Tag Archives: mass amateurization

Real time movie making with Xtranormal

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XtranormalOne of the more exciting companies I’ve come across recently is Xtranormal. It’s a great example of where I see the future of entertainment going.

Movies have been digital for a while, but Xtranormal moves the entire creation process into the digital realm. Newspapers went fully digital with the Internet and look what it did for them. I’d expect even more for movies.

People’s first foray into scripted movies is usually as part of a class project. Going through the motions you quickly learn how incredibly time consuming it all is. Your friends, now actors, are difficult to organize let alone direct. Having a script would be helpful but most people start without one. The biggest lesson you learn is that re-shoots and last minute edits take up more time than shooting the original footage. It simply isn’t an easy medium to work with and in the end you settle on something far below your original vision.

Edit and re-shoot in real time

Being fully digital changes much of that. With Xtranormal the actors are completely virtual, using text to speech for their dialogue. Even the camera and editing can be automated. You can build a film in less than a minute. Granted the text to speech is still a little rough and there are only a limited set of characters and sets, but the technology will only improve with time and what you gain can be much more powerful. For one, you can all but do away with those pesky re-shoots – you can create a movie in real time if you’d like.

Open source movies

Xtranormal also enables you to set a movie as being open – open for others to cut, remix, do whatever they’d like with your original work. That’s taking fan fiction to a whole new level and truly powering mass amateurization as defined by Clay Shirky.

Movies as a continuous evolving product

Editing movies in real time also changes the concept of a finished product. Think of a movie being in Beta. With edits and re-shoots being this easy it’s possible to also employ continuous deployment and continuous learning as advised by Eric Ries and his Lean Startup methodology. Think of split-testing not just a new ending, but a single line of dialogue. Truly the movie itself becomes a continuously evolving product.

It’s all about the level of content

I’ve seen other similar tools like GoAnimate but none use text to speech and the 3D aspect certainly puts Xtranormal a step above. That said however, Xtranormal will succeed or fail based on the level of content created with the tool. There are only a limited set of characters and sets to choose from so you’re story will be pretty confined to talking heads but with a little creativity I’m sure you can work around that and the roughness of the text to speech. I just started a project to try and experiment with interactive story using Xtranormal, hopefully others will start experimenting with it as well.

Best books for lean product managers

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Being an avid reader of non-fiction I find that I tend to go through phases. Right now I’m racing through books that have anything to do with Disney Imagineering. Prior to that it was lean product development. Having just finished Four Steps to the Epiphany I thought I’d compile a list of what I found to be the best lean product management books I’ve read over the last year.

Four Steps to the Epiphany

This book is all about Steven Blank‘s concept of Customer Development. If you’re not familiar with Customer Development you should be. It’s very different than the traditional product development model. Where as most start-up founders start with the conviction that they know success looks like and just need VC money to build it, customer development starts with a hypothesis. It’s only once a hypothesis has been validated that you really start building.

The book covers much more than just product management but gives you a good idea of the role in a Customer Development start-up.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Inspired – How to Crate Products Customers Love

The book by Marty Cagan is much more focused on product management and interestingly enough, describes a process that’s very similar to Steve Blank’s Customer Development. It’s all about quick prototyping and listening to users – seems simple enough but goes much beyond that and gives you detailed action items. Like Four Steps of Epiphany, much of the suggestions in are counter to what you might have come to expect from start-ups today.

Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

The Back of the Napkin

Lean development means getting your idea across in simple ways. I can’t tell you how much trouble misunderstandings have caused me in my years of product development. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words but this book by Dan Roam goes beyond just making pretty pictures. It explains how to go about creating the most informative picture even if you don’t know how to draw.

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

This by no means is a new book, but having re-read it recently I can’t get away from how timely it still is. Everyone talks about viralitiy, social media, etc. but the fundamentals of marketing are still about positioning your product in the minds of users. As a product manager you need to understand this if not just for the fact that your products success is not entirely up to which features you build or do not build.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 20th Anniversary Edition

Made to Stick

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/69242.Made_to_Stick_Why_Some_Ideas_Survive_and_Others_Die

If it’s all about positioning then Made to Stick is a timely guide to do just that. It’s also more than just marketing, it’s message of simplicity goes much farther.

