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Everything Changes (Torchwood)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

01 – "Everything Changes"
Torchwood episode
Cast
Starring
Others
  • Kai OwenRhys Williams
  • Tom PricePC Andy
  • Paul KaseyWeevil
  • Guy Lewis – Young cop
  • Jason May – SOCO
  • Rhys Swinburn – John Tucker
  • Olwen Medi – Yvonne
  • Gwyn Vaughan-Jones – DI Jacobs
  • Dion Davis – Officer
  • Jams Thomas – Hospital porter
  • Mark Heal – Security Guard
  • Gary Shepheard – Pizza lad
  • Gwilym Havard Davies – Man
  • Cathryn Davies – Woman
Production
Directed byBrian Kelly
Written byRussell T Davies
Script editorBrian Minchin
Produced byRichard Stokes
Chris Chibnall (co-producer)
Executive producer(s)Russell T Davies
Julie Gardner
Music byMurray Gold
Production code1.1
SeriesSeries 1
Running time50 mins
First broadcast22 October 2006 (2006-10-22)
Chronology
← Preceded by
Followed by →
"Day One"
List of Torchwood episodes

"Everything Changes" is the first episode of the British science fiction television programme Torchwood, which was first broadcast on the digital channel BBC Three on 22 October 2006. The story was written by show creator and executive producer Russell T Davies as an introduction to the show's mythos. The episode re-introduces Captain Jack Harkness, who had proved popular in the first series of the 2005 revival of Doctor Who, as the leader of Torchwood, a team of alien hunters.

The story is told from the perspective of Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), who comes across the Torchwood team through her job as a police officer with the South Wales Police, who are investigating a series of strange deaths in Cardiff. Through Gwen's discovery of Torchwood, the audience are introduced to team members Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori) and Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd). Suzie Costello, as played by Indira Varma, had also been billed as a series regular prior to transmission, though in a twist the character was revealed as the murderer and killed off at the end of the episode, with Gwen replacing her as a member of the Torchwood team.

Upon broadcast the episode earned BBC Three its highest ever viewing figures. Critical reaction to the episode was mixed, with reviewers making both positive and negative comparisons to Torchwood's parent show Doctor Who.

YouTube Encyclopedic

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  • Authors@Google: Frank Rose

