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I get the impression that Ryze is one of these online projects ostensibly dedicated to a purely pragmatic purpose (in this case, professional networking) which quickly devolve and evolve into something entirely different, unpredictable, out of control. No doubt on a shelf somewhere there is a forgotten business plan or design document drafted by cringing dotcom survivors that describes the ultimate professional networking site, and maybe that's what Ryze was supposed to be. But now this Web site is morphing in real time, bending to the will of (how many?) users. It's turning into something entirely different. That's the power of the feedback channel. It's the most powerful force in the media world: wherever it is unleashed, it carves a new path as powerfully as a river carves a canyon. The advent of the return path for user feedback is presently reshaping the media world that we inhabit. I consider this the most significant cultural factor shaping society as we cross the threshold into a new millenium and the second century of electronic media. In my professional career, I've lived through the evolution of electronic media from a single, monolithic, one-to-many broadside into customizable, responsive, one2one medium. Along the way, I've had the good fortune to get instruction & insight from some of the people who have helped determine the trajectory of this momentous change. * New York 1986 After messing around for a while in Europe as a dilatory graduate student and sometime teacher, I returned reluctantly to the US to pursue a real career. On my first night in NYC, one of my brothers invited me to join him for dinner with a friend named John Williams. At the time, John was a producer for Public Television, and over the course of dinner described his ambition to begin producing motion pictures. He offered me a job, and I immediately said yes, since I didn't have anything better planned and wanted to avoid a career in an advertising agency. In a movie development office, one routinely deals with dozens of scripts: one script I recall clearly was "Seven Years in Tibet" which John finally brought to the screen nearly a dozen years later. What incredible persistence. John recently produced "Shrek" and is now a thriving Hollywood movie producer. Once I asked him what he looked for in a script, and he replied: "Passion. That's the secret. Look for the passion in every project." Yep. That's the secret. * New York, 1987 Briefly, I labored under the naive notion that I might become a professional artist (which I subsequently learned is akin to seeking a career in penury and dissipation). I spent all my time painting big pictures and scrounging for art materials, and had a few shows at nightclubs like LimeLight and The World. New York City is frightfully expensive, so I paid my rent in an unheated Brookln loft by doing occasional work in film production. This led to my first real career moment. My brother Tom introduced me to the English director Tim Pope who did videos for The Cure. I was working in the production office as a coordinator. When he saw my paintings, Tim insisted that I quit that pointless job and begin a career as a production designer. He even had the good grace to give me my first production design job: I hand-tinted every frame of a 30-second TV commercial. I couldn't believe that you could get paid for painting. Tim taught me that you can combine art & commerce and make a career doing what you love. Awesome advice. By the time I was 25, my career as a production designer was in fast-forward, and I was working on everything from the Rolling Stones to Run DMC to Club MTV. * New York, 1989 Mark Pellington is a quiet giant. At MTV: Music Television, he lurked in a darkened office, chain smoking and musing about semiotics, film and gangsta rap. He invited me to join him on a stealth project called BUZZ. His purpose: to reinvent television from the editing room. At the time, I was pretty fascinated by the new digital editing effects equipment in TV post production suites, and I wanted to learn more. What a gig. Mark turned the editing bay into his palette for an experiential collage of pop culture. He was a master of digital post, and he broke all the rules of traditional TV editing, remixing the tired linear TV format into a hyperkinetic blur of jump cuts, overlays and unnarrated audiovisual montages. Joined by Jon Kline of MTV Europe and the formidable music duo TomandAndy, we proceeded to sample and remix and edit and tweak the very notion of a TV show. BUZZ was broadcast history. Of course, the show sank without a trace, but not before the radical editorial principles were absorbed into the quickening metabolism of Madison Avenue. The postmodern TV montage concepts pioneered by Pellington became the basis for TV advertising and endure today. * Moscow, 1989 Just for the hell of it, I took mushrooms on Red Square, but one hardly needed the chemical enhancement to marvel at the magnificent spectacle of postindustrial squalor that was the utter dysfunction and breakdown