Tag: FutureStates

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Truly Free Film

Lean World-Building

By Karim Ahmad

This is part 3 in a series of posts I’ve been obsessively writing on storyworlds. Part 1 was published on Indiewire, where I discussed the advantage of creating a spreadable storyworld for any piece of content. Part 2 was published right here, where I shared some takeaways from ITVS’ first major foray into building an immersive fictional web series – our fifth and final season of FUTURESTATES. Here, in part 3, I want to talk about another approach to building community through storyworlds that we’ve just recently adopted. A leaner approach.

The biggest drawback to the FUTURESTATES model was that we had to spend a lot of time and money before anything launched. And when you spend more time building in silence than you do sharing your creations, you can’t maximize sustained community engagement. But what if you could iterate an interactive story like FUTURESTATES over time? What if you could develop and prototype an immersive web series like any piece of software, and then audience test them like a TV pilot?

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Truly Free Film

How to Build a Storyworld of Content. And How Not To.

By Karim Ahmad

This is part 2 in a series of posts I’ve been obsessively writing on storyworlds lately. Part 1 was published on Indiewire last week, where I discussed the community-building advantages to creating a storyworld of content around any single piece of IP. Part 3 is now available here.

What I want to discuss here is the how. Assuming you already want to, how do you reboot your process to allow for multiple interconnected stories to exist within a singular storyworld? Well, that’s the first challenge, is that you have to really want to. Innovation is hard, it’s time-consuming, and you have to be willing to question all aspects and habits of your storytelling process. Easier said than done. It takes discipline. And often times, it required working way outside your comfort zone. But if you’re like me, that prospect will excite you as much as it terrifies you. So what does that process look like? What are some of the challenges and pitfalls to avoid? Here are some of the takeaways from our process reinventing FUTURESTATES series from an anthology series of scifi shorts into a collaborative and immersive storyworld of content. Our goal was to make the series stickier by creating interconnections between stories and by creating multi-platform access points for users to engage with the content.

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Categories
Truly Free Film

Prepping for the Future with the Vision Machine iPad App

By Greg Pak

I came up through independent film. Then I snagged a meeting with Marvel and spent most of the last eight years writing comic books. Now I’ve just completed an iPad app version of one of my graphic novels that combines elements of both comics and film. Here are a few thoughts about what inspired me as a filmmaker and comic book writer to plunge into the transmedia world of the “Vision Machine” app project and what I’ve learned.

Why “Vision Machine”?

A few years ago, Orlando Bagwell of the Ford Foundation approached me with the idea of creating a comic book that would help independent media makers imagine the technological, political, and social changes that will affect us over the next fifty years. As an indie filmmaker, sci fi guy, technology freak, and comic book creator, I was immediately hooked. What resulted was a 80 page sci fi thriller that follows three filmmaker friends as they confront the incredible potential and danger of the iEye, Sprout Computers’ latest piece of revolutionary personal technology. The iEye allows users to instantly record anything they can see or imagine, then edit, add special effects, and share it with the world just by thinking about it. Our heroes plunge into a mind-blowing utopia of creativity… and then, of course, the other shoe drops.

With its emphasis on copyright, trademark, privacy, and surveillance, “Vision Machine” let me explore questions that I’m always thinking about as a filmmaker and a citizen of the digital world.

And then ITVS came along and let me take the project to a whole new level.

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