DIY Thriller Four Boxes Taps Web Voyeurism for Chills | Underwire

The man in the cape hints at the major twist at the center of <cite>Four Boxes</cite>

The man in the hood wreaks havoc in Four Boxes.

She produces TV commercials. He keeps an eye on their 5-year-old son (when not tapping out screenplays). Now DIY filmmakers Megan Huber and Wyatt McDill are taking their homegrown web-surveillance thriller to Cannes.

Produced with $40,000 raised from 25 friends and family members, Four Boxes goes to the Cannes Film Market on Wednesday in search of international distribution. The 85-minute feature, centered on a trio of eBay auction liquidators who discover a spycam website focused on a crazed bombmaker, hits U.S. theaters this Halloween.

Four Boxes, which stars the Michigan couple’s childhood buddy Justin Kirk (Showtime’s Weeds), has made a big impression on the big screen since debuting at the 2009 South by Southwest film festival. But writer-director McDill says he found his chief inspiration in the small-screen experience common to web-addicted curiosity seekers.

“I got the idea for Four Boxes from the internet itself, which is endlessly cool because you never know what’s around the next corner,” says McDill. “The things you see on the web could be on the other side of the world, or next door; it could be live or not live, it could be manipulated, it can be pretend. I wanted to put those factors together with Rear Window.”

In Four Boxes, Terryn Westbrook and Justin Kirk play Amber Croft and Trevor Grainger

In Four Boxes, Terryn Westbrook and Justin Kirk play Amber Croft and Trevor Grainger.

McDill cites the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock peeping Tom suspense drama as one of his favorite movies.

“The difference is that in Rear Window, whenever Jimmy Stewart looks in the window across the way, you know there’s always going to be some action,” he says. “In our movie, the viewer is like a camera person, really, pointing the camera at different places trying to find the action.”

The filmmakers filmed Four Boxes on a Panasonic SDX900 video camera to keep costs low and also, McDill says, for aesthetic reasons.

“We wanted to harmonize the subject matter with the film itself,” he says. “We shot on this average street in this average house and used overhead lights, so the look of the film is sort of inspired by YouTube. People want escapism sometimes, but even more appealing than escapism is looking in the mirror.”

Wyatt McDill and Megan. Image courtesy Megan.

In Four Boxes, filmmakers Wyatt McDill and Megan Huber explore web voyeurism.
Image courtesy Megan Huber/fourboxesthemovie.com

For those who want to drill into the back story before seeing the film, McDill and Huber created a blog and Twitter account for Kirk’s Trevor Grainger character and his two colleagues.

“Within a year or two, we feel this will be standard operating procedure so that you can get to know the characters on a website before you see the film,” Huber says. “People are used to a level of intimacy and want to find out more than what they can get from the product itself. With Four Boxes, the website really starts the experience.”

The Twist

The movie, distributed domestically by Range Life Entertainment and E1, packs a jumbo surprise, says McDill.

“There’s a major twist in Four Boxes that makes it difficult to talk about the film,” he says. “It would be like talking about Psycho without revealing that Norman Bates is his mother.”

Follow us on Twitter: @hughhart and @theunderwire.

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Excellent article on Four Boxes with sublimely scary pics - just what the hell is going on in those boxes?

don't tell Ashton - interactive twitter art piece is filling in!

'The Interactive Communication class at Sweden's Berghs School of Communication created Don't Tell Ashton, an interactive art piece created via Twitter. Participants tweet the message "I'm on the world's first artwork made by Twitter users.

To JOIN go to http://www.donttellashton.com / Just @donttellashton" to get their Twitter profile pic included in the piece. The more followers, the bigger their image.

The artwork was so named because famous Tweeter Ashton Kutcher is apparently the only person with enough followers to cover the entire frame. When the frame is full, the final artwork will be made into an actual physical piece by Swedish artist Jon Holm.'

(source: Creativity http://bit.ly/cn77oT)

Augmented reality takes hold in classrooms | Curriculum

Augmented reality overlays digital images and information on real world settings.

Augmented reality overlays digital images and information on real-world settings.

A small but growing number of schools across the nation are turning classroom lessons into engaging experiences with augmented reality (AR), a technology that overlays digital information on top of real-world surroundings as viewed through a smart phone or other handheld, GPS-enabled device.

