Buzzfeed co-founder urges creatives to embrace data

“Data and optimisation”, “rapid prototyping” and “iterative design” were the buzz phrases at the annual Power to the Pixel Cross-Media Forum (Oct 7-10) on Tuesday, looking at the latest developments in audience engagement, new formats and innovative funding.

Kicking off the opening conference, John S. Johnson, co-founder of internet news platform BuzzFeed, urged filmmakers and other creatives “to embrace data and optimisation” when developing their projects.

“The train is leaving the station and you need to be on it for all our sakes. You need to embrace it, make it your own and make great work,” he told delegates at London’s BFI Southbank.

Johnson is also founding executive director of the New York-based Harmony Institute (HI), a research body exploring the impact of entertainment media.

He cited My Sky is Falling (MSiF), an immersive storyworld aimed at creating empathy for children in foster care in the US, as an example of a project where data had been used to powerful effect.

HI partnered with American transmedia guru Lance Weiler of Reboot Stories and foster care charity the Orange Duffel Bag Foundation on the project, which involved a series of live, immersive and participatory performances.

“Lance created a science fiction allegory that took the audience on an emotional ride similar to that of kids in the foster system,” said Johnson.

Audience members were wired with biometric sensors capturing their reactions and level of engagement.

“Lance was then able to iterate the information he was getting from one performance to another performance to increase empathy,” explained Johnson.

He also gave a sneak peak of the “producer dashboard” being developed for BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, the news platform’s recently announced film division.

The division, he said, would tap into BuzzFeed’s network of some 200 million monthly unique visitors and use it as a laboratory for content creators trying to develop motion picture ideas and test stories. The key indicator, as in all BuzzFeed content, would be how much the ideas were shared.

Other speakers at Tuesday’s conference included Weiler, Dr. Jo Twist, head of UK interactive entertainment and games industry trade body UKIE; Loc Dao, head of digital content and strategy at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB); Mikko Polla, group creative director of Angry Birds creators Rovio Entertainment; ground-breaking journalist Nonny de la Pena, who tells news stories through immersive story-worlds, and Jennifer Wilson, head of Australian and UK-based The Project Factory, which produced the hit game app Sherlock: The Network, a spin-off of the popular series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.

In a talk entitled “Prototyping and the art of the question”, Weiler discussed the difficulties of developing stories and code at the same time.

“There is always this friction,” said Weiler. “Anyone that develops stories knows what that process is like. When you’re developing code, it’s totally different.”

Weiler said he used a process of “rapid prototyping” or “agile development” to overcome the challenges.

“Software development kind of has a waterfall practice, which is not too dissimilar from how films are produced, while agile development is this idea of setting priorities, figuring it out and immediately trying something and testing it. The more you can put it into people’s hands, the more readily it becomes obvious.”

“When you’re a filmmaker you write a script and between the time when you get some notes and you’re actually showing it, you’re sitting there praying, ‘I hope everyone loves this’. At the end, it’s too late to do anything and you’ve missed all these previous opportunities to improve the work.”

Weiler said his latest project Sherlock Holmes & The Internet of Things was an attempt to figure out some of challenges of storytelling in the digital age.

The collaborative, 12-month project is open to anyone who wishes to join forces with a team of storytellers, game developers, makers, creative technologists and experience designers to capture the world of Sherlock Holmes through the internet.

Launched during the New York Film Festival in September, the project is being run by Columbia University’s digital storytelling lab where Weiler teaches.

Its work will be transposed into a massive online course due to be offered by the university in spring 2015 and participants may get a small financial return on their efforts, depending on whether the programme turns a profit.

UKIE’s Twist noted that the UK games industry had already incorporated data and “rapid prototyping” into its processes.

“The games industry is a young industry, just 25-years-old, and because of that and the fact we’re digital, we’re natural innovators,” she said.

Most games, Twist noted, were wired into the internet which generated data that companies routinely used to update and improve a product.  Beyond that, the common practice of making Beta versions of games available to die-hard fans ahead of the official retail release was a form of “rapid prototyping”, she added.

Case studies

Tuesday’s conference also included a trio of case studies looking at recent, ground-breaking cross-media collaborations.

The NFB’s Dao joined The Guardian’s multimedia specials projects editor Francesca Panetta to discuss their recent collaboration The Seven Digital Deadly Sins, exploring peccadillos and bigger crimes related to internet use.

The pair said intermeshing the working practices of one of the world’s oldest newspapers and a five-year-old interactive production hub “wasn’t without its challenges”.

“We exist within a film organisation and our processes are very different,” said Dao.

They said that while the NFB worked around methodical processes with long timelines, The Guardian, as a newspaper, was used to working to daily and weekly deadlines, although this was changing.

“You work to a journalist, editor model which is very foreign to us,” said Dao to Panetta.

Other productions spotlighted at the conference included NETWARS/Out of CTRL, a multi-platform work revolving around the theme of cyber warfare and featuring an interactive graphic novel app, a TV documentary, an interactive documentary and an audio and e-book series.  

Raphaelle Huysmans, a producer at Canadian digital production house Toxa, gave a presentation on its documentary game Fort McMoney, exploring the Canadian tar sands controversy, which went online late last year.

Forum calendar

The annual Power to the Pixel Cross-media Forum continues until 10 Oct with the Pixel Market Finance Forum on Wednesday (Oct 8), one-to-one meetings on Thursday (Oct 9) and a think tank involving more than 40 fund heads from across the globe on Friday (Oct 10).

Projects due to be presented at Wednesday’s meeting include Sixteen Films’ Ken Loach interactive documentary The Flickering Flame, which will be presented by producer Rebecca O’Brien, and Syria-set On Screen Off Record, the latest project from Swedish Bryge Sorensen of Final Cut For Real, who produced the Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing.