Hugh Garry

The Quite Wonderful Dr Horrible

 

I must say I've been loving Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and now it's gone I feel there is a hole in my life normally only felt when either the football season has ended or when the doors on the Big Brother house have closed one last time. In a week that sees the media hype for The Dark Knight hijack every pixel of screen space and every second of TV time put before us, it has been an absolute joy to watch this 3 act relatively low-budget 'made for the internet' superhero sing-along.

Dr Horrible is 'the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he's too shy to talk to'. Though it's called a blog, it's not. It's simply 3 acts in which the main character played by Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser/How I Met Your Mother) occasionally talks to the camera in a video blog kinda way. Act 1 went live last Monday and was down in hours due to the demand on the servers. Over the week acts 2 and 3 went up and are due to be taken down at midnight tonight (July 20th).

The whole thing came from the mind of Joss Whedon, a Hollywood writer and director who has previously written  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Toy Story, and Alien: Resurrection. He's also done quite a bit of comedy on TV including Roseanne and The Office (US). Apart from the great script, good songs and some decent one-lines what I really like about the project is that it came about as a result of the writers strike. I'll let Joss explain further...

"Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

"Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

"The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first."

If you're the kinda person that lives by the rule of always turning a negative into a positive then the success of this story will not come as a surprise. I've often found that my best work has come through such circumstances, or through being restricted in what I can do. Though it's been well documented that restrictions on cigarette advertising produced some of the most memorable print ads of the 70's and 80's, and Dr Horrible is excellent, I'll hold back judgment on the forthcoming StrikeTV (online channel filled with content written during the strike) having watched the trailer below...

www.strike.tv Teaser from StrikeTV on Vimeo.

Bored? Stoned? Insomniac?

 

Then you've got to check Upl8 by Poke NY. I stumbled across this courtesy of Russell Davies' great post on Watching The Internet. As a 2-laptop-per-producer kinda guy I'm a shocker for having YouTube running on my mac as I work away on my PC. It's music player of choice these days. As a video player the ambient glance-able nature of Upl8 is what makes it so wonderful. I sent the link around to the team and many emailed my back saying they wished they could twist the knobs or push the buttons. I was shocked. If you want to push buttons try this or this. The real beauty of Upl8 for me is that you can't push the buttons... you just type in the url and let it flow - ambient nonsense till the cows come home. There is some functionality but you'll have to go to Iain Tait's Crackunit.com to find out how to load it with clips of kittens.

As anyone working in radio will tell you glance-able content will play a massive part in the future of radio, but there have been 2 occasions in the last few years that hammered home how important it is already, and has been for sometime. The first occurrence was in 2006 when I asked my teen son to cast an eye over the Radio 1 website and tell me what liked most. Expecting him to talk about the wealth of video, incredible event coverage or superb music content I was stunned when he pointed to the 'track now playing' feed at the top of the homepage. When I asked why he replied 'Because if a tune comes on I like I can switch off the music I'm playing and turn on the radio'. I assumed nobody would choose to listen to radio this way and put it down to him being a lovable crank.

I totally forgot about it until I did a 'meeting the public' session early 2007 where I talked to a couple of Radio 1 lovers about listening to radio via their TV. I was pretty pleased to find out that it was their favourite way of 'listening' to Radio 1 until they explained that listening via TV allowed them to turn off their own music and turn up the radio when they see a track they like appear on the 'track now playing feed' on screen.

I always thought the real value of tracklistings was aligned to music discovery or compiling your own playlists, something that would augment the experience of listening to the radio rather than a reminder to switch the radio on for the next 3 minutes.