is dance who you are or what you do?

left to right: Jadzea Allen, Richard James Allen, Samuel Allen, Karen Pearlman in The Physical TV Company production of "...the dancer from the dance"  (photo by Ehran Edwards, (c)2013 PhysicalTV

Cutting a web series offers editors some interesting challenges in shaping audience experience - I look at a few of these in this post. 

Last year I cut a web series called "At The Fork" and found it really interesting from the point of view of structure.   Although the episodes are short – 2-3 minutes each, and the series is only 7 eps (the total screen time will end up being about 21 minutes) it is nothing like cutting a short film.   A short film has one major story arc that opens, develops and closes inside a single experience.   This one has seven mini arcs, each could stand alone, but they will be much better, like a tv series, when seen altogether, because there is a series arc that is only delivered by seeing them all.

One thing I’ve learned from handling this structure is how important it is for every scene to have a dramatic question.  This is something that also applies in short films.  In longer form you can maybe get away with scenes that don’t have anything at stake or don’t shift the power relationships or don’t advance the actions, they are just nice to look at.  But in short form, these scenes will tend to kill the energy of the whole because they take up so much more time, proportionally.   In webseries, if an ep (drama or doc, though not necessarily stand up comedy) doesn’t have a dramatic question that opens, develops, closes and points to another question for the characters, then it may well kill the whole series.  The eps are too short for moments that are just nice to look at, and each one has to compel the viewer to the next. 

This doesn’t mean it feels similar to cutting episodic TV.  Though I don’t have experience of this (and would love to hear from editors who do) I can imagine there are a lot of differences – story line complexity, character development within an ep, multiple plot lines.   This is not to say a web series couldn’t have these, but the one I cut only has one plot line, the characters progress within their relationships in each ep, so the story line is not complex.  It doesn’t operate the way a short film does, but it does feel more like a series of short films than a series of scenes within one story. 

One thing that is clearly different between a webseries and a TV show is that viewers take charge of time on the web in a different way than they do when they watch TV.   In a TV ep, the editor takes charge of the rhythm of the experience, including the pacing and timing of development from one scene to the next, and their proportional balance in relation to each other. The network, of course, controls the time limits of the whole and the ad break structure.   But Webisodes don’t have either of these controls.  Viewers decide if and when to get the next piece in the arc, they might decide to go out of order, which changes the arc in interesting ways!  Also, there is no time limit at all.

There are attention limits, but this doesn’t mean all episodes have to be short, it just means they all have to be good. 

One of the reasons I’m interested in the difference between cutting webisodes and other forms is that some of my colleagues and I have started thinking that getting students to make web-series might give them a better calling card than short films.  Web-series show that students can sustain a story over multiple eps, which might help them get work in television more readily.  Even more importantly, a web-series communicates directly with its audience – no gatekeepers, so it makes students more audience focused instead of funding body focused or festival focused.  Also, web-series give its creators direct feedback from their audiences – through social media or through statistics – audiences only click on the next one if they are compelled to by the first one!

“Convergence” is a huge question mark for industry right now, and there are plenty of signs that the distinctions between online and TV are collapsing.  We get and watch TV digitally.  Aggregators like YouTube and Blip-TV make channels, commission work with high production values, and sell ads.  Ads might clearly be labeled ads, or they might be branded content.  The models are shifting and potentially giving rise to new forms, certainly new structures of story telling.  This is, by my estimation, the biggest opportunity for developing the craft of editing since the rise of music videos in the 1980s. 

The questions for editors are not just about craft, but will of course also be about industry.  Employment for editors could increase as this form becomes more professional.  As my colleague Mike Jones writes “In the age of the internet a whole range of institutions have become 'broadcasters' and 'post production houses' that in the past would not have been so - museums, galleries, arts institutions etc. are now much more likely to have a team of editors in-house working on web-series, episodic productions all year round as well as often producing traditional Broadcast TVCs.”  My own view is that, like the Borg technology on Star Trek,  ‘resistance is futile’ so a pro-active stance that embraces the opportunities and guides them toward best practice is a better one for the guild to take than one which tries to stop the tidal wave. 

A few weeks ago my colleague Mike Jones wrote a blog post championing the return of the term "multimedia" to describe the new generation of screen stories that embed a lot of art forms into a single story experience.  He was talking about productions like The 39 Steps for ipad where there are cut scenes (short movies), text on screen (literature), interactive opportunities that allow the curious person to hunt around for clues (games) and of course images, sounds and music. 

Mike wrote that people might object because the word 'multimedia' reminds them of CD-Roms, but that is not why I object. 

I object because multimedia is a transitional term.   It says that something is not 'itself' but a conglomeration of other things. 

It is not unusual to go through transitional terms like these.  Movies, for example, were called moving pictures originally, suggesting that they were a combination of movement and image, which of course they are, but we don't call them moving pictures any more, they have their own name.  The word cinema is actually quite like the word 'movie' in that it draws on the Greek word 'kine' meaning movement.  Like "Movie" though, cinema is its own word now, it describes a particular thing which we think of as being a synthesized experience, not a combination of separate arts that are multiply making up an experience. 