Transcription

>>Female Presenter: As Frank will discuss in a few moments, we are no longer passive consumers of mass media or spectators. Now, thanks to Google+, we hope, Twitter, and YouTube, we are media. Storytelling is no longer linear and we are frequently asked to participate. This new narrative is still nascent, but continues to gain momentum. "The Art of Immersion" examines the blurred lines between author and audience, story and game, entertainment and marketing, and fiction and reality--what we call "deep media." Just so you guys know this might run a couple of times through this talk. It's actually our freight elevator. So, if you hear that just sort of go with it. Following Frank's talk of "The Art of Immersion," he'll be joined by some transmedia pioneers for a conversation about the changing nature of storytelling, collaborative production, and how these immersive experiences actually come to fruition. So please join me in welcoming Frank. [applause] >>Frank: Thank you. OK. Hi. So, I'm gonna talk a little bit about grammar today, but don't worry. It doesn't have anything to do with linguistics. I'm going to talk about the grammar of storytelling--how it's evolving, why it's evolving, and why that matters to us. So, as Janine pointed out, I wrote this book about how the internet was changing storytelling essentially. And the thing about storytelling is that it's always been mediated by technology, by whatever technology is at hand. And as I was working on the book, I realized early on that every medium has its own grammar. Cinema, for example. We take for granted the grammar of cinema because we're used to watching movies. People have been watching movies now for a hundred years or more. But all of the parts of that grammar, cross-cuts, fades, point of view shots, even a close-up, they all had to be invented. They weren't there at the beginning. And so the motion picture camera was invented around 1890. And for a long time, for a number of years, the typical shot was what's called the proscenium arch shot, which is to say as if the camera were set in amid the audience, looking up at the action taking place on stage. All of these other shots and the cutting and so forth, all that happened gradually over a period of years. It wasn't really consolidated until about 1915. And in fact, it was 1910 before they even came up with the idea of movie stars. So, what essentially happened was we had a 20-year period from the invention of the camera to the idea of putting stars in front of it. And another five years after that, before the grammar really coalesced. And 12 more, of course, 'till we got sound. So, as it happens, it's been about 20 years now since the birth of the web. And we're still figuring that out, too. What I realized when I was working on the book was that every new medium seems to take about 20 or 30 years for people to figure out what to do with it. And in the meantime, we have I've come to call the "horseless carriage" phase. Transitional, obviously, when we don't really understand the possibilities of the new technology. As with the proscenium arch shot, we just continue doing what we've done in the past. But it's not just a question of seeing the new in terms of the old. It's also defining the new in terms of what it's lacking rather than what it can become. So, I think that's what's happened with the internet. A lot of internet critics are basically saying, "Where's the horse?" "Social media devalues friendship. Where is the horse?" “Google makes me stupid. Where's the horse?" "Bloggers don't have proper journalism credentials. Where is the horse?" Well, the horse is gone and it's not coming back. So, what do we have instead? We have essentially a medium that consists of all media that is video, audio, print, any combination of the above. And that can be used in a way that's inherently non-linear, that is also inherently participatory. It encourages people to jump in to act. As a result, it's often game-like. It has the capability of being immersive. And it blurs boundaries relentlessly. The boundary between author and audience, between fiction and reality, between story and game, between entertainment and marketing. In the process of all this, it really changes the way we think. For example, I'm gonna talk for a moment about nonlinearity and what that does. So, nonlinear storytelling is not new, of course. In the 20th Century, it was pretty much the province of the avant garde. You had James Joyce. You had Jorge Luis Borges. You had Akira Kurosawa, Jean Luc Godard. Godard’s, in a debate at Cannes in the mid-'60s, was famously asked if he didn't think a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, to which he replies, "Certainly, but not necessarily in that order." This kind of nonlinear storytelling was self-conscious. It was intellectual and arty. It was essentially calling attention to the illusion that is narrative, which is kind of a no-no in certainly classical, Hollywood cinema and fiction in general. But then something strange started to happen. By the mid-'90s, nonlinearity had been absorbed by the culture to the point that Quentin Tarantino could release "Pulp Fiction", a movie that to most video executives at the time was utterly unwatchable. And to a new generation of viewers, it was an entirely natural way to tell a story. Nonlinearity was going mainstream. Within a few years, you had Christopher Nolan's "Memento." You had David Lynch making "Mulholland Drive." I talked to Lynch when I was working on the book because I wanted to ask him about this whole question of nonlinearity, where it's coming from, why it's become popular. And what he said really suggested to me "television." And when you think about it, television is an extremely nonlinear experience. We're trained not to think of it this way. We're trained to think of discrete elements. We watch the TV show, there's a break, we watch the news, we watch some ads, we go back to the show. But in fact, this is an extremely disjointed and nonlinear experience. And then of course, you have the web coming in, a technology, a medium, that's essentially based on, because of hyperlinks, it's essentially based on the whole idea of nonlinearity. In 2005, Alissa Quart, a film critic writing in film comment, coined the term "hyperlink cinema." And a few months after that, Roger Ebert in a review of "Syriana" wrote, used the same term. And he wanted to give credit to Alissa Quart, but unfortunately as he pointed out, irony of ironies, "I've lost the link." [laughter] So, there's one more thing about the horse's carriage analogy. Not only does it lack a horse, but it's still a carriage. People are trying to construct at this point, with the internet, the equivalent of a purpose-built motor car. That's kind of where we are with storytelling right now. We know the parameters. We know that it encourages nonlinearity. It has to be participatory in some way. All of these things. But that doesn't tell us how to use these things. It doesn't tell you the grammar. We still have to create that. And this book that I've written it's really a meta-narrative about the search for this new grammar. For me, it's then really an extraordinary journey. And it began with three stories that I did for Wired over a period of a couple of years before I actually started the book and before I had even the idea for the book. The first one was a piece on 3D, for which I interviewed James Cameron in the fall of 2006. At that point "Avatar" had not yet been green lit. He had it in development. He had it in development for some time. He was in Montreal on a sound stage where they were making "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 3D, which was the first feature film to use the 3D camera system that he and Vince Pace had invented. So, I went up there and it turned out he had a lot of free time, which was great. And so, we talked about "Avatar” a fair amount. And in particular, he talked about that kind of science fiction story as one that was ideal for creating a "fractal-like complexity," as he put it. So, the casual viewer could just see the movie, but for the real fan, he could jump in another order of magnitude and the pattern would still hold up. Really, you could have stories of almost infinite levels of depth, immersive entertainment. Just like Star Wars has become. Of course, Star Wars was the movie that inspired Cameron to become a director in the first place. About a year after that, I did a story on "Year Zero," the alternate reality game. It was really a piece on the whole idea of alternate reality games and we picked that as the one to focus on. It was an incredibly immersive experience based on the Nine Inch Nails album called Year Zero. Trent Reznor had made this album and he had a problem. He essentially created a concept album, but at a time when nobody buys albums anymore and certainly they don't buy albums that come with liner notes and the like. So, his problem was what are you supposed to do? How do you even convey to people that this is a concept album, much less what the concept is? And in his case, it was a completely fascinating story about America as a theocratic police state 15 years in the future. So, he engaged Susan Bonds, who's the CEO of 42 Entertainment, who is here by the way. She's going to join us in a few minutes. And Alex Lieu, who works with her. And the result was a game that played out over a period of many months and to about two and a half million people. Alternate reality games like this really do blur the line. They blur the line between story and game. You have, essentially, a series of riddles and puzzles and treasure hunts, that unlike a story, which the players then tell to each other online. So in a sense, they become the owners of it. And at the same time, they blur the line between fiction and reality. You have real events taking place in a fictional world, except that it can't be fictional because we're in it. And it's not on-screen or on stage. It's happening all around us. Finally, it blurs the line between marketing and entertainment. It's fun, but it also builds a lot of excitement about whatever it is that it's connected to, whether it's Year Zero or subsequently, 42 did one for The Dark Knight. And in fact, one of the first alternate reality games was commissioned by Microsoft for the release of Halo 2. That was called "I Love Bees." And the person who did that, Chris DiCesare is also gonna join us in a few minutes. He was at Microsoft Games Studio at the time and he told me when I was interviewing him for the book that he thought he might get fired over this. He was spending a million dollars in an unproven medium for a marketing effort that he couldn't even admit existed. And yet, its success was supposed to be measured in the amount of publicity it drew. So, actually he didn't get fired, but he did end up at Google some time later. [audience chuckles] So, we'll hear from him. And finally, I did a story about a year after that