Monsters! Robots! Weird Creatures! Oh My! They may be flat but they sure are fun.
(Hat tip: Lance Weiler!)
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Tag: Lance Weiler
Lance Weiler has a nice, albeit short, piece in Screen Daily on the audiences role in crafting cross-platform narratives (aka transmedia). Here’s a taste, but check out the whole thing:
Pre-production, production and post are melding ― so why do most producers wait until the film is finished to engage their audience? The art and craft of how stories are designed, delivered and shared must catch up with the realities of how audiences are consuming them. This points to a number of new and exciting storytelling possibilities. The audience is telling us what they want, we just need to start listening.
Lance will be at Power To The Pixel, along with yours truly, Brian Newman, and a host of other fantastic folk that I can’t wait to meet.
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Social Media For Storytellers
Courtesy of The WorkbookProject, comes a power point overview of how one can use to social media to extend a story and generate a conversation around their work. In case you didn’t know already, in the end social media can be an effective way to build an audience / community around a project and / or a body of work. Lance and his gang lay it out nice and clear. If you aren’t a convert yet, what more do you need?
Social Media for Storytellers
View more presentations from lanceweiler.
And here’s the direct link:
http://workbookproject.com/2009/07/resource-social-media-for-storytellers/
Watch it and let me know if gives you any good ideas… Thanks.
If you want the direct link, here it is:
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The Future Of Film
Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have the answer as to what the future of film is.
A lot of people though do have some good ideas as what the future may hold and what it is needed, from the small step to the big picture. I got to sit down with a nice group of very smart people while I was at SXSW and talk a bit about what I might be. Scott Kirsner who organized the breakfast has put the whole conversation up on his blog. The other participants are:
filmmaker Lance Weiler
conference organizer and producer Liz Rosenthal
technologist Brian Chirls
outreach guru Caitlin Boyle
filmmaker Brett Gaylor
producer and Filmmaker Mag editor Scott Macaulay
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The New Crew Positions
In a post entitled “Issues Of Sustainability” on the Filmmaker Mag Blog, Lance Weiler talks about how we as filmmakers can produce for today’s evolving audiences. In talking to filmmakers, I still find they often don’t yet fully conceive what it means to adopt a “transmedia” approach to storytelling and marketing. On the other side of the spectrum though is what made Wired’s recent post on “Why Hollywood Needs a New Model For Storytelling” such a gas — they’ve got it and got it good. Check it out. We may not need to build the ARGs and seed the story so heavily on blogs and elsewhere as Scott Brown writes about, but we do need to give serious thought about how the hell to build audiences for our stories.
Let’s face it: it just is not enough to have a good story well told anymore. Sure I still believe in the basics first and building out you narrative on a cross-platform basis is simply not enough to cut it. And yes, the first step towards better filmmaking is to have good material that you have given serious thought to.
I might harp a bit on the new approaches and filmmakers’ lack of thought there, but to be frank that’s because there still is a great deal of nothing going on in the old school department. As good as I found this year’s Sundance batch, and as hopeful as I am for SxSW’s crop, how do we drill down to the basics and make sure we have our pants riding high? I mean: what makes a good film good? Some folks may know how to tell their story nine ways to Sunday, but it still won’t sing, if ain’t got that swing.
I’ve have started a new series over on Hammer To Nail on “Qualities Of Better Film” and promise to go into over twenty such qualities that at the very least makes my motor run. It may be basic stuff, but I still find these qualities in short supply. Check it out over the next few weeks. Let me know what I’ve missed. I know that if everyone adopted the approach that I outline, I’d find more films I would want to give prizes to. On the other hand, since I find it hard even to do that even with my films, maybe we all just need to wake up to how damn hard it is to make good films (let alone better ones), and slow the heck down.
But while I am on the self-promotion tip: make a trip over to Filmcatcher where Christine Vachon and I hosted a couple of conversations with filmmakers and actors during Sundance (okay so only the teaser’s up now, but it tells you what you can anticipate). But that ain’t all…. there’s more to come on that front, or at least one similar to it, too. Stay tuned.
Filmmaker has a post on Lance Weiler’s upcoming article on data portability. I have been hungering for this one for a long time now. Data portability’s a key issue for all of us. It would have been on my list of what I want our film culture to be but I thought it was an issue or practicality more than a way of being. Open source practices and general transparency in actions and practices is something though that is essential to a truly free film culture and it definitely should have been on my list (I have now added it). What else did I forget?
Scott’s post goes on to discuss Facebook’s policy of dropping the accounts of those who have grown too large. It’s an irksome situation and something to be aware of. Check it out.