Proponents of the technology in education say augmented reality differs from virtual reality in that while virtual reality aims to replace a person’s perception of the world with an artificial world, augmented reality enhances a person’s perception of his or her surroundings.

The Augmented Reality Development Lab (ARDL), from virtual reality developer Digital Tech Frontier, lets users display relevant information at the appropriate time and location during an AR experience, which results in virtual 3-D objects appearing in the real world.

Students and teachers look through a viewing device or at a monitor to see virtual objects such as planets, volcanoes, the human heart, or dinosaurs embedded within their real-world environment—and they can interact with and manipulate those objects to receive associated information.

Debra Sloan, an educator with Forest Heights Middle School’s Eagle Environmental and Spatial Technology (EAST) program in Little Rock, Ark., uses the ARDL in the school’s project-based service learning class.

“AR raises the level of interaction for the students,” Sloan said. Students in the EAST program have created a virtual tour of the Clinton Library and are working to integrate AR technology into the tour. Also in the works are a map of the school for new students and a local hospital tour, both using AR.

The ARDL interface has pre-built education modules for science, math, art, and social studies, as well as a module builder for building new software. The software, which can be used in K-12 and higher education, lets students and teachers build programs, examples, and curricula using augmented reality. Students and teachers also can network together and share the modules they’ve created with other students and schools.

“ARDL is such a nice direction to go … in incorporating technology in the classroom, because it makes [learning] more interactive,” Sloan said. “The kids love it because they are active. … They love more than just sitting and watching things happen.”

Education technology advocates say AR can help students with spatial and temporal concepts, can facilitate interaction, appeals to kinesthetic learners, and offers engaging and self-paced interaction.

“The nice thing about augmented reality is that it can bring anything to life,” said Scott Jochim, creative director at Digital Tech Frontier. “All you need is a simple Google SketchUp model, or a more complex 3ds Max model if you so desire. Attach simple attributes, and presto—you and your students are engaged in an augmented reality educational experience.” (3ds Max is three-dimensional modeling, animation, and rendering software from Autodesk Inc.; SketchUp is a free 3D modeling program from Google Inc.)

Jochim said the ARDL was created in part to respond to the challenge that lecture-based learning does not affect students in the same way that technology-infused learning experiences can.

“This … is clearly going to revolutionize education,” he said.

Using Google SketchUp or Google’s 3D Warehouse—a collection of free 3D models that users are adding to daily—educators can locate 3D images of any item for classroom use and manipulation.

The ARDL retails for $2,100, which includes a 20-seat license. Jochim said additional fee-based curriculum tools will be available soon as well, but purchasing those will not be necessary to operate the ARDL; educators can continue using free resources in their lessons.

“It’s not just about throwing technology in these classrooms, it’s about empowering the teachers to understand the technology,” Jochim said. “Grasping the capability behind it gives teachers tools that are easy to use.”

In April, Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach Initiative, together with San Diego’s School in the Park program and the San Diego Museum of Art, launched a project that gives San Diego elementary school students the opportunity to learn about art with AR.

“In its simplest form, augmented reality is an effort to merge the physical and virtual worlds,” said Patrick O’Shea, director of the Handheld Augmented Reality Project (HARP) at Harvard University. O’Shea collaborated on the School in the Park program with San Diego officials.

Letters With Character - An Interactive Literary Environment

Dear Mr. Herzog,

I suppose we all become overwhelmed at times by the desire to explain, to plead, to pronounce. And to ask. Ever to ask. But we do not merely ask; we burn with the desire of knowing. We ache from the knowledge that what we seek is unknowable and we scream our questions, ever into the abyss.

But I think I know what's eating you.

Does size really matter to her? You bet it does, my friend. Oh, yes. And lasting power! Don't be a minuteman! And that's why, for Cialis or Viagra, or any of your other needs, visit canadaprescrip.com! Real name brands for cheap cheap cheap!

SIncerely,
Jess Walter

Harper Perennial has launched an interactive project inviting you to write a letter to a fictional character

Harper Perennial's blog The Olive Reader describes the project:

'Before there was any fiction at all, there were letters. For centuries, letters were the only way for people in different locations to communicate with each other. But letters have also become a rich and complex element of the best literary fiction. The acclaimed author and New Yorker editor Ben Greenman explores how letters function in life, as well as how they function in fiction in his new collection of inter-linked stories What He’s Poised to Do.

