Brian Seth Hurst's StoryCentered Column Features Brain Candy's Scott Walker Discussing Fan Fiction and Fan Communities | InteractiveTV Today

[itvt] is pleased to present the latest edition of StoryCentered (formerly "StoryCentric"), our video column from Brian Seth Hurst, CEO of The Opportunity Management Company and former second vice chair of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. StoryCentered focuses on the business, technology and art of interactive storytelling, and highlights new technologies and other industry developments that have the potential to fundamentally change the way we create and interact with stories and narratives--in television and beyond.

Solid Interview! Mastering Film » Digging Deep – Tyler Weaver Interviews Frank Rose

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Excerpt:

TW: In your book, you give reasons as to why, in spite of being part of a hugely successful television phenomenon like LOST, the ARG The LOST Experience didn’t live up to what it could have been. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that, and some of the risk involved when creatives used to working in one medium have to shift their focus and learn an entirely new one?

FR: I think that’s part of the difficulty. And the other part of the difficulty is what happens when you blur the line between marketing and entertainment. One of the main points in the book I think is that the Internet tends to blur all kinds of boundaries. There are others as well, like the boundary between fiction and reality – which is what I was referencing earlier when I was referencing the fact that people who were watching early web video series would start writing into the characters as if they were real.

There are many ways in which marketing and entertainment are being blurred now. Certainly ARGs are one of them. Even though the Year Zero game was not meant to be a marketing campaign (in fact, Trent [Reznor] paid for it out of his own money rather than letting the record companies pay for it), things can get very bolloxed up.

With most of the ARGs that 42 [Entertainment] has done like Why So Serious for The Dark Knight and Year Zero and so forth, they’ve been very well structured. With The LOST Experience, it was not done in nearly so savvy a way. In particular, there seems to have been a lot of miscommunication between the marketing people at ABC and the showrunners for LOST, and things started to get bolloxed up when they tried to get the sponsors for the show involved in The LOST Experience. And it’s not impossible to do that in a way that works, but as with something so simple as product placement, it’s also real easy to screw it up. Anything that’s going to be too obvious is going to screw it up.

With The LOST Experience, what the people who were creating it realized was that they were expected not only to work the advertisers in but they were expected to drive traffic to the advertiser’s websites, which is an entirely ridiculous idea. For the most part, advertisers have given up even trying to drive traffic to micro-sites – they’re much more likely to go on Facebook for something.

There was no clear understanding — or very savvy understanding — who it was for. That’s often an issue. Things like this are very good at building excitement for something. Typically, they’re not too good at bringing in an entirely new audience. They tend to be more for the committed fans, and what they’re good at is making committed fans more committed, and getting them to share things with other people. But you don’t typically bring in tons of entirely new fans through something like this.

DEFINING TRANSMEDIA – TO AN 85-YEAR-OLD GRANDMOTHER

TW: I’m back in Ohio, around family who look at me and ask “what the hell do you do exactly?” So, on that note, what is Transmedia? But with a twist. How would you define it to an 85-year-old grandmother in the middle of nowhere?

FR: As you probably know, I’m not a big fan of the word transmedia. The idea that people tell stories across multiple media forms in different levels of depth, all of that sort of thing. But how would you explain it to an 85-year old grandmother? (Laughs)

TW: I’ve been struggling with that one myself.

FR: There’s a sense in which people tend to get immersed in all kinds of entertainment, and this is really just another way of making entertainment more immersive. I do see it to some extent as a generational phenomenon, not that it’s only under 30-year-olds who are into it, but for people under 30, probably under 20, it’s an entirely natural way of communicating. People who grow up with all sorts of different screens around them and expect that you’ll be able move more or less seamlessly between one type of screen to another, and the technology hasn’t really kept pace with people’s expectations of it, which is actually often the case.

The idea of immersiveness — that’s something just about anybody can understand. The specifics of how do you combine a TV show with a web component and a comic book or whatever, I think those are — obviously they’re important to anyone who’s a producer — but to a consumer (that’s a word I hate), to people who are enjoying these stories one way or another, it really doesn’t matter. Any way that is possible for them to engage with it is something they’re going to want to do.

What’s happening now is that people are telling the same story, or different aspects of the same story through a number of different media. Obviously that becomes more complicated, especially for the producer, but if it’s done well, it becomes seamless and potentially an immersive experience for the viewer, the reader, or the 85-year-old grandmother.

TW: What do you feel is wrong with the term “transmedia?”

FR: It puts the emphasis on the wrong place, which is the idea that you have to develop stories across different media. I think that’s one technique, and often a very effective one. But I don’t think that becomes the goal in itself. I see a fair number of people to whom that becomes the goal. I don’t think every story should become a transmedia story...."

Love: Bjork Talks About How Nature Inspired Her New, High-Tech Album - Jason Richards - Entertainment - The Atlantic

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Excerpt from a great long interview:

Atlantic:
"Between your work on Volta, Mount Wittenburg Orca with Dirty Projectors, and now Biophilia, it seems like your music has become more earth-conscious in the past few years. Why is nature a theme that is important to you in this phase of your career?

