Month: September 2005

I haven’t been online for a bit because I’ve been trekking through the desert! To celebrate my birth day I went to Central Australia to hear stories of Creation Time. I’ve been to Alice Springs, Uluru, Kata Tjuka, Darwin and Kakadu for the last couple of weeks. I haven’t really been in the rough since I stayed at resorts, but I thoroughly enjoyed getting red sand between my toes during the day.

The best part for me was the storytelling. I spent the whole time listening to stories from Aboriginal guides, reading stories from the ground, canvas, cave walls and books; and scrawling my own. I was thrilled to find that the system for Aboriginal oral storytelling (as far as I’ve been privvy to) has all the tropes that I’ve observed and come up with for cross-media storytelling. Amazing, and completely understandable. My experiences there have confirmed and extended my own theories and made me feel absolutely at home (in more ways than one).

The ‘systems’ that correlate are: having layers of complexity that are accessible according the age/knowledge of the audience, having an understood essence that can be retold in many ways (different details and media)…stories having a multifaceted function as archive, guide, law, invocation and healing.

I’ll discuss this further, but for now, I had a wonderful time and can’t wait to get back to the Anangu people.

I just watched the SBS debate about the Aust film industry, which is available online, as I’ve mentioned before. Here are a couple of quotes applicable to the cross-media concern:

PENNY CHAPMAN, PRODUCER: The future of this industry is not cinema and it’s not free-to-air television. It’s that myriad of platforms and it means that we are no longer, as somebody said at the SPAA conference, looking at a four to five year life span for our programs. We’re looking at what somebody has called the long tail where it’s going to take us years to get back in a variety of markets what was spent on our program. But also I reckon the most exciting thing about this industry is the technology’s changing, kids are going out and making films for $2 on video cameras HDTV –

GLENYS ROWE, GENERAL MANAGER, SBS INDEPENDENT: […] Has that film-maker thought about the audience for the film, because there’s a lot of competition for audiences now. We’re now releasing Australian films into a market where literally people almost have Google TV at their fingertips WHERE they choose what they want to see, what they want to look at, what they want to know, what they don’t know now they can get it at their fingertips when they want it WHERE they want it. Going to the cinema I find quite an unpleasant experience now. It costs me $15, I have to sit there while terrible ads go on, I’m sitting with a lot of people who are eating, you know, horrible food, giant, you know cokes, it’s not a pleasant experience, coupled with the majority of the Australian films that have been around, or many of them look like a small experience. I want to see big cinema. I’ve paid $15, I want an orchestral score, I want to feel like I’m getting my money’s worth because otherwise, actually it’s cheaper and easier to stay home.

Summary of important points:
* The question isn’t: Is Film Dead? Is the Book Dead? Is the TV Spot Dead? They’re not dead and will not be far into the unforeseeable future. What we do have though, is another option on the horizon: film AND books AND TV AND Radio…
* A product has a lifespan now, not just a release date. Which means ongoing production AND income.
* Audiences want to choose how they experience a work: what medium & when. So give them access to all of it at once.