It has been an overwhelming and rather astonishing week to say the least… Since soft launching on the Discovery Turbo website just 9 days ago, the response to “Twist The Throttle” has been amazing to witness. Word of the project has already begun to spread like a wildfire across the Internet, popping up not only on a host of websites and motorcycle forums within The United States, but quite remarkably it has also begun to go international. Virally spreading from the States to the UK and other European countries, then to Asia, and even all the way to the Middle East… Ahhhh the power of the web!
To be completely honest this has blown everyone involved with the project away — I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we’re extremely thankful and quite excited that folks are digging the work this much. More to the point, we truly appreciate that folks have found enough valve in the project to continue to spread the word on to their friends and acquaintances.
As anyone in the documentary industry will tell you, that is both a rare commodity and quite a special one. When I take a step back to analyze it, I think one has to acknowledge not only the power and the potential of the web as modern distribution platform given its speed and efficiency, but more importantly I think you’ve got to acknowledge the influence of the motorcycle community as a whole.
In a broader context, the motorcycle community is clearly an extremely diverse group, but it is also far larger then I believe anyone realizes in terms of audience, or to put it in business terms, market share. I don’t believe that you can simply look at the sales figures for the major brands to get an indication of its size or potential. For every individual who owns a motorcycle, there are clearly far more who fantasize about owning one. This is important and worth acknowledging because in the world of television, the decisions whether to move forward with a project or not almost always ultimately rest on how large or committed the audience is — and I would submit based on the reactions to Twist that there is a sizable chunk or portion of the motorcycle audience that has clearly been underserved over the past several years.
Of course it would be awfully presumptuous of me to claim to fully understand the dynamics or tastes of every individual within this community – it is after all quite large - but like all documentary filmmakers, we went into Twist with several assumptions. Some appear to have been on target, some changed while we were in the field due to circumstance, and yet others missed the mark entirely.
What We Thought Going Into Production
We genuinely believed that the motorcycle community would greatly respond to the ‘sport’ side of riding – and I use that term loosely to encompass; the bikes and companies that push technology forward - because let’s face it, there’s quite a bit more to motorcycles then just choppers or Harleys, which is an area that has been well covered over the past half a decade or so on TV.
We also believed that people who enjoy using or looking at sporty motorcycles would be fascinated to learn about the quirks of fate and generally surprising histories of the major motorcycle manufacturers. Almost all of the companies we covered never set out to build a motorcycle – that’s fairly amazing if you think about it… And while none of what we covered is ‘new’ or impossible to find elsewhere (on the ‘net or in a book for instance), it is from a perspective rarely seen or discussed in the visual medium.
Not to sound overly scientific, but another hypothesis we held was that anyone who owned a bike built by these eight companies would be interested in seeing where their bike was born – both in terms of the factories and the locations. The corollary to this is that we believed each bike to be a direct product of its environment. It’s a belief that we came to while shooting our previous Discovery Turbo project, ‘Top Marques’ (only 4 of the eleven brands we featured ended up on the Turbo website, but hopefully that will change shortly). While bouncing around Western Europe and visiting the major supersports car manufacturers we began to notice that each marque seemed directly influenced by the area surrounding it.
Finally, we also felt that a sense for ‘the experience’ trumped any detailed discussion on the ‘technical data’ involved. This was partially based on who historically watches Discovery programming – regardless of its distribution platform or channel. By and large this portion of the general TV audience wants to know ‘how something works’ but they don’t want to feel like they’re watching a scientific dissertation either. So we intentionally avoided any talk of Newton meters or 2 millimeter changes to the fly valve. That was from our perspective to “inside baseball”..
I think this sense of ‘experience’ can best be visually articulated in the riding films that are online. They were never intended to replicate or replace motor-mag shoot outs – if you want to watch that sort of content there are already a host of places, such as MCN that already produce it and they do a damn fine job at that sort of content. We were interested in seeing and talking about the bikes in unique environments (some were more unique then others, but I’ll get to that later).
More analysis after the jump…
Unlike the birth of television when producers were basically making it up as they went along or even the ‘golden age of TV’ when they relied on rather ineffective statistical Nielson surveys, today thankfully there are message boards, blogs and other genres of websites that offer filmmakers, such as myself, a way to at least garnish a gleam for what folks enjoy or don’t enjoy.
That’s a really wordy way of saying that we’re trying our best to read every message board we can find or that gets passed along to us, because at least from my personal perspective that is the only way as we can try to understand what the audience really enjoys.
