The new Sleepydog website and blog launched today. I’ve been working with Sleepydog for maybe a year now. First with the social media stuff and more recently with the TV stuff. I consider myself lucky to be part of a team who has had so much success in creating so much cool content. Best of all, whether its working on Amplified, joining in at CreativeCoffeeClub or figuring out the perfect crime for our new show there’s never been a day I haven’t enjoyed.
I only work on a couple of the projects that come out of the office – in lots of ways it reminds me of the Googleplex setup, just without the creepy Stepford Wives atmosphere – but there’s always a lot more going on than I know about. Well worth adding the new site to your RSS reader to keep up – these guys tend to move fast.
Oh and I’ll be blogging over there too.
Also a good place to see some Slingers concept art:
Our heroic Mech Five, Junior, does his best to protect Marti
from a next generation Mech in episode 1.10 “Six“
I have a few of these kinds of things squirreled away for my talk in June. Not sure how long I have yet, but I will be talking about how Twitter (and the platforms that work so well with it) allow you to pull a few barriers down without the aid of Palitoy.
And speaking of set visits, following my day with Centurion, I just got invited to meet Hideo Nakata on the set of his new movie. More about that later…
One of the odder things I’ve been involved in recently was a Q&A session with JJ Abrams, Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto about the new Star Trek movie. It all took place in Playstation Home:
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it
PPC Interactive and @danlight in particular love having a bash at stuff like this. I found it surprisingly similar to the last thing I did with Reuters (perhaps the first time Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, will be compared with Captain Kirk). We used a mix of platforms again, and in retrospect I’m not sure that CoverItLive, UStream and Twitter were the best way to interact with something like Home, but it was a fun learning experience for me.
Funnily enough I was playing with some new software today that should make these kinds of events a lot easier to produce and up the interactive element. Will post about that later when it’s ready to launch.
Tech stuff aside though, this was all about the people and while it took a little while for the journalists to acclimatise and find their virtual legs, the director and actors were happy with what was going on and got it immediately – those around them perhaps less so (which is fairly typical) – but I think there is something here to build on.
Looking forward to see how far we’ve come by the time Star Trek II is upon us…
Friday morning I spoke to Noel Clarke from Centurion, Kidulthood/Adulthood, Doctor Who etc.
I’m lucky in that out of all the people I’ve interviewed and spoke to over the years very few of them have turned out to be dicks. On the whole they’ve been a very enjoyable bunch of characters. Noel immediately went to the top of the scale though – funny, charming and genuinely involved in the conversation.
While we waited for each Audioboo segment to load we chatted around a range of subjects from TV and film to LA to comic books to tech like Twitter. Here are the parts of the conversation that we recorded (as usual the lion’s share of questions came from his followers on Twitter):
Background on Centurion and his role
Talking history and stuntwork
Talking around his career and inspiration
Working with Neil Marshall and winning the Bafta
Social Media and new baby advice for @documentally
Thanks again to Noel for his time and all the fans for their questions. Interviews with other Centurion cast members are here.
The next step is to talk my way onto Centurion’s regular press junket and see if we have another chat with all involved later in the year… I’ll keep you posted.
Jeff Pulver has kindly asked me to speak at the #140Conf in New York in June.
I’ll be speaking about some of the stuff that Twitter has allowed me to do over the last 12 months or so and learning what a whole bunch of other interesting folk have been using it for. I’m hoping to get a better overview of the possibilities that such a disruptive platform offers and not make too much of an arse of myself.
I’ll also probably talk about some of the people Twitter has helped me work with:
Not too many hours from now I’ll be sat down chatting with Noel Clarke about his role in Neil Marshall’s Centurion (see previous post).
Interestingly Noel was very up for doing this because he’s already using Twitter and gets a kick out of this kind of thing. I’ve already had some interesting questions come in via Twitter and hope to also talk about technology like Audioboo – which we’ll be using rather than video just so we can hit and run.
Should be a fun morning so keep an eye on Twitter and Audioboo.
Note: One thing we won’t be talking about too much is Doctor Who… sorry folks.
Last week I was lucky enough to be asked to nip onto the set of the new movie by Neil Marshall. It was doubly exciting because a) I’m a big fan of the guy – I still think his Dog Soldiers is an exceptional piece of British genre film making – and b) I’ve been hoping for a chance like this since we did the Indy thing in Cannes last year.
I’d already been mulling over another trip to Cannes to see if we (we being probably myself and Dan Light again) could do something fun there one more time. But the problem with doing anything once a film has wrapped is that things very quickly fall into a very ordered junket machine. There’s room on those now for social media types, of course, and I’m always happy to go along, but it takes a lot of persuasion to do something truly new and innovative as I think we did with Spielberg, Lucas and the cast of Crystal Skull. Well, persuasion or a certain amount of subterfuge and luck.
