Nuno Bernardo, from BeFilms, created the original Sofia’s Diary in Portugal, an online drama with videos, blogs, interactive text messages, message boards and a TV show. It was a huge hit in Portugal and went on to spawn versions around the world, including the UK. Recently, he has created a new show Flatmates. This is for an older audience, but works along the same lines.

Nuno is also working on other drama and non-fiction projects.

If you haven’t seen Sofia’s Diary, here’s (part of) the UK version:

http://www.bebo.com/sofiasdiary

Nuno comes from a marketing background and this was his starting point for Sofia’s Diary.

He realized the teenage audience was becoming increasingly difficult to reach, especially through TV. Teenagers are increasingly more interested in the internet – as both a channel of entertainment and information (music, gossip sites, blogs, etc) as well as a way of communicating, through messenger services such as msn.

What sets internet use apart from TV is the interactivity between users. This is also borne out by the fact that teenagers are the heaviest users of text messaging. (Nuno quoted a figure of 200 texts a day for some teenage groups.)

From this, the idea for Sofia’s Diary was born.

The interesting thing from a writing/storytelling point of view is that it was is about creating a whole virtual world for the character and audience, and making a lot of this real time.

This included –

• Phone texts, sent directly to subscribed users, telling them about something that had just happened (and sometimes asking for advice).
• Internet diary blogs, updated every day at 8:30pm. These constituted -a daily experience- for the character, and always left a problem for the next day while asking advice –  for example: I’ve just found out that my boyfriend kissed my rival. Should I forgive him? Users were then invited to leave responses on message boards. This created debate amongst users, with the characters also joining in at times.

• Sofia had her own blog, as did many of her friends, all giving different points of view of central events.
• Weekly/monthly magazine diaries, published in teen mags.
• A radio soap, available for download – again -a daily experience-.
• A mobile phone alert service.

The idea for all of this was to connect with the teen audience by creating the world of Sofia in terms/medium that they themselves use – basically, communicating with them how they communicate with each other.

And all of this through a story which reflected/mirrored their lives/concerns.

Sofia’s Diary was launched in Portugal and was an instant success.

In 2003 it was extended to a television show on the Portugese PBS.

5 minute episodes were produced each day, with a 30 minute episode at weekends. This debuted to some of the best audiences on Portugese TV.

Unlike the other aspects of the Sofia’s Diary, the TV show was not a year-round experience, but ran for 26 weeks a year.

The brand also moved into books, DVDs, a Sofia’s Diary magazine, sponsorship and product placement deals, and product licensing.

Sofia’s Diary then went international, adapting to the local audience and culture. For instance, the South American version had a more sexually active teenager than the one in Portugal. (In the UK, instead of Sofia’s family consisting of mum, dad and brothers/sisters all living together, we had a more dysfunctional UK family. Go figure…)

The show launched in the UK with 5 million hits in its first week. After 6 months that was up to 30 million hits a week… The show then began running on Channel 5.

Nuno explained how it all worked in more detail.

First of all, it’s important to realize this was an ongoing, live experience – 7 days a week, featuring radio, blogs, live texts, magazine articles, comment boards.

It was all a constantly on-going story, so there was a strong sensation of living the story, like a great big multi-platform soap.

Elements were created to interact with each other – for example, the radio show fitted in with the blog, which fitted in with the text messages –  but each element could also be viewed/experienced alone.

In other words, most of the audience would listen to the radio show one day, receive texts another day, read the blogs for a couple of days, maybe spend an hour on the message boards at the weekend exchanging views and advice. It wasn’t necessary to view everything to understand the story.

However, all the different platforms were supporting and cross-promoting each other – which is a really interesting concept for writers to think about. Many people are very wary of the whole idea of writing for online drama, or are simply not that interested (“it isn’t real writing”), but viewed in the above terms, it suddenly seems like being given a big box of tricks, in every medium and platform possible, to tell your story.

The other important aspect was the extent to which the whole thing was hugely interactive.

The audience’s view and opinion on what was happening to Sofia (and her friends) was actively sought. And as that opinion came in, it could affect the story.

It’s a fine line, but as Nuno explained, the audience felt ownership of the show, but they weren’t writing it or dictating where it went.

This was especially true when it came to adding the TV show element, which was filmed way in advance so could never have reacted to the views of the audience anyway.

