Lightspeed Issue 46

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Dave: Oh yeah, that’s great. One of the things on mine is NonStampCollector on YouTube. People sometimes say that atheism is just another religion, and one retort to that is, “Yeah, atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.” So that’s where the NonStampCollector handle comes from. He has a video called Noah’s Ark, and I don’t know if anyone watched it, but it’s so funny. It goes through all the practical problems you would have trying to get every animal on Earth onto a big wooden boat, and nine thousand species of spiders, and how do you feed them? How do you get the polar bears together with the camels? It’s really, really funny.

  Matt: One of the things that you linked to, Dave, that I really liked was the They’re Made of Meat short film, based on the Terry Bisson short story. I really love how short video content, whether live action or animated, is a great way to share some of the awesome short stories in the science fiction world. It’s funny because occasionally they’ll try to turn a short story into a feature film—obviously a lot of Phillip K. Dick stories have gone this way. There was that horrendous movie The Box. Whenever you try to expand a short story into a feature film it always ends up being a bloated disaster, but when it’s a short film, or an animated short, I think it can really deliver the essence of a story really well. An animation teacher of mine named Nick Fox-Gieg won the best animated short at South by Southwest a couple of years ago with a Benjamin Rosenbaum story called “The Orange.” That’s an awesome film that perfectly conveys the story. It’s just the text of the story recited with animation, and it looks and feels great. It’s this awesome story.

  Dave: They’re Made Out of Meat is the number one thing on my list. The premise is that it’s a conversation between two aliens, and it turns out that most alien life in the universe is not organic, so they’re just horrified to discover that humans are organic and have brains with blood. They’re like, “They’re made out of meat, this is so freaking wrong.” It’s really funny. It’s the kind of thing that couldn’t be longer than four or five minutes. It’s perfect at that length.

  Matt: ’Cause then one of the aliens would have a girlfriend, and a boss who’s mean to him, and it would turn into this bloated thing.

  Dave: Cate, since Matt has brought up non-animated videos, do you have any non-animated videos you want to mention?

  Cate: Goodness, there are so many. When you suggested that I look up some of my geekier videos that I’ve enjoyed over time, the first video I thought of was MC Frontalot’s “Spoiler Alert.” I’m sure some of you have seen that, but it’s basically a nerdcore rap spoiling every single thing in every single movie. It’s really funny to watch, and actually really horrifying, too, because you know you’re spoiling things for yourself.

  John: Well, I will never watch it, probably, then.

  Dave: Speaking of music videos, one I had on my list is the—not safe for work warning—“Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” music video by Rachel Bloom, in which she’s like a school girl, and she sings about how she wants to fuck Ray Bradbury. When this came out, every single one of my friends linked to this. Saladin Ahmed said it’s like catnip for the internet because it’s boobs plus science fiction books.

  John: That actually ended up getting nominated for the Hugo Award for “Best Dramatic Presentation.” Then she actually went to Worldcon that year. They do autographing sessions, and there will be like four people in a row, and they have lines for everybody to come get their autographs. She was actually at the session right before mine. I didn’t get to talk to her, but we sort of nodded at each other as we were passing by.

  Dave: Wait, does she know you?

  John: No, no.

  Dave: So, you just nodded at her basically.

  John: Yeah.

  Dave: And she’s like, “Who is that guy?”

  Matt: [Laughter]

  Dave: It’s funny because Sam Weller, who wrote the biography of Ray Bradbury, he actually showed that video to Ray Bradbury, so there’s a video where you can see Ray Bradbury’s reaction to watching it.

  John: I was going to say, when Matt was talking about They’re Made out of Meat and adapting stories to short videos, when my anthology The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination came out, I think we talked about this on the show before, but David Levine has a story in the book called “Letter to the Editor,” and he turned it into a short film. It’s basically a mad scientist laying out his plans for why what he’s been doing over the course of his mad scientist career has actually been for the benefit of the planet. He’s making this case, and he’s explaining it all. It’s told first-person, like he’s talking to you, the reader. He did a short film of himself dressed up as the mad scientist, and he’s talking right to the camera. He does a really great job performing it. I’ve heard him read it live at conventions, and it was even more wonderful than having just read it myself. It’s very simple, and they did a little bit of editing, but it’s mostly one shot on him doing it.

  Dave: Speaking of adapting short stories, because I actually tried that, the first couple of videos I posted on YouTube, I took the audio from some of my stories that had appeared as podcasts, and I took the audio from the first scene of the story and did, every five seconds or something, a new image would come up to accompany the audio. They got a couple thousand views, nothing huge, but it was so labor intensive that I gave up after the first scene. I think it would have worked pretty well if I had a team to help me. If I had Matt to do it for me. I think that would be a good idea.

