Pact is making the tools freely available to producers across the industry. The templates provide a simple legal framework for producers to work together when developing intellectual property. It is hoped that this initiative will improve the quality and number of multi-platform proposals going to UK broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4.

John McVay, Chief Executive of Pact says: “Producers from both the TV and new media sectors have told us that they need a simple framework to help them to develop their multi-platform ideas. With the help of NESTA, the launch of this guide and these legal templates will be an invaluable resource, allowing more companies to create more truly convergent projects in the future”.

Jon Kingsbury, Director of the Creative Economy Programme at NESTA says: “One of the barriers to creative and commercial innovation is the lack of clear, open-source material that encourages creative businesses to converge. Tools like these are a pre-requisite for effective collaboration and will enhance independent producers’ development of multi-platform content ideas.”

This Guide To Collaborating provides producers with the information and a legal framework to make co-creating multiplatform projects run more smoothly.

The documents are currently available on the Pact home page.

We’re now looking for participants for this year’s Crossover programme.

Crossover is an extraordinary series of ‘innovation labs’ for creative professionals from a diverse range of backgrounds: game developers, tv and film producers, web designers, animators, theatre practitioners and others. Each Crossover lab is an immersive, five day incubator fostering new collaborations and original ideas for cross platform media content and services.

We are now looking for people to take part in Crossover Docs and Crossover Kids.

Crossover Docs (October 5 - 10)
Social media, social networks, alternate reality games, serious games, user generated content and participatory story-telling: are there new ways to engage audiences with factual topics and documentary subjects?

In Crossover Docs, factual and documentary film and television producers will work with games developers, web and interaction designers to invent innovative projects for cross-platform delivery. A focus of the five day, residential lab will be on interactive projects which address big ideas and contemporary challenges including climate change and other scientific issues.

Crossover Kids (Dec 1 - 5)
Crossover Kids will explore the future of children’s media and develop original ideas for cross-platform projects.

Children have always loved TV, but the days when passive viewing was their only option are well and truly over. They’re media literate and demanding more sophisticated, interactive content which is fragmenting the market. So what does this mean for content creators? A decline in traditional TV commissioning and falling budgets? Or an framework for innovation and collaboration?

Crossover KIds offers you a unique opportunity to experiment with a diverse, talented group of creative professionals: tv and film producers, game developers, web designers, animators, theatre practitioners and toy creators.

To find out more about Crossover and to apply to participate in any of the lab, visit www.crossoverlabs.org.

Crossover is funded by Screen Yorkshire, Skillset, NESTA, the Wellcome Trust and the London Development Agency.
It is supported by the BBC and Channel 4.

At the beginning of June we delivered the first of three Crossover Labs for Channel 4 at Buxted Park Hotel in Sussex. The primary purpose of this sequence of four-day workshops is to persuade the channel’s tv commissioners to engage with the challenge and opportunity of new media. Channel 4 has not until recently seen its online activity as part of its public service remit and, as a consequence, its websites are not paid for or creatively owned by  the people who commission the shows they are intended to support. Television commissioning editors are only interested in the audiences attracted by television shows: the only metric of success is ratings.  On the first day of the C4 Crossover, as we talked about why we were there, one of them said: “Frankly, I’d hoped to retire before I had to worry about any of this new media stuff”.  Another said: “I know we’ve got a website. I hear it’s quite good but actually I’ve never looked at it”.

It was the most challenging lab I’ve ever directed. On every other one people are present because they’ve applied and been selected: they may feel apprehensive but they’ve chosen to be there. On this one there were some who had had their arms twisted and they were reluctant participants.

The lab lasted four days and by the end, all had gone through at least a partial process of conversion. The commissioner who had never looked at her show’s website had her damascene moment when developing a persona, an outline of a typical audience member - a 19 year old female student.. She said: “You know, I absolutely believe in this character we’re developing: she’s at the heart of our target demographic. And we’ve just decided she hardly ever watches TV.”

The lab culminated with a discussion about ways forward for the Channel which is now trying to move rapidly to adapt to the changing media ecology. I first pitched the idea of a new ‘workshop’ programme for interactive media to them 10 years ago, modelled on the project C4 had set up in the early 1980s to discover and develop new talent in independent tv production. In retrospect, it would have been too early because there would have been no market for the output. It’s possible, if they get it right, that the Channel has timed it’s move well. The infrastructure is there to build an audience and there is a base of talent, companies and individuals, capable of making stuff.

It’s still going to be a major challenge, though. The Channel is starting this process almost a decade after the BBC started trying to adjust its structures. The Beeb still isn’t properly integrated and it’s still difficult to find people at White City with real production and commissioning credits in TV who have any real interest in new media. It’s very hard for a media organisation structured on a 20th Century model of what media are to adapt to the digital landscape.

His theme was the inevitable shift from theatres and DVD to digital download as the primary means of distribution of feature films.  To date, Hollywood’s solution to the bottleneck caused by too many movies competing for space on a limited number of screens has been to make fewer, bigger films. But this is a short-term fix which will inevitably give way to more profitable distribution models based, in part, on less costly product reaching smaller audiences.

Gubbins didn’t see the move to sales direct to the home as a threat to cinema ticket sales, citing the example of football where the live, social experience still beats the more comfortable and, in many ways, superior experience of viewing a match on TV. He suggested that an economic downturn was just what the film industry needs as a boost for the cinema as a cheap night out.