So why can't 'multimedia' become its own word describing its own art?  Well, first of all because it has been used too many times before to describe too many kinds of experience.  Mike refers to the CD-Rom, but misses out on the stage shows that combine, for example, dance, text, lighting projections etc.  These were big in the 70s, and they are big again now, but the lighting projections are computer generated rather than cued and focused by hand.  And what about those free love 'happenings' in the 60s where projections of food dyes dropped onto glass slides were hazily synchronized with the acid driven music and writhing.  The good old days of "multimedia".

But more importantly, "multimedia" can't become its own word because it blocks synthesis.  It demands that the media stay multiple rather than being an entity, what the Germans might call a Gesamtkunstwerk .  Sorry to quote from wikipedia, but they basically have this one right:
"A Gesamtkunstwerk (translated as total work of art,[1] ideal work of art,[2] universal artwork,[3] synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, all-embracing art form or total artwork) is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms "

The term is one that Wagner used to describe Opera.  But just as we don't call Opera 'sung drama' we shouldn't call an ipad app that uses a few things we are familiar with from other places a 'multimedia' work.   And I firmly believe that this tablet based beast, which we can touch and move and read and watch but cannot yet name is well on its way to becoming as legit a form as Opera. 

Finally, in addition to being a played out slut of a name, and to blocking synthesis, multimedia as a name blocks something else.  Something that Mike himself writes about a few posts later: "normalisation".   By continuing to call things 'multimedia' instead of giving them their own name, we continue to say they are not 'normal' media they are new, unnamed, and unnameable combinations of normal media.

I for one, would rather give them a name and move on to being creative within then, maturing them, experiencing them as part of my richly mediated life.  It is tempting to suggest something flippant, say "Frankenstein", for these unnamed genetic hybrids, but I would rather have something that speaks of and to my experience.  So what to call these apps that bring together social, personal, textual, visual, aural and interactive sensations into one?  What is most salient about my experience of these, what distinguishes them from the gesamtkunstwerk of, for example, movies or operas, is that I touch them to make them move.  I am in charge of time with my touch, and time is the real media in which they unfold. 

So here's a list of touch based names to start with, make your arguments for and against!

1. Touchtold stories
2. Haptic narratives
3. Tactile media
4. Boovies or Mooks (just kidding here folks, though my partner Richard James Allen and I are working on "a book you can watch and a movie you can play with"
5. Touch Media (and my guess is this one will shorten down to one word. Any bets onwhat that will be? Touchies? Touchms?)

and the winner is?

The proposed "reforms" to Australian Content rules has once again raised the question of the purpose of the Australian screen production industries, as the battle lines are once again being drawn to protect the telling of "our own stories".    The battle is important and I encourage you to sign the petitions, which you can find here.

But it is amazing that this battle has been fought so many times in Australia since the early 60s and yet still needs to be fought again. Perhaps it keeps coming up because its terms are misunderstood.  The  battle is not about telling our own stories. Telling our own stories is something we can do on Facebook and YouTube, we need high end television drama to make our myths.

To mark the occasion of once more entering the fray in support of Australian creativity on our screens, I  re-publish below salient excerpts, slightly updated, from  my 2009 essay, first published in Lumina, called Make Our Myths. 

The question of the purpose of film was once a hot button issue. It raged in the early 20th century, when the technology was new and people fought over whether its purpose was to be a visual art, or a dramatic one, or if it should be used to record the real or to create propaganda. Debates about purpose no longer rage, but they should. The question of purpose should be at the heart of every production, before cameras roll, before funding is secured. A production that knows its purpose has a much greater chance of achieving it, than one that does not. Just as an industry that knows its purpose has a greater chance of survival than one that does not. It is not just a matter of what is the technology of film for, but what is our film and television  industry for?

The purpose of our television drama industry is, at this moment, a question being pressed upon us proposed reform to the television content rules. 

Usually when the question of purpose is raised at the level of government policy making, our industry is justified as needed to ‘tell our own stories’. But this justification has worn out, if indeed it ever energised us.

The purpose of Australian drama production, I propose, is not to tell our own stories. The purpose is to make our myths.
What’s the difference? Three things stand out for me: scale, dynamics and ownership.

First scale. The potentials that are opening up for the crafting of large scale, long form stories in television series have begun to be exploited in Australia in the last few years.  Rake, The Slap, Underground, Redfern Now, are working on a cinematic scale to give substantive proportions to stories on our now not so small screens.  Australian creativity with cinematic scale in high end drama is just starting to be widely visible.  We are really only seeing the second generation of film and television creatives making their mark, and the first generation of Indigenous Australians having huge successes on screen since the Australian 'New Wave' of the 70s. This generation is making great films and great television because it has a history of creativity to build on, a genetic coding of creativity, creativity in its upbringing on Australian content. Cutting quotas now will mow down that creativity in our industry, and send us back, within ten years, to a culture where every wheel that would make an industry turn creatively will have to be re-invented.

