When Tim Duggan and John Callaghan created an online video programme, arts coverage got hip, writes Davin O'Dwyer
IF YOU WERE to use home-produced TV programming as a guide, you could be forgiven for thinking that Ireland's arts scene is restricted to a few of the big galleries, and maybe the Abbey and the Gate. Tim Duggan and John Callaghan, however, were all too aware that a lot of the most interesting creative activity around the country was happening well below the RTÉ radar, and instead of moaning about it, saw it as an opportunity. Through their multimedia company, Mercury Boy, they began to produce a weekly short online video covering those events that were never going to make it on to The View. In June of last year, The Bubble, as they called it, was born.
"When we started The Bubblelast summer, we didn't design it to be scalable, but it quickly turned out to be something much bigger than we anticipated," says Callaghan (29). "It started as a pilot project, we knew nobody else was doing it. My background was in VJing, which is creating visual interpretations of music and short films, so I was part of the underground visual arts scene. There was no programming covering that stuff but because of our backgrounds, we knew there was a lot of interesting stuff happening, and we knew that it wasn't being documented or archived."
The Bubblewas, Duggan and Callaghan claim, Ireland's first video podcast, and it immediately pointed to the potential avenues for alternative programming now that digital technology has vastly democratised the production process. Created with a Sony high-def prosumer camera, a few MacBook Pros and Final Cut Studio software, the sharply executed reports on events such as the Street Theatre World Championships, Monster Truck gallery openings and art-oriented club nights was digital programming of the highest quality. The standard was so high that this paper has recently started hosting the films on the Ireland.com website, offering it even greater exposure.
"I studied film here and in New York, before working for three years with a mobile marketing company," says 26-year-old Duggan. "I found it hard to break into the commercial end of directing. I shot a few music videos and commercials but the opportunities weren't exactly jumping out at me. I created Mercury Boy to produce my student films in New York in 2003, and then I operated it here as a media production company with another chap, Leon McCarthy, before we got John on board, and he added a really strong creative dimension to the company. Leon has since gone in another direction, into architecture, so it's just John and myself now."
How difficult is it to operate a small media production company here, and is Dublin really the creative hub we keep hearing about? "Well, you can't go to Jobs.ie and get yourself a creative job in two seconds," says Callaghan. "It's all about who you know, and the chain of events that result from that. There's a huge amount of really amazing graphic designers and video people here that people don't know about, and probably find it tough to get employment in that area.
"For instance, one Bubble we did was about Synth Eastwood which invites submissions from people on a certain theme and then displays it at a club night. The standard is amazing, professional quality stuff."
Duggan continues the theme. "There's a strong creative collective in Dublin, but in terms of workflow for everybody, there's probably not enough, it's more difficult to get work out of it. In that respect, you really have to make your own opportunities, and I think that's what we did with The Bubble. And since we've done it, it's had a knock-on effect. There wasn't much of an online vibe until we started doing The Bubble, but even in the few months since then, we can see that changing.
"For instance, on the Guardianwebsite, they have a thing called Tate podcast, so every time there's a new exhibition, they'll go and do an eight-minute film on it," says Callaghan. "We were approaching the big galleries here, but there was a resistance to it. But now, the Science Gallery have video podcasts, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival had it, so the attitude is changing," says Duggan. "I wouldn't be afraid to say it, we've set the groundwork for the online video community which is developing here. We were the first people to do it, and we've been knocking on doors over the past eight months."
"We also want to expand The Bubbleout of Ireland into places such as Berlin, London, Barcelona, towns with a young population and vibrant creative scenes who don't get coverage," says Duggan. "We can build on the successful model we have at the moment, but in places where there's already a more developed internet user base than here."
"Those artistic communities, in a roundabout way, only exist because of the technology," says Callaghan. "It's exactly the same democratisation of the process that allows them to create the work as allows us to create the videos about their work. Which is why they are so open with us when we're covering them. We use their content, they facilitate us."
On top of expanding The Bubble, Duggan and Callaghan are not short of ambitious plans for the future. As well as developing Doing the Deal, a 10-part Dan and Becks-style TV series about the Dublin advertising and media world, they have plans for an online news video feed and that's in addition to their regular commercial work with advertising companies creating viral videos and commercials.
"We have loads of plans," says Callaghan, "but the best way, in terms of getting things off the ground, is doing it yourself and taking the initial hit and having the faith in it that it will succeed."
"Our options for Doing the Dealare to go to RTÉ and wait a year and a half to see if we get a commission, or perhaps go to Channel 4, and we could get it done in six months," says Duggan. "That's very stifling for our industry. There's a handful of us working in this sphere in Dublin, and so we're creating the world as we go along. We're straddling the creative side with The Bubbleand also the commercial side with our advertising work. Most companies go one way or the other, it's the love or the money, but we try to straddle the two sides."