/Interview/ The brains behind: 230 Miles of Love
02/04/2009 | Filed under Discover > Interview
Fancy some location-specific entertainment while you’re driving down the M6? We talk to Andrew Shanahan, creator of the first comedy to be broadcast via satnav
.net: Please explain the concept behind 230 Miles of Love.
AS: 230 Miles of Love is a satcom, a comedy that plays out via your satellite navigation system at specific points in the world. In this instance, the sketches are about and located on the 230 miles of the M6 motorway and once downloaded onto your satnav (in much the same way you’d download a podcast onto an MP3 player) the sketches are triggered at strategic points along the road, hopefully enlivening your journey and filling you with a warm, tingling sensation that is almost certainly laughter and not a heart attack.
.net: How did you come up with the idea? What inspired it?
AS: The idea came about because a) I love satnavs and GPS stuff b) I write for a living and c) wine. The M6 was perfect for a test subject because a) it’s a good long road and therefore has lots of points along it that are a good starting point for comedy (I mean just how weird is this) b) everyone has an opinion about the M6 and more than 200,000 people use it every day so there’s a good potential audience and c) wine.
.net: What tools did you use to create the satcom?
AS: The wonderful site www.geovative.com did all the hard work. I just wrote the sketches, recorded them and created a tour with Geovative, which people can then download. A partially trained bear could have done the same.
.net: What were the main challenges? It doesn’t work on all satnavs yet, does it?
AS: No, this is true, it’s mostly Garmins at the moment. That mainly seems to be because TomTom isn’t so keen on letting user-created rich POI files onto their machines, which seems a bit short-sighted, given that this could be the sort of application that makes the satnav into a celebrated content platform rather than just a Go Here box.
.net: How did you assemble the cast and technical crew?
AS: I’m very lucky that where I live in Manchester has a thriving comedy scene and so I asked for some help and lots of local comedians came out to help record it. For technical crew, we used a facility called Futureworks in Manchester, which is a school of media where we were lucky enough to get a sound engineer and a great recording studio for relatively little money.
.net: How long did it take to create the whole series?
AS: The whole thing from conception of idea, writing 30 or so sketches, casting, rehearsing, recording, editing and getting the site up and running was just under a month. I was really, really stretched for deadlines after that little window of opportunity so it was a now or never sort of thing. Looking back, I’m really glad that I did it. But in retrospect the writing could have used a harsh and punishing edit. It’s a learning process though, I suppose.
.net: How did you test whether it actually works?
AS: Ha! I didn’t! I don’t drive on motorways (weird phobia thing that makes me a bit twitchy unless I stick to A-roads) so the first time it was tested was when someone from The Guardian said they were reviewing it. Fortunately, aside from having to talk the journalist through downloading the show onto a Garmin and her nearly crashing because she had the volume way up high, it all went swimmingly, or drivingly if you prefer.
.net: What part did the Motivation Charitable Trust play?
AS: In the middle of that rather frenetic month it dawned on me that it was actually an interesting idea and fed into some exciting areas of locative media, so it seemed like it might generate some publicity. Consequently, I decided that it would be good to re-focus that publicity onto something worthwhile, which is where Motivation came in. They do incredible work with wheelchair users in developing countries and consequently the people they work with know full well about the frustrations and joys of transportation issues and we liked those parallels with people on the M6.
.net: How did the first series go down? What kind of feedback did you get?
AS: From a personal point of view I was thrilled with how things turned out. We’ve had over 25,000 people listening and downloading the show which, given that it’s a first of its kind, seems amazing. I learned a lot about not trying to write an entire episode of a sketch show in a little under a week. Garmin made very encouraging noises about possibly supporting Motivation in the future and there was a lot of very nice emails and reviews about the show that seemed to indicate it had made people laugh and potentially brought some love to the M6.
.net: What’s planned for the sequel? Why are you looking for a company with ‘a significant marketing budget’?
AS: The sequel is out there and going - as I write this over 1,000 people have taken part. It’s an ARGHH (Alternate Reality Game Ha Ha) and like a giant purple fool I’ve painted myself into a corner where it seems that the only way I can take credit for it would be to destroy the fiction of the game, thus ruining it for everyone. The best I can tell you is that I had to learn to engrave, it’s costing me a small fortune to run and it’s likely that the only review of the show I’ll ever get was the lawyer I used to check I wouldn’t go to jail for doing it, who declared it as, “truly the oddest thing I have ever been asked to comment on in the course of a 20-year professional career.”
.net: Is this the future? What other location-specific projects are you working on?
AS: I think it’s an aspect of the future. I actually think storytelling and jokes are the future but I think I’m experimenting with some of the new ways that stories and jokes will be delivered in the future. I think any way you look at it we’re moving towards a future where pervasive computing looms large and as part of that writers have to become more comfortable with using very new media to tell stories and jokes. As for projects, there’s a horror story that will appear on your satnav when it gets foggy, there’s a family adventure game where zombie dogs chase you across a park which I’m hoping to do on the iPhone and I’m now working on the third Moving Comedy now, which looks like it’s going to be a graphic novel about suicide (but funny).
.net: Will you eventually make money from your Moving Comedies?
AS: Currently, I’m making precisely no money from Moving Comedies, in fact they’re self-funded so they’re costing me swathes of money that would otherwise be used to feed and clothe my wife and child. However, as I keep telling my weeping wife and shivering child I can definitely see a time though when specialists in locative media content are paid for their work and when that time comes I want it on record that I’m at the front of the queue waiting to fill my voluminous pockets with lots and lots of lovely gold.
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