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

Here is the blurb from Develop Mag:

TIGA Cross Media Content Conference: ‘Working with Games’ at Bafta, 195 Piccadilly Tuesday 23rd October, 9.00-5.00 at the London Games Festival.

The conference will feature speakers from the games, film, TV, advertising and web areas but the unifying theme will using games and games related skills to reach audiences.

The conference is structured to be a series of quick fire presentations from games, creative advertising, and web companies and broadcasters and one from talent agency 19 - the speakers will all point to how games skills and know–how can be applied to many applications outside the traditional games market including education with a many examples being showed for the first time:

Speakers include: Adam Singer, Peter Cowley Endemol, Peter Davies BBC, Jonathan Smith– TTGames, and Nice Tech also working on BBC virtual world application. Ubisoft will talk about their move into CG film, 19 about the how interactivity can work for the Beckhams, and Google on how games are written into their new thinking. Cimex and Pre-loaded have made inroads into the educational content market and will show examples, whilst Mark Boyd of BBH, Blitz’s Sion Lenton, IGA’s Ed Bartlett, and Dan McDevitt of Woot!media will show how there is a healthy market for games growing in advertising.

I couldn’t find anything at their site about the event but something might be up soon.

There is a new wave of cinema experiences emerging that points to the revival of the cinema event. Contrasting interactive film (which can be experienced by one person and the interaction is limited to a DVD or remote input), these cinema events require audiences to participate in some way in an event environment.

• Kinoautomat (movie vending-machine), 1967… 2007

This 1967 work by Radúz Çinçera, One Man and His House, is a film that was screened at the Montreal World Fair in a specially-constructed cinema with buttons for the audience. The film continually stops at certain points, two of the actors then come on stage and ask the audience to make their choice of direction.  This is regarded as the first interactive cinema work and is interesting too because the film was specifically designed for this interaction. However, it should be noted that the interaction (like many interactive works for various technical and skills reasons) was only the illusion of interaction. As Media Art Net observes, although a different filmic sequence was shot and screened based on the audience choice. The next choice was always the same. It has recently been revived with an English version being screened in Prague. An interview with Radúz’s daughter, Alena Çinçera , and more pics is here.

Image sourced from Media Art Net. Copyright Radúz Çinçera

• Cause and Effect , 2002/…

Inspired by Kinoautomat, Chris Hales has been creating short ‘interactive cinema performances’. Cause and Effect has been running specially-created short films since 2002 and is currently touring Poland and Finland. There is a video available for download on the site, and here is a basic description from the main page:

We experiment with various techniques of group interaction and the types of interactive film that are commensurate with it. Although using sophisticated methods, the show is designed to be portable, tourable, and suitable for most venues. Currently interaction methods enable audiences to influence films by shouting, passing around bright or coloured lights, using mobile phone handsets, waving, singing soprano and humming. A typical performance consists of around eight short interactive movies (chosen from a substantial repertoire) covering genres of video art, drama, non-fiction, education, and music. The show is both entertaining and intellectual and appeals to a wide audience demographic. It is constantly developing, with varied modes of interaction being explored and new films being regularly created. Certain films are customised for the actual theatre and the language of the country in which the show takes place during a rapid pre-production phase when we arrive at the location. This localisation adds to the audience’s surprise and involvement with the films presented to them.

Image sourced from Cause and Effect

• Lance Weiler’s “Cinema ARG”, 2006/…

As I’ve mentioned here before, Lance Weiler created a unique theatre experience for the screening of his latest film, Head Trauma. His ‘cinema ARG’ involves special screenings of the film with a band playing the soundtrack live, actors and props from the film in the audience and mobile phone interaction. It has been touring across the USA and is now expanding to the web. His latest description:

This fall the HEAD TRAUMA cinematic gaming continues. Players will interact with the film’s characters; offline, online, and via mobile devices in what is a cross between flash mobs, urban gaming, and ARGs. The game starts in late September with the airing of a special web series. The series will run across a number of outlets such as myspace, xbox, twitter, eyespot, stage 6 and opera. Then on Oct. 20th, live cinema games will play out in 10 cities across the country. Within the series are clues aka rabbit holes that lead to hidden sites, blogs, social networking pages and media. A full list of cities will be released in the coming weeks.

• MSNBC’s Newsbreaker Game, 2007

As I’ve mentioned before in my post that includes stats on its success, this example is an interactive cinema advertisement. They actually call the work ‘interactive crowd gaming’ in movie theatres. It was created by SS+K in collaboration with Brand Experience Lab for msnbc.com. Here is a video of one of the cinema events:

[youtube y6izXII54Qc]

All of these works show without doubt the reinvigoration of the embodied and multi-modal cinema experience. What I find exciting are the fact that many of these works (and more to come I’m sure) are being specially designed. Do you know of some other interactive cinema performances/gaming?

