Richly Detailed Website for Crowdsourced Creative Commons Spanish film THE COSMONAUT- from Riot Cinema
Robert Pratten of ZenFilms created this remix trailer - nice!
Robert Pratten of ZenFilms created this remix trailer - nice!
"What we do
Visual Editions, nicknamed VE, is a London-based book publisher, started in early 2009 by Anna and Britt. The idea for VE comes from our joint love of books and a (mischievous) desire to do things differently, so that everything we do translates into a new experience for our readers, and for all the writers and designers we work with. What we do is make sure we turn all that love and mischief into beautifully, lovingly, wonderfully written and crafted books.
We wondered why there is such a large divide between text-driven literary books on the one hand and picture-driven art and design books on the other. And we wondered why this divide seems so extreme, when most of us compute visuals in our everyday more than ever before. We believe this visual everydayness adds to the way we read, it adds to the way we experience what we read and the way we absorb and understand the way."
Christy Dena took the stage a began a very erudite presentation about what Transmedia is in terms of the disparate art forms that it marshals together to tell a story. Her own work to date has been defined by a simple question: “What separates us and what unites us?” Oftentimes, it’s a case of perception.
She gave an anecdote of a short story she had written once upon a time of a girl living in a village who faces a coming-of-age ceremony. She is anxious in the knowledge that it may irrevocably change her life. When Dena thought about how to enrich and enhance the story into a novel, it occurred to her that she could tell the story on the Web, too, in some other form. She chose to transpose the same story – told from another perspective – from the point of view of a teenage robot that must face a rite of passing in which new code will be downloaded into her digital brain. Towards that end, she employed Chat Bots to interact with her readers – allowing them to ask the robot questions and have a dialogue with her.
The point of this story was to illustrate some of the design challenges of Transmedia. Dena had to find a way to guide readers from the book to the Web and, ultimately, back to the book. Instead of choosing to tell two separate stories in two separate media, she looked for a way to integrate the two. Both had very different restrictions. On the one hand, the fixed narrative form of the book; once written and put out there, it couldn’t be changed. On the other hand, a much more fluid and interactive narrative form of the Web and the Chat Bot.
Over the next 8 years, she worked on other people’s projects and pursued a PHD, while looking for answers to this design challenge. She was inspired by the words of Dick Higgins, who coined the term ‘Intermedia’. She read a quote by Ken Freedman – a Fluxus artist – who interpreted the Fluxus movement as an increasing number of the most interesting artists to cross the boundaries of recognised media…
..to fuse the boundaries of media with media that had not previously been considered as art forms.
Dena sees one of biggest impediments to Transmedia going forward is the acceptance that all forms of media are equally important. There is a perception in our culture that some things are art forms and other things aren’t.
Films are art, games are not. Theatre is important, TV isn’t. TV is important, New Media isn’t.
Instead, some of the more interesting work comes out when each of the art forms are considered equally meaningful.
There is a trend towards ‘Gamification’ – game-ifying life. The most simplistic iteration is earning points for checking into a website, completing a puzzle, or attending an event. But for many years, game designers, commentators and academics have been fighting for the game to be recognised as a legitimate art form. Games were traditionally analysed in academia through narrative theory. Story is the way that we can understand the world.
Before the argument was “All the world’s a story.” Now it is “All the world’s a game.” Where is the recognition of difference? Some people understand the world through game. Some through other forms of media. Some, a mixture of many media.
Each media platform is something that cannot be changed – a TV is a TV; a newspaper is a newspaper; a computer is a computer. But what unites all these different elements is what the designer and user perceives as what is happening.
Unity is perceived, but variety is manifest.
An object is comprehended as beautiful when it offers unity and variety. There is a pleasing variety within unity. Perhaps the most beautiful art form is all the art forms combined.
Mass communication has a cultural heritage that one channel can reach everyone. Transmedia says that each media and each artform is a different way of reaching people through their medium or art form of choice. And you can communicate more that way.
Dena put it to us that those working in Transmedia will in some ways no longer be a broadcasters, filmmakers or novelists. We’ll be thinking of what unites everything – the message. But we must look upon each area or artform as equal. Dare to design for a wider embrace.
Personally, I think the most important part of her presentation is this point about unity and a unified message. In Transmedia, the toolset is very big. The scope can be very wide. But the message must be clear and profound. It is the seed from which everything else sprouts. And it must be there from beginning to end.
