Small Screen, Big Ideas

The Age

Wednesday May 21, 2008

Claire Halliday

Three Fitzroy women are taking Melbourne to the world with a quirky made-for-mobile broadcast. Claire Halliday reports.

MELBOURNE'S trams are among the stars of an edgy new show being picked up around the world, via the internet, mobile phones and other hand-held devices. It's television ... but not as we know it.

Fitzroy's Ish Media are creating interactive content that, they hope, might one day revolutionise the world of small-screen entertainment.

Called GirlFriday TV, Ish Media's broadcast is the only made-for-small-screen/mobile show available on Telstra BigPond mobile and aims to sate the increasingly ravenous appetite for "snack"-style media.

There's been a huge growth in the demand for bite-sized chunks of television, movies and music on hand-held devices, available to the audience wherever they roam, rather than the traditionally longer format of mainstream television seen while sitting still in your lounge room. But until now, most of what is available on hand-held devices have been reruns of US or British sitcoms or local sport. Very little is either made for the mobile market or made here.

Aside from the Telstra deal, the best proof that Ish Media is hitting its mark was GirlFriday TV winning the coveted best entertainment award at the recent Australian Interactive Media Industry Association awards.

Ish Media creative director Kylie Robertson says it was exciting to win the award and a great vote of confidence in the company's work.

With a background in crossplatform media production, Robertson doesn't use the term "new media" - after all, she's been involved in the creating of interactive content since 1998."

For a long time I felt frustrated that nobody was catching up," says Robertson, 32, who cut her teeth on multimedia production while working as a project manager and interactive designer for Sausage Software before moving to film, television and multimedia production company Tribal.

Along the way, the inspiration for her own concepts saw her involved in such pioneering projects as Rock Chickz and Jupiter Green. Then came GirlFriday TV."

I was looking at my mobile phone one day, wondering what would happen if someone found it and how it was like a diary of my life," she says. "I dreamt up the idea of GirlFriday being this everyday girl, who finds someone's mobile phone on the tram and wants to find out whose life is contained within it."

Enter Karla Burt. The 31-yearold producer has worked across various television formats and networks since 2002 - doing everything from volunteering for Channel 31 to stints as a contestant co-ordinator for ABC's The Einstein Factor and Channel Nine's game show Temptation."

I saw her reel and thought she had the perfect mix of fiction and reality in the stuff she'd done before," says Robertson of Burt, who also now acts, with comedian Tania Lacy, in the GirlFriday TV series.

While Robertson and Burt continue to do the ancillary bits - writing the character's texts, emails and diary entries - writer Vanessa Burt then came on board to, as Robertson says, "do the linear short-format episodes and really shape GirlFriday to what it is today".

It was 2005 when executive producer Debra Allanson - a woman with a swag of experience as a senior executive in production financing, distribution and media content strategy in both Australia and the UK - decided to hitch her own wagon to what she firmly believes will be a rising star."

I saw a very early prototype of GirlFriday - just on a mobile phone screen. I was already making some decisions about what I wanted to do with work and when I saw it, the light bulb just went 'bing'," says Allanson. "I knew that this was the way things are going."

In 2006, Robertson, Vanessa Burt and Allanson started Ish Media.

Despite the format being based around the wonders of interactive technology, Allanson says that it is very important not to get caught up in it as technology merely for technology's sake."

First and foremost it's storytelling. It's about engaging a viewer and so you need really good content to do that. That gets back to all the basic principles - good stories and good characters, well told," she says.

It's something that all three women believe GirlFriday TV delivers - something that Allanson says is surprising to many viewers."

What's surprising about it is, there are low expectations about the quality with this sort of medium so when you see something that is broadcast quality - both in scripting, performance and production values - it makes you realise that mobile online as a medium can really work," she says.GirlFriday joins locally made Forget the Rules on Optus' network.

The Australian Film Commission says Australian viewers under 24 have cut their consumption of free-to-air televsion by about 20% in the past decade, most of these defecting to the internet and their mobile phones.

For Burt, who lists shows such as Seinfeld and Arrested Development among her favourites, the joy has come from creating a program that she herself would love to watch."

It's not Hey Dad!," she adds.

Yet talk about Australian comedy and, aside from the recent spate of Kath and Kim/ Summer Heights High brand of parody-based shows, that's exactly what many audiences imagine.

For Allanson, the task of getting advertisers to sign on has been a hard one, with much of Ish Media's marketing budget going into ensuring that people are familiar with the concept."

When you're ahead of the pack there's nothing really to point to, except what's gone before and that might not be indicative of where it's going in the future," she says.

There have already been meetings with television networks about transferring the mobile/ online model into a regular TV show and a handful of other projects are under way, including Film Victoria's sponsored Three Day Growth - a five-minute pilot that is described as a male-skewed comedy for online and also broadcast. It began production last week.

While audiences may still be quite fickle when it comes to interacting with online content, Robertson believes that change is definitely in the air."

There's a shift coming where you will see content channels evolving on MySpace and Facebook and Bebo. They've already got their audience so now it depends on quality of content.

It will be really interesting to see what happens over the next six months. It's just timing now. It feels like it's about to all happen."

LINK www.girlfriday.tv

Who is GirlFriday?

She's a witty, irreverent and sometimes slightly bumbling twentysomething everywoman whose life is played out in two-minute episodes that can be viewed on the internet (for free) or downloaded to your mobile. The show starts when our heroine falls asleep on the tram and wakes to discover a mobile phone that has been left behind by the cute guy who was sitting opposite her, and gives the audience the opportunity to be interactively involved - whether that's rifling through the contents of her handbag, getting into her text messages, peeping at the video and photos on her mobile, or even reading her diary.

© 2008 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home