Nominate Unofficial M.E. (Again)
Back in November, I tried to cajole people into nominating Not The Official Twitter of Mutant Enemy for “Best Brand Use of Twitter” in Mashable’s Open Web Awards.
Despite failing to convince enough people it was worth their while, I’ll try again now that the nomination period for this year’s Shorty Awards is underway. My argument is the same now as it was then.
It’s a long shot — a ridiculously long shot, in fact — but I thought it would be interesting to see how far we could push an unofficial account promoting a given brand that doesn’t have an official one.
The larger argument for the utility of the unofficial account in question is outlined in On Mutant Enemy And Social Media, also posted back in November. Most of the case for the account’s successful, if unoffocial, representation of the Mutant Enemy brand in social media is made by spending some time browsing the past several month’s worth of its updates.
Unlike the Mashable awards, as near as I can tell from the rules, you can only nominate once for a given account under the Brand category in the Shorty Awards. Or, rather, you appear to be able to nominate a brand multiple times, but I believe it simply replaces your previous nomination with your new reason (you have to supply a reason with your nomination).
So, please consider nominating @UnofficialME for the Brand category in this year’s Shorty Awards. It’s still a long shot, but it’d still be interesting. Just remember: You must include a reason for your nomination to count.
Update: In addition to the official Brand category, I invite you also to nominate @UnofficialME in the community category Fan Brand, created as a kind of fallback position. If there’s enough support for a given community-created category, the Shorty Awards might convert it to an official category.
Update: See the @UnofficialME profile on the Shorty Awards site for the instructions on which categories in which to nominate.
The Flat And Lifeless Riese
I tried to like the web series Riese, which premiered in November with a substantial production budget behind it. But it’s a problem for any show when its lead goes about her business looking nothing so much as bored for the entirety of the roughly 45-minute story.
I should explain up front that this is the second version of this review. I went into my first attempt intending a piece mainly about disappointment. I feel bad about it, but upon my re-watch of the entirety of the just-concluded Chapter One, it’s become a piece that can’t help sum itself up at the start with the bluntness above.
It’s true that the strange quietness of the almost dialogue-free opener, embedded above, and the vague intimations of steampunk in the series’ design and promotion, intrigued enough for me to want to see what the series had in store. But it didn’t take long for that initial interest to turn, mainly, into a sort of impatience. What little online discussion I read tended to gravitate to the same early criticism: poor pacing. Too little seemed to be happening in a series whose episodes clocked in at around eight minutes in length each.
By the time we got to this week’s release of the fifth and final episode in the series’ first chapter (the second chapter shot in December for a release cycle to start in February), that frustration expanded to a more encompassing theme: almost everything in the series — pacing and energy, action and dialogue, the performances themselves — is, in a word, flat.
There’s an almost complete lack of variation in tone, events happen at more or less the same speed, and no one seems particularly invested in anything they are saying or doing. For all the attention the project has generated — whether due to its creator’s use of social media and a sort of alternate reality game (ARG), or through some attempts at comparing it to Sanctuary, which went from the web to television — the end result has been something of a disappointment.
Where there should be a serious attempt to generate a real and palpable tension, Riese instead presents us with thumping music played over lugubrious camera work. On occasion, an actor apparently was told to breathe heavy. In essence, the series indicates tension but never actually presents tension.
That might be the crux of most of the series’ deficiencies: it indicates rather than presents. There’s no sense of who any of the characters are as people, until and unless we get one of the stray moments in which one character says to describe another. Indication instead of presentation.
During my re-watch, my notes for this, the second version of this post, became increasingly staccato. It might make sense just to combine by theme and offer them up here as bullet points.
- Over-reliance upon thumping music to tell you to be interested, or to try to compensate for flat movement. Pointless Batman-like camera angles, to go with the thumping music, to try to get you interested in nothing happening on screen. Endless shots of Riese walking through the forest, or walking through hallways, or walking outside buildings, or standing around breathing heavy isn’t tension, especially not just because there’s thumping music. It’s just monotonous.
