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14 May, 2002

My agent has found a contact that he thinks will be interested in my digital drama idea, so I'm going to get it out and dust it off today.

Last night watched 'Spooks' which is the BBC's first step into the online drama world. There is nothing digital about the tv drama itself; it uses split screens a la '24' in order to look modern, I guess. But the drama series is accompanied by a website, which is, basically, an espionage game, conceived and set up by the BBC Fiction Lab. I had a look through it last night and it does function as a game, with added fan-dom type information about the characters and the world they inhabit. Effective.

I'm more interested in exploring digital content. So we'll see what my agent's contact things.

3 May, 2002

It occured to me today that it might be a good idea to keep a journal of my attempts to get a digital multi-stranded drama based on 'Branded' off the ground.

To date I have spent some time developing the idea on my own, as well as through conversations with a friend who is a producer. This friend took the idea to the production company she works with, a company that makes a lot of ground-breaking television drama. They weren't interested. At the time we were pitching the idea at the teenage market and they said it was too dark for that age group, as well as being too high-risk, in terms of the digital content.

I then reworked it, abandoning the idea of making it for young people (which I had found limiting in the first place). I spent a lot of time thinking through how best to use the possibility of a multi-stranded digital storyline, whilst working around the premise that the drama would also need to be shown in analog format; in other words, the drama would have a terrestrial, analog version that would go out in, for example, four parts, and there would be additional supplementary material for the digital viewer. It would utilise the large range of possibilities from websites to webcams to fan-based storylines.

The world of online fan-dom provides interesting models for digital material, models that traditional drama producers might not consider.

Anyway, I took the more developed idea - still only a two page outline - to the production company I am working with on my feature film, Box; they were initially really excited, but then got back to me saying that digital drama is still considered too costly, too high risk.

And now that one of the largest digital tv companies in the UK has collapses into receivership, drama producers aren't exactly going to be jumping on the digital bandwagon, despite the fact that the gov't says all tvs will be digital by 2010.

At ELO I had a very interesting conversation with a Finnish academic called Raine Koskimaa; his ideas about how to develop a digital drama were nearly identical to mine - which made me think I must be on the right track. In Finland tv-based Chat has become hugely popular and their gov't is turning off the analog signal quite soon, 2006, I think, despite the fact that very few people have gone over to digital tv.

I've asked my film and tv agent to help me out with the idea now; he's totally in the dark himself about digital drama, but he's willing to put some time into finding out what, if anything, is being developed in this area. BBC Fiction Lab has got a couple of projects apparently.

So that's where I'm at. But 'Branded' remains a kind of template (in my head/dreams) of the digital drama I'd like to write.