Courtesy of WITNESS.org

When I saw the title of The February 2nd New Yorker blog post Does Egypt Need Twitter? , I looked to see if Hosni Mubarak wrote the post. After all, it was a case of dogma superceding the truth, and that was a signature Mubarak move during the 17 days that preceded his resignation. But in fact is wasn’t the famed dictator who was suspected of having been living in an alternate universe each time he came on Egyptian state TV to reaffirm his position; it was Malcolm Gladwell reaffirming his position on the role (or lack thereof) of social media in political movement, with an ever so slight pivot that well, reminded me of the now departed despot. I responded to his first New Yorker piece here last year.

Shall I belabor the despot point? Maybe not. Since the people of Egypt did it loud and clear for the world, I need not. But you get my drift. But I will quickly raise my placard in protest of social critics who, at great pains to remain right do the world a disfavor. It is an insult to the intelligence, collective power and passion of the revolutionaries of the world that Gladwell on his cushy New Yorker pedestal pontificates on what revolution is or is not. He says:

…the least interesting fact (….) is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented….People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.

Ahem…interesting to whom? To Gladwell, and his feeble-minded supporters, none of whom has ever endured the repression and brutal conditions of a dictatorship? As someone who grew up without free speech or the freedoms Mr. Gladwell enjoyed in this country, I say “Please” right back to Gladwell. Please don’t belittle the apparatus that enabled a generation of young people to lead a revolution to topple a 30-year long dictatorship. Please stick to subjects that don’t involve truth and human pain and suffering as you are patently unqualified to tackle those subjects. Please enjoy yourself in the faculty dining room pontificating among those who allow ideas to trump truth. But, please, instead of decreeing what’s “interesting”, you might want to consider what matters. To me, and certainly to the Egyptians, that would be the truth.

Stainboy is an anti-superhero superhero, whose only talent is his uncontrollable production and smearing of greasy stains everywhere he goes. In the series, he works for the Burbank police, and at the start of each episode he is ordered to investigate and bring in social outcasts. Many of the outcasts are characters from Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy where the Stainboy character made its first appearance in two short poems.

Beginning today, November 22nd until December 6th, anyone can submit lines on Twitter for the next episode of the Stainboy story, hashtagged #BurtonStory. In what Burton himself describes as an “Exquisite Corpse” experiment, the story will be created 140 characters or less at a time, to yield an episode likely less than five minutes, which is how long the previous animated episodes ran.

Here you can see the 6th installment of the popular flash animation series launched in 2000. In this final episode, we flashback to Stainboy’s beginnings in the weird kids orphanage in Burbank.

STAIN BOY

Of all the super heroes,
the strangest one by far,
doesn’t have a special power,
or drive a fancy car.

next to Superman and batman, I guess he must seem tame.
But to me he is quite special,
and Stain Boy is his name.

He can’t fly around tall buildings,
or outrun a speeding train,
the only talent he seems to have
is to leave a nasty stain.

Sometimes I know it bothers him,
that he can’t run or swim or fly,
and because of this one ability,
his dry cleaning bill is sky-high.

The world of mega-influencers is no doubt an elite one, and Oprah is a phenomenon like no other – she is the gold standard for measurable influence. As her daytime show comes to an end I wondered if there could be, in the digital era, an influencer as powerful as Oprah. She is no doubt a one-of-a-kind, and her combination of empathy, support and self-improvement struck a cord with individuals who sought a powerful connective point in their increasingly isolated worlds.

Incidentally, over the weekend, as I led a discussion group for filmmakers about using social media to promote their films and build their audiences, it occurred to me that the spheres of online influence are quite different from those of the offline variety. So much so, that despite Oprah’s 4.5 million fans on Twitter, her rank on influence metrics site Klout is 65 (out of 100) and her “amplification” level, defined as “the likelihood that your content will be acted upon” is 0.

Clearly, this does not reflect the true measure of her power. If Oprah says jump, the reverberations are felt throughout the mediasphere- so the idea that she cannot motivate people to act based on her words is inaccurate in the offline world if somewhat true in the social media world. But it begs the question of who the mega-influencers will be when audiences are more diffused across media platforms. Personalities like Ashton Kutcher, whose real fame quotient is lower than an actor like Brad Pitt, wields enormous influence online, based solely upon his building his influence quotient as one of the first “celebrities” to embrace the influencer role in social media.

