Cross-Media + Transmedia Entertainment

** SHORT VERSION: I’M NOW BLOGGING AT WWW.CHRISTYDENA.COM **

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

After my post about Danah Boyd’s exploration of the history of social network sites, Trebor Scholz has developed his own. It is pretty comprehensive:

This is a cross-cultural, critical history of social life on the Internet. It captures technical, cultural, and political events that influenced the evolution of computer-assisted person-to-person communication via the net. Acknowledging the role of grassroots movements, this history does not solely focus on mainstream culture with all its mergers, acquisitions, sales and markets, and the (mostly male) geeks, engineers, scientists, and garage entrepreneurs who implemented their dreams in hardware and software. It does trace the changing nature of labor and typologies of those who create value online as much as it searches for changing approaches toward control, privacy, and intellectual property. This history shows strategies for direct social change based on the technologies and practices, which already exist.

Emphasizing the role of women whenever possible, this history shows that the interests of those who used the Net as social platform shaped it in the interplay of military, scientific, entrepreneurial, activist, artistic, and altruistic agendas. The evolution of the Social Web was driven by fear, desire (to be with others), and fandom. By no means exclusively an American story, it shows instances in which users succeeded when striving for open access, jointly negotiating with corporate platform-providers.

Check it out: http://www.collectivate.net/journalisms/2007/9/26/a-history-of-the-social-web.html

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/

A few posts ago I mentioned the new blog, The Extratextuals, and an (at the time) upcoming event . The session was put together by Jeff Gomez:

 Jeff Gomez (Moderator), CEO Starlight Runner Entertainment
As the host of the seminar, PGA member Jeff will familiarize producers with the history, criteria and relevance of trans-media storytelling. An expert in the field of trans-media development and creator and producer of highly successful fictional worlds, Jeff exponentially increases the value of intellectual properties by preparing them at early phase to be extended across a wide variety of entertainment platforms. Jeff has written and produced elaborate trans-media universes (including content such as feature and episodic animation, video games, comic books, novels and web portals) for 20th Century Fox, The Coca-Cola Company, The Walt Disney Company, Acclaim Entertainment, Mattel, Hasbro and Scholastic. (bio from The Extratextuals)

Check out Starlight’s company description:

Starlight Runner Entertainment, Inc. is a leading creator of highly successful fictional worlds, maximizing the value of intellectual properties by preparing them for extension across multiple media platforms.

Starlight Runner produces animated and live-action feature films, as well as advanced media content. The company also packages books, comics and graphic novels, and develops video games and alternate reality experiences with world-renowned partners and clients.

The Producers Guild of America blog reports on Jeff Gomez’s insights at the ‘Creating Blockbuster Worlds’ event:

The 8 defining characteristics of a transmedia production:

1. Content is originated by one or a very few visionaries
2. Cross-media rollout is planned early in the life of the franchise
3. Content is distributed to three or more media platforms
4. Content is unique, adheres to platform-specific strengths, and is not repurposed from one platform to the next
5. Content is based on a single vision for the story world
6. Concerted effort is made to avoid fractures and schisms
7. Effort is vertical across company, third parties and licensees
8. Rollout features audience participatory elements, including:
   - Web portal
   - Social networking
   - Story-guided user-generated content

Examples of contemporary trans-media properties include: The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, Hot Wheels: World Race / Acceleracers, Bionicle, Pokemon, Magic: The Gathering, James Cameron’s AVATAR, many Disney projects including High School Musical, Pirates of theCaribbean, Fairies, Hannah Montana.

Great! I love reading how other people describe the form. I’ve described it in so many different ways according to my audience. I agree with all that he says though I’m wondering why he says three or more platforms rather than just two? I guess that fits in the franchise approach that he is working in. But of course, the continuation of a property across media platforms is not the exclusive domain of conglomerates.

At the IAB Leadership Forum on User-Generated Content and Social Networking held on June 4th in New York, Tom Troja (VP of Marketing for Pajamas Media) had this to say about how storytelling changes in the UGC context.

Nokia are about to launch the beta of their foray into the social networking area with Mosh.

A user-generated content platform designed specifically for use with any mobile device. Create, upload, collect and share applications (like games, software mashups, videos, blogs, music and photos) all from your mobile.

The site is password protected by screenshots are already on the web:

source

But the mobile-phone site (http://mosh.nokia.mobi) is available now:

source

Signup for the beta at: http://mosh.nokia.com/

Here are some new sites or sites that now have blogs that readers of this site may find interesting:

• Ian Bogost’s blog

Well known serious game designer at Persuasive Games, co-editor of serious game site Water Cooler Games and ludologist Ian Bogost has started his own personal blog. Indeed, it is part of a full-blown personal site aggregating his writing, books, teaching etc. Good stuff.

• Evan Jones’ blog

I’ve mentioned alternate reality game designer Evan Jones’ site Stitch Media before. Previously, however, you could just signup for a mailing list. Now Evan has a blog where he comments on the latest happenings in the TV, alternate reality gaming, extended entertainment etc sectors.

• Propagating Media

We are John Hartley, Jean Burgess and John Banks, a research team working on an ARC-funded project called The Uses of Multimedia. The main purpose of that project is to explore the extent to which new media allow for wider participation in creative innovation, and thence in the growth of knowledge.

Enjoy!

Lance Weiler – an acclaimed director films such as Head Trauma (that I posted about here) and The Last Broadcast — asked me to write an article about films and cross-media for the Workbook Project (a free resource for content creators). Of course I agreed to! So, I wrote a long article about the some of nifty things filmmakers are doing with content across mediums. I include websites, graphic novels, remixes, blogs, books, ARGs and so on. It is called ‘Filmmakers that Think Outside the Film’. Actually, I’m thinking it would be good to do a series: TV Makers that Think Outside the TV, Book Writers… I’ve got tons of stuff for all of them! Let me know if you’ve got a site or magazine appropriate to house it.

But for now, check out the article. I haven’t included EVERYTHING but I’ve put alot in. In case I’ve missed something really important though, please leave me a comment either at the Workbook Project or here. I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Check it out: http://workbookproject.com/?p=239

Democracy TV is an internet TV broadcaster. Here is their description:

There’s an opportunity to build a new, open mass medium of online television. We’re developing the Democracy internet TV platform so that watching internet video channels will be as easy as watching TV and broadcasting a channel will be open to everyone. Unlike traditional TV, everyone will have a voice.

Democracy TV is developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation. Their latest news is that they’re created a channel guide so everyone can more easily find the shows. There are so many Net TV companies out there, some by organisations and others by corporations, so I’m sure there are also Net TV Portal guides out there too. Findability is a big issue for so many, for those who do not already have a net status in some way. We’ve already got the technorati, the e-lite on the web and so the same model that the web was supposed to dispel is back again. Is there democracy on the web? There is an e-lite that has a louder voice than others but rather than reaching that status through sheer size and monetary power an individual can gain the same status through sharing, uniqueness and alot of time.

Tim (Chippy) has created an aggregator of blogs that post about “alternate reality games” (ARGs). This is a good feed to have if you’re new to the area.

Alternate Reality Game Blogs