February 22, 2005
Welcome To The Scene
A Serial Drama from the Point of View of Webcam
""The scene" in this case refers to the social culture that goes along with the "pirate" infrastructure (the so called "darknet") that is behind the release of Hollywood movies onto the Internet. We see that scene through fictional character Brian Sandro, NYU college student and member of the notorious CPX release group.
The drama unfolds entirely from the point of view of a webcam focused on Brian at his computer and a recording of his desktop as he IM's, browses the web, rips DVDs, listens to mp3s, etc. Of course, looking at someone's desktop is normally boring but in this scripted desktop world its the vehicle for the character interactions, so we see Brian as he organizes rips with his release group mates, makes shady side deals with a street vendor in Asia, worries about financial aid and flirts with his girlfriend." [blogged by akb on Demand Media]
"Refreshingly, unlike most other 'net only tech related video dramas this one has a story line and character development. Brian descends into addiction and lies with increasing frequency to cover himself. The viewer experiences the dissonance of the unpleasant real world, with its crappy food service job, boring classes, and financial problems, when it intrudes into the fantasy world of "the scene" where Brian is an untouchable worldwide hero.
In addition to the unorthodox storytelling technique, "Welcome To The Scene" innovates on several other fronts that show a savy sure to be copied in the future by other independent producers of independent online video.
# Its delivered as a serial. That is, 4 episodes in have so far been released with the next scheduled for March 4th. Getting your audience to come back for more (stickiness) is crucial to building an audience for future projects.
# The show is licensed under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be freely distributed by anyone.
# The show has agreements with other entities, for instance it has sponsors that get a plug as each episode begins and features the music of independent musicians.
# On the tech front, the show is available in high quality and makes excellent use of delivery technologies. Luckily, like anime, the content compresses very well, so 800x600 video can be delivered at 300kbps. The show is available via major p2p protocols (bittorrent, Ed2k, Gnutella, Fasttrack ). This leverages both bandwidth savings and the communities around the respective p2p networks.
One important thing to note, "Welcome To The Scene" is not produced by a college kid in their dorm room. Its produced by Jun Entertainment. They seem like a small shop with a corporate client list whose principals have a standard corporate background who have hired a college kid that knows about file sharing. For some the smell of venture capital and market seeding interferes with the enjoyment of the product, for some it does not. Regardless, there is some enjoyable content for Joe netizen and valuable lessons for hopeful Internet video distributors."
Posted by jo at February 22, 2005 03:02 PM
