Crowdsourcing For Auteurs: The Purefold Irony
As with most people who attended the enormously exciting Futures of Entertainment 4, I found there was a massive amount of information to unpack both during and after the conference. Perhaps because my perspective is that of a creator/artist who is navigating the rapidly shifting rules of storytelling in an era of transmedia, the questions of art, aesthetics and auteurship naturally stuck with me.
Attendees following the backchannel conversations during the conference, may have noticed a thread on authorship vs. crowdsourcing (not always in polarity), which led to the subject of auteurship and whether that idea has a place within the wide open world of Transmedia. It struck me that the Purefold case study, led by AG8 was in itself an interesting connundrum for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the irony that the canon on which the project is at least conceptually based (Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner) is a work of legendary auteurship, AND that AG8’s assigned task was to create an interactive multiplatform campaign for their brand which would drive business TO their production company which represents…what else…auteurs.
The panel was called “Case Study: Transmedia Design and Conceptualization – The Making of Purefold.” AG8 are the architects of the campaign, their client is RSA and their collaborators include The Alchemists, also at the panel. For people unfamiliar with the way companies like RSA work, let me digress into their business for a second. They are essentially production companies which also act as exclusive reps of commercial and music video directors – the directors’ marketability is based on their reputation as visual auteurs. When ad agencies have a commercial to produce, they take bids and creative proposals from a host of RSA-like companies and often make their decisions based on the creative compatibility of the campaign to the director and/or the strength of their creative approach to the advertisers concept.
For many years, companies like RSA rode the tide of an endless flow of million-dollar commercials and flourished by incubating the best visual creatives in the business. With the changing landscape of TV and the ad business pulling back from the traditional :30 ad and drastically slashed budgets in the last couple of years, these companies began struggling, and a number have since folded. RSA’s Scott family – Ridley,the most famous and his brother Tony, their brood of budding young Scott auteurs and other well-known film and television directors have managed to (barely) stay relevant because they have a lot of well-established brand names in their stable. But these companies are facing an unprecedented crisis, and they are desperately trying to find a way to keep their directors employed in an era of diversified advertising strategies and the proliferation of social media.
I go into this level of detail on the business because I find it deeply fascinating that the key tool – crowdsourcing – of an brand campaign – Purefold – aiming to keep RSA relevant is at complete odds with the very fiber of RSA’s business – singularity of artistic/aesthetic vision. This certainly signals the willingness of RSA to step into the new world of branding and storytelling BUT, what sort of bedfellows will the “crowd” and the RSA auteurs eventually make under their in their Creative Commons alliance? It is of course too early to tell as the project is still in process and their presentation was primarily focused on genesis and process and not yet on the creative results.
When David Bausola and Tom Himpe, principals at AG8, presented their method of crowdsourcing they used the word “harvesting”, a description which also appears on their website. The method: by seeding Friendfeed conversations with concepts/ideas that RSA auteurs have invented, they conduct what is essentially a real-time study of what people are saying about this subjects, all riffing (if I understood this correctly) on the core theme of “empathy”. Needless to say the world “harvesting” caused an instant flurry of reactions on the Twitter backchannel during the conference as attendees bristled at the semantic implication of the word. Defenders of the method responded saying that because they created the project under Creative Commons which allows sharing and remixing, the method does not in fact imply exploitation as some felt it did.
I chimed in on this Twitter chatter myself, as I think this unease between the “crowd” and the auteurs or their agents, in this case the Purefold team is something which has not yet been fully considered. In our zeal as storytellers to jump on the crowdsourcing wagon, many issues of authorship remain unanswered. Is curation the new auteurship? How is crowdsourcing in Purefold different from me browsing a news site or reading a magazine and tapping into the Zeitgeist in a way that informs my artistic work? On one hand, I understand that only through experiments like Purefold do these issues fully play out in a way that allows new paths to be forged and on the other, I worry about a world of participation in which the rules are either too obscure for the players to be aware, or in which the auteur is forced to crowdsource simply because it creates the appearance of some sort of creative democracy.
Hello Aina
Thanks for writing about the project.
When I designed the framework for Purefold, I had a few core principles in mind.
1. Attribution is a must — sources of expressions and idea(l)s should always be represented so that culture can be traced.
2. Freedoms — human expression should not be hampered, only considered.
3. Transmedia shouldn’t start with a new ideas, it should build upon what has happened in the past.
Combining the three principles is something that resonated with BladeRunner – several key scenes/shots from that film have fixed everyone’s (who has ever seen it) vision of what futurism *is*. Praise to the director for being able to have such an impact, the downside is that these images are *owned* and will never be freely available in the near future for anyone to use (fair use aside). And thus the problem that Creative Common aims to resolve for future producers and directors.
RSA Films produces films upon agency commission, the directors art works are not (normally) owned by them. Same goes for BladeRunner — it’s not owned by Ridley Scott.
As a creative – there is nothing worse than not being able to have access to your own work – or is there? That’s something Ridley and I spoke about at length when I first presented the idea.
How do artists such as these retain any ownership of their art? Creative Commons BY-SA resolves this, and places the works in the cultural domains for us to watch, refer and build upon. This licence bakes in freedoms that all creatives desire when under commission.
