I laughed my way through the episode – their bender night followed by waking up in Hank’s convertible on the beach with some freshly tatted backsides. Aah, yes. I know these guys. They are my friends and I miss them. Ok, I know what you’re thinking – is this fictional or real? Honestly, it doesn’t matter because on my tweed couch with the wool throw in December in New York, it was a nice fuzzy feeling. So imagine my excitement when I browse my Twitter feed and see that @Gennefer is talking to @RealHankMoody. I jump in and check out his feed. It’s crazy and unmistakeable how Hank Moody-esque this guy sounds. Tweets like:

Is there anything better than waking up after a night with a great woman, having a hot shower, and then hopping back into bed?

I’m hooked. I make a mention of him to someone else on Twitter and his ears much have started burning or something because all of sudden I get this tweet:

@filmfuturist well hello don’t think u can just mention my name without introducing yourself. U have pretty lips BTW. What’s ur story?

I swear I almost fall off the couch. At first I don’t know what to say because I know Hank is a player and I don’t want to fall for his sweet talk. So I decide to keep it neutral and ask him for some dating advice:

ME: @RealHankMoody I’m nerdy Hank. What does a girl need to do to find a smart dude?

HANK: @filmfuturist don’t *do* anything other than be yourself. You’re smarter than that. Plus, your a jewel – they will find you.

I’m not sure what to do next, so, I wimp out and hit “Follow” and become a Hank Moody follower so I can watch from the sidelines as he seduces women and talks of his conquests.

I finally work up the nerve to ask him if he’ll answer some questions for my blog and he’s charming, and gracious and utterly HANK MOODY. So here they are for your enjoyment.

How does it feel to be Hank Moody?

It feels fucking great at times.  But being a single dad is hard work.  I don’t think I do as admirable a job as I’d like, although Becca, my daughter,  does get fed and shelter is provided.  I do live a hard life, but I surround myself with women that care about me.  At least for a few hours at a time.  My strategy is to string them all together to form a 24/7 support structure.

Where did you learn your game?

My game? Are you referring to my writing? I wrote short stories and poems throughout school and really hit my stride in college. I read a lot too. Books and lately blogs, such as yours.  It keeps my mind active, my vocabulary current and my wit sharp.

I’m dying to know what the teenage Hank Moody was like – were you a stud then too?

Not really. I mean I was shy, but I always said what I thought, didn’t hold back, told it like it was.  I think that brutal honestly was seen by girls as something different to what they were experiencing at the time.  And different is attractive in many ways.

Seems like the only person who really scares you is Sue Collini. Is she ballsier than you?

Firstly, I’m not convinced that Sue is a woman.  So until the results of any tests come back to conclusively determine her sex, I’d like to not comment on the record about her balls.   In reality she’s a pussycat.  One of those that hisses a lot.

I swear I saw you once at a party in Bel Air – in the poolhouse, making it with a girl AND a guy – was that you?

I’m not ruling the possibility that is wasn’t me out. I’d like to think not. But a lot of crazy shit went down in Bel Air that I’m not too proud of.  Let’s just say that if I can’t remember and there is no photographic evidence, then it didn’t happen.

Most guys who play girls like you are called douchebags – why do you think that title doesn’t apply to you?

I’m very fond of women.  I care about them.  I genuinely desire not to hurt them.  I love their attention and desire their touch.  Their kiss awakens me.  I think about them, their hopes and dreams.  I talk to them.  All of them need attention.  All of them need to feel good.  All of them make me feel good.  Douchbags deliver a win/lose proposition to women.  My girls are treated well and respected. Win/Win.

I worry about your writing – when will you write again?

Yes. I’m in the middle of writing a new novel now.  A lot of my research is being done online via twitter (@RealHankMoody).  Its been a very tough road to overcome writers block.  Especially when I’m preoccupied trying to be the best father figure to Becca.  But I hope to have it completed by summer.

I despise your rap but I’m totally seduced by you – mind if I come over?

As long as you cook me breakfast in the morning.

Attendees following the backchannel conversations during the conference, may have noticed a thread on authorship vs. crowdsourcing (not always in polarity), which led to the subject of auteurship and whether that idea has a place within the wide open world of Transmedia. It struck me that the Purefold case study, led by AG8 was in itself an interesting connundrum for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the irony that the canon on which the project is at least conceptually based (Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner) is a work of legendary auteurship, AND that AG8′s assigned task was to create an interactive multiplatform campaign for their brand which would drive business TO their production company which represents…what else…auteurs.