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Mike Monello – A Universal Framework – Power to the Pixel 2010 – Day 1
October 21, 2010 by David G. Wilson · 4 Comments
Today I want to talk about Mike Monello’s presentation on Day 1 of the Power to the Pixel 2010 event, because it has a lot to say about Transmedia (past and present), plus it’s full of great insights for practitioners and future commissioning agents. For those of you who don’t know Mike, he is one of the co-producers of ‘The Blair Witch Project‘ and a founder of Campfire.
Monello began with a provactive statement:
I have no desire to make movies anymore.
Which was qualified by saying that Transmedia had become so much more fulfilling for him as a producer and a storyteller that he was no longer as excited by the prospect of creating something in the dark, crafting it in private and then launching a shrink-wrapped product on the world. Instead, he enjoys the process of dialogue with fans, building a mythology together and feeling the adrenaline rush of watching events unfold ‘live’.
This is what happened in the pre-release build up to the ‘Blair Witch Project’ and led to the creation of Campfire. Since then, he has been working predominantly with ad agencies and brand owner’s marketing departments, because marketeers are used to creating ads and campaigns across multiple platforms. For them, Transmedia isn’t much of a leap. And, for the time being, this is where the money is coming from – out of advertising and marketing budgets. Consequently, this has led to Campfire working on a number of projects for TV shows (Trueblood & The Colony), video games, publishers (Penguin) and brand owners (Audi).
Monello admits that for many Transmedia producers the technology and choices can be daunting. His advice is to focus on the story that you want to tell and the way in which you want to tell it. Sound familiar? All the other decisions will then fall into place. Furthermore, we have to think this way, because audiences are already engaged with stories as Transmedia – whether we’ve planned them that way or not. They don’t differentiate between an activity book, a game, a TV show, etc… to the audience, it’s all part of the same story universe.
A simple approach to Transmedia… the best approach… is rooted in simple human behaviour and desires… Successfully implemented in experiential entertainment for years – what Michel Ruilhac refered to as ‘Experience Design‘. Transmedia is not just a buzzword but a form of story that is closest to how we perceive the world.
To give an example of ‘Experience Design’ from history, Monello used Coney Island – the peninsula on the southern end of Brooklyn, New York – that from the 1890′s to the 1930′s was a “perfect storm of entrepreneurism, creativity and technology.” Maxim Gorky called it, “A fantastic city of fire” – on account of the million plus electric lightbulbs that were used to light the area – the first mass use of electricity in America. Coney Island had become a fairground of unusual attractions, events and marketing.
George Tilyou was a permanent fixture at Coney Island and, arguably, a Transmedia artist who combined theatre and amusement rides into a grand spectacle. He built a wide assortment of amusement activities, which today would be an insurance nightmare: a loop-de-loop rollercoaster that wasn’t without incident, a human roulette wheel that turned around until it spun people off into the crowds… but in 1897, he launched ‘Steeplechase Park‘, which was to become his crowing glory.
The Steeplechase Park was a mechanical race-track, where the punters could sit on a wooden ‘horse’ and fly around a track. But the main attraction here was not the track itself but the ‘Blowhole Theatre’ that followed. After riding the track, the participants were forced up onto a well-lit platform (as opposed to a gift shop, which would be the strategy today) and forced to traverse a shifting floor, shaking staircase and clowns with electric prods who would electrocute the men and corral the women over blowholes that would upset their skirts. This was essentially a giant stage, because viewing galleries and balconies had been built all around it for other people to watch. And audiences couldn’t get enough of it. They had to darken the stage to force voyeurs to leave in order to let knew people in to watch. This show ran for 70 years, making it the longest running show in New York’s history.
For Monello, what we take away from this history lesson is that customers would pay for the privilege of entertaining other customers. People like seeing shows but they like seeing other people even more. Sounds like YouTube, doesn’t it?
In 1907 Steeplechase park burnt to the ground. The morning after fire, Tilyou posted sign
“to enquiring friends, I have troubles today that I had not yesterday, I had troubles yesterday which I have not today. On this site will be built a bigger better Steeplechase park. Admission to the burning ruins 10 cents.”
Tilyou was a showman to the end…
Lesson 1: design communal, shared experiences. This will make them more meaningful.
The Internet gives us massive scale and visibility. Like the design of the Greek ampitheatre, audiences react best when they can see each other.
