The Future of Television with Gub Neal 16th March

gub nealGub Neal is a producer with a wealth of experience in television, known for ground-breaking, award winning and hugely popular shows, such as Cracker, Band of Gold, Prime Suspect, Queer as Folk and current series The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson.

He will be sharing his in-depth knowledge of the creative process and the business of television drama past, present and future.

Gub has worked in a commissioning role within television (Head of Drama, Channel 4 & Controller of Drama at Granada) and also as an independent producer, co-founding the production company Artists Studio in 2009. His career has spanned many developments in production and distribution in the sector: from the opening up of independent production in UK TV in the 90s, through the rise of satellite, cable and pay TV and into today’s digital landscape, catering for global audiences. He will be drawing on his knowledge and experience of television past and present and considering current trends, to lay out his vision of what the future holds.

This talk is organized through the Creative Conversations initiative at the Department of Creative Professions and Digital Arts at the University of Greenwich and features as part of the Film and TV Production UG programmes. Interested academics and members of the Creative Conversations network are also welcome to attend.

Time & Date: 16th March 2016, 5.15PM. A drinks reception will follow the talk.

Venue: University of Greenwich, Stockwell Street Building, 10 Stockwell Street, Greenwich SE10 9BD

 

Why do reader/user communities build?

We used to call them ‘the audience’ but now they don’t behave as we expect audiences to. They’re active, they’re vocal, and they’re engaged. They have multiple options and channels, voices and media.   They want do everything and have a say in everything on  their terms. And many of them don’t want to pay for it by following the traditional publishing business models.

We are all the audience for something. We live in exciting times as an audience, we are being courted and sought after with suitors from all forms of media. We are encouraged to enter and explore created worlds through multiple entry points. Using American TV show Fringe as a case study Mélanie Bourdaa discussed how audiences engage across multiple media  to follow story arcs in ‘Following the Pattern’: The Creation of an Encyclopaedic Universe with Transmedia Storytelling.’ A key, and very influential strategy and theory she suggests  is Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling . It allows us to engage with a writer/designer’s vision on multiple levels, as much or as little as we want. The key thing here is that we can choose to become really involved, going beyond the ordinary level of engagement for an audience.

It is not all about the audience, these are equally exciting times for writers and creators. You can imagine your story in people’s social media, in games, in books and on the TV.  A story can have an active following, conversations happening in real time, apps can help access it and live experiences can draw in a completely other group of people or enhance the feeling of belonging that a community has.

Authors can choose how they want to share their book experience with their audience; they can choose to have their characters tweet, such as Goran Racic tweeting as his hero Thomas Loud from his book ‘Loud Evolution.’ Not stopping there he has created a whole district in Minecraft where visitors can explore his world. Little by little the book world that we enjoy enters into our real world, to come with us to the office, the gym or while we wait in a Tesco Metro queue.

But at what point does this audience become a community? A dedicated group of people that are interested enough not just to buy the story in its multiple forms but to spend the  time to influence the plot on many of these digital platforms, following the success that gaming has enjoyed where players can influence or even change the storylines within certain parameters . Let’s face it, those of us that are old enough to remember them loved those old multi-branching adventure books where you could make decisions and those choices took you to different pages of the book.

The main problem that authors, designers and marketers face with all of this participation is money – where does all the money come from to create these great experiences. Audiences want so much for free now. The kickstarter model has proved a great launch pad for creative projects. The backers are the people that actually want the creative product and so are happy to fund it. The audience becomes the backers becomes the community.

I enjoyed Naomi Alderman’s, Rebecca Levene’s and  Adrian Hon’s Zombie Run! in this way, an audio adventure while you get fit. I like the idea,  backed it through kickstarter and then became part of a community of runners, though not the fastest of runners I am a happy runner  enjoying a story and getting a little fitter along the way. Intriguing a potential audience sufficiently that it then becomes a community and is prepared to pay for it is a hard model to follow and necessitates creating work with no guarantee of return. This is only one of business model out there that author/ designers/ filmmakers and publishers are using.

Fallen London with its steampunk aesthetic is equally captivating, a browser-based game in which every choice you make changes the storyline. It is free to play but the business model choice to keep it that way means it is delivered in little chunks. However, the community that Failbetter builds through this sharing will potentially go on to buy Sunless Sea, or The Night Circus or buy pure narrative premium content such as The Gift.

