Mild Concern

I hope you all enjoyed a fun and mathematically accurate Eurovision on Saturday night. As the spreadsheet proved popular with the internets it will be back with a vengeance next year. The show as a whole was a mixed bag with a few too many ballads for my taste and Bonnie Tyler… well she was clearly drunk. If only she’d been singing Holding Out for a Hero then maybe the UK would have fared better. I think we all know which song should have won above Denmark (Finland forever!!).

The real highlight of the night was not any of the entered songs or the riveting voting section but the bit in between. As people across the globe tried to choose their winner Sweden put on an extraordinary show; allow me to present to you the Swedish Smörgåsbord. It is a fantastically tongue in cheek song from Sweden than outshines all the “proper” songs sung on Saturday night. It has everything: Meatballs! Ikea! Recycling!

Enjoy:

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It’s Eurovision day! Time to gather a group of friends, buy a box of vodkas, and crowd round the TV to watch the bizarre and the bland compete for the title of Très Bon Chanteur Spectaculaire or whatever the title is. Political voting will be even more fun to watch what with the EU bailouts and whatnot but what is more important is whether anyone can top Russia’s baking grannies from last year.

To help you enjoy yourselves I have put together a plan to help you recreate the Eurovision voting process in your own home so that your party can better handle the voting part of the evening once all the songs have been sung and vodkas have been drunk. I’ve even made you a spreadsheet because a party without a spreadsheet is like a boat without a rubber duck; clearly not an essential but why not eh?

So. Before you turn on BBC One at 8:00PM give everyone who will be voting 26 small pieces of card or paper. You can either allow each person to write the names of the countries themselves or print off one of the BBC’s scoring sheets and cut out each country. Then when the show is on each voter or “party-goer” can place the countries in order from best to worst based on whatever metric they like. Last year we tried to rank as a group as we went along which lead to arguments over whether a song should be “good” or simply be “Eurovision”. I personally don’t care what you sing if you’ve got a man operating a unicycle on stilts in the background.

Once all songs have been performed everyone then makes sure they are happy with their personal ranking and perhaps hilariously messes up their neighbour’s notes/scraps of paper before apologising and blaming the drink. After this it is time to collate the votes. To the spreadsheet!! Click on the Excel symbol to the right and within moments you will have your very own Mild Concern Eurovision 2013 Party Score Collation Spreadsheet for Maximum Fun and Mathematical Accuracy^TM.

It is all pretty self-explanatory, I hope, but here’s a quick guide. When you first open the spreadhseet make sure you have macros enabled. If you see a warning like this…
…deal with it.

The first thing you see with be an empty white box. Type in the first voter’s name and hit Enter, then continue until you can see everyone’s name in the list. If someone goes to the loo at this point and is pretty forgettable they may be in trouble. Once you’re done click on the grey button.

Now you are at the heart of the spreadsheet. The table to the left will show you which country is winning based on your party’s votes and the table on the right is where everyone enters their scores. When prompted each person should list their top ten countries to the group, preferably with reasons and some slurring, while the Spreadsheet Master^TM uses the drop-down lists to put these countries into the table Once all ten are entered the voter should verify the list, salute the Spreadsheet Master^TM (optional), and they will hit the “Submit Scores” button which will…. submit the scores (I told you it was self-explanatory).

Once everyone has voted you will have your winner! What mathematically accurate fun we’ve all had in replicating the voting process of the Eurovision Song Contest. If only all parties had spreadsheets…

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The Great Gatsby
Hard to believe that this is only Baz Luhrmann’s fifth feature film but it is, I checked. When Luhrmann is good he is incredible (Romeo + Juliet) and when he is bad he is painfully so (Australia) so where will this adaptation of a classic novel I bought but have yet to read land? Rotten Tomatoes currently reports 51% positive reviews so who the hell knows!

Fast & Furious 6
Did anyone know that this franchise was still going? It’s like coming home from holiday to find you’ve left the TV on while you were away. It’s been playing to itself for ages without anyone noticing. Ah well… where else are you going to get Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, and Vin Diesel in the same film? In Fast and the Furious 7 currently in pre-production!