Consider it a great how to guide to finding simplicity. Products and processes can get very complicated, this book will help you take a step back and see what’s important.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Here Comes Everybody

Threw this in because I found it to be a book that makes you think about how the landscape is changing. It’s all about mass amateurization, something Clay Shirky introduced us to when he described how the world of publishing is changing.

Product managers should be familiar with the concepts in this book as they did social media a few years ago. Mass amateurization changes everything.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Honorable mention

If Eric Ries would ever write a book about his Lean Startup I’d have that up here too. I’ve seen him speak twice and am always interested in hearing more. His Lean Startup is almost a nuts and bolts approach to Customer Development and more. Luckily he’s running a workshop next month that I’m attending.

A billion to take on WoW, time for mass amateurization

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Apparently WoW is so dominate in the fantasy space that future MMOs are looking for greener pastures to explore.

Sports just makes the most sense. Loads of people like football. At Monumental we want to take national pastimes and make them MMOs – things like fishing or trainspotting. Fantasy is very well serviced. I’d need a billion quid to take on WoW.

- Monumental CEO Rik Alexander

A billion to take on Wow? While I can understand that is a daunting sum, I doubt exploring every genre under the sun will prove successful either. What they need to do is change the model, not just find another genre. What they need, what we need is mass amateurization. Of course that probably means less profit than what WoW is pulling in, but how long will WoW be able to hold onto that profit margin – especially if mass amateurization is unleashed on the market?

Mass amateurization is the web’s normal pattern. Travelocity doesn’t make everyone a travel agent. It undermines the value of being travel agent at all, by fixing the inefficiencies travel agents are paid to overcome one booking at a time. Weblogs fix the inefficiencies traditional publishers are paid to overcome one book at a time, and in a world where publishing is that efficient, it is no longer an activity worth paying for

- Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

Looks like us little people are going to be responsible for innovation in the metaverse

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I found the post Putting the creativity back in creative capitalism particularly interesting to the development of the metaverse. In my last post I wrote about a comment from Dusan Writer, where he expressed worry that much of what is great about the metaverse is being twisted for corporations. He echoed that feeling in his post – Small Worlds, Small Minds: How Brands Have Sucker-Punched Virtual Worlds.

The brand agenda has siphoned talent from the metaverse to create the equivalent of commercial candy, throwing a sucker punch at the idea of virtual worlds without even knowing it’s doing it.

I pretty much agree with Dusan but also feel that corporations have their place. Then I read about the paper the post is built upon.

In the economy of the 21st century, economic and technical innovation is increasingly based on developments that don’t rely on economic incentive or public provision. Unlike 20th century innovation, the most important developments in innovation have been driven not by research funded by governments or developed by corporations but by the collaborative interactions of individuals. In most cases, this modality of innovation has not been motivated by economic concerns or the prospect of profit. This raises the possibility of a world in which some of the sectors of the economy particularly the ones dealing with innovation and creativity are driven by social interactions of various kinds, rather than by profit-oriented investment.

This makes you think, have corporations really done that much for us? Could we do just as well without them? Then I realize those are the wrong questions. Or more correctly, I as an individual and enthusiast of the metaverse am the wrong audience. The authors hold up the internet economy as an example.

The dominant driver of the Internet economy is not profit-seeking innovation but individual and collective creativity. Creativity is, and always has been, driven by a wide range of motives, some altruistic and others, like the desire to display superior skill, rather less so. Trying to tie all of these motives to direct monetary rewards is futile and, if pushed too far, counterproductive.

The key is in the last sentence, this is meant more as a warning to businesses than users, developers, and fanatics. Businesses shouldn’t worry so much about profiting off every little thing but rather work with the real innovators – the users, the little people, weekend warriors, etc.