"The Spiral" started
with a burglary where six major works of art
from six different countries were stolen. Arturo, an enigmatic artist
who heads an art community called The Warehouse was behind it. The thieves invited everyone to search
for the paintings, hidden deep in www.thespiral.eu. You could simply enjoy
the thriller series on TV or experience the story through the game, the
online community and the physical events.
Peter De Maegd, producer and story architect of "The Spiral", reveals how
this gigantic project was born and the challenges he faced.
Interview with Peter De Maegd, story architect and producer of The Spiral
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| Peter de Maegd |
Peter De Maegd is an independent film
producer who focuses on the new opportunities of converging media. Over the
last decade, Peter was involved in the production and marketing of over a dozen
feature films. With his company Potemkino he focused on innovative projects and
formats like "Where is Gary?", "Miss Homeless" and
"Jean Wordt Vlaming". He also collaborated for a few years with
Caviar Films. Peter gives lectures on storytelling for Converged media.
Excerpts:
How was the idea of "The Spiral" born?
4 years ago, SVT (public
broadcaster in Sweden) and VRT (public broadcaster in Belgium) teamed with the
ambition to build an innovative participative story project and to work on a
pana-European level.
They brainstormed with other broadcasters and focused on
two questions:
-What story theme pleased
viewers across Europe? The response was crime.
-What setting brings
together characters from different countries in a harmonious way ? The response
was an artistic setting within Europe.
That's how the concept was
born: 6 artists from 6 countries living in the artistic community and stealing
art.
Concerning the
participative part of the project, an audience was invited to recover the paintings
by hunting for them. Additionally, some of the artists were killed during the
process, so the series became a crime series.
The answers to these 2
simple questions enabled us to create the core of this project.
And I joined the project
at this stage of development.
Thus the idea of coproduction was present from the beginning of the project. How did
you find other broadcasters?
SVT and VRT brought three additional partners
to the table. We needed a sixth broadcaster to make it work. And after a lot of
legwork and lobbying, we got two more broadcasters who teamed up: TV3 in
Denmark and ARTE for France & Germany.
You were the story architect for "The Spiral". How did you
develop the transmedia experience?
We already had a strong
idea from the start which was to introduce Larping ("Live Action
Role-Playing", a form of role-playing games where the participants
physically act out their characters' actions). Then we started to analyze the
project with the participation parameters. We decided to open the participation
to a higher level of involvement, knowing that fewer users would be involved at
the beginning. The Larping was done by
Martin Ericsson who also did “The truth of America"
produced by SVT.
We asked ourselves : What
would happen if the story on TV were real? How would that play out online and
in reality? We went through the script noting a long list of things and after
that we defined which elements we could develop, adding in the participation
parameters in a way that would build a coherent storyworld in relation to the
TV series.
What other platforms did you use?
www.thespiral.eu was our
main platform. It was a point of entry into our story world and we had 140 000
visitors there. Another point of entry was the Warehouse community, which was
only active online. Then we had a
Twitter channel, Facebook groups such as TheSpiral EU and The Warehouse, games and the physical events.
What was the audience participation? Could you give us some statistics?
We had 4 phases of our community
growth. The first one involved building the online Warehouse community as it
was a real community. That was done with about 40 selected and experienced
LARP’ers. This stage wasn’t public.
In the second phase we started
www.thespiral.eu. We announced this platform and encouraged our audience to
consult the Warehouse community if they wanted to know more about it. At the
same time we tested the challenges and games in the Warehouse community. It generated 7000 participations.
In the third phase we launched a game
on the 21st of August 2012 and we stole the painting. We actually removed 6 paintings from 6
different museums and we organized press conferences.
In the game people could find
additional information about "The Spiral" such as why there are 6
missing paintings, etc.
During the last phase we broadcast
the series on TV. The TV series helped the online players to understand the
plots in the game so they could be one step ahead.
Moreover, we followed the logic of
reality so if a painting was found by
internet users in Gotland, it really appeared in this place.
One hard question that many producers face: What was your business
model?
The game and multiplatform approach
accounted for almost 10% of the total
funding and was separated from the
funding for the TV production.
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| Business model of "The Spiral" |
Concerning the investment per source,
one third of the investments came from the broadcasters. However, since it was
a coproduction, this participation could be higher and reach as much as 50%.
Another third came from partners such
as the Dutch Film Fund, and the European Media Program (Interactive Works and
Media Broadcast support).
The Media Interactive Works Fund was
extremely important for us because it gave us necessary investments for the
long phase of development for this project which lasted 2 years. Once Media Broadcast
support came in, the broadcasters were convinced that this complex project was
going into production because they knew how difficult it is to obtain this kind
of support. The combination of these two funds permitted us to build a new
financial model.
A quarter of our funds came from the Belgium
tax shelter and the remaining 8% came from our own investments and presales.
What did you learn from this experience?
The main lesson we learned
from this project was that we integrated
the social networks too late in our communication strategy (starting in May
2012). We therefore missed out on many opportunities to communicate about the
story.
From the beginning we
wanted to build a story as it was real, with paintings that disappeared from
the museums. So we thought that if we wanted to create a suspension of
disbelief across multiple platforms, we should not communicate about the story and
simply leave people free to explore it. In fact, as people want to believe, the
only thing that can damage their suspension of disbelief is bad storytelling,
bad acting and inconsistencies.
If you could change something in this project, what it
would be?
First of all I would have
started communicating about the project already during the development phase
and use this opportunity to build momentum for the fiction story.
Secondly, I believe we
should have one person on board who represents the 7 broadcasters. Since we
didn't have this person, each time we had a major discussion, I had to contact
each broadcaster. This was a major weakness in our very complex organization.
Now I know that when you have a coproduction you should have one team member
from the broadcasters who represents all of the broadcasters. In this way you
can communicate efficiently. Moreover, I was the only person who knew exactly
all of the details regarding the project and that created a bottleneck effect
at some points.
Where can we find "The Spiral" today?
In France you can find it
on Arte. And it will be released on DVD soon.
We will also upload the behind the scenes on our website.
We recently posted a 5
minutes case study video on http://www.thespiraltheseries.com. And we plan to upload the video of the
presentation that I gave at Power to the Pixel (in October 2012) .
What can I hope for you now ? What is your next
challenge?
The next challenge is
pretty simple: to use the network and the know-how that I have acquired and to
work towards new projects. Innovative projects such as Jean Saves Europa which
is a participative documentary series based on Jean Becomes Flemish and of
course we’re looking into a second season for The Spiral.
I'm also working on a
horror movie and we plan to do something very specific with it: to do a
crowdfunding by selling some traps around which the story is built. You can
follow the project on Facebook: WELP project https://www.facebook.com/CUBthemovie?ref=ts&fref=ts
