The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| Crowdsourcing goes to Hollywood as Amazon makes movies Posted: 10 Oct 2012 08:27 AM PDT  The Amazon streaming video app for Apple's iPad is seen in Los Angeles in this August 1, 2012 file photograph. — Reuters pic Essentially, Amazon is crowdsourcing the creation of original content — movies such as "Zombies versus Gladiators" and the children's TV series "Magic Monkey Billionaire." The retailer hopes the approach will result in more hits and fewer flops than the traditional Hollywood practice of filtering creative ideas through three-martini lunches with studio bosses and movie stars. Like rival movie provider Netflix Inc, Amazon is developing its own content to supplement movies and TV shows from Hollywood's back catalogue. Amazon pays an estimated US$1 billion (RM3.07 billion) a year to stream programming from others over its Prime Instant Video service. Since late 2010, the company's Hollywood studio, Amazon Studios, has let aspiring screenwriters and film makers upload thousands of scripts to its website. It has an exclusive, 45-day option to buy movie scripts for US$200,000 and TV series for US$55,000. It can also pay US$10,000 to extend options for 18 months. Instead of green-lighting a feature-length film or TV pilot, Amazon first helps develop the scripts it options into trial videos. It posts these online to solicit reviews and feedback from its millions of customers. Writers use the feedback to adjust scripts, hoping to boost the chances of creating a hit when Amazon spends millions of dollars turning projects into full movies or TV shows. "Hopefully we can avoid big bombs," said Roy Price, head of Amazon Studios. "Our notion for what the world needs may be a roller-skating movie or a battleship film, but that could be wrong. We can do tests and find out that, actually, no one cares about this project or that one. If you do that before you spend US$200 million on it, that would be good. Good for customers and good for the business." For instance, Amazon took its nine best test movies from 2011 and posted them on Amazon Instant Video, the company's streaming video service. Customers viewed the projects hundreds of thousands of times, according to the company. It is using reviews and feedback to re-write scripts. Amazon also collected data on how long customers watched the test videos and how many watched all the way through. "That form of implicit feedback is as useful, or more useful sometimes, than the explicit feedback," Price said. "This told us something about the marketability of these ideas." Amazon Studios recently turned "Blackburn Burrow," a movie script by screenwriter Jay Levy, into a digital comic to get more consumer input. The comic, recently the most-downloaded free comic on Amazon's Kindle store, comes with a survey for feedback on what people thought about the story, according to Levy. "If you look at the amount of data Amazon collects every day, it's incredible," Levy said. "This way, they begin to get actual feedback about the story and will create something that people really get invested in." Bringing market research to the creative process is nothing new, of course. Hollywood tests movies with focus groups all the time. But it is not done on such an open, large scale as Amazon's approach. "You often don't get audience feedback until you almost release a movie," said Edward Saxon, Oscar-winning producer of "The Silence of the Lambs." "Film-making is an iterative process - a draft and then another draft. Amazon is very smart to find more places along the way to get feedback." Saxon is one of a handful of big-name producers who have signed on to Amazon Studio projects. He is helping develop "Children Of Others," about a woman who takes her last chance at a fertility clinic, only to find that her unborn child may be the first wave of an alien invasion. Amazon Studios currently has 21 movie projects and nine TV projects in development. The movies will be made for theatrical release - Amazon has a deal that gives Warner Bros. Pictures the first crack at bringing them to the big screen, known in industry parlance as a "first-look" deal. Any TV series will be distributed on Amazon's video streaming platform as exclusive shows, according to Price. Amazon has been clear about what it wants to spend and it knows movie-making costs money, Saxon said. "I am betting my professional energy that we are going to see a good number of Amazon movies, and I hope mine is one of them," he added. "The movie we're making is going to compete with the big boys." — Reuters |
| British singer Sarah Brightman to be Russia’s next space tourist Posted: 10 Oct 2012 08:23 AM PDT  British singer Sarah Brightman (L) hugs Eric Anderson, Chairman of Space Adventures, a US firm that brokers spaceflight experiences, after a news conference in Moscow October 10, 2012. — Reuters pic Brightman, 52, who is famous for starring in "The Phantom of the Opera", plans to rocket some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth to the International Space Station - becoming the first space tourist since Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte donned a red clown's nose on his 2009 trip. "I am more excited about this than I have been about anything I have done to date," Brightman, in platform heels and a silky black dress, told reporters on a visit to Moscow. "Most of my life I have felt an incredible desire to take the journey to space that I have now begun," she said. "This is beyond my wildest dreams." A press conference held for the announcement in Moscow began with a music video advertising Brightman's new album "Dream Chaser", which is expected to be released in January. The video of her crooning the album's top track "Angel" is spliced with footage of her as a child and famous moments from Soviet space history. Brightman, a UNESCO artist for peace, said seeing fuzzy television images of the first "bouncing" human steps on the moon in 1969 when she was eight years old inspired her with the dream to travel to space. "It was something miraculous. For me it was an epiphany," she said of the experience. "It seemed so unrealistic and crazy at the time but I suddenly saw that it was possible," she said. While the diva did not disclose the price tag for the trip, the ninth so far brokered by US firm Space Adventures, it can be expected to be at least as much as Russia charges NASA astronauts for the privilege - more than US$50 million (RM154 million). The adventure package includes 12 days in orbit. Brightman said she will use her mission to promote education for women in the sciences and raise environmental awareness. The star - who sung her about enthusiasm for space in thigh-high boots and a sequined leotard in her 1970s hit "I Lost my Heart to a Starship Trooper" - has already booked a ride on Virgin Galactic's planned suborbital SpaceShipTwo vehicle. A decade after US businessman Dennis Tito became Russia's first space tourist, the commercial space flight industry is heating up. US space agency NASA gave the industry a boost when it signalled it expects to rely on private sector "space taxis" to ferry cargo and crew to the US$100-billion orbital research station after the retirement of its shuttle programme last year. To experience weightlessness on Virgin Galactic's suborbital plane, Brightman will have bought a US$200,000 ticket. The firm, an offshoot of British tycoon Richard Branson's Virgin Group, expects to launch commercial service in late 2013 or 2014. The singer will be the first space tourist aboard Russia's Soyuz spaceship since 2009 after seats on the three-person craft became scarce when NASA mothballed its shuttles, leaving Russian rockets as the only ones capable of carrying crews into orbit. But NASA is considering doubling the amount of time an astronaut spends on the orbital station to one year - to lay the groundwork for future missions deeper into space - potentially freeing up seats for tourist from 2015. A Russian space official Alexei Krasnov said Brightman's flight would likely be carried out in 2015. Brightman married composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1980s and pursued a chart-topping solo career after they broke up in 1990, bringing classical music to a broader audience and selling millions of records along the way. — Reuters |
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