Tracking Transmedia

"Jesse Brown on the film board's latest project...

 

"....they've announced a major new effort: a global subscription-based movie service specializing in “auteur” documentaries, debuting in 2014. No word yet on pricing or who their “prestigious” international partners are, but I’m sold on the idea alone. This is a product strangely absent from the online streaming video marketplace, and it’s awesome to see a Canadian cultural institution seizing that opportunity and leading, instead of waiting to see if some American startup can make a go of it first.

 

In unveiling the initiative, NFB chair Tom Perlmutter pointed to Canada’s role as “one of the most important world centres for documentary”. This may not be true today, but it was for a long time. The first feature length doc ever produced, Nanook of the North, was a Canadian production, and we’ve made dozens of world-class documentaries since (personal favourites include Comic Book Confidential and Up the Yangtze). But lately we’ve been treating the genre like an ugly stepchild, starving documentary production and eliminating docs from TV airwaves. Documentary, like comedy, is something we can actually do well, and the NFB is doing a very good thing in laying a digital claim on this turf...."

 

"The franchise's licensing and merchandising rights are split between CBS and Paramount which created headaches for the multihyphenate's production company Bad Robot....

 

Despite the initial bumpy ride, it appears that Paramount, Bad Robot and CBS Consumer Products worked more harmoniously on "Star Trek Into Darkness." The parties collaborated on a Star Trek video game (left) that will feature the voices of the film's stars Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto; a graphic novel prequel to the film that was overseen by screenwriter Roberto Orci; and a novelization from Simon & Schuster (below).

 

Still, Jeff Gomez, CEO of the transmedia consulting firm Starlight Runner Entertainment, says there could have been so many more lucrative tie-ins. He contends that the rebooted franchise has enormous potential outside the multiplex.

 

"Right now the 'Star Trek' movies are movies," Gomez said. "There is no apparent ongoing transmedia strategy behind them, just a handful of licensing opportunities around the release of 'Into Darkness.'

 

"Why would that be attractive to an artist who sees beyond the boundaries of the silver screen to envision a true multi-platform narrative all based on a global franchise?..."

"You think you're being all clever and original with your brand storytelling. In fact, you're not....

 

At the core of every brand, Royer added, is a good story waiting to happen.

 

"Brands are stories," he said. "They want to embody a story. When we start working with a client, we don't want to take a brief. We don't want to just say, 'What's your problem?' We want to go right back to, 'Why was your company started? What's your mission?' We talk about mission all the time, and it's just another way of saying, 'What kind of story are you on? What kind of story do you want to tell?' … Part of our job as an agency is to reignite that and really figure out what that story is."

 

A new wrinkle in the digital age is the hijacking of brand stories. "The hilarious thing to me is when a story is now taken over by the people," Hepinstall said. "It used to be a one-way thing, where the company would say, 'We're this,' and invite no feedback. Now, in the age of social media, that's impossible." She pointed to Shell's recent crowdsourced posters and the Walmart/Pitbull incident as evidence of disasters that can happen when brands lose control of their stories...."

"The National Film Board chairman’s digital strategy helped bring a fading institution into the 21st century...

 

The NFB is in Cannes this week, invited to the inaugural transmedia component in the festival’s powerful commercial market, to introduce Bla Bla, Vincent Morisset’s animated film-for-computer created by the viewer using a touch screen. That follows a headline-grabbing stop in mid-April at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, where it screened Journal of Insomnia, a project that asks users to take a late-night phone call to link to a site filled with interactive content about their condition.

At the end of April, in the midst of the Hot Docs festival in Toronto where it showed docs debating cancer care and the treatment of mentally ill offenders, the film board announced it planned to launch a Netflix-style documentary subscription service. More buzz followed a week later: The NFB released Perlmutter’s strategic plan to become a major player in the global media landscape by 2018, and won its seventh Webby, the Internet’s equivalent of an Oscar, this time for Bear 71, a transmedia project that used video collars on bears to collect footage. Meanwhile, the NFB’s work on interactive projects with both The New York Times and The Guardian is ongoing..."

"The increasing merger of TV and Internet is expanding the universe of viewers outside the realm of the old cable boxes gathering dust in warehouses...

 

Television, no matter where you watch, is inherently social.

“Another way of thinking of connected TV which could take us into a more interesting space is simply we are connecting audiences who are watching TV,” Jeremy Toeman, CEO for Dijit Media, a venture-funded startup focusing on discovery and analytics in the TV industry...."

 

"More like, "some touching." A new interactive visualization of Arrested Development’s recurring jokes is rather hands-on, so try not to leave any blue fingerprints behind...."

 

and the interactive is here...

 

http://recurringdevelopments.com/

CROWDFUNDING

The Cosmonaut has been one of the most successful projects in the world in the use of crowdfunding, having raised more than €400.000 and becoming a project with more than 4,500 producers.

machinima -- one of the largest channels on the world's largest video platform, youtube -- is now available without a computer, by way of xbox live.

Residents in the Boston area will have the chance to see a pretty unique art installation this weekend. On Sunday evening, hundreds of LED-enabled umbrellas will light up Cambridge thanks to a  to a collaboration between MIT and a Connecticut-based dance group known as Pilobolus. The event is called UP: The Umbrella Project and was first performed up in Camden, Maine last October. Over 300 members of the MIT student body, faculty, and staff will participate; each gets an umbrella lined with red, green, and blue LED lights plus a controller to let them change the lighting as they see fit, and all of the movements will be broadcast onto a large inflatable screen so that the performers can see their movements..."