of the Soviet system. I was the creative director for the Moscow Music Peace Festival, the biggest heavy metal rock festival in the world, where headline acts like Ozzy Osbourne and Bon Jovi and Motley Crue thrashed in front of 100,000 screaming Russian teenagers (and about 1/3 of the Soviet Army, who provided security in the Lenin Stadium). An insane statement of nihilistic Western pop culture in the middle of a defunct socialist nightmare. There was no moment of sanity in the entire festival. Black market trades with Army deserters in hotel rooms, midnight rides with underground motorcycle gangs, bribing taxi drivers with illicit Marlboros, sex with groupies and a KGB minister's daughter in squalid Stalin-era hotel rooms, drunken brawls fueled by amber "bison vodka", round-the-clock work raising the eight-story steel structure of the biggest rock and roll stage in European history, an unexpected surprise detention by the Red Army, and finally everything culminating with the thrashingest, headbanging-est, noisiest moshpit of thousands of sweaty Russkis and the utter decline of Eastern civilization, broadcast live around the world. A cross-cultural moshpit of ideas, fashion, music and slurred slogans. Wayne Isham taught by example that, when you are the director, you have no one else to blame if you don't go for it, completely, utterly, irrevocably and all the way to the bitter howling end. He demanded the impossible, lived life to the utmost extreme, and delivered high energy rock and roll results. If you're the creative force on a project, never take no for an answer. As George Bernard Shaw put it, reasonable men accept things the way they are. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable men. * New York, 1990 By the end of the 1980s, I was directing TV shows, videos, promos and commercials, and loving it. Music videos had finally matured as a genuine electronic collage medium, and the novel visual sequences unlocked by video gradually transformed the way TV looked. Cable channels were seeking advice on how to reposition and rebrand with a hipper, po-mo look. And advertising agencies were soliciting young video directors to inject a measure of street cred into their derivative campaigns. There was abundant work. One day I got a phone call from Mark Pellington: "Hey, I heard you're directing TV commercials." I was totally flattered that he called. He added: "Now take a week off and do some artwork." Huh? I was stunned. I was booked to do another commercial for MCI the next week. "Go do a video art project, or a PSA for a charity, or direct a free video for a band that has no label yet." I was stunned at the time, but later realized that Mark had given me the most valuable advice of my career: at the commercial peak, take time to recharge your creative batteries or you risk burning out altogether. If you don't refresh and renew the source, then soon you've got nothing left to give. Ever since Mark's call, I've made time in my schedule to paint, write, refresh. * Hong Kong, 1991 Longtime MTVer Vinnie Longobardo had invited me to join him in China, where we launched MTV Asia on the Star TV satellite system. I had only been married for one year, and my supercool wife agreed to relocate with me to a steamy tropical island where I was going to launch a cable TV channel. Here I got a chance to apply every lesson I'd learned, from the limitless creative insanity of rock music production to the cool digital postproduction image manipulation. Our mission: train a team of 30 Asian kids how to produce TV programs and get a 24 hour TV channel on the air in less than 3 months. MTV launched in Asia in September 1991, and we asked the viewers to send in faxes and letters, which we read on the air. Soon we were innundated with viewer mail from all over Asia: Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, China, Korea, Singapore, India, Pakistan, Kuwait and even Israel and Egypt. I learned the power of the back channel: as soon as we invoked viewer feedback, we triggered a huge volume of viewer requests. Kids from all over Asia sent photos, pictures and dioramas of their schools, their families, and their friends. We put them on the air, and they responded with ever more passion and creativity. I travelled around Asia with a guerrilla film crew, shooting 16mm shorts that featured cool Asian kids talking about the future. I travelled to the desert of Rajasthan, where the Maharana of Udaipur granted me permission to film in his palaces and in the dusty narrow city streets. We filmed pan-Asian club kids in Hong Kong, and rockers in China, and young bikers and elephant drivers in the jungles of Northern Thailand. We even shot during a typhoon in Taipei, where the rain went sideways and winds howled. By projecting an image of cool Asian kids on TV screens in 30 countries, we balanced the overwhelmingly Western images in the rock and rap videos and succeeded in injecting an Asian identity into the 10 year old music channel. But we did even more: we forged a vibrant connection with a young audience across 1/4 of the earth's