Universe Creation 101

A few years ago I was lucky to be invited by Gary Hayes to be a mentor for a new laboratory that was being developed by the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Those were the heady days of the Laboratory of Advanced Media Production (LAMP), when this great range of mentors and participants (and onlooking VIPs) spent a week in some exotic location guiding traditional media practitioners into the great new horizon of new media. I was the cross-media person, which, in 2005, was not a common concept. It has only been in the last couple of years (with the help of Henry Jenkins’s book Convergence Culture) that aspects of the area have caught fire in the mainstream). So over those first few LAMPs my talks were ever changing — adopting whatever terminology and approaches seemed to explain the concept best to those new to the area. Well, now you can have a look at those ppts, as some of them are online at SlideShare, and here! OMG!

(Read on …)

Well, not quite ‘death’ but an indefinite hiatus. I’m powering down this blog for a few reasons, one of which is my desire to finish my PhD. I’ve tried for the last year and a half to do PhD writing and work and this blog, but found the mindsets are somewhat incompatable. I’ve decided therefore to close this blog down. I don’t know if I’ll bring it up again and if I do when, or whether I’ll start another one. But I do know that I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging here these past few years. I have especially enjoyed meeting many of you because of the blog, and seeing ‘cross-media’ (etc) projects become ubiquitous. Thankfully, the area has alot more people looking at it now, from alot of different perspectives. Here are some blogs that will keep you informed:

• Networked Performance: research blog that posts about emerging network-enabled practice;
• You can read and listen to news about alternate reality games and just about any online extension of a film, TV or book property on the ARGNet blog and ARG Netcast (podcast);
• Henry Jenkins personal blog and the Convergence Culture Consortium blog has lots of goodies from a media studies perspective about ‘transmedia storytelling’ and ‘convergence culture’ in general;
• DeMontfort University share their investigations into what they term ’Transliteracy’ at their PART blog;
• Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner and longtime practitioner of ‘trans-media’ projects, is now blogging regularly about his insights and experience over at the Producers Guild of America blog;
• Monique de Haas blogs about ‘crossmedia communication’ occasionally;
• Tony Walsh posts semi-regularly on alternate reality games;
• Valentina Rao blogs about crossmedia games and anything related to that at Games Across Media, and will hopefully be starting her PhD on the subject soon;
• Johnathan Gray, Derek Johnson and Ivan Askwith are blogging about everything around TV and film at The Extratextuals;
• Crossmedia Dialog is a group blog that post regularly on crossmedia in Amsterdam and worldwide;
• Faris Yakob, Adam Crowe blog about ‘transmedia planning’ and other changes to the marketing industry;
• Jak Boumans posts every single day about stuff happening in the Netherlands and worldwide at Buziaulane; 
• Max Giovognoli runs everything to do with cross-media in Italy;
• MobileCrossMedia is a blog that looks at the different ways mobile phones can network with different devices and the real world;
• If you don’t already get it, the Convergence Newsletter has regular interesting newsletters about convergence in journalism and has been my favourite newsletter for the past few years;

I don’t plan to be blogging here about events or publications I’m involved in, instead I’ll pop them on my bio site. But for now, here are some events I’m involved with, in the not-too-distant-future:

• I’ll be on the ‘expert panel’ with Mark McCrindle and Tim Flattery at Mitchell Communications Group ’s launch of ‘While You Weren’t Watching’, a documentary on changes to branded entertainment etc in which I was interviewed. The launch is private but the documentary will be put online I believe in Nov; 
• I have my own panel on ‘Designing, Experiencing and Analysing Games in the Age of Integration’, and I am a panelist in Darren Toft’s panel on ‘What Happened to New Media Art?’ at the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Dec;
• I’ll be on the panel on ‘Cyber-Born Film’ at Megan Spencer’s Destination Festival (or DestFest) in Dec;
• In Jan 08, I’ll be a guest lecturer again for Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media, De Montfort University, UK;
• In Feb 08, my essay on ‘Tiering in Alternate Reality Games’ will be published in the special issue of Convergence edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze.

For now though, I will continue to be online in a different way. I’ve started a podcast, a podcast where I’ll interview talented people working in this area. My ‘birth’ podcast is a bit awkward, but the second is a great one: an interview with Stitch Media’s Evan Jones. At the site, I also provide sneak preview information about Stitch Media’s latest project.

That is it for me here, thankyou all for sharing this time with me. I’ll see you on the other side of my PhD.

Check it out: www.ChristyDena.com  

Check it out: www.UniverseCreation101.com

I found these on John August’s blog. Priceless.

From Crackle: Script Cops, Ep 1: Domestic Disturbance

From Crackle: Script Cops, Ep 3: Traffic Stop

A couple of years ago Scott Donaton, the editor of Advertising Age, published a book called Madison & Vine: Why the Entertainment and Marketing Industries Must Converge to Survive. Scott revisited ‘branded entertainment’ in a talk he gave recently, which has been published at the Madison & Vine section of Advertising Age. In the article he quickly explains what Madison & Vine is:

At its simplest, there were two primary factors that drove the entertainment and marketing businesses reluctantly into each other’s arms. For marketers, as I mentioned earlier, there was fear. New devices such as digital video recorders were giving audiences the ability to bypass traditional forms of media advertising. These devices let consumers decide when, how and whether they were going to interact with all forms of content. So some in the ad community decided that if they were going to avoid commercials, one valid reaction to that would be to embed products, logos and commercial messages into those entertainment vehicles viewers were choosing to spend time with.

