You Suck at Photoshop Returns: Creators Talk about Interactive Storytelling
First, if you are one of the three people on the planet who hasn’t seen “You Suck at Photoshop,” go straight to My Damn Channel and check out the travails of Donnie Hoyle (and perhaps pick up a few tips on Photoshop while you’re at it).
YSAP’s co-creators Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch, who make up Big Fat Brain, came out of the TV commercial world, which may say something about the short-form, high-concept chops needed to pull off online comedy. As has been reported by Time magazine, the two put out the first episode of YSAP as a one-off, and, after getting thousands of hits, decided maybe they were onto something.
Mobilized TV spoke with Matt and Troy about the new model for interactive storytelling, why “quarterlife” bombed and if there’s a mobile future for Donnie.
How much did your background in advertising lend to the success of YSAP?
MATT: We did use a lot of our talents from the advertising world–how to get a message across and communicate. Troy has a theater background so he was able to marshall a lot of his theater skills into bringing that character to life as well as his Photoshop skills.
TROY: Matt has a history of screenwriting and film school. So we have a good amalgam of experience and talent. It was a lot of sweat and a little bit of luck to make it work.
What happened once it evolved from a one-off into a series?
MATT: The one thing we learned is that there’s a big difference between “TV on the Web” and a real Web 2.0 experience. Once we found out we had an audience, we decided that we should take them on a little different ride. Rather than having them passively wait for each episode, we started building in experiences that happened outside the actual content.
For example, Donnie Hoyle decided he wanted to auction his wedding ring. We actually posted it on an eBay auction and 50,000 people came in four hours. Maybe 70 or 80 people actually bid on it and got it up to $750 – and it was a $5 ring from the pawnshop. In eBay, there’s an opportunity for the buyers to ask the sellers questions about the product. We had hundreds of people ask funny questions about the series and the character. They were asking things like, If this ring comes with infinite sorrows, what happens if I buy it and my sorrows are not infinite? The answers were just as funny as the question. We were ripping them out 15 and 20 an hour. And people were cutting and posting the questions/answers and putting them on blogs. Within 24 hours, there were over 10,000 mentions of the Q&As on blogs and on various news sites.
TROY: What we decided was that this was the real opportunity. We had the audience, but what did we do with them once we had them? We took them on a ride. Out of the 10 episodes, we had four or five different off-content experiences that ranged from Facebook pages to a real corporate website for the fictional characters to work at during the day.
What we discovered is the idea of distributed storytelling. The content is only the beginning of the story. If we’re touching the audience as deeply as we think we can, they become willing to participate in the story and it becomes something wholly different than watching TV.
It sounds like you’re talking about interactive TV in a very different way than simply choosing between different paths for a story.
MATT: This is why the establishment is having trouble with interactive TV. Your property can’t be too precious. You have to be willing to abandon ownership of the characters and stories to the audience. Web viewers want to call the shots, to control the experience. If you put too strong of a harness over your characters or stories, they’ll walk away. We had to learn the delicate balance of playing along with the audience and keeping the integrity of the story so we can mix in new characters. But you have to be willing to let the audience take the reins. We can do that because we don’t have high-level executives looking over our shoulders. And it can have unexpected consequences.
What are some of the most memorably good–and bad–consequences of letting the audience take the reins?
TROY: I guess from a good side, the eBay auction was the one that told us there’s something good in this if we take a chance and don’t know what the outcome will be. We actually haven’t had any bad consequences. On “Snatchbuckler’s Second Chance,” which we saw a spin-off with its own storyline, we have had so many YSAP fans storm the castle demanding Donnie’s return that we became more flexible on the storyline and re-introduced Donnie through this other series.
MATT: We had the ten-episode breakdown for Snatchbuckler’s Second Chance that we threw out the window when we realized the fans were taking us on a ride. It hasn’t ended our own vision of what “Snatchbuckler” can be, but we’ve taken a detour to tell other stories–and we’ve built up a strong audience. More good can come from this than bad when handing over the keys to the kingdom.
What else has YSAP’s audience taught you?
MATT: Since we’ve been along for the whole ride, we see how people become a community around a property. Usually web videos are skateboarding accidents or sleeping kittens. When you create a community with loads of characters, community forms. Some people really think Donnie Hoyle is a real guy. There are people who are new to the YSAP series, and they don’t realize this is a put-on. They think that it’s actually a Photoshop tutorial that went horribly wrong. You’ve got another group of people totally in on the joke and know Troy and I are behind it and Donnie is a construct of our imagination but they suspend their disbelief and play with those people who think it’s real and educate them about what it’s about.
There’s a viral community, and Troy and I can’t help but listen because they’ve invested so much of their time and interest into the series–almost as much as we have. We want to keep it going for them. We scour the web to find all their comments. We do that on a daily basis to keep up with the pulse of Donnie-dom out there.