For the upcoming Creative Conversations panel on March 2nd , the next part of our Creative Conversations New Space of Publishing series, we start to tease out this very subject. ‘Building Reader Communities’ will question what distinguishes a community from an audience, and if writers and publishers need to build such communities and what they could gain from doing so.  We also want to unpick what the implications are for the writer-reader and publisher-reader relationship when the business model changes and the community is so much more in control of the creative product.

Our panellists will include: Auriol Bishop & Alex Pheby, co-directors of Greenwich Book Festival; Meike Ziervogel, novelist and founder of Peirene Press; Alexis Kennedy, CEO of in interactive fiction studio Failbetter Games; and a commissioned video featuring Kate Russell, tech reporter and author of ‘Elite: Mostly Harmless’, a sci-fi novel based in the Elite Game World.

It promises to be an interesting evening of discussion and places can be reserved through Eventbrite.

Featured image Winter Kaleidoscope by Dr-Wolf0014 on Deviant Art

Building Reader Communities 2nd March

Writers and publishers have always needed readers, but is that enough any more? Does future success depend on building reader communities?

Our next New Space of Publishing Panel explores this question, with the help of:

ALEX PHEBY-2

Auriol Bishop & Alex Pheby, co‐directors of Greenwich Book Festival 

As co-directors of Greenwich Book Festival, Auriol and Alex worked with fellow director Patricia Nicol to launch Greenwich Book Festival in May 2015, with the theme of discovery. Strands included history, politics and music (memoirs from Viv Albertine and Tracey Thorn), as well as fiction highlights, such as Jessie Burton, South London author of international bestseller The Miniaturist. The festival also featured a strong focus on childrens’ books, with workshops and other participatory events, and a showcase of new writing from the University of Greenwich’s creative writing students. In addition to their festival experience, Alex and Auriol bring their individual professional experiences to the topic of building reader communities. As Creative Director at Hodder & Stoughton, Auriol is responsible for creative strategy, consumer campaigns, positioning and packaging across Hodder’s publishing output. Alex is himself a novelist and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich.

www.alexpheby.co.uk
twitter: @alexpheby

 

MeikeZiervogel_portrait3_rb

Meike Ziervogel, novelist and founder of Peirene Press

Meike has a background as a journalist, working for Reuters in London and Agence France Presse in Paris and is the author of three novels, Magda, Clara’s Daughter and Kauthar. Meike founded boutique publishing house Peirene Press in 2008, to bring contemporary, award winning European literature in translation to English language readers. Peirene Press specializes in novellas and short novels ‘that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a DVD’ and offers its readers an annual subscription option, as well as individual titles for sale. Peirene Press also produces a newspaper and hosts regular events, including literary salons and coffee mornings. Meike will be sharing her particular approach to building the writer-reader and publisher-reader relationship.

www.meikeziervogel.com
Facebook: @PeirenePress
twitter: @MeikeZiervogel

Alexis

Alexis Kennedy, CEO of interactive fiction studio Failbetter Games

Alexis Kennedy is creative director of Failbetter Games, best known for their interactive fiction game Fallen London, which has a large and loyal community. The expansive community and world of Fallen London provided a strong foundation from which to launch the videogame Sunless Sea and was key to its critical and commercial success. Alexis will discuss the relationship between story and community and how it is essential to Failbetter Games’ business model.

http://twitter.com/failbettergames

KateRussell

Kate Russell, tech reporter and author of sci-fi novel ‘Elite: Mostly Harmless’.

Kate is currently writing her second book with her online community, enabled by TWITCH streaming and linking to the Elite: Dangerous games platform (the fourth release of the original Elite video game, which was a British video game phenomenon in the 1980s). Kate’s knowledge of how to build a community and work with social media is encapsulated in her book Working the Cloud. She will be bringing these insights to the panel via a specially commissioned video.

Our panel will be discussing questions such as what distinguishes a community from an audience? and why might writers and publishers need to build such communities? We will also consider the implications for the writer‐reader and publisher‐reader relationship

Join us to explore these and other questions  on the 2nd of March. The evening will begin with welcome drinks at 6pm in the Stephen Lawrence Gallery Project Space which is based within the Stockwell Street Building. The panel will follow at 6.30pm.

The Stockwell Street Building is located at 10 Stockwell Street, Greenwich, London, SE10 9BD

 

Video of this panel event is available here