I Am User Generated

So my holiday break work is to take a bunch of great ideas and turn them into full stories. This is what I do more and more in the new work that I’m involved in. There’s a lot of smart creative people with great ideas but far too few storytellers and even fewer interactive digital storytellers.

As I struggle through this process I keep thinking about a screenwriting professor I had at NYU. He challenged us to come up with 50 ideas a month. At first I thought that was impossible. There’s no way you could dream up 50 screenplays in a month. But what he asked for was, ideas, not full blown screenplays. Ideas are simply the kernel for a larger story. Unfortunately, in contemporary filmmaking there a way too many feature films that are just ideas stretched out to a feature length without the storytelling discipline applied. This is emblematic of a lot of content creators. Let me give you an example.

An idea: A guy goes to the store to get a bottle of wine. As he leaves the store he drops his wallet. The wallet is recovered by a beautiful woman. When he meets up with the woman to retrieve his wallet they fall in love at first sight.

Not a bad idea. Could be a cute romantic comedy about fate and chance encounters. But it lacks any story at this point. To create a story from this idea we need to introduce some conflict, some drama, some emotional hooks, some back-story, some character arc and all that good stuff that we learn as writers. Unfortunately, in our disposable content culture few great ideas get this far. Here’s that idea pushed a bit further.

Story: A guy goes to his regular liquor store to buy a bottle of wine for his one year anniversary dinner with his girlfriend. Despite being a wine expert he asks the beautiful new clerk for advice. He tells the clerk that we has a special dinner with his mom who is from out of town. He takes the clerk up on her advice and grabs a bottle for twice the price he was planning on spending. Caught up in his crush for the clerk he accidentally leaves his wallet at the store. The next day, after a mediocre anniversary dinner, he realizes that he left his wallet at the store. His heart flutters with anticipation to see the beautiful clerk. He goes back to the store and the clerk immediately recognizes him as Mr. Chateau Pontneuf with the mom from Miami. The romantic connection is clear but is it worth cheating on his girlfriend?

Okay so still lots of work to do but at least we’ve added in some conflict; his moral debate on cheating on his girl, some backstory; he’s from Florida, some emotion; the crush connection between him and the clerk.

But I’m not just talking about film here. This discipline needs to be applied to anyone making content. Advertising creatives used to be called, “Idea Men,” but that’s really only a good skill if you only write headlines and 30-second TV spots. The real Mad Men need to create whole campaigns with multiple media touch points that all tell a great story. I also see it in the tech scene. There’s a ton of smart people with great ideas but they really need the mentorship of a VC to really draw out the larger story of their product, brand, business strategy and positioning.

There’s a lot of great ideas but very few of them make great stories and it’s really story that we have always connected with.

Okay enough pontificating and procrastinating, time for me to get back to work.

Well the time has come for me to sorrowfully say goodbye to the DDB family. I will greatly miss the debates and creative stimulus that flowed through the walls and permeated through some amazing and often award winning work.

It all started, oddly enough, over three and half years ago when I was showing some weird media installation work at a small art gallery. As the show was wrapping up an acquaintance of mine, Blaine, approached me and said, “I like it but I don’t get.” After waxing poetic on every influence from McLuhan to Richard Serra to Banksy, Blaine who shared my interest in graffiti and public and private space, invited me to meet her boss. The boss, Yvonne, was also interested in this emerging, more social media landscape. After a few chats and debates, I was brought on by DDB to help form Radar DDB, with the sole goal of figuring out how advertising works in social media.

Since that time, thanks to some great clients and heaven sent hires we’ve been able to build a talented and endlessly dedicated team of experts. Now that we’ve franchised the model out to the other global DDB offices and operational merged with Tribal DDB I feel okay about leaving and tackling a new challenge. But just okay. I don’t feel great about it because of the amazing people and potential to keep doing even more great work in the future.

But alas, I have the unique opportunity to continue my number one life passion of storytelling with some amazing new collaborators. As anyone who reads this blog will know, I gave up a career as a narrative filmmaker once the media landscape began to change in 2004. Since then I’ve become obsessed with finding new ways to tell visual stories. I wrote my masters on oral storytelling and remix culture but that simply scratched the itch. My time at DDB has given me a wealth of experience and technical knowledge that now needs to be combined with my academic theories. This is why I feel very fortunate to be given the opportunity to work with the National Film Board of Canada to help tell stories in the most innovative way I can. This is my passion and their mandate.

I will continue to work with some of my other clients to help them push the boundaries of how we tell stories in this ever evolving media landscape. There’s so many talented content publishers in film, TV and gaming that just need a little love from a creative Internet kid like me to fully reach an audience that is hungry to interact with their media in less of a monolithic and linear way.

