RED LIGHT PROPERTIES - Online Graphic Novel by Dan Goldman
Red Light Properties
By dan goldman
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props Lance Weiler! I'm loving what I've played with so far
Red Light Properties
By dan goldman
![]()
props Lance Weiler! I'm loving what I've played with so far
Check out Disney's foray into participatory storytelling
Thanks to Scott Walker for the excellent post on Disney's participatory experiment
His overview of the project & highlighting of areas that could be improved (Legal Limitations & allowing for the reuse of submissions) is particularly interesting in light of what RSA/Ag8's Purefold project was envisioning in the feedback cycle between films, fan response & fan generated content within a Creative Commons agreement.
I LOVE the interface design of this website - no wonder it won a webby in 2009! This is a must play! Ok, so you have to believe me - it's not just a grey square
From Digital Buzz:
'I’ve been trying to track this video down for the last week to show everyone (finally succeeded), it’s called Nike Grid, an experiential campaign meets ARG about to be launched in London that is all about running. Street running, infact. The Grid is London, North, South East and West across 40 postcodes, the entirety is your gameboard.
The idea is to run from phone box to phone box, street by street across London to claim the most streets in just 24 hours. For each phone box “check in” you’ll get points, and the more you run the more you get. Nike have also taken more than a little inspiration from FourSquare by issuing “badges” for speed, endurance and stamina over the event, with the whole thing tracked and broadcast through Facebook.
If you’re in London and want to get involved you can register for The Grid right here. Good luck!'
Human beings construct narrative. It’s what we do. We impose meaning and cause and effect on events. We say, this happened and then because of or it, that happened. We do it even when it’s not true—which is how places like Vegas stay in business. If you’re flipping a coin, and it comes up heads nine times in a row, what are the odds on the tenth toss? 50-50. Statistics are not narrative.
How we construct those narratives is strongly affected by culture. The stories that are told to us teach us to expect things to happen in certain ways. Some of those conventions are probably more universal than others. I suspect that teaching fables, like Aesop, are common across cultures. Stories of spirits—he didn’t realize it was a ghost until/ he woke up and the beautiful mansion was really a ruin/ the parents told him their daughter had died a year ago/ are also probably fairly widespread. Maybe the story of virtue rewarded, which is a kind of teaching story (do the right thing) is also fairly universal. I’m speculating here. Cowboys and cops are a kind of subset of the convention of the hero. But it is neither a truth nor a universal convention that a car, flying off a cliff, explodes spontaneously and cataclysmically in midair. That convention is one of American TV and movies.
According to Nielsen, the average American watches over four hours of television a day. Insert the usual caveats about averages and Nielsen ratings here, because I’m not sure how people manage this, given that so many of us have jobs and school. But we watch a lot of TV. Even given that some of that is news and sports, there’s still a lot of storytelling in there. Kids watch more. Again, according to Nielsen (caveat, caveat) kids spend 900 hours a year in school and watch 1500 hours of tv a year. That’s almost six hours a day. Making narrative may be a human condition, but I have to wonder, has any culture ever been subjected to so much storytelling, by so many different storytellers, in history?
It makes us very savvy about narrative conventions. Think about how many times you walk into a room and a television show you know is on. You don’t really know the exact time, but you glance at the screen and, say, Dr. House is sitting in his office, tossing the ball into the air, and he gets up and limps out. You know it’s somewhere between quarter of and five minutes of the hour (if you have watched House a couple of times, and maybe even if you haven’t.) We know the conventions of shows. We know when the detective is about to get the murderer to confess. We know when the diagnosis is a blind alley. We know the moment when the sitcom star realizes that they are in a situation (which is why they are called situation comedies.) We know the rhythms of the stories. The same is true of pop songs. I lived in China many many years ago, and when I listened to classical Chinese music, one of the things that struck me was that I never knew when the song was going to end. I had no internal model for the structure of the music. Chinese pop songs, on the other hand, were much more familiar to me, even though they were being sung in a language I barely spoke. They had refrains and bridges.
Television shows and movies have very strong structural conventions. Over time, watching and learning these conventions has had an interesting affect on TV and movies. Television shows today, like CSI, present three story arcs in the same time period that a show like Starsky and Hutch would present one story arc. Some of the events on TV are now abstracted rather than dramatized or explained.
What does this have to do with transmedia storytelling?
In my case, a lot. (Cont’d in Part 3, next Wednesday)
Another excellent post from Maureen McHugh (I can hear the ghost of Mamet in the opening - but no wait - he's still with us! phew!)
This video is in the 'Holy Mother of God' brilliant/creepy category (yes that exists) - gracias, Susan Cowan!
Greek mythology was the source of some of the most enchanting storytelling ever created – the kind that absorbed people, immersed them and made them obsessed enough to kill and die for.
Greek mythology offered a complete (although inconsistent) cosmology that included explanations of how the world came to be, how it was organized, and the logic that dictated how it behaved.
