The Revolution will be Televised…

My children prefer to download films (and TV series) and watch them on a laptop when they feel like it – rather than be bound by the dull old schedule of the box in the corner of the living room. And now it seems that the way we all watch television is about to be revolutionised…

Google are about to show off the fruits of their collaboration with various TV hardware partners at the Consumer Electronics Show next week in Las Vegas – and everyone knows that Apple are supposed to be launching a TV sometime this year.

All of which suggests that the time has come for our conventional assumptions about what a TV is (a screen connected to an aerial or a dish but nothing else) is about to change forever.

Exactly what this means to the TV industry is anyone’s guess at the moment – but you only have to look at what Apple did to the music and publishing industries to conclude that it may not turn out terribly well for our big old-fashioned broadcasters.

It’s pretty easy to see that some sort of connected TV that allows consumers to choose only the content they actually want (and probably ask for it by just talking to their Siri-controlled TV set) is going to be very attractive to viewers and not at all appealing – in fact, probably utterly terrifying – to the broadcasters and advertisers.

As Evan Niu of Motley Fool notes here: “As consumers ditch expensive cable TV packages for more affordable a la carte online offerings, content partners will have no choice but to give in to Cupertino. Again.”

Our 2011 Blog in Review

WordPress, who host our blog, sent us their annual review of our site today. In an excellently American statistic, it turns out that the 4,000 visitors attracted to our site would have filled ‘…three New York subway trains.’

People found us from the main Jacaranda website, then via Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin in that order…which seems to pretty much mirror a wholly unscientific estimation of each of those sites utility and popularity in the corporate world.

The most searched-for topic was ‘best corporate video’ which suggests that a large number of people are looking for an example. If true, they won’t have been satisfied here, as the topic linked to a ludicrous spoof – which, unfortunately, a number of our readers did actually mistake for a real film.

What this says about the corporate industry (or the general public’s impression of the type of film still being made by it) is perhaps best left unexamined.

Pitching, Procurement and Being Preferred

2011 has been a busy year for pitches – many of which we’re delighted to say, we’ve won. It’s a process that’s always time-consuming, sometimes rewarding and often frustrating – not least because many companies who should know better, are still using procurement processes designed for the bulk purchasing of paperclips and toilet rolls, self-evidently unsuited to properly assessing creative work.

Others are adopting the ‘supplier’s briefing’ idea – where all the production companies invited to pitch are brought together in one room to take the brief and ask questions.  It’s like being at a bizarre cocktail party – with no drinks and no friends – where  the assembled characters are:

• The Incumbent Conspicuously calling all the client’s by their Christian names and laughing knowingly at their jokes.
• The Regulars – Nodding seriously to denote huge familiarity with the subject at hand but careful not to ask any questions at all because these could help the competition.
• The New Kid – from a production company no-one’s ever heard of called ‘Soil’ or something based in Spitalfields. Naively, he asks very relevant questions, the answers to which everyone else surreptitiously scribbles down.

That said, some companies have put great effort into designing and running assessment processes that are, whilst rigourous, very fair in measuring both production companies’ general capabilities and specific creative ideas. B.P.’s Preferred Supplier’s process should be seen as a benchmark in this respect.

It would be a great step forward in 2012 if other companies  adopted  similar intelligent procurement processes…having won a place on the list, we would say that, wouldn’t we?

Happy Christmas to all of our preferred clients and suppliers…

Running a Good News Story

This doesn’t fit the current narrative of universal gloom, so we’re all the more anxious to mention it.

We’ve worked with Leonard Cheshire Disability for a number of years, producing their AMI Awards – and with BP for even more, as a preferred supplier. So we were delighted to be able to introduce them to each other when the latter won an award from the former at the recent Ability Media International Awards – “…for helping build a more inclusive world for disabled people, with its 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Ambassadors TV and social media campaign.” More details here.

As a result of attending the event, Duncan Blake, Director of Brand at BP has decided to run a marathon in aid of Leonard Cheshire. Duncan said: “I went to an event recently that was run by Leonard Cheshire who do amazing work for people with disabilities. I was moved and inspired by some of the incredible stories I heard. I realised how hard life can be for people with severe disabilities and how courageous many of them are. I don’t normally request sponsorship, but I want to take this opportunity to make a difference for Leonard Cheshire and the people they support. And BP will match what you give.”

You can sponsor Duncan here.

Going down to Rio…

We’ve just finished a shoot in Brazil for BP, working with the extremely talented Toa Stappard, who managed to keep focused – in every sense – despite the many distractions of Ipanema beach.

Shooting on Canon 5D brought some challenges – as ever, but these far outweighed by the benefits of this fantastic camera. For a start, the complete kit could be flown as hand luggage (despite some animated discussion with security about the security threat posed by a tripod). It wasn’t very long ago that 12 or 15 massive flight cases of checked baggage was the norm.

But there are creative, as well as practical benefits.  Getting informal shots on the streets of Rio at night would have been quite impossible with a conventional camera, according to our Brazilian fixer. Standing outside a bar in downtown Leblon with a Digibeta kit would have had us, at best arrested, at worst, shot. With the 5D we succeeded in looking like lost tourists – and got some excellent footage as a result.

The new C300 from Canon looks really interesting (combining the picture quality and lens options of the 5D with a ‘proper’ video camera) but I’m convinced the 5D will still have a really important role for shoots where portability and low profile are important.

 

Steve Jobs Celebration

Apple has put an 81 minute video online – a record of the memorial meeting they held in Cupertino – a celebration for the life of Steve Jobs. Watching 81 minutes of video online is perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea – but as a massive and unapologetic Jobs fan, I have.

