engaging stories... ...told economically

The massive growth of iPad, and other mobile technologies, for consuming digital media formed the centrepiece of the conference. We reported it, also using mobile technologies, and the idea that mobile can be a two way street struck a chord with many of the delegates. I will be talking about iPhones, but other smartphones are fast becoming equally capable.

I was fortunate enough to go to IBC this year. Clearly, technical improvements are been made in increasing the number of pixels, frames per second and the number of dimensions we can enjoy. But I think there are other measures of progress too. 

We are all familiar with the airing of the CCTV footage after the unexpected landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Shaky mobile footage from events such as Tahrir Square, Syria, Libya and London are increasingly common on news channels. So high technical quality is not the only criterion for what is transmissible. Arguably, sometimes good enough is good enough. 

But why would anyone deliberately set out to cover news with a telephone? The image quality is hardly comparable with even say DVCAM. 

There are some immediately obvious reasons however:

In fact it's not just news which can use this technology. A Korean director, Park Chan-Wook, shot his $130k feature film 'Night Fishing' entirely on iPhones. On an iPhone? Well, not quite as it comes out of the box. He did add a few quids worth of bits. The 'making of' is in Korean and interesting even if you don't know what's being said.

So here is a technology which can deliver reports and other short form content in audio and video. It's clearly not going to compete on quality with high production-value TV content. But the fact that newspapers and hyperlocal web sites are increasingly using video, and on comparatively limited budgets, suggests that originating some content with this technology is going to be a fact of life. Applying broadcast reporting skills to citizen journalism tools will become more common.

Brands too are beginning to discover the value of being a channel. The days of having one or two "I'm great, buy my stuff!" promotional videos on the business website really are at the end of their useful life. Being a channel means having lots of frequently changing content or you won't attract the eyeballs. But it's unlikely that brands will have the same production budgets as television. So to attract audiences they will have to do something different. CCTV & phone footage makes it to our screens because there is no alternative. The story is so compelling that the technical quality is the lesser consideration.

So if way can be found to ensure that stories are compelling then very few will object to, or even notice lower production-value.

There is something in the literature about this too. We get the notion that stories must have a beginning, a middle and an end from Aristotle. But he also mentioned something else in his work, 'Poetics'. He said that stories must be beautiful. To be beautiful something must be the right size. If a thing is too big to be seen in one go, then it can't be beautiful. Equally, something so small you can hardly make it out can't be beautiful either. Stories must be perceived as complete to be beautiful.

To be able to get the benefits, from what started out as consumer tools, we must ensure that the rules we use to make content are appropriate. We must make beautiful stories.

How these technologies work together in practice is the subject of part 2.