Floating as a flat disk on the encompassing river of Oceanus, the Earth housed the subterranean house of Hades below it and the sun, moon and stars above it. This universe was populated by a cast of gods, each with their own genealogy, characteristics, personality and expertise. Poseidon was the god of the sea; Aphrodite the god of love, beauty and sexuality; Hades – the god of the underworld; Hera – the goddess of women; Dionysus – the god of wine, who inspires madness and ecstasy.
Greek myths were accounts of how events would unfold within the parameters of a world inhabited by a population of humans and some wildly mythical creators.
5D: The Future of Immersive Design is a global community of multi-disciplinary creators that are fascinated by a similar pursuit of worldbuilding for the sake of generating new storytelling experiences.
The process that is being developed is one that begins with the construction of a world. Before a specific narrative is even imagined, a parallel, fictional world is created for that story to take place in. Complete with an ecosystem, a world of characters and some general governing laws, this place of fiction becomes the platform for stories to unfold.
This panel hopes to debate and discover this emerging design process.
Alex McDowell, a world-renowned production designer, will elaborate on how worldbuilding is transforming the role of design in storytelling professions. Alex develops universes where stories take place.
Jer Thorp, an incredible master of data visualization, will discuss how by weaving together strings of data found in the world, new stories can be created. Narratives, after all, are chains of data that are put together in special sequences.
John Underkoffler, a futurist and the inventor of the Minority Report interface, will reflect on how these stories get experienced as our interfaces transform. Both the media delivery systems and the way we interact with our data can have a huge effect on how we think and design.
Ben Kreukniet, a spectacular lighting designer, will discuss how the process of worldbuilding, its contents and interfaces, can be experienced in new ways when placed in the physical world.
Alex McDowell
Minority Report
MINORITY REPORT is a film made from art and science. Directed by Steven Spielberg with production designed by Alex McDowell it imagines Washington DC in the year 2050, where an experimental police program PreCrime has been set up based around the unique talents of three precogs who by previsioning the future are able to prevent violent crime and murder.
The design parameters were expanded by the director’s impetus to create a future reality rather than science fiction, requiring the terra- forming of an interconnected world conceived as a container for linear narrative.
As well as triggering the first fully digital design process in film, and McDowell’s continuing development of an immersive and non-linear virtual design process, Minority Report was also a proof of concept of the idea of a narrative developed as much out of the interior logic of the film landscape as from the traditional script process.
Fight Club
FIGHT CLUB, the renowned film by director David Fincher and designed by Alex McDowell exemplifies the notion that the film language of space and place is based less in architecture than in narrative structure. In constructing film reality the designer creates something completely different – each unique world is made of geography, social context, reflection, history, feathers and tar, glued together by interior logic; a machine for storytelling which may at the same time resemble a house.
Death and the Powers
DEATH AND THE POWERS: A Robot Pageant is a new opera currently in development at MIT Media Lab by composer Tod Machover, with libretto by poet Robert Pinsky, directed by Diane Paulus, and designed by Alex McDowell.
It tells the story of Simon Powers, a great and wealthy man, who is conducting the last experiment of his human life. He is passing from one form of existence to another in order to project himself into the future by becoming the System, an organism beyond the bounds of humanity.
The elements of realtime media, lighting, animatronic set pieces and the robot performers are all an extension of Simon’s new being, per- formed though a vast interconnected intelligent system. The System, programmed to create sculptural images, moving pat- terns, and even human-like gestures and expressions, will show the audience the disparate, fleeting thoughts and memories from Simon’s inner world.
JER THORP
Just Landed
Lately, a lot of progress has been made by epidemiology through the study of social networks. Spread of disease can be tracked by modeling the ways in which humans travel and interact. This project scrapes Twitter for phrases like “I just landed in Tokyo!” and renders the resulting trips on a 3D plane.
GoodMorning!
A more whimsical visualization of Twitter, ‘GoodMorning’ shows the world waking up – and greeting each other on Twitter. This render shows 24 hours of AM greetings, showing us how (and when!) the world says ‘Good Morning’.
NYTimes 360/365
The NYTimes publishes thousands of articles every year, both online and in print. Can an entire year of news stories be compacted into a single image?
John Underkoffler
Oblong Industries is the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment.
The SOE’s combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.
Ben Kreukniet
Volume
Volume is a large scale semi-permanent installation that was installed in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s John Madejski garden from November 2006 to January 2007. A collaboration between UVA and onepointsix (Massive Attack’s special projects arm), Volume consists of 47 columns of light, each with their own audio output. As visitors moved through the space, they triggered a spectacular display of light and sound – made up of six audio-visually distinct movements.
Volume won the 2007 D&AD Yellow Pencil in the category of Digital Installations and has been nominated for the Designs of the Year at the Design Museum.
Massive Attack tour 2008
For our fourth tour with Massive Attack, UVA created a new stage set, with a wide, sculptural LED screen as the centrepiece. The visual treatments, created in collaboration with Massive Attack, are the group’s most explicitly political yet. Flickering references to rendition flights, detention without charge and surveillance societies light up the stage, and computer-controlled lights, also designed by UVA, allow perfect synchronisation between the music and the visuals.
