The Muppets are back! On Nov. 23, Walt Disney Pictures is bringing its next live-action Muppet film, aptly-named The Muppets, to movie theatres across the country.
The film release is the culmination of a multi-pronged marketing campaign that has embraced the social and digital spheres, and in the process, helped reinvigorate the Muppet brand.
It’s rare to see such solid execution on so many digital and social channels and for that reason, we wanted to take a deeper look at the various aspects of Disney’s and The Muppets Studios’ efforts.
Going Viral to Revive Interest in a Brand
Over the last two years, The Muppet Studios has embarked on a proactive social and viral campaign. It all started with an epic cover of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, and was followed by more songs, iPhone apps and responses to episodes of Internet backlash with just the right amount of aplomb and visual humor.
In retrospect, the timing of these viral video endeavors was perfect. It coincided with the original announcement that a new Muppet film would be coming to theaters.
full post on mashable.com
Excerpt from original article:
"...ORG and partner Consumer Focus undertook some empirical research on the state of the lawful market for downloadable movies in the UK. This is important because whenever our government or courts undertake to increase penalties for copyright violations – measures such as our nascent national censorship regime for sites that offend the entertainment industry – it is always with a kind of sad head-shake and the lament that despite the healthy, burgeoning lawful market for downloadable material, stubborn pirates continue to take copyrighted works without permission.
ORG's study Can't look now: finding film online investigated the lawful availability of downloads for "recent bestsellers and catalogues of critically acclaimed films, including the top 50 British films" and what they found was that the claims of the lawful market for movies are as evidence-free as the piracy claims they accompany.
Here's what ORG found: though close to 100% of their sample were available as DVDs, more than half of the top 50 UK films of all time were not available as downloads. The numbers are only slightly better for Bafta winners: just 58% of Bafta best film winners since 1960 can be bought or rented as digital downloads (the bulk of these are through iTunes – take away the iTunes marketplace, which isn't available unless you use Mac or Windows, and only 27% of the Bafta winners can be had legally)..."
TORONTO—One of the goals of Remembrance Day is to ensure we honour those who lost their lives in battle in order to secure a better future.And part of that challenge is to ensure future generations understand what our soldiers sacrificed. That was a mission of Secret Location, based in Toronto, which calls itself an integrated media company.
D-Day to Victory screenshotSecret Location created a website extension of the History Television's D-Day to Victory documentary series, which aired leading up to Nov. 11. The site covers the Allied push towards victory in Europe during the Second World War, breaking the campaign down into six components which echo the six television episodes focusing on D-Day on June 6, 1944, to the seige of Berlin.
read the full post on design edge.com
Excerpt from the full notes "....This conversation gave rise to the concept of an east coast/west coast divide in transmedia, where the “east coasters” were people like Brian who came from an indie film perspective, while the “west coasters” were the Hollywood types talking about larger franchises.
It was this dialogue that led Brian to be invited by Henry Jenkins to speak to his class as the torchbearer for east-coast transmedia thinking in the (again, Brian’s words, said tongue-in-cheek) “dark depths of Hollywood”. And he realized that what we’re really talking about are different business models for these systems.
He says we’ve been pigeonholed by the fact that all our funding models are based on the patronage model — which is where all art forms start. A patron gives us money for something other than the joy of the art: a marketing campaign, an educational purpose, etc. The project is funded because it has tactical usefulness.
And this is contrasted to what we as artists and storytellers all know: that our fans will pay for it. In every other artistic medium, there is some moment where fans start to give us money for what we produce.
Brian then brought up the “impostor syndrome”, which he said was “common among bright people.” It’s the general belief that at some point someone’s going to figure out that you really don’t know anything.
read the full post on silverstringmedia.com
Excerpt from original post by Klint Finley November 15, 2011
Boston based venture capital firm Atlas Venture and consulting firm Bocoup have launched Game Lab, a new fund for companies building technologies that will advance the development of video games with HMTL5 on the Open web. These need not be game companies, just any company that will advance the technology that contributes to the open Web game ecosystem, including: “authoring tools, platform services, game discovery, content market places and actual games.” The fund was announced last month on the Bocoup blog by Boaz Sender, a software engineer at Bocoup and a member of the Game Lab investment team.
Bocoup is developing Abacus, an open source framework for building HTML5 games. “Essentially, it’s everything you’d need to build a game OTHER than the game engine,” Sender told me in an interview. Its features will include identity management, leaderboards and other components that could be reused in many games. Game Lab companies won’t be required to contribute to Abacus, but it will be encouraged.
full post is on http://servicesangle.com