50 Strange Buildings of the World | Village Of Joy
this might be my favourite
this might be my favourite
Ahh... the other side of NIKE
'In the early nineties, Japan’s asset price bubble burst, resulting in a seemingly irreconcilable recession. During that time, many Japanese lost their jobs, and subsequently, were expelled from their homes and a tide of suicides made the desolate situation seem even more hopeless. Combining the facts that Japanese government offers little assistance to its unemployed and the high cost of living in the city, many were forced out onto the streets. And, in Tokyo, these people sought a retreat and solace in the Miyashita Park (now known as the Nike Miyashita Park, after the Japanese government sold the public park to Nike under a mum transaction).
As the park became a space for the homeless living in cartons and makeshift tents, providing sanctuary for those with no where else to go, these people started to express themselves through art and music. At the same time, artists and young people became attracted to the park and the Miyashita Park turned into a tightly-knit community for the creative and the outliers. Since Nike purchased the Miyashita park, the public park has been turned commercial and it was reported that Nike plans to expel its inhabitants and turn it into a corporate venture. Today, movements to protect the Miyashita Park and its community has spread throughout the globe, with supporting groups in countries as far as Spain.
Check out the documentary created by Danish director Emil Langballe.'
the coolest musical interface/video in days. I sooo want to see this live
Kensington Palace is being transformed. As the walls of the palace are being shaken by a £12 million renovation project the rubble and the dust is unleashing powerful and secret stories about the lives of Kensington's princesses.
At the heart of the Enchanted Palace journey is a quest for the seven princesses who once lived here. Their lives have been re-imagined as installations offering a fascinating interpretation of the palace’s hidden stories. The rebellious princess who ran from an arranged marriage into the arms of love. Sad queens who bore the pain and sadness of lost babies. The young heir to the throne who escaped the controlling grasp of her overprotective mother.
Visitors must use their eyes and ears to find clues that reveal the identity of the elusive royal residents. Guided by an enchanted map, the advice of obliging palace guardians and a few helping hands, their search will take them to all the hidden corners of the State Apartments and lead them to a glittering finale where they will at last meet the princesses face to face.
Bringing the Enchanted Palace to life are the palace guardians, our expert front of house team and professional actors, who provide a personal insight into the strange world of the palace.
Spellbound fashion
The Enchanted Palace reveals the emotion and drama running through Kensington Palace’s history. Contemporary fashion collides with the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection and real stories from the palace to create stunning installations, fashioned by world famous designers including Vivienne Westwood, William Tempest, Stephen Jones, Boudicca, Aminaka Wilmont and Echo Morgan.
About WILDWORKS
WILDWORKS is an international theatre company, based in Cornwall. They produce unique landscape theatre in challenging places and with extraordinary communities. Past productions have been sited in old quarries, derelict mines, working fishing quays, abandoned department stores, dockyards, a Napoleonic citadel, the Green Line in Nicosia and they have worked with gospel choirs, drama groups, local artists, surfers, tea dance regulars, North African migrants, cake-makers, ex-miners, a young hip-hop group, abseilers and a Hell’s Angels chapter.
source: http://bit.ly/cttdEN
Saturday April 10th 2010
In the late evening of Thursday 13th April, 2000, a car flew off on a sharp bend near the English market town of F-------. Susan Capulet, 34, died in the crash. Montague, the driver and owner of the car, survived with heavy bruising to his chest.
Susan Capulet's widower, a successful property developer with a portfolio centred around F-------, was left with three children, Jess, Tybalt and Juliet. In 2002 he married again.
Montague, a popular landscape painter, still lives in the area with his wife and son.
Before the accident, Capulet had several Montagues in his burgeoning art collection. None hangs in his home today.
Sunday April 11th
Capulet's new-build mansion lies outside the town centre. His youngest daughter, Juliet, is the only child still at home.
His son Tybalt can be found two hours away at a public school – he has never settled in there or any of the other boarding schools he was been sent to since the age of 7, shortly after his mother's death.
Their big sister, Jess (23) who they all still nickname “Nurse”, lives and works (trainee solicitor, commercial law) in the nearby city of J------. Nurse keeps in close touch with her father and Juliet and does her best to communicate with her brother.
Monday April 12th
Capulet is taking his second wife and his daughter Juliet to Australia, in the summer, for good.
On Nurse's advice, Juliet joined Twitter yesterday , messing about on her Dad's laptop. She tweeted away to Jess, who arrived back at the mansion after supper (grateful to have avoided their stepmother's cooking) for a few nights' stay . Later Juliet linked to the Youtube video she had made of her room, pausing on the framed photo of their dead mother.
