Transmedia Seattle

"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."..."

Mark Sweney: Chief content officer on the revival of Arrested Development, big Hollywood deals – just don't ask him about viewing figures..

Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos is supremely confident that reviving the sitcom Arrested Development, which was made available globally online last night in a single 15-episode junkie-pleasing hit, will be the latest "slam dunk" in the video streaming service's mission to revolutionise the TV industry.

Just don't ask him how many of his 34 million subscribers in 40 countries are actually watching it.

"We're not going to publish ratings of any kind, it is wildly inaccurate to say we don't talk about it because we don't want to have to talk about the failure of the next show," he says, warming to the topic that sums up the essential difference between Netflix's all-you-can-watch viewing model and traditional TV's weekly drip of serialised shows.

"It has been a mistake for [pay-TV] companies to talk about ratings, it creates performance pressure around these shows which is very unnecessary," he argues. "HBO got excited about the ratings on [its first big hit] The Sopranos, I would have too, but now they have to talk about every one of them. There is as much going around about how few people watch [HBO's] Girls as there is about how good a show it is."...

I wanted to share a list of cool, free multimedia tools from a talk I presented last night at Florida International University during a meeting of the

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.

'Researchers at HP Labs discover that Twitter can predict with astonishing accuracy how well a movie will sell...

We've all got the vague intuition that Twitter allows you track, in real-time, what people are concerned about or obsessed with. But this is a little freaky: Two researchers at HP Labs, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, have discovered that you can actually use Twitter mentions to predict how well a movie will do in it's first couple weekends of release. What's more, the method works even better than the most accurate method currently in use, the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX).

Asur and Huberman started by monitoring movie mentions in 2.9 million tweets from 1.2 million users over three months. These included 24 movies in all, ranging fromAvatar to Twilight: New Moon.

Then they took two different approaches, dealing with two very different performance metrics: the first weekend performance, which is largely built on buzz and the second weekend performance, which is largely built whether people actually like the movie....'

Transmedia 101: Crowdfunding Transmedia Crowdfunding Transmedia: with James Cooper & Jay Bushman. June 18th, 7-9 pm  9 Ossington. Lower