The Rules

• I have to write a feature length screenplay in one week starting today the 13th of May 2013. 

• For the purpose of this challenge I’m going to say that ‘feature length’ is 100 pages or more.    

• I will write the screenplay on a public platform and share my progress through other channels.

• I only need to have produced a first draft by the end of Friday - no re-writes required!

• Facts - I will attempt to be factually accurate with regards to period elements however in the interest of speed (and entertainment) I may fabricate and/or ignore facts in some cases.

Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea

This was going to be a longer post going into more detail about my current situation and the motivations for this challenge but it was taking too long to write!

Sufficed to say that I’ve got a bit of time on my hands at the moment and I wanted to do something creative so I decided to write a screenplay.  I don’t want this to be one of those wishy-washy decisions that ends up with my tapping away at a script every now and then for the next year though so I also decided to set myself the challenge of writing the whole thing in one week.

This week.

I’ll be doing as much of the process out in the open (I’m hoping that by sharing it I’ll be motivated by fear of public failure if nothing else!) so do follow along!

As for the script?  It’s an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for at least three years now, but it’s never gotten any further than me jotting down a few notes on some scraps of paper and earmarking the odd page in a history book.

The working title is ‘Victoria’s 11’ (for a while it was: ‘People in Glass Houses shouldn’t throw Stones’ - which might give you a few more clues!) and it’s a period heist film - think Ritchie’s Holmes meets Soderbergh’s Ocean.

Here’s a quick logline/synopsis to whet your appetite:

‘Jack Steam, gentleman thief, thought the game was up when his last job went wrong. That was until his old business partner came to him with an offer; one last job in return for his freedom.  Now Jack’s got one week to put together a team and pull off the greatest heist ever attempted and the whole world is watching.’

All challenges need rules, you can read mine here.

A Pretty Story

When we were working on the Strange London identity we started looking around to see if there were any emerging trends in branding at the time. In doing so we noticed that several organisations have been working on dynamic, or living logos.

We liked this idea and started thinking about ways that we could incorporate this kind of technique into our logo, site and general branding - in a quick and easy fashion.

Someone suggested that we could use location as our variable with IP addresses as a proxy for real world location.  Whilst we were looking into we realised that IP addresses are made up of numbers ranging from 0 to 255 – as are RGB color values. So there it was. We would use a person’s IP address to adjust the color scheme, not only of our logo but also for our site by calculating complementary and tertiary colors.

Back slapping ensued for all of 90 seconds before we realised that we could run into some serious compliance problems with this plan as we’d never know for certain what colours we’d be working with.

That effectively put the kibosh on using IP colour on the website but there was definitely something there so instead we decided to throw together a quick site and share it with a few people.  We were obviously right. With no PR or paid promotion Pretty IP was hit by more than 50,000 users within 12 hours or going live.  That figure now stands at 100,000 and continues to grow.

What have we learnt from Pretty IP? Well not much new, but it’s certainly re-enforced a few key lessons:

1. Have a use - at the end of the day Pretty IP has two simple uses; it tells you your IP address and it generates a colour palette for you. 
2. Fun - Pretty IP’s ‘usefulness’ is limited but that’s ok because it’s supported by a sense of fun.
3. Shallow Engagement - when all you’re asking a user to do is hit your site (and maybe share it with their friends and followers) it’s relatively easy to traffic, it’s when you start asking users to jump through hoops that things get hard.
4. Get stuff out there! - build it quick and get it out there. The easiest way to test a hunch is to test it in the wild.