I am producing Lance Weiler’s HOPE IS MISSING (with Anne Carey). It’s hard to call it just another feature film when Lance does so much more to expand the story world. In the past, I have encouraged filmmakers to make a short to demonstrate their skills or help clarify the world they want to create. Yes, Lance made a short for HopeIsMissing (aka H.i.M.), and you can watch it at the bottom of this post, but that’s just a tip of the iceberg.
When I speak about it to studio execs, most still don’t know what I mean when I say it is a transmedia project. Hopefully that will never be the case again once we make the feature. One would think that this would have already changed though by what has been done already.
Perhaps you were at Sundance and encountered the PANDEMIC. It was an installation at New Frontier. It was an online experience. It was location-based ARG. It was story R&D. Lance explains:
How I Learned to Start a Pandemic from Turnstyle Video on Vimeo. [...]
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Lance Weiler for maybe two years now. I love how he thinks. I love how he takes that thought and transforms it into action. Process is more key to what he does, than virtually anyone else I have worked with. The journey is the destination. He is willing to walk without knowing where it all might be going. He is collaborative to the Nth the degree. His vision for cinema truly knows no limits.
Wired Magazine singled him out this summer as one of the fathers of transmedia. BusinessWeek credited him with changing cinema alongside Thomas Edison, The Warner Bros., and James Cameron. Between his features, The Workbook Project, & DIY Days, the man is profoundly generative.
If you were in Sundance this past week (and even if you weren’t), you probably witnessed how he infected Park City with [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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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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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This site could not have been built without the help and insight of Michael Morgenstern. My thanks go out to him.
Help save indie film and give this guy a job in web design or film!