“Ben Greenman’s masterwork of stories inspired by letters offers fresh insight into the mysteries of intimacy.”
—Simon Van Booy.

On the occasion of the book’s publication, and in celebration of the art of the letter as a form of fiction, Harper Perennial invites you to participate in its Letters With Character campaign, and to write a letter to a fictional character. The letters can be funny, sad, demanding, fanciful, declarative, or trivial. They can be about a novel, a short story, or a children’s book, works both literary or popular. There is only one requirement: They must be written by a real person and must also address an unreal one.

The best, most interesting, strangest, and most moving letters will be collected on LettersWithCharacter.blogspot.com. Visit the site to see a selection of those that have already been written: a romantic appeal to Captain Ahab, a moving consideration of middle age addressed to a Garcia Marquez heroine, a hilarious challenge to Agatha Christie’s famed detective Hercule Poirot.

Bright Falls - Alan Wake Live Action Prequel integrates TV serial structure with game play

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Bright Falls is the prequel online series for X-Box's just launched game, Alan Wake. 4 of 6 episodes are up on the blog and so far the series is garnering praise for its David Lynch-esque aesthetic. What intrigues me about the game is that the game play relies less on the gun than the use of a flashlight where enemies are vaporized with the beam. Crzy!

The environment is also supposed to be gorgeous, woods, fog, scary shit in the dark but what most intrigues me is the use of a serial tv structure. The game runs through a series of episodes with recaps at the start of each new episode. The buzz is that the integration of TV format with game play really adds to the narrative immersion.

Can't wait to play!

Selling Amanda Abroad: How Transmedia Storytelling Challenges Foreign Publishers, Licensees

Selling Amanda Abroad: How Transmedia Storytelling Challenges Foreign Publishers, Licensees

April 14, 2010 @ Edward NawotkaOne Comment
Rating: +10 (from 12 votes)

The Amanda Project

By Siobhan O’Leary

Translating and adapting a book to a foreign market can be a demanding enough task, but when it comes to transmedia storytelling, the process of “translating” a story world and attracting a following can pose even greater challenges — even if a book or series is already a proven success in its original language. It’s not so much a question of translation, as much as it is one of transference: you’re taking an entire project and sending it abroad, where it surely will be changed — much as a person is — as it integrates into the foreign culture. But how much do you cede creative control? Who contributes? What happens?

Take The Amanda Project, a collaborative transmedia YA mystery series and interactive website developed by Fourth Story Media and published in book form in the US by HarperTeen. The first book in the series, Invisible I, was released in September 2009, with the beta site launching six month earlier in March.

It has since been licensed to nine foreign publishers in France, Canada, Norway, Turkey, the UK, Brazil, Spain (both Spanish and Catalan) and Vietnam. Most of the licensees have acquired rights to all eight titles planned for the series, with a few opting for only the first four in the series. All of the licensees are planning to develop an interactive component for their readers.

Though the publishers license the books directly from HarperCollins, they license the interactive site and content from Fourth Story Media and negotiate separate fees for a variety of other options depending on how much tech support they need to get their Web sites up and running. The splitting of licensing and advertising revenue is subject to negotiation on a project-by-project basis.

“So far we’ve worked directly with Norway, France, and Spain to help get their websites started — walking them through how the site works technically and conceptually,” said Ariel Aberg-Riger, Creative Development and Marketing Director for Fourth Story Media. She added that Fourth Story Media would also be sharing things they’ve learned in terms of user engagement and community management.

Foreign licensees will be starting with some of the same interactive concepts — from puzzles to clue hunts to writing contests — that were implemented for the US launch of the site. They will also use some of the same stories as seed content for their sites.

“From there, we encourage them to hire their own Web writers and follow their readers, since the whole point of the site is to react to the girls,” Aberg-Riger said. In the US, majority of the content that has appeared on the site is a direct result of what readers have commented on and contributed to the storyline, from theories about the disappearance of title character Amanda Valentino to their own fictional characters.

At the same time Fourth Story Media is open to the idea of foreign publishers implementing their own mystery arcs as they see fit. But since some of what will be published in the US editions of the remaining books in the series will be user-generated, the biggest question remains how and if that will be reflected in foreign editions.

