Jill Golick

I know you from web series, but did you start in film or another medium?
When I was in my second to last year of university, I was studying psycholinguistics because I was interested in child development. I had a job with a film company and they were making classroom materials. In those days, they were called film strips: frames of illustrations with a soundtrack that went with them, and there were some film strip projectors that would automatically move the frame forward, and some that you had to turn them. They sent me to schools to test them with kids and teachers. And when I came back, I had a lot to say, and they saw me as cheap labour, so they got me to write the teacher’s guides for them.

That was my first writing gig. When I was home for Christmas in my last year of university, I visited them, and they said they were working on this new reading film strip series, so I took it home and I wrote it for them.

By the time I graduated, they were waiting for me to give me a job, writing stuff and testing stuff that goes into classrooms, working with teachers – things like that.

This was all instructional though?
Yes, and I was just going to do that until I had enough money to go on a trip to Europe. Or maybe get another job and go to grad school.

So what were you qualified to do when you graduated?
Nothing!

I got a degree in psycholinguistics, which doesn’t even exist. There’s no career for it, really, at all. So I was prepared for nothing, but I don’t think I really knew in those days that university didn’t prepare you for anything. It was just a good time away from home.

In that first year after graduation I met the executive producer of Canadian Sesame Street and he gave me some writing jobs, little three minute things.

How did you meet him?
We had a family connection – same thing with the film strip guy. So I ended up working on that kind of stuff for a number of years. Sesame Street eventually ended up hiring me on staff for a year, writing, wrangling, casting the kids.

And so I kind of fell into writing. Even though I loved writing as a kid, and I wrote stories and things like that, as a career it came to me by accident.

When you first went into it, what in Facebook made you think it would be perfect for narrative?
I don’t know if you remember when you first signed up for Facebook, but you got this big long form to fill out about yourself: who am I, what are my beliefs, what do I like, what’s my marital status – well, that’s a character sketch right there.

And I thought, ‘what if you make all these characters, and there’s space for them to interact and they could talk to each other…?’ And then Twitter came out in 2006, and I was blogging, and there were different places online that you could put photos.

I realised you could break story in exactly the same way you do for television, and then – instead of writing scenes to express each beat – you could distribute the beats on different online platforms; for example, one beat could be a photo album, another beat could be a blog post, another could be people talking to each other on a Facebook Wall.

I became completely obsessed with it. I would spend a lot of time thinking about how I was using the Internet to travel from click to click to click, and looking at how I was interacting with people who I met.

And then I came to the realisation that the characters could talk to the audience, which completely blew my mind! I started trying to convince people in the industry that this was the way to go, and they just couldn’t understand what I was doing.

So I had to go and produce something.

What were your first experiments in using Facebook as a narrative tool?
The first thing I did was called Boy Meets Girl. I constructed a piece of a story that everybody understands; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again. I thought that there was a little mini story that everyone could get into, so let’s take that and do it as dispersed story telling and see if they can follow it.

So I hired a crew, I wrote scripts, I wrote blog posts, I took photos and I put this thing out. It’s about a guy who has a vlog called Boy Tells All, and a girl who has a blog and she writes about knitting, relationships and sex. It starts with his video where he’s walking down the street and he’s telling us about the adventure he had with this girl last night. Out of nowhere, she comes running down the street and she hits him with her knitting bag (which I knitted myself for her to carry). And she says, ‘you gave me something last night.’ And he’s been scratching his balls through the whole conversation.

The second beat is her on Facebook, and she says, ‘girls, can you help me: I have this itching, and the doctor can’t see me tomorrow – what can you recommend?’

When I launched this, I had sent emails to 300 people, but about a day later, there were people from all over the world responding to this online, and they came to a community diagnosis that she had venereal lice, or something like that!

And this lived on Facebook on their profiles?
Yes, but everything was dispersed. The video was on YouTube and on his blog and then on Facebook.

So it’s one of the first instances of non-linear storytelling in the way that you can enter the story where the beginning is never any one place. It’s dependent on how the audience discovers it.
Right, you could come to her blog or you could find his video or you could meet them on Facebook. And there were characters on Twitter.

So I ran a week’s worth of material and people enjoyed it. There was a lot of interaction, and some social media agency guys saw what I was doing and were really interested, and they asked me to speak at a marketing conference. I made slides, and went and presented. They were all very seriously marketing people and there was me with my stupid project.

The people who were interacting with it – did they know that it was fictitious?
Here comes the rub. So the characters had friended people before the story started. I messaged all the people in their friends lists and told them that ‘I’ was a work of fiction and if it bothered them to unfriend ‘me’. There were links to my website and it told them that this was a work of fiction, but people missed that.

At the end of my presentation, this woman in the audience stood up in the audience and said this was against Facebook’s Terms of Service, and I was like, ‘yes, it is, but I’m not selling anything, I’m just telling a story.’ And she said she was going to tell Facebook on me, and I was hustled off stage.

