So it’s the Day of Announcements here at Machinima for Dummies Towers.
Guerilla Showrunner!
I’ve been working on a new project - yes, in addition to the mammoth task that is Death Knight Love Story. For a while now I’ve been feeling I want to do a bit more talking about all the various tips and tricks I’ve learned over more than a decade of making shows. And I’m not just talking about Machinima shows here, but also live-action stuff like Kamikaze Cookery.
And so it occurred to me that no-one’s really talking about the new paradigm in showrunning. Traditionally, a “Showrunner” is someone like Joss Whedon or JJ Abrams - the guy running the entire, enormous, expensive apperatus of a full-fledged network TV show.
But these days, technology’s done to that idea what it’s done to film, to music, and to publishing. Nowadays, you can be - and I have been, multiple times, and so have a lot of you guys - a showrunner from your bedroom, with a budget in the tens of dollars rather than the tens of millions of dollars.
It’s time to acknowledge that, come together, and start talking about how we make Our Thing - our tiny-budget serialised video thing - work. And so I’ve been starting to write some of the stuff I’ve learned down, in the hopes that it’ll help other people.
It’s called Guerilla Showrunner.
So far, I’ve got articles on how to get more viewers, why you don’t actually need a big scary plan for your show, what I’m talking about when I say “Funnel”, and why it’s vital for your viewer numbers, and today I’ve just put a piece up about how to make sure you know what your show’s goals are (because it’s easy to screw up if you don’t).
I’m also just finishing off a free course on converting casual viewers to crazed fans, but more info on that when it’s ready.
And MfD too
Johnnie and I have also been talking about what we’ll be doing with MfD in the New Year.
First up, expect a new layout and backend pretty soon. That should deal with the spammer problems that have afflicted us, and generally drag the site kicking and screaming into the ‘10s.
The Machinima world’s pretty quiet right now, but we’re also looking at what sort of things we can blog about in the New Year. There are some exciting tech developments coming up - Kinect, anyone? - which we’ll be covering, and maybe getting a bit more codey and hacky than we usually do. We’re also going to be looking at the fact that the Machinima world’s really split apart, and seeing what we can do to start us all trading ideas again.
And we might even end up doing some ebooks or something similar, covering developments and techniques that have happened since the book was published 4 years ago.
Watch this space!