When I talk to artists and marketers about reaching influencers, I speak almost entirely in terms of niche. Niche has become the holy grail of the web marketing and social media game and it is enormously empowering. But what artist, author or guru wouldn’t want to have access to the online version of Oprah, and see the kind of enormous effect that her stamp of approval has on one’s life and career? The question is whether that kind of mega-influencer is even possible in our ever-fragmented digital world. But I look forward to that kind of phenomenon…and to seeing who will be the digital Oprah.

And every once in a while when there’s lots of time to play around, you can get really, really into making pretty melon-thingys with it. But then it sits there behind everything else in your drawer until…wait, I think I found a new use for it – I can use it to scoop the inside of a cupcake out to make a room for a filling!

I’ve written about how Twitter feels like entertainment to me sometimes, and have often used it as many do, for polling or advice, or just to keep up with the news of your business or friends. But as many have pointed out, it’s an evolving platform, the full potential of which will reveal itself in time.

Microblogging in and of itself is an interesting hybrid between the fully formed blog concept and the concise idea nugget that speak to our fast moving, mobile enabled times. There is no doubt that the evolution of microblogging has been courtesy of the mobile computing age. So what can we I do with this thing?

The entertainment possibilities grow everyday. With the success of @shitmydadsays (a recounting of foul-mouthed, misogynistic advice-giving 74 year old dad), CBS is taking the chance on another Twitter based show with @sshdonttellsteve, a chronicle by “Steve’s” roommate of his layabout, unemployed and frequently drunk roommate. And just last month, we find Ashton Kutcher developing a show called Dear Girls, based on @charliemcdonnell‘s eavesdroppings on a bunch of ditzy girls who live upstairs from him.

In a trend that leans mostly toward the satirical, these shows all have the quality of distancing oneself from the main characters and laughing AT them, in a very Twitter-esque “OH” kind of way. OH-the abbreviation for “overheard”- is a way Twitter users show their disapproval or scorn for certain kinds of social behavior. Usually, when someone is inappropriate, or oversharing in a public context, these quotes tell the rest of us that “those people” are to be the fodder for jokes. This clearly makes for very entertaining commentary. Which is why that strain of Twitter commentary is what makes it to Television.

But I wondered if we might not take the core function of satire into the edgier realms of social change or use it to address social consciousness. And sure enough, I was reminded of a feed I saw quoted in the early days of the BP oil spill, @BpGlobalPR. This fake PR feed tweets in a voice that sounds both cheery and honest about an oil company’s motivations and behind-the-scenes ammoral behavior.

Like all good satire, it is amusing because it unmasks the PR game that these large corporations play, and which we all know they play. For instance, here’s a recent tweet: “Chevron launched their “We Agree” campaign today, calling on oil companies to clean their messes. Jerks.http://ow.ly/2Vx7q ”  Clearly, accountability is at the heart of this satire, and they take the same “shame on you” game that we play with our foul-mouthed dads, drunken roommates and ditzy neighbors and bring it into corporate accountability.

Of course CBS will NEVER be interested in satire based on critical social or environmental issues, but that is why Twitter is a wonderful home to have if you happen to be gifted in that sort of voice. After watching The Inside Job this weekend, I thought: Where is the Twitter feed that satirizes greedy bankers. Hello? Any takers? This melonballer needs another use!

Bayne’s openness stuck with me and I made note of the fact that he was working on a film called DRIVEN. But at the time, I wasn’t aware of the details. Then a few weeks ago I wrote a post on Kickstarter and thought it might be useful to talk to a filmmaker on the frontlines of crowdfunding. Glancing through some of the most successful projects on Kickstarter, I noticed Bayne’s project, an ambitious documentary with an equally challenging funding goal of $25,000, which had been funded in a remarkable 20 days.

I was impressed and reached out to Bayne for an interview, which you can read below the trailer of DRIVEN. I hope it will provide a much-needed perspective on the crowdfunding process and also illuminate the journey of an artist with a vision, which Gregory Bayne is handily proving himself to be.

WHAT IS YOUR PROJECT ABOUT?
My film is an intimate look at the life of Jens Pulver. Jens is a legendary Mixed Martial Artists, 3 time World Champion, and the first ever Lightweight World Champion in the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Challenge) who rose from a childhood laced with violence and substance abuse, to become one of the most loved and respected mixed martial arts fighters of all time. The film chronicles Jens’s journey back to the cage for what could be his final bout.

Ultimately, DRIVEN is not about a single fight: It is a film about a universal human struggle, transcending loss, and overcoming hardship through the many fights we all share in our pursuit of greatness. It is, poignantly, a film about one man’s drive, in an increasingly dire American psyche, to overcome the most trenchant of odds, and redefine his fate in a quest to provide a more solid future for self and family than his own meager inheritances would have allowed.

