Inspiration for Market7 came from involvement I had in production of marketing videos for another technology company. Producers would complain to our company that we didn’t put in enough preparation for them to be adequately prepared for expensive shoots, we’d complain to them about the lack of clarity on how to provide feedback about video content spread across multiple files, and our engineers and marketers would argue about not-quite-right verbiage already committed in the footage. The situation screamed for a better way, so Market7 has emerged, and it also screams for parody treatment and today Scott Adams obliges.
Lots of infrastructure work lately, pace of feature releasing will pick up towards full pace over summer. Most recent release includes:
improved script printing
enhanced robustness of dynamic stream delivery which provides video from current playhead location instead of only doing it from start to finish of video, so that if someone wants to skip ahead, no need to wait while download catches up (more on this functionality here) This is still not turned on across the application, but can be for certain accounts (previously it was just for certain projects) — please advise if you want dynamic stream delivery for all projects within an account, or for particular projects, by emailing to info@market7.com
in response to a customer’s request, there’s now 1-step ability to remove certain members across multiple projects (including option to notify people of their removal by email) within a Market7 account, which the account holder can access from the My_Account link towards the upper right
As our base diversifies, including expanding use on bigger budget production projects that tend to involve longer footage, customers increasingly request that our player functionality be immediately and comprehensively available for any portion of small or large video files. Our initial player functionality has been based on progressive download, meaning that once a video is requested, it loads in timeline order, and later portions of the video aren’t immediately available until the download catches up. As part of our assessment, and after experiments with a few commercial streaming servers, we determined the best approach for us is to engineer and implement our own approach to dynamic streaming, which we’ve spent the past month or so developing, along with a few other cool annotative player features, demonstrated here:
To assure good customer experiences, and even though we’ve already extensively tested, we haven’t yet turned on the new dynamic streaming for everyone, and we’re asking for volunteers. If you would like us to turn on dynamic streaming for (a) particular project(s) of yours, please email support@market7.com or sales@market7.com letting us know which project(s) and we’ll do so. Once we confirm that video play and annotative interactivity works robustly across projects, video files and users, we’ll turn on dynamic streaming everywhere, which should occur during February 2010.
Dynamic streaming, like its name indicates, allows users to click anywhere within timeline of a video immediately upon load, and play of video from that requested point is immediately responsive. Also, in implementing the architecture we have also allowed for Flash (.flv) and H.264 (ex: .mp4, .m4v) videos to be in-the-clear in our player so they do not get transcoded, meaning that they are immediately available for play upon upload, and that they are played at full quality of the source content with no modification. Videos of other formats do still have to be transcoded to Flash for our player, although from the File Actions button in our player, the original states of those videos can be downloaded with full fidelity for file-transfer purposes including to see un-modified in a compatible player. One more change we made to our player is allowing j-k-l keyboard shortcut navigation back-play/pause-forward, and the same for left and right directional arrows and space-bar, with additional benefit of visual fast-forward and rewind by holding down the appropriate keys.
The player enhancements are demonstrated in the screen-capture video towards the top of this blog post. Other enhancements with this release include:
Continuing last couple of months’ theme, we’ve made still more speed improvements, especially this time for loads of project home pages
Improved layout and presentation on printouts of pages from Script, Task and Event modules
Easier flow for inviting new members to projects
Activity feed reflects the first time a new member logs into a project
And again, please do email to support@market7.com or sales@market7.com letting us know projects of yours you’d like us to move to dynamic streaming immediately so that you can try it out (and please let us know how it works for you).
Extensive recent interaction with users reveals that value from our service can improve with better performance from our site, largely faster responsiveness on page loads and other user activities. This has been our primary focus the last couple of releases, and will continue to be our emphasis through year end. Like always, we have tons & tons of ideas for new features and entirely new modules, and we can hardly wait to get back to constructing those, but for now we’re prioritizing infrastructural upgrades. Some of the recent enhancements include implementing a new approach to load balancing for consistent service availability and tuning our JavaScript to reduce (/eliminate?) “slow script” warnings especially in Internet Explorer — our engineers will be posting soon to elaborate on the steps we’re taking.
Of course, we do have several neat, new features implemented in this release (click any of the images to enlarge):
Shadow-text in draft mode of scripts to clarify where character-name & spoken dialog go:
Script Shadow Text
Ability to click into & manually overwrite comment placement time in annotative player for precise placement:
Comment Time Overwrite
Feedback tab prominently available on every page to interact with us on questions comments etc.:
Feedback Tab
That last one is part of a broader initiative of ours for better communication with our users about their use of video.Market7 integrated within the service itself, on which Shannon will expand in upcoming blog posts.
Mass Animation project to make an animated short movie through a Facebook application that got 60,000 applicants, of whom 50, worldwide, were selected to collaborate
Versus domination of motion picture animation field by male American professionals, skewing older, the mass animation project was >50% overseas participants, >50% female, age range of 13-48, and many students & people moonlighting from other professions
In big studios very few people influence directions of projects, but when process is democratized so that every contributing artist can access & weigh in on every aspect, the result is enriched by more voices influencing
Dynamic & simultaneous crowd participation in creative development, with Darwinism applied to select results, significantly compresses timeframes and can contain costs
A common liability of user-generated content is the lack of a tight story, but when people collaborate and each scrutinizes the others’ work the results can be superior to the random shooting & uploading that can be found so much now
Script and storyboard are vital guides to direct dispersed animators towards a project converging on a tight end result and not elements overly challenging to stitch together
Distributed creative contribution is getting sufficiently proven to drive full length feature animation or development of an entire video game
Eating your own dog food is sometimes a humbling one. (Here is your opportunity to see me in a dress). We started our first Full Market7 production by writing a ridiculous script revolving around items we happened to have in the office. Seth and I collaborated without communicating directly (which, frankly, is fine by me), relying only on our Market7 tools to collaborate on the script.
