There’s this guy called Tim Wright. He’s a lovely chap. He did some planning and writing and things for a game we made a long time ago at Poke. Anyway he’s either become a nutjob or a genius (or maybe he was always both). I’m not sure if I’m qualified to say which right now.
He says:
From 30th June to 25th August, I’m following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’.
That’s quite a bit of walking he’s doing. And he’s documenting the whole thing on a blog: http://www.timwright.typepad.com/kidmapper. And he’s podcasting and Tweeting and all that jazz too.
And he’s sticking up his photos on Flickr where they get combined with a passage from the book that’s relevant, like: “There was in this part of the isle a little hut of a house like a pig’s hut, where fishers used to sleep when they came there upon their business”:
And he’s reading out passages from the book in relevant locations and putting the videos online:
And bravely he’s offering up:
Perhaps there’s something you’d like me to do or think about whilst I’m walking. Perhaps you’d like me to visit specific sites and film them for you. Or better still, perhaps you’d like to come out here and join me for a walk, add your own responses to being on the Kidnapped Trail and have an adventure of your very own.
And like he says, he can be found on most social services under the name ‘kidmapper’.
Now the big problem I have with this kind of thing is that it makes our job as internet slags really hard.
How on earth are we supposed to do things for paying clients that compete with this? He’s not thinking about dayrates. Or production costs. Or about delivering a specific message to a given set of look and feel guidelines. He’s just out there doing something because he really wants to. Because he’s got this mission that he wants to do. Just because.
And it’s charming. And interesting. And funny. And real. And a touch shambolic. And a little bit odd. And I want to follow him. Because I don’t know what’s coming next. And I know that he doesn’t either. Oh in that incredibly honest way he’s starting very much from zero – he currently has only 19 followers on Twitter.
Go Tim!
Visit his blog now: http://www.timwright.typepad.com/kidmapper
By the way, he doesn’t even have an Amazon merchant link from the book on his site. THAT’S HOW PURE HE IS!
Good.
ace. in the future all webby things may be made from cheap blogware and free social/publishing services glued together.
…and I bet he didn’t set any targets as well….that’s the curse of the doing the interwebs!
These lovely REAL human ‘projects’ make our job so bloody forced sometimes…
No brief, no message, not on brand, no legal bullshit, no sign-off, no value summary
At the end of the day it’s all about the context right?
So as much as our clients can’t do the Tims or the 14 years old dude in Sweden that does funny faces to his webcam and get gazillion views on Youtube, there are some things that can be done only with budgets and productions etc and when done in context as we know, they can be really amazing…
There is hope
Always be interesting ;-)
Hey thanks for the write up! To be honest for quite a long while I did think about trying to organise this project as something less shambolic and more planned & strategic. But the more I thought about writing proposals and developing a format the more it seemed to kill the spirit of the thing. Besides I wanted to do it this year not next! I actually like the feeling that I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m not sure what comes next. This doesn’t mean though I can’t sweep the mess up in the autumn and think about developing something smarter – like a print version of kidnapped mashed up with all our shared media (I could sell personalised novels maybe) or a mobile audio plus notes app that you can use on your own literary hikes. So I would I suppose like to make some kind of living out of this in the end…
On the other hand, I really am just a nutjob.
Take care
tx