Nuno also gave another interesting reason for NOT giving the audience power over the direction of the storyline. The audience will always protect the protagonist (if you are telling your story correctly!) and punish the antagonist, which would ultimately lead to very boring stories, with little conflict or drama.

However, the feedback from the audience could also act as real time criticism of the story. For example, on several occasions it became clear through the online discussion boards that the audience hadn’t understood very clearly why a character had behaved in a particular way, or had misconstrued their motives because the story, in that instance, had just been told too fast.

The writers were able to read this and go into the blogs or send out texts the next day and clear those kind of issues up (in character of course), reassuring the audience.

Therefore this rolling multi-platform story was starting to interact heavily with the audience, -interrupting- their lives with unexpected and unplanned text messages from the characters, (“Oh my god, I’ve just found out Dave kissed Francesca…!”)

This is storytelling which apes life-like experiences, blurring the story/reality lines. (Not that I believe that the audience isn’t capable of distinguishing the two. Of course they are. But it questions HOW we tell stories.)

And then Nuno’s next project took that even further.

For Flatmates, again created originally for Portugal, Nuno took a group of 3 flatmates and an older age group. From a storytelling point of view, this complicated (in a good way) the relationship between the audience and the characters. The audience have favourites, and the three flatmates can fight it out online with their blogs, the users then fighting on the message boards.

This led to a different, and potentially more interesting, dynamic between audience and characters.

Another thing they found was that teenagers didn’t like the websites for TV shows. They seemed tacked on, with no interactivity, and histories and blogs which started the day before the show’s debut. Therefore, when creating the blogs, they created a past for the characters, even using the actors family photos, etc to fill that past out.

The audience chose the actors through online auditions which the audience voted for. This had also happened with Sofia’s Diary.

The community/fans were invited to come along to the bar featured in the show, to mill around as extras, but also to interact with the actors, who stayed in character the whole time.

The actors appeared on a daytime talk show as their characters, and the show introduced them as such, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, or at least playing with them.

Someone forwarded me an exerpt from a talk you did at UCLA about New Media. I really liked you point of view and your enthusiasm. I am finishing post production on an original web series for Sony’s Crackle.com called The Bannen Way. I Co-wrote, produced and star in it. It came out of my frustration with my career and wanting to create. We launch January 6th on line with Day and Date iTunes release of the feature. It’s been quite a ride.

The Bannen Way Trailer is on Crackle.com

In creating my own online drama I took an in-depth look at other series– Why did they succeed or why did they fail.  Here are my observations about a very spectacular public failure: Quarterlife.   These are the take-aways from my analysis of the web series created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creators of television’s Thirtysomething and Once and Again and producers of My So-Called Life.  You can watch the series here:  Quarterlife on MySpace

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Without Authenticity and Urgency the Audience Disengages

The series, Quarterlife, is named for the phenomena of the “Quarterlife Crisis.”   This is the emotional angst and anxiety that hits around age 25 – 29, when college grads wonder: “What am I doing with my life?  Why am I broke, bored and/or stalled in my career?”  The iconic television series, Friends, explored the same territory in a comedy.

There is a sense of entitlement and astonishment among the Quarterlife characters summed up by Dylan Krieger (Bitsie Tulloch), the protagonist:  “A sad truth about my generation is that we were all geniuses in elementary school but apparently the people who deal with us (now) never got our transcripts because they don’t seem to be aware of this.”

This sense of entitlement and astonishment seemed to also accompany the series’ failure.  What went wrong?  Don’t you all know we’re television geniuses?

Quarterlife lacked the necessary authenticity and urgency to engage its core web audience.  The producers didn’t fully understand their audience and the series felt too much like a cynical ploy.  The Friends characters took themselves much less seriously.  Quarterlife simply can’t sustain all the self-important angst.

New Media Ploys Annoy the Audience

Quarterlife was originally conceived as a broadcast series but didn’t get picked up by a major network.  Herskovitz and Zwick broke the series down into 8-minute segments.  They independently financed the show and created special channels for the series on MySpace and YouTube.

Rather than creating content specifically for this new medium and this particular audience, the creators recycled a conventional series and distributed it in smaller chunks.  Their goal seems to have been to get back on broadcast television as quickly as possible.

Despite the social networking aspects of the Quarterlife website, it seems the creators did not fully embrace (or fully understand) their audience and this new storytelling medium.  After a much-hyped launch, viewership dropped precipitously.