surface, giving them a place to voice their opinions, vote for their favorite songs, talk back and speak up. This took place during the post-Tiannenmen Square period, amid a generational shift that put power in the hands of the people, and it changed the way many Asian kids related to mass media and monolithic authority. Several of the young Asian kids that I taught are now successful TV producers there, including Kenn Delbridge and Henry Doo in Singapore, and there has been an explosion of locally produced programming. One night, while I was staying late in a transmission suite to watch MTV Asia play out onto the uplink into space towards AsiaSat, a broadcast engineer explained how satellite TV could be made interactive with the addition of a telephone back channel. The concept of interactive TV enchanted me. Instead of faxing or mailing a response by snail mail, people could respond to the broadcast immediately. The possibility amazed me. Now I knew what I wanted to pursue next. * New York, 1993 In the early 90s, MTV headquarters was searching for a new mission. The channel was a decade old, and was already an entrenched part of the TV landscape. I had returned to Manhattan to head up the on-air promo department, and my boss had succeeded in shattering the ratings barrier with Beavis and Butthead. But it seemed that the channel was drifting without a mission. We were relying on the tired notion of "the New Music Revolution" as our slogan. Computers were new and interesting features in the office. I had brought in Macintosh computers for my producers to use to manipulate TV images (in those pre-PowerMac days rotoscoping was done frame-by-frame in Photoshop). One of the staff producers, Todd Mueller, showed me Mindvox, a hip NYC ISP. I got very inspired and recommended to MTV management that we buy the ISP and offer MTV-branded Internet service, since this was clearly where our audience was gathering. I was disappointed, but not surprised, when one executive snapped, "We're trying to run a cable channel here. This has nothing to do with our business." Like many of his colleagues, this particular executive had grown up in the radio business before migrating to cable, which was considered "new media" in the early 80s. They weren't ready to migrate to a new platform yet. I wasn't interested in spending more time in a stagnant atmosphere, so I promptly resigned and headed out to LA to start a software company. * London 1994 While the Northridge Earthquake was levelling freeways and ugly apartment buildings in Los Angeles, I was working in Terry Gilliam's studio in London. We were restoring the artwork from the original Monty Python series, which Terry had stored in a humid attic for 25 years. The delicate airbrushed pictures were photographed, scanned, digitized, retouched, and re-animated frame-by-frame in painstaking recreation of the original sequences. These animated sequences became the throughline for the Monty Python CD-ROM. I had a genuinely terrific time writing, designing, and editing this title, working in close collaboration with Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Eric Idle. Fellow Ryzer Marc Finkel was the director. This CD ROM was the only accurately titled product of the entire CD-ROM era: Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time. It was conceived of as a deliberate parody of the horrible mediocrity of Windows 3.1, designed to torture PC users. Naturally, it promptly became the number one comedy CD ROM and eventually the best selling comedy software program in history, and one of the longest-selling software titles in any category. It was 7th Level's first hit product, and provided the momentum for the company's successful IPO in October '94. Subsequently, in classic game industry tradition, 7th Level proceeded to release a series of mediocre sequels. The main lesson I learned at 7th Level was to trust my creative instincts throughout a long development cycle (despite the unsolicited "creative" input of a megalomaniac CEO and his legion of bootlicking toadies). I also learned that startups exist for only a moment in time: most of the original founding crew had departed from the turbulent scene within two years. By then I was long gone, directing a TV series at Propaganda Films. But I enjoyed the chance to work with legendary producer Bob Ezrin, comedian Howie Mandel, and most of the Monty Python cast. And I think Marc Finkel will agree that Bob's advice to "Eat Fish Soup" remains one of the more cryptic adages ever muttered. * Hollywood, 1996 Tiny dynamo Sally DeSipio and I spent a winter sojourn on the lot at AND Interactive, where we produced one of the first web dramas, Candidate '96, a fictional account of an independent candidate for president. It was the dawn of Internet optimism, when the geeky new medium was finally mature enough to bear the burden of the ad banner (barely). Like the Spot and East Village, we experimented with non-linear narrative and multiple POV storytelling. The site won numerous awards for design and script, and even attracted positive reviews by