Tomorrow I’ll flying to Perth:

Perth DAC: The Future of Digital Media Culture:

The Future of Digital Media Culture
In the early 1990s, the very term digital was new and novel. However, it has taken only fifteen years for e-mail, the Internet, mobile phones, the power of searchable databases, games, film and TV special effects and workplace software tools to become a common and essential part of modern life. Research has not only described the arrival of these new forms, but is increasingly addressing the unexpected social and cultural uses of digital communications and virtual work/play environments.

In the same historically brief time, popular attention has turned to the potentials and problems of the newer new technologies, bio and nano. In addition, the global phenomenon of terrorism, super-epidemics and climate change have developed from distant concerns to everyday realities. Thus the context for digitally mediated processes is also very different.

perthDAC 2007 will explore the complex interaction of human behaviour and new technologies that will be The Future of Digital Media Culture.

I’ll be presenting a paper in which I argue that the future of digital media doesn’t just include digital media.

On Monday 17th, I’ll be presenting on Filmmaking in the Age of Cross-Media Production for the Film and TV Institute.

I look foward to seeing some colleagues and family I haven’t seen in a while, and meeting people for the first time.

The Boston Interactive Media Association (BIMA) is holding it’s 3rd Annual Cross Media Forum on September 18th 2007 in Boston. It is described on the site as follows:

In the ever-changing and increasingly fragmented media environment, marketers must develop multi-platform advertising strategies to effectively reach their target markets.  The BIMA Cross Media Forum was created to bring together leading agencies, marketers and publishers to have an open dialogue on the challenges, successes and realities of executing across multi-media platforms. Now in its third year, this half day forum includes case studies and panel discussions offering actionable, solutions-oriented recommendations for both planning and implementing successful cross media programs.

Keynote Speaker: Peter Hirshberg, Chairman, Technorati

Session 1: Overcoming the Obstacles to Cross Channel Integration     
Moderator: Kate Kaye, Editor, News and Special Projects, ClickZ
Panelists: Erin Matts, Group Director of Strategy, Digital, OMD; John Moore, SVP, Director of Ideas and Innovation, Mullen; Kristen O’Hara, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Time Warner Global Marketing; Traci Topham, Vice President, Interactive Ad Sales Marketing, Scripps Networks; Lisa Valentino, Senior Director Digital Sales, ESPN

A cross channel campaign that uses multiple touch points to convey brand position and key marketing messages is the ideal way for advertisers to overcome fragmentation and clutter. The reality is that buyers and sellers alike face numerous obstacles as they strive to develop truly integrated media programs. As a marketer, how do you contend with the fact that most companies are not structured to reward integration? How do publishers manage and balance the needs of multiple participants from the agency side? What does it take to get representatives from different channels to work together to come up with an integrated solution that supports the “big idea?”
 
Join a distinguished group of panelists from leading agencies and publishers as they share their insights on how to overcome these and other challenges and successfully shape cross channel campaigns.
_________________________________________________________

Session 2: Breakout Sessions - B2B & B2C Case Studies

Planning an integrated campaign is difficult but there are many agencies & marketers who have pulled it off successfully.  Hear their secrets of success.
_________________________________________________________

Session 3: What to Do, What to Look For, and What to Avoid When Executing Cross Media
Moderator: Ken Dec, Chief Measurement Officer, Director of Strategic Planning, PARTNERS+simons
Panelists to Date: Kerry Benson, SVP/Account Director for Liberty Mutual, Hill Holliday; Erica Crossen, Senior Manager Operations, Brightcove; Mike Lacorazza, VP/Director of Marketing, Digitas; Erin McSheffrey, Director of Program Management, Carat

Once you have successfully planned, sold and gained approval to implement a cross channel campaign, the work doesn’t end there. Even an expertly integrated plan can falter in execution if you do not take a number of additional factors into consideration. Have you secured the T&R rights to run the creative across all recommended platforms?  Does your creative messaging translate across all channels?  How do you compare and measure the success of each medium and its overall impact on the campaign?  Join our panel of implementers - creative, traffic, messaging, production and measurement team members - to receive essential tips for executing successful cross media
programs.

DigiDocs 360 is a new strand of programming at Doc/Fest, dedicated to exploring the digital revolution in broadcasting and the impact that convergence, digitisation and interactivity will have on documentary production and delivery.

