We’ve seen and heard on the first two episodes of ReInvent Hollywood how technology and desire are changing the nature of the film form as well as how artists consider their work and relationship with the business. Barriers to entry of both creation and distribution have been crushed. Platforms abound for a wide variety of formats, aesthetics, and engagements. As a result we are all overwhelmed by an abundance of culture and leisure time options, challenging both business and consumption models. How do these same changes effect things on the side of the audience? In tackling that issue on “ReInvent Hollywood: The Audience”, I found a new way to explain what the Film Industry must do in our era of transition.
Tag: transmedia
HOPEfully you are currently participating in our conversation to ReInvent The Form of Film. Although I am writing from the past, and posting in the future, I anticipate the conversation is currently based on creative solutions to the form. I imagine some of you are wondering about technical innovation and how that may change things for us. To that end, I wrote up this list of recent advancements to consider. Some I was able to find good links for. Others I have not succeeded yet, and could use your help.
How will these technological advancements play into storytelling?
Today will be the first episode of the web series I am hosting, “ReInvent Hollywood”. It will be live at 11A PT on http://reinventors.net/series/reinvent-hollywood
The first episode is on “The Form”. Is the era of feature film dominance over? If so what is to take it’s place? We will look at technological advances and cultural changes that effect the manner in which we tell stories. Has science influenced us? Will it? What are good examples? Are their best practices? We have a great group joining in to participate: Karim Ahmed, Tiffany Shlain, Michel Rielhac, Liz Rosenthal, and Lance Weiler.
I wrote the following blogpost to give you an idea of the why and the how:
Categories
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?
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.
A creative life is a precarious thing. Actions occur that could profoundly effect your ability to earn a living doing what you love. We get blindsided again and again, sometimes not recognizing things until they are too late to alter them. It’s one of the reasons I have tried to meticulously track for you what are the good thing and bad things happening in indie film these days. Yet, it seems to me we all need to do a better job of tracking them if we don’t want to get trapped in a future we won’t be part of..
My thought is that we should be able to define a series of issues in which we can put events, ideas, and articles into as they occur, helping each other stay on top of them.
The first step is to define the issues. That is what I am doing today .
I had the pleasure of participating in the panel “New Narratives: Building An Interactive Storyworld” at SXSW this year with Karim Ahmad of ITVS & Future States, Aina Abiodun of Storycode , and Mike Knowlton of Murmur. It was a lively panel and we packed the house.
I had a few takeaways from the panel I thought you might like me to share. 20 to be exact.