Purefold, or Decade 2 as it was formerly called (RSA couldn’t get that cleared as a TM), is inspired by BladeRunner for many reasons (I spoke about the correlation of empathy and social media at FOE4) but also, that films characters (the replicants) are implanted with propriety memories — from Tyrell. A such, we all exist like this. The opening scene of BR is etched into my memory, but I can never use that image — without permission — if I was lucky to acquire it, the fees would be eye watering, I sure! But when I fly into LA at night, guess what I see.
Thinking this way comes directly from my admiration of Lessig with culture and copyright – working this ethos back into storytelling was something I wanted to achieve with the Purefold framework.
My big take away from the FOE4 conference is that very few people who want to produce Transmedial productions have grasped the the co-creation politics yet. Too much is front loaded with big ideas of storytelling or which platform to use. What needs attention, if this artform is going to work commercially is, how does culture work best for everyone. That way, productions will naturally integrate within our lives.
Harvesting is perhaps a cruel word – but an honest one. Facebook actively does this (it harvests your social relationships – and shares them commercially) – so does Google, so does every social media platform (that’s the business model…) . Neither do it with transparency.
Why are film makers exempt from these business models? As you point out, RSA interest in this new world had to explore new business models – perhaps this is something that FOE needs to attend to more. Film is no longer a standalone piece – so the business of film is now integrated into wider commecial propositions.
Scott Walker has been busy in this area of thinking too, and I think he’s being very clever with his CC Plus approach.
With the use of Friendfeed to aggregate the ideas, users can ‘like’ and comment and then through their API, I can generate a hyperlinked ‘credits’ page which points back to the author which keeps updating as time goes by. This is a kin to the history books of culture – but only more honest. It shows what was collected, viewed, liked. Nothing gets used unless the licence is a match to the one we use.
It’s very simple, but effective for applying attribution, freedoms and facilitating transmedial productions. As a service designer interested in the structure of narrative, this is a good basis to build more productions upon. Feel free to apply the ideals to your own work.
And if you’re interested to see how else this model can work in other ways, or how other peoples memories can inform character design, have a look at http://www.demographicreplicator.com
Best, David
http://twitter.com/zeroinfluencer
Hey Aina,
It’s funny how the audience at FOE4 bristled when the word “harvesting” was used and the subsequent questions made me think that some people didn’t quite relate to the project the way I did.
All creative people take inspiration from a variety of sources – we suck it all in, process it, filter for cliche and out pops something original. You could call that harvesting. What is a mood board if it isn’t a collection of harvested images from other people’s work that collectively express/communicate a theme and tone.. for the purpose of creating something original. Nobody has been exploited in drawing inspiration from inspiring work.
Maybe in the context of advertising the word “harvesting” was too emotive for the audience? Perhaps a better phrase would be “active listening”.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that RSA are crowdsourcing a campaign. What Purefold will try to do, as I understand it, is to be relevant: not to manufacture fake campaigns and use expensive “push” advertising to convince people that yes, this is important to you; but rather to listen to the conversation of the crowd and find a creative way to “pull” the crowd to the Purefold content by contributing to the existing conversation. Where Purefold’s clients play a part is determining which conversations are listened to.
Note the that actual Purefold video content will have been written by professional writers and shot by professional directors. So there’s no phoney pretense of “creative democracy” as you describe it – the digital asset is the work of a single creative team as any video in the past would have been. What’s changed is that because this is episodic work, the audience, through their direct feedback, the background conversations and let’s call it the “issues of the day” do influence subsequent webisodes and hence are involved in the creative process and the evolution of the Purefold story.
I think this is all pretty cool
David,
I could not agree more with you about the powerful impact Creative Commons (and, in particular, their CC+ licensing structure) can have on creative endeavors of all kinds.
CC+ truly shines with collaborative projects. For example, you can structure the licenses to maximize remixing/reuse/repurposing of other’s creative ideas without the artists or intellectual property owners having to sacrifice branding, canonical cohesiveness, narrative continuity, or commercial rights.
Brain Candy, LLC has built one property franchise using a CC+ structure, Runes of Gallidon (http://runesofgallidon.com). It’s an incredibly extreme version of our franchise model, but there are many ways to implement the licensing structure to achieve similar results.
FOE4 hammered home the fact that creating sustainable models of content creation is a serious and real need. Much of the entertainment industry is in flux, but real opportunities exist for those willing to challenge the status quo and think progressively.
Hearing about Purefold was interesting news. Discovering Purefold’s intent to tap the creative community for ideas to integrate into future works was exciting. Learning that the most liberal CC license was being used for the generated content was mind-blowing.
A pre-Blade Runner world, offered by RSA, under a CC-BY license? “Yes, please!”
Eagerly awaiting more Purefold updates…
To be fair though, David, the meticulous process you described as “harvesting” is really a modification to the way your film is researched (in a way that is more systematic and real-time.) So you kinda walk into that buzzsaw unnecessarily (at least from my point of view.) The “crowdsourcing” value comes almost entirely from the CC license (which establishes that you could use it if you wanted), you’re discovering it through the harvesting.
—Long rich and established -Ridley Scott has been stale and
dried up —for decades now. FACT
“—Paging John Huston! —Paging John Huston!”