Then I tried to find her, and she was pretty pissed off. She said that transparency was everything, and I was like, ‘well, I’m just telling a story, it’s a work of fiction.’ I had a lot of conversations that evening, and I managed to talk most of them down off the ledge.

The next day, by noon, everything was gone from Facebook.

If I haven’t taken the photos and screenshots for the slides, I would have nothing left of the property. Every character that I had mentioned in that presentation was gone. There was a huge blog war for about two weeks afterwards with screenwriters and marketers going head to head, posting about it, arguing in the comments. And that was my first time out.

So what learnings did you take from that?
Unfortunately, it made me fearful about the thing that excited me the most, which was characters communicating with audiences, which I felt then there was a massive hunger for. Everyone who played wanted to talk to the characters; even though they knew they were characters. It allowed them to play in the storyworld which they seemed to really want to do.

For example, the characters would be talking about having a dinner party, and they would invite someone from the audience. And the person would post that they were at the liquor store buying a bottle of wine and the next day they’d be hungover. It was all fiction, playing in the fictional space.

The audience loved to give advice and see that advice carried out in the next beat of the story.

I never went back to bring any character back to life on Facebook. But I kept pursuing stuff; I started to colour much more inside the lines. I eventually did Ruby Skye P.I., which looked so much like old media, certainly in the first season. There are still unchartered territories for me that I would like to play with.

But we have way more platforms now, and there are other shows that, for example, have their own characters on Twitter; do you think you would still have the same problems?
No, I don’t think there would be the same kind of problems now.

So is there anything stopping you from exploring said unchartered territories?
No, there isn’t, I just need the right project. But the space is crowded now, it’s harder to get noticed, so it’s a matter of putting together the right package and getting some financing, so that people can see it and enjoy it. And I think the thing is, when other people are interested in bringing those kinds of skills into a project, largely it isn’t done from the very beginning and we don’t have a property that is designed for this, and then it becomes an adjunct thing, like Twitter conversations between Sherlock Holmes and Watson – they don’t really make sense or move the story forward.

Are you still as excited now as you were back then with all of the platforms that we have? I’ve spoken to a lot of people that maybe have started their character explorations on certain platforms, and a few years later, are super cynical because everyone is doing this. But with the potential that you saw for it then, is it still something that you can see now?
Yes, I can definitely see it now. I still think it could be done on a big scale, and really entertain audiences, but you know, it’s not something that I’m developing for at the moment. But maybe I will, who knows.

Do you still work with broadcasters?
I do.

From the outside in, trying to pitch broadcasters or bring projects in, there’s very much the feeling that they’re very behind. What are some of the challenges that you think there are from the broadcaster’s and creator’s perspectives for adopting this kind of storytelling?
Well, I think, number one is, film and television have rejected the call, particularly in Canada where we had a very big, staunch storytelling web series movement here that we really should have capitalised on because we could’ve been the world leaders. I mean, there was a period for a couple of years where Canadians were winning all the awards at all the webfests. If the industry had focused on it more, we would’ve been able to really have a strong movement.

Whenbouts was that?
2010, 2011, 2013: there were lots of Canadians going to webfests and coming back with the prizes, and we’d bring each other back the trophies because we couldn’t all go to all of them. Out With Dad and Ruby and Clutch and some others, and there was a community here that was working on it. Broadcasters and traditional production companies – the world is changing around them and they’re hiding their heads in the sand, going back to core business practice, but not adopting anything new.

It almost sounds like they’re regressing?
I think so, and the way I see the market going in the future, what we want are big, big libraries. That’s what Netflix gave us, some of the music sharing sites: you don’t want to own it, you don’t want it scheduled for you, you just want to be able to have access to it and consume it. So where the money is right now in film and broadcast television is buying up big libraries, or getting things into these big libraries, and that’s where broadcasters and distributors are focused.

But the other thing I think that’s going to happen in the future is that the handmade product, the personal voice story and also the story where you can touch the creator is what people are going to hunger for. Yes, you might have access to this big library, but what are you going to subscribe to that’s new? So I think these new kinds of storytelling, and creators who are available to you, are going to be a secondary component that’s going to be different, that’s going to attract you to this library if you pay your money.

I’m optimistic about the role the independent creator and the new voices in the system, but at the same time I’m quite fed up with the corporatisation of art.

But, to play devil’s advocate, one definitely needs the other because everyone needs to eat, surely?
Yes, but two things: one, a huge amount of money is generated by entertainment products – film and television – and that is really going towards shareholders and corporate people who are becoming more wealthy. It’s not going towards making new and interesting properties, experimenting with new kinds of storytelling, or building a loyalty bond with an audience. And that loyalty, that thing you want to belong to, is what’s going to attract you to spend your money.

Also, I don’t think entertainment has to be the cash cow that it is now. I mean, screenwriters in the US make vast amounts of money. It doesn’t have to be that much money – we don’t have to be making films for $20m to make $200m in every case. I think a small group of people can support an artist that they like and who speaks to them.

