Tracking Transmedia

"In the week that Tumblr has been acquired by Yahoo, it's interesting to see that Urturn, a service with a similar focus on user-generated content being shared by a youthful audience, has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Balderton Capital and coincides with the launch of Urturn’s mobile app for iOS.

 

Until January this year, Urturn went by the name of Webdoc and it initially developed an audience by allowing users to share multimedia collages encompassing images, videos, text and audio. The rebranding as Urturn saw the Switzerland-based startup focus on templates that added some direction to users as to what they could create. The templates also make sense when it comes to marketing partnerships, allowing users to create, say, their own personalised version of a musician’s album cover as a form of viral, meme-based promotion.

 

Indeed, music is one area that Urturn, and Webdoc before it has done well in. Acts such as One Direction, 50 Cent, Ellie Goulding and Alicia Keys have run campaigns in the past and recent sign-ups have included Snoop Lion and Will.i.am...."

During today's unveiling of the new Xbox One, Microsoft announced that legendary director Steven Spielberg would be working on a new live-action Halo show.

Amidst all of the hullabaloo – and total gamer glee – surrounding today’s announcement of Microsoft’s new Xbox One came a special highlight for TV fans: the news that Steven Spielberg would be producing a live-action series based on the Halo game universe.

Photo: Steven Hensley Photographer/Flickr

Well, this is awesome news. When someone who is as much of a kid-at-heart as Spielberg is signed on to work on a show based on a videogame world, nothing but greatness can come of it. The series, which will be available on Xbox Live, will beproduced in conjunction with the game’s developer 343 Industries.

"You are not alone. That may be the message incoming from deep space transmissions received as static on the Man of Steel website recently. There's a mini-viral going on leading up to the release of the new trailer for Zack Snyder's Man of Steel on Monday morning, which started with a clip of pure static playing on theManofSteel.com website over the weekend. It has slowly updated with a second version that became slowly clearer, showing what seems to be a symbol. Krypton? Zod? Superman? We'll find out soon. MovieViral has been covering this and just posted that a message is being decoded by the Deep Space Radio Wave Project.

 

At first no one knew what the static meant or why it was there, but speculation was that it was an incoming deep space transmission from General Zod — for Superman/Clark Kent. At least that's what the thought was. Now with this being deciphered as what appears to be "you are alone [not?]," it seems this is more of a message forus, for Earth over all. Ohh, shit. Before we continue, here's a look at the static as of Saturday afternoon, which will probably get clearer as everything progresses towards the trailer. Click to see the site:..."

"Transmedia producers in Canada already have ways to network with and benefit from each other through organizations like the Toronto-based group Transmedia 101. But those specifically interested in creating web series just received an additional resource with the formation of the Independent Webseries Creators of Canada (or IWCC; CIWC in French). Serendipitously coinciding with the announcement of theVancouver Web Fest, the IWCC is a nonprofit professional association that sees today’s web producers like the television pioneers of the 1940s and 50s: building a new branch of the entertainment industry in uncharted waters, but this time doing so in a direct relationship with the audience, without any of the gatekeepers of old media.

 

Vice-President Jason Leaver put forward another metaphor: “Web series are being recognized as this generation’s indie film movement. We are so proud to be part of this historic moment in time and to recognize the groundbreaking and internationally recognized work being done in Canada right now.”..."

With all the discussion about the future of Kickstarter in recent weeks, it may be appropriate that a film that began its campaign at the beginning of the crowdfunding movement is finally coming out this Saturday. The Cosmonaut — a Spanish-made English-language film directed by Nicolás Alcalá and produced by Carola Rodriguez and Bruno Teixidor — raised over €300,000 from 5,000 contributors. It was the first crowdfunded film in Spain and helped pave the way for the foundation ofLánzanos, Spain’s Kickstarter equivalent.

Filmmaker: So how did you go about finding contributors and collecting donations?

 

Alcalá: We started contacting bloggers and influencers and just showing them the project in a very humble way. And they loved it and started to spread the word. From there, it jumped to online media and then printed media and TV. Since we were the first [crowdfunded] project in Spain, and because of many other factors, the thing exploded.