Chorus
Chorus’, UVA’s kinetic installation with sound by Mira Calix, was recently featured in Artichoke’s ‘Lumiere’ in the world heritage site of Durham Cathedral. An array of motor-assisted pendulums weaves through space emitting light and sound. The rhythm of the work evolves through chaos and returns to unison, producing a hypnotic and seductive performance that heightens the viewer’s awareness of the space and their relationship with it. More than 75,000 people visited the festival, over the 4-day period.
Terrific preview post by Tali Krakowsky on the upcoming FITC panel on 'Storytelling: Absorbed, Obsessed and Immersed.' See you there!
While a large chunk of the digital and social media world were networking it up at SXSW (and believe me, those left behind or who decided to leave early were quite jealous), a smaller but just as voracious group of unique storytellers and academics gathered at USC for the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the UCLA Producers Program, School of Theater, Film and Television co-sporsored one-day conference Trandsmedia, Holywood.
Lead by Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and Henry Jenkins, Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communications, USC, the conference was a one-day affair packed to the gills with panels discussing everything from how transmedia is reconfiguring entertainment to tips and tools on designing your own transmedia stories, to where the future of marketing utilizing transmedia may be heading.
Although an entire article onto itself could be written about “What is Transmedia?”, and the term itself is heavily debated (one of my collegues instead refers to himself as “Platform Agnostic” while others think the term “Cross-Media” is simpler and more accurate), but the general consensus is that it is telling a story across numerous platforms. A simple example would be the Star Trek franchise, which began as a TV show and extended to movies, novels, video games, etc.
An especially niche example of this type of storytelling exists in the form of ARGs or Alternate Reality Games. These are generally described as a type of storytelling in which the audience members themselves are participants in creating the story and the world in which the story is taking place. One panelist at the conference described the process of participating in an ARG as “digging through sand to find shards of pottery. If you find enough shards, you can reconstruct the entire pot.” Through a process of tools such as puzzle-solving, clue-breaking, and live events, an audience is encouraged to piece together a world and ultimately, if the “game” is properly supervised, each player should feel as if they contributed in the overall story that will eventually unfold.
The third panel of the day at Transmedia, Hollywood focused exclusively on Alternate Reality Games and strove to answer the tough questions of whether they should be considered artforms unto themselves or could they be viably marketable as a type of advertising campaign. A wide array of experts in the field were gathered to discuss this issue, ranging from pure academics to those working for-profit in the field of ARG design. Moderated by Mann, the panel consisted of:
–Ivan Askwith, Director of Strategy, Big Spaceship (clients include NBC, A&E, HBO, EPIX, Second Life, and Wrigley)
–Susan Bond and Alex Lieu, 42 Entertainment (I Love Bees, Why So Serious?, NiN’s Year Zero)
–Will Brooker, Associate Professor, Kingston University, UK (Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture; The Bladerunner Experience; Using the Force; Batman Unmasked)
–Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, Founding Partners, No Mimes Media (The Threshold)
Jordan Weisman, Founder, Smith & Tinker (The Beast, I Love Bees)
The discussion was a lively one, with widely varying views between those who felt ARGs should be looked at as pure artforms without the need to try to put marketing value on them, those that felt they should be valued on their academic merits alone, and those who were striving to prove they had marketability, and thus should be able to have a price tag put on them. Though all seemed to agree that at their core, ARGs are indeed a storytelling device and the artistry of that should not be understated. But as Jordan Weisman put it, “If we don’t figure out how to charge for them, we don’t have an art form.”
An audience member, who was clear to identify himself as Head of New Media at Vivendi as well as intellectually fascinated by ARGs, succinctly cut-to-the-chase of the argument by asking, “At what point does this move from intellectual masturbation into something that is actually successful and digestible and something that will perpetuate?”
“A lot of people are trying to get equity for their brand, to rise above the noise in their category. And an ARG can do that for you,” explained Susan Bond. “If we’re really talking dollars and cents on marketing terms here,” added Alex Lieu, “what is 18 months of engaging or 11 million people (the number of active participants of the Why So Serious? campaign) who are going to tell their friends, where the average length of engagement is 45 minutes or longer…what is that comparatively to a 30-second spot that you hope people will see and recognize and remember? That’s a very different argument in terms of Return on Investment and how much you are spending. So you can say that’s expensive but the expense should equal out what you’re trying to get.”
After this discussion, another audience member was quick to point out that if we’re talking ROI, then this is not an artform.
Obviously, there is still a lot to be discussed and discovered when it comes to ARG storytelling. Like “Transmedia”, even the term “Alternate Realty Game” was a debated topic, regarding how much of game theory should actually be included in their development and whether players or academics should be responsible for forming those theories. “Having played and now produced, it’s all about the story and the storytelling”, weighed in Steve Peters. “Of course you can use games to help catch people and obviously you need to do that and there are a lot of ARGs that you look at and say, they could have used this gaming technique…but at the end of the day it’s all about the entertainment just like with a great film or a great novel or a great book.”
The following quote from Maureen McHugh, I feel, does a good job of summing up this lively discussion: “We are in on the ground floor of what in 200 years will be a dominant entertainment form. I am probably wrong about that, in 50 years someone will have invented the Holodeck and they’ll forget all about us.”