There is a video on youtube somewhere of some old guy talking about producers trying to make radio programming work on television but struggling. Apparently broadcasters needed to come to terms with the uniqueness of the new television medium – you know, leave behind the old ways of creating media and maybe make this new tv thing into something really powerful.
It is near impossible to not view new forms of media through the lens of the old, something we all do when we describe internet based shows as ‘web TV.’ We call shows that because that is what we are all used to, and that is what they are similar to. Sure most online productions shorten their videos up, and lack a lot of the production values associated with traditional television but in just about every other aspect internet shows are just that – web TV.
When I discovered ‘Bxx’ recently I took note because it is exactly the opposite of modern web series – it is NOT web television. The brain child of Daniel Knauf, who is most well known for being the creator of HBO’s acclaimed show ‘Carnivale,’ Bxx aims to take advantage of the nature of the internet and web users.
In the above video Mr. Knauf gives a pretty good explanation of what he is trying to accomplish. When we go online we all have our mouse at the ready – our fast-twitch finger muscles are trained to select, and de-select, various stimuli on our screen. Even now I have eight programs running and seventeen tabs open in my web browser. You all can imagine how tempting it is for me to click away from MS Word and stop writing for a minute. Online narrative is a significant victim of this because the very best stories take time to tell – they can even be slow for awhile but in a movie theater we trust a film to pay off, online viewers simply click on something else.
Where Bxx tries to address this is by making the experience non-linear and interactive. At its most basic Bxx is letting its audience create the experience for themselves – to become their own director and editor and discover the story on their own.
Shot over 2 days in a house featuring seventeen cameras, Bxx collected hours of video. The video was then uploaded to the Bxx website where it is compiled with news articles, photos, audio recordings and various documents. The user is then able to go through the content in their own way, at their own pace, camera to camera, room to room, from the beginning or even starting at the end.
Will this format work, will this eventually become the new standard for web based storytelling? Only time will tell, but for now it is exciting to see how content creators are taking advantage of the web’s strengths and weaknesses. The internet is the most complex communication medium ever created, and as such the content we consume will likely become more complex over time as well.
Bxx is currently doing something akin to a beta test – the first 5000 people to sign up at http://bxxweb.com will get to take the site for a test drive when it launches. Check it out!
Alan Ayckbourn’s “The Norman Conquests” are really the start of this idea. It will be interesting to see if the narrative can be as interesting filmed this way, as reality television.
Carnaval was exceptional, for example, because of the way it was lit and filmed. The production designing was as important as the plot. I dug that show!