For example, the Norwegian publisher of the project, Aschehoug, will most likely publish subsequent books in the series as direct translations from the US editions, though they plan to communicate some of their own user-generated content to HarperCollins in the process. The Norwegian edition of Invisible I is slated for publication in mid-August of this year.

Most of the parties involved are taking a wait-and-see approach when it comes to how foreign publishers will incorporate small user-generated details into the rest of the series, particularly as this is relatively uncharted territory for most everyone involved, including HarperTeen.

“There is an element of the packager/publisher relationship, but this is really the first project of its nature for HarperCollins,” noted Jean McGinley, manager of foreign rights for HarperCollins Children’s Books.

And while the book manuscript convinced foreign publishers that this was a compelling story that would interest readers, McGinley adds that the online content developed by Fourth Story Media played a big role in helping to selling the rights.

“The book trailer was submitted to foreign publishers right out of the gate, and was their first glimpse at what a unique project this was,” she said. Harper also brought a complete breakdown of the site with visuals to international book fairs and gave foreign publishers password protected access to the beta site to give them a better understanding of how the site worked and to demonstrate how integral it was to the project.

Camilla Eikeland-Sundnes, editor of the Norwegian edition of The Amanda Project at Aschehoug added that this is the first time the publisher has worked on a project where social media components constitute a genuine part of the editorial process, as opposed to just the marketing strategy.

“Having access to the US beta site was absolutely necessary for observing and understanding the potential of this project, including the opportunity of including user generated content,” she said. “We wanted a transmedia touchstone, and this was simply it.”

As far as the foreign publishers’ interactive content is concerned, FSM is planning to be flexible in terms of allowing licensees to do what will work best in their own markets — be it on the interactive site or perhaps even in mobile campaigns that might be better suited to European markets.

There are no immediate plans to moderate the foreign interactive sites, “but we’d definitely consult with them — let them know what we’ve found most successful here, and what we’d suggest,” said Aberg-Riger.

DISCUSS: How will transmedia storytelling change narrative?

READ: A profile of Fourth Story Media from Publishing Trends.

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Maureen McHugh's Part 5: Interactivity | MimeFeed

Why transmedia? Why not watch a movie? Or read a book? Because video games have taught a whole generation that it is possible for the audience—in this case, the player—to interact with the story. The interaction is extensive in video games. Without it, there is no experience.

But the story is also pretty limited. Video game interaction is repetitive, limited, and often tangential to the story. For many players, story interrupts the game, just go online and read about any video game that doesn’t allow the audience to skip the cut scenes. It’s the experience, the shooting, the driving, the changing the radio station, the exploring, that engages the audience most.

Interactivity is a double edged sword. We don’t put video games on TV because watching them is, frankly, boring as hell. Doing them, despite their often repetitive nature—shoot that, now shoot that, now shoot that—is fun.

Here’s a secret about transmedia. Every time the story shifts from one media platform to the next, a percentage of the audience stops following. Every time there’s a puzzle, a percentage of the audience stops following. In this way, transmedia is a great deal like video games. Only about 20% of all video games purchased are played to the end. (That’s a guess, by the way, from the video game industry.) People get to a sticking point—an ambush they can’t seem to get past, or a big boss they can’t defeat, and they walk away, and a lot of times, they never get around to coming back. The video game industry, at one level, doesn’t care if you finish the game. They just need you to buy it. Game designers do want you to finish the game.

What the audience wants from an interactive story is the sense that their actions mattered. Their sense of that possibility deepens their investment. It makes the experience feel ‘real.’ Historically, audience actions have changed the storyline. In the earliest days (okay, maybe even now) the stories were often still being produced even as the first installments went live. So if the audience took to a character, that character’s role would change in response. The audience wants to see the ripples of their actions through the story. They want to affect the story. They want to be part.

To continue to borrow from video game nomenclature, they don’t want the game to be on rails. That is, they don’t want the experience to be so scripted that they have to simply guess what the right answer is to unlock the next piece of story. They want room to play, to be part. They want power within the story. The ultimate expression of this would be what video gaming calls the sandbox. That would be that the experience sets up the world and some conditions and the audience creates the stories. Unfortunately, the intrinsic impetus for plot is that things go wrong. And the audience, like most quite normal people, don’t want things to go wrong. They want things to go right. But without tension, there’s no reason to go forward, nothing to resolve.