Across the continent from Madison Avenue, those in Hollywood found their own business models and bottom lines under enormous pressure, partly from the same factors. There were other pressures felt all over Hollywood. For film studios, the costs of producing and marketing films became a huge burden just as some traditional sources of funding dried up. And the movie-business, too, was threatened by the same technologies disrupting the TV and music industries.

The result was that these two sides, the ad business and the entertainment business, which decades ago established outposts on separate coasts of the U.S. and mostly operated independently of each other since then were suddenly compelled towards each other. They realized that they had the potential to help each other out. If nothing else, the advertisers had the money and the entertainment companies had the creativity and the attention of audiences.

And covers some notable examples:

• Paramount Pictures, Hasbro and General Motors: Transformers feature film
• BMW: The Hire film series, comics and game
• Virgin America: Virgin Americans animated series
• Dove: Evolution video, part of Campaign for Real Beauty
• Sundance Channel and Grey Goose Vodka: Iconoclasts interview series
• Burger King: games
• Volvo and MSN: Mr Robinson’s Driving School
• Axe and MTV: The Game Killers

Check it out: http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article.php?article_id=121042

UK-based Hi-ReS! (Handsome information - Radical entertainment Systems), founded in 1999 by Alexandra Jugovic and Florian Schmitt, have been creating amazing award-winning websites for the film, TV, music and marketing industries for a few years now. Some of their sites, like Requiem for a Dream and Donnie Darko, I mention in my article about ‘Filmmakers That Think Outside the Film‘ over at Lance Weiler’s WorkBookProject. Here is a listing of some of the sites they’ve worked on:

• Soulbath (1999)
• DJ Vadim (1999)
• Requiem for a Dream (2000)
• Donnie Darko (2001)
• The Center of the World (2001)
• Business of Strangers (2001)
• Modjo Music (2001)
• Diesel Stylelab (2002)
• The Lexus Minority Report Experience (2002)
• The Third Place (for Sony’s PlayStation 2) (2002)
• The Dreamers (2003)
• Massive Attack (2003)
• Six Feet Under (2003)
• The Punisher (2004)
• Miles Aldridge (2004)
• BMW Carparc1 (2004)
• …
• The Lost Experience websites (2006)
• The Fountain (2006)
• Beck’s website

Any day now a book (with DVD), Hi-res!: Amantes sunt Amentes, detailing their projects will be published. You can preorder at: Amazon UK and Amazon US. Great stuff!

Those who have attended one of my presentations over the last few years will recall Peter Greenaway’s multi-platform project: The Tulse Luper Suitcases. One part of this massive work is the online game Tulse Luper Journey. Here is some info about the TLS and the TLJ from the game’s site:

Tulse Luper is the lead character in an ambitious series of projects initiated by film director Peter Greenaway.
So far, the project includes three feature films, a series of DVD’s, travelling exhibitions, books, publications and this online game produced by Submarine.

These are all part of a growing universe of stories, facts, fiction, history and drama based on the adventures of a man who spent most of his live as a prisoner - mistaken for someone important, a spy, a lover, an artist, a writer and an observer. 

Greenaways statement that “cinema is dead” calls for new ways of communicating ideas. This game is part of the search for a crossover format that breaks the boundaries and rules that have been imposed by film, theatre, books, games and other traditional media.

Created by developers, artists and students from around Europe, The Tulse Luper Journey explores new boundaries of online interactive media.

The online game finishes on October 15, so all those “researchers” out there are prompted to hand in their findings pronto.

Check it out: http://www.tulseluperjourney.com/

New Line Cinema CEOs Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne were interviewed on the Charlie Rose show. They talk about the importance of franchise sequels being equal to or better each time; online fans and Snakes on a Plane; digital on-demand cinemas; simultaneous release across media; audience testing; gambling on Lord of the Rings; merging with Ted Turner and then TimeWarner; the importance of passion…

• Charlie Rose interview

From Peter at the Criterion blog, comes this gem created by Alonzo Mosely:

[youtube FExqG6LdWHU]

If you’re interested, Alonzo has put the full list of films at his blog.

X Timeline is a site that provides a system for anyone to create timelines of any topic, and embed them on another site. There are plenty for entertainment — in particular properties, technology timelines and so on. This technology makes it easier to share what fans and researchers have been doing for a very long time.

Check it out: http://xtimeline.com/

This is on old one (oct 2006) but I only just discovered it from Vassilen’s site Mobile Aesthetic. The mobile series is distributed in the UK through O2, T-Mobile and 3; and in the US through amp’d mobile. The series of 20×2 minute episodes, directed by Johannes Roberts, will be available as a feature film on DVD soon. I’ll add it to my Mobile Drama Round Up.

Check it out: www.whenevilcalls.tv