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Anyone I host, either at Deletetheweb.com or on their own domain, needs to be aware of this alert from our hosting provider Dreamhost: they’re physically relocating the servers this Friday/Saturday. There’ll be a roughly five-hour outage early Saturday morning, UK-time, affecting web and mail.

You shouldn’t lose mail in the process – it’ll just spool up on their servers waiting to be delivered – but if you see some weirdness, this will be why. Your websites will be down and unavailable. You’ll likely also be unable to send email during the downtime.

Back from Dorset, Cardiff, a storytelling festival, a meeting at the National Media Museum, and storytime with my nephew and nieces, to… consulting on a new Richard Hammond series. Yes, I was surprised, too.

Anyway – expect more posting than the last couple of weeks. And some more films at SciCast soon, too (finally). In the meantime, here, courtesy of Flossie, is the Welsh Space Agency. Rock on, guys.

High time I came straight out and said this:

I’ve made a substantial amount of children’s television, and I’m appalled that the current generation of children aren’t getting the sorts of inspiration enjoyed by their predecessors. Yes, the BBC is still making good stuff, but they’re now the only significant supplier, and their track-record for factual programmes in particular has been patchy for the last decade. Hence: scary times.

However, while I broadly agree with the goals of Save Kids’ TV, I think their focus on high-quality drama is part of what got us into this mess in the first place, and isn’t necessarily a full solution. Heck, I don’t even agree that television is necessarily part of that solution.

So while I’m interested that Jana Bennett’s been suggesting tax breaks (rather than top-slicing the BBC license fee, natch), and I’m delighted for the animation and pre-schools industries that they can integrate the back-end – ie. merchandise the hell out of their properties, and sell internationally by re-dubbing (see comments at that link) – neither of these help me directly.

Much more interesting to me is Tom Loosemore‘s move from the BBC to OFCOM, and the concept of a Public Service Publisher.

See – it might not be obvious from the current website, but SciCast is my first stab at ‘Children’s TV 2.0.’

I’ve spent this week in the Thomas Hardye School in Dorchester, helping groups of kids make short films. We’ll be publishing them soon, via SciCast and Films for Learning. Some of them are terrific.

Some of them are the future, right now.

Sorry, but if it takes us five years to solve all this stuff, we’ll have missed an entire generation of kids. While I should have been at Showcomotion this week, I’d only have been ranting about how it felt like dinosaurs discussing meteorites. Look over the other side of the watering hole, and there’s a bunch of ugly furry things that don’t understand this ‘cold-blooded’ concept you have going on.

But what really drives me up the wall is that I only have another few weeks before the cash runs out, and I have to do something else entirely. For the first time in my career, being a freelancer sucks.

Fascinating article over at gaming and social software blog Wonderland, relating discussion with Jesse Alexander, Executive Producer of Heroes (and Alias, and Lost). The main topic concerns crossover between television and gaming, and not merely the usual ‘how do we exploit this property?’ nonsense. No no, this is bi-directional, with TV learning lessons from the games industry.

Let’s face it, gaming isn’t niche: PWC predicts spending on games in the US will surpass that on music this year – globally, that’s already the case. That there are games that tell fascinating, wonderful, gripping stories is not accidental – that only happens when people know what they’re doing.

While I wouldn’t describe myself as a huge fan of Heroes, it does put its finger on something fresh. Perhaps it’s that it’s fluffy and light – and could feel trivial – but somehow taking itself as seriously as it does invites the viewer to buy in. It doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t – which is lightweight entertainment – but given that, there’s a sense of buckling the belt and the show saying ‘right, let’s get this party started.’ That conviction is strangely infectious.

The best of the new Doctor Who episodes (Blink) have been similar; the BBC’s Jekyll (by the same writer) ditto; the games I tend to like (BioWare‘s stuff, notably) could be described similarly. But it needs a delicate touch: I’ve always considered Lost to be overblown, in the same sort of way that X-Files always was and, arguably, Battlestar Galactica is, unless you’re American in which case it’s probably about right (discuss, 20 marks).

Read the article; it’s interesting.

I’ve long said here that I dislike the phrase ‘user-generated content,’ for all the usual reasons (‘users’ sounds dismissive, blah blah blah). Also, ‘user-generated TV’ seems to me an oxymoron.

Ved Sen puts it rather elegantly, in a critique of Mint Digital’s second UGTV conference (I laid into the first one last year; from the second we at least have photos):

Television, by design works at a large scale. Because of its technology, capital intensity and overall structure, it only works for millions of people at a time. It simply doesn’t work for a few hundreds. That’s why Youtube works – not because of the half a dozen videos that get seen by the whole world, but because of the thousands of videos which individually get seen by a few people. For User Generated content to go on TV – it needs to be good enough for a million plus audiences. How many pieces of user-content merit that kind of audience. It seems a bit like forcing a square peg in a round hole. Think of going the other way – imagine trying to create mass-Internet content. Why would you do that?

