November 18, 2009

FNB Innovators: Alex Johnson

This week, FilmNewsBriefs is featuring Alex Johnson as our innovator. Alex is the co-creator/ creative director of RADAR, a weekly three-minute made-for-mobile series on Bablegum, as well as Co-Founder of Work Book Project Labs (WBP Labs). We discuss the series, creating content to live both online and off line, as well as the technologies used for a series of this kind.

FilmNewsBriefs: What are your main goals for creating the Radar series?
Alex Johnson: RADAR is about creating a hybrid genre of narrative, documentary, music video, branded content and commercial. It is structured with the end user in mind, to be consumed on the audience’s terms – online via mobile. As curator and creative director I find artists I think are interesting that represent new forms of storytelling or who are working cross-genre, and match them with other emerging talent – directors, DPs and music. It is also meant to inform, inspire and feel inclusive so that the audience can watch the piece, then go check out everyone involved: tweet them, meet them.

FNB: Why is Bablegum an ideal home for this series?
AJ: Babelgum, most notably Karol Martesko, has been extremely supportive and given us a huge amount of creative freedom. We present season ideas to them for an initial sign-off and after that they are very trusting and hands off. Labs has final cut. They understand the importance of original content and twenty-first century distribution.

FNB: Discuss briefly WBP labs and the kind of data it collects.
AJ: Labs is a division of the Workbook Project (WBP), an open creative network that encompasses a number of projects including roving conference series DIY Days and the WBP Awards, which will soon be awarding a filmmaker a theatrical run in LA, plus full publicity and social media support. It also encompasses the magazines New Breed (about the new breed of filmmakers) and Culture Hacker (about Transmedia). Labs is the commercial division of the WBP, it’s an agency-meets-think-tank-meets-project-producer. RADAR is our first project; we are finalizing our second at the moment and are in talks about several more. We exist to work cross-genre in smart, modern ways matching original IP with brands and audience. Future projects may encompass urban gaming, improv, video, real world experiences, specially created apps, anything that makes sense for the story and the audience.

FNB: How do you choose your filmmakers?
AJ: I directed Season One and for Season Two we had a work-for-hire relationship with our directors. It’s an agency model in which I am a very hands-on creative director, and hold a collaborative relationship with them, guiding the brand and overall creative. In terms of who we hire, we look for directors that can handle that hybrid. It’s difficult to be able to work as fast as we do while maintaining high production values, being able to change up story structure on the fly if necessary. I’ve been lucky to work with some very talented people.

FNB: How do you choose the subject matter?
AJ: In terms of methods of curation, it’s impossible to spend an evening in NYC without hearing about an incredible project from a friend or stranger, or seeing something you want to take a photograph of and look into later, or noting something from a fly posting or billboard, or seeing a piece of street art or url chalked on the sidewalk. There’s an interesting trend right now in which offline word of mouth and paper are becoming important again, compared to the digital information we’re now flooded with: the fanzine over the blog, the Xeroxed flyer over the jpeg version.

We’re inundated with choices online and constant feeds of information, so I feel like the role of the curator is becoming more apparent in culture. We need trusted voices to point us toward what we should look at when surrounded by all-encroaching content. William Gibson writes about us all being curators in a data filled digital world, in which the passionate obsessive can become, the modern connoisseur. However, I think curation is as much about filter as it is collection or research. When I look at projects I look at them from three major perspectives – creative, strategic and brand. As a creative: Can this project be told as a story? Can we tell that story in a visually engaging way? Who are our characters? And as a strategist: How much has this trend been covered in recent press, is it new? Does the project tap into current concerns or mood or use of technology? From a workbook project brand perspective: Does this project use more than one art or communication form, is there a community or digital element, etc?

That said, as both a filmmaker and a strategist, having spent time in advertising and in interactive, trend-spotting and audience patterns are as important to me as a good story. It’s not just about the content itself, it’s also how people will react to the episode and push it back out. At WBP Labs (an agency-meets-think-tank-meets-project-producer), our projects take into consideration audience behavior and interaction as a key element when [brainstorming]. That way we can create original content and match it back to both them and brands. I also think that the curation expands further than the content chosen — I look at individual episodes as a holistic whole, matching a variety of creatives and voices — from the projects and contributors to interesting directors, DPs and featured music and bands, so that each piece is unique.

