Left to his own devices…

For my mid-term presentation for Shawn Van Every’s Live Experimental Interactive Television course, I fleshed out the Fly or Pie idea I developed with Jong Yoon, Lisa Maria, and Robert.

The big changes were the introduction of a “pseudo-celebrity” panel of judges (I volunteered Red, Dano, and Shawn for the positions), and the elimination of any direct feedback with the audience during the voting process so as to allow for the host to reveal the results of the voting after the performance. (Assuming the buzz meter didn’t go so low as to require the performer to be pied.)

The latter choice would up generating a lot of discussion in the class during my presentation, as more than a few students thought that the lack of direct feedback after a vote was cast might discourage people from continuing to vote. While I can see their point, I like the idea of retaining some mystery in the proceedings. However, I have to agree that ultimately, such feedback would be useful since it could allow viewers to rally to support a performer who’s not doing well in the online voting.

The way the show would work is as follows: performers would be introduced and allowed 3-4 minutes to perform. While they are performing, viewers can vote online through a website that would feature both the voting apparatus, and information about the current performer (short bio, links to whatever online content they might have put out about themselves). Voters are voting the performance either as “fly”, which will drive up the performers “buzz meter” or pie, which will drive the buzz meter down. If at any point the buzz meter goes below 30%, the performance is stopped and the contestant is hit with a cream pie. Also, the judges can stop the performance at any time by calling for the performer to be pied. Should the contestant finish their performance, the judges will rate their performance from 1 to 10–with the best possible score an overall total of 30 points–which gets added to the results of the online buzz meter. The winner is the contestant with the most points at the end of the show.

Here are the links to the pdfs of my script and storyboards for an approximately five minute version of the show:
Script

Storyboards

And here is the system for transmitting viewer feedback to the studio:

And a crude wireframe for the “Fly or Pie” site:

I rate our mini-show, Fly or Pie, a success as the people viewing us appeared to enjoy watching me and Lisa Maria taking pies to the face.

The idea was inspired by the old TV show The Gong Show: which was a show which invited people to come on and perform to display their “talents” with the promise of prizes for the best performer, and the threat that the worst performers would suffer the indignity of having their performance ended with an embarrassing “gong”.

It's not true that his name is
the Greek root for embarrass

Robert created the interface that allowed audience members to register their approval/disapproval of the contestant’s performance. I served both as host and the first contestant, because I figured the first person to perform would be pied by the audience just as a matter of course since both curiosity (ould we really pie contestants if they ordered us to do so?) and our natural instinct for mischief (I can make this person wear pie!) would make it so. That was the reason why the show began with my recitation of Shakespeare’s classic “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy from Hamlet, which despite by years of study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, had the viewers hitting the “pie” button like it owed them money. But I was willing to take one for the team.

To her credit, despite her fine signing performance, Lisa Maria also showed herself to be a great team player by pie-ing herself after she was done, so I wouldn’t feel alone in the sweetened foam. Bless her heart!

In think what worked about our show is the entertainment value of allowing the audience to pie other people. One change we might make is allowing a pie to be thrown in all instances–maybe the viewers can vote on whether the performer gets the pie or the host (or a designated “pie boy”). That way the viewers’ urge to cream someone with a pie would not get in the way of letting good performers complete their performances and be judged–without which we really don’t have a competition. We also might experiment with offering viewers a variety of pies with which to cream the competitors.

If we keep with the fly motif, we can tabulate the positive votes the viewers transmit on a “buzz”-ometer, with the idea that the performer with the most “buzz” being declared the winner of the show. Given the number of talented people on the floor, and the willingness of people here to share their gifts–or just act silly–we can easily fill twenty-eight minutes with a talent competition. As long as all the competitors are willing to wear whipped cream if their performance is judged as lacking, Fly or Pie can definitely fly.

I’ll start off this week’s blog post with my review of the project that Adam Harvey, Jeff Howard, Mustafa Bagdatli and I presented in last weeks class:

We used TextMarks, php, Processing, and Max to take a text cued with the keyword “daftv” and consisting of any of the valid choices (“work it”, “make it”, “do it”, “make us”, “harder” “better”, “faster”, “stronger”, “more than”, “hour”, “our”, “never”, “ever” “after”, “work is”, “over”) to manipulate a video of two scantily clad women wearing homemade “robot” masks dancing to the song. The presentation went really well, the only problem being a slight delay in the response from the text to the video manipulation.

One way it could have been improved would have been that we could have displayed the last four numbers of the caller whose text affected the video so the viewer could have had a better sense of when their action affected the video. (Our php script actually logged the caller’s phone numbers, so we could have done this with a minor tweak.) We also could have chosen a smaller keyword, or maybe set up a key so that viewers didn’t have to text in the whole phrase, which would have allowed the viewer to transmit their texts faster.

Ultimately though, I think that our project is something that would work better as a presentation in a dance club or at a dance party rather than as a broadcast show. While watching the four presentations, it occurred to me that if interactive television has a future, it will involve enhancing current broadcasts rather than mimicking things done better by video game consoles. Both our project and the horse race projects were similar to games, with viewers directly manipulating the course of the “narrative” if you will. Video game consoles and on-line computer games already do that better than TV can. The other two projects–the auction game added to PBS’ Antique Road Show and the MST3K type interaction added to Real Genius–are much more in line with what I see as the future of interactive TV. The broadcast is still central to the entertainment experience, with the interactive component as a secondary enhancement that could add a level of enjoyment to both the viewers who opt to interact with it or those who just passively watch.

For the other assignment for this week, I watched the Super Bowl while monitoring several sites: ESPN.com, CNNSI.com, ColtFreaks, a Colts fan forum, Stampede Blue, A Colts fan blog, Canal Street Chronicles, a Saints fan forum, NFL.com’sGame Center, and my Red Sox fan board Sons of Sam Horn’s Super Bowl Game thread. Among the interesting options were NFL.com offered fans a chance to vote online for the Super Bowl MVP, with their vote comprising 20% of the voting for awarding the honor to the player in question. ESPN offered a running chat of their football bloggers that fans could participate in, as well as revolving polls about the state of the game (which team had the momentum, should the Saints have gone on 4th and 1 in the second quarter, etc.)

In addition to their fan chat, Stampede Blue had a radio stream of one of the board’s moderator’s comments from the Super Bowl site. He joined by a Saints board moderator and a Chiefs fan, and together they called in their observations about the game and the crowd for those not lucky to be there.

On CNNSI, I spent most of my time monitoring the live game blog done by Joe Posnanski, who is one of the site’s best writers. I also kept an eye on two of my other favorite sports writers through Twitter, Bill Simmons and the always acerbic Jason Whitlock.

Keeping an eye on all those screens I experienced a bit of information overload. I have almost no memory of any of the Super Bowl commercials, probably because none were memorable, but also because my attention was so focused on all the windows on my computer screen that I had no attention left for the television when the game wasn’t being shown. (I do recall the Letterman-Leno one, but that’s mostly because of the shock of seeing those two who have been savaging each other recently, sitting separated only by Oprah.)

While all the bells and whistles offered by ESPN.com and NFL.com were interesting, the site I spent most of my time on was the game thread on SoSH, as that allowed me to trade thoughts on the game with people I’m familiar with. (In addition to having spent many Red Sox games chatting with these people through the board’s chat room and game thread forums, I’ve also met a good number of them through game outings organized through the board.) Though I was watching the game by myself, I still had the experience of watching with a group, which was nice since my homework assignment for a certain class kept me tethered to my computer, which is to say home. The game itself provides enough of a spectacle that all the information delivery and fan polling features of the sports sites were a bit superfluous, but the chat allowed one to feel connected to many others, which is important in that the Super Bowl is the one common viewing experience left in these days in which the cable, the internet, and Tivo have fractured the viewing audience.