BBC's Signs of Life
Ashley's announced Signs of Life:
The BBC has commissioned Endemol to create an ambitious interactive online show that aims to tap the youth audience that is increasingly turning away from TV.
Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of future media and technology, described the show, to be called Signs of Life, as the BBC's "most ambitious internet format to date".
8 x 20m is coming, at a cost of £800,000 for the series.
The show, which aims to target the key, late-teenage demographic that is declining on the BBC's broadcast channels, will be set in a village in Suffolk where "strange things happen".
Mr Highfield described it as like "Buffy meets horoscopes".
Course, Buffy would kick horoscopes' arse, but that's a whole other conversation.
He stressed that the online show was not a primitive "choose the ending" style experience.
"The web is not just a way of getting TV out. We need to rethink the idea that if something is successful it goes to BBC One. We need to perhaps think that something is successful if it is a success on YouTube."
Quite right. The BBC's also put out a recent interactive teen-oriented soaplet, although the budget for Wannabes was less than that for Signs of Life. I'm curious about the budget for Afterworld, too, come to think of it, and also how to track these things. There's no option to subscribe to episode updates via RSS or similar - how am I supposed to remember to go download the latest?
"Buffy meets horoscopes"
Great, now I've got the mental image of Sarah Michelle Gellar reading the Sunday papers. That's it, that's the entire season...
CUT TO INTERIOR. BUFFY IS READING THE SUNDAY PAPERS. SHE FLICKS TO THE HOROSCOPE PAGE AND READS.
Buffy: Huh. Says I'm going to have a small windfall of cash.
PAN OUT. CUT TO EXTERIOR. FADE TO BLACK.
Posted by: Tom | February 16, 2007 at 07:16
I am no teen or even late teen, I however seldom watch TV either, so I guess the trend is spreading to us ole people too! I have not been a teen since the mid 80’s ha ha.
My first impression of Signs of life reminded me of a game that I played back in the mid 90’s Called Realms of the Haunting, which was an interactive pretty much state of the art PC game of its time with movie like cut scenes.
Signs of life though is much deeper, with well acted out and scripted scenes and some pretty cool special FX, supported by equally well conceived interactive tasks/puzzles along with interactive psycho analysis/character analysis tasks with an option to submit and save the results (wonder what they do with the psycho analysis data?)
I found each chapter very interesting, intriguing and fascinating, I hope there are more projects as good as this in the future.
Posted by: Simon | January 08, 2008 at 19:55