Watching this clip from the Muppet Show today, I’m in awe of the creative and technical aspects of it (it’s such a complicated production, and it looks so seamless!), but when I was a kid, and saw this on television, it scared the hell out of me:
Speaking as a puppeteer, I love the fact that the bed spins. And when Kermit hides under the covers? It’s done so naturally, but, man alive, that must’ve been an awkward move for Henson.
The set is finished, and it’s up on the framework:
Which means, of course, that the framework works! I’m pretty excited about that. As I may have mentioned before, I was worried that it would fall apart. But it didn’t, thankfully, and everything’s good. It looks pretty shiny, too.
Having the set up at the proper height leads to additional problems, though: getting the camera up there. Longer-term plans include some kind of fancy handheld rig, but for the moment, I’m going very lo-fi, and repurposing a small rolling cabinet I have, and a sheet of plywood to create and elevated dolly. I have plans somewhere for a more sophisticated one, but this is a good first step:
This is one of the days where the studio space looks more and more like an actual puppet studio. Which is nice.
Hey all,
Phase one of the new set for Ask Palpatine is nearly complete. It’s not quite as polished as I’d have liked, but I think it’ll do nicely, and photograph well (especially on the web-sized resolutions we’re pumping it out as). Today’s got me a bit nervous, because as I finish the set, the next step is to hang it, and this’ll be the first big test of my extensible set-design system.
So, basically, it’ll either work amazingly well, or my next post will feature a photo of the collapsed and broken set framework.
This is what the set looks like currently:
Future plans include building a chair for Palpatine to sit on — an Emperor needs his throne — and building two Imperial guards to stand watch over him.
There will be a couple tweaks to it, with some type adjustments, and such, but this is pretty close to what the landing page for the Colbert Puppet Challenge video will look like. I’m happy to say that I did the design myself, and that it came out pretty snazzy.
I’ve been thinking recently about a gap, or what I am choosing to view as a gap, in online video metrics. People are shouting about the total number of views their videos have, with great relish, but what use is that number, really? When someone gets on the front page of digg, or a Youtube feature, or something similar, they will get a lot of views. But when that spotlight turns away from them, how much of that extra traffic do they keep? In my experience, you keep almost none of it. So, sure, you can convince enough of the Digg users, or the Youtube or iTunes editors to talk about your show, but are you convincing enough of the people watching the videos to come back?
What does it matter, in other words, if your Youtube-featured video gets 100,000 views? Are those views gained because people are liking your content, or because it’s what’s in front of them, and they’re essentially channel surfing?
The goal of this potential metric would be to measure the popularity or stickiness of the person or group making the videos. Because I want to be able to compare my limited popularity to your massive popularity.
Now, I realize I’m saying nothing particularly new or insightful. To make up for that, though, I’d like to present a new metric. This is rough, and I’d like to get feedback on it, to make it better, or to let me know that it’s a silly idea.
The metric is this:
Video Views (Total) / Number of Videos / Number of Subscribers = Views Per Subscriber
Allow me to explain the logic. Dividing the total video views by the number of videos will get you an average number of views per video that you put out. This strikes me as a useful abstraction to compensate for the growth or decline in your traffic/audience over time. You need, I think, to “stabilize” the number.
Please note, I’m not a statistician, but rather a puppeteer, who spends a good chunk of his day with his hand up a fictional character’s butt. I may be continuing this trend right now.
Once you have your average, you divide it by the number of subscribers. The reason I do this is because I have noticed that I’m getting a number of views on each video I put out that is consistently higher than any of the standard metrics (such as feedburner). By those counts, I ought to only be getting a fraction of the views that I am. The reason for those extra views? People happening upon my content, by whatever method, and giving it a try. Some will stick around and become a subscriber, while most won’t. In theory, my numbers should not only be going up but be going up faster, as more people subscribe, and more opportunities are existed for people to happen upon the content (assuming that fans mention the content). My question is: should this drift between subscribers and views be large, or small? Which is the good metric? I believe that a lower Views Per Subscriber (VPS) is better, in that it suggests to me that more of the people who are being shown your content are sticking around. This may be the most obvious thing in the world to say, but if I have X subscribers and Y views, it’s better for the life of my content if an increase to Y*2 views is met with a X*2 increase in subscribers. Otherwise, the new people being shown your content are sticking around. Or they are sticking around for a while, and simply replacing other fans who have jumped ship (which would potentially explain any flatlining in subscribers).
To put in a real-world example, I’ll use my current Youtube numbers. They aren’t amazing, by any stretch, but here they are:
800,000 views
90 videos
704 subscribers
This brings me to a VPS of 12.62 (800,000/90/704).
I think that the better number is one closer to 1 (every view is brought in by a subscriber; with each new potential viewer being shown your content becoming a subscriber), but I’d love to hear what you think. My reasoning for favoring a golf-style scoring system can be explained thusly:
Suppose that over the course of adding 5 new videos, my views per video average increases from 8888 to an even 20,000. Without an increase in subscribers, that would mean that my VPS would be:
900,000 / 95 / 704 = 13.45
My VPS is higher, and the stickiness of my content is shown to be less. Suppose, on the other hand, that as part of that growth I brought in, say, 300 subscribers:
900,000 / 95 / 1004 = 9.435
There are obvious downsides to this approach, of course. I could put up a single video, get 1 view and 1 subscriber, and have a VPS of 1. Is that a bad thing, though? If you have ten subscribers, and you only have ten views of each of your videos, are you performing poorly, or have you saturated an extremely small market?
Maybe a better piece of math is to simply divide the number of subscribers by the number of videos you’ve released? In that case, the higher number would be better (and my own would be 7.4).
What do you think about the need for a new metric? Which approach do you think makes more sense?
What would your VPS be?
This is Git. He’s a puppet I built for a couple short video bits we’ll be doing for FITC, the design festival coming near the end of the month in Toronto. Git’s meant to be your stereotypical pretentious art director / web designer. He’ll be interviewing some of the speakers before and during the show.
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Made a few changes to the main site. The landing page is a little different, with a handy-dandy listing of our shows right there on the front, Palpatine has been added to the Puppets listing, and our fairly recent client work, Spaggy, has also been added.
Neat stuff, and there’s more to be added in the next little while.
Check it out:
http://www.askpalpatine.com/2008/01/24/is-tom-cruise-a-sith-lord/