This sense of scale we are beginning to master is also salient to myth making. Myth is, by definition, larger than life. The ancient Greek and Roman Gods who are at the heart of so many western story telling traditions are larger-than-life beings embodying human traits and living those traits in extremes for the purpose of testing their strength and understanding their qualities. They serve the purpose of making something that is abstract into something that is alive and kicking. And there are dozens of these gods and heroes who embody traits like foresight, chaos, wisdom, or trickery. When a myth is made about these traits it is ‘our own story’ in that it is the telling of a story in which some core human quality comes into conflict with another one or with a force that it must change or be changed by. But the story is bigger than just the person who feels chaotic or capricious. It becomes mythic when it embodies that quality on a scale that is potent, active, calamitous and consequential.

I am not suggesting that we should make movies or television about Greek gods, but that we should understand the scale of these qualities of humanity and make stories larger than just the protagonist’s feelings. If we just tell our own stories, we tell of little conflicts that might really happen to us, and use ‘might really happen’ as a measure of strength or truthfulness of the story.  When we make myths, we actively seek strength and truthfulness, not just at the level of our immediate circle, but at a larger level concerning what it means to be human. Qualities we struggle to overcome or which we celebrate, issues which concern generations, questions that have consequences.

We can’t really justify a show about a lawyer or a backyard brawl as myth unless we can explain how, for example, the fight between ordinary people from different backgrounds and cultural perspectives can resonate larger than life. My answer to this is that myth is also made through dynamics, and particularly, dynamic dramatic questions.

Dynamics are central, absolutely core, to the purpose of screen production. The Greek root word of ‘cinema’ is ‘kine’, meaning movement, and this is what we go to the cinema or watch TV series for: an experience of moving images, moving sounds and moving stories. Not static ones, but dynamic ones. Dynamics are the audience’s immediate, kinaesthetic, physiological experience of meaning. Change and modulation of force, and conflict or confluence of energies of life, emotion, image and sound are understood by audiences at an immediate physical level, a communication direct to the body that precedes our cognitive understanding of plot events.

Story dynamics are the rise and fall of movement and energy in the story events. Construction of these relies on construction of dynamic dramatic questions. A dramatic question is a question that implies action and has something at stake. It often starts with the word ‘will’ and it always has an active verb in it, not a passive one. Will someone do something, get something, achieve something, rather than: does someone feel or experience something. Action is dynamic, it forces change, movement of story, emotion, images and sounds. Creating dynamics is the reason for taking human traits and embodying them in gods. In ancient mythology gods give these traits a body and power with which to act.

Having something at stake is the other important half of a dramatic question. Stakes create dynamism by making us care. The more we care, the more we experience the movement between hope and fear.  We hope something will happen, we fear it won’t. These things, in a myth, have room to move dynamically. In real life, relationships that may have potential for hope and fear can stay the same forever. We don’t really want to live dynamics, we want to live peacefully – but we do but want to see dynamics make relationship myths on the big screen.

I have  argued that we should not tell our own stories, we should make our myths, and that the difference between our own stories and our myths are scale, dynamics and ownership. I have sketched out some ideas about scale and dynamics, but I have not yet made a case about ownership. This is where all of the ideas come together.

The notion of ownership is deeply embedded in the phrase ‘tell our own stories’ but the question of who the owner is needs to be confronted here. If the ‘owner’ of the ‘our own stories’ is the person or people with the money to make the screen productions or the producers who raise the money, then we are ascribing ownership to a very small, culturally prescribed group of people.   Myth on the other hand is owned by everyone it speaks to, and it speaks to humans more broadly than within specific cultures or societies. In order to be a myth is has to be a story bigger than ‘our own’. This does not mean it has to be an American re-run, in fact, quite the opposite.

American movies and television are based in American myths, and these are not the same as Australian myths. I speak from personal experience here: Americans believe in manifest destiny and Australians do not. Americans are raised to behave as though they could become the president of the United States and Australians are not. American screen productions uphold or critique uphold the underlying myths of pursuing your destiny or dreams, and taking individual action in the world. So, dynamics and scale come easily to those myth makers, which is why it may seem as though to argue for scale and dynamics is to argue for Americanisms.

But we have the capacity to make myths here, which is why what is really at stake for us in the reform of content laws is not telling our own stories but growing our creativity.   A creative culture is an engaged, responsive, innovative culture - just what a government fears most, in spite of any rhetoric to the contrary. Creativity in television drama made in Australia encourages a sense of 'can do' in people, a sense that their own creativity is being affirmed.

Myth making does not mean stories have to be happy or sad, smart or dumb, expensive or cheap, real or surreal. They must have scale, dynamics, and ownership by more than just their makers. Sign the petition, grow our creativity, make our myths.