We offered the opportunity of contributing from $3 or investing higher amounts, but always giving something in return. And in the meantime, we also made the project transmedia and completely re-imagined how distribution should work....

 

...the crowdfunding part I’m more interested in is the crowd, not the funding. If you have a community of loyal fans that feel they are part of your project money will eventually come. That’s what happened. Those guys said “my film” instead “a film,” so when we asked them to help us . . . they did all the work. It was a crazy week because we were, actually, traveling to the shooting in Latvia. We found out about our huge success when we landed...."

"Actor Jason Bateman says the new "Arrested Development" will likely pull in relatively strong audience numbers, now that it's no longer being held to the benchmarks of prime-time network TV...

 

"It was incredibly ambitious and complex, what (Hurwitz) and his writers constructed and scheduled to shoot ... it's like a big, huge puzzle, it's really admirable," said star Jason Bateman in a recent interview.

"He's just got incredible taste and talent.... There's such a faith in him by us, he's just completely unsatisfied with anything that is not worthy of accolade."

 

But Hurwitz wasn't able to pull off his convoluted vision completely, as he revealed to fans on Twitter.

 

"Done! Just finished the final mix last night. In two weeks 'Arrested Development' will be yours to do with as you please," he tweeted last week.

"Except for one thing! You gotta watch them in order. Turns out I was not successful in creating a form where the setup follows the punch line."..."

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/jason-bateman-confident-there-s-lots-more-arrested-development-to-come-1.1289009#ixzz2TvIuviqo

5 Reasons Content is the New Currency by Geoffrey Colon, VP, Social@Ogilvy If this interests you, click here to read more on Fast Company: http://bit.ly/Conte

"Because even Poe-obsessed serial killers need friends, Fox is giving fans of its dastardly drama The Following a shot at buddying up with murder-happy mastermind Joe Carroll....

 

As Following fans dig into the material seeded throughout the Tumblr page, an already engaging linear TV series becomes a wholly immersive experience. 

 

Another factor in Benty and svp of digital media William Bradford's favor is that they didn’t simply hire a marketing pro to script the transmedia elements. Writer Jan Libby’s c.v. includes everything from alternate-reality gaming to the Lonelygirl15 series; as Benty notes, Libby’s visual arts background (Cal College of the Arts, ICA Boston) make her especially suited to crafting links between a linear narrative and multimedia storytelling.

 

Bradford said the Tumblr page has gathered disciples steadily from week to week. At present, visitors to the site number in the tens of thousands. "All of what we're doing with Tumblr has been done in conjunction with showrunner Kevin Williamson and Warner Bros. TV," Bradford said. "It’s really an opportunity for us to extend the palette of the show. It’s not just a tune-in vehicle."..."

Is Asia the crouching tiger of transmedia?




The Asian region is poised to take the transmedia world by storm, judging by the number of innovative story forms emerging across Asia. Even though Europe and North America had a head start in ...

"As we’ve noted here before, Simon Rich is a mind-bogglingly prolific creative force. At 29, he’s built a body of work that includes screenplays, novels, magazine articles, short stories, and Saturday Night Live sketches....

 

WORK ON WHAT YOU WANT FIRST. For more on global leaders in technology, design, media, music, movies, marketing, television, and sports, see Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People In Business 2013 report. Read more with Simon Rich here.

Recognizing that not everything you do today will be something you’re dying to do, Rich says you might be better off tackling your favored task first. "It sometimes depends on deadlines, but I’ve found that the most efficient thing is to write what you want to write," Rich says. "So if I have a movie script due, and I don’t really want to do it--really what I want to do is write some short story that I’ve started--I’ve found that it’s actually faster to just write the story and then go to the screenplay. There are exceptions to that, if something is really due imminently, but I always secretly know, in the back of my mind, what I really want to be writing."..."

 

A group of Kansas City high school students and their mentors have electrified a Karmann Ghia, modifying it so that it will only run when it gets mentioned in social media

In the penultimate part of Filmmaker and the MIT Open Documentary Lab's interview project with prominent transmedia figures, D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, answers our questions....

 

MIT OpenDocLab: What are the most useful skills for an interactive storyteller? What are the tools of the trade?