Disruption. Headhunters. Execution. Yes, the cutthroat nature of modern corporations could rival any of the hand-severing antics of HBO’s Game of Thrones.

"The AR Basketball App Mug is a mug and an augmented reality experience all in one. Have you ever felt bored during coffee breaks or while waiting for the hot tea in a mug to cool down while at home? What better way to spend your coffee break then enjoying a cup of your favourite hot drink and shooting a few basketball hoops on your iPhone? Now this is all possible due to one mug...."

The Dreamlands is a weekend camper fantasy larp based on the fantastical tales of H.P. Lovecraft. It will occur during the summer solstice of 2013 on privately owned land near the Mojave Desert. There will be a heavy emphasis on role-playing, immersion, and player agency. A call-less combat system will be utilized that makes fighting, which should be rare, involved, tiring, and deadly. The event will have very few numbers (no levels, no build points, no XP, etc.) and the only math should involve bargaining and trade.

 

If this first chapter is successful, a Dreamlands larp may repeat once a year. This particular event is for people ages 18 and older only.

Sign up to play here

 

SYNOPSIS

Documents are forthcoming, but here is the very brief explanation:

The Dreamlands is a one-shot weekend camping larp based on the works of author H.P. Lovecraft and others. It is being run by Aaron Vanek, a veteran larper and co-founder of Live Game Labs....

"According to numerous sources close to the situation, the Tumblr brand will continue on in the wake of its $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo.

That includes definitive promises by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to once-sale-shy Tumblr CEO David Karp to allow him to shepherd the fast-growing blogging product and with no forced integration with Yahoo’s other many content properties.

 

That said, sources added, there will be more back-end changes to marry infrastructure, such as undergirding Tumblr’s nascent advertising business and giving it more distribution opportunities.

 

“At the beginning, at least, it’ll be hands off,” said one person close to the situation. “It has to be.”

 That said, Yahoo execs discussed and are aware of issues around porn published on the site, although they believe it to be fixable over time...."

"IMRSV developed software for smart advertising billboards. But now it's bringing sight to the Internet of Things. It could even make a toy smile back....

 

When Jason Sosa started work on a webcam technology that detects, in real time, the age, gender, attention time, and glances of the people looking at it, he thought he was solving an advertising problem. It's turned out to be much more.

 

His startup’s first product was a digital billboard that changes the ads it displays depending on who looks at them--showing, for instance, an ad for a toy to a child and an ad for aftershave to a man..."

By Sam Ford:

 

"Transmedia storytelling has become a common phrase in many media industries circles. But what does it look like for B2B?

 

.... the Annenberg Innovation Lab at theUniversity of Southern California recently launched a new initiative called theTransmedia Branding Research Group.

 

"The Lab has decided to make transmedia storytelling for business-to-business brands one of their primary areas of focus, an endeavor in which I look forward to participating. As that effort gets underway, here are my initial thoughts about what "transmedia storytelling" in the B2B world really means. In short, I think B2B transmedia storytelling can be most powerful when it:

Is built on real-life relationships. Hill Holliday's once suggested that the difference between B2B brands and B2C brands is that B2C brands typically have to use their storytelling to create the illusion of "brand personality" or of a relationship between the product/company behind the product and the customer. Meanwhile, the vast majority of B2B customer relationships are built on direct interaction between human beings at each company. The concept of "transmedia," then, should often be focused on extending these relationships which already exist into new realms...."

 

Jacki Morie, a virtual world designer in telehealth care, thinks they can. Morie is a Senior Scientist and Project Director for the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT).

Photo credit: Wikipedia Never an outlet to shy away from controversy or a juicy political scandal, Gawker may have finally outdone itself....

 

"...The story started on Thursday night, when Gawker posted a piece by John Cook detailing how the site came to be offered a video of what was claimed to be Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack. Cook journeyed to TO, met with some shady characters and saw the video footage with his own eyes. The video’s owners – Somali drug dealers - had already shopped it to Canadian media outlets, but had deemed one’s offer of $40K to be too low. No, they wanted six figures for what could be the nail in the coffin of Ford’s strange and embattledpolitical career. So, what does any enterprising news outlet do in the year 2013? They start a crowdfunding campaign to ask site readers to donate the $200K it would take to pay the ransom on the video and vow to post it on their site once they presumably hand over a bag of unmarked loonies and toonies to the men who claim to supply the most powerful mayor in Canada with drugs...."

"Big data has enabled many firsts. It was used to develop the atomic bomb that ended WWII. It was used to put a man on the moon. And now it is used every day in every way through the devices we carry around in our pockets--our mobile phones....

 

THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY.

The dataset you want is a global one, but the most valuable individual queries are typically the hyperlocal ones. Design and build your platform solution for the broadest possible footprint, and then slice and dice it as necessary to create value. For example, the Weather Company uses its global weather data to create localized, sales-driven analytics on segments such as retail. Data says a high-temperature forecast of 60-degree weather prompts sales of shorts in Chicago, but the same encourages sales of jackets in Phoenix. This helps shape more effective messaging on our properties for both the consumer and the advertiser...."

 

A Reddit user mapped the connections between the network's niche communities. The result looks like a galaxy.