'It's harder than it looks': Elisabeth Murdoch's startup reaching the masses
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A young actor with a bushy goatee, cast as a Satanist on a murder-mystery show called “Solve,” sat facing a camera on a stuffy, no-frills set in July. Six tenderfoot crew members stood sweating in the shadows nearby. One was staring at his iPhone’s stopwatch.
“Now give me a take where you’re exhausted,” the director, doubling as a camera operator, told the actor. “You’ve been up all night worshipping Satan in this one. Ready? Action!”
Elisabeth Murdoch with her grandmother Dame Elisabeth and brother Lachlan in 2012.
Photo: Pat Scala
It was no good. “Too long,” the iPhone guy said glumly. “That was 22 seconds.” Orders were given to redo the scene — preferably in an 18-second take. Perhaps try a “jittery” Satanist.
This is the down-and-dirty future of television as practiced by Vertical Networks, a startup founded by Elisabeth Murdoch, the media entrepreneur whose father is Rupert Murdoch. While her dad and brothers, Lachlan and James, have been busy selling the family’s old-line studios to the Walt Disney Co., she has quietly built Vertical into a major supplier of app-based video series for mobile devices. The stories are told in short bursts (20-second scenes, episodes that last mere minutes) that rely on whiz-bang production techniques (split screens, on-screen text) and are filmed vertically instead of horizontally: MTV for Generation Z.
“I wanted a front-row seat in seeing this new world unfold,” Elisabeth Murdoch, 50, said in an email.
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