DigiDocs 360 is a unique opportunity to hear about the national and international opportunites available for producers looking to embrace multi-platform production.

Speakers include:

Frank Boyd, Unexpected Media
Adam Gee, Channel 4
Marc Goodchild, BBC
Cassian Harrison, Smokefall
Morgan Holt, 3
Chris Joyner, Katalyst
Fleur Knopperts, IDFA, The Forum
Stefan Lechere, Google
Annie Valva, WGBH
Peter Wintonick, Necessary Illusions

Check it out: https://sheffdocfest.com/view/digidocs

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the Sheffield International Documentary Festival are pleased to issue a call for proposals for a new cross-media competition called the CROSS-MEDIA CHALLENGE.

The CROSS-MEDIA CHALLENGE is a co-production competition for innovative, interactive, socially engaged content with applications for mobile and broadband. It will award one producer a $10,500CAD/£5,000 co-production development deal with the NFB.

ABOUT THE CHALLENGE
Inspired by the NFB’s legendary Challenge for Change program of community filmmaking, today’s NFB is adapting the adage “think globally, act locally” to develop socially engaged media projects relating to issues such as the protection of the environment, health care, human rights, poverty and violence against women.

How can we inspire an exchange of story-telling practices among diverse communities? How can we use media creatively to foster an international dialogue on issues that have local roots? How can we unleash the creative talents of marginal voices and communities and make them heard?

We are interested in projects that use the versatility, mobility and borderless nature of new platforms to enable communities to talk to each other. Projects must be documentary based.

Eligible projects must be cross-platform and multi-platform involving the best features of each medium to ensure maximum audience participation. Projects should take full advantage of the range of new platforms, with particular emphasis on interactive, mobile and on-line. Projects must demonstrate direct contact and interaction with communities as part of the development plan.

More info at: http://www.nfb.ca/about/news.php?id=1554

At the beginning of my research a few years ago, I analysed the Nightmare video-board game. The new Atmosfear DVD board is still part of my research and so I was thrilled to see an article in the latest GameNews enewsletter on ‘Mixed Media Board Games’.

In the broader scheme of things, the video game industry co-exists with the board game industry, however the connection between the two is little explored.  At the same time that video games have been establishing their credentials as a popular form of entertainment, the board game industry has also prospered, partly as a result of a European rennaissance spurring game design and partly due to innovative board games that incorporate moving images and digital media.

Board games have at least three key aspects: family or group involvement, replayability, and very easy set-up. Video games on the other hand have come from a tradition of requiring the necessary hardware to play, providing enjoyment for the single player, and depending on the genre or type of game of course, little focus on replay value.

The European renaissance in board games refers to a situation credited to a game of the year award introduced in Germany in 1978, which resulted in the creation of a run of modern board games that are popular in Europe and have been translated into English, to find much broader appeal. However the incorporation of moving images and digital media into the world of board games has a close connection with Australian industry as a result of the success of the trailblazing game, Nightmare, and its follow on products, and additionally today through the efforts of DVD Trivia Games and its series of sports and popular topics DVD board games.

Going back to the late 80’s and early 90’s, Phillip Tanner explains that he and Brett Clements had a production company called A Couple ‘A Cowboys and Brett “had a lot of success with a board game called Oz Quiz initially and then together we created Dare, The Truth Hurts, and Idiot Box – all traditional board games.” “Brett suggested we combine our production skills with our board game skills and that is how we created the video board game genre.”

The original video board game Nightmare debuted in Australia in 1991 and throughout Europe in 1992. Three sequel tapes were created, Nightmare II Baron Samedi The Zombie, Nightmare III Anne De Chantraine – The Witch, and Nightmare IV Countess Elizabeth Bathory – The Vampire. And in 1995 Atmosfear The Harbingers was launched.

“Nightmare is a race against time and is all about frightening fun.  You have a host that guides the game, makes you jump, makes you laugh and sets you up against your friends” explains Phillip, adding “it is a lot of fun to play and is at its very basic the simplest form of interactive television – you talk to the TV and the TV talks back to you.”

The VHS video allowed for very easy setup of board games that incorporated moving images, and the DVD player does so today.

Tom Parkinson, Managing Director of DVD Trivia Games Pty Ltd, says the DVD format is a relatively free, easy way of playing games.

[...]