self-appointed Internet design czar David Siegel. The project flourished in the creative hothouse atmosphere at AND Interactive. For a brief shining moment, AND held the greatest concentration of Web talent in Southern California. Pioneering interactive TV concepts for cable TV were incubated alongside dark infoporn such as Richard Metzger's Disinformation. If the notorious cable tightwads at TCI hadn't pulled the plug in mid '96, the whole thing probably would have gone public in spectacular fashion in mid '97. The place was chaotic, but founders Alan Debevoise & Morgan Newman sure get credit for nurturing creativity. It was fun to work there. * Los Angeles, 1997 - 2000 Recruiters for Sony's movie studio, Columbia TriStar, contacted me when I was working in China. They brought me in to supervise the design and deployment of the studio's major commercial online properties, including the online games and soap opera sites. Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! Online swiftly became the most heavily-trafficked online games in the world, and they provided the foundation for the success of Sony's online game service, the Station. In the event, I learned how to avoid the hilarious, incessant, and totally high-school infighting waged by various executives who only succeeded in damaging staff morale and their own careers. (While at Sony Pictures, I got in the habit of painting truly creepy portraits of mean old men, one example of which I posted on this page. Exorcising evil spirits, perhaps?). A promotion to SVP, managing my own division focused on broadband, interactive TV and wireless networks, afforded me the freedom to promote a vision of integrated entertainment marketing across every digital platform. Running the only profitable Interactive TV business in North America was a highlight. It became swiftly apparent that the most compelling interactive content offer on any 2-way digital platform were games. I had the pleasure of reporting to several of the smartest dealmakers in the entertainment industry, and learned a great deal from Sony Electronics' strategy for the digital era. *Aisle 6, Seat 3D, 2000 - 2002 I joined PacketVideo in late 1999, and spent 2.5 years travelling nonstop around the world to promote the concept of mobile multimedia & establish partnerships. The idea of video on a mobile phone was considered utterly preposterous in 2000: I was ejected unceremoniously from the office of one Hollywood tycoon when I did a demo for him. It was too outlandish. Unthinkable. But the team at PacketVideo succeeded in making the impossible happen. Today, every mobile operator in the world is in the process of deploying some form of multimedia. We launched the world's first mobile multimedia service on a trial basis in March 2000, and conducted over 45 trials in every part of the world thereafter, culminating with the commercial deployment of wireless video on NTT DoCoMo's 3G network in April 2002. Along the way, we raised $140 million dollars in strategic investment capital, struck strategic partnerships with most of the leading companies in the wireless industry (including Motorola, Nortel, TI, Intel, Qualcomm, Siemens, Sony, IBM, Alcatel, Nortel, HP, NEC, and many, many more). We established partnerships with over 320 media companies and attracted over 2000 developers worldwide. And I had the opportunity to work with the leading wireless companies in the world, in the hottest mobile markets: Korea, Japan, Finland, Sweden, and more. But I think the most important accomplishment was demonstrating conclusively to the world that the most logical next evolution of electronic media is to cut the cord, and provide instant, on-demand multimedia to audiences whenever they want it. The most significant technology phenomenon of the 1990s was the advent of the digital network, and in the coming decade the combination of IP with wireless mobility will irrevocably transform our relationship with electronic media and the programming that it carries. * LA, Edinburgh, London, Stockholm, 2002 Machines That Go Ping is dedicated to addressing the problems that present an obstacle to the further evolution of digital entertainment. We're focused on nurturing startup companies that provided needed solutions in P2P, mobile, broadband, digital media creation & distribution. We're helping network operators, media companies, content creators and technolgy vendors manage the evolution toward ubiquitous digital distribution. * Santa Monica, California, present day I've launched my own company, PeopleJam. Check it out online at www.peoplejam.com. We're combining video programming, blogging and online community to create a truly responsive video network on the Web. We're focused on helping people achieve more in their lives, and we've provided a broad suite of tools to help them discover what is meaningful in their own lives and connect to others. I think that Ryzers would get a big kick out of PeopleJam. Please check it out! Sign in to be able to view RTercek's guestbook and friends list!
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