Agent 99 - Online story telling

An answer to a question I posted on TwelvePoint.com

Question:

Can you give us some pointers as to the basic requirements for posting film/video on the web and whether it would be better to do this in a number of short clips as opposed to a longer reel?

Answer:

OK, there're two issues here:

Basic video posting

This is not about how to talk to the chap down the market about your vegetable-selling epic, this is about commercial reality, the cold shower.

If you pop over to the UKFC site they have a section called 'Research', in there is a whole bunch of stuff about audiences and producers and all that (very worth skimming) but the main page I wanted you to take a peek at is called 'Weekend Box Office Figures'.

A book I picked up recently is Seth Godin’s ‘The Dip’. If you don’t know Godin he’s a bit of a god in marketing circles (boom boom) and writes a lot of clever books that are getting shorter and shorter and better and better. His books are mostly about current marketing tropes, and it would be fair to say that he has invented a fair few of them. But ‘The Dip’ is a little different.

I wrote this one for a forum question on Twelvepoint.com, but liked it enough to copy it over here. The question was whether is was a good idea to write a treatment or outline etc etc. It is a good thread, but it was frustrating me as words like 'always' and 'never' got used; always write a treatment, always do this and so on. So here's what I wrote back to the thread...
Everyone is wrong, it's only you that needs to be right