Tag: transmedia

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Truly Free Film

Transmedia, Brand Sponsorship, & Crowdfunding: New Methods For A Long Gestating Project

Guest post by Zeke Zelker.

Ted: We are trying to find new ways these days.  New ways to tell our stories.  New ways to build community around our work.  New ways to bring audiences out to support our work.  And new ways to fund our work.  As we take these steps down these bumpy paths, it is our communication with one another that will bring forth the best practices.  Zeke had been speaking about some of these such steps that he was employing, and kindly has chosen to share them with all of us. Below Zeke outlines his new film, and then reveals what has made the process unique for him.

I’ve been working on this project for over ten years. Generally I let ideas percolate in my mind, on paper and screen before I set out to embark on bringing the movie to life, my ten year gestation period, is one hell of a pregnancy. I’ll pitch the project to various people within the industry, observe their reaction then go back to rewrite, rebuild, rethink. This project is different, sure we ALL say that, but this one is on two fronts, how we’re funding the project and how we’re telling the story.

Brief Synopsis: Why would four people give up everything to live in a tent, thirty feet in the air, on a catwalk, eight feet wide by forty-eight feet long? To win a mobile home and “ninety-sixty hundred” dollars? Desperation? Greed? Attention? Escape? No matter what their reasons, Clarence Lindeweiler is trying to capitalize on them to save his struggling alternative rock radio station WTYT 960.

At first a laughing stock of the community, Clarence’s hair brained scheme to drum up listeners garners national attention, pulling his radio station from the ratings basement to number two. As the contest wears on, the novelty wears off and ratings start to dip. Clarence takes the do-anything approach to right his sinking ship however his shenanigans backfire. The community and media turn on him, calls ring out to end the contest but success has gone to Clarence’s head. Who will become the lucky contestants? Who wins the grand prize? Tune into WTYT 960 to find out.

The story for Billboard, an Uncommon Contest for Common People! was inspired by true events from my childhood. I recall driving by a billboard, in the early eighties, on our way to the mall, where three men lived, to win a mobile home. Times were tough then; high unemployment, people couldn’t afford housing, high fuel prices, does this sound familiar? Seeing those men waving at us, as we drove by them, has stayed with me.

Within the framework of the project we’ll be exploring many things about the human condition using the platform of transmedia to help engage the audience and interact with them much like the real contest did close to thirty years ago. This is a challenging project and we need a lot of help in its creation.

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Truly Free Film

Transmedia, me, and Braden King

I became interested in Transmedia as a way to deepen both the narrative experience and the relationship between the experience and the participant.  It frustrates me how feature films often feel disposable and not truly resonant for most viewers; I know we – as both creators and viewers — don’t have to settle for this.  This situation is partially derived from both the creators’ and the industry’s reliance on a single product as representative of the movie experience; we don’t have much other than repackaging to show for our engagement, and that engagement is too often 100% passive.

We have reductive in our expression of narrative.  I generally define the Six Pillars of Narrative as: Discovery, Process, Production, Participation, Promotion, & Presentation.  Creators limit themselves when they draw the line between art and commerce, thinking marketing techniques don’t warrant their creative hand.  We shouldn’t ignore aspects of narrative that deepen the dialogue with those who become the very community we want.

As a film producer, I have a specific (and rather limited) way of thinking about process.

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Truly Free Film

“Transmedia Now” Week On In Media Res

Today’s guest post is from Elizabeth Strickler, informing us of what is going over at InMediaRes this week (and a wee bit of cross promotional activity).

In Media Res is dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship. Each weekday, a different participant curates a short (less than 3-minute) video clip accompanied by a 300-350-word impressionistic response. We use the title “curator” because, like a curator in a museum, the participant repurposes a media object that already exists and provides context through their commentary. Theme weeks are designed to generate a networked conversation between curators and the public around a particular topic.

For the week of July 26-30th, the theme is “Transmedia Now”. The curators are: Christy Dena, Marc Ruppel, Robert Pratten, Brian Newman, and Ted Hope.

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Truly Free Film

Towards A True Cross-Platform Future

Last fall at PowerToThePixel I had the good fortune to be invited to partake in a ThinkTank on transmedia.  They have recently published their report on the day and I encourage you to read it.  Special thanks for Michael Gubbins for pulling the report together and facilitating the session.