about Hollywood getting into the whole idea of web video. This was as a result of the writer's strike largely. Film and television writers obviously doing the strike, they couldn't write for film or television, but they could write for the web. So, a lot of them did. And I came across a lot of people, or several people, who had started off as TV writers and they'd gone into video games, working for Activision, working for electronic arts, which of course is a huge studio in Playa Vista. And they were wondering how you could really combine the two. That's what their motivation was in doing this. And at the same time, there was another question, which was, how do you pay for these things? They didn't have a big enough audience really to be supported by conventional commercials. And the infrastructure for that wasn't even in place at that point anyway. So, what happened was you had a lot of product placement. You had what has come to be known as "branded entertainment," where brands and storytellers got together and did something. So we have a couple of people here also who are experts in that in one form or another. Paul Woolmington from Naked Communications, a branding agency that's based in London, has a big office here and many other places in the world. And Ted Hope, who's one of the leading indie producers in the US, indie film producers. He's produced such films as "21 Grams," "The Laramie Project," "American Splendor," and the list goes on. So, the final question I want to get back to is, why does all this matter? Why is storytelling so important? Why is it so basic to us? I think it's because stories put information in a framework. They're essentially processing mechanisms. They create a signal within the noise. And that's how we process information. We can--. We're capable of following instructions. We can use a recipe. We can go through a checklist. We can follow a set of instructions, but we're not really that good at it because we're not particularly methodical creatures. Instruction sets are essentially lists, and lists are very hard to learn. Stories are easy to learn because they're easy to grab on to. They're a way to store memories, which is why I think that it's fair to say that stories are to humans as algorithms are to machines. So, that's where we stand. It's 2011. We think we live on internet time, but that's really just things coming at us. It doesn't have anything to do with our ability to process it. And the truth is we're still groping towards something new. It's really an essential and completely exciting phase, I think. But we might as well be trying to make movies in 1911. You know, people were feeling pretty good about it back then, too. Nickelodeon is so 1908. It figured out movie stars. They'd mastered the jump cut and the fade. But spoken dialogue was still years away and color, it was hard to even imagine what color would look like. So, who's going to figure this one out? Who's going to take the next step; construct a new grammar of storytelling for us now? When we know that, I think we'll know how this meta-story is going to end. Thank you. [applause] [freight elevator sounds] [Frank Rose chuckles] >>Paul Woolmington: So, as we smoothly transition into this next part of the [chuckles]--. I'm Paul Woolmington of Naked Communications. And Frank has eloquently introduced all of us, so I'm not gonna do all those boring introductions. [freight elevator sounds in background] I feel like a giant lorry's about to crash through the--. Anyway, Janine asked if I would very informally moderate and all assist the conversation. And I think the rule number one is to really just keep out of the way and let the conversation flow. So, I just wanted to maybe kick off. And we'll try and leave a little time for obviously audience participation and I'm sure you've got some questions which might elaborate on Frank's early point. So, I just wanted to kick off with Susan. Susan, it occurred to me that you have been doing this, trying to figure this out for longer than most from what Frank was saying. Any observations from you where we stand today? Because we were just, even the discourse we had a little earlier, you were saying like, Twitter didn't exist but a few years ago and you were doing some of these amazing transmedia, whatever you wanna call it, narratives way before that. But just any observations from when you first started producing amazing nonlinear stories to where it stands today? >>Susan Bonds: Well, absolutely. So, I think it is really this kind of strange juxtaposition of the fact that storytelling is as old as anything that we can remember. And it's at a central part of our life and it's something that people don't have to teach us. We all know how to tell a story. I'm sure you guys can tell a good story here. So, it's like something that's really part of who we are and combining that with the fact that not only is technology moving at a rapid pace, but also the way we interact as a society, the way we interact in our social groups, the way we interact with each other, the fact that we're now all connected, which is something I don't have to explain to this room. So, I think that we tried to approach it from the viewpoint of wherever we are, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to tell a story that connects people. And the fact that we are so connected actually is an opportunity in itself. The one thing that was true ten years ago, and is true today, is that the web gives you instant feedback. So, as a creative storyteller, you have to deal with that. And when you let people into your world and into your story, you then have to deal with their expectations. So, I think overall, if you look over the past decade, people's expectations have grown significantly. [audience member's phone alarm beeps] And now, what used to be surprising and novel is expected. And if you don't do that, then bad mark on you. So, it's interesting to see how things have evolved and I don't know if you guys probably felt like I did when you saw the social network. It's like, that was 2004? [laughs lightly] Oh, my God. It's like the world has changed so fast and again, what happens here at Google it's like keeping up with it is in one sense it's challenging, but in the other sense it's natural. This is a natural evolution. That's why anybody can do it. It's because it's just the way things are going. >>Paul Woolmington: Chris, do you? >>Chris Di Cesare: The thing that I think is interesting is just as time has gone on, how brands have learned how they have to accept the consumer participation dialogue in the process. And I worked a lot on YouTube. One of the stories that I remember--and this is a little different than storytelling but it goes back to that--I remember that whole Diet Coke Mentos spots, when those videos first appeared and they, how the brands dealt with that so differently. Like, Mentos just shipped boxes of Mentos to the guys behind it, where Diet Coke was like, "OK, we gotta stop this. We have this. [Ted Hope and Paul Woolmington laugh] They're fucking with our brand over here. We can't have that." So, and I think brands now, they have to figure out how to have them participate in that process. It's just an evolution. >>Paul Woolmington: It was an interesting inflection point, wasn't it? That classic people going white-knuckles in the Coke board room. And Mentos on the opposite were like, they were going, "Yay! We're the little guys." >>Chris Di Cesare: Exactly. >>Paul Woolmington: And the Coke guys going, "Oh my God, what exploding Coke." I'm gonna quote from Frank's book, a lovely little quote that I actually used in presentation, I was telling him. "In a command and control world, we know who is telling the story, it's the author. But digital media and this new era has created an authorship crisis. Once the audience is free to step into the fiction and start directing events, the entire edifice of the 20th Century mass media begins to crumble." But I-I- Ted, you've been deeply involved and obviously working with writers and incredible directors and actors. I just wondered, what excites you about this blurred line between audience and author? Any comments? Any thoughts about how that inflection point has changed your world, or might? >>Ted Hope: Quite a few. It's interesting, I think, that the brands are actually far more progressive than the artists or authors are. In terms of what's attracted me to whether it's transmedia, deep media, storytelling, part of it is trying to confront the superabundance of stories, of content that's out there. Friends of mine who worked in the film festival submission world clocked it at around, they thought that around about 45 thousand titles are generated a year. >>Paul Woolmington: Wow. >>Ted Hope: Forty-five thousand titles and the US market currently is thought to be able to consume about 600 theatrical titles a year, of which 125 are studios. Which means that the available market share for the world supply is 1% a year of the world's supply. And that's this year. Next year, there's still another 44,400 films that weren't seen. So, it's down to 0.55%. And then you look at how fast the past is digitized on top of that. You could live,you could say today, "I wanna live in 1968," and do that more fully than you could in 1968 and just see content from that. [Paul Woolmington laughs] As a filmmaker and as an artist, how do I get my films seen? And to think that the feature film form, even quality storytelling, even corporately-backed quality storytelling is enough to get traction with the global audience is foolish. The one advantage I have to somebody like Kurosawa, a far better storyteller than I, is that I'm not dead. >>Paul Woolmington: You've got one advantage. >>Ted Hope: That's it. I can make my stories penetrate deeper in many different ways, but when I start talking to the directors and writers that I work with and I say, "You know? This bit of the script, I don't actually think we should provide that plot point. I think we should keep it a little open-ended here and not try to spell this out so that later we can have an opening to go back to." They kinda look at me and, "who goes back [Paul Woolmington laughs] to do that?" "What are you talking about?" "Well, maybe it's gonna be someone in the audience, that goes --." And it just stops. And it's so hard to try to start to get people to start to look at like, how do we start making these films be a two-way street where there's a place that people can participate? >>Paul Woolmington: Frank, I mean, I'd love to bring you back in at this point on that; the blurred line between author and audience. I mean, at what point will there be an inflection point on the demise of the mass media 'cause obviously we've got a lot of Googlers here? >>Frank Rose: Right. I think that if anything, the people who are doing the kind of thing that I'm talking about often err on the side of abdicating the storytelling. And the people, as you were saying, Ted, who