This is my position based on never attending a single “socially distanced performance” … and I’m 100% correct

Aren’t you excited!?

We still get to do live in-person shows during lockdown by being really crafty! There are all these newspaper articles about clowns performing half way across a yard from a kids birthday party. Drive-in festivals. Concerts performed for audiences on balconies.

It’s a dawning of a new age of entertainment that completely sucks and consistently emphasizes the fact that we are not allowed to be close to each other.

IRL Shows are a tribal experience

We are evolutionarily programmed to love live entertainment. Even an amphitheater show is just a modernized campfire that we sit around to share hunting stories.

While we’re rubbing elbows with audience members, we’re hearing them clap and laugh and gasp, but we’re also hearing them and seeing them breath, fidget, look around. We are getting primal herd clues about our place and safety in the world. We are getting status shift cues from those around us that help us determine where we fit in a pack of people.

Not only does the crowd set the context of the performance, it sets the context of our identities. I’m not saying you’re going to change your entire image of self from a puppet show, but these tribal reinforcements are soothing to our animal minds.

#STFAH

Besides the entertainment value of the shows, I think we have a responsibility to encourage people to stay at home for all non-essential activities. Creating public non-essential activities is antithetical to public health ideals.

Some people are saying they’re making socially distant performances to encourage more social distancing. This to me is like drunk driving to encourage sober driving.

Shows in yards

1. You’re hanging out with people outside of your pod.
2. You’ve missed them.
3. You want to connect.
4. You want to show them your mouth.
5. You don’t want to shout from 6 feet away.
6. You don’t know what 6 feet is.
7. You still have to go thru the house to get to the yard.
8. You still need to share a bathroom.
9. It doesn’t work

Drive-in concerts

1. People aren’t going to stay in their cars
2. The people who will get out of their cars will be the people that are the most likely vectors
3. You will be listening to the music through an FM station on your radio. Why not listen to well produced music through your car stereo?
4. You can’t hear anyone else clap
5. You’re super spaced out and far away from people
6. Either the capacity is really low, or you’re far from stage
7. It’s a sad constant reminder that you’re not at a real show
8. Either the ticket prices are really high, or there are not sustainable profit margins
9. What’s good about it?
10. You still need to use public restrooms
11. They’ll still try to sell you stuff. No profits without concessions.
12. No
13. It encourages more people to go out for non-essential activities
14. It isn’t very fun to sit in a car

I’ve had the bluntness of my blog criticised.

I told people their IRL entertainment services have no value during a lockdown. I encouraged people to quit. This is not because I hate showbiz folks, but because I want to get to the root cause of why we’re doing this stuff.

When people ask my friend Chris Ruggiero how to get into entertaining, he says “Don’t.” He knows that people that people that are determined will be fueled by that, and the others don’t need to suffer the slog.

Badasses Mobilize!

I heard someone say this pandemic is going to lead to some businesses shutting down, some businesses maintaining, and some businesses taking off! That can happen every single day of history. It’s true for every thing people create.

If you’re a great entertainer with something to share… If you’re helping the world… If you want to face humanity with a truely generous gift… speed up now! Give more. Increase your audience size. Increase the amount you serve your audience. Find the way to to more business success now.

Find the rules. Play the game to the edge of the rules

The toughest part of the pandemic is figuring out what the rules are.

• What do audiences want now?
• How do we serve the new needs of our people?
• What tools are available?
• How do our skills fit in?

None of those questions are “Does it matter?” or “Is it possible?” If your mission is important to you, those are easy “HULK YES!” answers.

Now the rules of the game are settling into place and the new realm is going to be different. You can’t approach it the same way, just like you can’t approach anything the way you did 10 years ago.

Consider what people will expect now.