- Unfortunately, the lead mainly comes across like she’s playacting, not acting. Everything she does is exactly the same, via the exact same lack of expression. Half of the time when Riese is in danger, she just looks, in fact and instead, bored. The only variation comes when the director apparently told her to breathe heavy to indicate tension.
- Dialogue is stilted, or too on the nose, or too clunkily expository, delivered with no life in it. Why does everyone talk so slowly? Countless pauses (in conversation or even within a single character’s lines) and laconic delivery isn’t, again, tension or interesting character dynamics. It’s just boring.
- No sense of character comes from the performances.
One realization that struck me during the re-watch necessitates a comparison. While my introduction to web series came through Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and The Guild, it was After Judgment which convinced me that dramatic science fiction not only could successfully take to the form, but be done well.
The first season of After Judgment (leaving out the intertwining, and semi-separate Before Judgment), consists of sixteen episodes totaling around an hour of story. While a bit more happens in terms of plot development and exposition in that hour than happens in Riese’s forty-five minutes, it isn’t enough more to explain the differences. After Judgment, unlike Riese, flows smoothly and offers a clear sense of an entire range of characters just from the performances alone.
But in Riese, I have no sense of even just the title character beyond what someone else says about her — unless I’m supposed to be getting something from the fact that she’s bored all the time and breathes heavy.
For all of Riese’s much-vaunted budget, After Judgment manages to best it on almost every count — proving, if nothing else, that it isn’t money or connections or marketing savvy that makes for a good web series. All things considered, I’ll take a lively script and dynamic performances but no real budget over the opposite any day.
There was some chatter from the series’ creators on Twitter that they were reading the criticisms from certain quarters and taking some of them into consideration as they put together the second chapter. Most of those early criticisms were generally about the pacing issue, but my re-watch made it clear to me that the pace of Chapter One is inextricably bound together with a larger set of issues.
And casting a number of recognizable genre actors for the upcoming episodes (see the series’ blog for details), as much as additional talent can often prompt others to step up their own game, isn’t going to be enough.
Addressing the issues above would invariably have an effect upon pacing, sure. But the problems aren’t that limited, or simple. It remains to be seen if in Chapter Two the series graduates from merely indicating to the audience how they should consider a given scene to actually presenting something which will instill the intended reaction.
I do still plan to check in with Riese than the series returns in February. But given that Chapter One led me from mere disappointment to something far more critical, they’ll have to overcome a fair amount of skepticism to snag me for all of Chapter Two.
Nominate Unofficial M.E.
In the absence of an official presence (and since the end of a fan campaign I spearheaded called Watch DOLLHOUSE Week way back in May), I’ve been operating what could best be described as Not The Official Twitter of Mutant Enemy.
On a lark, I’ve been urging people to nominate @UnofficialME for Best Brand Use of Twitter in Mashable’s 2009 Open Web Awards. It’s a long shot — a ridiculously long shot, in fact — but I thought it would be interesting to see how far we could push an unofficial account promoting a given brand that doesn’t have an official one.
As of this post, there are just over one and a half hours left to submit nominations for this year’s awards, as the process closes at midnight Pacific tonight, Sunday. So, if you haven’t yet today, please nominate @UnofficialME for Best Brand Use of Twitter in Mashable’s 2009 Open Web Awards.
On Mutant Enemy And Social Media
The original incarnation of this commentary, not previously published, was written prior to the sequence of events which started with Dollhouse being taken off the air for November sweeps month and ended with today’s news that the show has been canceled.
I’ve not made any particular effort to rewrite what follows to place Dollhouse into the past tense, and so some instances of urging action might no longer be directly or immediately relevant at present. I simply trust the reader will take into account when this was written, since the case study provided by Dollhouse in a social media context remains valid as an example, as does (I believe) the overall argument presented here.
This is not meant to be a comprehensive examination of Dollhouse-related social media activity. Examples and comparisons provided along the way represent my own contributions in that regard primarily because they were the examples with which I am most familiar.