are more used to doing a much more traditional form of storytelling take it the opposite way. I think that the only reason that people become interested in a story in the first place is because it's a great story, whether it's Star Wars, whether it's Avatar, whether it's Harry Potter. The question, the trick really becomes how do you balance that and how do you leave out things that you were saying, Ted. How do you leave openings for the audience to come in? I had this conversation with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse when I was interviewing them for the book. They were the show runners, of course, of Lost. And what they said was that they felt that the show gave the illusion of interactivity, but in fact wasn't really. But in a way that wasn't entirely true because what happened with that story, I mean, number one, that was an extremely controlled bit of storytelling. It went on for six years. It was an extremely selective release of information. And it was so complicated that essentially what happened was the audience had to get together online just to figure out what the story was. >>Paul Woolmington: Yeah. >>Frank Rose: So, you had things like Lostpedia, which was specifically founded by, started by some guy who, in Anchorage, Alaska, who had watched the entire first season in a couple of nights before the second season started. And then he watched the first show of the second season and he had a complete WTF moment. [laughter] And so, he went online to find out what was going on and he didn't find anything except a few discussion threads. And so, he decided to start a wiki on it. And he was familiar enough with the Wikipedia software that he had it up and running in about six hours. And now it's in 19 or 20 languages. There are thousands of articles. It's extraordinary. >>Paul Woolmington: Yeah. No, that's great. Chris, I was gonna bring you in at this point a bit more that having worked obviously at Microsoft, having been a marketeer, having I guess also participated in creating something with Susan back along. I was just wondering what do you think that computer and video games, why that had such a disruptive influence on the overall entertainment industry? 'Cause obviously, we still talk about Hollywood--and of course everyone knows the statistic-- Hollywood gets the lion's share of the ink, but gaming has long since passed it in terms of gross revenues. And how is that obviously changing the way we do things? >>Chris Di Cesare: I think video games are just the evolution of our time. I mean, first and foremost it just puts you at the center of the experience. So, being able to live that role provides that degree of immersiveness that I think everyone's striving towards. I mean, I think that's touched on in the book. Like, everyone wants go deeper, get closer to the characters and so forth. And it's one of these things where I think people in video games admire the storytellers in Hollywood and the Hollywood guys kinda go, "Oh, I wanna be more, kinda closer to the game." And they both battle it out to figure out which way it's going. I think in gaming in general, just as technology is advanced, you're able to add. the characters have had more dimension to them so that, like a category unto itself, like a shooter, right? In the past, all the shooters were the same, just blow things up. But now, you're able to tell more richer, deeper stories. And I think that was the thing like on Halo, the property I was involved with. It was similar to Star Wars in a way where they didn't think of themselves as creating a game. They were thinking of creating a universe, first and foremost, that people could play in. And I think now as technology has advanced, you can see that get closer to the characters. And you see it happen when a video game can now sell, have bestselling books and so forth. They wanna get closer to it. >>Paul Woolmington: Susan, just to pick up on that because obviously a lot the activities you've created have a lot of play. I mean, clearly there's players inherent in everything that you're doing, but how do, do you codify this? Do you think about these spurs, these behavioral spurs? Or, is it sort of? Tell us a little bit about the creative process that you go through. I mean, are there any examples you can give, or whether you have methodologies that you use at these different inflection points? >>Susan Bonds: Well, so just to echo what Chris is saying, I think when you watch a story and you see the knight save the village or get the girl, it's like, "Well, I wanna be that person. I wanna be the hero of the story." I mean, we all remember The Matrix when Neo got the package and he ripped it open and there's a phone and it says, "Follow the white rabbit." And you're like, "I wanna do that." And that was one of our goals was just to essentially create that moment, that Matrix moment, where the phone rings, you're given instructions and then you're off. You have no idea where you're going. So, as part of the Year Zero project that Frank was mentioning, we had created a world that was obviously being sent back in pieces, 15 years from the future. And the players were deciphering it and putting it together. What's the vision of this world? In a way, it was like narrative archeology. We're getting these shards, these little bits of glimpses of digital media that are reflective of the society of the day. Well, what were those people like? What are the issues they're dealing with? And as part of that, we wanted to transfer that somehow a sense of urgency to today. So, one of the things that we did is that we introduced the idea that in the future, you were gonna lose things that were very basic to you. And that one of the ways that people were fighting back was through art. And one of the messages was the fact that you have a voice and you don't have to necessarily agree with me, but you just need to speak up. And this was something that people could hold on to that had relevance for them. So, I think that in the video game genre, you can be the hero, but if you can somehow make it relevant to the point where you now see the world through the game layer, or the alternate reality or whatever it is that you put over it, then you have a win because you're really giving people a different point of reference which they have a very personal connection to. It's like, "Well, I'm the hero of this story and it's making me think about this." And so, I think that's a good example of how if you create that personal moment, I do agree that there has to be a balance between a story that you're, I would say this, a world that you're creating that's fully realized in detail that people can play. And then you give them a path through that or give them the tools to really add value to the world. >>Paul Woolmington: Yeah, Ted? >>Ted Hope: It's curious. The films that I've done are independent films, which probably the best way to describe it is really in personal tales, real life, raw emotion. And as I've wanted to explore a different way of telling stories, I've moved more into some genre topics of superheroes and horror, mostly because it's in sci-fi. It allows you more free reign, but I've continued to try to strive to try to figure out how you can expand beyond a feature film narrative within a more traditional story. And a lot of the films that I've made have had unsympathetic characters at their center, that I've always been drawn to how films create empathy, how you can start to understand somebody who you normally wouldn't ever want to be in contact with in other situations. And as I start to push the writers and directors that I work with to really try to consider a multi-platform mode of storytelling, we often will say, "OK, do these supporting characters. Can we do a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern device and focus a little bit on a supporting character?" We had a film this year that won Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival called "Martha Marcy May Marlene." And it's a story of a young woman who had been abducted into a cult. And as the movie opens, she escapes and reunites with her sister who she was estranged from, but her mind's been blown and she's suspecting the cult's coming to get her. And well, you'll have to go see the movie when it comes out this fall. [laughter] But before we ever did that, I kept pushing the filmmakers to try to write five short pieces about the different members of the cult. I got one done. But we made a short film. And kinda it's curious when you think of the different levels of audiences. Some audiences want to drill down really deep and really engage. For me, as a producer, my audiences frequently start with the financiers. And then the actors. And then the distributors. How do I reach them? And so, this short was made for the audience of the film festivals in some ways. We made this short film with some of the characters we cast in the feature film in the same story world that we later made the feature in. And it went to Sundance. It went to the New York Film Festival. It won a prize in Cannes. And that's exactly the path that the feature now is going because it introduced, it was the discovery mechanism for that audience of how they came to discover this filmmaker and this story. And I think that trying to come up with ways that we do it in a non-genre context where it isn't the glimpse of a futuristic world, or the threat, or things that run on more gaming principles. How do we encourage engagement across platform without necessarily using game mechanics is another place where there's gonna be a lot of growth and a lot of soul searching in some ways of trying to figure out. So, if you can figure that part out, Susan. [laughter] >>Paul Woolmington: Susan? >>Susan Bonds: Wow. So, I think of, I understand what you're saying about telling personal stories and certainly about unsympathetic characters, but we've always tried to, and this isn't a game theory, this is a storytelling principle, it's like, "We'll figure out something that resonates with everyone." For example, when I was working with Chris and we were talking about Halo, it was more than just--. Well, first of all they had built this fully-realized world. So if it's how to make it personal to us. And the idea came up about telling a War of the Worlds story because we've all thought of that moment of what if something unexpected happens? What do you do? How do you handle it? Obviously, that was the whole beauty of War of the Worlds is it felt like it was really happening. So, how do we take that and modernize it? And-- >>Ted Hope: But I would actually say that the whole beauty, and I think this is something that Frank hits in his book, is actually that it was a trick, which made it a story that we could pass on. So, my son knows of War of the Worlds as a prank. And that's so exciting to him that somebody could've pranked the nation. >>Susan Bonds: Pranked the nation. [laughter] I think Google could