Luke Alexander's blog

This is one of my favourites from while I was in Abu Dhabi.  I haven’t done any digital processing to the image – the effect was achieved by taking this photo through the dirty window of a pet shop with a strong yellow light behind me from a streetlamp.

This poor bird was kept in a petshop near the old port, and I thought it was such a sad sight to see this magnificent creature trapped in this squalid setting.

Photo taken with my Nikon D40 and kit lens, set to ISO 1,000 for a grainy effect in the low light.

As 90% of the universe’s brands send their marketing departments to seminars on how to “use social media”, the others are making everyone else feel stupid by getting it spectacularly right first time.

Whoever is behind Old Spice’s campaign deserves a medal, or at the very least a pay rise, for showing how to take advantage of those much-obsessed-over new opportunities without overthinking, misjudging or watering down.

For those who haven’t seen it, Old Spice has taken its highly successful ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ commercial and turned it into a running gag which has taken over Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a whole other set of channels, where the Old Spice Man answers questions from real people in short, 30 second YouTube videos.  It’s funny, addictively watchable and is starting genuine conversations online about the product.  Here are three things I think they’ve got particularly right:

It’s funny and I want to watch it

No matter how many times it’s repeated, the adage that ‘content is king’ rarely seems to sink in.  Without any massive expenditure, a celebrity appearance or indeed anything other than a film crew, a decent actor and a funny writer, Old Spice has created something genuinely interesting to watch.  Putting your faith in a cleverly made character and some solid running gags take a bit of courage, but this is the kind of content (in novel, play, TV form) which has endured for millennia, with no additional software required…

And building interactivity into the concept rather than the technology means it’s easy to access and quick to make while still encouraging involvement.

It’s everywhere

It’s not a ‘twitter campaign’ or a ‘facebook campaign’ – in fact, it’s pretty channel-neutral.  Rather than obsess over where their demographic lives, the Old Spice team have cleverly created a central campaign which can feed effortlessly into all of these channels.  Particularly genius is the decision to proactively film the Old Spice man answering random questions from Yahoo Answers.  It leads to good content, shows that they ‘get it’, and gives them access to another community in the process.

It’s suited to how people use the internet

This campaign is not a standalone asset created for a website and ‘spread virally’.  It’s designed from the ground up to work with how people really use the internet.  It’s quick, genuinely interactive, personal and open.

These attributes bring massive benefits – and means that Old Spice can do things like engage direct with celebs on twitter and garner endorsement by the bucketful without spending a cent.

I knew absolutely nothing about Welcome to Thebes before I went into the National Theatre production earlier this week, and I thoroughly recommend this approach to get the most out of it.

Since that essentially invalidates this mini-review, I’ll keep it nice and short.

The play, a new work from Moira Buffini, takes the location of Thebes as shorthand for a jumble of classical and contemporary themes.  At its most basic level, Welcome to Thebes brings us a collision between the dense, symbolic action of classical tragedy and the visceral reality of the aftermath of modern conflict.  In doing so, it manages to provide a fresh alternative on both.

It is in its relocation of conflict-torn Thebes to a post-war African state, complete with the vocabulary of Truth and Reconciliation, where the play will lose the patience of some of its audience.  And, indeed, the script does occasionally lapse into cliché from which the superb cast cannot quite rescue it – particularly in the characters of the insane Prince Tydeus and the cabinet / chorus of gossiping middle aged women.

Others may criticise the liberties Buffini takes with her apparent source material – the story of Antigone.  But, even as an over-sensitive Classicist, this didn’t bother me – and it came across as an authentic retelling, retaining the sublimest themes without fixating on accuracy in details which were, at any rate, perfectly fluid two and a half millennia ago.

Highlights included: the ever-present and aptly comic Tiresias, highlighting the themes of blindness, foresight and destiny which stood up well against its classical source material; a superb interpretation of the arrogance of democratic Athens which never quite dipped into parody of American imperialism; and forceful, poetic writing delivered by a well-chosen cast.  The decision to place Thebes in the hands of a democratically elected Euridyce is bold, but pays off.  And the character of Theseus is nothing but a joy to watch.

