WebHelperMagazine.com

Welcome to WebHelperMagazine.com. Please consider signing up for our RSS feed. Check out our job board, and be sure to leave comments -- we post your name and a link to your site as a way to thank you for joining the WHMag conversation.

At WebHelperMagazine.com, we run article series on Copy Writing Techniques to help you in creating good web content at your blogs and sites, and have a section on Social Media Marketing which contains a number of articles on the details of creating videos for the web. But has anyone given any thought to the history of visual story telling? First came Theater, then Television, and now online Video — visual story telling. I wager that the info-preneurs that can understand the strengths and differences of each will have a leg up on the competition — and Daniel Ravner has some ideas about just that. [Ed.]

by Daniel Ravner

The entertainment industry knows it’s on the brink of a major shift. The future runs through a link, but which one still remains a mystery. Television stations launch mega sites and production companies open internet divisions. However, the question of what is exactly internet content remains unclear. For the major media enterprises the answer usually falls between one of two options: 1.translations of existing television content, usually through editing or 2.original content, constructed like a television production only without the budget.

“Why then, doesn’t the original content on the net feels like theater? Simply put, because of the Close Up. It calls for small acting and intimacy, the opposite of theater.”

The future of content lies in the internet because the future of television runs through the web’s technology. The concept of internet content is, to a large degree, still undefined because that the popular language that would define it is still being formed.

Looking at the successes internet culture gave birth to (And I’m talking about content made within the internet, for the internet, and would not reach large audiences if not for the internet) one can easily conclude that virtual creation has more to do with the theater, that with television or cinema.

The major difference between theater and television or cinema (and I apologize in advance for generalizing) is that in the theater the story used to incite an emotion or an insight is conveyed mainly through dialogue. In film and television the story telling is resting on visual for its effect (Imagine an actor playing a prisoner on stage and shouting his heart out “fffrrreeedddoommm”. The cinematic translation of that scene would be a camera moving from his darkened face to the window and out into the open spaces.) Yet another major difference between the mediums is technical. Theater usually uses a small amount of locations while a movie or a TV series would use many.

The continuous viral successes (as opposed to a specific video that roams the world through emails’ FWD) are such that rely on dialogues and not visuals. The biggest cultural phenomenon youtube presented to the world are “ask a ninja” and “lonely girl,” both comprised of one location, a visual gimmick and a spoken content that creates the different webisodes. A peek at youtube’s “most viewed of all times” page shows that in the top four videos, with a combined 138 million views, the camera doesn’t move from the beginning of the video till its end. “Mr. Deity,” a Sony sponsored popular sitcom about God is mostly a studio piece, with hardly any visual story - the drama and the comedy are all in the dialogues.

This is not to say that there isn’t original commercial art on the web that expands further than the studio confines, but this is usually the result of animation or editing of existing materials.

This evolution makes sense to me. The internet is an alluring stage for creativity but the big money (for original productions) is still absent. So the solution is low budget creations which translate into small production values manifesting mainly in a single location presentation. Drama in a confined space is a challenge that the theater has much more experience with.

Why then, doesn’t the original content on the net feels like theater? Simply put, because of the Close Up. It calls for small acting and intimacy, the opposite of theater. It is the combination of the two that create the clearest examples of significant pure internet content.

It’s only a question of time before technology closes the gap between television and the internet, as far as broadcasting methods. I hope and believe that by that time, the internet has already established an original unique language to the medium. That way the internet will not be another television station, rather an evolution in the way we tell stories.

About the Author: Daniel Ravner, was born and raised in Israel. He studied Theater and Film in New York City where he earned the W. Eaton award for excellence in playwriting and the ‘Best of Festival’ Award for his short film “the art of talking to girls” (IFC sponsored festeyeful film festival). He is currently residing in Israel and his recent efforts include prime time TV writing, acting as an artistic director of an emerging artist’s theater festival (www.smallbam.com) and a new comedic play he wrote is due to open in the coming winter nation wide.