Among the observations and recommendations:

• The business models of film and other creative industries are struggling because they are trying to dictate how customers use the media

• Creative industry needs to break free of restrictive single media practices with territorial rights and release windows

• Different media platforms are not always in competition and can cross-fertilise a brand and attract new audiences

• Value is moving away from product sales towards customer engagement with a brand

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Issues and Actions

PGA Approves Transmedia Producer Credit

This is PGA’s wording for providing the credit:

A transmedia narrative project or franchise must consist of three (or more) narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe on any of the following platforms: film, television, short film, broadband, publishing, comics, animation, mobile, special venues, dvd/blu-ray/cd-rom, narrative commercial and marketing rollouts, and other technologies that may or may not currently exist. These narrative extensions are not the same as repurposing material from one platform to be cut or repurposed to different platforms.

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Truly Free Film

How We Solve Problems Today (and a whole lot more…)

Bruce Sterling has a great post in Wired on “Atemporality for the Creative Artist”.It speaks accurately of the present, and offers a great prescriptive for what comes next.  What’s “Atemporality”?  Look at how problems are dealt with these days.  I know I come fairly close to what Sterling lays out here, and it goes a long way to answering that first question:

‘Step one – write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.

Step two – write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys.

Step three – write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted.

Step four – open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further.

Step five – start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem.

Step six – make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.

Step seven – create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.

Step eight – exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine – find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’

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Truly Free Film

Can Truly Free Film Appeal To Younger Audiences?

The Art House audience is graying at a rapid rate. Indie Film has lost its marketing muscle in a way that Indie Rock never has. New film audiences aren’t developing in the same way that they once was. Why aren’t we all doing more to recruit new participants?

Now mind you I am not providing statistics to back this statement up (do you really need to do that on that internet?). I admit I am just speaking from instinct, from standing in the center of the hurricane and trying to observe the weather. If we are going to have a sustainable industry, we have to consistently recruit new blood, both in terms of audience, staff, and creators — that’s just common sense, but the indie side of things has had a hard time of doing it.
What is it that new audiences want? What must the indie community do to engage them?
It is really surprising how few true indie films speak to a youth audience. In this country we’ve had Kevin Smith and NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, but nothing that was youth and also truly on the art spectrum like RUN LOLA RUN or the French New Wave (PARANORMAL ACTIVITY not withstanding…). Are we incapable of making the spirited yet formal work that defines a lot of alternative rock and roll? And if so, why is that?
You’d think with truly free film’s anti-corporate underpinnings that those who seek out authenticity would respond, but perhaps it is film culture’s historic precedent of the filmmaker’s ongoing pursuit for greater dollars. The examples of artists who forgo the monetary reward in favor of delivering the truth are all to rare, and thus audiences end up thinking that if the film itself isn’t about the sell, then the filmmaker’s career most likely is. Who really represents integrity in the film world? Who places their art or their audiences first? Is it the cost of production that forces 98% of the industry to focus first on commercial success? Is it the lack of support for the arts in the USA that makes media artists generally money-driven?
Maybe it’s not the content or the economic situation though, but the presentation that is more the turn-off for the newcomers? People often speak of the Alamo Draft House in Austin as the ultimate indie movie screen as it serves beer and food and has great clips that play before every film. It makes movie going feel like an event. And you can drink… alcohol. But me, I have never found movies to mix well with liquor — other substances, yes, but not the booze. It takes a specific type of film to appeal to a partying crowd. And a particular place that can recruit them. We have to give them more of a reason to leave the apartment than just watching a movie like they can at home. We have to return to really putting on a show.
Maybe it is the form in general. The way we have been making movies for the last 100 years appeals to only the singular pleasure of “being directed to”. What about the audience’s desire to participate? How come we have not found a way to encourage participation on a more widespread basis? Transmedia holds tremendous potential in its efforts to turn the presentation into an actual dialogue, although we still lack the defining work that goes beyond cross-platform to an actual back and forth, with both sides being equal creators.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a forum or think tank that really tackled these issues? That helped to lead the way?