Harrell: First of all, I think that social, cultural, and critical awareness and sensitivity are key. You cannot get anywhere without addressing meaning and the world around you. Sensitivity to the human condition comes first, but then you need to express it using an interactive system. Toward this end, I think that computational literacy is quite important. Let’s think about this using film as an example, clearly you can create films without traditional cinematic literacy. For example, think of Stan Brakhage just dropping moth wings onto film stock, right? You can do a lot of different things; it doesn’t preclude someone from attempting to make works in the field without that particular form of understanding. But if you want to do work that is in dialogue with some of the affordances of the computer, then computational literacy is important because it gives us ways of thinking that are useful. I’m not just talking about abstract data-structuring or the coding procedures, I am talking about mental frameworks for thinking through issues of how information can be structured and operated on in systematic ways more generally.

"Mayo 2013 se ha convertido en el mes del crowdfunding. El pasado 14 de mayo se estrenó – de forma simultanea en cine y en Internet- El Cosmonauta, el paradigma de la ficción nacional realizada a través de dicha estrategia colaborativa.  La película rodada por Riot Cinema Collective ha sido posible gracias a las microaportaciones de casi 5.000 personas e instituciones, convirtiéndose en la primera película española financiada casi íntegramente de forma colectiva (80%). 

Además, este proyecto realizado por Nicolás Alcalá (director), Carola Rodríguez y Bruno Teixedor, es un universo transmedia que gravita en torno a una película de 80 minutos de metraje,  34 episodios de entre 2 y 15 minutos, un libro, un falso documental y un plan de producción público y disponible a través de su web. Los autores/productores también han habilitado una plataforma online para solicitar un estreno en cines de cualquier ciudad. Ya han cerrado 22 citas en 9 países para las próximas semanas...."

Armed with only a revolver, a change of undergarments and a bicycle, Annie Londonderry embarks on an epic around-the-world adventure in 1894, with New York City as her first taste of freedom.

Teens, Social Media, and Privacy | Pew Internet & American Life Project

 

Teens are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than they did in the past. For the five different types of personal information that we measured in both 2006 and 2012, each is significantly more likely to be shared by teen social media users in our most recent survey.Teen Twitter use has grown significantly: 24% of online teens use Twitter, up from 16% in 2011.The typical (median) teen Facebook user has 300 friends, while the typical teen Twitter user has 79 followers.Focus group discussions with teens show that they have waning enthusiasm for Facebook, disliking the increasing adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful “drama,” but they keep using it because participation is an important part of overall teenage socializing...."

"HONG KONG (20/05/2013) Hong Kong’s first festival for web content, transmedia, branded entertainment and webseries will start on 5th of June as associated project of the annual Le French May.

 

Being a part of a global webfestival network – with such locations as Los Angeles, Marseille and Melbourne – the first edition of the Hong Kong Webfest will bring to town such international speakers as Frederic Josue (Head of Marketing at Havas Media), Mourgan Bouchet (Vice President at Orange) and Nicolas Thorin (Director of Internet advertising M6), among others, to present and discuss the future of the entertainment industry in regards to what technology and new business models can do to the way content creators develop the stories that best engage a connected global audience...."

 

Festival director Marco Sparmberg explains, “The HK Webfest is at the intersection of cutting edge media technology, cross platform distribution, digital marketing and transmedia storytelling. All these sectors will merge eventually and we have to find new business models for the industry along this way...."

The 7 Principles of Social Design - How to Make Content Shareable Click here to read more about each principle on Fast Company: http://bit.ly/FastCoSocialDesig

http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/happiness-without-borders In March 2013, Coca-Cola set out to break down barriers and create a simple moment of connection between two nations -- India and Pakistan. The initiative "Small World Machines" provided a live communications portal between people in India and Pakistan and showed that what unites us is stronger than what sets us apart. The key to engaging with each other through the machines was simple: people in India and Pakistan could complete a task, like touching hands, drawing peace, love, and happiness symbols -- together.

Simple one-sheet to help transmedia storytellers present their projects. The aim is to get some consistency of presentation so that those listening can "get it"

Tumblr posts were being moved to Wordpress at a rate of 72,000 per hour yesterday.

Your customers have a finite set of awareness as they are trying to sift through competing messages in multiple channels. Marketers and designers that understa