Anthony Zuiker on Interactive Storytelling

NEW YORK: Anthony Zuiker, the creator of the CSI franchise, talks to World Screen Newsflash about his interactive digital series Cybergeddon as well as new projects, including Whodunnit? for ABC.

WS: Does writing for the web offer different freedoms compared to writing one-hour dramas for linear channels?
ZUIKER: There are endless freedoms to this format; you can do pretty much whatever you like. You have one strong solid voice as an artist. You are championing your other brand partners: [Symantec’s] Norton has been a great partner, also Nissan. You are really able to reinvent the format for the web. We shot in May, we aired in September. There were nine ten-minute chapters, which were released in 30-minute segments over the course of three days. We did a lot of ancillary content, extra content about the characters. So in terms of being an artist and launching globally in 25 countries in ten languages, it’s pretty much a creator’s dream.

WS: And what are the advantages for your brand partners? They had access to a very different world; it’s not the 30-second spot anymore.
ZUIKER: No, it’s not. To be involved in Cybergeddon, if you are Symantec or Nissan, the shelf life [of your investment] is unbelievable. If you imagine back in the CSI days, it was almost $1 million for a 30-second spot. For that same $1 million, in Cybergeddon, you’ll have 30 years of shelf life. That means downloads, foreign and domestic DVR, Netflix, iTunes, home video. It’s endless content that cannot be cut out or tracked and is permanently part of the narrative.

WS: You are one of the few creators who have worked with a brand successfully. What is the kind of give and take that goes on with the advertiser?
ZUIKER: It is a wonderful [process of] learning how to dance together, meaning at some point they have to respect what I do in terms of storytelling. I have to hear them as a brand partner and together we find a way to collaborate and do it right. They don’t really get involved in too much interfering in the storytelling. I honor what they need to have happen for their brand. So it’s a pretty amicable experience.

WS: This isn’t your first experience; you had to deal with brands even in CSI.
ZUIKER: Yes, multiple brands for CSI. That was a little more high octane, because there were certain overt demands you had to comply with because brand integration was so new for television. But this is a much longer relationship. It’s a longer movie. We were pretty much upfront and transparent about what we were going to be doing together. They want more and we want less, and we figure it out and come to an agreement.

WS: You have said that storytelling in the digital age has to be built for the device. Would you explain that?
ZUIKER: I think a lot of people that do original content for television or movies just slide it over to the iPad or the iPhone or iPod touch or tablet and call it a day. It’s really not the proper format. Cybergeddon was designed to be in chapters. It was designed to have hard-hitting openings and gripping storytelling and hard outs and cliffhangers to draw you to the next chapter. It’s a whole different mentality in terms of sectioning your movie into nine pieces and then creating a format, a style and a pace inside of that; it was almost conducive to the iPad or the Galaxy tablet. At the end of the day, as we get more and more interactive with our audience, there will be other features and utilities inside that experience besides just the sit-back experience of watching a tablet.

WS: You also wrote a “digi-book,” which had content online. How much interactivity does the audience want?
ZUIKER: You give them the beauty of choice. For the Level 26 series, we did Dark Origins, Dark Prophecy and Dark Revelations. In our app called Dark Prophecy, which is on the iPad, we gave them the ability to read it just like a Kindle, or you can read it like a Kindle and you can actually have sound effects, or you can have the [full] experience, which is: read the book, watch the movie, collect evidence, gather suspects, gunshots go off, your screen breaks, blood trickles down, a knife comes across. [It’s] always surprising you. [The app] knows how fast or slow you read. The interactivity was endless, but if you just wanted to read the book and not be bothered, you can do that—it’s the power of choice.

WS: And Cybergeddon also has a lot of extra elements on the web to enhance the viewing experience.
ZUIKER: We have a lot of ancillary content. Yahoo! did a great job building an interface for the chapters in the book. We did a thing called Zips, which is short for Zuiker clips. We took all the individual characters and did six one-minute episodes about them that sometimes dovetailed into the movie, and gave a perspective of the movie that you wouldn’t have gotten if you had just watched the movie [alone]. And those 70 or 80 pieces of content float around YouTube, Yahoo!, all over the world in different languages, and act as PR soldiers that point you right back to the movie. It’s a smart approach.

WS: Was shooting Cybergeddon different from shooting a drama for a linear channel?
ZUIKER: It was an 18-day shoot. It wasn’t really different. The thing we kept saying was, push, push, push, take chances, take risks. We kept telling the director, You’re not shooting a television show, you’re really shooting a super-aggressive movie with multiple points of view, almost like 24, where you have three or four screens at one time. Just keep a frenetic pace.

WS: What other projects are you working on?
ZUIKER: The headline one is Whodunnit?, which is a CSI-style competition mystery show [for ABC]. It’s our first foray into this new genre we are creating called reality fiction. We also have Wonderland at NBC. Shaun Cassidy is our showrunner and executive producer there. Whit Anderson wrote the script. It takes place in Detroit. The Alice in this particular series is the adversary and she is the evil queen. Very cool!