Hugh Garry

...like having dinner with Joe Pesci

Russell Davies is crowd sourcing an analogy library so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring. Here goes...

Working for the BBC is like having dinner with Joe Pesci. Sometimes it's impossible to know how people will react when things go wrong.

With so many heads rolling over the whole Brand Ross affair one can't but help look back and ask 'How did it all come to this'? If for a moment you can somehow try to erase everything that has gone since from your mind, and bring yourself back to that moment, would anyone predict that what had been said would have had such dramatic consequences. Really? Ultimately it all comes down to a judgment call on whether Andrew Sachs would view such comments as lighthearted or intentionally offensive.

The whole thing reminds me of the scene in Goodfellas when at the end of yet another hilarious anecdote by Tommy (Joe Pesci) somewhere in amongst the riotous laughter Henry (Ray Liotta) is heard to say 'You're funny'. Unfortunately for Henry the comment made in good spirit was not taken that way by Tommy and what followed was very comfortable to watch...pretty much like the news this week.

From this point on it's hard to imagine how Russell Brand or Johnathan Ross will perform given that somewhere in the back of their minds is the fear of a Pesci-like reaction waiting to leap on every comment made about a celebrity. Similarly staff at the BBC will fear a Pesci-like reaction from the public at any content deemed 'risky'. Who wants a bad judgment call on their CV? Calculated risks will be gone forever, replaced by much safer Radio/TV programming at a time when people are calling for the BBC to be more distinctive. I'm not saying insulting people is distinctive, but look beyond the bad language and both were capable of distinctive TV.

Fortunately for Liotta, Pesci was winding him up and it all ends up with laughs and smiles. Sadly for Brand, Ross and Leslie Douglas the only people laughing are the 30,000 who went out of their way to hunt down the audio on Youtube so they could be offended by it. It's a bit like that old Tommy Cooper joke... "Bloke goes to the doctor and says 'Doc, my arm hurts when I do that' (holds arm up in a weird way), so the doctor says 'don't do it then'. That's two analogies in one post.

Ross Brand Visualisation

Here's what the public felt about Sachsgate as seen via Wordle. First visualisation represents comments from readers of the Daily Mail.

This one is from the Guardian

3 lessons in mobile movie making

It was late April when I came up with idea of making a film about festivals shot on mobile phones. I quickly spread the word around the office and everyone got pretty excited about it. A few weeks later news came through that Spike Lee had teamed up with Nokia to do something similar and I instantly got that feeling you get when you go to a party and someone is wearing the same shirt as you..thunder stolen, pocket well and truly picked. It's inevitable that mobile movie making is going to be big, I just didn't want the floodgates to open until I got my film out the door.

When I discovered a week before the premier of Shoot The Summer that Spike had finished his film I was pretty keen to see the results. It was a strange position to find myself in. Here I was like a school kid in the exam hall peeping over the shoulder of a class mate to compare work... only this time the class mate was Emmy Award winning Spike Lee. Regular readers of this blog will know that earlier in the summer I found myself pitching a comedy idea to Bafta winner, Emmy winner and Golden Globe winner Stephen Merchant. The film has put me in good company and I feel I've faired up pretty well. After a difficult start Stephen got the idea and liked it when he saw. As for Spike, I like his film, it's great, but it's only 7 minutes long. I wanted it to be longer because I wanted to see what he'd do with it. As it is I've learned little. I wonder if he's sat there with his Emmy looking at mine thinking 'shit, glad his film is an hour long, I've got loads to learn from that'? Doubt it.

So what were the learnings from Shoot The Summer.

1. An hour of mobile footage IS watchable. The quality of the footage captured by the Nokia's N95 is incredible. 5 mega-pixel camera and 8 gig memory means that you can capture a full hour of 'TV quality' footage on your phone. Even on the cinema screen it looked great. If you've ever full screened a youtube clip you'll know how much quality can be lost but it was barely noticeable. As for shaky hand shots causing nausea whilst watching, its a myth. Most people filming themselves are focusing on their faces. As their face is attached to the same body as the hand holding the camera there is no shaking. The foreground remain still whilst the background moves.

2. The general public are beginning to think editorially. People are getting the habit of using camera phones to make movies of their own and as a result they now think about what they will do before they press record. Some of them have a good editorial idea about what they want to do and plan it beforehand. This is why I didn't end up with a load of footage of people wasted in tents or other nonsense. This will get better over the years... think about the effect the arrival of digital SLRs had on photography.We'll soon be a nation of Coppolas.

At the start of the summer I had a bag full of phones to give to strangers at festivals. Everyone thought a majority of them would be stolen by the end of the summer. None of them went walkie... OK, I did have to go chasing around Cambridge one night to track one down but that's because the guys that had them had over indulged in something stronger than Pimms. The reason none of the phones vanished was because the value of 15 minutes of fame for the audience far out-weighed any monetary value the phone could bring. People want to be on-screen. People want to be more than just themselves when the cameras are on. And people want to be a part of something interesting. All these factors worked in my favour. As for the artists, they tended to gravitate towards the safety of performance. There were a lot of improvised songs and spoken word... all good though.

3. Choose your UGC subjects before a frame is filmed. The general model for UGC is based around skimming the best from a huge number of participants. This model doesn't work for me for 2 reasons. The first is the time it takes to go through thousands of videos. The second is that you end up with thousands of disappointed people. My first memory of UGC goes back 3 decades to a TV show called Vision On which starred Tony Hart. Each week The Gallery gave us, the general public, the chance to get our painting shown to (probably) millions of viewers. Now I was no van Gogh but each week I'd see a piss poor painting of a tortoise appear in the gallery thinking 'if Jim aged 9 can get his painting in the gallery then surely my battleship should be in too'. It never was and how I hated the makers of the show for that. That's always the danger of UGC, someone ends up feeling like their work is inferior and unfortunately the bigger the call to action the more resentment there will be.

