Sundance: Quibi offers first demonstrations of new series

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From documentaries to sneaker culture to an ASMR chillout show, Quibi wants everything. And the developers love the license model.

Quibi co-founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman wooed filmmakers at what they consider the next generation of storytelling at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday. Quibi also offered its first preview of the platform in action, with a VIP cocktail party where guests could preview some of the 175 titles that will only be available for mobile phones in the first year of the streaming platform.

For the uninitiated, Quibi provides short content – films that are broken down into chapters and a series of scripted and non-scripted series that all run for a maximum of 10 minutes – and replaces flipping through Instagram in line at Starbucks or falling into the fear of Twitter in the dentist’s waiting room.

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Talent doesn’t have to be convinced. Apparently everyone already has a Quibi show in the company that has put millions into commissioned projects that are more licensed than owned by the platform. (Unlike Netflix, Katzenberg says, “We’re not a studio.”) Quibi has exclusive rights for seven years. The rights are then passed on to the author.

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At a Quibi panel on Friday morning with Katzenberg, Quibi creator Lena Waithe (producer and narrator of “You Ain’t Got These”, a documentary that offers a critical look at sneaker culture), this means an audience to win for the project Maybe it will be revised and released as a feature.

“The biggest thing you really said was ownership – the fact that we would license it to you, an idea that I could do it there and then sell it to another location,” Waithe said on a stage that she shared with Katzenberg. “I’m primarily a business woman.”

Lena Waithe at Sundance.

Evan Agostini / Invision / AP / Shutterstock

“You Ain’t Got These” was one of the offers when previewing Quibi content on Friday night. Dozens gathered on a main street and were given a cell phone and headphones to be among the first to enjoy the Quibi experience. The company hasn’t yet introduced its app or user interface, but the demo showed Quibi’s trademark: Turnstyle, the patent-pending technology that offers different perspectives depending on whether viewers hold their phones in portrait or landscape mode.

In the aftermath of Waithe’s show, which was seen at the party, they, Hasan Minhaj and others talked about Air Jordans. Some interview scenes offered viewers two different angles of view of the same person, while only one angle was shown in landscape format. The transition between the two was seamless.

Other shows available included “The Daily Chill”, which combines an ASMR narrator and soundtrack with soothing pictures, and “The Gayme Show”, a competition hosted by podcast co-host “Las Culturistas”, Matt Rogers, and the comedian Dave Mizzoni. The available episode had Ilana Glazer (“Broad City”) and “Saturday Night Live” actor Bowen Yang as guests. Also available was what Quibi charges in chapters as films, including “The Stranger” by “The Killing” creator Veena Sud.

At the panel discussion, Sud said that shooting for Quibi means moving the actors’ eyes and playing more with a vertical plane than with the traditional horizontal plane. A scene in a gas station was shot horizontally by narrowing the aisles so that the viewer’s eyes were directed from north to south. The result was that the actors sometimes looked directly at the camera, which resulted in a more intense and intimate thriller.

“From time to time it felt like FaceTime, exactly what the app requires,” she said.

Veena Sud, Kaitlin Olson and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Michael Buckner / Deadline / Shutterstock

Given the two native orientations, a Quibi series requires a long list of results. But as Katzenberg says, there are only a few rules for producing a Quibi series.

The first is that no episode can be longer than 10 minutes, with a sweet spot of six or seven minutes.

Whether it’s comedy, reality, drama or news: “It has to spark your interest right from the first shot … whether it’s visual or verbal,” he said. It also has to end with what Katzenberg calls a “wow” – there is no time to waste on slow action or character development.

If it is a series, it must have a tick so that the viewer wants more. Katzenberg said the main speaker was Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”, a very short chapter novel that ended with a cliffhanger or other driver that kept the reader going.

It’s a hands-off approach that actress Kaitlin Olson faces Will Forte in Quibi’s “Flipped” compared to working with FX in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”.

To the Creators: “I said,” Otherwise you are the pioneers. We don’t know, “said Katzenberg.” We are dealing with the best employees in the group. So we’re going to learn how to learn. “

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