And now, with the fight behind us, and a fairly extensive interview with Jens ahead of me, I’m finding that the film is also about mortality, and transformation. It’s become apparent I believe, to Jens, that in order to thrive as a fighter, in his personal life, and build a future for himself, he must in some ways walk away from the legendary status that was the fighter “Little Evil”, and carve out a new path for Jens Pulver.

DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE ROAD AS A FILMMAKER THAT BROUGHT YOU TO DRIVEN?

I’ve worked as an editor on many feature documentaries, probably most notable was Trudell (Sundance Competition ’05), about legendary Native American activist John Trudell, so approaching this project was definitely in my realm.

I started my road in filmmaking in the early 90′s, and as the years have passed I’ve found myself becoming less and less excited about, or interested in, what I would call the ‘clean’ or ‘perfect’ cinema. The status quo of films that are manufactured within an inch of their life, leaving no room for the spontaneous, or the truly emotional, that are so wrapped up in ‘style’ to let us know how cutting edge they are. I like my cinema imperfect, a little dirty, and open to the journey.

So when I came across Jens, and his story, I knew instantly there was something there. Right off the bat I definitely had, and have, ideas in mind how it would come together, and what the shape would be, but I purposefully didn’t impose a style upon it, because I didn’t want to get in the way of the story.

What I’m trying to say is that my creative road has jumped track from the world of manufacturing experiences, to engaging in the experience, and finding the story within. I don’t do this because I know everything, I do it because I want to learn.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT JENS PULVER AND HIS STORY THAT COMPEL YOU?

I admire people that put themselves out there, and Jens is very much out there. In the last 10 years, in his world he has become a very public figure that has had to weather the ups and downs of wins and defeats while millions of people watch. I find that fascinating, and when that is coupled with the fact of his abusive childhood, his incredibly giving nature, his adoration among his fans, and his deep complexity as a human being that, at this time in his life, is so keenly self aware of where his real battles lie…I just find myself incredibly compelled by all of it, compelled to tell his story, compelled to try and understand him and his journey, and best I can, by viewing life through his lens.

IS THIS THE FIRST TIME YOU’VE ATTEMPTED TO MICROFUND/CROWDFUND A FILM? IF SO, HOW HAVE YOU FUNDED YOUR PAST PROJECTS?

Whether it was collaborators kicking in a few hundred dollars, someone giving me an unexpected check after seeing some of my work, or making the direct plea, in one way or another everything I’ve worked on has depended on a level of crowdfunding, DRIVEN is just the first time it’s expanded way outside the realm of friends, family & acquaintance.

My other film I am currently finishing, Person of Interest, garnered most of it’s budget via crowdfunding, on a much smaller scale than DRIVEN, but still largely fan supported from day one.

HOW DID YOU FIND KICKSTARTER? WERE YOU A CONTRIBUTOR/FUNDER BEFORE YOU LISTED YOUR PROJECT?

I became acquainted with Kickstarter when I backed the launch of OpenIndie. Since then I’ve backed, and supported several other projects on the site. I basically view it is another level of social networking, as it were. I’ve met, albeit electronically, some incredible people on Kickstarter, I think their staff is amazing, and I want to be part of helping the site, and this style of launching creative endeavor, grow. So, I think it’s important to participate, and at risk of sounding cheesy…pay it forward.

ONCE YOU SETUP DRIVEN FOR FUNDING, HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT DRIVING PEOPLE TO THE SITE?

By leaving no stone unturned.

About a week before launching the campaign I put up the first teaser trailer on YouTube. Within a week it had been viewed 10,000 times, and I began receiving several emails a day from people that were moved by it. So, seeing the writing on the wall that ‘the time was now’ I just jumped in the campaign, and never looked back.

I responded to everyone that was emailing me, began sending out to my own modest email list, set up google alerts for search terms like “Jens Pulver Documentary” so I could find out where the film was being talked about, and used YouTube’s insight tools to find out where the trailer was being watched. Then, I simply ventured out into the world wide web and engaged with whomever I could. MMA Forums, blogs, journalists writing about MMA, and so on.

After about a week there were 10 pages of relevant links on google about the film, discussions were springing up everywhere and the trailer shot up to 30,000 views. Long story short, I spent all day, every day in MMA discussion forums, responding to blogs, and emails, sending new emails, keeping in constant contact with backers via Kickstarter updates, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, I used YouTube annotations to update the two trailers I had online there to both explain and help guide people to the campaign, did a couple of MMA Radio shows with Jens…it was basically an all on the table approach.

There is additional detail on this, and the ebb and flow of funding at the Kickstarter.com blog.