There were more interesting history lessons from Coney Island. For example, in 1897 Dr Martin Cooney invented the incubator to save the lives of premature babies. Unfortunately, he could not gather support for his invention from the medical community, who had come to think of premature babies as a lost cause and, instead, focused their resources on saving the lives of mothers and helping to prevent premature babies in the first place. So, in 1903, he set up a permanent exhibit at Cooney Island. People could come and see premature babies being saved in full view inside his incubators. He used the money he raised for further research. Eventually, people understood that the babies at his Cooney Island exhibit got better treatment than they would in hospitals, as Cooney opened up more exhibits world wide. Eventually, the medical community took notice and the rest is history.
Lesson 2: People make an instant connection to tangible stories.
Hot dogs were also, apparently, invented at Coney Island. Charles Feltman established ‘Feltmans’ and sold hot dogs for 10 cents each. One of his cooks, Nathan Handwerker set up a rival shop, ‘
Grazie, Marcus!
This installment returns to our coverage of PICNIC with one of the “PICNIC Specials” sessions, and advanced masterclass entitled Everything We Know About Transmedia Is Wrong! It’s worth noting that some speakers referred to the session as Everything You Know About Transmedia is Wrong!, a subtle distinction. The panel was moderated by Seth Shapiro, two-time Emmy Award winner, principal of New Amsterdam Media, and a leader in the field of digital media, having worked for a number of media initiatives. One of these initiatives that may be familiar to our readers is Tim Kring’s Conspiracy for Good.
All of the panelists were first given the opportunity to introduce themselves along with a short presentation on their ideas on transmedia. First up was Dan Hon, co-founder of Mind Candy and Six to Start, currently a senior creative at the London branch of Wieden + Kennedy. Dan started by showcasing one of W+K’s recent major success stories, the Old Spice viral campaign. He then prefaced his definition of transmedia by discussing The Beast, a game that many consider to be the first alternate reality game. Hon reminded the audience that The Beast played out on the pre-YouTube, pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter “archaic web”, a time when sharing and collaboration online was synonymous with email. The Beast and its launch was based on the principle of “Internet archeology”: if you start digging for something online, you might just discover a story and even get involved in it. So, in the case of The Beast, people intrigued enough by a brief mention of a “sentient machine therapist” working on the movie A.I. to search further would stumble upon a deep narrative.
According to Dan, there’s a major challenge facing the traditional alternate reality game, something we might nowadays call transmedia entertainment: people seem to associate them with massive collaborative problem solving and puzzles. One of Hon’s major complaints with current alternate reality game and transmedia development upon which he as waxed eloquent in the past is that ARGs are not mainstream enough because they “incorporate obscure shit that no one want to see or do” by relying on tactics such as steganography, cryptography and solving stupid puzzles.
Read Daniël van Gool's full post from September 26, 2010:
http://www.argn.com/2010/09/picnic_everything_we_know_about_transmedia_is_wrong/
IT’S true: Sue Sylvester is a man.
Behind most great comedic actors, the saying goes, there is a great comedic writer. Will Ferrell has Adam McKay. Jack Lemmon had Billy Wilder. And Jane Lynch, who won an Emmy Award last month for her portrayal of Sue Sylvester, the acid-spewing, narcissism-redefining cheerleading coach on “Glee,” has Ian Brennan.
It was the 32-year-old Mr. Brennan, for instance, who wrote the classic Sue zinger: “You think this is hard? I’m passing a gallstone as we speak. That is hard!”
And this oh-so-subtle put-down, said to one glee club student: “So you like show tunes. It doesn’t mean you’re gay. It just means you’re awful.”
One of Ms. Lynch’s favorite Sue lines — again, written by Mr. Brennan — involves a threat, this time to her main nemesis, the glee-club director Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison): “I will go to the animal shelter and get you a kitty cat. I will let you fall in love with that kitty cat. And then on some dark, cold night I will steal away into your house and punch you in the face.”
Ms. Lynch said: “Ian is this incredibly nice, incredibly sweet guy who just happens to have a really cruel, supremely mean sense of humor. I think it has something to do with growing up Irish Catholic.”
When it comes to writing “Glee,” the hit musical comedy on Fox, the three creators of the show — Mr. Brennan, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk — each play a different role. Mr. Murphy, the director of “Eat Pray Love” whose television work includes “Nip/Tuck,” picks the songs and comes up with some of the crazier story lines, like football players dancing in formation to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” Mr. Falchuk, a “Nip/Tuck” alumnus, generally handles the scenes that jerk tears.
Mr. Brennan — who never had a professional writing job before — is a one-man one-liner factory, in particular writing the majority of the dialogue for the megalomaniacal Sue. The Web is overflowing with lists of his quips, with no compilation complete without this one: “I’m going to ask you to smell your armpits. That’s the smell of failure, and it’s stinking up my office.”