1. Remote working leads to outsourcing. Outsourcing leads to cheaper labor. They call it gig economy, but mostly it’s turning the most straightforward work into commodities. This means entry level jobs lose value and complex creative jobs get more valuable.
2. Full-time staffs will be reduced in size
3. Centralized organizations will not be as popular
4. People are going to consider digital events even when geocentric events are possible for their different benefits.
5. As there’s more leaning on digital entertainment, customization and bespoke entertainment will be more desired and expected.
6. People will be more open to novel solutions to problems.
7. Organizations will be able to make quicker decisions because there have been a lot of holes poked in bureaucratic systems.
8. Even though they are more open and agile, people will also be wary of planning because the pandemic proved that anything can happen. Contracts might be a little more specific.
9. You’ll probably be expected to work with less overhead
10. Nobody’s going to do things well during a big change over, so the more practice you get, the more ahead you will leap

Entertainment can’t succeed if it can’t fail. The more we protect ourselves against mistakes, the more we protect ourselves against kismet. Basically, take risks.

The risks go beyond the primary story

There’s the story of an entertainment thing ( John McClane needs to save the Nakatomi Plaza and he’s putting his life on the line), but then there’s also the meta-story. The story of “This director took a risk” or “This composer is just doing the same thing as always” is just as much a part of the story for audiences.

There can be a lot of layers to the meta, also. Depending on the audience, they might notice all of them or only a few, but only a naive person would think the audience only sees a single narrative and is capable of being focused on only that.

There’s risk built in to all entertainment

Public speaking is believed to be Americans’ greatest fear. When someone stands out and asks for the spotlight, they’re taking a risk. That risk goes away when that person is crazy or is obviously driven by some crazy-making force (like a fame).

Sane charisma amplifies this risk because someone charismatic is showing a total commitment to deserving the attention.

Failing at goals is entertaining too

…So failing is succeeding, but going for the middle is not anything.

So, let’s find the risk. Let’s stuff our stuff full of it on every level. Let’s surround ourselves with bold people. Let’s make ourselves stories of risk and success.

I tell the people I advise to commit to real goals with time constraints, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do.

I’m taking my own advice, and also making it public for extra pressure!

My goal is to positively affect two thousand twenty people in the entertainment industry. I want to give a boost to their work somehow. So, I set up this page… If I’ve helped you this year, please let me know!

Here’s the page with the commitment and form.

Starting August 3. A free branding challenge for entertainment pros. Five days, five emails. Join the challenge and up your branding game 100%!

Can you handle it!?!?

Don’t waste your time on getting a terrible logo made.

People come to me all the time to help them with something that will not improve their business. A logo for a small company is the best example of this. I will not accept payment for any job that doesn’t return payment to my clients.

The point of a logo is identity thru repetition

The reason for a company to have a logo is so that it sticks out visually instantly from other brands. This works because people see the logo over and over again. The ones you recognize above – that don’t have words in them -are recognized because you’ve seen them so many times.

The reason these companies can get you to see their logo so many times is because they have a lot of money for advertising.

The benefit of a logo is tiny trust

After they hit the same potential customers over and over again with the same logo, then they start reaping the benefits. The benefits of logo recognition are not huge, but big companies with big profit margins don’t need huge results. They benefit from intellectual property protection (like a soda with a Coke logo is probably made by Coke) as well as brand trust for repeat customers.

It’s expensive to make a good logo

A good logo expresses a brand promise in a simple form. The Nike logo is not about a goddess, or a shoe. It’s about enhanced physical performance. To come up with a way to state your brand meaning with a few lines is very difficult. To make that logo mark stand out from all other logo marks in your domain is insanely hard. Companies pay a dirt-ton of cash to get the simplest logo designed. Logos are supposed to have a shelf-life of a century.

A small business identity is important only as a one-off

The only defining reason for a small business to show identity is to express that there’s something there. I think this is why most people want a logo. They think, “We’ve gotta stand up for ourselves and show we’re not the same… that we’re legit.

This makes sense, but this is why you need simply a type treatment.

When someone sees that film strip, they’re not going to know it’s your company. When someone sees either of these, they probably won’t be sure they’ve seen it laid out like that before. That doesn’t matter. You want people to know your company. Make it clear what your company is. With the top one, you’re gonna really squeeze that logo mark down in order to fit it on a website. With the bottom one, it will be legible at all sizes and doesn’t take up any unnecessary real estate.