Back in the day, brands were in advertising and we were quite clear about what that was; there was quite clearly a separation between the show and the advertisement. Now I think it’s even more integrated across the plethora of comms channels that we have; Youtubers, who seem to have crystalised ‘influencer marketing’, are symptomatic of this. In terms of how things are commericalised, what role do you think brands have in this?
Somebody always pays for art. You just have to walk into any museum in Europe to see that; back in the day, if you think of the church and churches, art was sponsored by God. It evolved in most countries where the government pays for culture because it’s considered important. I’m for brand participation, and in almost everything I did, it was built to have a brand sponsorship or partnership. I don’t have the skills to bring someone in, but I did spend a lot of time trying to work with marketers and learn marketing language so I could evolve to that place.

A story is about a storyteller and their audience. You’re telling a story to people. Mass media made the audience the commodity that it sold to advertisers, and tv shows were just like sugar to attract the audience – it was just the cheapest lowest common denominator that could bring in big numbers of viewers to justify the price of the ads. Mass media made the audience passive; it said, ‘you sit on the couch and drool – we’re telling the story here.’

I think when the internet came along, and people could talk back, they began to hunger for something that was different from that kind of entertainment. For example, we saw the rise of DIY, people mending things and filming all kinds of stuff in their houses, in a new way.

When there’s someone who is really savvy and understands the people who are consuming the content and educating the brands, that’s one thing; but when the brand comes in and wants a storyline where a guy buys a truck and gets his car loan from us but there’s no drama in the scene because he just gets it. The show stops being drama and becomes advertising.

But if you really have to let the drama lead; focus on telling the audience a great story. Under those circumstances a partnership between a brand and storyteller should work really well. Because the brand’s role is in facilitating the connection between a storyteller and the audience. Both storyteller and the audience would be grateful and develop brand loyalty as a result. But it has to be about the story, not the brand.

As a creator, how do you decide which stories you want to tell?
Well, they’re just the ones that won’t get out of my brain!

With Ruby Skye P.I., what happened was that there was this new fund in Canada, the Independent Production Fund (IPF), that announced that they were going to finance some web series, and I was like, I want a piece of that money. So I went and applied with six different producers – all different projects, all different markets, each one very different and unique, different strategies and marketing plans.

I had this idea that was lying around about this girl detective so I threw that one in. And it was the only one that made it through to the second round.

Where did your idea for Ruby come from?
I’d written a lot of mystery, and I really enjoy writing mystery, and I was interested in a girl detective who was stubborn and driven by the need to know stuff.

I don’t know where stories come from, they’re just there. I just had this idea to do a girl detective, and I had this other idea that was rolling around in my head about a Nigerian scam. Everyone knows what a Nigerian scam is – just look in your email junk file. And I put these two things together and that was that.

Sometimes it genuinely is as simple as that.
Well, many pieces come from many different directions. I had done another web series called Hailey Hacks which was a pre-teen girl who taught you cool things that you could do with your computer, and that was really an experiment in business models; what I did was that I made one minute versions of the videos and much longer ones, and you could get the one minute one for free, and for a $1.99 you could get the longer one. But I only had three videos and I had no marketing, and pre-teen girls don’t have credit cards, and it was 2008, and no one was buying anything over the web.

But I took that character and I made her the little sister of Ruby.

So you suddenly found yourself a producer; surprising, but really not unsurprising, given the path of many self-produced shows. What was your learning curve like as a producer?
Steep. So, I knew a lot about creative producing – I knew what to do in an editing room, what went on on set, all that stuff. But I had no idea how to make budgets or keep track of it; and once you got the money, did you actually have to spend it in the categories you said you were going to spend it in? I figured out really early on that things like marketing plans and business plans were just creative writing, and I could just make up something and people would accept that.

We got through the first season, and by the second season I was giving talks on how to finance web series in Canada, which was hilarious.

But you learn everything on the job, and the job is the best teacher. I mean, it’s not just the producing, it’s making up the marketing as you go along.

I’d say that that’s part of the producer’s role.
Ok, but there’s no path for marketing a web series, and no one to tell you what to do. I just made things up and some of them were greatly successful and some of them weren’t. And also, that’s where communities started to become important. All of us were fumbling around, but you know, someone had spent a lot of time in this area and somebody else knew about this, so it was really important for us to get together to promote each other’s shows and learn from each other. Community became so important.

I remember what this was in 2008: that sense that we were all in this together. Since then, it has blown up – lots of new creators have come in, and the conditions with regards to market, knowledge and platforms are completely different. How have you seen the community dynamics change since you put your shows out?
There was quite a lot of fracturing of the community here. At one stage we were very kind and generous to one another, and at another stage it felt like some people were promoting themselves rather than working for the good of the community. And that was hard, so we’ve sort of broken up into smaller groups. By becoming more established, we’ve fractured the community a little bit.

But I think it’s still a more generous space than television, and there’s still the ability to reach people all over the world and talk to them.

Everything that was true in 2010 is no longer true, but even though things have moved on, the cool thing about the web is that there’s unlimited shelf space.