accept complexity and a loss of control.
Naturally we have Waterfall-Models for the advertising industry as well as for the movie industry.
But if we think of communication as 'mental-software'-development, we can ask ourselves, how a similar paradigm shift could be visualized for our industries.
But I haven't seen a fancy looping-model by now - so I draw one by myself.
However it follows a personal premisse: I believe that content is as convergent as technology. It will be more and more difficult to distinguish between entertainment, news or advertising content. The only glue that holds an audience together will be a story, that offers an experience.
When I have drew it, I had not thought about advertising or tradtional media or interactivity. I have thought about developing an exiting story.
So here it is. It is a first draft - so feedback would be awesome.
The great thing about the loop: It does not suggest the time frame. Perhaps the first too loops happen in a day. The first Storytelling Rollout could be the rollout of a prototype within the creative team. And while fans of doing will rush to production, fans of planning will be more busy with feedback and audience knowledge.