That morning, while Jess was running the city streets in training for the London Marathon, Mercutio woke up with a hangover and a missing mobile. Merc's best friend, Romeo Montague, isn't on Twitter, but he was certainly on form at the pub last night, according to Merc.
Tuesday April 13th
Juliet tweeted away on her new netbook before and after school – only revealing late at night that she was dreading the tenth anniversary of her mother's death today. Jess had been hoping to spend more time with her little sister but went running and baked instead, thinking all the time about that bastard Montague and why wasn't he prosecuted for killing their mother. Tybalt didn't mention his mother once in a day of tweeting that went from bad (lessons, rugby) to worse (he was caught dealing skunk by the headmaster late at night).
Mercutio spent the day remembering the huge fight nearly ten years ago between Romeo's dad and “Crapulet”, who beat the crap out of his mate Romeo's dad. Merc was too young at the time to know what was going on, but he' s grown close to the Montagues since then and he knows whose side he is on.
Wednesday 14th April
Away on a residential course in social media marketing for the hospitality industry , Laurence Friar spent yesterday tweeting inspirational messages and memories of Susan Capulet, before playing Twister in an altered state.
The three Capulet kids themselves found the anniversary of their mother's death disrupted and underlined by the news that Tybalt has been expelled for drug-dealing. Juliet and Jess both found him on Twitter – he didn't apologise. Jess's deep bitterness towards Monatgue became clearer and Juliet made a video to her dead mother.
Mercutio has named it “Montague Day” because he reckons the family should stand proud. Romeo still couldn't been persuaded on to Twitter and his dad told Merc to keep a low profile. Merc still scored with a ginger girl that evening. He also twitpic'ed his friend Romeo.
Thursday 15th April
Capulet went to fetch Tybalt back from school – his expulsion and yesterday's anniversary cast dark shadows over the whole family . Juliet came home from a day at school dreaming about her party - to find her father and brother fighting on the lawn. During a tense family dinner last night, Capulet made it clear that Tybalt is not coming to Oz.
On his way home from his course, Laurence's postive thoughts were interrupted by finding out about the Capulet family troubles. He offered consoling and supportive tweets to all three kids, offering his own memories of their mother.
Mercutio spent all day in bed with his ginger girl.
Friday 16th April
Jess went round to Laurence's to talk about his memories of her mother. The Susan Capulet he described didn't match up with her image of her – particulary Laurence's version of her mother's friendship with Montague.
Jess returned home upset – to find an even more upset sister. Someone at school had written MONTAGUE IS INNOCENT on the back of Juliet's P.E. Shirt.
At the Friar's cafe, Merc finally presuaded Romeo to sign up to Twitter, with enthusiastic support from Laurence, who later went round to the Capulets to network with Capulet Senior and bond with Tybalt.
Saturday 17th April
Juliet had such a great day at school yesterday, her friends made “Capulet and Proud “ T-shirts. She came straight home to tweet to Jess and everyone else about her upcoming party. Proud to be a Capulet – dying to be 16.
Romeo and Merc had a morning of manly bonding with Montague before heading down to Friar's , Tybalt Capulet's arrival changed the tone quickly. Friar headed off a fight but the whole thing made the Montague – Capulet tension a whole lot worse.
Romeo and Merc played Upload That Load with their mobile cameras into the evening while Tybalt had a talk with Capulet. Maybe Tybalt could start working in the property business so he can look after things when the others go to Australia? Tybalt likes the idea of heading up things if he sorts himself out.
Sunday 18th April
Juliet was worried about leaking her party on The Internet, but Jess sorted her out with some party gear shopping.
After a morning of dreams about travelling the world and an afternoon of gaming, Romeo was persuaded to go to The Swan , the local pub, by Mercutio, who had been drinking since lunch.
Mercutio got into a funny Tweet-flirt with an older woman in The Swan – that would be Jess , who took Tybalt down there after another tense family dinner. Tybalt had already made a fool of himself at the Blues football match that afternoon – he was picked out by the TV coverage, ranting.
Laurence Friar was also at the Blues game, sponsoring a young player, helping with the disabled supporters – and trying to get Tybalt to calm down. Friar went home for a quiet night in, but heard something going off in the pub car park.
That was a fight between Romeo and Tybalt – Romeo knocked Tybalt down with his first punch. Jess broke it up.
this is kinda fascinating - the voices on individual twitter lines are great - Tybalt citing Bukowski - all getting very interesting
Romeo & Juliet on twitter? ok, I'll bite!
