Crossover Labs and Sheffield Doc/Fest invite creative businesses and freelancers working in digital media across West Wales and the Valleys to apply for a 2 day bespoke conference and unique mentoring opportunity
We are inviting applications from creative professionals from diverse disciplines, including film and TV production, animation, games, theatre, web design and new media, willing to share an understanding of a rapidly-changing mediascape.
Convergence Catalyst will train digital media professionals in creating long term sustainable careers in the Creative Media Industries, able to create their own opportunities and engage directly with consumers, rather than waiting for traditional commissions, and so reaping longer-term and larger profits
The conference will include seminars and discussions led by internationally-respected experts on:
- Commissioning and Producing for Convergence
- The Future of Distribution
- What does convergence mean for the Welsh creative industries?
- Cross-media idea development
- New media business models
- Transmedia Storytelling.
- Working with Higher Education
- How to Plan a Cross-Platform Production
- Making the most of what is around you: Games and the ARG
- Exporting Creativity
- Your fans, family and friends are your funders
The conference will also include networking time with experts and alumni from Crossover Labs and Doc/Fest’s MeetMarket.
NEW LOCATION - Convergence Catalyst takes place at Brangwyn Hall in Swansea, on December 1st and 2nd.
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:
Slava Rubin (IndieGoGo)
Sean Coleman (Red Kingdom)
Marc Goodchild (Formerly Head of Interactive at BBC Childrens)
Mark Atkin (Documentary Campus)
Emily James (Leftfield Films)
Peter Gerard (Distrify)
Jo Roach (Multimedia Exec Producer)
Simon Smith (BBC Academy)
Jeanie Finlay (Glimmer Films)
Alex Connock (PRETEND)
Roger Graef (Films of Record)
Al Morrow (Met Film)
Siobhan O'Flynn (Transmedia Consultant, Toronto)
Mandy Rose (Collab Docs)
Heather Leach (Ginger Army)
Speakers will continue to be confirmed in the coming weeks, so watch this space!
From the CBC:
MASHUP CHALLENGE RULES AND REGULATIONS
Rules
Demystifying McLuhan: Audio/Video Mashup – Contest Rules (“Contest”)
From 12:00am EDT on October 31 to 11:59pm EDT on November 13, 2011 (“Contest Period”).
1. TO ENTER
To enter the Contest, create a piece of media composed of two or more bits of different content and demonstrating the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (“Mashup”) as defined at http://www.cbc.ca/mcluhan/mashup-challenge/index.html (the “Website”).
You must submit your Mashup to http://mcluhan.projects.fm/enter along with your name and email address, or login via a valid Facebook account linked to your email account. Mashups must be in one of the identified acceptable formats as indicated on the Website and must be under one gigabyte in size and under three minutes in duration if the Mashup is in a streaming media format.
To be valid, all entries must be received by 11:59 pm EDT, Sunday November 13th, 2011. Contestants may submit more than one Mashup, but each Mashup must be unique.
The odds of winning a prize are directly related to the number of eligible entries.
No purchase required.
2. MAKING YOUR MASHUP
Mashups must be your original work, and must not violate the rights of any third party. To create your Mashup, you can use material: (a) provided by CBC on the Website for the purposes of this Contest, or (b) created solely by you. You can only use elements created by a third party (including without limitation music, photographs or video) if you are authorized to use such elements in any medium whatsoever worldwide in perpetuity.....
Complete Rules on CBC:
http://www.cbc.ca/mcluhan/rules-mashup.html#.TrPs0WDTKfQ
We’re creating a video game with no graphics, played entirely using audio. It is an audio adventure, set in a fully 3D world that you’ll never see.
It's called BlindSide, and it’s one of the first games to bring a brand new gaming experience to sighted players, that can also be fully enjoyed by visually impaired gamers. So far we’ve completed 10 minutes of gameplay to prove out the technology, and demonstrate that our core mechanic is fun. There have been a handful of audio-only games, but nothing like this before.
We hope to raise money on Kickstarter to complete the first 45 minute episode (which could end up providing even more gameplay, depending on your skill level) and need to pay professional actors, buy sound effects, buy software distribution licenses, support coding time, eat ramen etc. If we raise our target, we plan to launch the PC and Mac versions of the game at the end of January 2012. We’ve done the hard part, now we need to do the expensive part.
Talk: Story Architecture – Crafting Transmedia Design
Siobhan O’Flynn, Karine Halpern with Scott Walker
- How to lead audiences across different platforms is still a challenge of transmedia, and it is a crucial question for experience design.
- Stories are so popular because they communicate experiences and emotions.
- Design principles for transmedia stories:
- Non-linear spatial storytelling – whilst keeping the coherent and cohesive.
- Break the 4th wall: augmented reality. Transmedia offers tremendous opportunities for individuals to enhance their own experience of the story, to play with the content on their own terms.
- Social (relationships, sustainability, social media marketing): The sustainability of communities surrounding storyworlds becomes increasingly important. It takes a huge amount of commitment and energy to foster and maintain fan communities, and stopping this fostering and maintenance is a seen as a betrayal of the audience by the fans. Producers must be aware of this from the very beginning.
- Participatory and/or UGC: Both allow the audience to move from passive to active by offering opportunities to ‘touch’ the canon.