Certainly a recommended theatre trip, particularly for those with a classical bent.  But don’t go expecting Sophocles or Ford Coppola.

There’s something very exciting about playing a computer game where the first thing you see is the proud BBC branding.  Today, I did that for the first time with the launch of the first BBC Doctor Who video game for a very long time.

I’m a big believer in the broadcaster, its public service values, and whatnot.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt as proud as I did when I reported to TV Centre for my measly six week work experience placement during a university holiday.

But even leaving particular warm fuzzy feeling to one side, the fact that the publicly-funded BBC is taking a solid step into the world of interactive entertainment makes so much sense to me.  In the same way that the organisation can fund and support innovative, lesser-known or niche artists – whether in comedy or music – I would love to see in future a world where the BBC is responsible for finding the UK’s answer to Braid or Portal.

And of course, the idea of a Doctor Who computer game – where I can literally play the Doctor – is something that, at the age of 10, I would never have hoped possible.

So what of the game itself? Or, at least, the twenty minutes I’ve played so far.

Well, the game continues the current series’ feel of slickness and high production values.  Despite a strange crash-to-desktop bug solved by turning my multi-monitor setup off, the game starts well.  As it loads, the heart-lifting Doctor Who theme swells up at the appropriate moment, alongside with a charming animation of the eleventh Doctor and Amy almost falling out of the Tardis with excitement as we reach the main  menu screen – mirroring the childlike excitement I felt as I clicked the button to take me to the first episode – the City of the Daleks.

The Tardis materialises in Trafalgar Square in 1963 – but not as we know it.  We are instantly plunged into the plot as a Dalek appears, chasing what it claims is the last human being on the planet.

The next twenty minutes of gameplay gives us a clue of what to expect in the rest of the game.  And it’s nothing shockingly different from what we’d expect.  It’s a mix of standard action puzzle game, with some mini, Operation-style puzzles thrown in like Bioshock’s hack mechanism for good measure.

This all flows well and feels right, apart from the stealth mechanic, which was already annoying me only 10 minutes in.  If you near a Dalek, you will automatically enter stealth mode.  The area in which a Dalek can see you will light up green, and you have to avoid it.  Occasionally, the Daleks move and you have to hide behind something.

It’s not massively difficult, but it can be a little frustrating, particularly as the game stops you going in certain directions by placing Daleks here and there who can’t be navigated around – meaning that if you misunderstand where the game designer wants you to go, you’ll probably be dead as you realise it.

The dull, slow stealth sections are annoyingly frequent and have the surely unintended side effect of making the Daleks look extremely stupid.  Granted, they’re not the most cunning of foes in the TV show, but believing that we can walk inches away from one (provided we aren’t in the arbitrary green zone) just feels weird.

Speaking of things feeling weird – my second bugbear.  The character animations, particularly the faces, are just plain odd.  I may be spoilt by playing high budget PS3 games and watching new-fangled 3D movies, but the animations in this game feel like such a massive step back.  I probably wouldn’t have noticed if it were 2001.  But it’s 2010, and I did.

Which is a shame, because it jerks you out of the experience somewhat.  We’re used to watching the every expression of the two talented actors who play the characters on TV, and perhaps then unconsciously expect the same of the game characters.  Similarly, the voice acting is off – partially due to facial expressions and perhaps because the actors are quite simply not used to recording a computer game soundtrack.

So those are my initial thoughts on the game.  I’ve lots still to discover, and I’m happy that much of what I love in the show – some decent dialogue, some fascinating situations, a good dollop of OTT sci-fi jargon – has made it into this game.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Saw a great quote today by a commenter over at Mark Watson’s blog by Samuel Beckett:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better

It’s from Westward Ho!, a play I’ve never seen, so apologies for having entirely divorced it from its context.  But as a standalone quote, it appeals.

I’m not much of a quote collector, but I like this one.  In an industry where we spend a lot of time defining, and then measuring, success – I like the idea of positive failure.  I can think of plenty of times where a statistical failure has become a massive success story.  And without insinuating that that is what Beckett was trying to say, I’m going to take advantage of his useful ambiguity to make him say it anyway.