You might pay a designer to make you a type treatment

… but you don’t have to pick something awesome and it doesn’t have to last very long. All you have to do is make sure it doesn’t clash with your brand. You can make a new one next year. Easy.

Spend a few hours getting your type treatment done, move on to things that will actually help your business… like returning that one email!

Part 1: Great entertainment is about leading an audience. You take care of them thru the whole experience. Leaders are powerful. Leaders think through everything for you.

Part 2: Everything that humans experience is a story. We are incapable of taking in new information or making sense of sensory input without attaching it to a story.

Combine Those Parts: Someone creating great entertainment must give the audience story. A strong, bold, story. Great entertainment overwhelms with story, so the audience can relax. Mediocre / generic entertainment leaves it up to the audience to go off on their own, this is not rewarding, and is possibly even isolating.

Story is in everything. Not just the narrative.

You go to a play and it’s people pretending to be different people in a different town, in a different time, where the passage of time is even different and probably the concept of time and space is different.

There’s a bigger story that envelopes this narrative. It’s the story of the entire world as you know it. You came from dinner. You’re sitting in a historic theater with a slight dusty smell. You know one of the actors from another play. You know that it rained outside today. There are a lot of other things you could be doing.

A great playhouse will overwhelm you with story. There’s messages about their mission, the concessions are fun, the building is grand or weird, the employees are wearing a uniform, the preshow is intentional, the choice of the play and the actors makes sense in that venue even. You get overwhelmed with meaning, personality, story. You are unified with the rest of the audience and on the path to accepting, and enjoying the narrative story.

The story is … we’re all here to play pretend. We’ve all come from different lives because we want something great. We are in the hands of capable people who do this because they’re passionate about sharing something great. They want to give to us. They want to take care of us. They are people like us. This is a tradition. This is tribal. This is amazing. We’re experiencing something historic and also something infinitely immediate.

Michael Rayner will shout a story into you

He enters the stage shouting. He’s either dressed like a used car salesman or Mr. Rogers’ cousin. He’s telling you how he’s old and fat and his daughters are costing him money for tutors. He’s calling out what’s in the room and how his wife is at a concert instead of being there to see him perform. It’s a lot. Then, he’s rolling a cheeseburger on a parasol; or flipping a tennis racket under a wheel barrow. This is a story of a man who loves to show you how ridiculous life is. There is no downtime. There is only a firehose of story.

Lamonte “Tails” Goode is a Magnet for your mind

There’s a vocabulary of only so many things a human body can do. Lamonte’s Cyberyoga is physical modern Shakespeare. Not only is it poetry with the vocabulary you’ve seen, but it invents.

He’s serious, contrary, familiar ( yoga / breakdance / modern dance / contortion ) and on a mission to do something. What is he trying to do? What’s important to him to express? Where’s he coming from? How does he have all these influences and what’s he going to do next?

It’s a story of mystery. It’s not “here’s a thing, figure it out.” It’s more “watch this and wonder!” from his costume, to his expression, to his gestures toward the audience, to his music choice. It’s a story of a man who wants you to see him and also leave you questioning.

Laura Michelle Hughes will flip the script

She’s a vapid singer songwriter, who gets way too far on her beauty. Then, she’s ditsy and annoying too. Then, she’s actually a good singer. Then, it turns out this was a parody of a songwriter. Then, okay, we get it — it’s a comedy song. Then, this is brilliant with an unusual perspective. Then, there’s no way there’s any more directions to go. Then, it goes further! This is a highly trained pro with comedy that doesn’t stop. And she’s hot (I’m married to her).

It’s a story of someone battling every assumption who wants to deliver perfection in entertainment with every moment. She doesn’t keep you guessing… She keeps you assuming and being wrong and it’s delightful and worth it!

If you’re not a magic geek, this may not be for you.

I started doing magic tricks when I was 7, started making money doing shows when I was 11. I’m 41 now… I think. I have booked hundreds of magic acts through Scot Nery’s Boobietrap. I have watched way too many magic acts. All this is not to say that I’m an expert, but to say how many painful experiences I’ve had with magic!

