| Home > Media > How is making video stories for mobile small screens different? Anthony Lilley, MD of leading UK-based firm, Magic Lantern, explains |
| How is making video stories for mobile small screens different? Anthony Lilley, MD of leading UK-based firm, Magic Lantern, explains | | Date Created: 14 Mar, 2006, 01:56 PM |
 Multimedia content doyens are wracking their brains for more profitable distribution methods for TV and film - methods that will avert piracy, allow audience behavior tracking and restore the 30 second ad spot's revenue generating potency against fragementing audiences. But while the producers struggle to deal with technology changes, the content creators are feeling their way towards a new "science" of content - one that allows the interactive, mobile and small-screen nature of the contemporary world to actually change the nature of the stories that are told. Netvideo recently spoke with the Managing Director of one such company, the UK's Magic Lantern. Its MD, Anthony Lilley (pictured right with Netvideo's Jason Romney), is a former theatre director and lawyer. Today, he is MD of one of the world's most imaginative and prolific new media content creation companies. One example of Magic Lantern's work is the FourDocs video upload server that allows documentary film makers to upload and thus distribute and monetise their 4 minute works via Channel 4. But as well as providing business smarts and corporate leadership, Lilley hugs the coal face with his company's content producers and dreams up actual content projects.
In this interview, Anthony Lilley talks about his company's new formats and story types, developed specifically for the mobile, small screen world. He profiles work on the BBC drama Spooks and children’s TV properties. But he says the famous children’s books in the 1970s and 80s where the reader would reach the end of a paragraph and decide whether the character would turn left or right, were the mere early "cave paintings on the wall of interactive media", compared to what is coming. "The narrative form of interactive media is not film with clicks in it, it is actually a whole form which is centred on the user being in charge of the experience," Lilley says."That is related to, but different from, a traditional cathartic and Aristotelian narrative, where things happen to other people...It is always on the boundary between forms where the creative things happen."
In this interview, Lilley speaks about interactive narrative, in games, in machinima and in the world of mobile. Although the sun was setting (and Netvideo apologises for the interview's inexorable dimming), Anthony Lilley provides one of the most lucid and fascinating accounts of the specific, practical issues that film makers face when they make the transition to mobile phone video.
"I’m more interested in what forms of content creatively make more sense when the audience is on the move," Lilley explains. "Or when you are in this very personal relationship with a device which may be only one foot away from your face. What does that mean for the creator of that experience? ...The creative challenges are really quite significant.
"What should the graphics look and feel like when you are very close to somebody. You are paradoxically, in a TV production, relying on the sound a great deal to cue people into what might be happening next, or what was important. Or you play music in to stress the tone of a scene. That is very difficult to do if you don’t know whether a person is listening with headphones or has a tiny speaker on a mobile device. And those are the creative challenges of actually creating mobile content.
"The filmic equivalents of those in 1905 were not having the ability to move the camera because it was too heavy. There was no sound, no color, and an audience without grammar. Back then, the audience didn’t know that when a shot closes in on a doorknob, the door is probably going to open; an audience had to be taught that, initially. And we are in that stage in the mobile content area, and to an extent, with online video, where there is no real grammar yet for how this works.
"The danger is simply porting television grammar which doesn’t always necessarily work on a tiny screen in a very different personal relationship. So it is creatively fascinating territory at the moment, and, commercially starting to make sense because there is a big enough audience. Certainly if the products are global in potential reach, and there is a big enough audience for people wanting to be commissioning that work now it can work [profitably]."
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