I’m just as stoked on where media and communications are going now as I was in 2004 when I first left film, as I was in 2007 when I first joined DDB, and as I was when I finished my masters in 2008. I have been remiss in not blogging more but I will endeavor to share some more thoughts with you, the occasional reader, because I feel it’s important to air out some ideas in order to innovate. If you’re at all interested in #storytelling, #transmedia, or #innovation, then don’t hesitate to drop me an email (jameschutter at gmail) so we can keep the dialogue going. I can’t wait to start sharing some new work that will hopefully keep storytelling evolving.

Well there you have it. Even though it seems painfully obvious to say that the world is going more mobile, it still seems that in North America we are still way behind. Although the mobile device is the most portable it still seems difficult to use while travelling. International connectivity is an issue and the carrier charges are cost prohibitive. Ubiquitous wi-fi seems to be lurking in the wings but of my travels this year, Vietnam was the easiest to connect and New York was the most difficult. With accessing information in the cloud becoming more important we definitely need our mobiles as our link to our information in the cloud. Hopefully solid research numbers like this presentation will help push us forward into an even more seamlessly connected reality.

Great news! My dad, who’s a university professor, has just been granted his first sabbatical. Bad news, my dad is in his fifties and three years from retirement. One sabbatical, in a 40-year career, three years before retirement just doesn’t add up. Like all good sons my lifelong quest is to not repeat the folly of my father, so I set out to find my own equation that granted me a better solution to continued learning while working.

Stefan Segmeister, the world-renowned designer posits this solution: Given the fact that the first 25 or so years are devoted to learning, the next 40 or so to working, and the final 25 to retirement what if we cut off 5 years from retirement and intersperse them into your working years? By this math we’d take a sabbatical every seven years thus pushing back out retirement by 5 years.

Well this seems like a better solution then that of a single sabbatical right before retirement, it isn’t exactly realistic for us who are not owners of world famous design firms.

Knowing that I didn’t want to walk in the same steps as my father, and that I didn’t have the job security to take a year off every seven I decided to start Sabbatical Saturdays. Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking and you’re right, this isn’t such a radical move but it does give a focus to my weekend. If I take one day off a week to further educate myself then I’ve taken 52 days a year which adds up to taking a full year off over the course of seven years. Essentially I’ve taken the same time as Sagmeister but just done it as weekly commitment as opposed to checking out for a full year every seven years. The sacrifice is simply that instead of nursing a hangover until noon, then doing laundry, then watching TV, then starting in on creating a Sunday hangover, I decided to devote a whole day to learning and completing a project outside my work discipline.

Let’s make no mistake, this is not a day to hang out drink espressos in the sun and pontificate whilst cogitating, this is a time to execute on a specific project. Any sabbatical has a rigorous set of deliverables. So the first part is to define those deliverables and due date. Knowing that I’m a born flaneur/procrastinator I’ve enlisted the help of a faux academic advisor to keep me on track.  I’ll play the same role for them. My “student” is interested in new media’s role in education and the development of critical information age thinkers, so I’ve assigned Peter Drucker, Richard Florida and Neill Postman to compliment the more contemporary authors Daniel Pink and Seth Godin.

Most sabbaticals also involve leaving the nest for a time to get perspective on your surroundings. Well this is a downside to a weekly day commitment as opposed to an extended leave of absence; this doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be followed. Take your Saturday Sabbactical from your local Chinatown or drive to your next neighborhood and work from a café.

So as it stands this is simply a creative experiment with an unknown outcome but worst-case scenario I’ll just wait another 20 years and take a sabbatical like my dad. He turned out okay so I’m fine with that. As it stands I’m kicking around three projects: A portrait cookbook, a book on nutrition and creative output and a film script on the 1968 student revolutions. Sure they’re loose ideas now but hell I got seven years to complete them and all I need to do is devote one day a week.

Good luck. Let me know if you need an advisor and I’ll try to find one for you.

I had the pleasure today to speak at Northern Voice 2009. I’m so grateful to the crew of volunteers that have been putting on this world class event for the past 5 years.

I shared some of my theories on Mash Media with a savvy and engaged crowd. The session was “hijacked” by some really interesting questions on copyright law. Seeing that I’m not a copyright lawyer I could only speak on my own personal views on the subject. Some of my own personal views were formed based on:

The Pirates Dilemma by Matt Mason

It makes a good point that we all violate copyright every time we sing Happy Birthday. Information is a two way street that is decentralized and democratized. Piracy allowed America to industrialize very quickly thanks to stealing patents. Thomas Edison was seen as a pirate for inventing the gramophone. Musicians feared Edison.

I sensed that same fear today when I presented some of my own personal theories on storytelling and art making. I was surprised to read that an attendee was scared of my views on copyright. Admittedly, saying “fuck copyright” was a little harsh on my part

RIP: A Remix Manifesto
“It’s beneficial to share ideas.” “Sharing is the nature of creation”

Lessig Remix
Creating, not consuming is the order of the day.