DEFINING THE FUTURE
Starlight Runner president and CEO Jeff Gomez told MipTV delegates this week that the skills needed to tell stories across multiple media are now worthy of special designation. Jonathan Webdale reports.
Transsexual. Transatlantic. Transmigration. Transmedia. Transmedia? The spell-checker turns red. Something must be wrong. It’s not in the dictionary. It’s not a proper word. Remove your tiles from the Scrabble board. No score.
This situation will change if Jeff Gomez (left) has his way. The president and CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment has more than 20 years’ experience developing video games and digital extensions for franchises including Pirates of the Caribbean, Prince of Persia, Tron, Halo and Avatar. He’s helped created ‘online universes’ for brands such as Hasbro, Mattel and Coca-Cola.
He feels it is now time for a new moniker to describe what he, Starlight, and a small but growing band of producers are doing. Transmedia is its name.
Anyone even vaguely familiar with digital media will be accustomed to its proponents’ propensity to shroud their work in impenetrable vocabulary, which somehow sets them apart from tradition.
Some would argue it’s pure elitism, or worse an effort to disguise the fact that behind the supposedly dark art lies nothing more than the same narrative skills that people have relied on since the days of cave paintings. Multi-platform? 360-degree? Do we really need to add transmedia to the lexicon?
“We’ve been licensing movies and TV programmes into other media platforms and consumer products for many years. What’s new is that transmedia storytelling is the process of conveying messages, themes or storylines to a mass audience through the artful and well-planned use of multiple media platforms,” says Gomez.
“This is something that’s developed from scratch. It’s planned and implemented from the get-go. That’s something fairly new.”
He offers a few examples: The Truth About Marika ? a TV series and alternate reality game made for Swedish pubcaster SVT by a firm called Company P, which is now working with Tim Kring on a project called TEVA. Heroes Evolutions, the online and graphic novel extension of Kring’s landmark series, also gets a mention.
“The show was veritably designed for transmedia implementation and it’s documented that the transmedia extensions of Heroes for NBC Universal have generated 10s of millions of dollars each season in additional revenues,” says Gomez.
He gives ABC’s The Dharma Initiative, a digital spin-off from Lost, credit too. Series creator and executive producer JJ Abrams gets listed alongside a number of other Hollywood heavyweights- Joss Whedon, Jesse Alexander, Naren Shankar and Bryan Burk- as among those worthy of the transmedia epithet.
“These are producers who are aware that in order to retain a certain degree of control and certain amount of financial interest in extensions of their stories on TV they have to become creatively involved with the marketing division of the network or the licensees, the people handling the video games and things like that,” says Gomez.
“Because they’re getting involved they’re able to roll out a vision that is a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more pop culture than a television series.”
Aren’t we just talking about people who get the internet? “It’s not just that. It’s a matter of people who have the capability of bridging creative and marketing for example, who can manoeuvre their way across multiple divisions of large companies like Disney or Viacom,” says Gomez.
“They speak the language of different media platforms ? the web, mobile and video games ? and yet at the same time can defend and protect the integrity of the intellectual property where it initially launched, which in this case is TV.”
Starlight has formed a coproduction alliance with New York-based animation studio Curious Pictures to devise TV animation that’s designed to work with the web, video games and mobile, and a similar arrangement with an unnamed European player is on the cards.
“It is a lot of work but we’re no longer preparing content that’s going to be two hours long. We’re preparing to interact with a large audience and furnish them with hundreds of hours of content,” say Gomez.
At the core of any transmedia property there needs to be a ‘narrative mythology’ or what he calls a ‘vast narrative’ profiles of all the characters, locations, objects of any significance, and an entire chronology of the fictional world, replete with descriptions of the central themes and brand essence that’s being communicated.
“These mythologies are vital, they are platform-neutral and they should be created before you even think about what the TV show’s going to cover or what the website is going to address,” says Gomez.
He is adamant that the skills involved in devising these warrant special demarcation and points out that the Producers Guild of America (PGA) is in the process of ratifying ‘transmedia producer’ credit. He neglects to mention that he sits on the PGA board, which no doubt means the word will be appearing on the Scrabble board soon.
Jonathan Webdale
16 Apr 2010
© C21 Media 2010
Ongoing props to Jeff Gomez for defining and advocating for the unique skills of transmedia producers
lovely lovely video - love dioramas!
and here's the talk that inspired the article on 'Ideas into Execution'