  John: I know you wanted to talk about book trailers, and what I was just saying about the Mad Scientist’s Guide video that David Levine did, to me, I think, for an anthology, that’s like the perfect sort of book trailer. I actually do have a couple of book trailers. I have one for The Living Dead and one for Seeds of Change. There was a very primitive one for Wastelands that we had on YouTube at some point, but I took it down because it just wasn’t up to par. But, David Levine’s video was like, okay, that’s content that you would watch independently of having any interest in the book. Most book trailers, it feels to me like, you kind of have to already be interested in it to watch it. Some of them are good—the one for Scott Sigler’s Nocturnal is pretty good; I happened to see it because I was watching Sword and Laser and they aired the trailer on there—but most book trailers that I’ve seen don’t seem very good at capturing the audience because it’s like a trailer for a movie, but then the experience of reading the book is not going to be anything like watching the trailer for the book.

  Dave: I agree that most book trailers are just so underwhelming. Especially because we’re used to movie trailers where they spend hundreds of millions of dollars making a movie, and then they take all the best shots from it, and put it together in two or three minutes. You’re just like, “Wow, that’s amazing.” Then the movie usually turns out to be terrible. But then a book trailer is like they get some random person, and they have some cheap costume, and then it’s shot on a crummy camera. It doesn’t make you want to read the book at all. The only ones that I’ve ever thought were good was one for Stephen King’s Duma Key that was super produced. That one was pretty good. Actually, there was one for Carrie Ryan’s book The Forest of Hands and Teeth that actually made me want to read that book. I agree that it’s totally problematic, trying to do book trailers.

  John: I think the problem with these is that they’re just being posted on YouTube and online elsewhere, and you have to go want to watch them. If they were airing at the beginning of a movie reel, while you’re just sitting in the audience waiting for the actual movie trailers to start, if they were airing them then, they might actually play well. They’re introducing the audience to this thing that maybe they haven’t heard of, but there is that visual component so you watch it to check out what it is, and then maybe you’ll get interested in it. Like I said, it still has the same problems of not really feeling like the experience of reading the book, but at least it might actually reach a new audience, whereas you’re sort of self-selecti
ng who’s going to ever click on these things the way it is now.

  Dave: When we interviewed Rick Yancey, he was saying as part of that $750,000 marketing campaign that they actually are showing trailers for The 5th Wave in movie theaters before movies, so it would be interesting if there was some way to know whether that actually was effective.

  John: That’s very exciting.

  Matt: John, I think you’re touching on something that I’ve noticed a lot in the online space, which is that there are so many fans out there, and everyone has really specific interests. I think that the barriered entry for a lot of people to finding new, exciting stuff that they would really be into is just knowing that it exists. So much about searching the internet is needle in a haystack stuff. It’s sort of the result of search engine optimization, where you go looking for something like, “Sci Fi Comedy,” right? And the first hundred thousand results for that will be the same fifty things that are the fifty biggest things in the world, but beyond that there is so much other content that’s just harder to find. I wish that there was a way for people to be introduced to new and exciting stuff without requiring a trailer to be at the front of a movie, which obviously would be really expensive. Or, like a two-page spread in Entertainment Weekly, or a banner ad on the front page of YouTube.

  Cate: There’s a concept in new media that good content rises to the top, and that’s becoming a little bit less true now that there’s a lot of big money getting involved, and a lot of sponsorship and advertising, and that’s all complicated. But, good content does rise to the top. It’s not just Justin Bieber that goes viral, luckily. You find someone, and then they like it, and they share your video, and then they mention it to a friend, and that’s just how it works.

  Dave: See, Cate, have you ever bought a book or been tempted to buy a book after seeing any sort of video about it?

  Cate: To be honest, I haven’t. I’ve seen very good book trailers, though, and I think the best book trailers are when it acknowledges that it’s fundamentally a literary activity. It kind of embraces what makes books strong, which is the voice, and the voice moving the plot forward.

  John: I mentioned that I have two book trailers, so there’s one for The Living Dead, which was actually done by a professional studio that was looking to get into doing book trailers. They approached me because at the time The Living Dead was very popular, it had just come out, and they wanted to do something with zombies, I guess. They offered to do it for free, so I said, “Yeah, sure.” I thought it turned out okay. It’s pretty cool to watch. It has good original music to it. It has some nice visuals. The trailer I have for Seeds of Change—to me, that actually feels like the best kind of trailer you could have for an anthology like that. Short of actually adapting a story into a full short film, like with David Levine. The Seeds of Change trailer, my friend Jack Kincaid did it for me. He found a bunch of public domain images and video, and he cut together this thing that did a little excerpt of each story. He’s a voice actor, so he did a lot of the voices, and he narrated a little segment of each story, and he did all this original music for it. It’s really an impressive production. I still get chills watching it, maybe because it’s my book, but it really feels like that’s a really good job of introducing the book quickly to an audience.

