CBC wants you to Expose yourself this summer

With the trend of things user-generated continuing to heat up with the summer weather, the CBC has launched an online competition aimed at finding the best short video from a Canadian producer.Of course, harnessing the Web to drive user interaction and solicit content is a concept that the public broadcaster has played with for a while, most notably with the ground-breaking ZeD. Indeed, at the Banff World Television Festival earlier this month, CBC Television's creative head of interactive for arts and entertainment Shawn Bailey referred to the new series, dubbed Exposure, as "a more mainstream ZeD.""I guess the comparisons are inevitable with ZeD," concedes Sean Embury, Exposure's senior producer. But he thinks there are better comparisons to be drawn from the CBC history books. "ZeD was very much based on an acquisitions model...at the end of the day, most of the stuff that went into the show was still a short film purchased from a distribution company."Exposure, on the other hand, "is maybe a little bit more like New Music Canada , in that the whole idea of this is that it's about promotion," says Embury. That's promotion not necessarily of established video artists or filmmakers, but a more democratic Web 2.0 kind where Canadians of all stripes can test their storytelling skills and upload videos.While a run of six TV episodes associated with the contest begins July 29, Exposure is very much a Web-driven property. Its main sponsor, Yahoo Canada Co., is helping integrate its content - including Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Groups - with that of the show, to offer a mix of promotion and practical tips for would-be entrants.In addition, the weekly winning selection chosen for each of the first five shows will actually be determined not by a CBC producer but by voting, feedback and other interaction on the part of Exposure's online community.The process begins several days before each TV show airs, when three finalists are chosen to compete in the Yahoo Canada Showdown. Those three will have their work featured on the TV show the following Sunday, with one eventually being crowned that week's winner. All five weekly winners will then be profiled in the sixth episode, priming the pump for a final audience decision.Perhaps Exposure's biggest break from other ‘best video'-type shows is that the overall winner - who'll receive a $25,000 online development deal - will be announced in a special online episode, rather than on television. "We thought, ‘This all starts on the Web, why don't we end it on the Web?" says Embury.The Web-heavy philosophy informing Exposure is also evident in the CBC's staffing choices: nearly everyone on the property's creative team hails from the online world. The show will be hosted by Lara Doucette, a Vancouver actor who's garnered a cult following as a regular on the video podcast TikibarTV, and will feature writing from Victoria-based writer and musician Billy Reid, whose videos on Youtube have received tens of millions of hits.Finally, in addition to working with Yahoo to get the word out, the CBC is also publicizing Exposure on Myspace and Youtube. "We've spent a good chunk of time trying to find every Canadian who had uploaded an original piece of storytelling-type content to Youtube, to Google Video, to Yahoo Video," Embury says.But will Canadians take part, and upload their content? A cursory look at the Exposure site shows more than 150 videos uploaded thus far, just a week into the competition, less the ones taken down for contravening CBC rules on copyright infringement and obscenity. The offerings run from comedy and film-school student animation reels to serious documentaries on sex workers.Not leaving anything to chance, Embury and the Exposure crew contacted some former contributors to ZeD and other submission-driven initiatives from the CBC and asked them to enter their work in advance of the June 17 launch date, to help seed the content database and, hopefully, get others' creative juices flowing.And though online video-sharing has become rather ho-hum in the Youtube era, Embury notes that Exposure will differentiate itself by being "one of the few video-sharing sites that has a TV property attached to it."Embury returns to the ZeD comparator to contrast that earlier effort with Exposure's mandate. "It's not experimental in terms of the type of storytelling we're looking for... There's no focus on the avant-garde or the alternative or any of that stuff," he says. "We want to create a fun, entertaining show: there will be some poignant moments, some good laughs, and maybe you'll see a part of the country that you haven't before and meet some new people."

CBC wants you to Expose yourself this summer

Broadcast | June 26, 2007

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