- Transmedia allows for a shift towards spatial design:
- Non-linear narratives open new narrative spaces for audiences
- Fans can move between multiple platforms (spaces)
- Characterss and story archs extend over time and across platforms
- There are multiple points of entry into the story universe
- There is increased room for interactivity
- Producers need to ask themselves what the audience experience is supposed to be - thrill, threat, excitement, competition, for example – and base their narrative design on this experience type throughout all platforms.
- Your story and the technology are only two tools in transmedia storytelling. Your audience also becomes a tool in itself, particularly through interactivity and participation. This means that as a producer, you must understand people’s behaviors, their instincts and needs, etc. and use this knowledge to shape the transmedia experience.
- The 5 “E’s” of experience design:
- Entice – You have to find a way to invite your audience into your experience, and to lead them across the different platforms involved. Often, teasing them helps to accomplish this.
- Enter – Once the audience enters your transmedia experience, you must make it clear to them what they have to do and what is expected of them. Direct them through the use of appropriate sign posts; genre, familiar story archs, and characters are very strong cues as well.
- Engage – Now that your audience is invested in your experience, allow them to engage with it and to derive satisfaction from the engagement.
- E-motion – Even if your audience is invested in your experience, they can still leave easily. You have to find ways to prevent audiences from leaving and to move them deeper into the experience instead. Once one sub-set of the overall experience is finished, help them to move to the next.
- Extend – Help your audience to share the experience and to draw in others.
- Designing a transmedia narrative doesn’t mean there is no ending to the story. There has to be a grand narrative composed of many smaller narratives, and all of them have satisfying endings in themselves.
My Panel with the Amazing Karine Halpern!
« Big Shout Out to Christine Weitbrecht for the capture!
Every theme park designer should know what's been done in the past. Benchmarks and precedents are extremely important. With that in mind, you should learn the ten guidelines to theme park design developed by Walt Disney Imagineering President Marty Sklar.
Mickey's 10 Commandments
1. Know your audience - Don't bore people, talk down to them or lose them by assuming that they know what you know.
2. Wear your guest's shoes - Insist that designers, staff and your board members experience your facility as visitors as often as possible.
3. Organize the flow of people and ideas - Use good story telling techniques, tell good stories not lectures, lay out your exhibit with a clear logic.
4. Create a weenie - Lead visitors from one area to another by creating visual magnets and giving visitors rewards for making the journey
5. Communicate with visual literacy - Make good use of all the non-verbal ways of communication - color, shape, form, texture.
6. Avoid overload - Resist the temptation to tell too much, to have too many objects, don't force people to swallow more than they can digest, try to stimulate and provide guidance to those who want more.
7. Tell one story at a time - If you have a lot of information divide it into distinct, logical, organized stories, people can absorb and retain information more clearly if the path to the next concept is clear and logical.
8. Avoid contradiction - Clear institutional identity helps give you the competitive edge. Public needs to know who you are and what differentiates you from other institutions they may have seen.
9. For every ounce of treatment , provide a ton of fun - How do you woo people from all other temptations? Give people plenty of opportunity to enjoy themselves by emphasizing ways that let people participate in the experience and by making your environment rich and appealing to all senses.
10. Keep it up - Never underestimate the importance of cleanliness and routine maintenance, people expect to get a good show every time, people will comment more on broken and dirty stuff.
Martin Sklar, Walt Disney Imagineering, Education vs. Entertainment: Competing for audiences, AAM Annual meeting, 1987
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"...King Abdullah II is more connected to Star Trek than you can imagine. The royal highness actually did a cameo in Star Trek: Voyager, but because of the fact that he wasn’t a member of the Screen Actors Guild, he wasn’t allowed to speak any lines However, he is in there, and you can check it out yourself in the clip below. It’s too hard to say at this point what exactly this awesome theme park might hold, but the park itself is said to be scheduled to open sometime during 2014. Oh how many Star Trek fans are jumping up and down right now? It’s going to be a blast I am sure. So what camp are you a part of, Star Trek or Star Wars? Why is it the best?..."
http://www.bitrebels.com/geek/king-of-jordan-builds-1-5-billion-star-trek-the...
iOS iPhone
Prepare to experience a spine-tingling supernatural game at the Storyworld Conference 2011.
It’s Halloween in San Francisco, evil’s lurking in the city & you’re a Paranormal Investigator. Occultist & transmedia producer Oliver Drew has mysteriously disappeared & you’ve got his phone, but there’s a catch - it’s haunted.. Read strange emails, listen to creepy voicemails & find clues to break the hex on his secret documents; but, be warned: a wicked & terrifying force is calling.
Will you answer the phone? Can you save Oliver’s soul? Dare you take a spin with death?
- Wear headphones for horror
Features:
* A three-day horror ride through the spirit world to find Oliver Drew
* Decipher his private emails, SMS messages and documents
* Listen to his chilling voicemails
* See who he follows on Twitter
* Scan QR codes to reveal maps & spooky hidden content
* Take freaky calls from ghosts & phantoms
* Discover frightening video & audio content with intense effects
* Access a Storyworld Conference 2011 timetable with a twist
* Solve clues to break in to the hexed documents folder
* Find out what’s behind the mysterious cursed zoetrope
* Inject fear into your conference experience & compete for a chance to decide Oliver’s fate