The idea of letting someone like me (an idiot loaded down with phones, cameras and video crap) onto an actual set or location while a movie is still being shot should be a laughable proposition. But the ability to not fuck up in situations where its very easy to make a mess has garnered me a little reputation and something of a track record in doing exactly this kind of thing.
Still, I was surprised to get the email from @wez asking me down for the day – the Centurion set up until that point had been very secure with only one official photograph being released (the above shot of Olga Kurylenko looking very fucking awesome as the Pict warrior, Etain) and there’s a lot riding on this movie as a followup to the rather schizophrenic Doomsday. But after a meeting to clarify what the day would entail we were all set.
And it all went very well. We got lost a little, we spent most of the morning in a Roman fort watching an action sequence come together (fire, blood, screaming etc) and got to hang out with Neil and members of the cast who were on set – namely Olga, David Morrissey and Michael Fassbender. We spent some time chatting to the crew and I was also in the company of a chap from Pathe and @Nevskyp from Den of Geek who were there also to cover the production side of the movie. The main difference in our approach was that my content flew out directly from the set to the fans and also threw in questions sourced from Twitter. I took a lot of kit with me, but in the end opted for my newest social media tool – Audioboo.
I actually have a lot of video and photography from the day too, but the deal was that none of that gets out just yet. Which is fine with me – I only just today found an outlet for some of the stuff I’ve been sitting on from 12 months ago. The beauty of Audioboo on the day was it allowed me to get the feel of the production out alongside Twitter updates while not having to worry about releasing the visuals – although the makeup and special effects I saw were wonderfully detailed. You can read an overview of Audioboo over on @documentally’s blog.
The interviews I got up on the day were with Ian, the publicist, who allowed me way more access than I was expecting:
Closely followed by Nick, the supervising armourer:
Followed by the director himself:
Then David Morrissey:
And finally Michael Fassbender:
Myself getting in the car with Fassbender came about entirely by accident. He found me straight after David Morrissey meaning we both had to wait for Audioboo to do its thing. So instead of hanging around waiting for the upload to finish we shared a car back to a different part of the set. That the PR people were happy for me to drive off with the male lead like that speaks volumes about how open these guys have been. I was introduced to so many people as ‘Mike from Twitter’ simply because I was constantly tapping away at the iPhone or balancing my MacBook on a fallen log.
I also got to have a brief chat with Olga, but just as the wind picked up – meaning an on the spot decision not to use the recording. That was a shame because she spoke about why she was drawn to the role and how Neil likes to create strong female roles. Then we moved locations and were treated to the sight of fully armed Pict warriors accompanying our 4X4 into the heart of the forest to take a tour of one of the other sets – a beautiful and traditionally crafted Pict hut – where we got to chat to more crew and watch a little more of the action before heading back to London.
Happily I get to do one more piece of Centurion fun in the morning. Which I’ll mention in the next post…
After having some fun with film types and social media (I think there’s still some Michelle Yeoh footage to surface) I was approached by the publisher John Murray to see if I had any ideas about mixing things up with their authors. Of course, I said, as long as you have someone interesting. How about James Frey? was the reply…
Handily James was already scheduled to appear at the ICA last month and I’d already been chatting to those guys about helping out with what they do since they kindly suggested we relocate the Tuttle Club there. Perfect.
I’d read A Million Little Pieces just prior to its UK release and had actually met Frey before from my time as a bookseller, but aside from the South Park episode in which Oprah’s vagina pulls a gun and shoots a police officer, I hadn’t kept track of his career post-controversy. So off I went to his UK site and was pleasantly surprised to find it was the work of my friend @stml. Small world. Big Jim Industries is well worth a look too.
So the next step was to source some fan questions from Twitter:
In the meantime @blackpooltower (James’ UK publisher) got the word out via his forum which eventually lead to a fun afternoon at the ICA chatting to the author. He was as laid back and interesting as I remember and had a copy of Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock (highly recommended!) tucked under his arm. He turned out to be eager to go past our allotted time and here’s the resulting interview in three parts:
“I don’t believe in inspiration”
“I’m from the notorious Freys”
“I have the same lawyer as the guys from South Park”
What was interesting to me was that while James wasn’t prepared to speak at the later event about the Oprah controversy, he was more than happy to answer questions about it direct from his readers. It was also encouraging to see how quickly John Murray themselves got excited about this kind of thing.
There’s a direct link here between both the innovative stuff we’ve been doing with Reuters and all the film related stuff I’ve had a hand in since the Juno Twitter screening back in ‘07 and hanging out with Spielberg and the Indy cast in Cannes last year.
But more on all that later…
Oh and go read Bright Shiny Morning. It’s a lot of fun.
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