Theatre purists want to remain steadfast to the traditional roots of theatre, shunning digital intrusion in favour of the honest actor/audience interaction that gives theatre its unique presence. Others such as Forkbeard Fantasy, Coney and Unlimited are embracing the seemingly limitless possibilities afforded by digital media.

Increasingly theatres (whether through actual desire or financial requirement) are devising new ways of attracting a more modern, tech savvy audience.  Most now use social media for marketing, with blogs on Twitter, groups on Facebook or film style trailers on You Tube. Some such as the National Theatre or Royal Opera House are turning to screening live performances to outside audiences who are perhaps fearful of the risks live theatre involves and more comfortable with this slightly more removed filmic format (its easier to walk out if you don’t like it!).

And a growing few are taking to exploring how technology can enhance the theatrical experience, often communicating with us through digital mediums, interactive websites where we meet the characters and world they inhabit before even reaching the theatre.  And sometimes, we don’t even reach a theatre…well not the type with a stage and proscenium arch many traditionalists would think of.

This week, with the help of the inspired creatives at Idea Generation, the Royal Shakespeare Company launched their own modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet on Twitter, with each character relating their part of the story over five weeks. Along the way, they’re posting soundbites and videos on YouTube, bringing Shakespeare’s teen romance to twenty-first century teenagers without asking them to set foot in an auditorium.

On April 26th, Stellar Network is hosting a panel event at The Young Vic Theatre to debate these and other pressing issues surrounding digital media in both theatre and film.  Among the six-strong panel is David Varela, a writer/producer who has worked across all four media of theatre, TV, film and online storytelling.  His talents and experience are vast, acting as apprentice to Richard Attenborough while still at university, winning numerous awards for his short films and screenplays, writing for both radio and television (including a great many projects for the BBC and Channel 4), The Hampstead Theatre, ICA and The Royal Court, producing a global adventure for Sony on the PlayStation 3, and now leading a team at nDreams in developing and running an Alternate Reality Game starring Lewis Hamilton.

David works on large cross-media projects that combine all manner of online and live media to tell stories and entertain and usually have some form of interactive element.  He draws influence from many sources, ranging from Charlie Kaufman to 42 Entertainment, Philip Pullman, Raymond Chandler, Kneehigh Theatre and 1980’s text adventures.  But his interest in working cross-media in fact started out as a result of reading the Guardian.

“I studied English at university, made shorts and wrote poetry. Then I came to London and wrote light entertainment (anything from magic shows to musicals) for a holiday entertainment company. I worked as a copywriter, writing in many different voices for many different companies. I wrote plays. I wrote screenplays. I wrote radio plays.

Then I saw an ad in the Guardian written entirely in code.  Unscrambled, it was an open call to writers, designers and creative types to work on an international murder mystery treasure hunt. It was called Perplex City. I started as an in-house writer and took on more and more production duties.  For nearly two years, I worked on this huge cross-media game creating a fictional world using audio drama and live events, fictional websites, videos, puzzles, songs, maps, text messages, board games, and just about every medium you can think of. My diverse career finally came together. It felt like I’d unwittingly trained myself for this new, peculiar job.”

As a writer/producer, David clearly loves his work and is evidently doing well.  Pointing out that he does not have to work across different media for every project (he recently wrote a ‘conventional’ play for Radio 4) his ability to work amongst many media is clearly keeping him in continuous paid work, a situation few writers can lay claim to.

Unquestionably there are some very exciting ventures and possibilities to be explored here and rewards to be reaped.  Our imaginations can be stretched in ways that a bare stage or basic set can only at times achieve.  Artists can communicate with us in many more unique ways and a new audience can be reached who may never have embraced traditional theatre.  But as these barriers are worn down and audiences old and new begin to embrace this shift in culture, questions and concerns about what this means for the future of theatre grow.  Will audiences no longer have to suspend their disbelief?  Will actors feel more like they’re on a film set than a stage?  Will conventional plays lose out to those that are more de rigueur? Will theatre companies who cannot afford these new technologies fall behind those with big budgets and friends in the right (cyber) places?

Whatever the answer, one thing is for sure; as stealthily as it did within our homes and workplace, technology and digital media is becoming an increasingly important part of theatre and its future.  We have little choice but to embrace it.  But in the same way technophobes and traditionalists must open themselves up to these new possibilities, so too must the digital theatre entrepreneurs be mindful of the conventions and devices which make theatre the great unique art form it is.  And for those who fall somewhere in the middle, approach it all with caution…. sometimes computer says no….

Leanne Davis, Actress & Stellar Network PR & Marketing Manager

………………………………….

Stellar Network will be holding our Future Proof event at The Young Vic this Monday 26th April.

This blog post covers the kind of topics we imagine the theatre professionals at this event will be talking about.  There will also be very informed discussion on digital influence in the film industry: content and distribution, from 3D to digital workflows to new business models.

For more information about the panel, the format of the evening and to book tickets visit www.stellarnetwork.com/events

Well to start with there’s a lot of speculation still, particularly in regards to the likes of the South Bank Show, which Stellar has heard will be fine. But from digesting as much of the news as we possible can, it seems most of the hard hits have come to the Yorkshire, Leeds, studio where a fair bit of drama is shot. It also seems likely that the Cory-nobs Manchester studio will close and production will move to the new Media City in Salford Quays – but that doesn’t open until 2011 so we shall see. The best coverage can be found on the Guardian, which also has some comment from ITV employees.