As of writing this post, we’ve either discovered or have had passed on to us 98 99 different websites that mention various view points on Twist The Throttle. Based on what we’ve read, I’d estimate that ninety percent of the posts spread across the net indicate that folks have greatly enjoyed what they’ve seen thus far — which I would submit means we at least came close to the mark on many of our original assumptions.
Of course there have also been some more critical reactions as well — Frankly that’s to be expected with any publicly distributed work and it’s the nature of the beast in Television.
So I thought that tonight I’d take some time to address some of the questions and criticisms that we’ve seen pop up… Not because I feel that I have to, or because I’m trying to be defensive, but rather to give all of you a sense for why certain decisions were made and also because I believe we now live in an era where you simply can no longer exist in a vacuum but rather should try and engage in a two-way conversation with the audience if at all possible.
Questions and Criticisms…
By far the greatest complaint at the moment seems to be the repeated ‘Twist The Throttle’ narration at the open and close of each film.
Clearly we missed the mark here. Our intention wasn’t to hammer anyone over the head with the title; rather the supposition at the time was that statistically speaking very few people watch multiple short form films on the internet in one sitting – especially once you get past the tweeners watching dogs skateboarding on YouTube. We simply had no way of anticipating that folks would be watching multiple brands at one time. We’ve even read posts on forums where people watched multiple hours – clearly no one expected that to happen. So clearly as we move forward – in whatever way, shape or form that is – we will not repeat the title in an episode. As an audience you’ve made it perfectly clear that you do not like that and we’re listening.
This leads directly into another frequently posted topic – length.
Unlike contemporary television where there is a rigid clock for programming – changing on the half hour or hour mark – the web is a brave new frontier and honestly I don’t think anyone has any idea yet how it will evolve as a medium. General industry wisdom held that four minutes was just about tops for how long a Webisode film could run and we tried our best to stick to that format. Of course we did violate it considerably on the history and manufacturing films – and trust me that doing so was an on-going debate – it’s just extremely difficult to tell the stories of these magnificent brands in four minutes while giving the audience any meaningful insight. If I had to do it over today, after reading the posts you’ve written, I’d push to extend the films as much as possible. It’s obvious now that folks in the motorcycle community will watch a web video of any length as long as they are ‘hooked’ or interested in it. Again, that’s a lessoned learned – though to be fair I also have to point out that the four minute mark might still hold true for a non-riding audience. Since those folks don’t post on motorcycle forums I’ve got no idea what they think.
Another hot topic – though considerably less so then either the title narration or the length of clips – has been the depth in the technical focus, or for some folks the lack thereof.
Above I’ve already highlighted our general theory that ‘experience’ trumps ‘tech talk’ and I feel no compunction in saying that I think we were correct about that for a few reasons. First given the Discovery brand we have to assume that there will be far more viewers that come from a general audience then viewers from the riding audience overtime. Secondly, these films will be staying online for a while yet the technical side of motorcycling – especially in sportbikes – changes quickly. Very, very quickly. So to get into tremendous depth ultimately hurts the shelf-life of the films, which in turn hurts the success of the series online. Finally, as I’ve mentioned previously, if you really want hardcore tech talk there are a vast number of places where you can find it in far greater detail then you could possibly provide in a four-minute film.
One of the bigger questions is about, ‘The Missing Brands’ – such as Aprilia, Triumph, Moto Guzzi, KTM, and Buell…
Like all documentary productions there’s only so much time you can spend in the field, so many subjects you can cover and realistically only so far you can stretch the budget. In addition, with a project like this until there’s a way to verify the demand, the network is only going to commit to so much content on a particular project. They run a business after all, which while glossy and somewhat glamorous because it shows up on television, runs exactly like any other brick and mortar establishment. That is to say, they are in the business of selling goods (commercials) and until they know there’s enough of an audience to support more product (the docs), then they have no reason to fund it. Our hope is that if the response to Twist continues, we might be able to find a way to delve into how these other brands tick as well…
It’s worth mentioning that our intention all along was to hit Triumph – and to their credit they were really into the project and willing to make it work. What didn’t were two things; Time and Budget. Coordinating the nine companies involved (8 marques and Alpinestars) was a considerable jigsaw-puzzle to say the least. Imagine all of the headaches involved with moving into a new house and then multiply it by ten but compress the time you have to do it by half and you only scratch the surface of the scheduling that was involved and the conflicts that had to be worked around. Then add in an incredibly weak dollar when stacked against foreign currency and things get real tight, real fast. This unfortunately meant that Triumph ended up on the cutting room floor before we ever rolled a single frame.
