The Future of Digital AdverFilms

shepperton studios, originally uploaded by donshades.

Last week I spent a long day doing an interactive Ad shoot for one of our clients at Dare. In order to get the required assets, we had to hire a very tall studio. Infact the only place with a studio big enough was London's famous Shepperton Studios.

“Great!” I thought. This is is. We're here! A digital agency shooting an ad in the same studio they used to shoot Harry Potter's Cribbage game. We've made it. We've grown up....

Then I realised. We were shooting a fucking banner Ad.

Indeed things are beginning to change. Clients are starting to trust us more frequently with budgets which extend to more than your best mate with a DV camera shooting in an empty meeting room. But where's the story? Flo's point on the creative social blog is an interesting one and something that has bothered me from day I checked out of the film world and into the land of Digital.

"Why are we trying to do everything our own way?".

It seems that we spend too much of the time getting excited by interesting interactive technology, and not enough time worrying about story, meaning, narrative. I'm just as guilty of this as everyone, by the way.

I am a bit of a film geek however and for me that makes a good story paramount. TV script writers have been bothered about this since the days of the Bulova Watch Company (obviously they fuck it up a lot..); so why do we think needn't bother?

This is something that I feel very strongly about. There is some great work about of late; but all too often an interesting understated story is left high and dry - out gunned by the technology which is packaging it up. Digital agencies are full of copy writers, not script writers and this is evident from the output of their more narrative ideas. I keep banging on about the novelty factor of youTube slowly wearing off and suddenly we're left swimming in shit... well I think this is most definitely starting to happen. Things move with sound on the interweb - great. Now tell me a story, and tell it fucking well or I'm clicking onward. I was at a lecture the other day where the speaker mused over the next layer of the web being the Visual Web. If he's right (and I don't see anything to make me think he's wrong); then surely the champion players of this visual web will be those who know how to tell a story, how to write a good story to be told in spoken words, sound and moving pictures.

For me we've got a lot of growing up to do before we can move in and start our own digital production office at Shepperton.