After watching a few episodes of Forget the Rules and Girl Friday, I have bee struck by how traditional they are in terms of story content. The former especially, which comes across as a 3-min version of Secret Life of Us but set in Fitzroy instead of St Kilda. The creator of Forget the Rules is quoted in The Age as saying that free-to-air TV networks are too "conservative" to produce drama for young people anymore, but I have to say that the content of his online show doesn't seem to stray too far from the conservative anyway. The problem we are left with is that TV executives don't want youth drama because young people don't watch TV much anymore, however in transforming these shows into a short format I think that a great deal is lost. Forget the Rules and Girl Friday both have a very sketch-like quality to them, because it is very difficult (some would say impossible) to engage with an audience emotionally in only 2-3 minutes. Compared with Secret Life, This Life or Love My Way, we do not have the opportunity to get drawn into the characters' lives and therefore be moved as well as entertained (Love My Way, end of season one. Gut-wrenching).
Girl Friday is a more successful example of using short-form drama in a digital context because it plays up the comedy element (over-the-top performances, fantasy sequences etc) and also it uses the technology as part of the story. The first episode is about finding a mobile phone on a tram and trying to track down its owner. It also has many layers of potential interactivity for the audience, so the viewer can choose how much to engage with the program.
However, the most successful use of these new technologies, in my opinion, is the LonelyGirl15 series which screened on YouTube. The Age referred to this program as "controversial" because it didn't tell its audience that it was a scripted drama, viewers thought they were watching a teenage girl's video diary, but this is exactly why it is so clever. It plays on the idea of voyeurism and uses a new technology and entertainment in order to make a point. People use the internet and YouTube to, for want of a better word, spy on other people around the world. In finding out that LonelyGirl15 was actually an actor reading a script, perhaps it made people contemplate the morality and potentially exploitative nature of watching people's personal lives.
3 comments:
Having been a scriptwriter for one of these shortform series (and being bitterly disappointed with the final product) I would say they should be an opportunity to present different narrative shapes, a real sense of moments in an ongoing life, something not as full rounded or (often) trite as a 30 minute or one hour episode. But I agree that is seems they aren't.
I think there are some examples from around the world where they have done this, but not in Australia! Probably because we rely too heavily on bureaucrats to make our decisions. But shouldn't this technology also allow people to take control of the product more, and be able to avoid funding/financing?
sure maybe but there is no point in producing the product if there is nowhere to broadcast it. This stuff is almost designed to be webcast or consumed on phones etc but I for one cant get excited about that format.
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