  Dave: I just want to say that The Living Dead trailer, it’s for a zombie anthology, and he used stock footage of kids hanging out, and then did some sort of digital processing on it to make them look zombified. There’s this shot where this girl turns her head to look at the camera, and I was like, “No, when she turns her head the far side of her head should be all messed up and bloody.” So they went back and did that. I just want to say that that was my idea, if anyone watches that video.

  Matt: I did a book trailer for Amanda Cohen’s Dirt Candy Cookbook. It’s this comic book cookbook, which I think really translated well to video because you can actually see the art from the interior of the book. It makes it much easier to do a video presentation for something textual if it has really great art or illustrations. So, comics work better in a lot of ways.

  Dave: Cate, why don’t you tell us a bit about your vlogging. How did you get into that?

  Cate: My friend referred me to the Vlog Brothers channel because I was going to college with someone who was closely associated with them. That’s why I found out that there was this entire world on YouTube with people talking to each other with cameras. I started putting videos online as many, many teenagers now do, and it just blossomed from there. Some of my videos were more well received than others, and they got some modicum of attention within the community.

  Dave: What kind of equipment and/or software did you use?

  Cate: I started out, and I’m a little embarrassed to say this, just with my iSight on my Mac. I would just sit in front of it and talk for a bit and then edit that together with iMovie, even though I already had a video camera; it was just easier. Then I eventually got a better quality camera, not as good as a DSLR, but a pretty good handicam, and I graduated to Final Cut, which is a little bit complicated, but still fun to use.

  Matt: Cate, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about who the Vlog Brothers are, and what’s your story for how you discovered them, and what it was that you liked about them so much.

  Cate: The Vlog Brothers are a pair of brothers who have this incredibly amazing community that they’ve created over the years. I think they started in 2007. John Green is the first of them, and he is currently a New York Times bestselling author, and his most recent book, The Fault in Our Stars, is being made into a movie, and that’s very exciting. When he started vlogging, he already had a fair bit of online presence, but it was nowhere where it is now, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers and subscribers. Hank Green created several eco websites in the beginning of the 2000s, and he was working on that. Together they decided to start a project where they would talk to each other, and through John’s notoriety and participation from the outside world, they got more and more important. It’s really interesting the community that’s been built up around them, which is about all things geek and celebrating what is nerdy and what is often ignored. They have this new channel called The Brain Scoop that they are directing that follows someone who exhumes animals for a living. It’s a very interesting thing. It made me realize that video could be more than just viral videos and punch lines, and it could be an actual conversation, and a very meaningful one at that.

  John: One of the things about their plan to do the Vlog Brothers channel was that they actually agreed to not to communicate with each other for a full year other than via the vlog. No email, no text, and no communication in any way. I think they said they might allow each other to talk on the phone, but they were basically going to only be communicating with each other via the vlog. One would do a vlog and the other would reply in a vlog, and that’s how they were going to communicate for the whole year.

  Matt: The thing I really like about the story is that their fame and notoriety played off each other. It started off because John Green was an author and had fans, it brought a small group of people to watch this conversation between him and Hank Green. Hank Green is, I don’t know if you’d call him a filker, but he’s like a wizard rocker. He writes a lot of songs about the Harry Potter world, so he had a song about the last book, or something, and the video of him singing that song went viral and brought this huge influx of fans to the vlog-cast. Then, because of that influx of fans, it allowed John Green’s next book to hit the Times list, which then created this new burst of fandom for him because it was on the Times list, it brought new fans to the vlog, and it grew and grew from there, to the point now where—I guess one of the Google grants that Cate was talking about earlier—they received a Google grant to start a new series of shows on YouTube.

  Dave: When Cate was mentioning that was before we started recording. Cate, could you repeat that for the benefit of our listeners?

  Cate: Right now, YouTube is straddli
ng two worlds. They’re this burgeoning hub of online, independent content, but also they’re trying to figure out how to address that there’s a TV-like quality to them, and they’re trying to mix their new media with old media. They developed this YouTube original content initiative where they gave some of the top independent content creators on YouTube a TV-like grant where they could take, depending on how much money, some of it was smaller, a couple hundred thousand dollars and see what they could do with that, what shows they could create. Some were more successful than others.

  Dave: You were sort of saying that none of them have really made back the money that was invested in them, right?

  Cate: They were expected to do it within the first year, and I think that maybe one or two channels at most have out-earned that grant, at least through advertising alone. That would be SourceFed, because it’s a very small operation. It doesn’t take much to make, but it’s very viral. It’s a news show, basically.

  Matt: One of the interesting things that John and Hank Green have been doing is this new venture called Subbable, which is an online surface that curates interesting YouTube content. If you’re a fan, then you can subscribe and donate money in a Kickstarter kind of form. You can watch all the content for free, but if you’re a fan, then you can send in money to support the shows and content that you like. It’s an interesting attempt to break away from the ad-connected model. I think that as the internet evolves, and internet entertainment evolves, there’s going to be a point where the amount of content, and the budget at which that content is being produced, can’t be sustained by YouTube ads alone.