Fast Forward

"Muse me: inspiration drawn from foreigning the familiar. … It's a beautiful thing when two people can share a conversation but not a conclusion," noted one of tonight's salon gathering attendees, Tamara Jackson, earlier this year on her blog. Tonight, over cocktails at a bustling bar in Los Angeles, a small and informal group of like-minds — ranging from young masters of the universe to wise men and women dabbling in 2.0 — converged to talk about film, web, design and so much more.

It was always the plan that FWD:labs would have an off-line balance with regular salon gatherings. Uniquely for FWD:labs, this bridges artists in film, web and design working with cinema. Six tenets of these salons, based on the book Creating Customer Evangelists, include:

• Continuously gather feedback about our work, our goals and ourselves
• Share knowledge freely between those ahead, behind and just plain curious
• Build word-of-mouth networks for work or for play
• Meet and share with the community beyond your comfort zone, your own rolodex and your own industry
• Smaller, bite-sized offerings rather than big, oft-overwhelming extravaganzas
• Rally behind a cause, be it FWD:labs or other: it's all welcome

As of tonight, and after a long time on the back burner, it's come full circle. Hardly at all about talking shop, which would have been all too easy, the group included some of the FWD:labs collective as well as some new faces, each of us comfortably stretching from our own social networks with stimulating drinks and intoxicating conversations.

One thing was clear: everyone was enjoying themselves. Tonight will be followed by Salon Gathering #002 and #003, powered by momentum and proximity. In just a few weeks across town, the next stimulant will be Saturday morning coffee at a quiet cafe, before another Friday evening cocktail at a boisterous bar. Check the calendar for updates, as the time and place will change up to stay fresh.

To be notified of upcoming salons, please join the e-mail list.

The McKinsey Quarterly interview on innovation at Pixar with director Brad Bird

Kaizen (改善), Japanese for the philosophy of continuous improvement, is one method to stir up innovation and playfulness, which is especially useful in the business of creativity.

The three principals, according to the Wikipedia entry, include:

• Consider process and results, not just results, to foreground actions to achieve effects
• Think big picture, not just what's in front of you, to prevent additional problems
• Approach with a learning intent, not judgmental or blaming, to re-think the assumptions that led to the current process

Innovation

In a New Yorker article now on newsstands, "The Open Secret of Success," car maker Toyota is singled out as most profitable and innovative and now the industry's sales leader. Part of that is due to the core approach of kaizen, which Toyota began after the Second World War. As a continually successful car company, it's in part due to "defining innovation as an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis. Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains. And so it rejects the idea that innovation is the province of an elect few; instead, it's taken to be an everyday task for which everyone is responsible." The article highlights how philosophy of kaizen contrasts with how most companies think about change.

In a May 4 post by Cameron Schaeffer, "How to Kill an Organization: 5 Barriers to Kaizen," the life lesson blogger opens with a quote from the 2003 book, "The Toyota Way," by Jeffrey Liker. "The greatest sign of strength is when an individual can openly address thing that did not go right, take responsibility, and propose countermeasures to prevent these things from happening again. … [Kaizen] pushes the decision making (or proposal making) down to the workers and requires open discussion and a group consensus before implementing any decisions." Schaefer elaborates on the five thoughts — including insecure leadership, unmotivated employees, and promotion by numbers — and suggests that companies who keep ahead "must reward the mavericks, the innovative thinkers who question the norm and create new ways of doing things."

Playfulness

In a May 4 article in the New York Times, "Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?", M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book "This Year I Will…," notes three zones for change: comfort, stretch and stress. When we try something awkward and unfamiliar, or stretch, change can happen:

"Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain. … If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we'll run from what we're trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don't set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness."

All together now

On May 9, blog Signal vs. Noise recapped the Times article and others in a post called "The small steps edition." They also cited the McKinsey Quarterly interview from April with director Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) called "Innovation lessons from Pixar." (Free registration required at mckinseyquarterly.com to read entire article.)

When The Quarterly asked of important elements to stimulate innovative thinking, Bird touches on having the faith to follow through:

"The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … 'You don't play it safe–you do something that scares you, that's at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That's what gets you up in the morning.'"

ABC.com's online full episode player

Circulated today in the world of digital ad sales, an internal memo notified rival networks that a circle has been broken. Last Friday, ABC announced that it will "break from industry standard of single-sponsor online pods and test ad breaks with multiple commercials." Currently, breaks usually include one :15 or :30 commercial.