prank the nation. I'm waiting for that. [laughter] >>Chris Di Cesare: But the thing is, I think, like a lot of it is the--. So, in the ARGs or in the War of the Worlds premise as a whole, what's interesting is that you have this umbrella story, but the real thing that drives it is not the story itself I find, but the stories from the participants and their engagement, their involvement in the actual process. Like, for the I Love Bees thing, people, they didn't talk about like what was the story that they talked about like War of the Worlds. It was more like, "Well, there's this guy who's battling a hurricane in order to get to a pay phone in order to pick up the phone 'cause the story had to go on." These human stories became what drove it because it was a unique way of telling stories. >>Paul Woolmington: Frank, any thoughts on that? >>Frank Rose: I think that, I mean, one of the things I was really fascinated by when I was working on the book was I did a series of interviews with Howard Roffman, who's in charge of the Star Wars Expanded Universe at Lucas Film. And essentially, although we didn't exactly talk about it in these terms, what we got into was a whole idea of story worlds. I mean, that's a phrase that's become a bit more popularized now. But what he was saying was that George Lucas, when he was first making the films, when he started making the films, he created this, what Lucas called an "immaculate reality." He realized every detail. And he didn't do that, Howard pointed out, because he thought you could spin stories off of it, spin more stories off of it. He did it because that's what you have to do in order to make something seem real when the whole thing is made-up, when there is no Planet Tatooine, there are no moisture farmers-- >>Susan Bonds: What? [laughter] >>Frank Rose: I'm sorry. [laughter] We'll talk later. But ultimately what happened was that because the world that he created was so incredibly rich in detail, it meant that there were all of these sort of handholds that you could grab onto and use to spin more stories off of. I was just fascinated by that. I always thought that was a great--. >>Paul Woolmington: Frank and I played this game a little while ago, a month or so ago, and I just wanted to bring Ted in on this one. OK. In a storytelling duel, who in your opinion would win, Dickens, Lucas, Spielberg, or J.J. Abrams? [Ted laughs] Or you can add who you think could--. >>Ted Hope: It's, I think in the same sort of way, the folks who make the biggest myths, whether it's the Grimm Brothers, Greek mythology, the Bible, any of those things that allow people to take for themselves and spin again, works really well. So, the folks that were a little less hung up on their own authorship, I think, actually probably wins because they generate more stories, whether they're the pen or not would be my argument. So, maybe not those folks at all. Folks who had maybe a slight lesser output themselves, but allowed other people to take those tales and run with it. And I think it's, part of the problem is that we still hold up these big storytelling Gods and link their name. And yet, in terms of the filmmakers, for the most part, you could argue that what Lucas later, ultimately what Lucas has created, extends well beyond the features in a much stronger way. But the dominance of the feature film form as a prime financial vehicle, I think, has limited people's ability to launch new characters, to not launch new worlds. And as we start to, as filmmakers loosen up and can see themselves more as a brand that can speak in different formats across different genres in different time lengths. They can put out all of these little pieces. And to me, the beauty of a story that you start today, but I don't actually plan to finish or actually make my main component of it for 15 years from now, that to me is a great challenge and a great glory. That's the duel that I'd love to challenge those great masters to 'cause they were stuck in a dominant form. And I think that right now, we're at the point where that's really breaking down. In terms of film, the dominance of the feature film, I think, has ended. We haven't seen the results of it, but we're right there. That's what has occurred over the last couple years. >>Paul Woolmington: An observation to pick up on what you were saying is, inherent in what you were saying, is we have this muscle memory that's built into all of ourselves. And we have this sense of control. Part of that is this sense of ownership and/or control. But how do we release this muscle memory? Is it just gonna happen through the participation of audiences? Through the loosening of social media 'cause people are gonna change the way their behavior acts? Is it gonna happen from ground up, so to speak? I mean, is that what we're seeing? I mean, Susan, what are your thoughts on the muscle memory issue 'cause you've probably come up against it many times,how to break through. >>Susan Bonds: Definitely. I mean, I love movies. I'll just have to tell you that. I mean, I think when we were growing up, it's like we all have had that experience where we lost ourself in a world. And I think one of the things that all the people certainly on that list have is this. We've all left their media daydreaming in those worlds because they were so fully realized. We could actually put ourselves in it. So, I actually think, and someone has said this before, that I think it's the meeting in the middle. We still need great storytellers and I think YouTube has probably proven without a shadow of a doubt that we're not all great storytellers. [laughter] Can I say that authoritatively? >>Chris Di Cesare: You can say that. >>Susan Bonds: OK. >>Chris Di Cesare: There's a few. >>Susan Bonds: So, we need this creative force coming and bringing these fully realized worlds to us. But I also agree adamantly with Ted, which is, if these creative forces can loosen up a little bit, there's ways to let people into your world that really can add value. And so, I think Ted mentioned that War of the Worlds told over pay phones was a trick, but that's how we got everybody's attention. That how we got above the noise. 'Cause sometimes, you can have a great idea, but you still gotta get people to know about it. >>Ted Hope: But my point was the pleasure was that it was a trick. That people love that in terms of like, that moment that they guy had in Anchorage, Alaska, a place where you don't get to go out and certain things are still legal, [Frank Rose laughs] so you have other things that help lead you to that kind of WTF moment. [Susan Bonds laughs] >>Frank Rose: Right. >>Ted Hope: We've reached a point, I think, in our muscle memory of how we receive stories. My ten-year old looks at Dr. Who and says, "Oh, I understand the code." [panel members laugh heartily] And I'm like, "What?" It’s like, "I understand the story code." He's like-- >>Paul Woolmington: How old is he? >>Ted Hope: Yeah, like, that was like, how I understood OK, you don't watch whatever the children series was. And you're going to have to start watching Torchwood once you get two digits? [Paul Woolmington laughs] It's like, you're breaking it down too fast. But that fact that we still do tell stories as we did a hundred years ago in the movies, in the beginning, middle, and an end. We recognize it when we see the hand gun in the first act. It will go off in the third. And we understand that's way too programmed and we no longer want that from that entertainment. We need to have engineer the WTF moments when someone says, "Oh my God. It's someone who's insane who's directing this." How great is that? >>Frank Rose: Right. >>Paul Woolmington: Chris? >>Chris Di Cesare: I'm sorry, Frank. >>Frank Rose: Yeah, I think that if I can go back to Lost again, another thing that I had in this discussion with Damon and Carleton was that they said that when fans come up to them and wanted to talk about the show, they basically got two reactions. And one was they wanted to be reassured that the producers knew where the story was going. That it was actually going to go somewhere. And the other was that they wanted to have some sense that they, the fans, could actually influence the story. And as Damon and Carlton said, these two impulses are actually kind of contradictory except that they're not entirely contradictory. The conversation bore out essentially. What came out was that because television is such an iterative process, a TV series, unlike a movie where obviously the whole thing is made before anyone sees it. But with the television shows, especially one that lasts over a period of years, there is a chance for the audience to provide feedback if the producers are listening. And certainly in the case of Lost, Damon and Carlton were listening. And the example they gave me was these two low-lifes, Nikki and Paulo, who appeared in I think it was the middle of Season Three. And that was before they had managed to set an end date for the series. So, the producers had no idea how long the show was gonna have to go on and how long they were gonna have to spin this out. And so, they introduced these characters and the audience viewers just went, "Wait a minute. We've been watching this show for two and a half years and suddenly two new survivors show up?" Number one. And number two, "We don't like these people at all. They're slimy and get them out of here." >>Susan Bonds: Rejected. >>Frank Rose: Right. So, the fans rejected, the audience rejected the new characters. And what Carlton said was they listened to this. They heard this. And they said, "OK, you want us to get rid of these people. All right. We'll not only kill them, we'll fucking bury them alive." And that's what they did in the show. [laughter] >>Chris Di Cesare: It's funny. One thing around that in terms of participation, like sometimes you can let the people driving the experience can listen too closely and that can screw you up, too. >>Frank: Right. >>Chris Di Cesare: Like, the first ARG, The Beast was this program that we did where you end up like the vocal minority. Of course, it's going to give you more feedback then you'll ever wanna deal with. And then you start chasing after the pleas that point zero zero one percent of the audience and then you end up alienating everyone else. So, I think that's one of the biggest challenges in this participatory way. As, how do you balance with the audience, even the guy who doesn't speak up? But they probably outnumber the people that do. >>Frank Rose: Right. Exactly. And another example of this is Dickens, who of course wrote all of his novels as serials. They came out monthly. And he had barely finished writing one series of chapters before he had to start on the next one. And so, that was a very iterative process as well. And he listened very carefully to his readership. He didn't always do what they wanted him to do. In "The Old Curiosity Shop," when it became apparent little Nell was not really going to make it much