Charlie Corts is tucked away in a windowless room on one of the lower floors of Simon & Schuster‘s corporate offices, with three HD digital cameras mounted on tripods, pointed at a black backdrop that fills one wall; in the corner, he’s got two large monitors and a computer hooked up to eight 750-gig hard drives—enough processing power, these days, to run an efficiently slim digital video studio. Corts’s new position as Simon & Schuster Digital‘s director of video production and development is a corporate homecoming of sorts—before producing video clips for Yahoo! Finance’s “Tech Ticker,” he was creating content for the CBS.com website.
“In the past we had some great videos, but it was hard to find them on the site,” chief digital officer Elinor Hirschhorn admitted to us during a recent visit to the studio—part of the ongoing S&S Digital strategy is to take the videos that Corts shoots and bring them “front and center” on the company’s home page (along with other online venues). Referring to the various offices an author about to be published by Simon & Schuster might visit during a trip to the publisher, Hirschhorn said, “We’re trying to have one of those steps to be through the studio to create multimedia that will help them market themselves.”
The effort began with an interview with Stephen King about the origins of “N.,” one of the short stories in his latest collection, Just After Sunset, and how it was adapted, through a co-production deal with Marvel Comics, into a multi-episode digital series by Marc Guggenheim and Alex Maleev. That interview, along with other bonus features, is now being included in a DVD that’s bundled with a special edition of Just After Sunset. “The DVD wouldn’t have happened without Charlie,” says Sue Fleming, the executive director of content and programming, noting that Corts also edited the 25 ninety-second episodes—which were a big hit this fall on their dedicated website, on MySpace, and for sale at iTunes—into a single, unified short film (which is, we were told, headed to short film festivals). “It’s an evolution of ideas… that came at the end of the process,” she explained. Now that they have a template for this sort of digital marketing, she added, “it’s gone beyond just the ability to record in the building.”
Corts has already shot interviews with roughly 50 other authors, and though he was tight-lipped about exactly what lay “beyond,” he did confess to having “a lot of fun things” in the works.