Another question I’ve personally received quite a few times through email, IM or private message on forums, has revolved around certain riding films looking different (or shall we say less dynamic) then others.
Every riding film was shot in just one day — with the exception of two brands, where our time with the bikes fell over a weekend. In most cases we were able to shoot the bikes as long as there was daylight - but in two cases we had just a few hours to get what we could. In that respect, shooting video is a drastically different animal then still photography. It just takes more time, no two ways about it. To be politically correct I’m not going mention brands or bikes, I’ll leave that up to your imagination and/or viewing habits, but given the extremely tight shooting schedule, I think it’s pretty clear that the guys behind the lens — our immensely talented Director of Photography Andrew Warsuzki and 2nd Unit Shooter (and Jack of All Trades) Andrew Cochrane — both did fantastic jobs capturing some truly brilliant looking footage and a tremendous amount of multiple angles.
Final Thoughts & A Contest!
Another thought that we’ve seen repeatedly posted is a clearly articulated desire for more content like Twist The Throttle on the brands you care about – we absolutely hear’ya and we couldn’t agree more. We’re currently trying our best to convince the powers that be that you are not alone and that there is in fact not only a dedicated moto-audience, but a thirsty one as well.
With this is in mind I thought perhaps now might be a good time for the first Twisting Asphalt Contest — because to be frank we need your help in order to communicate just how broad the audience for this sort of moto-programming actually is.
To be perfectly transparent and up-front about it, we simply cannot keep tabs on all the forum activity surrounding Twist The Throttle. Google and Yahoo no longer seem to search forums very well nor do they index quickly and since I think it’s fairly safe to assume that anyone reading this site also hangs out in various motorcycle forums on the ‘net, I thought it might be a win-win to offer some free DVDs of our past sportbike programs — and perhaps a mystery set of moto DVDs 
for whomever can suggest the most threads about Twist The Throttle in forums other then the ones we’ve already either found or which were passed on to us, which are listed below…
Please note: I’m not asking nor suggesting that anyone spam forums – we’re looking for threads that users have created on their own and have grown organically.
Finally I wanted to say thank to everyone who has watched the films. All of us hope you continue to enjoy them.
Cheers,
Dylan
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Great series!
I was surprised at the level of quality and the amount of content that a freely distributed series on the Internet provided.
My only complaint was the “twist (of) the throttle” narration bit.
Maybe in the future you can also cover other types of bikes, like the now incredibly popular Adventure models (every brand seems to be getting in on this).
Keep up the good work.
Awesome, awesome, awesome. This is the kind of work to which I aspire. I hope I’ll be able to put out this kind of quality someday. It’s beautifully shot. The bikes are fantastic. It’s a great show. I hope you guys do more soon!
yes, do let’s make more of them!
I discovered the films through a forum link and I must say that I loved them, and I too was surprised to find such quality content available freely over the web. Here in the UK we’ve had some good motorcycle programming but this seems to have dried up a little lately. There’s definitely a market for it, and sometimes it can even reach out to a far wider audience as ‘Long Way Round/Down’ has proved.
The great thing about making this kind of content available on-line is, I’d imagine, that in the long-term it can actually reach a greater number of viewers than traditional broadcast. It’s easy to miss stuff that only ever goes out via TV broadcast, although clearly many traditional broadcasters are still struggling to come to terms with the new medium (echoes of the music industry there…). Discovery Turbo have definitely got it right, with a nicely designed site and outstanding video image quality.
And as a Ducati owner I was particularly delighted to watch your films about the marque’s history and the insight into the factory. Even though the Ducati factory has been well covered before I’d venture that your account was among the best I’ve seen.
Perhaps most importantly on a personal level, the instalment about the Futa Pass has inspired me - I’d not heard of this place before, but now I’ve started looking into the practicalities of riding down there from the UK on my 749 this summer, dropping in at Ducati in passing.
Great work. I look forward to your future productions.
Hey ya David-
Glad to hear that you enjoyed the films
It’s always nice to know the work is appreciated… And if you dig curvy roads, you simply can’t go wrong taking a trip to the Futa Pass. It’s magical… absolutely magical… And the best part is that unlike so many areas around the world where there is really only one or two good sections with curves, the Futa Pass is really just a gateway to an entire region of delicious asphalt. My best advice is to allow - perhaps even plan - on letting yourself get ‘lost’ - I know that’s somewhat counterintuitive, but there are simply a myriad of magnificent roads running between Bologna and Florance and each one just gets better and better 
Cheers,
Dylan