longer, people went nuts. And there were practically riots on the street. There was a ship that landed in New York from England. This was a time when information traveled a little more slowly than it does now. And it was met on the docks by a crowd of people saying, "Is little Nell dead?" [laughter] And so, in that case, obviously, Dickens did not listen to his readership. He knew what would make a good story. And he knew that as much as his readers said they didn’t want little Nell to die, secretly they did. [panel members chuckle] And, but there were other stories where at times when the story wasn't going as well, like "Martin Chuzzlewit" for example, when he did listen very carefully to the audience, to the readers. And so, I think that's part of it. You have to know when to listen and when not to. >>Paul Woolmington: I have to weave marketing in here a little bit because obviously it's interesting. My observation is that there's a dearth of good work coming out of the marketing industry around, you know, liberating themselves out of the way they've always done things. Why do we think that is? Is it again back to the same old adage that you've got the same people with the same sort of muscle memory producing the work? And what is it gonna take to break out of that? Is it gonna require just different types of teams? And again, I know you've touched on this a little bit, Susan, but you obviously must work in a very creative environment but with really interesting multidisciplined--. And I was also taken with what Chris was saying was 'cause also this level and the attention to detail and the sort of detail that you need to go through is unlike the sort of detail that we tend to look at when you're producing marketing campaigns. And so, it's this different way of actually building this whole ecosystem of, and also having that flexibility to respond to things and not quite knowing where you're gonna need to go. But you've got the people and the resources, or you're gonna jump on it, which again, is simply marketeers and more traditional storytellers often aren't flexible. So, that's quite a long question, but it was weave in the whole marketing thing. >>Susan Bonds: Well, coincidentally, where we started was how can we do something to get the attention of the marketing adverse? We now have the ability to program our lives. When we were first start talking about content to come out on the web in the '90s, we were like, "Oh, we'll just make programs and put them online and at 8 o'clock on Tuesday people will show up." Well, people don't show up because the internet is theirs, right? And you can do whatever you want with it. Your phone is yours. Your tablet. It's like, I can program my life. I can TiVo. I can whatever. So, I think that if you look at the discontinuity or the sea change that's happened, I think taking too long to embrace it is going to be fatal, right? So, one thing is to recognize that the sea has changed. So that's number one. And then number two is like, I think what we have seen with the marriage of entertainment and marketing is that if you can take what is the great attributes of the core property and you can extend that out. And it's now possible to do. There's no better marketing in the world. It's like, "Let's let people experience what your world or story is." And that requires a tremendous different type of set-up than a traditional ad agency. >>Paul Woolmington: Well, and it's something we're working on at Naked actually. It's I think psychology as long since understood since Freud was out and cognitive behavioral psychology is in. And yet, a lot of marketing still follows this theory of Freud theory, which is keep asking the question "why?" and we're gonna reflect as opposed to--. And I think what it's doing and essentially it's one of the marketing golden rules was AIDA, Awareness drives Interest drives Desire drives Action. But actually, the whole thing has now been flipped on its head. And if you follow cognitive behavioral strategy or psychology and you say, "It's all about actions. It's all about these actions which actually drive interest, desire, and then probably awareness." In that fashion. So, I think that's also having a huge impact on the way in which--. And of course the digital age is social media or digital is the perfect place for action, but it's how do we then take that action into the traditional media and things like that? >>Ted Hope: I think what really starts to change is where we really start to place the value on the communities that we create around our stories. You know, much in the way Chris was saying with Bees and everything. People wanted to hear the stories other people told. That's what kept bringing them back was the social component. And when we do that, we get a little bit more distance from being on-point, on-message. I have, a couple times, been able to get the marketing departments in the film industry it's a real problem because no one wants to give up any piece of their budget. On "Adventureland," a movie I did a couple years back, we were able to get the marketing department of Miramax to give us money to shoot additional content. We were in an amusement park. We had young actors who were booked for the run of the show. And I got like two funnier guy directors to come aboard and just well, invent stuff. And we made training videos for the amusement park from the period. >>Paul Woolmington: Brilliant. >>Ted Hope: And we made a documentary. One of the characters ran around hitting everyone in the balls and we did an anthropological look at the different ways it's done and all of that. And we deliver this stuff that was very funny. [laughter] Miramax looked at it and they said, "This is not on-message. This is not on-point. We don't know what to do." And I think that-- [laughter] >>Paul Woolmington: Yeah. >>Ted Hope: as we start to recognize the community, we also recognize I'm not on-message all the time. I don't need it. I still like to go back to that world. I relate to that character, not the one that was punching in the balls. The other, the Jesse Eisenberg one I related more to. But, and it gives us that reason. If we put the value, if we say, "We built this huge two and a half million people for Batman, we're not gonna let them go. We're gonna keep them there and feed them more things." >>Susan Bonds: And actually, it was actually 11 million people who participated in The Dark Knight because people wanna live in Gotham City. And there were six decades of dreaming about it. But I do think what you're saying is incredibly important, which is the internet has provided us a tool to be very targeted. So like, I watched Lost because I wanted Jack and Kate to get together, obviously. [laughter] Which I was able to clearly influence the writers to make happen. But I mean, like other people are watching for completely different reasons. And so, I think it gives you the ability to say, "OK, well you're watching for this reason, you for that one." We can give content to you that's not a trillion dollars and we can make you feel like, "Oh, yeah. They're validating why I think this material is cool. This world is cool." >>Paul Woolmington: So, I'm gonna ask the panel one more question and then you guys please think of some really smart questions 'cause I'll then open it. Janine , are we good on time? >>Janine: Yeah. >>Paul Woolmington: Yeah, great. I just wanted to ask each of you, who's inspiring you at the moment? Or, what's inspiring you? Maybe not just who, but what's inspiring you in what you're doing and how you're thinking about new things, new books to write, Frank, or work you're doing at Google, Chris. And I'd just love to--. Maybe I'll start with Frank 'cause you've got a furtive mind and you're interviewing people. Is it who or is it what? >>Frank Rose: Sure. I mean, this is sort of odd, but I find that there's a whole generation for which the stuff that we're talking about and trying to sort out just comes entirely naturally. And a few weeks ago, I had brunch with this guy who was down from Boston who had just graduated from BU. His name is Nate Goldman. And he had done a, he had spent two years as an undergrad, putting together for no credit or anything this War of the Worlds type zombie experience [panel members chuckle]that took place over a variety of different media. Primarily, his college radio station. Also he got people to dress up in the streets and all kinds of stuff. And to him, this was just utterly natural. This was just how you would do something like that. He did it without any particular resources, except for access to the radio station. He had never heard of transmedia or Henry Jenkins or my book or anything until after it was over. [more chuckling] And I thought that was brilliant. [laughter] I thought this is, in a way, in my wildest dreams I'm John the Baptist. [laughter] >>Paul Woolmington: Chris. >>Chris Di Cesare: One thing, I guess who I'm really impressed by. One thing on YouTube that I'm like, amazed by is that where the top partners on YouTube, these guys who create these web series are amazing to me because not only do they have to create the content, they have to market the content. They have to basically become this A-B-C, but they're sitting in their bedroom creating all this. [Paul Woolmington chuckles] And some of them now are making big bucks. I mean, so just this and it's the same thing, they probably have no idea when they started that that was they were gonna become a network unto themselves. But people now that know that they not only create the content, but how to foster and grow a community, I'm just amazed by. >>Paul Woolmington: Susan. >>Susan Bonds: So, just to echo what these guys are saying, I think for me, what is inspiring to me is actually seeing people go after these sacred silos and saying, "Well, I'm not going to do it like that. I'm going to do it differently." And I mean, I look at, I think they do quality programming at HBO, but they're also thinking about what is it people really want. And they're launching things that give people access to content that is counterintuitive. You're like, "Well, if we give them access to next week's episode this week, then who's gonna come back and watch it next week?" But in fact, they're just feeding the frenzy because people feel like, "Oh. We are somehow participating in all this quality entertainment that's coming out." But I think the thing I'm really looking for is what we're saying, which is someone who is not in any way, no one foot, toe, finger, whatever, stuck to the notion of traditional media models. They're just like, 'Well, we're just gonna do it like this." And then everyone's gonna look and go, "Oh yeah. We were stuck over here so we couldn't see that, but now that we see it, we can all go for that." >>Ted Hope: There's a lot of great work that's being done out there that inspires me on a daily basis. The thing that I struggle with most and what I'm always looking for is the folks who