Digital aspects of the Arts Council Plan 2011-15

Arts Council Plan 2011-15

The Arts Council have just released their plan for 2011-2015, setting out what they’ll do to deliver their ‘Achieving great art for everyone’ goals and priorities.

On the digital side of things, there are various references to partnership, co-production and building capacity, while IP is flagged as a ‘challenge’. It’s all fairly top-line stuff as you’d expect, and you should always be wary of reading the digital bits in isolation from the rest, but here’s what’s worth pulling out.

The meat of it is on p10:

Digital innovation
Digital technology has huge potential to support and accelerate the delivery of all of our goals and priorities and offers exciting opportunities for artists, audiences and the broader sector. We will work with partners, including National portfolio organisations, to build capacity and increase skills sharing. We will encourage distribution of excellent art through digital platforms and archiving to extend its life and reach. We will encourage an approach that promotes openness, generosity and sharing for the public good, working with partners to develop policy and support with regards to intellectual property – a key building block and challenge to growth and innovation in digital media. We will seek to open up opportunities that lead to new revenue streams and align our investment with other partners to increase impact and public value.

The plan also has some information specific to different parts of the country – there’s no real detail here but, for the sake of pulling it together, here’s what there is:

East and South East (p18)

There is great potential to increase the digital capacity of arts organisations in the area, as this will become one of the primary means of increasing reach. The area has some of the UK’s most vibrant cultural new media and digital development sectors and is home to global digital businesses like Disney, Second Life and Microsoft. We have invited Lighthouse, Brighton to be the area strategic lead in digital arts research and development, exhibition, co-production and distribution

London (p21)

We intend to support consistent and strategic partnerships and alliances with a range of partners, including commercial promoters and publishers and digital providers, to better understand and exploit the value of the subsidised arts offer.

Midlands and South West (p22)

We will skill up the sector in the use of digital platforms to extend reach and accessibility for audiences.

North (p24)

We will build on the area’s strong track record in digital, for example through building partnerships with Media City in Salford

Also announced by today the Arts Council were details of £440m of strategic funding. The most interesting elements of this (from my point of view) being:

At Playful

Playful 11 - Hello

Last week I went along to Playful, a conference that describes itself as:

a one-day event all about games and play — in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. It’s a conference for architects, artists, designers, developers, geeks, gurus, gamers, tinkerers, thinkerers, bloggers, joggers, and philosophers.

There’s no sense in me writing copious notes here as I spent the day running the conference’s liveblog and so have probably written enough already. I will say that it was a very good event, so copious thanks should go to the organisers, sponsors, speakers and ticket buyers who all made it happen.

Actually I will say a bit more. The thing about running a liveblog is you end up writing loads but there’s no time to think or reflect on what’s said. A week later, these are the two themes from the conference that have settled in my mind. I don’t think I’m done thinking about them yet, but here they are for now:

Expectations

Although they contained some great lines, none of the ‘this future is rubbish’ rants really chimed with me and, besides, they often seemed a bit far off topic. I’m more interested in how such strong expectations are formed, whether/how they might be managed and, ultimately, the conditions under which they might be met or frustrated (and the circumstances under which one or the other might be more appropriate). I think I’d like to hear a talk about that.

Permission and trust

Three talks covered these topics from different perspectives:

  • Richard Lemarchand talked, from a game designer’s point of view, about how much freedom you allow players to have in their interactions
  • Georgina Voss talked about how ‘players’ negotiate that freedom between themselves
  • Louise Downe talked about trust – that is, how much freedom a user is willing to give up to a computer or a machine

More about theatre trailers: finding alternative influences

When I wrote that post about trailers in the theatre I searched around to find any discussion on the topic elsewhere. I couldn’t find much and what I could see was concerned with how bad they are.

I also had a search around some theatres’ YouTube accounts and it occurred to me that there might be a more fundamental problem here. In fact Rachel Coldicutt preempted this post in a good comment on that previous one, saying:

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why theatre isn’t very good at being cinema. And it’s because, I think, cinema is already amazing at being cinema and the theatre is pretty damn good at being the theatre.

What happens

I’m going to generalise a bit here, but bear with me because (give or take a few exceptions) I think this holds broadly true:

  • Cinematic trailers are made to be shown on TV and in the cinema. They’re then also put online.
  • Theatre trailers often mimic cinematic trailers. However, they aren’t shown on TV or in the cinema (nor in the theatre, for that matter). They just go online where, for the most part, nobody sees them.

An alternative approach

These videos are going to be shown almost exclusively online – on YouTube, on the company or venue’s main website’s event info page and maybe (hopefully) on some blogs. The key thing is that audience here isn’t captive – it’s prone to clicking away within fractions of a second.

As such, it would surely be better to take inspiration from successful YouTube videos, rather than going toe-to-toe with the cinematic trailers that have been made for very different viewing conditions. I’m not necessarily saying that adorable kittens should feature in every video (although…) but, depending on what you’re looking to achieve (and that’s the most important thing to bear in mind), there are ways to play to the strengths/mitigate the weaknesses of the medium:

  • be brief and try to get the key information in early – remember you’re losing viewers with each passing second
  • make use of clickable annotations, adding links to further info/tickets
  • in fact, just watch this video (NB: some of it’s outdated and I really wouldn’t endorse everything the guy says)

Something I would endorse is the point about making an effort to nurture your online audience. As Maya Gabrielle (National Theatre) says in this talk:

If you’ve made a beautiful piece of content but not created an audience for it, you’ve wasted your money

It’s not quite as easy as all that though, is it?

Of course, there are things that a respectable arts organisation won’t be able to get away with and that may well prove to be a hinderance. For instance, yesterday I was mighty amused to read a post by Kingsley Jayasekera from Sadler’s Wells.

He pointed out that a month ago, one of their videos was downloaded and then reposted to someone else’s YouTube account. It has since racked up four times as many views as the official video in a fraction of the time.

It’s exactly the same video, so why has this one scored so many views? Well, it can be hard to tell exactly how/why these things come to be spread around more widely, but looking at the differences between the two:

  • The official video has a descriptive title, is tagged and contains a short description – all of which will help it to be more easily discoverable by people who know what they’re searching for. However, it’s also age-restricted (over 18s only)
  • The cheeky re-up has none of these attributes. What it does have is a snappier, more amusing title which may well have helped its chances of being posted around websites, blogs and forums. (Screenshot).

Of course, Sadler’s are unlikely to be able to describe a trailer in those kinds of terms. The brand perception that serves them so well in other areas would preclude it.

Still, there are other ways for an organisation to play the YouTube game. ENO deliberately courted an online audience with their ‘Can I be your friend?‘ video for Two Boys (which I notice includes a link to a more traditional trailer) and I helped Birmingham Hippodrome to score an accidental hit with this video.

You could also argue that Sadler’s Wells’ succeeded by putting out a video deemed worthy of reposting (with ident and end card intact). How many others can claim that? After all, if Tim O’Reilly is right then:

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy