How To Grow While Staying Insanely Creative, The Aardman Way | Co.Create: Creativity \ Culture \ Commerce

Excerpt from an excellent interview:

"ENSURE THAT FINDING AND DEVELOPING THE BEST IDEAS STAYS AT THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING YOU DO

An early break for Sproxton and Lord was making animated shorts for BBC Children’s Television. Their first successful character was a stop-frame animated plasticine character called Morph. The launch of British TV station Channel 4 back in 1982 proved an important catalyst when it began commissioning animation for a grown-up audience, and the pair began experimenting with animating recorded conversations of real people--a groundbreaking technique. Aardman’s subsequent Lip Sync series for Channel 4 included Creature Comforts--the Oscar-winning short made by Nick Park, creator of Wallace & Gromit, who joined Aardman in 1985.

"In the early days we had an accountant who’d say 'Just do the best work you can and the money will look after itself,' and that’s broadly how it still works today," Sproxton continues. "Though as a business we’re much larger in scale now, we’re not big and corporate--that’s just not us. We’re not just finance-driven. We’re about trying to get the best out of people, getting everyone to muck in, recognizing that everyone’s creative and encouraging them to be so. It’s all about coming up with the best creative ideas."

full post here:

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1680299/how-to-grow-while-staying-insanely-creati...

Excellent Post by Christine Weitbrecht » Direct Global Distribution Models for a Global World / What the TV Industry Can Learn from Hollywood

<blockquote class='posterous_long_quote'><div class="post_title"><div class="calendar"><p class="date">25</p> <p class="month">Mar</p> </div> <div class="post_info"> <h1>Direct Global Distribution Models for a Global World / What the TV Industry Can Learn from Hollywood</h1> <span class="author">Posted by &nbsp;</span> <span class="category">Published in Business Opportunities, Distribution, Entertainment Trends, International, Television, Uncategorized</span></div> </div> <div class="post_content"> <p><em>[NB: While I'm talking specifically about the (US) TV industry in this post, the principle of direct global distribution to reach the global audience is applicable for pretty much any medium that can be digitized.]</em></p> <p>In this blog, I have again and again referred to a variety of trends that currently impact entertainment consumption around the world immensely. I will not go into detail on each of these because I have done so before, but I will compile them in a quick re-cap so we’re all on the same page:<span></span></p> <ul> <li>Audiences around the world become increasingly inter-connected across national borders</li> <li>Consumption itself has become global: audiences around the world watch the same movies, the same TV shows, read the same books, and play the same computer games</li> <li>Consumption has also become inherently social: Fueled by social media and the interactivity of the internet, we can now discuss our favorite and most hated products with consumers around the world</li> <li>At the same time, entertainment content (and many other products) have become extremely niche and focused on a particular segment of the audience</li> <li>Entertainment experiences in particular have become a shared experience on a global scale; e.g. awaiting the opening of a movie, the publishing of a book and/or its sequel, the sale of a new computer game</li> <li>Piracy is escalating</li> <li>A growing amount of people around the world speaks either English, Spanish, or Mandarin</li> <li>The internet offers a (technically) globally accessible space without the need of linear, 24-hour programming</li> <li>The internet becomes available to a rapidly increasing number of people everyday, particularly in Asia</li> <li>Companies like Amazon, PayPal, and Apple have set up global electronic payment structures</li> <li>Companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have created powerful user-profiling mechanisms that allow for carefully targeted advertising</li> <li>While domestic cinema attendance is gradually dropping in the US, international cinema attendance has been increasing steadily, along with international box office revenues (particularly for Hollywood studios)</li> <li>Fans and fandoms are using the interconnectedness of the internet to organize on a global scale and to become even more vocal about themselves and their fan objects..."</li> </ul> <p></p></div></blockquote>

Excerpt & you can read the full post here:

http://christineweitbrecht.com/?p=373&goback=%2Egde_135781_member_103384278

Fascinating Argument by Erik Kain: Five Economic Lessons Of The Hunger Games - Forbes

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Fascinating article by Erik Kain:

"The film version of Suzanne Collins’s first novel, The Hunger Games, topped $155 million at the box office its opening weekend, making it the third highest debut of all time.

Obviously the economics of the film itself are working out just as planned, and everyone involved in the project can rest assured that the second and third books will be similarly adapted for the silver screen.

But the economics of Panem itself are another matter entirely. The future dystopian society built on the ashes of what was once the United States looks remarkably different from our own world. A high-tech, wealthy Rome 2.0 sits at the epicenter of twelve (actually thirteen) Districts which supply the Capitol City with its resources and wealth, from energy needs to food to electronics, and even “peace keepers.”

Spoilers for the entire series may be included in the following post..."

1. Markets Are More Efficient Than Command Economies

2. Globalism Only Works If You Ditch The Extraction Model

3. Economic Inequality Is Bad For Business

4. War Drains Economic Resources

5. Technology Can Be Used For Good Or Evil

Another record for “The Hunger Games”: Mobile ticket sales — Mobile Technology News


By Kevin C. Tofel Mar. 26, 2012

"Over this past weekend, “The Hunger Games” set the highest opening weekend for a non-sequel, raking in an estimated $155 million at the box office. That’s a ton of tickets and a chunk of them were sold online and on smartphones. Fandango, one of the first movie ticket sales sites, shared data from the weekend as “The Hunger Games” pushed its platform to new heights.

According to Fandango, its service accounted for 22 percent of all tickets for “The Hunger Games” this weekend. That tops the prior record-holder, 2011′s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2,” at 19 percent of all ticket sales. Over the weekend, Fandango peaked at 17 ticket sales per second for “The Hunger Games” and on Sunday morning, the movie still accounted for 90 percent of all Fandango sales...."

Christy Dena on Transmedia: Do You Go Both Ways? (Excerpt) - Meanland: Reading in an age of change

<blockquote class='posterous_long_quote'> <h2> Do You Go Both Ways? </h2> <div class="more"> Posted at Friday 16 Mar by <strong> By Christy Dena</strong>. </div> <p>"Transmedia doesn’t mean what you think it does. You may have heard of this term “transmedia,” it is one of the buzzwords that has spread through the literature, film, TV, and gaming industries in the last few years. I have. I have lived and breathed it for years, even before it was called transmedia. I’ve given hundreds of talks around the world about what it apparently is and could be. I wrote the first PhD on Transmedia Practice, where I argued it cannot be defined by an end point – projects that involve the continuation of a narrative across more than two media for instance – and instead it represents a change in the way people create.</p> <p>I therefore concentrated my education efforts on the “how to,” sharing what is needed to write and design transmedia projects. What comes into play with this too is the difficulty in working across different departments within a company, and across companies. Companies that have carved their place in the world by specialising in one artform or industry. You’re a novelist, and there are publishers, or you’re a dancer, who works in a dance company. Each of these industries has their own production processes, jargon, artistic and commercial goals, relationship with their audience, as well as politics.</p> <p>And so I spoke about this new kind of practitioner, one that creates projects that..."</p></blockquote>

Read Christy's full post here:

http://meanland.com.au/blog/post/do-you-go-both-ways/#