Idea IS the format

These aren’t two of ours – want to get that clear straight up, so that nobody thinks I’m claiming them. Not too proud to admit that there are other people out there producing visionary grabbable goodness

The CLOVERFIELD widget is nice and simple, and, crucially, offers a really juicy five minute excerpt from the movie, along with a simple, clearly communicated incentive for people to spread the word.

It’s just a shame for the rest of us that the chance to host an advance screening of the movie in your hometown is only available to “legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding the province of Quebec)”. Damn those guys in Domestic have it easy.

The JUMPER widget also looks like part of the domestic campaign, although these things always spill over into international regardless. It’s much simpler, but the point is it’s out there early and grabbing eyeballs. Who knows what’s to come as we get closer to the February release?

I’m pretty excited about both movies. CLOVERFIELD has always been pitched as a working title, but given how much buzz there is already around the movie I think they’d be crazy to change it. As for JUMPER, I’m really looking forward to seeing Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell and Samuel L. Jackson under the direction of Doug Liman (THE BOURNE IDENTITY).

We’ve just wrapped another of our grabbable widgets – this one’s to promote I AM LEGEND, and will be available as an automatic update for everybody who grabbed our BEOWULF widget.

Personally I hate the word ‘widget’, but it’s rapidly becoming part of the lexicon of online marketing to describe these kind of embeddable applications. If you want one of the earliest examples of this kind of thing, and a strong indicator of how successful it can be, the proliferation of Youtube videos in their early days was driven by precisely this principle. In an age when everybody has their own little piece of screen estate somewhere on the web, all you have to do is give them something cool or useful enough and they’ll do your advertising for you.

This is something we’ve been working on at PPC lately, recently pushed live. It’s been once of those projects that’s really stretched a few of us, but everybody – including the client – is really made up with the end result:

The content may seem like fairly obvious stuff, although the choice of backgrounds is a nice touch. But in terms of how far we’ve travelled since the days of the campaign microsite, this feels like a real milestone, and we have a nice slate of projects coming up where we should get to play with the format. Hope you like it. Hope you grab it. Hope you share it!

A few of my nearest and dearest know that I’ve been working on a short (12-15 minute) screenplay. The working title is WEATHERMAN. (It’s already changed a dozen times, so don’t hold me to that.)

The root concept can be traced all the way back to a poem i wrote as part of a creative writing course while studying English Lit in Edinburgh, some time around 1999. I think I eventually called it ‘Alien’, forming part of a fairly slapdash body of work submitted to a suitably indifferent reception. I still have it on a disc somewhere, formatted for the Apple Mackintosh Classic I was using at the time (see below) – if I manage to resurrect it maybe I’ll try and get a copy up on here, for posterity alone.

‘Alien’ came back to mind about a year ago when I was out with Ems, wheeling Lola around Downs Park. I was trying to explain what Second Life was, how it worked, what mind-bending possibilities existed beyond it’s immediate limitations.

I started playing around with the script during a week in France earlier this year. We had a blanket week-long ban on blackberries, mobiles, laptops, but on the first day we went down to the local village and I bought a typewriter in a bric-a-brac market for 10 euros. It was pretty cranky, but it basically worked ok.

The great thing about writing on a typewriter is that you don’t tend to get bogged down the way you do when you word process. With a typewriter, you maintain a certain amount of forward momentum, rather than endlessly chewing over your work until the spirit and spontaneity of what made you sit down and start writing in the first place is no longer recognisable.

I came back from France with a first draft, if you could call it that. I stole the occasional moment to type it up a little, but for the most part it stood still. I picked it up again in Thailand, made some real progress thinning down the dialogue, and developed a stronger sense of how it might be structured. Of course, one step forward is so often ten steps back, and I came back from Thailand knowing that there was still a hell of a lot of work to do.

The reason I’m posting about it now is that Kelly O, a friend of mine from LA who does some work with Fox, met me for breakfast at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica on Saturday, walked me up to Barnes & Noble, and found me a copy of Syd Field’s ‘SCREENPLAY: The Foundations of Screenwriting’. I started reading it on the flight back and it’s already clear to me what a cruel and necessary and illuminating process it will be finding out exactly how much I have to take on board.

There was one quote that hit me square in the face the first time I read it, right at the end of the introduction: “Talent’s is God’s gift; either you’ve got it or you don’t. But writing is a personal responsibility; either you do it or you don’t.” I like that. When I go too long without making the time to write, I feel like I’m neglecting a responsibility. I hope I go on feeling that way.