Their experiment affects online video streams of full-episode content, including shows like "Lost," "Desparate Housewives" and "Ugly Betty." The memo also notes that "ABC was one of first broadcasters to offer episodes online and its viewers average 47.5 minutes on the site, more than 3x as long as any other broadcaster."

Albert Cheng, executive VP digital media at Disney ABC Television Group (DATG), told The Hollywood Reporter that "[i]t would be premature for us to say people only want one ad. It's a likely sort of thinking, but we want to push it a little bit to see how it would go. … If research shows that users don't want more ads per break, Disney won't pursue that strategy."

It's unclear how this model will work but this is a testiment to the TV industry's commitment to providing its content online and transfer its business model for a digital world.

Will everyone follow suit? Why is ABC ahead with visitor trends of time on their site? How soon until new Internet is like old TV?

Spike Lee's page on the Nokia Productions web site

Oscar-nominated director Spike Lee, teaming with Nokia, is calling his experimental filmmaking endeavour the "democratization of film." In a recent article in the New York Times, the filmmaker expresses his interest in mobile contest "because it's a great collaborative effort. Within five years, new movies will be made with devices like these. … We want people to send sounds, music, maybe a baby crying in the park." The director will oversee the top 25 submissions of video, music, photos and text sent in by cell phone users to create a feature-length film.

Sharing Cinema

Film intentionally made, not just distributed, for mobile is gaining momentum as these devices have larger screens to see and easier accessibility to share. In 2004, Fox started, and trademarked, "mobisodes" with spin-off episodes of hit show, "24: Conspiracy," which were comissioned by Verizon. In 2007, MTV Networks started the animated series "Lil' Bush: Resident of the United States" and mtvU tried the live action "Suck Less, With Kevin Smith," both partnered with Amp'd Mobile. Also in 2007, Robert Redford's Sundance Institute and GSM worked to make the Global Short Film Project and its five short films for your phone. Director Maria Maggenti, whose film "Los Viajes de King Tiny" was included, shares her excitement on the new dialogue. "The thing that's interesting about this format–about using this technology–is that there's still a really strong impulse that people have to share. … The same way you do when you go to the cinema. I hope that people say: 'Oh! Let me send you this little movie,' or 'Come over here and watch this movie that's on my cell phone!' That's what I want people to get out of it: Sharing it."

Cinematographic creativity might be on the rise, but online video is rife with incoherent randomness. It's another capture medium and distribution platform for storytelling, but yet to gain the momentum behind webisodes and social video networks.

One of the new ways of thinking is the transparency of dialogue between audience and distributor. In the BusinessWeek article, "How Nokia Users Drive Innovation,", suggests that "[i]nstead of people recording silly Web cam videos for YouTube or inventing frivolous advocacy groups on Facebook, [cell phone users] can help make the mobile Internet more useful." These efforts need — and this one has — a roadmap with specific assignments. As noted in the press release for the Lee/Nokia contest, "each act will be announced online and people will then have four weeks to produce their submission."

New School

Lee goes further to suggests that "[a]spiring filmmakers no longer have to go to film school to make great work. With a simple mobile phone, almost anyone can now become a filmmaker." Film critic Eric D. Snider disagrees in his opinion on Film.com. "Hold the phone there, Spikeroo. There's a huge difference between 'making a film' — i.e., pointing your camera or cell phone at something and pressing 'record' — and being a 'filmmaker.' No, you don't have to go to film school to be a filmmaker. But merely possessing a device that can record moving images doesn't qualify you as one either. I've got some pots and pans in my kitchen. Does that mean I'm a chef? If so, it's going on my resume."

Director David Lynch also had some curt thoughts on being "cheated" with cinema that ends up on cells. Ironically, the soundbite from the Inland Empire DVD extra found its way onto YouTube and, in January 2008, the mash-up became an iPhone parody.

New Relationship

Proximity is a big change, as noted on SlashFilm.com. The scale of audience to screen to a movie theater screen, to a living room television, to a personal computer screen, and to a cell phone in your hand divide each step of the way. Wired Magazine, in a 2004 article on cell phone filmmaking, asked director Joe Miale on that relationship. "You're not going to make a short film that is character-based. It would be more caricature-based. … A two-minute Pixar movie, with animated fish, would be perfect. I don't think there's enough on that tiny little screen to give you a breathtaking performance with subtlety."

In a recent interview with AdAge, Spike Lee said of his hopes for this feature film, "I never underestimate creativity in people."