Al Gore spoke movingly of the idea that Jobs created products that people love. This is a cliche, of course – but he’s literally right, I think. Jobs had the genius to somehow make us feel so attached to our Macs, iPhones, iPads or whatever that we forgive them almost everything.

I know this from recent personal experience.  I spent most of a weekend trying to download the iPad software update for my wife. As I tried to make it work for the tenth or eleventh time, it occurred to me that I was surprisingly relaxed about the fact that this was taking up a ridiculous amount of time.

Why didn’t I mind? I’m not really sure. But I do know that if a PC goes wrong (or, more often than not, tells me smugly that (but not why) I can’t do what I want), I just instantly want to smash it with a hammer.

Star speaker at the memorial for me was the genius product designer Johnathan Ive. Amongst other things, he said this:

“Steve used to say to me – and he used to say this a lot – ‘Hey Johnny, here’s a dopey idea’. And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet, simple ones. Which in their subtlety, their detail, were utterly profound. And just as he used to love ideas, loved making stuff – he treated the process of creativity with a rare and wonderful reverence.”

How many other CEOs do we have whose staff believe that they treat the process of creativity with a rare and wonderful reverence? Then again, how many other CEO’s deaths will very many people care about?

 

Impermanence and Link Rot

Apparently, The Buddha taught that “…because conditioned phenomena are impermanent, attachment to them becomes the cause for future suffering”. Clearly the big B had an early glimpse of the future suffering that was to be caused by our attachment to fundamentally impermanent digital media.

Back in the day, we carried our 1″ master tape in it’s strong lockable case away from the edit suite and stored it on a shelf somewhere. And, it’s probably still there. A bit dusty, but perfectly accessible and perfectly intact – so long as you can find someone with a 1″ tape machine to play it back for you.

But now we’ve got the digital rushes from a shoot. Transfer them to a hard drive on a Mac or a PC and all is fine. Until that hard drive stops spinning. And then it’s all gone, probably forever. So you keep a copy on another drive, but the same is true of that. As someone said, there’s no such thing as a hard drive that doesn’t fail, there’s just hard drives that haven’t failed yet.Or you could store stuff ‘in the cloud’ – all good until the company running your cloud goes bust.

My thanks to Graham Dean who has pointed out that the perils of impermanence have affected the art world as well, where some digital works are said to be suffering from ‘Link Rot’ – an excellent term devised to describe the impermanence of a location on the Internet. There’s more about this issue here.

I think there’s much to be said for the permanence of films stored on tape or film and for art painted on big bits of canvas or paper – even if the Buddha would disapprove of such attachment.

 

 

Steve Jobs R.I.P

Very sad to learn of Steve Jobs’ untimely death. Michael Rose’s excellent obituary captures some of the magnitude of what we’ve lost: “The world is poorer for the lack of another twenty years of Steve Jobs’s brain, his energy, his judgement, his almost uncanny power to force reality to conform to his expectations rather than the other way around.”

When we started Jacaranda with Anita Roddick in the late 80′s, we automatically adopted The Body Shop’s computer and IT systems. At the time they were apparently the UK’s biggest corporate user of Macs – so, by accident, we grew up with Apple – and it took us years to realise how lucky we’d been.

One of Steve Jobs’ defining characteristics seems to have been a total disregard for market research, preferring instead to rely on an unshakeable belief in his own judgement of what his customers wanted – a judgement that was right much more often than his critics always hoped.

Such unswerving self-belief was a characteristic that Anita shared and which helped to make her business, in a much smaller way, hugely sucessful. (‘Market research is like driving while looking in the rear-view mirror’). It was also a trait that lead to both being adored by many and vehemently disliked by a few.

Other than both being self-confessed ex-hippies, the other thing that they both share is having both died too early to really enjoy their success. It’s been said by her family that Anita’s greatest regret would have been not living long enough to give away all the money she had made. From what little I know of  Steve Jobs and his (much less well-publicised) philanthropy I guess the same may be true of him.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, this video of his address to Stamford University students some years ago is brilliant and made all the more poignant by today’s news.

iPhone 4s – A really useful video camera

Some commentators seems fairly underwhelmed by Apple’s iPhone 4S announcement yesterday – largely because it wasn’t called an iPhone 5, as far as we can tell. The Siri voice-recognition app looks like pure Star Trek – and very cool, but you can’t help wondering how often people will actually use it. Barking orders into your phone might just work in San Fransisco, but on the Tube? It’s just not British.

All that aside, what is pretty impressive is that the new phone supports 1080p HD video recording via an 8MP camera. In the past we’ve been pretty sceptical about the potential of the  ‘User-Generated Content’ market – with production companies encouraging clients to believe that their staff can make their own films really easily on Flip cameras. On the whole, they couldn’t.

But now that everyone can have a 1080p HD capable camera in their pocket….maybe they can? Or, at the very least, maybe production companies should be helping clients to understand the potential of this tool to supplement professional filming?

Fake Apps

David Byrne, long hailed as ‘coolest man on the planet’ or similar by many (and indeed elsewhere on this blog) has just made a contribution to a new exhibition called “Social Media,” at The Pace Gallery in New York. His artworks are simply a series of fake (but, at first glance, almost convincing) screenshots for iPhone apps that don’t exist.

According to the press release, “The exhibition focuses on contemporary artists exploring public platforms for communication and social networks through an aesthetic and conceptual lens. In an era of increasingly omnipresent new technologies, Social Media examines the impact of these systems as they transform human expression, interaction, and perception.”

Leaving all that aside, what’s great is the way in which he manages somehow to combine the ‘aesthetic and conceptual’ with the just plain funny…if only other artists could pull this off more often…