When NBC Digital's Ayelet Sela first stepped into the police squad room -- she had been assigned the task of creating new interactive dimensions for NBC's Homicide: Life on the Streets -- she was long on experience in the arts, multimedia technology, and radio journalism.
But she hadn't rubbed elbows much with reality faced by the show's Baltimore detectives every day. So, one of the first things she did on landing the job two and a half years ago was to get a taste of the life she'd been called on to portray.
"I went down to Baltimore and was meeting with the homicide unit -- the actual Baltimore homicide unit -- and getting to know the machinations behind investigating a homicide," Sela recalls. "And they sent me over to their friends at the morgue who allowed me to sit in on as many autopsies as I could handle. Three to four was my max."
She sums up the experience as "getting really immersed in this medium." The medium in this case was cold, hard reality, a choice of words that sheds some light on how she views her work as producer, director, and writer of Homicide's Second Shift site.
Where others speak of convergence mostly in terms of bringing technologies together, Sela attempts to merge technologies, blurring the lines between script and real life, creators and audiences. When the show and site launch a combined Web-on-air drama Wednesday, the creative melding will go well beyond marrying media. In past Second Shift episodes, Sela has drawn viewers into the action using techniques like organizing a chat press conference in which site visitors act as reporters, firing questions at a chief of detectives played by an actual Baltimore police captain.
For the production launching this week, a bulletin board -- depicted in Friday night's on-air segment as a key to a murder investigation -- will be live during the show and will feature, among others, on-air episode director Jay Tobias. When the show's detectives are depicted playing interactive games online, the games will be simultaneously live on the Web. And Sela says computers themselves, where much of the violence in the story and the subsequent investigation are played out, become an essential presence, nearly characters in their own right.
Sela came to Second Shift after a career as a dancer mixing video into her performances, an audio producer for multimedia CD-ROMs (among her credits, the disk version of Art Spiegelman's Maus), and a reporter and producer for National Public Radio. Regarding her age, she'll only admit her national-tragedy frame of reference is the JFK assassination in 1963 rather than 1986's Challenger disaster.
She grew up in New York, attended five colleges as an undergraduate, including the University of Rochester and Mills College, and finished with a master's from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.
"I've always been engaged in multimedia," Sela says. "I made a shift out of the performing arts around the time of Jesse Helms, when I was very struck by the difference between what was going on here and ... what was going on in Europe, the kind of attention people paid to culture, and the role culture played in people's lives." Sela spent three years at NPR before joining NBC in 1996. Her assignment from Tom Hjelm, executive producer of NBC Digital programming: Create an "online show extension" for Homicide.
"I said, 'What's that?' and they said, 'Well, you guys figure it out.' I think it's really a pretty unique situation in this industry that they sort of allowed different teams to come up with really new, creative approaches, and they didn't cookie-cutter everybody and go, 'This is what we're gonna do.'"
Her first focus was creating supplementary plot and character material to be sent out via Intercast, a technology that allows digitized content to be transmitted via cable in analog TV's vertical blanking interval. But, after reading the book that inspired the series (David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets), sifting through five years' worth of on-air episodes, and doing her own ride-along research, Sela developed ideas for original characters and story lines that would mesh with Hjelm's idea of creating the detective squad's "second shift."
Thus followed three online dramas in which Sela -- acting as writer, director, and producer -- employed streaming video and audio, as well as static text and pictures, and created an after-the-TV-characters-go-home parallel to the on-air show.
Last summer, Sela says, Hjelm suggested it was important they "raise the level of convergence" -- again leaving it to her to work out the details.
That led her to create a treatment involving a ritual killer with a penchant for exhibiting his handiwork live online. Beyond a whodunit, the story explores the cyberspace hall of mirrors where it's hard to tell just what's real and what's not. The episode begins on the Second Shift site Wednesday, continues tomorrow, goes on-air Friday night, and wraps up 19 February, Sela says.
Sela shares credit with her online cast -- recruited from Broadway, film, and TV -- and crew, including programmer Joe Nekulak, 3-D artist Haji Uesato, and designer Rosemarie Jacobsohn, for pushing the site's artistic level to make it a fully converged part of the on-air show.
And, again, convergence is what this moment is about, she says.
"From ... the time I started with NBC, they talked about the word convergence. And I do feel like this is the first time. We're here, we made it, we got there. This is totally convergence from the ground up, from the first inkling of the idea, and all the way through the creation and execution of it."
Next? "What I would like to happen is that when NBC does a pilot that I'm sitting in there with the pilot producer and saying, 'OK. Let's start this pilot from the ground up as an interactive piece.'"
Whether or not that's pragmatic -- she notes pilots are canceled all the time -- the way to the next creative level is bound to appear.
"There are no rules in this game yet," Sela says. "There aren't any conventions yet, and that's why this is such a fertile playing field."