How does he come up with this stuff?
“It honestly just kind of flows out, kind of in aria form, and I have to whittle the writing down to something usable,” Mr. Brennan said while curled up on a sofa in the “Glee” production offices on the Paramount Pictures lot here. “It’s just the mean things that pop into the back of your mind that you sometimes want to say but don’t. The difference is that Sue actually says it.”
Mr. Murphy likened Mr. Brennan to a human sponge.
“Ian is a big collector of detritus — ideas and words and observations that he thinks might be useful,” he said. “He writes them all down. I call it the magic book.”
Mr. Brennan insisted that Coach Sylvester’s attitude is not based on a real person, but conceded, after some pressing, that the prickly Mr. Murphy is sometimes a muse. “Sometimes if I get stuck, I’ll think, ‘What would Ryan say in one of his really mean moments?’ ”
It is clear that some of Mr. Brennan’s inspiration comes from himself. One of the running gags on “Glee” involves Sue’s hatred of curly hair. (“I don’t trust a man with curly hair,”Mr. Brennan had her say in one episode. “I can’t help picturing small birds lying sulfurous eggs in there, and I find it disgusting.”) Mr. Brennan has a love-hate relationship with his own long, wavy locks — something that started after an encounter with Stephen Sondheim.
After college Mr. Brennan was cast in a Chicago production of Mr. Sondheim’s “Saturday Night.” Watching a rehearsal, Mr. Sondheim commented on Mr. Brennan to the stage manager, “He’s one haircut away from being attractive.”
Writing was never a dream for Mr. Brennan. Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Mount Prospect, Ill., Mr. Brennan had his heart set on acting. In junior high he got the lead in a community production. During high school he was in competitive speech and drama, and also joined the show choir, grudgingly, because he thought he needed to learn how to sing and dance if he was going to make it big. “God, those sequins were awful,” he said, recalling the choir costumes.
After attending Loyola University Chicago he toiled as an actor in Chicago for a few years, ultimately landing parts in Steppenwolf Theater Company and Goodman Theater productions. Then came some bit television roles in New York.
All that time, however, Mr. Brennan couldn’t shake his show-choir experience. So, in 2005, he bought “Screenwriting for Dummies” and wrote a first draft of “Glee,” then conceived as a biting, cynical film along the lines of “The Virgin Suicides.” He shopped it around and got nowhere.
Then fate struck. A friend of Mr. Brennan’s in Los Angeles was a member of the same gym as Mr. Murphy. The friend passed Mr. Brennan’s script to him. A year of rewrites later, “Glee” was born as a television musical comedy.
About 12 million people each week now watch the series, which has spawned hit CDs, a concert tour and a robust apparel business — and may be turned into a Broadway show.
“The big learning curve has been figuring out how to deal with the anxiety,” Mr. Brennan said of his first full-time writing job. “You have a script deadline and this enormous operation depending on you and — sorry! — you have no ideas.” He also frets about the attention he has received, particularly when it comes to his older sister, Sarah Brennan, who is a founder of a charter school in a rough Chicago neighborhood. “I feel guilty that she works so hard doing something important, and I’m the one getting noticed,” he said.
Mr. Brennan remains close to his parents, who were visiting the “Glee” set in early October.
“I just let him be himself,” said his father, John Brennan, a former priest. “I can’t take any credit for his talent,”
With more than a hint of sarcasm, Charman Brennan, a middle school math teacher, said: “What about the brilliant mother? Feel free to leave her out.”
John Brennan added: “Ian has always been a character. His preschool teacher told us that he was the only one who got her jokes.”
A character indeed. Ian Brennan, who is between girlfriends at the moment, is a chatterbox with a habit of talking with his fingers outstretched in front of him, as if he were manipulating marionettes. He has an unusual fashion sense, piecing together vintage-shop polyester with street-vendor jewelry in a look he calls “70s tennis eccentric.” (“It’s almost like he wears little costumes,” Ms. Lynch said.) In general Mr. Brennan has a hard time sitting still.
“It’s kind of rodentlike, isn’t it?” he said. “Can’t you picture me grabbing a nut and scrambling up the wall?”
He stuck with the metaphor over the course of several hours on the Paramount lot, where “Glee” is taped on three soundstages. On the show’s choir-room set, Mr. Brennan leaned backward against a grand piano and startled himself by playing a chord.
“It’s my tail,” he said. “I just finished playing a sonata with my tail.”