A very distinguished keynote speaker at the recent film and TV SPAA conference in Australia recently said: “Producers should not get involved in distribution”.

As a producer of both offline video and online interactive content, the internet is both our creative medium and our distribution mechanism. If I do not understand the opportunities, business models and structure of the Internet, then I cannot fully exploit it creatively.

A recent example I worked on was the cross-platform project Scorched. Scorched was a one-off drama about Australia running out of water and Sydney being pretty much razed to the ground by fire. It aired on Channel Nine in August 2008. To accompany the TV show, a huge creative effort was expended on the website. The show was a 90 minute telemovie, but online were the following:

- 25 x 2 minute online drama series called Cassie Has Dreams
- 10 x 1 minute video blogs
- 10 x 2 minute news broadcasts for a fictional newsnetwork called CPN
- 4 fictional websites for various companies and characters from the show

For a one-off Australian drama, that’s a whole Opera House load of content.

While there were many lessons learned, and many things that the team would do differently, what was so enjoyable about the project was that the web was seen as a creative medium in which to experiment, not just a distribution mechanism for DVD extras or catch-up episodes of the show itself.

The cross-platform TV panel on which I participated at SPAA talked a lot about Scorched. The audience was keen to understand how it had got off the ground and, most urgently, what the business was behind the project.

The angle I took, and one which has been resonating louder and louder since is that it is vital for screen producers to differentiate between the internet as a distribution mechanism, and the internet as a creative medium. They are means to different ends, they have different business models attached to them and can be confused easily.

The internet as a distribution mechanism currently focuses on catch-up TV models of pay-per-download (iTunes), advertising-supported free distribution, or subscription TV channels. These are the models that distributors and audiences are used to for real-world experiences via a cinema, DVD rental or Pay-TV service.

The internet as a creative medium is barely born. While the WWW was invented in 1992, it took a good 5-10 years for people to start experimenting with interactive fiction on the web, online MMORPGs and video. I have yet to see a truly native internet/web creative experience of scale. I do not believe that any existing film or television director, producer or executive is capable of conceiving such a project. I would suggest that an individual would have to have been born from 2004 onwards to be able to use the new tools that are available to us in any truly fluent way. Anyone born before then is experimenting, enjoying and pioneering this new medium like a young student to a new language. We enjoy the newness and make great strides into the new landscape, but we are not fluent in the language. We are about to enter the phase which all language students will recognise when the language is used for humour, but I have not seen anything yet. The fun we can have by going through phrasebooks looking for bizarre example translations has yet to be experienced in full on the internet, though there are many one-liners.

The projects which we work on here at The Project Factory, and the partners with whom we work are, I hope, beginning to define elements of this new language. Like the slapstick humour, pace and ‘repeat until funny’ gags that were in the silent movie era, I hope that when the generation of fully fluent digital natives starts to really flex their creative muscles with the non-linear structure of the internet, they are able to look back and laugh with, not just at, our initial early attempts.