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.