Bjork: "Nature has always been important to me. It has always been in my music. In Reykjavik, Iceland, where I was born, you are in the middle of nature surrounded by mountains and ocean. But you are still in a capital in Europe. So I have never understood why I have to choose between nature or urban. Perhaps it is just a different reality, perhaps people that live in cities abroad only experience nature for two weeks a year in their holiday, and then they experience it as some trip to Disneyland or something. That it isn't real. I have noticed the magazine shelves in cities have like music papers, porn and then like [National Geographic] describing some lost Utopian world people will never get to see... Sorry, don't mean to get defensive, but you city folks are the odd ones, not us. Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison..."

Sweet Find From Randy Matheson! LEGO’s ‘The Life of George’ Connects Physical and Virtual Gameplay

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So sweet I quote in full ;)

I can’t remember a time where I didn’t have LEGO around. There have been more than 400 billion LEGO bricks produced since 1958, that makes 58 Lego bricks per person on Earth if my math is reasonable correct. There must be at least that many still stuffed down between the couch cushions at my parent’s house.
LEGO has always been a leader in incorporating technology into the product. They created a Lego website in 1996 in the very early days on the web. They created a line of programmable robotic bricks and bit called Mindstorms, which it developed in partnership with MIT Media Labs. LEGO’s Digital Designer software lets budding designers create models using virtual bricks, then post the results online at LEGO Design ByMe and purchase the real bricks to make the design in real life.

On October 1, LEGO released it’s latest product ‘The Life of George‘, an interactive game that requires the player to recreate the items that appear in George’s vacation photographs using LEGO bricks assembled and placed on a special gridded gaming mat. Players use the free iPhone app to score to time and capture an image to test the accuracy of your LEGO building skills. The game features 12 levels of play with 10 group of photos in each level. The game begins with images from George’s trip to Hawaii including sunglasses, palm trees, a crab, even a cocktail glass(??). You can challenge yourself or battle against one of your brick-building buddies for LEGO dominance.

‘The Life of George’ kit is available for $30 at LEGO stores now. The free ‘Life of George’ app is available in the Apple app store.

Keeping It Altogether - My Fall Update of Upcoming Talks & Places to Be!

It’s a gorgeous weekend in Toronto & it’s time for an update (for me!) on a packed fall schedule 

 

Last week, I had a great time giving a talk on Crossplatform/Interactive Documentaries & Social Change to Dub Poet Lillian Allen’s class at OCADU. Talking about digital storytelling, transmedia & design strategies with poets was fabulous! hope to do more of that!

 

Next up, I will be leading the Corus Convergent Media Master Class with a select number of creative/producers as part of the kick-off to the International Women in Digital Media Summit. Great crew & I’m looking forward to our session. 2-5 Oct. 23, 2011. If you haven’t checked out the program, this will be a stellar gathering of super smart & creative people. Arianna Huffington, Christy Dena, Frank Boyd, Sheri Candler, Kat Cizek.... Registration is still open!

 

http://wift.com/digital-summit/

 

Then, a bit of a different talk on Interactive Documentaries & Social Change for Digifest on October 27. There are so many great projects right now, I’m updating my case study examples! I’m looking forward to catching as many talks as I can & especially Janine Marchessault’s installations (more info needed!!) - she is the Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media & Globalization, co-runs the Future Cinema Lab at YorkU, & will be co-curating Zone B for Nuit Blanche next year.

 

http://torontodigifest.ca/2011/

 

Then, hoping to pack some sleep in before flying out on Halloween late to San Francisco for the amazing StoryWorld Conference & Expo, which Allison Norrington deserves massive props for organizing. I’m having a blast collaborating with Karine Halpern of the Transmedia Ready 7 Families cards (co-created with Cynthia Jabar & Paul Burke), and we’re busy crafting our Architecture Design talk for 9 am Nov. 2. And yes, that’s 9 am! you must join us if you’re there! no excuses - Up to late/ hung over isn’t good enough ;) And if you haven’t booked your ticket, this will be the global hub of transmedia/crossmedia/digital storytelling conversation for the duration. Don’t miss it!

 

http://www.storyworldconference.com/ehome/20801/29548/?&

http://www.khgoblog.com/

 

Whirlwind back to TO and getting ready for the McLuhan 100 Conference, with a project launch that I’m still keeping under wraps. (Sotto voce: More deets to follow.) This week will be packed with arts events & talks not to be missed.

 

http://mcluhan100.ca/events/the-conference-festival/ 

 

And just to make the fall even busier, my SSHRC Insight Development Grant research project, Nuit Blanche and Transformational Publics with collaborator, Faisal Anwar, is in full swing. The focus of the project is on the interactions of the digital and the physical during Toronto's all night event, and on the dynamic flow of content exchanged via the social web. More deets to follow here too as the project evolves.

 

If you’re out at any of these events, come say hi! Loving this fall :)


Siobhan O'Flynn, PhD
Digital Storytelling & Strategies
1001tales.posterous.com
siobhanoflynn.com
@Sioflynn