Universe Creation 101

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 kept forgeting to post about this but just in case there are some of you that not aware of what Radiohead are doing, here it is. Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows, will be released in December but you can preorder at their website. Rather than just offer the CDs for buying, Radiohead have undertaken four very important strategies:

1. Cross-media bundling: When you purchase the album on their website, you get the box set which includes the music on CDs, the music on vinyl and as a digital file. They use the method common in the online pornography industry: order the tangible product, it’ll get posted to you, but while you wait you can download the file immediately. Considering the subject matter of the pornos, I can understand the desire for immediacy. :/ The point about cross-media bunding, however, is that it acknowledges the affordances and in the case of the vinyl, the sentimental and connisseur value of certain media. It also acknowledges the reality of use: people use lots of different media platforms to experience a product. A CD on the stereo for instance, digital files on the iPod and so on. The content is not bound to a particular medium.
2. Staggered release: The digital download is available as of 10th October, about two months before the boxset. This helps build awareness and familiarity with the product, which should translate to sales of the boxset with its added value.
3. Enhanced material: Like the pervasive method of the feature film DVD industry, the product provides extra materials such as new songs on top of the album, photos and artwork (which, I note, has also been used in the music industry as well). The digital download and obviously any pirated files, will not have this added value.
4. Consumer-defined price: The price of the digital download is not pre-defined, instead, the consumer (person!) can name any price they want to pay for the download. They can even put in nothing. Amazing. Obviously this is not something that most bands or creators in general can do. Radiohead are in a financial position to take such giant leaps. But gee it is great. I personally cannot stand the tactic producers use to combat pirating by locking their material and so this free-will counter-balance is endearing to me.

There is so much I could say but no need to delay you any longer.

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

Robert Kozinet, of Brandthroposophy:

“What Does DRM Really Stand For? Whack-a-Mole!”

Read his full post: http://kozinets.net/archives/53

Lance Weiler, the director of the film The Last Broadcast (which has been described as the “original Blair Witch Project”) released another film last september: Head Trauma. What is interesting about the project is the STACK OF GREAT THINGS HE HAS DONE with the film!! Firstly, he or the film has a presence on many social networking sites, such as MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and faciltiates community with his blog and vlog. He gives back to the community too, by providing information about DIY filmmaking on the DVD and has an “open source repository on filmmaking“. 

Second, he has a great graphic novel on the main website, which is half comic/half vignettes of the film. It feels like a cross between the “webler” that was created for Peter Greenaway’s transmedia project The Tulse Luper Suitcases using stills and audio from the film and the graphic novels used in the Heroes 360 Experience (I love the integration of the graphic novel and film narratives by the way).

Thirdly, he has created an alternate soundtrack of the film ala Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of Oz. Lance describes it at the HTMySpace site:

We created an alternate soundtrack for my newest feature film HEAD TRAUMA. The soundtrack CD is meant to be cued up with a special scene on the DVD of the movie. So if you turn down the volume on the TV and turn up the volume on the stereo you’ll get an alternate soundtrack experience.

Here is their movie describing the process. Lance calls it “a natural extension to the narrative”. This extension actually seems more like the album Haunted that accompanied Mark X. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. But back to Head Trauma. You have to go another website (www.parkthevan.com) to find the secret scene to synch the music with…and the synch scene is perfect. I really like the way link love is shared with this distribution of clues. Rather than create a whole lot of sites yourself, embed clues in sites of fellow crew etc. Share the link love. Lance sees the alternate versions, the remixing as being integral to the story too:

Philadelphia Weekly Online reports:

You’ve released a Dark Side of Oz-style alternate soundtrack CD of your film called Cursed: The Head Trauma Music Project with people like Dr. Dog, Bardo Pond and Sun Ra’s Marshall Allen. Is this screening a continuation of that?

“Yeah. Because Head Trauma deals with the fragmentation of memory, I thought it’d be cool to create other versions of the film. Movies kind of get stuck by being the same thing over and over again. A band can go and play and reinterpret their music, or fans can reinterpret it by doing covers. Films don’t have that option.”

This interweaving of snippets of memory and remixing (and sharing the filmmaking etc) is something that the team behind SMSSugarman in South Africa have been developing too. But, one difference is what Lance offers as a new cinema experience. This is where we get to cool point number four. I’ll let the the press release tell the good news:

In what has been called a cinema ARG (alternate reality game) HEAD TRAUMA is taking a hybrid of music, movies and gaming on the road for a number of special event screenings 

The event consists of three core elements.

1. A screening of HEAD TRAUMA with a live soundtrack performance by Bardo Pond, Espers, Fern Knight, Marshal Allen (Sun Ra), Steve Garvey (Buzzcocks) and others. The music is mixed live with the dialog and sound effects tracks from the film to create a new alternate soundtrack.

2. Various props and sets from the film are setup on stage and certain characters from the film will emerge from the audience.

3. During the course of the film a phone number appears on screen. When viewers call the number they begin a game that will last through the film and follow them home.

They receive a number of cryptic clues as they are asked to solve a series of riddles. The interaction involves phone calls and text messages from the characters of HEAD TRAUMA that will lead viewers to hidden clues spread across the Internet.

“We’re trying to change the cinematic experience. We want to take the concept of narrative storytelling and move it across multiple devices and screens, so it is engaging the audience in new and different ways. People have been calling it a cinema ARG and the response to the initial screenings has been amazing. Not to mention I’m always looking for new ways to scare the audience.” Says HEAD TRAUMA creator Lance Weiler.

Bravo Lance.

HT Main site: http://www.headtraumamovie.com/

Baby Rock Records is offering lullaby versions of rock tunes so that the parents can enjoy listening as much as their bundles of joy. They’ve got lullaby versions of Metallica, ColdPlay, Bjork, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Tool, The Cure, Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, The Pixies, Queens of the Stone Age, No Doubt, Smashing Pumpkins and The Beatles.

As fortune would have it, the site was recommended to me by a stranger while I’m in the middle of a discussion on a narrative listserv about plurality. Perfect.