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The lockdowns around the world are leading us to advance technologically more than ever. The bureaucracy that has held technology back for so long got rolled back due to crisis-mode and innovation was allowed to happen.

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If you’re chasing a dream, I’d like for you to consider something different. Consider a mission.

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Zoom can eat it!

When it comes to live streaming shows, everyone sucks pretty bad. That’s a bad thing for audiences, but a good thing for you if you’re just starting out. You can be a big fish.

A long time ago, I wrote about THE 5 ELEMENTS OF A GREAT LIVE SHOW. This was when “live show” generally meant IRL performances. Now, there’s a lot of people entertaining via web video. There’s a big difference. Below are a few of my patches, but really I encourage creators to think completely differently about this medium and reinvent what a live show can be on camera.

1. Detail

There is a lot of detail missing from the experience of a video show.

• The viewpoint is limited to whatever direction the camera is pointing
• The camera pixels send only so much info to the viewer
• Audio and video are compressed for transmission
• There’s no smell. There’s no feeling the air. There’s no bumping into others.
• There’s no depth. It’s 2D
• The audio is best limited to only the thing that an audience came for unlike in a IRL show where you hear everything in the room and your brain picks out the important stuff

PATCHES: You can’t completely fix everything, but you can adjust a little bit for this lack of detail. Use the tricks that TV and movies use. You can’t turn video 3d, but you can move your camera and use lighting to clarify the depth of what people are seeing. In real life you can wiggle your head to understand perspective. You can do the same with the camera.

You can pickup more detail of important subjects by zooming in and pulling away or moving them closer and further from the camera.

Don’t be limited to just the audio of the thing you’re doing. Bringing in sound effects can be cheesy, or they can be helpful, or both. Throwing in a little pre recorded vid with audio can make the world you’re creating fuller.

Include interesting props and set decorations to make things visually stimulating. You could even mail things to the attendees ahead of time so they get more of a sensory experience.

2. Exclusivity

Exclusivity is the most valuable thing in a live stage show. When something’s put on camera, it often loses the exclusivity.

• streaming can be done for a bigger audience than an IRL show
• video can be recorded and shown again
• watching something on screen triggers that feeling in our brains even if the audience is small and it isn’t recordable

PATCHES: First, make it extremely clear how exclusive the stream is. Whatever makes it special, reiterate it. Remind people it’s special and why.

Fire Leopard’s Leopard Stream is “not recorded” and they put that in their promo, so you know the thing you’re seeing is only for you and the other people watching at that moment.

Make it cost more. I think the default thinking is that “This is from home, I can do this the easy way,” but creators need to bring increased cost to make up for the loss of specialness. Dream of ways that you can make each individual stream more costly. Spend more energy pouring sweat? Put yourself in more danger? Eat a raw onion as fast as possible? Shave off all your hair? Break an expensive oven? These are great gifts to the audience.

Make it chancier. Include more interaction than ever. Format your stream to change dramatically with viewer input, then they know that it’s just for them.

If you’re doing things for a specific group of people, you could have that group’s logo on EVERYTHING. It goes on the set, props, etc. If it’s on a specific date, do the same thing. Make it all happen right there, then and never again.

3. Malleability

The feeling of malleability is omnipresent in a stage show. The interface for interacting and affecting a performance is built in — laugh / clap / heckle. In an online show, all that stuff is gone.

PATCHES: How is an audience to put a dent in your show and make it theirs? Again, MORE interaction!! The show needs to have interaction built in. It’s not just let them leave comments or chat messages. It means asking for certain kinds of interactions, giving them a lot of ways to connect, and making those interactions matter to the content of the performance.

Studies show that the number of followers someone has is directly proportional the number of IQ points they don’t have.

… and if you believe that statement, it probably is because it validates your lack of fans. Well, don’t worry, I’m going to continue to validate that, but with true, actual, real information. This isn’t about being brainy, this is about making brainy use of your fanbase and expanding your impact with force.

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