It is entirely possible, of course, that there are convincing reasons why the below is not already happening. It also is entirely possible that in fact there are plans and intentions about which none of us have heard. Whatever the case, I thought I’d offer for perusal my take on Mutant Enemy and social media.
An Intro
In the age of social media, traditional “marketing” must adapt not only to providing information, but to engaging in discussion and problem solving as well. In a very concrete sense, marketing must become customer service, which increases both presence and reputation — core goals of marketing.
In most, if not all, of these newly-necessary activities, FOX Broadcasting has fallen down on the job when it comes to Dollhouse.
It is my assertion not only that Mutant Enemy can step in to fill that gap, but that it should, in part because Dollhouse needs some sort of official social media presence, but also because it will establish a presence for Mutant Enemy itself, benefitting it in the future for other projects.
What follows describes what I believe should be possible, not necessarily what is possible within the contractual rules and obligations of Hollywood (an issue mainly raised by the YouTube section). For me, it’s always been best to start with “in an ideal world…” and work my way back to the real, rather than artificially restrict ideas from the start.
Read Full Entry →
Twitter’s Engineers Gone Wild
Back in August, Twitter outlined their proposed solution for institutionalizing the “retweet”. The company received a good amount of criticism over the direction they had chosen to take, mostly due to that direction completely delegitimizing the way in which Twitter’s users actual engage in retweeting.
Last week, Twitter began a limited rollout of their retweet function, and already it’s clear from early chatter that Twitter took into account absolutely none of the criticism it received in August. Shortly, then, Twitter itself and then various third-party applications will present users with a retweet function that suffers from at least two major flaws.
- No comment. Currently, users frequently add a comment of their own to something they retweet. At the very least, this helps mediate against Twitter becoming a sea of duplicate tweets. More than that, users often retweet something in order to argue against it, something the new Twitter retweet function disregards completely and renders impossible. Twitter is rescinding the ability of its users to provide context for comments and links they pass along to others.
- I don’t follow. In the new retweet feature, retweets will appear in a user’s timeline as if they came from the originator even if the user doesn’t follow that originator, with some sort of indication as to who amongst the people you follow retweeted it. In other words, users in essence will be seeing tweets in their timeline from people they don’t follow.
Regarding that second flaw: Once upon a time, Twitter removed a feature wherein a user could display to their followers all of the replies they sent, even if a given follower did not also follow to person to whom the user was replying. According to Twitter, users were “confused” by this behavior. (It’s more likely that the reason was to limit use of system resources, a constant problem with the service. But apparently Twitter found it easier to publicly blame the alleged stupidity of its users.)
Somehow, it seems, Twitter would have us believe that users were confused by seeing tweets from people they follow, merely because they were directed to people they did not follow, but at the same time would have us believe that users will not be confused by seeing tweets that themselves, from almost all appearances, are from people they don’t follow.
All of this seems as if Twitter’s engineers decided they had an awesome new idea, and everyone was so in love with their spirited engineering prowess that they simply didn’t give a shit about how their users actually used retweeting as a conversational tool.
More likely, there is some specific reason why Twitter has decided that retweeting ought to be conducted in a manner that places an artificial restriction upon how one references and discusses the comments of another. Some reason that Twitter simply isn’t telling us. Which itself is an artificial limitation on conversation.
Much as Twitter fed us horseshit when explaining why they disabled a useful feature regarding how a user’s replies were displayed to their followers, they appear to be feeding us horseshit on retweets.
Any decision made by the provider of a popular service will be met with some resistance, or at least criticism. Ultimately, that shows how strongly users have come to feel about that service.
But when decisions are made which change the ways the service is used, especially in a manner which devalues the service, the resistance only is made worse when the explanations given obviously don’t pass the smell test.
In the end, for as long as Twitter itself and any third-party tools permit it, I will be making no use of Twitter’s imposition of conversational retweet restrictions. Hopefully, makers of third-party tools will give us a choice between the longstanding real solution created by the users themselves and Twitter’s engineering “solution” in search of a problem to solve.
← Back to Home
© The One True b!X.
Powered by WordPress using a modified DePo Skinny.