Please do let us know if you have more information you can share with fellow members. And perhaps now is a good time to get your application in to Stellar’s Pitch event

I’m working as a production runner on the third series of The IT Crowd. Having never been to Pinewood before it’s become something of a myth in my brain, populated with celebrities suckling on peeled grapes in their house-sized trailers while the teamsters smoke cigarettes outside enormous corrugated soundstage doors and buggies maniacally zoom directors from office to set.

I’m not far off.

Well. I am. But it’s a nebulous sprawl of a place, that’s a fact, and everyone still seems to be buzzing from having the latest 007 production in residence. Currently the big man on campus is Prince Of Persia and a lot of the supporting artists I talk to have worked on that as well.

I get through to lunch, and realize I’m having a blast. Pinewood is FUN, I think to myself, grinning like a lunatic as I sprint across a car-park trying not to slosh any of the six coffees I’m juggling over my skinny wrists. Then I stop grinning, because I look like a lunatic. But still. I don’t know if I really expected to have fun!
Because:
a) The last time I was on a multi-camera TV set was as an actor, and the runners never really looked like they were enjoying themselves too much, all frazzled eyes as they frantically checked their pockets for the last receipt they might have forgotten to get and furiously scribbled down dinner orders.

b) Most of us have been there, and while obviously as much an integral part of the structure as any other on-set job, I think it’s fair to say that being a runner is, well, a bit mindless.
Sometimes mindless is nice, and thankfully one is manic enough not to worry about it, or even to concoct this blog, which is scribbled on the long train back from Uxbridge after an even longer day (14 hours? I think?). Hence the scatter-brain. Here’s to sleep, and here’s to next time.

Alex

It was held at 01 Zero-one in conjunction with Own-It and the speakers were Robert Lands, Head of IP Media, Finers Stephens Innocent LLP and Sarah Edwards, Head of Entertainment Development, Talkback Thames. The compere was yours truly.

It was a fantastic event, full of lively discussion and debate! The podcast is now available in two parts – here and here.

Please take a listen and let me know your thoughts, opinions, etc. We’d love to do similar events in the future but we need YOUR feedback

Cheers

Tom S

And then little grey cogs started clunking. Clunk-clunk. 6 million people care! Clunk-clunk. But… why? Clunk-clunk. Surely this is just another enterprise (pun not really intended) in sensationalizing a part of the average person’s life so as to garner audience share from those not yet gormlessly addicted to the reality-TV tidal wave? Just another idiotic and desperate squeeze of a mouldy and almost dry kitchen sponge? Clunk-clunk.

What really renders me incredulous and speechless about this fusty fad is that it is, quite blatantly and flagrantly, a fallacy. It simply isn’t reality. As a couple of CEO’s attested, The Apprentice couldn’t possibly be further away from an entrepreneurial business model. We’ve managed to do something quite bizarrely post-modern, and entirely flip the coin. Our “reality-TV” is less real than most of the drama that comes out of HBO or BBC. My televisual viewing cache is currently filled with brilliant series like The Wire and Six Feet Under (on DVD of course… take THAT, ads), and, despite not being an expert on Baltimore crime or running a funeral home, I have a strong feeling both represent reality far more accurately and intelligently than Master Chef, Beauty and the Geek, or Holly & Fearne Go Dating.

It was inevitable, wasn’t it? We love ourselves. We love screens. We love to see ourselves on screen. We love to love ourselves. I just can’t help but feel it’s reached a point of immaturity. It isn’t us up there. It isn’t you. It’s some fame-hungry shill as desperate for a national embarrassment as I am tempted just to sweep the whole mess under the telly cabinet, and just pretend it never, ever happened at all.

This, I have decided, with a Charlie-Brooker-esque gruffness, is an outrage. From whence did this stereotype emerge? Who, what or when is responsible for defaming this intricate, subtle, and varied art? Perhaps it’s television’s fault. We so associate documentary as a televisual form (read: the news) that perhaps it’s no surprise the mode in which we consume television is the same position assumed when people begin discussing documentary: neck loose, torso slouched, seas of flab rolling over a taut belt, legs thrust out at curious angles and a hand creeping subliminally towards the no-no bits.

Viewing someone in this position can only induce upon the observer a kind of vague disgust, and rightly so. By and large we like see fiction as an escape, somewhere we can go and be transported far from the benign movements of our little lives. And yet, how often do people trundle out the mouldy adage: Truth is stranger than fiction! My day-to-day existence has nothing to do with the monogamy of penguins in the Antarctic, or people hurling themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge, or a man who was mauled to death by grizzly bears, or even the war in Iraq.

To be honest, I have just been working on a documentary, so perhaps I feel a little biased. Say the word documentary to a cinema and, mostly, they react like you just libeled their mothers in The Evening Standard. And punters, well, we’ve covered them. It’s time for a change. Groups like the Channel Four British Documentary Foundation (BritDoc) have already begun the revolution. I suppose I could start by making a documentary about it, couldn’t I?