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Embracing newform

CONTENT LONDON: The creatives behind digital titles including Ballybeg Post Office and Prank Me explain why traditional TV firms need to be more open to taking chances with new types of programming. John Elmes reports.

The Newform Drama session at Content London this week

Most people in the TV industry would say they are forever looking forward for the next idea, for new voices and the new arenas where people will gobble up content. But is the sector as forward-thinking as it would like to believe?

Even the streamers like Amazon and Netflix, so often – and quite rightly, in many ways – held up as the pioneers in the TV space, can be viewed as part of the establishment. Many call Netflix a ‘channel’ as opposed to a media or tech platform, and the streamer is commissioning shows in a way that wouldn’t be out of place at a traditional broadcaster.

Indeed, for those creating new kinds of content, TV firms’ claims that they are eager to move with the times are often little more than lip service, delegates at C21’s Content London have heard this week.

“Someone needs to give us a break,” Selma Turajlic, co-founder of UK digital content firm Little Dot Studios, told the audience during the Newform Drama session. “Someone needs to trust you that content, even scripted drama, doesn’t have to come from people who’ve been doing it for 20 years.

“We’re not seeing much diversity in the supply of people who are actually making those [innovative] shows, but there is a huge interest in getting access to the tribes and sub-cultures and developing some of that [content] that is getting millions of views that you see on social networks. We had an obligation to facilitate some of that change and go on a journey with young writers and creators.”

Little Dot was set up to discover “how social platforms work, how content moves around and how you work with new talent.” It manages more than 150 YouTube channels, as well as Facebook pages and social video content for global TV brands.

This year, the firm has been behind Ballybeg Post Office, a social media-based comedy project built around a fictional village community. It was inspired by comedian Michael Stranney’s Edinburgh Fringe stage show Welcome to Ballybeg.

The aim was to create a successful sitcom world that viewers could discover, watch and interact with, evolving the traditional 30-minute TV episode into a real-time experience. It went viral and the company developed an eight-episode web series that Little Dot is now taking to the TV market.

“We could have gone down the route of just creating a script, but we decided to actually create a script, build a world and essentially live-test it,” Turajlic added. “We had 400,000 interactions. The interesting question is how does that work in a traditional commissioning world? [Do you] put this in front of a commissioner and say, ‘By the way, this is how many people are interested in viewing this’? For us, this is clearly a traditional half-hour [comedy].”

Ballybeg Post Office is based on an Edinburgh Fringe show

While Turajlic acknowledged the difficulty of securing traditional TV firms’ faith on the back of a single piece of content, she added that she and her colleagues were “specialists in this space” who constantly work with digital-native producers that understand the industry.

Her point was picked up by Jesse Cleverly, creative director of Wildseed Studios, which invests directly into piloting ideas from creators. The company has created two popular digital productions that were born in the digital space and use talent from that realm.

Prank Me, created by Cleverly and Paul Neafcy, is a digital thriller following rising social media star Jasper Perkins (Corey Fogelmanis), known for his extreme pranks on his channel. When a high-profile stunt doesn’t go according to plan, Perkins, encouraged by his growing viewership and crowdsourced victims, goes on a killing spree, blurring the line between audience and accomplice.

Meanwhile, sci-fi feature film The Darkest Dawn, which saw huge success on iTunes, was created on a shoestring budget.

“On the one hand, we’re in the world of £3m-an-hour drama, but we’re also in a world where you can make a feature film for [very little],” Cleverly said. “Clearly there are opportunities to make really ambitious work. Often what [creatives in this space] need is extremely high-level mentorship. If you give them that, you can jump them up into an international film festival and a commission.

“It’s easy to look at YouTube creatives and say, ‘This is shit, the production quality’s shit… this is bad, that’s bad,’ but actually what you’re looking at is a resource that’s grown and operated outside the structures we all took for granted.”

Production and distribution giant Fremantle recently took the leap of faith Turajlic and Cleverly have been calling for with new scripted podcasting arm Storyglass.

Robert Delamere, brought in as creative director, said Fremantle identified an opportunity in the “explosive growth” in podcasting, with a quarter of the UK listening to a podcast at some point every week. He told delegates that one of Storyglass is keen to avoid using established TV models in an area which is still being figured out by the TV world.

“One of the things we decided to do on the podcasting label is to not have any enforced form; to not turn around and say this has to be 6×30’,” Delamere explained.

Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike in State of the Union

He said a “development budget” had been provided for Storyglass, and that this was in a “minor key, rather than a major key,” making it less of a gamble to take a risk with new talent. One of Storyglass’s first projects, Director’s Cut (working title), comes from “new talent” comedy writers and performers Kill the Beast. The dark-comedy podcast is a murder mystery set on a troubled film set.

“I don’t care where the idea comes from or who it comes from, I just want to see if an interesting idea can be encapsulated in this format,” he added. “How can we elevate people who have beautiful, genius, visionary ideas and bring them [to the fore]?”

Delamere’s comments echoed those of Arvand Khosravi, senior associate at Endeavor Content, which is distributing See-Saw Films’ (10×10’) shortform comedy series State of the Union. The show stars high-profile actors Chris O’Dowd (The IT Crowd) and Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl).

Khrosravi made the point that, in the age of innovative ways of doing drama, creatives are often able to write their own rules. “There’s really no forecasting for this; there’s no robust, set market for something like [State of the Union],” he said. “My expectations, having had the conversations with See-Saw in the early days, were that the digital buyers were going to be [interested in the show] for sure, the linears were probably not.”

Ultimately, linear platforms’ reluctance to take a chance on shortform is something that will have to change if they are to survive – as highlighted by Turajlic: “Length is this anomaly that we’re just all stuck on. Who cares whether it’s half-hour or 10 minutes?”

With digital natives fast becoming the largest audience group, Cleverly said large organisations would be forced to adapt. “The problem for TV has always been that you can’t innovate, it’s too much of a risk,” he concluded. “We’re struggling to wean ourselves off systems that might not be working very well.”

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