The absence of limitations is the enemy of art
Orson Welles
About seventy years ago, shrines to moving picture arose in living rooms around the western world, becoming the centerpiece of our domestic lives, kickstarting a shapeshifting evolution through the decades. Storytelling found a new medium, and one that would spark our undying adoration in unprecedented ways, birthing entire industries devoted to monetizing our attention.
Come the late 70s and 80s, we saw the rise of color TV and the VHS, letting us enjoy our favorite stories in ever more visually engaging ways, even on our own schedule. Fast forward through decades, from set-top-boxes to Blu-Ray, and to the bandwidth-abundant present where virtually anyone can stream a sprawling plethora of content onto screens of many shapes and forms. At your finger tips are high production Hollywood movies that play beautifully on screens you can hold in your hand, to overwhelming audio-visual experiences like IMAX that knock the socks off the most jaded amongst us.
All the way through this journey, the narrative evolved to fit the medium.
Today we have seemingly hit the upper and lower limits of what is possible, not only in terms of resolution, screen size, and budget, but in the attention span that a storyteller can command in an ever more information-saturated world. These limitations have driven us to innovate in ways that were impossible to foresee when Johnny Carson hit the screen in the 60s.
As any accomplished artist will tell you, limitations are a source of creativity. These limitations both intimidate and excite the best storytellers, inspiring them to formulate new ways to tell stories that touch us deeply.
Cue Quibi, a true exercise in artistic limitations.
WHAT IS QUIBI?
Quibi is a brand new episodic entertainment platform where the episodes are quick 5-10 minute “quick bites”. Founder Jeffrey Katzenberg describes it as “long-form that is going to be told in chapters. And I think that’s the thing that is most innovative about what we’re doing.”
Meg Whitman, the chief executive, describes Quibi as providing “easy access to the highest quality entertainment that fits perfectly into busy, on-the-go lifestyles”.
But this cliched turn of phrase does not do justice to the holistic storytelling that this platform makes possible. Ever the showman, Spielberg wants his exclusive “Spielberg’s After Dark,” series only to be shown in the evening, so Quibi made it so.
Quibi also takes advantage of the horizontal or vertical orientations of your phone, letting filmmakers change the viewers point-of-view, opening up all kinds of exciting ways for storytellers to flex their creative muscles.
With abundant funding, and names like Spielburg, Guillermo del Toro, Kevin Hart, and Jennifer Lopez involved, the platform’s lofty dreams are garnering attention from big brands.
HOW WILL QUIBI MAKE MONEY?
“You can’t produce the premium short-form content Quibi has planned via ad-funding alone”, says Katzenberg. With a $5/month Quibi subscription, you will see 2.5 minutes of advertising content per-hour. There will also be an $8 tier for those who want to skip the advertising.
Katzenberg thinks 70% of subscribers will chose the lower tier. For those viewers, the 2.5 minutes of ads per-hour will be sliced up into 15 second chunks and spread throughout the content.
Whitman said some of the ads will follow the episodic nature of Quibi’s shows, telling small “brand stories” in chapter-by-chapter segments. In four 15-second installments, brands can scatter a longer narrative across one of Quibi’s shows.
But how will brands be able to cram a story with convincing characters, conflict, and drama into such tiny spaces?
WILL BRANDS LEVERAGE QUIBI’S LIMITATIONS TO TELL THEIR STORIES?
As the story goes, Ernest Hemingway was having lunch with some famous contemporaries when he decided to bet $10 that he could write a short story with a beginning, middle, and end that was only six words long, and would make them cry. The result became the most well-known example of “flash fiction”:
For sale, baby shoes, never worn.
Ernest Hemingway
Flash fiction shows us that moving stories can be told in extremely limited spaces. Indeed these limitations could spur some exciting exercises in extreme brand-storytelling. But brands will need to use every visual trope and special effects technology available to capture the hearts and minds of audiences within these tight boundaries.
To truly master the art of flash fiction, brands will need to become the studios of the future, bringing in-house the best visual and scripted storytelling techniques available. Decoupled production studios open the door for companies to produce short-form entertainment that stands up to the Hollywood-calibre content that will surround it.
Whether or not the audience embraces Quibi, we’re excited to see how this new format will challenge creative minds to hone their storytelling craft to its most razor-edged extremes.