Universe Creation 101

Last month I was lucky to be invited to present at the Power to the Pixel event, which is part of the London Film Festival.

POWER TO THE PIXEL is a not-for-profit company that provides the independent film community with the latest in depth information and knowledge about new opportunities available in the transforming digital media landscape.

I did the opening talk on the conference day, ran a workshop on the workshop day and participated in the Think Tank they ran. It was an amazing event in which I got to finally meet many people for the first time, people I have watched, conversed with online, and even worked with remotely. Liz did a fantastic job with the event. The sessions were webcast on the main site and at Screen International. They had over 10,000 people watch the webcasts, which is very cool. Well, now the videos are slowly being released online. All the conference day talks are now on the video page on the main site, but not the workshops. They are available elsewhere at Blip.tv or YouTube. There are LOTS of interesting talks there about distribution, branding, crowdsourcing and finance there. But for here I’ve embeded the videos and ppts of my talk and workshop on ‘Films in the Age of Cross-Media Production’ and my workshop on ‘Writing Across Media’ respectively. Enjoy!
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In today’s post I thought I’d share so real life places I’d like to do/have enjoyed. These real places are related to the immersive entertainment and marketing area many of us are in. They are experiences that, unlike many of the online works that many people refer to all the time, you actually have to go to! While there are many wonderful museums, wonders of architecture and of course wonders of nature, I thought I’d highlight an unusual mix of places and events related to the wacky area of immersive entertainment and marketing. Here are some to get the list going. I’d love to hear of places or events you love.

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 ep004_TimWright: Download

Another podcast! Yay! At this rate I might even crack three podcasts a year. hehe. Joking aside, I’m excited about our guest today. UK digital writer Tim Wright shares his vast experience with over a decade with online interactive drama and more recently multiplatform storytelling. Below is a time guide showing you topics Tim touches on a certain points. Everything Tim (and I) refer to is in the show notes.

00.00: Online Caroline
11.10: Lonely Girl 15
13.18: closure
15.58: Balancing world creation and fan fiction
19.56: Mount Kristos
25.33: The Search of Oldton
39.32: Multiplatform storytelling
52.09: Scaling
Happiness…

Show notes:

• Jill Walker-Rettberg’s essay: ‘How I was played by Online Caroline’
• Rob Bevan
• MindGym
• Jenny Cam
• Online Caroline
• XPT (fictional company)
• Richardson’s Pamela
• Lonely Girl 15
• Mount Kristos
• Kate Modern
• You Sucjk at Photoshop
• In Search of Oldton
• Writers for the Future
• trAce Online Writing Centre
• Sue Thomas
• Multiplatform Storytelling for Screenwriters @ 01ZERO-ONE
• Ted
• The Lost Ring ‘Running of the Labyrinth’ instructions
• Jane McGonigal’s SXSW presentation: Alternate Realities (PPT at SlideShare)

More info about Tim:

• Tim Wright’s blog
• XPT (Wright & Bevan’s company)

Other interviews conducted at UC101:

• Lance Weiler (video)
• Evan Jones (audio and text transcript)

Postscript:
Sorry about the technical difficulties with the podcast. The video editing software I use doesn’t let me do edits to the second, and I’m still trying to figure out how to get both myself and the interviewer at the same sound level. Tim teases me about being in a black room (it was midnight for me!), and being close to the screen with bad lighting. What can I say, I’m an interactive drama cliche. I’ll have to increase the drama with a call to save the world or something.

Hello everyone! Today we’ll delve into segmentation techniques. By segmentation I refer to the various ways unique content can be continued across different media platforms. This doesn’t mean cutting up content created for a single session (a feature film for instance) and then delivering it in parts (although you can do that!). But here I’m referring specifically writing or designing the production with a certain episodic structure in mind. While the notion of episodics is fairly understood, what isn’t is the variety of episodic techniques available and how these can be utilized in a cross-platform project. So, in this post I’ll outline ways a production can be designed for multi-platform segmentation.

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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!

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Hello everybody!

Firstly, a quick thanks for the new subscribers to this blog. Some of you have joined up here because of my ‘Cross-Media’ presentation for DIYDays.com, but most of you because of my prompt at my old site www.Cross-MediaEntertainment.com. As you know, I’m closing that feed off and will be staying with this one. Welcome everyone!

So, onto business!

Today we’ll look at technologies used to manage cross/trans/multi-platform/media projects. I’m not talking about cross-media measurement, but about the tools you can use to deliver and manage your content across media platforms. I’ve selected a range of technologies used in alternate reality games, pervasive games, location-based games and interactive TV:

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Manifestos can be wonderful community-forming, revolution ranting things. I cannot recall why (I just needed to I think) but I created my own little silly declaration in 2005:

A cross-media creator is a conductor of an orchestra of media channels & arts types; an imagineer, constructing fictional worlds that cover the planet; a programmer, interpreting conversations between technology and nature; a sorcerer conjuring awesome events even they are surprised by; an audience member that wanted more, and so made a pact with The Creator to change the world.

But, I’ve realised it is time to dust off a few great ones from creators both past and present. I chose the following according to how well they matched two things: related to cross-media/multiplatform/transmedia/360content and whether they functioned in some way according this this definition of a manifesto in Wikipedia:

A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature, but may also be life stance related. [source]

So, here they are, listed in chronological order (oldest to newest):

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I thought Jay Smooth of ill doctrine explained the non-post-guilt-perfection-cycle really well, so, over to him:

No more little-hater-don’t-post-cycles!!! One strategy I’m using to get around this (and lack of time) is to do ‘uninterviews’. So, expect some more chats with great people experimenting with cross/trans/multi-platform/media/entertainment/storytelling/games soon!

In the previous podcast interview, Lance Weiler spoke about a special festival and conference for filmmakers: From Here to Awesome and DIYDays.

The festival will play out in theaters, living rooms, online and via mobile devices and the conference (DIY DAYS) has become a series of live discussions in LA, SF, Boston, NYC and London. Our goal is to create an open discussion and debate that will evolve over the next four months.

I was lucky to be asked to contribute a remote presentation for DIYDays. Lance asked me to do a primer on cross-media and so I decided to do ‘The Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of Cross-Media’. I was half-way through my video edits when everything went caput. So, I rejigged it and created a conversational powerpoint. It is now online at DIYDays…and here:

Let me know what you think!

And check out all the amazing videos from the great collection of remote contributors — Brett Gaylor, Brian Chirls, Matt Hanson and Timo Vuorensolaand — and from the live sessions:

• DIYDays
• From Here to Awesome