Sean Stewart says, “Storytelling isn’t broken.” That is, we know how to tell stories that work for our audiences. Most of the time, we are better at creating entertaining stories than they are. This is no reflection on the audience, I have spent thirty years practicing. Spend thirty years practicing piano and you’ll be better than most people. Story starts with something going wrong and the simplest rule of plotting is that things get worse.

MMOs like World of Warcraft get around this with quests. Quests are pretty simple plot-wise. They present a goal (the problem is ‘how do I get x’). There are obstacles (at first very simple ones but as the quests get more sophisticated, so do the obstacles.) Players who figure out how to accomplish the quest get resolution. The quests are not great storytelling (although the more sophisticated ones have more and more story in them.) But like sex, they are for many people a lot of fun to do, even if the what’s most fun to do may not be all that entertaining to watch. (Your mileage may vary.)

But when transmedia projects have attempted to allow the audience to create content, the results have not been particularly successful. What an audience wants is an existing story where their actions matter, rather than to create the story themselves. What they want most of all would be for the story to remain in flux. They would act, and then we would react, and create the next installment of the story.

This has actually happened, in some sense. During I Love Bees, an ARG set in the world of the video game Halo in 2004, the actions of a member of the audience actually scuttled the existing plot. During a live phone call (with an actress playing a character) the audience member revealed the location of another character. There was much re-writing and revision of the affected websites.

The problem is that video has to be done weeks in advance or it looks amateurish. Scripting, casting, planning, filming, and editing all take time. While it’s theoretically possible to turn content around in a week it’s also very expensive. The more lead time there is on creating websites, crafting video and audio, creating an interesting and compelling narrative, the better the experience looks and feels. This doesn’t mean that changes aren’t made at the last minute. I’ve seen a project where a producer was auditioning actors when an urgent request came in for an actor to do an audio recording. The producer picked an actor from the audition, sent the actor back to record right now, and the new audio file was posted before the audition was finished. But that’s a way to burn out the people making the transmedia project.

Maureen McHugh's Part 4: Old Methods in New Bottles | MimeFeed

 

 

Conventions are essential to transmedia work. Stories that have shapes familiar to the audience. The damsel in distress. The disappearing person. The murder mystery. Transmedia is also establishing conventions for itself.

Many of the conventions of transmedia are borrowed. And many of them are rather old conventions that have fallen out of popular use. Transmedia is a new, naive medium, and so it makes fresh some existing conventions that have become clichéd or technologically obsolete. 

Transmedia echoes television and older literary traditions (like Charles Dickens novels, which were serialized in magazines or the television show 24, which is rather like the perils of Pauline with torture) in that it’s often structured as a serial.

Surprisingly, transmedia has also resurrected the radio play. Part of the reason for that is economic. Audio alone is cheaper than video, and more compelling than text. But audio is also a novelty for an audience that has mostly only experienced music and talk radio as audio forms. It’s unexpected and it feels intimate, overheard. It can be delivered, in it’s shortest form, to a mobile phone, which makes it even more intimate and private. The story is whispering in your ear, just to you. The phone call feels interactive but for right now, that interactivity is limited. With a lot of back end programming and a parser, you can have a kind of limited conversation with a character. (You could hire an actor, but again, that limits the possibility of a real breakthrough into culture—can you hire enough actors to field a million phone calls, and would you want to even try?) So already there is an artificial convention in transmedia storytelling, the one-sided phone conversation. The monologue from the character to you.

A very effective version might be the pretense of a pocket call. Where the audience member has the sense that the characters don’t realize they’re broadcasting. The coincidence of important conversations accidentally being broadcast is no more artificial than the convention that every criminal leaves a clue. (According to the U.S. Department of Justice Statistics, about 30% of homicides go unsolved and that number is rising.) Or that business in Michael Bay movies where cars flying off cliffs spontaneously explode in mid-air.

That’s a convention that will lose some of it’s effectiveness as it becomes less novel. Early movie audiences screamed in delighted fright when the train came towards them. Now we don’t. For an audience right now, overhearing a conversation on a phone feels somewhat ‘interactive’ but when audiences become more accustomed to transmedia conventions, it will just become expected.

Which leads to Interactivity. Ah, interactivity. The Holy Grail.

Love that Maureen McHugh brings in Dickens - I'm obsessed with Bleak House at the moment - reasons to follow in a later post.

And lovely idea embedded in here - I'll let you find it