are willing to slow down to try to tell a big story that in the independent world, people write this script and then they think they can make a movie right away. I've been working for about three years with a filmmaker named Lance Wiler, who is in some ways the most famous filmmaker that nobody knows. But we've been doing a transmedia build, working a long time on the script to make sure that the story element of it truly holds up and has enough openings in it at the same time that it can last for a much bigger world. And along the way, he's been willing to do what he calls a lot of "story R&D," things that he, whether they're events or installations or films or apps. Putting things out into the community, letting people play with it. Some of this, Frank touches in his book, emergent storytelling, emergent game play, really not needing to succeed in making a masterwork of art at an early stage, but willing to let, let's see how people play with it and try to adapt that. But really the part that for all of this tons of visionary whatever he did at age 15, it didn't come my way in pill form. I really wish that I had gotten hold of, but the thing that's really most impressive to me is the willingness to, like, I don't have to produce it overnight. I don't need to be proclaimed a genius. I don't need to win the Sundance Film Festival and get picked up. I can actually try to manage something. I'm gonna engage a lot of people and I'm gonna depend on the crowd for us to try to get it right. That to me is very inspiring. >>Paul Woolmington: Yeah. No, that's great. My only comment would be to celebrate the brilliant misfits that sort of--. That's what we try and say at Naked is we're always trying to hire the brilliant misfits. Clearly, everyone wants brilliant people, but-- >>Ted Hope: Good listing. [laughter] >>Paul Woolmington: Yeah, but anyway. That's a nice segue because I know that there's, I think, some friends of Google in the audience and certainly I think there's a number of people from, I think, brilliant misfits in the audience 'cause I've had the pleasure of working with the Creative Lab and some of the amazing people are working there. So, I'd love to throw it open to the audience to obviously ask anyone any questions. I think there are microphones here, or we're a relatively small audience, so just shout your question out if you've got any. Please. >>FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: I was talking that I work with Lance and I've worked with him on a couple of projects and he definitely gives up authorship and he starts small, which is fantastic. So, he's always tweaking things as he's going through a process. I work for OgilvyEntertainment on trying to harness social media and gaming for social change. And a wall I come up against daily is that social change isn't really exciting to audiences at their core. What's exciting to people is conflict. But obviously, I'm working with big brands and brands don't want to be associated with conflict. So, what do you think about that? >>Susan Bonds: Well, I think that's--. I mean, obviously lots of people are always coming to us saying, "How can we use this for good?" And going back to where we were able to see in Year Zero, was you can't tell people what to care about, but you can set up a construct through which they see the world through different eyes. But you're really at a conflict yourself, because you just pointed it out. 'Cause great storytelling has conflict. So, you can't really put someone else in someone else's shoes unless you create that drama. So, I mean, I believe in that entertainment, like we've seen it. There's a million examples we can point to, films that made us think differently about the world or an issue or a situation. So, I think that this media is as well. You have to stick true to good quality storytelling. You have to put people in the world in the situation in the story. And you can't just expect them because it's for good. You can't tell them what to care about. We can't tell you people what to care about either. You know what I'm saying? It's like, "No, we're just gonna think for ourselves." So what you can do is bring them into a world of story where they experience it personally and it changes the way they see the world. That's my two cents. >>Paul Woolmington: Question in the back. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: [ inaudible; off the microphone ] just to go back to what he was talking about this idea of building stories to go through the times, starting small and taking longer to create, which obviously sounds fantastic. But who's investing in those types of projects? Who has this sort of vision to be able to back those types of eyes and are allowed to get on with their craft but over like a two, three, or even perhaps a four year period? >>Ted Hope: Yeah, I wish I knew that answer. [laughter] >>Susan Bonds: Did you get their telephone number? >>Ted Hope: It's hard. Particularly in the tech world, there's always ways to raise funds for experiment and innovation. And it's a lot harder in the content business for that. I think that part of the problem we're also relying on a financial model that is, again, based on generally the feature film dominance or ad-based television. So, how do we start to move to something else? 'Cause certainly if I can bring a community together that stays together over a long period of time and all I'm doing is selling them a ticket, or a download, to a movie, I'm not a very good businessperson. If I can find people's liked interests I should be able to drive a fair amount of different forms of commerce through that community. I think that part of the problem is we're probably still all looking at old revenue models for it as opposed to something that's more of a new revenue model. If we're bringing people together and they're responding to the things that we like, they're revealing a great deal of data that's useful to a lot of different people, too. >>Paul Woolmington: Chris. >>Susan Bonds: I actually think, too, that this is an opportunity because you don't have to open a movie on opening weekend to get your world out there. You can do things on much smaller platforms and start building an audience. And that is a huge way in for a lot of people that didn't have a way in before. So, I think it's a big opportunity. >>Ted Hope: I mean, if you look at Marvel and DC, basically comics were a great inexpensive way for character generation and testing. Had they had the business plans that they would become the big entertainment entities that they are today, I don't know if anyone would've believed them. Like, "This is what we're going to do, is publish on cheap pulp paper for 40 years and then we're going to make a hundred million dollar celluloid things." [laughter] >>Paul Woolmington: Stan Lee, yeah. An interesting observation I think is that--and I hate to plug another book--but there's a book by a friend called Peter Sims and it's "Small Bets." And have a read of it. And I think it's just interesting him talking a lot about small bets. We have this tendency in Hollywood and in marketing and what's the big idea, you know? Everyone's looking for this big idea. And actually, the greatest successes of today were these iterative successes where they place small bets and they made mistakes and learnt by their mistakes. And that's the theory behind the book and it's just this notion of how you experiment. You were talking a little bit about the loosening yourself up into that experimentation mode, but I think we're gonna see so many more amazing business plans come out of small bets and being able to lose, but lose small but learn from it. I think that's interesting. >>Chris Di Cesare: Yeah, just to add on that, I just think that that's the beauty of the web in the fact that costs are coming down. And I think it's where people can produce their own short stories or films and tell their own stories in a way that you could never--. The barriers of entry are just so different. And if you can find an audience then it goes from there. So, it's about if you get the momentum behind you, I think they sky's the limit. >>Paul Woolmington: Well, are there any other burning questions? Any other burning questions? Yes. >>FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: I was wondering what your views are on the anonymity of authorship on the internet. And for instance, there's recently the guy that was supposedly like a lesbian somewhere and he was actually some married guy in Sweden and how we're being tricked into things, that what we should do about that and how we can get around the deficiency? >>Paul Woolmington: Anyone want to take that? Frank? [laughter] >>Frank Rose: I would just like to point out that on the internet, everybody knows you're a dog. [laughter] As with the purported lesbian who, it comes out soon enough. I don't know. I think that's another example of the kind of blur that I was talking about. It's obviously impossible to make sure that everybody is exactly who they say they are. And I suppose in some way, that's part of its charms. >>Susan Bonds: Well, I definitely have an answer for that in terms of creative content, which is don't perpetrate a hoax because people will find you out. And I think that what you end up being and like what we've always tried to do is provide a clever way to invite people into the story that's buzz generating and cool. So then they go, "Oh, well I saw that and I did that." But once people are like, trying to debunk you, the internet has infinite resources. They will figure it out and as in this case-- >>Chris Di Cesare: Yeah. >>Susan Bonds: they'll figure it out. So, don't start that way because you will get figured. Like, did everyone see the movie Catfish? I mean, like other than being also sad, but I mean, it's also like you will get found out. So, don't throw down the gauntlet because somebody will pick it up. >>Ted Hope: Or program the hoax into it at all times. Like, that’s the point that should be exposed. >>Paul Woolmington: The reveal. >>Susan Bonds: I don't think you can program the hoax into it the whole time, but that's not in this day and time. Not since Google. [laughter] >>Ted Hope: No, but the fact that it's going to be discovered is part of the--. >>Paul Woolmington: Well, on that moment, just as the discussion was just about to get heated. Susan and Ted were about to--. Anyway, I'd like to first and foremost, thank Frank. Well, firstly, thank Google for hosting this event. Mega thanks to Janine and the team at Creative Labs and everyone for coming out on a hot, steamy day to be in a nice, air-conditioned lovely catered venue. I thank Frank, "The Art of Immersion." I think everyone's got a free copy of the book. Amazing book. I've read it twice now and I'm giving it away to all my friends and I think it's gonna run and run. Thanks Frank, Chris, Susan, and Ted for being great panelists and for just stimulating the debate. Thank you everyone. [applause]