WHO FUNDED YOUR FILM? FRIENDS? FANS? CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR SUPPORTER BASE?

All of the above, but with an emphasis on fans, or those who became fans through connecting to the initial trailer that was released. Now it’s up to me to deliver for them, and to continue to engage with them, so they make that very important transition to ‘true fan’.

I IMAGINE MANY OF JENS PULVERS’ FANS ARE SUPPORTERS OF THE FILM. DID THE NICHE NATURE OF THE SUBJECT IMPACT THE DONATIONS IN ANY WAY?

Yes, Jens is incredibly well thought of in the MMA community. He’s a legend in the sport, and probably the most approachable person in the world of Mixed Martial Arts. I think the niche nature of the film definitely opened the campaign to a wider audience quicker, for sure, but I also think it was the transparency of my approach, and willingness to engage that helped drive the campaign contributions.

YOU ARE 100% FUNDED WITH A VERY AMBITIOUS GOAL OF $25,000 IN 20 DAYS. ARE YOU SURPRISED?

I don’t know if I would say surprised, I mean yes, on just the sheer magnitude of the goal, I’m amazed it all came together. But from day one, I just had in mind “I’m doing this”, so I’m more grateful than anything that the work paid off, that people connected with the project, and that I’m making a film that I really believe in.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN IN THE PROCESS ABOUT THIS KIND OF FUNDRAISING?

A lot! Most of which I outline in this blog.

YOU ARE FILMING LEADING UP TO JEN’S BIG COMEBACK IN MARCH. WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE FIGHT?

Well, the fight has now ended, and I am about to sit down with Jens for an extensive 4 day interview, in an effort to really get inside the world, and mind of Jens Pulver. We will be discussing every aspect of his life, his career in and out of the ring, key fights, the sport and artistry of mixed martial arts, and his road from here. This interview will provide a road map for the film as we begin to put the picture together.

Post production starts in April.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE WILL HAPPEN WITH THE PROJECT WHEN IT IS FINISHED?

I will be releasing the film myself (at least initially), and my greatest hope is that it’s a successful film, in terms of storytelling and artistry, that people enjoy, take something away from, and feel compelled to tell others about.

In surveying the various projects out there, I found myself drawn to Twistori, which is an interesting take on this  trend. By limiting their tracking to only real time uses of the words LOVE, HATE, THINK, BELIEVE, FEEL and WISH, the project draws your attention to the verbs that create human emotion. Below, I have simply screen-grabbed whatever came through the feed in the 2-3 minutes span I was watching it scroll through.

The makers of this project acknowledge that their inspiration comes from another project called We Feel Fine which actually tracked emotions mined from all over the web in the form of text and image, and then organized them into a fascinating compilation and creative analysis of human feelings. It took me a while to wrap my head around what they were actually doing. I should say that the the authors of the project Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, are together a combination of computational, creative and sociological whizkiddery. But don’t let that deter you from looking through this project, and apparently their soon-to-be-published book on the project. In their explanation of the project and its methodology they say:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

I surmised after reading through their material, that they are in fact going about storytelling in a quasi-scientific way – and I say “quasi” only because while data is real, what they are seeking to document is really the range of human emotion.  So while they do uncover patterns in people’s feelings/behavior, it never quite seems that the purpose of the project is purely statistical despite their use of all this computational skill and technology.

There are fascinating ideas in the individual words and images here and it begs the question, “where does science/technology meet art and storytelling”?

The conversation continues.

So as a person who creates entertainment, I evaluate these games both in terms of what they mean for changing business models in an era of social media and what it says about people’s behavior, their tastes and interests. I am sure like all things in pop culture, people will get bored and Mafia Wars will give way to Yakuza wars, which will give way to Compton wars which will give way to Alien wars and on and on. You get my drift – these guys aren’t necessarily looking to create “art” per se – they are through and through commercial entertainers. But they are capturing audiences, something like 61 million sets in the case of Farmville, certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Hollywood has always prided itself on being the arbiter of popular tastes, having dipped their toes into every kind of mainstream entertainment, until this point. The innovation and creativity that goes into building these social games is coming from elsewhere. The stories are not conventional but I would argue, still narrative in their own way. Interactivity and social connections drive these forms of entertainment. And while Mafia Wars may not make as indelible a mark on contemporary culture as say The Godfather, the audiences ability to share these gaming experiences with each other and connect in a completely non-linear manner is clearly driving the popularity. And this is practically the cavemen days of the technology. I think as social gaming evolves both in the way it drives revenue for social sites like Facebook, we will see increasingly more interested and sophisticated narratives emerging.