It's not just economics that inspired Golick to experiment with Story2Oh, but the "thrill of the new frontier. The world is wide open on the internet. The possibilities seem limitless. There aren't that many rules."
The WGA strike has brought a lot of attention to claims that it's difficult to make a profit on Internet content, and Golick has made it clear on the Story2Oh! blog that she wants it to be profitable. Though the initial phase is self-funded, she sees product integration as the most obvious financial path if the project is successful. What might make it attractive to advertisers is exactly what might make it appeal to an audience.
"It's an incredible opportunity for interaction between story teller and audience that simply isn't there in television, especially Canadian TV where your product can be wrapped, locked and sitting on the shelf for a year before your audience sees it and responds," she said.
Golick laid out the plot as she would when writing a TV series, but considered the various ways she could break the story down to best use the new medium, asking herself: "Can I put it in a blog post? Is it a Twitter, is it a Facebook wall-to-wall? Will some del.icio.us bookmarks tell the tale?"
The goal seems to be to harness various Web 2.0 elements in a way that YouTube-style entertainment only begins to approach, creating something more interactive and less tied to one format than most current Internet offerings. "I think we're at least a decade away from making the kind of great art that is now getting made for television," Golick contended.
"In the early days of TV, we pointed cameras at stage plays. The audience came and enjoyed even if it wasn’t the most brilliant use of the medium," she pointed out. "But since then, we've got more adept with television as a medium and now we have brilliant uses of it like Mad Men, The Wire, The Sopranos. Okay, you can add House to the list if you want."
Golick knows great TV. Her blog, Running With My Eyes Closed, breaks down episodes of some great – and some not-so-great – TV, using her screenwriter's eye to understand why they work – or don't. But while she produced educational software in a past life and has always wanted to translate her love of the web into a story for the web, she considers Story2Oh! part of the experimental phase of Internet entertainment.
"We're in early days of the web and some of the stuff is just television delivered a new way. And there are people enjoying it. I personally want to use my keyboard and mouse whenever I'm at my computer which means I do a lot of email checking and texting while I'm watching quarterlife."
Article comments
1 - Phillip Winn
This is brilliant, but I wonder how it will all play out when *everybody* is doing it. The first few get a free pass because they're new and cool. When there are hundreds or thousands of campaigns ongoing... I don't know.
2 - Diane Kristine
Yeah, and as someone I know said, this particular project doesn't seem scalable. In other words, how does it work if it's hugely successful? That one-on-one interaction between fan and character either has to barely scratch the surface or automated, in which case it will be less personal (none of that winking at my obsession with House, or commenting on my blog for example) and therefore less "cool." But for now it's fun and I think they're on to something that maybe can be built on as more people get more experience creating this kind of entertainment for the web.