Plot

During a murder investigation in Cardiff, police officer Gwen Cooper spies on a group of five people called Torchwood, led by Captain Jack Harkness, exiting an SUV. One member, Suzie, uses a metal gauntlet to temporarily bring the victim to life and talk to him. Gwen flees when Jack notices her. The next day, Gwen runs into Jack again at a hospital and, following him, finds a sealed-off area where Jack catches a Weevil.

As she escapes, Gwen follows the Torchwood SUV to Roald Dahl Plass, where she loses sight of them. Discovering a local pizza store makes regular deliveries to Torchwood, Gwen disguises herself as a pizza delivery girl. Monitoring her actions, Torchwood willingly let her into their underground hub. Jack shows Gwen around the hub, including the captured Weevil from the hospital. They then leave the hub via a pavement slab lift, which takes them to Roald Dahl Plass in front of the Millennium Centre; the slab makes anyone standing on it unnoticed to passersby.

Over drinks, Jack explains that Torchwood is one of several branches, including Torchwood One which was destroyed at Canary Wharf.[N 1] They catch "tons" of aliens and scavenge alien technology that are washed up through a rift in space and time that runs through Cardiff, while preventing others from obtaining them. Jack places an amnesia pill in Gwen's drink, leaving her with no memory of the meeting.

The next day at work, Gwen is shown a drawing of the murder weapon, which triggers a series of memories. These solidify when she spots a Millennium Centre programme with the word "Remember" in her own handwriting at home. Outside the Millennium Centre, Suzie explains she killed the man Gwen saw resurrected to test the gauntlet. Suzie pulls a gun on Gwen as she is the only one that can link Suzie to the murder weapon. Jack rises from the pavement lift, and Suzie turns and shoots him in the head. Jack then comes back to life. With no chance of escape, Suzie shoots herself in the head. Gwen now remembers everything.

The gauntlet is sealed away. Standing on the roof of the Millennium Centre, Jack tells Gwen that he died once, but was brought back to life,[N 2] and that he can never die. He agrees with Gwen that perhaps Torchwood can do more to help people, and offers her a job, which she accepts.

Production

This episode had the working title of "Flotsam And Jetsam". This title was worked into the script when Jack describes the idea of "flotsam and jetsam" falling through the Rift into Cardiff.[citation needed] The opening scene, involving the reanimation of a corpse in an alley at night, was adapted from a pitch written by Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner for a possible science fiction series called Excalibur, devised before Davies became responsible for the 2005 revival of Doctor Who. In "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" Captain John Hart jokes about the name Torchwood and says it should have been named Excalibur.[1] The BBC Three premiere on 22 October 2006 aired Everything Changes back-to-back with the second episode, "Day One", in a 100-minute premiere special; the closing credits of both episodes were combined to air at the end.

Music

The song "We Are the Pipettes" by The Pipettes is featured in this episode (as Gwen & Andy arrive to break up a bar fight), "She Moves in Her Own Way" by The Kooks (heard in the background at Jubilee Pizza) and "Spitting Games" by Snow Patrol (as Owen hits on Linda at the bar).

Broadcast

In the unofficial overnight viewing figures, "Everything Changes" gained an average audience of 2.4 million for its debut showing on BBC Three,[2] a 12.7% share of the total television audience for its slot.[3] This was the largest audience ever recorded by a BBC Three programme, as well as the highest ever audience for a programme broadcast solely on a digital television platform that was not either a United States import or a live football match.[2] The figure also placed "Everything Changes" third in its timeslot across all channels, beaten only by the analogue channels ITV1 and Channel 4 with Prime Suspect and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen respectively.[2]

When "Everything Changes" was repeated on analogue channel BBC Two three days after its BBC Three airing, it won an audience of 2.8 million, a 13% share.[4] This again placed the episode third in its timeslot, behind Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC One and the thriller Bon Voyage on ITV1.[4]

Reviews and reception

The website of The Stage entertainment industry newspaper gave "Everything Changes" a positive preview in its coverage following the 18 October press screening of the episode. "The first episode is an economical, by the numbers introduction to the team", wrote reviewer Mark Wright. "It's certainly bold, the cast are very pretty and the dialogue has a zippy archness to it. Whether that will become grating after a few episodes remains to be seen, but if you like your sci-fi drama a bit punchier than the whimsical Doctor Who, touch wood, you should find a lot to enjoy in the adventures of Torchwood."[5]

Previewing the episode for the Radio Times listing magazine, Mark Braxton was impressed, but felt that the series would offer better episodes later in the run. "It's slick, scary, funny and expensive looking, but it's also very much an establishing episode", Braxton commented. "With the guided tour dispensed with, however, the fun can really begin."[6]

The Guardian newspaper's television reviewer Sam Wollaston also gave the episode a guarded welcome, although he felt that the attempts to make Cardiff appear glamorous were a failure. "They've done their best to sex the place up—lots of helicopter shots of that posh bit where Charlotte Church lives, but it still looks like Cardiff, to be honest. No matter—most of the interesting things are going on below the ground... It's not yet clear whether Eve Myles as new Torchwood recruit PC Gwen Cooper can fill Billie Piper's boots. Surely not—those boots are two gaping weekend voids that no one can fill. But this looks promising: it's slick, quick and a tiny bit scary. Not much humour yet, which was the lovely thing about Doctor Who. But it's early days; don't jump quite yet."[7]

The Sunday Times Culture magazine mentioned Torchwood as one of the week's highlights and added that it was "arguably better than Who". Less positively, the Scotsman when reviewing the episode said "Torchwood seems to me to be as nonsensical and full of holes and unexciting as the genre always is."[8] The use of the alien perfume on the young woman and her boyfriend by Owen has drawn criticism of the character online, with some viewers pointing out this is similar to date rape.[9]

Notes

  1. ^ As depicted in the 2006 Doctor Who episode "Doomsday". In the 2007 Doctor Who episode "The Sound of Drums", Jack confirms that he changed the old Torchwood regime that was destroyed at Canary Wharf.
  2. ^ As depicted in the 2005 Doctor Who episode "The Parting of the Ways".

References

  1. ^ White, Cindy (24 August 2007). "BBC's Torchwood Has U.S. Roots". Sci Fi Wire. Archived from the original on 15 October 2007. Retrieved 25 August 2007.
  2. ^ a b c Deans, Jason (23 October 2006). "Torchwood scores digital first" (Requires free registration). Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved 23 October 2006.
  3. ^ "Torchwood scores record audience". BBC News Online. 23 October 2006. Retrieved 23 October 2006.
  4. ^ a b Deans, Jason (26 October 2006). "Torchwood lands on BBC2 with 2.8m" (Requires free registration). Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved 26 October 2006.
  5. ^ Wright, Mark (19 October 2006). "Everything changes—a first look at Torchwood". The Stage. Archived from the original on 4 January 2007. Retrieved 2006-10-23.
  6. ^ Braxton, Mark (21–27 October 2006). "Today's Choices – Sunday 22 October". Radio Times. BBC Worldwide. 331 (4307): 74.
  7. ^ Wollaston, Sam (23 October 2006). "The weekend's TV". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 October 2006.
  8. ^ Heggie, Iain (21 October 2006). "Aliens versus yoof". The Scotsman. Retrieved 19 December 2006.
  9. ^ Rawson-Jones, Ben (13 January 2008). "Cult Spy: Catching Up With 'Torchwood'". Digital Spy. Retrieved 7 May 2008.

External links

This page was last edited on 4 February 2024, at 22:02
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