“Podcasting News, for example, gleefully pronounced the web series a bomb in December, running a chart of each episode’s views on YouTube that looked like a graph of Ron Paul’s 2009 delegate count, noting that the show was getting fewer web views than ‘sleeping kitties, graffiti videos or even a clip of Sims in labor’,’” wrote Los Angeles Times media columnist Patrick Goldstein.

Goldstein also suggests that Quarterlife served as a magnet for web devotees’ scorn for all the Old Media Titans who’ve been invading their turf, hoping to turn the new medium into another profit center.

Herskowitz didn’t help matters when he wrote in Slate:  “Most of it (web entertainment) is simply incompetence and ignorance masquerading as an ‘Internet style.’ And until now no one had tried anything that would actually engage the emotions of an audience.”

It’s ironic that Quarterlife doesn’t engage the emotions of their audience in a way that is authentic or that rings true.

Emotions Not Experienced Directly Distance the Audience

Protagonist Dylan Krieger narrates the series via her video blog.  She is a would-be writer stuck in an assistant’s job at a woman’s magazine, working for a boss who tries to steal her ideas.

The creators assume that video-blogging is the same thing as writing.  The key difference, as a commentator on New TeeVee pointed out, is:  “A writer wants an audience for her ideas and observations; a video blogger wants an audience for herself.”

This personal performance aspect is the narcissism of “Watch me – Look at me – I am what’s important here.”

In her video-blog, Dylan says that her “curse” is to see what people are thinking and feeling. In the visual language of storytelling, that is the reaction shot that shows the audience a character’s thoughts and feelings writ large on the actor’s face.

When Dylan narrates, as video blog performer, she prevents the audience from experiencing these emotions, thoughts and feelings directly with the characters.  Her performance distances us from the characters and is a classic violation of the “show don’t tell” rule of storytelling.  Her narration tells us what we’ve already seen or should have already seen ourselves.

If, however, personal narration directly contradicts what we have seen (or will see) then that shows us something new and interesting about the narrator and/or the other characters.   This counterpoint works wonderfully in the classic Herskovitz and Zwick produced series (created by Winnie Holtzman), My So-Called Life.

That show’s high school protagonist, Angela Chase (Claire Danes), is hopelessly infatuated with Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto).  She remarks romantically that he is always closing his eyes as if it hurts to look at things.  Later, we see him dousing his eyes to get the stoner-dude red out with Visine.

There is no such ironic or poignant counterpoint in Dylan’s narration.  She tells us what we should see for ourselves or repeats what we already know.

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) muses publicly about personal concerns via her newspaper column in Sex and the City.  The opening image vividly shows the contrast between the public and the private in Carrie’s life when she is splashed with dirty water as a bus plastered with her glamorous billboard image roars past. Sex and the City uses humor and irony to illuminate the disappointments, anxieties and dissatisfactions of a slightly older age group than Quarterlife.  Carrie, the wry witty writer, is not the self-conscious performer that Dylan is as a video-blogger.  The Friends characters also took themselves much less seriously.  Quarterlife simply can’t sustain the self-important angst.

Boredom, Stasis and Frustration Aren’t Urgent

As a friend has pointed out, “there is a reason so many serial dramas are set in hospitals and police stations, these environments provide an automatic sense of urgency, conflict and high stakes to a story.”

Articulate, over-sensitive, highly-educated, middle class white kids bemoaning the lack of a “special and gifted” life track (which is their due) doesn’t provide much emotional urgency.   There is little at stake if they can fall back on Mom and Dad, as one character does.

Fans watch football matches or basketball games because there is a sense that if you aren’t present or watching, cheering as hard as you can for your team, something terrible might happen.  The strength of your passionate concern will somehow help to put your players over the top.

Serial drama fans need to feel the same passionate concern and  personal involvement with the characters whose lives they follow.  What is the worst that can happen? Why do we have to watch to prevent that terrible outcome?  Why must we yell at the screen:  “No, no, don’t do that!”  What do we fear for our characters?  Why is it urgently important that we watch?

Interpersonal relationship can have that kind of emotional tension and urgency.  The stakes just have to be high enough.  The conflicts have to be intense and personal enough to evoke our deepest concern.  We have to be worried about the characters!