Is the film business about to enter it’s equivalent of the punk era? Gubbins argued that now that primary school pupils can plausibly carry video cameras in their pockets and are beginning to use them to express themselves, we may a real democratisation of the moving image. It may be anathema to the established industry but production cost are getting so low that there are now unique opportunities for new voices to speak through new types of film.

It’s ultimately a pretty rosy view of the future: the big boys will continue to find ways of making profits both through traditional distribution mechanisms and on new platforms while wider bandwidth and the long tail will provide space and a market for independently produced niche product.

Can it really be that easy?

The third of this year’s BBC Innovation Labs finished on Friday with Jason Daponte, the BBC’s Managing Editor for mobile applications, saying it was the best set of presentations he had seen in the three years they’ve been running. I tend to agree, although the southern lab last year was also very strong. Four of the ten teams got the funding they had asked for and two more were told that their projects would go forward subject to further discussion.

The lab has been covered in blogs by Noam Sohachevsky of Mint Digital (here), Stuart Varrall of Fluid Pixel (here) and Tom Evans from Numiko (here).

Visitors for the pitching day included, for the first time, a senior manager from BBC Vision. I had to introduce him to the commissioners from Future Media and Technology: while the BBC is better adapted to multi-platform publishing than many broadcasters, it has some way to go before it becomes properly integrated.

Unexpected Media has had an extraordinarily busy couple of months including a visit to Winnipeg to run a workshop for the National Screen Institute of Canada, a “meet the players” session at the European Media Event in Brussels, three Innovation Labs for the BBC (with one more still to deliver) and a lab in Cannes in the context of the Content 360 pitching contest at MipTV.

The Lab in Cannes, which was for the six contestants in Ogilvy’s cause-related marketing competition lasted for two and a half days: half the time that we normally have for a BBC Innovation Lab. The participants were all working on ideas that associated a good cause with brands selected by Ogilvy from their accounts. The projects that made it to the final were proposing projects for Fanta, AmEx and BP.

The format was a public pitch of all the projects on Tuesday morning, two days of work with a mentoring team including Richard Adams (Chemistry Digital), Matt Marsh (First Hand) and Heather Croall (Sheffield Doc/Fest) alongside people from Ogilvy, a final public pitch on Thursday afternoon. After hearing the first pitches, the mentoring team met with the jury to hear their feedback and to find out from them what would make for a winning pitch by the end of the process. It was clear at this stage that different jury members favoured different projects and that there was no obvious winner.

We agreed that each competitor would need to tell four convincing stories in their six minute pitch:

• an impact story: how the campaign would change the world
• a brand story: is the proposal good for the brand (and does it fit with the brand values)
• a user story: will people really want to interact with the proposed product or service
• a product or service story: is the proposal for a really compelling campaign.

We spent the first day deconstructing the original pitches, working through the judges’ feedback. In one case the cause, brand and proposal didn’t seem properly integrated, in another the campaign’s strong message was lost in unnecessary and distracting embellishments, a third had chosen not to refer to a specific brand. We then had the teams pitch to a ‘watering-hole’ of mentors, Ogilvy personnel, brand representatives and invited creatives to get final guidance.

By the time of the second public pitching sessions all the presentations had changed: some radically, others more subtly. There was one stand-out winner: Fanta’s Heros. It was a simple, compelling and powerful pitch and the judges were unanimous. Unexpectedly they decided to award an additional three prizes: $5,000 each to two projects which will also be pitched to the brands. They also gave €1,000 to two students from Slovenia aged 21 and 22 who had performed amazingly well as the only team not working in their first language.

Turning one prize into four, persuading Ogilvy to take three projects forward seems like quite an endorsement of the Lab process.

The Innovation Edge Conference – Tuesday, 20th May 2008

NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference is an unrivaled opportunity to get under the skin of innovation in the UK – and consider the impact it will have on our future.

The conference brings together a powerful mix of experts from industry, culture, politics and academia. Bob Geldof, Lord Puttnam, Helen Alexander, Michael Birch and urban artist ‘Inkie’ are just a few of those who’ll be fuelling the discussion.

Be a part of it. The Innovation Edge is free to attend. Register now here.

The Digital Innovation in Film project plans to team-up film businesses with specialist partners to help them digitise, market and distribute their films to audiences around the world in new ways.

Over the next 18 months up to 10 film businesses will be selected from across the UK, to take part in a project that is designed to focus on business growth. A unique combination of workshops and one-to-one support from “innovation partners” will encourage the companies to explore emerging opportunities for new revenue streams.

The pilot, which is being developed in conjunction with national and regional development agencies, aims to uncover new ways of working that could be taken up by agencies across the UK when helping other businesses. If successful, the methods explored by the project could benefit as many as 100 UK film businesses across the UK.

It’s pitch day at the first of this year’s BBC Innovation Labs and we’re back at Forest Hills Hotel near Aberfoyle.

The Scottish Labs always seem to engage the most technically proficient, not to say geeky, teams of all the labs. Last year we had one group both whose members had PhDs in string theory.

There are also a surprisingly high number of people here whom I’ve worked with before including Fearghas McKay, who more or less introduced Artec to the internet more than 15 years ago and Richard Harris, who was CTO at the Digital Village.

There’s been some blogging here, here and here.