The model that worked for me was heading out to the festivals, spend some time meeting people and when I thought they were interesting enough and had something to say I'd then asked them to film something for me. It was a lot easier than sifting through millions of clips and allowed me to keep tabs on how my film was going to look as summer progressed. It also gave me the luxury of finding someone else at the festival if the people I chose didn't capture anything good. The other great thing about this method is that you get to meet lots of interesting people who will eventually star in your film. Ben and Alex, Chris from Aylesbury, even Gary Numan, great to meet them all.

Mobile movie trailer

Tonight is the Premier of Shoot The Summer at the Camden Roundhouse Freedom Studios so I'm a bit too busy to blog. However I thought you might want to see this trailer we've made for the film.

More blogging on this to come when I have a few moments spare. Hope you like the trailer. The full film can be seen online from tomorrow (Oct 23rd)

Work, Love and Play

One of the best things about TED is that the speakers gracing the stage have the god given talent of talking about dry subjects in a way that can make you laugh and cry in a way you would never have expected. I can thank politics for my career. I studied politics at A level and such was my hatred of the subject by the time I picked up my grade 'E' that I decided on a career in music.... or anything but politics.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Doris Kearns Goodwin's talk on past presidents and what we can learn from them is as great an example of injecting passion and emotion into dry subjects I could give. At a time when we are surround by so much coverage of American politics focusing on topics such as Palin's passport or Obama's 'terrorist sounding name', her stories of Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson are truly inspiring.

In it she builds 3 stories of Lincoln, Johnson and her father around a quote from psychologist Erik Erikson.

"The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play. To pursue one to the disregard of the others is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age, whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement but with serenity."

She continues to talk about how being haunted by death at an early age and the lack of any sort of afterlife Lincoln realised that if he accomplished something worthy in life then his honor and reputation would out-live his physical existence. She continued to point out that his powers of empathy and ability to accept his errors and learn from his mistakes were the kind of qualities Americans should be looking for in their candidates for 2008.

To emphasize Erikson's point further she turns to another president in Lyndon Johnson with whom she worked alongside in his latter days as president. After years of concentration on work and success Johnson was unable to find joy or solace in his family when he retired, the hole left by work was too large to fill. WOW!!! What a statement. How sad. How frightening. The very thought makes me want to snap my laptop closed this minute, wake my children from their sleep and force them to play Fifa '09 with me this minute, whether they like it or not.

"Despite all that power and all that wealth he was alone when he finally died, his ultimate terror realised."

To finish she caps a wonderful talk with an explanation of how her understanding of narrative comes from her relaying baseball stories to her father as a child. Heartwarming and insightful through to the end it left me questioning the messages I send out to my children. Whilst constantly attempting to inspire them through example and stories of my work I wonder if I'm distorting their view of how adult life should be before they've got there and been able to make up their minds for themselves. Perhaps if I chatted to them more about football or even 'Family Guy' they will take learnings and apply them in a way that they see relevant to how they want to live their lives.

As someone who absolutely adores the work I do I never see working until midnight as a problem. The title of this blog 'Better than digging a hole' is a reference to my joy at being in such a fortunate position to do the job I do. My father was a laborer. He spent his working life digging holes until a stroke in his thirties took away his ability to work. With six young mouths to feed it was a massive blow to my father's Irish pride when my mother went out and became the bread winner. As a result my childhood could have been better. I spent a lot of time with my father but sadly that time was spent watching him counting his days away in his armchair in the corner of the room...and that is what inspires me to work as hard as I do. To constantly strive to be better at what I do and never refuse work because he never had the option to do so keeps me hungry to work even harder. I'm slowly starting to address the fact that it's a distorted belief that by providing for my children (financially) is the number one priority. Arcade Fire nailed it with the line "You say it's money that we need, As if we were only mouths to feed" from 'Intervention', we need equal measures of nourishment from work love and play too. Perhaps instead of trying to right the wrongs of my childhood the lesson i should take is that extremes are never good and balance is everything.

Wow, that got heavy. Anyone fancy a game of Fifa '09

Mobile movie nears completion

I’m sat here in ‘The Shed’ at Radio 1 editing the final part of Shoot The Summer arguing with Pete Roach about which bits to leave in. I want to leave the mistakes in, he’s rather they were taken out. As the editor Pete has had the daunting task of gluing all the clips together in a way that tells some kind of meaningful story. Poor Pete.

Fortunately for him I made a massive editorial decision the day I came up with the idea for a full-length user generated movie. Rather than asking the audience to send in their clips all summer whilst I was tanning myself in Ibiza I wanted to get out there and meet the people first, get to know them a little, then give them a phone to capture their festival experience. I had to be confident that they could film something of value before I’d part with the phone. It’s not easy making that judgment having known someone for such a short time but it seemed to make a lot more sense than wading through thousands of random clips, emailed anonymously by people I’d never met.

We are so used to thinking of UGC as ‘cats on skateboards’ that we often can’t see beyond the youtube experience. I’m pretty happy with the results and my method seems to have produced some nicely shot well thought out pieces from both the audience and the bands. I’ll be honest, part of me really did think I was gonna go through summer trying to make sense of bands board on tour buses and kids off their faces in tents but that certainly isn’t the case.

As I said earlier I’m still editing so I’ve still not watched the film in full. If you were to force me for an early assessment of it I'd say its it pretty bloody good... But I would wouldn't. I’ll know if this whole project has worked in the next few days as it’s being screened on Wednesday at the Electric Proms.  I’ll blog again next week and chat more about my learning’s and the people I met over the summer.