Weak Conflict Undercuts Urgency

The biggest potential conflict and most interesting social question in Quarterlife is weakened if not completely neutered.

Dylan’s friends don’t seem to care that she is violating their privacy, disclosing intimate information, betraying confidences and spewing interpersonal revelations to anyone who has access to a computer.

She names names.  She distributes secretly recorded videos.  She commits the emotional equivalent of a physical violation.  Outside of a minor emotional hissy-fit, this potential conflict quickly passes by the wayside.  Nobody really pays attention to Dylan’s video blog.

Her revelations cause little conflict within the group.  They cause no conflict outside the group (no outsider causes a problem for the characters because of information learned through Dylan’s blog).

It is very startling and disconcerting when strangers know the intimate details of your life and remark on them to you.  What happens when everyone knows your whereabouts and/or your personal business?  How does that cause problems and create conflict for the characters?

What are the limits of personal privacy and the ethics of personal disclosures about others?  All those questions are interesting opportunities for conflict that could come from who the characters are as individuals and how they might view the world (or privacy) differently.

If Dylan’s blog has no effect on the other characters, what is the dramatic point other than to show her on a web cam?   This feels like the creators trying to be hip but it comes off as empty, false and inauthentic.

When It Isn’t Urgent It Has to Be Funny

The characters in Quarterlife are remarkable for their lack of humor or any wicked sense of fun.  They take themselves and their lives way too seriously.  The series doesn’t have a vivid appreciation of the absurd.

The classic series, Friends, mined this age group’s anxiety, boredom and frustration brilliantly.  The theme song by The Rembrandts sums up the same storytelling territory:

“So no one told you life was going to be this way.

Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA.

It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear,

Well, it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

I’ll be there for you…  And you’ll be there for me too.”

Friends had wit, warmth and sense of the absurdity of life (and lasted many years past the characters’ “Quarterlife Crisis” because the fans weren’t willing to let the characters go).  Contrast this with the previous quote:

“A sad truth about my generation is that we were all geniuses in elementary school but apparently the people who deal with us (now) never got our transcripts because they don’t seem to be aware of this.”   (Poor me!)

Which show would you rather watch?

Seinfeld, originally featuring the same or slightly older age group, totally lacked urgency and was proud of it.  That show was about nothing more critical than finding a parking place, making a reservation at a restaurant or buying soup at a lunch counter.  The series had a wicked sense of humor; made us laugh and we were satisfied and came back for more.  If it’s not emotionally dramatic then it must be laugh-out-loud funny.

What Was NBC Thinking?

Quarterlife was picked up by NBC at a time when broadcast dramas were running out of stockpiled scripts and scripted shows were shutting down all over Hollywood during the strike.   It seemed like a slam-dunk opportunity.  Then, just like the story concept for the series characters, reality hit and it was nothing like anyone imagined.

The show only had 3.1 million viewers in its NBC broadcast debut, the worst in-season performance in the 10 p.m. hour slot by an NBC show in at least 17 years. The series also got hammered in the adult 18 – 49 demographic, where it managed only a 1.3 rating.  The show was pulled from NBC’s schedule after only one episode.

Why would NBC think that a series allegedly conceived for and widely available on the web would attract the same audience age group in a repeat on broadcast television? Everyone who was interested had seen the show already.

If viewers can watch on their own time on the web why should anyone watch the show on NBC’s time? What was new, different or added to the viewing experience during the rebroadcast?  The network didn’t seem to understand the core audience either.

There is an element of condescension (or maybe contempt) in all of this exemplified by the words the creators put in Dylan’s mouth:  “We blog to exist, therefore we… we are idiots.”  A show on any media platform is really in trouble when the creators have contempt for or belittle their own characters.

Most online series are presented in episodic form, just like television.  If you create 22 or whatever number of episodes of bite-sized narrative, each is doled out, one at a time, over weeks and months.  Why is this a good idea?

No one likes to wait.  The Internet is the most impatient medium ever invented.  Going online is all about instant access all the time.  Why not put up a whole series (all episodes) in one shot?  Then the audience can view as much or as little of the narrative as THEY want exactly when THEY want to view it.

They won’t have to wait.  They can sample the series in order or out of order or however they like. Why do we think audiences have the patience or the attention span to come back to very short narrative snippets over time?  Isn’t this just the automatic mimicking of an old medium– episodic television?  Is that one reason why so many narrative series in this new medium fail?