Production wrapped last week and the process of using the annotative player to review and comment on the video has begun. Here is some behind the scenes stuff to tide you over.
On Monday at SxSW I watched Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson from Adaptive Path discuss the 10 tips for managing in a creative environment. This post focuses only on two tips. Don’t worry, At the end of this, I will list the other eight tips for those of you who absolutely MUST look under the bandage.
What I love about the adaptive path research was how they took a cross disciplinary slice. They spent time studying diverse, creative groups including restaurants, theater troupes, and professional writers among others.
Tip #1: Actively turn the corner
This diagram is of the creative process:
The first half of creating anything involves a divergence of ideas. You start with a single idea and then everyone starts throwing in different ideas that diverge from the original. No idea is eliminated at this stage and often experiments and mini-models are created. Then you turn the corner. At some explicitly defined point, you stop taking in new ideas and start converging towards a single point by eliminating what is unnecessary. This reduces scope creep, release slippage and the dreaded moving target. Eliminated ideas aren’t trashed, simply put into a “future creation/release” bucket.
Tip #2: Kill your darlings
Eliminate the ideas you LOVE that don’t get you closer to the goal first. Don’t eliminate the low hanging fruit or easy choices first. Choose instead to go after eliminating the tough choices from the beginning. By biting the bullet and eliminating the difficult choices first, the low-hanging fruit (those ideas to which you are not attached) becomes easy.
The eight other tips: 3. Cross-train the entire team
4. Rotate leadership
5. Know your roles
6. Practice, practice practice
7. Make the mission explicit to the entire team
8. Leadership is a service
9. Generate the creative projects around the group’s interests
10. Remember the audience BONUS: Celebrate Failure (after all, it’s part of the creative process)
Back in the caveman days when we wanted a mate, we just beat them over the head with a large club. I know because I have seen countless reenactments on television. Occasionally, there was a ‘numbskull’ who, despite being struck with repeated blows, had no idea that the mating ritual had begun.
How would we reach these numbskulls? Not by beating harder. For these folks, we needed to guide them through the process with iterative, easy-to understand steps. (“ok, walk over to this rock. Good! Now just a little bit further to that bed of mammoth fur over there”)
{I hope this level of degradation pays well}
Many times in script development, the helicopter stunt sounds like a good idea until someone takes the club and hits everyone over the head with the price tag. Unfortunately, this usually happens at the end of the script development. After weeks or months of head nodding, a flurry of expense-induced head shaking breaks out. The result: wasted time and last minute rewriting.
What would be useful is a way to wed the story development and production planning/budget together. Some iterative steps that show everyone where the production is headed opposed to a heavy club at the end.
Does Market7 have such a thing? Well, no, not yet. I know you all saw some sort of self-serving marketing pitch coming on but this is a blog. It is composed of observations gleaned from talking to hundreds of producers. Occasionally, these things just hit ME over the head.
A treatment (sometimes called an approach, concept proposal, or conceptualization) is simply telling the story of the film/video in prose. It covers the core idea around how the video will look and sound.
Typically, the writer and/or director will create a few treatments for the client from which to decide upon. Once a treatment is chosen, the transformation of treatment to script begins.
Short and Sweet
The treatment is of limited length, not more than a paragraph. It’s much like a movie synopsis description you might read in the paper or on-line. It doesn’t contain every important detail and might even finish in an open question of how the story ends.
A change in treatment = starting from scratch
If a client changes his/her mind in the middle of a production and decides to go with a different treatment than agreed upon, it means basically starting over. Some clients don’t understand that changing the core idea affects production so profoundly. Producers, often worried about seeming inflexible, won’t explain this impact. As a result. Clients end up unhappy about late delivery or cost overruns and producers are frustrated by a stressful production.
The treatment is the foundation of your video. Everyone should understand that, though sometimes necessary, ripping apart the foundation affects the entire structure. In understanding this, you understand that giving extra care up front on the approach in the treatment will pay big dividends throughout production.
Boredom. It is what most viewers of your content will suffer from. As the enterprise, you put forth your money and as the producer you put forth your time and creative energy only to have the child of your collaboration end up in the ‘unwatched’ category.
Here are a few things you can do when writing your script:
Length (not too long):
1. 30 second advertisement (if the viewers don’t know your product or service).
2. 2-3 minute informational (if the audience has knowledge of the product or service and wants to know more).
3. 8-12 minute instructional (Only for specific teaching purposes).
Interest (Keep it compelling):
1. Focus on a specific topic, break broad topics up into multiple segments.
2. Find a way to connect emotionally with the audience.
3. Edit, edit, edit. Say the most with the fewest words.
4. Every good story has a beginning, middle and end. So should yours.
{I hope this level of degradation pays well}