To me, the whole concept of UGTV seems not so much backwards, as inside-out. Which doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen – as Sen goes on to note, Current.tv is interesting because it targets a very specific niche for which the approach might just work. But fixating on UGTV isn’t necessarily a way to get things done in general.

Last week I was giving informal advice on a funding pitch. ‘It’s so hard to get decent news coverage in this field,’ said the people preparing the pitch, ‘So: we want to fund someone to identify good stories, and to push them to the media.’

I thought they were crazy – they’d be paying an amateur to do high-level PR. Their thinking is based in an out-of-date concept: that ‘the media’ = press and broadcast. Don’t get me wrong, printing presses and television transmitters are expensive bits of infrastructure, and there’s a certain sense in having newspapers and television companies as gatekeepers. But you no longer have to play that game if you don’t want to.

My suggestion was that they instead pay the staffer to get out and make the news films they wanted to see, and publish themselves. Their contention is that the stories are of interest to the public, but not enough interest to make it past news editors. Fine – offer your stories to the public and see if they bite.

“But… where’s the audience?” they worried.
“I thought you said these stories were of interest to the public?” I countered.
“But…”
“Oh, come on. You want to target teenagers. What’s the audience penetration of BBC Local Radio News in that demographic, compared to – say – Bebo? And you see more risk in this approach?”

The BBC Local Radio News journo in the room didn’t look happy. But really, the only people with anything to fear are those who are too tightly-bound to the existing infrastructure and its gatekeepers.

People like… those at UGTV’07?

I’m back on the road again, by the way. Had a brilliant day in a school in Port Talbot yesterday – great kids, wonderful crazy films, hugely enthusiastic staff – and I’ve two more workshops this week, at Techniquest and in Mold. Next week I’m in Dorset and Devon, for four more days of workshop.

It’s all going to be a bit on the mad run-around side, but it’s a joy to be back into it. However, things are likely to be a bit slow on the blog front for a couple of weeks.

Mark Ravenhill writes in yesterday’s Media Guardian of his distaste for a world of script editing dominated by Robert McKee’s Story. I completely agree, though I fear he’s rather late jumping on the McKee-skeptic bandwagon.

Not that Story is a bad book – it’s not[1]. It’s more that people who’ve been on McKee’s course have an annoying habit of ending up as disciples, evangelising The One True Way of Writing Screenplays. They apply this to everything, from blockbuster films to hour-long documentaries to make&do magazine shows for children. And yes, I have had a discussion with a (very) senior children’s TV figure, in which he invited me to learn lessons from McKee for a 2-minute item that involved yoghurt pots and string.

There are lessons to learn. But slavishly sticking to McKee’s structure is at best a creative straight-jacket, and at worse a crutch for the lazy and talentless.

(if any journos are reading: there’s your pull-quote. Heh)

A few years ago I attended a conference session about McKee’s Story, in a meeting of science documentary makers. The panel unanimously extolled the virtues of the approach and derided anyone who queried their methods. Those of us at the back shuffled uncomfortably – finally, I understood why I hadn’t been able to watch Horizon for years; the editors gently enforced a Story-esque conflict/antagonist/turning-point/three-act structure. Whether it suited the narrative or not.

Eventually I could bear it no longer. I stood and said – almost certainly less-elegantly than I recall, sadly – “This session has had an excellent set-up and a modicum of conflict. However, it’s sadly lacking in turning-point or hope of resolution. I propose a solution: I’m off to the bar.”

A surprising number of people walked out with me.

[1] – Come to think of it, I’ve not read it. I’ve read someone’s session notes from the 1-day workshop, but not the book. From some accounts (see the Amazon reviews) this is the best way to find out what McKee’s banging on about.

I’ve worked out why there’s no SDK for the iPhone: the multi-touch panel would allow you to build a software theremin. And as we all know, the only thing that sounds worse than a kazoo is… a theremin. Hence: no SDK. Boom.

While I’m being geeky: has anyone else noticed that Apple’s new website is quite wide? How’s that going to render on an iPhone?

One of the things I’ve regularly found amusing about predictive text input is that where there’s more than one match for the button pushes (which is usually the case), the default choice tends towards the whimsical rather than the useful. For example, 686 defaults to ‘nun’ rather than the perhaps more regularly-used ‘mum’.

I’ve just found another one: 2564 defaults to ‘clog.’ I don’t know about you, but I find myself wanting to discuss Dutch footwear far more regularly than, say, blogs.

how would we visit the South Devon Chilli Farm?