Like all things, we’ve got an idea for the vision of where the second season of YSAP will go. But again, our relationship with the fans of YSAP and Snatchbuckler will determine that later on. We’re not sure where it’ll go. That’s what makes it so watchable for people. The prevailing wind of the community becomes a forceful element in the storyline and the episodes.
TROY: You can see where we’ve taken specific fan comments and worked them into the next episode because we think it’s a great way to dialogue with people. We want to give shout-outs to our fans: Hey, we listened to you and took it in this direction because you thought it would be fun.
Can you give me an example of that?
TROY: Many many people thought Dane Cook was behind YSAP, so in the second episode, Donnie filled up his folder with pictures of Dane Cook and labeled them things like ‘douche’. We didn’t say we were or weren’t Dane Cook, but we reflected that we heard peoples’ talk. We’re not an anonymous entity churning content out. We fanned the flames so thousands of fans are still certain that Dane Cook is behind it. Which pleases us to no end.
Can T-Shirts and mugs be far behind?
MATT: With lots of [content], people will think, Well, how can we monetize it? If this were a Saturday morning cartoon series, we’d get the merchandise pumped out. If and when we decide to do this, it’ll have to be just as participatory and interactive from a marketing standpoint [as it has been from a storytelling standpoint]. We wouldn’t force a T-shirt down anybody’s throat. We may be able to put together a fan site where people can design their own stuff and fans can help decide what to make.
TROY: Now, [merchandising] is an unnatural extension of what we’ve done. It seems like a drop-kick to try to take advantage of it now. We made the decision not to do the merchandise, to not do interviews as Donnie Hoyle. Often, we decline to talk about him at all. The mystery of him was what drove it. There’s magic behind Donnie and we don’t want to cash out on that for a couple of months of T-shirt sales.
Will we see a mobile component to YSAP?
MATT: That’s a great question. One thing is a little out of our reach now as far as what we control with regard to distribution. We have partnerships with My Damn Channel who have their own ways of distributing content.
TROY: We know mobile is a very viable medium out there. Technically, however, YSAP might be difficult to transition to mobile because there are so many details to the visual elements. That might be sort of challenging but we’re game for bringing our sensibility and comedy to mobile devices.
I understand you’re already using Skype as an element.
MATT: Yes, Donnie and Snatchbuckler both have Skype accounts. People skype these guys. Troy is the voice of Donnie and I’m Snatchbuckler. People have this incredible epiphany when they call the Skype accounts and actually get us. They find a clue and see what it’ll yield. They’re playing a game and then have a one-on-one conversation with a character in the show. The calls are from people all over the world. We get about a dozen a day, and they laugh their heads off when they have a conversation with me in character.
Aren’t you worried that thousands of viewers will call?
TROY: We don’t have to talk to all 10 million viewers to get the message across. They’ll tell anybody and everybody that they spoke with Snatchbuckler, which grows the viewership and keeps this ripping through the viral world.
What ways are you innovating interactive entertainment with “Snatchbuckler’s Second Chance”?
MATT: The premise is that Snatchbuckler goes to an online rehab center [called Peopleburg] for people recovering from online game addiction – but it’s actually an online game itself, so that’s the great irony. We didn’t just use the Second Life machinima engine, we created our own game to make Peopleburg be that much more real. Our intention–and it’s worked–is to make people think that Peopleburg is a real place.
TROY: Doing an extension of Snatchbuckler to mobile medium is a natural next step. We’d love to see how it plays out on mobile devices. So we’d open the doors to Peopleburg and people can come and have a real-time immersive-content collaboration experience, allowing people to walk around the set of the show being produced.
MATT: Suppose you could enter the world where we’re filming the content and you could kick around and run into the characters and maybe even get cast into the series?
When will this happen?
MATT: To be determined. This first season is a seasonette, moving back into second season of YSAP. Snatchbuckler will be on a short hiatuas.
Did you learn anything from the failure of “quarterlife”?
TROY: We earned a lot from “quarterlife.” There was so much buzz and hype about it because it was a series on the web transitioning to TV. To me, that seems totally non-intuitive. All the things we do in the Web 2.0 universe to make this content participatory–if we stripped this away and turned it into a 22-minute episode, it would lose all of that. There’s a certain ability to be able to watch a piece of content and then go and experience all these other things, and it has to happen in a web environment on your own time. We wouldn’t ever want this to get outside of the web. Then all the fun goes away.
Does that mean that TV is dead?
MATT: I don’t know. People have been talking about it for a long time. I just don’t watch it anymore so I can’t answer that question. TV isn’t even on the radar and doesn’t make any sense for what we’re trying to do.
TROY: As long as “Deal or No Deal” is on, I think TV has a shot.
Tags: Big Fat Brain, Deal or No Deal, distributed storytelling, Donnie Hoyle, EBay, interactive TV, Matt Bledsoe, My Damn Channel, quarterlife, ring of infinite sorrows, Skype, Snatchbuckler's Second Chance, Troy Hitch, TV, viral community, Web 2.0, You Suck at Photoshop, YSAP
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 12:28 am and is filed under Advertising/Marketing, Content.