Beware of Mr. Baker (limited release)
“Ginger Baker looks back on his musical career with Cream and Blind Faith; his introduction to Fela Kuti; his self-destructive patterns and losses of fortune; and his current life inside a fortified South African compound.” Nope, no idea. I’m lost.

Rangeelay (limited release)
I tried watching the trailer for this Bollywood film but it was all in Punjabi so I am none the wiser as to what the plot is. I will share the following still with you instead because, well.. just have a look:

The Liability (limited release)
“When 19-year-old Adam agrees to do a day’s driving for his mum’s gangster boyfriend Peter, it takes him on a 24-hour journey into a nightmarish world of murder, sex trafficking and revenge, in the company of aging hit man Roy.” When I was 3 or 4 my girlfriend’s dad was a milkman and I got to go for a ride in his milk float. This film totally gets me.

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Yesterday one of the Kickstarter stories we were following came to a surprisingly abrupt end as Melissa Joan Hart closed the campaign for Darci’s Walk of Shame two weeks early and with a mere fraction of the target raised. Clearly Hart and chums were hoping to have the same success as Rob Thomas with his Veronica Mars project and Zach Braff with his ongoing Wish I Was Here endeavours but Hart could see she wasn’t going to pass the $2-million mark she needed and pulled the plug.

So why didn’t Darci experience the same success as her contemporaries? Is it as simple as the fact that Sabrina Goes to Rome was a long time ago, was awful and that Hart has a much smaller fan base than Braff and Veronica Mars? Is there a convoluted and inaccurate mathematical analysis I can perform? I bloody well hope so.

To begin my numbers-based investigation I gathered together some statistics for each project. I looked at their Kickstarter success, or lack thereof and the three lead actors Twitter accounts to get an idea of fan base size. I also looked at the three existing titles which the respective Kickstarter projects relate to (Veronica Mars, Garden State, and Sabrina Goes to Rome) and noted their IMDb user rating and the number of years since their release. Here’s what I gathered:

The first thing to note is that Mars and Braff are pretty similar when it comes to their average pledges and Twitter followers yet differ greatly in the amount of money they have raised. Melissa Joan Hart has much less money and followers but gets far more money per pledge. No proper trend here so I will be ignoring the number of Twitter followers a lead actor has.

At a quick glance however it does seem that a higher IMDb rating for the previous release and a more recent release make for a larger amount of money raised. The bubble chart below makes this clear:

The size of the bubbles is the amount of money raised on Kickstarter and the largest is for the highest rated film/show which was released the most recently. From here I continued on my pointless journey and created a new metric of IMDb score divided by the number of years since release (a sort of combined recency and quality score) and plotted it against the amount raised:

And there we have it! A direct relationship between how much you can raise on Kickstarter for your film based upon the recency and quality of your previous work.

Amazing! Inaccurate! Time-wasting! Superb!

An endlessly useful formula I think you’ll agree. What this means is that we can calculate the ideal value of IMDb Rating/Years Since Release that will get you to the $2-million mark. That value is 0.705 and is also endlessly useful because we can use it to make the table below:

This tells us how many years you can wait until you try to make a follow-up film on Kickstarter based on your TV show or film’s rating on IMDb. For example Buffy the Vampire Slayer has an IMDb rating of 8 and has been off-air for 10 years so still has another 1.35 years until it will no longer raise sufficient funds on Kickstarter. On the other hand Freaks and Geeks has an IMDb rating of 8.9 but has been gone for 13 years now so is just too late.

So if you own the rights to an existing franchise and fancy raising money on Kickstarter use my handy formula to see how much you will be able to raise. You are welcome.

DISCLAIMER: This is in no way accurate, does not take enough projects into account, and ignores far too many other factors to be of any use.

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11th April 2013 – 13th May 2013

“Darci soon realizes it’s not going to be quite as easy as she hoped. To make it back in time, she faces an obstacle course of hurdles that would make a hardcore Marine fall to his knees and sob like a baby. But like the Marines, Darci has her reputation to uphold, and nothing is going to stop her from trying to erase what she considers to be the biggest mistake of her life.”

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