FNB: How are you using social media to engage the community that exists around the subject matter?
AJ: Each contributor (the people we feature) is at the center of their own, usually extensive, network. We tap into that, immediately offering them everything they need (photos, embed codes, synopses, links) and keep a continued dialogue going with them. For instance, with this week’s episode, “Missed Connections,” illustrator Sophie Blackall posted the video to her blog and there were immediately a ton of comments from the most loyal of her readers, most of whom run their own blogs. We’ll be reaching out to these people as the next stage in a concentric circle. We also provided her with a new publicity photograph from our on-set stills photographer, which will link back to the episode when posted online. It’s about creating multiple points of entry to the work, where it makes sense.

We also update our website, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter daily, keeping an updated version of a Twitter list of contributors for others to follow, and are about to launch an extended version of the site including editorial blog and feeds from contributor’s own social media. We also have a team at Labs that reaches out to relevant blogs weekly about that week’s episode. All that said, I think it’s a mistake when people consider social media as just an online phenomenon. The essence of social media is about people talking and spreading content via word of mouth. RADAR is both an offline and online experience. Our audience’s encounter with these creatives is not limited to a three-minute time frame, as we also create live experiences in which we bring the episodes to life.

FNB: How have you created live experiences?
AJ: At our last event people danced as Eclectic Method remixed RADAR, turning the footage into music; we had street art by ColorMeKatie on the walls; we sent volunteers out into the audience with 50 sketchpads and did a mini version of Dr Sketchy’s; followed by a blood-soaked performance by the Bambi Killers. All of the contributors from Season One attended and networked and talked. At the moment, we’re in planning stages for another extended offline experience to take place in March. I think it’s important for filmmakers to approach any type of content from a 360 angle and look at all its facets.

FNB: Let’s discuss some of the technologies you used to make the series. Do you have any tools for development?
AJ: Once the episode has been curated, development happens via a series of calls between me and the contributor, then I like to sit with the potential episodes for a while before providing either a treatment to the director or an in-depth creative brief, containing high line concept, messaging and references, plus a Quicktime of the conversation with the contributor, after which we’ll refine it together. Then we loop in DP and sound for calls and tech scouts and start prepping.

The depth of development depends on the episode. With some projects the approach is obvious, some take a little more time to emerge. I like to experiment with concepts and styles: Day in the life on the Waterpod, split screen in Art Battles, recreations of illustrations in Missed Connections, Poetry Brothel as Eyes Wide Shut, Dan Goldman stepping out of his own comic world in Red Light Properties and in From The Desk of Sarah Seeley, highly stylized dance routines on the street and in an office. We work very, very fast. We have a weekly turnaround on each episode from curation, research, development, pre-production, production, post and publicity. Some episodes can be very challenging, we’ve done up to 15 locations in one day and while we work with the same crew weekly, except for directors and DPs which I change out, we can have anywhere from 10 people on set, to Missed Connections’ cast and crew of 40, costumes, make up and hair and extras.

FNB: What kind of camera do you use?
AJ: Nikon D90, two bodies and a lense kit. It overheats, so we have to arrange our shooting schedule and process on set around that, but it shoots beautiful HD video and we’re able to do many things with it that are not possible with other kits, for instance the experimental look at the beginning of the Bambi Killers was achieved by dismounting the lense, and Tom Quinn shot some beautiful scenes in which he racked focus between subjects in the Waterpod episode. It also allows us to be mobile – the DPs usually carry the lense kit on their back when they’re running around, but very importantly for what we do is that it allows us to meld into the crowd. People do not react to a stills camera in the way they do to a standard film or video camera and it allows us to achieve completely natural moments without disruption or self-consciousness.

FNB What’s your editing process?
AJ: We post at House of Trim and work with editors Jawad Metni and Josh Cramer. Josh has also now directed two episodes for us – upcoming in Season Two, and joins us as a Producer on Season Three. I talk with Josh during development to see how we can up the ante in post, as we are [brainstorming], or we try simple experiments.

FNB: What’s your marketing strategy?
AJ: We work with publicists Falco Ink and also run this internally at WBP Labs. I have a marketing background, in interactive strategy and independent film, as does Segment Producer Janine Saunders, who has worked with media theorist and author Doug Rushkoff for a number of years.

FNB: Are there challenges when trying to capture an environment without disturbing/effecting it?
AJ: This is something I am extremely aware of. For instance, with Slam Theater in Season One, it was essential to the project that we not interrupt the proceedings in any way at all. The D90s greatly help with this, and we have a very small footprint, our crew is pretty guerilla and knows how to work fast and light on their feet. During Season Two, we also started approaching this from the opposite way, creating events with the contributors that we had control over, which essentially enables us to treat an event like a film set.

Alex’s Website: HERE
Follow Alex on Twitter

View the RADAR series HERE:

Links Referenced:
WBP Labs
WBP Labs on Twitter
RADAR

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