Phillip reports that Nightmare sold 3 million units worldwide as a video board game, and the DVD version, renamed Atmosfear, has sold an additional 750,000 units in the two years since launch in 2004. Phillip partly attributes the remarkable success to marketing stating that “Nightmare was marketed wonderfully through Village Roadshow and included TV, Cinema, and even video tapes. It was branded not just as a game but as an entertainment package. The guy in charge of selling the game in [to wholesale], Milt Barlow, was very passionate about it and every distributor world wide felt the same.”

The DVD Trivia Games products AFL DVD Trivia Challenge, World War 2 DVD Trivia Challenge, and Cricket Trivia Challenge were launched towards the end of 2006 and in regard to commercial success so far, Tom says he “wouldn’t put it down to giant.” “We have made our money back but are not in profit, the money has been reinvested in the product and further development” explains Tom. This has led to a move to cross promote the board game through mobile phone spin-off games and PC downloads. The mobile phone spin-off games include recently released AFL Grandfinal and NRL Final games available through the Telstra network, which includes a revenue share back to DVD Trivia as well. The additional products and promotions aim to introduce people to the DVD board games.

Phillip comments that games are all about a journey, skill, and chance. “With board games you spend a lot of time working out the basics because normally you just have a board, playing pieces and dice – it is what you do with them that makes it interesting. With video games you add functionality, graphics and audio but if the underlying game is crap it doesn’t matter how cool it looks.” “Make the game fun and interesting, know your target market and hopefully make some money” remarks Phillip.

For those in Melbourne, Australia, Tom Parkinson will speak at the next Dissecta on 25th September.

Apparently, there is a new journal out that will publish in March 08. Here is the highly relevant (to readers of this blog) call for papers (CFP):

Science Fiction Film and Television is a biannual, peer-reviewed journal published by Liverpool University Press. Edited by Mark Bould (UWE) and Sherryl Vint (Brock University), with an international board of advisory editors, it encourages dialogue among the scholarly and intellectual communities of film studies, sf studies and television studies.

We invite submissions on all areas of sf film and television, and which situate texts, practices and institutions within broader national, historical, cultural, theoretical and critical contexts. In addition to popular and contemporary works, we are interested in papers which consider neglected texts, propose innovative ways of looking at canonical texts, or explore the tensions and synergies that emerge from the interaction of genre and medium. We encourage work that considers the specificities of the genre and what its increasing centrality to film and television globally might suggest for critical approaches to film, sf and television.

We publish articles (6000-8000 words), book and DVD reviews (1000-2000 words) and review essays (up to 5000 words). Suggestions for papers include but are not limited to the following areas:
•silent sf
•European sf (e.g., French New Wave, Turkish pop cinema)
•East Asian sf (e.g., kaiju eiga, anime)
•Hollywood sf blockbusters
•animation and greenscreen
•adaptations
•low-budget and independent sf
•children’s sf
•costume, design and music
•spectacle and special effects
•the ‘soap opera-isation’ of television sf
•sf and avant-garde practice
•the relationships between globalisation, transnationalisation, media convergence and sf
•the science-fictionality of media technologies and forms themselves
•cross-media and transnational franchises
•audience, fans and consumption

Articles should be 6000-8000 words (MLA format) and include a 100-word abstract. Electronic submission in MS Word is preferred. Send submissions to both editors at mark.bould@gmail.com and sherryl.vint@gmail.com. If you are interested in reviewing a book or DVD, or have materials you would like reviewed, please contact Sherryl Vint.

The upcoming London conference, Television Studies Goes Digital, has a few interesting papers:

User-Generated Content/Producer-Generated Consumption: How Outsourcing, Crowd-sourcing, and Industrial Identity Theory Fuel Digital TV
John T. Caldwell, UCLA 

Dislocated Screens: The Place of Television in a Mobile Digital Culture
William Boddy, Baruch College, City University of New York

Joined up thinking for the digital age:  Little Kids TV in a multiplatform world
Jeanette Steemers and James Walters, Westminster University

The possibilities of a digital aesthetic
Dr. Karen Lury, University of Glasgow

The Long and the Short of Convergence Aesthetics
Max Dawson, Northwestern University

“The Days of Commissioning Programmes are over…”:  The BBC’s ‘Bundled Project’
Niki Strange, University of Sussex

From Viewer to Participant
Lizzie Jackson, BBC

Digital Television and audience research: a sociological approach to capturing ‘user flows’.
Helen Wood, De Montfort University

The number of papers that address the use of multiple media platforms rather than just ‘digital television’ attests to the inappropriateness of defining a media conference by a single media type. Television hasn’t just gone digital, it has gone to the web, mobile, books and so on.

Check it out: http://www.digitaltvstudies.org.uk/