The panel was called “Case Study: Transmedia Design and Conceptualization – The Making of Purefold.” AG8 are the architects of the campaign, their client is RSA and their collaborators include The Alchemists, also at the panel. For people unfamiliar with the way companies like RSA work, let me digress into their business for a second. They are essentially production companies which also act as exclusive reps of commercial and music video directors – the directors’ marketability is based on their reputation as visual auteurs. When ad agencies have a commercial to produce, they take bids and creative proposals from a host of RSA-like companies and often make their decisions based on the creative compatibility of the campaign to the director and/or the strength of their creative approach to the advertisers concept.

For many years, companies like RSA rode the tide of an endless flow of million-dollar commercials and flourished by incubating the best visual creatives in the business. With the changing landscape of TV and the ad business pulling back from the traditional :30 ad and drastically slashed budgets in the last couple of years, these companies began struggling, and a number have since folded. RSA’s Scott family – Ridley,the most famous and his brother Tony, their brood of budding young Scott auteurs and other well-known film and television directors have managed to (barely) stay relevant because they have a lot of well-established brand names in their stable. But these companies are facing an unprecedented crisis, and they are desperately trying to find a way to keep their directors employed in an era of diversified advertising strategies and the proliferation of social media.

I go into this level of detail on the business because I find it deeply fascinating that the key tool – crowdsourcing – of an brand campaign – Purefold – aiming to keep RSA relevant is at complete odds with the very fiber of RSA’s business – singularity of artistic/aesthetic vision. This certainly signals the willingness of RSA to step into the new world of branding and storytelling BUT, what sort of bedfellows will the “crowd” and the RSA auteurs eventually make under their in their Creative Commons alliance? It is of course too early to tell as the project is still in process and their presentation was primarily focused on genesis and process and not yet on the creative results.

When David Bausola and Tom Himpe, principals at AG8, presented their method of crowdsourcing they used the word “harvesting”, a description which also appears on their website. The method: by seeding Friendfeed conversations with concepts/ideas that RSA auteurs have invented, they conduct what is essentially a real-time study of what people are saying about this subjects, all riffing (if I understood this correctly) on the core theme of “empathy”. Needless to say the world “harvesting” caused an instant flurry of reactions on the Twitter backchannel during the conference as attendees bristled at the semantic implication of the word. Defenders of the method responded saying that because they created the project under Creative Commons which allows sharing and remixing, the method does not in fact imply exploitation as some felt it did.

I chimed in on this Twitter chatter myself, as I think this unease between the “crowd” and the auteurs or their agents, in this case the Purefold team is something which has not yet been fully considered. In our zeal as storytellers to jump on the crowdsourcing wagon, many issues of authorship remain unanswered. Is curation the new auteurship? How is crowdsourcing in Purefold different from me browsing a news site or reading a magazine and tapping into the Zeitgeist in a way that informs my artistic work? On one hand, I understand that only through experiments like Purefold do these issues fully play out in a way that allows new paths to be forged and on the other, I worry about a world of participation in which the rules are either too obscure for the players to be aware, or in which the auteur is forced to crowdsource simply because it creates the appearance of some sort of creative democracy.

When I found this nicely done video of Henry Jenkins (of whom I am a great fan) talking about his theory of Convergence in the middle of Times Square, I thought it would be a nice kickoff. Nice conceptual and VFX work by HCD Media Group.

The idea of a phone as a device of person to person communication as it was initially conceived way back when landlines were invented is certainly no more. What’s more, I think what this TED presentation demonstrated was that the mobile phone is now completely transforming our lives – socially, politically, physically and creatively. Of course, the question of whether these changes mark “progress” or not will continue to a subject of lively debate for some time to come.

I am personally fascinated by the idea of mobile Augmented Reality because it has the potential to completely alter the way we filter the world around us as we go about our daily business. In my last post, the overview of various experiments in AR focused almost entirely on gaming, or uses that required a less nimble and seamless interaction with the augmented world. With the iPhone platform (and to some extent Android) unlocking all kinds of possibilities in mobile AR, I think we are in for a complete shift that will impact our entire notion of reality.

The recently released Layar app for iPhone puts the location + information based product to work in a practical sense as the Techcrunch article explains “it’s the placement of a digital layer of information on top of a real-life view of the world around you, as seen through e.g. a mobile phone’s camera lens. …use your smartphone to glance around the main square of a city you’re visiting and get up-to-date information about nearby restaurants, ATMs, real estate offers, and more on-screen, bolted on top of what you’d be seeing if you weren’t looking through the lens.”

Then there’s Wikitude, which claims to be able to identify “more than 370,000 world-wide points of interests (cafes, museums, schools, caves, castles, archaeological sites, battle fields) and can be searched by address by overlaying information on the real-time camera view of a the iPhone, as you hold up the device. See a list of museums nearby sorted by distance and links Detail, Map, Drive.”

None of these advancements should shock anyone who has used a GPS device in their car because it is essentially using the same technology – mapping, and satellite tracking, enhanced with additional data applied to certain uses, like travel. I think it’s fantastic in the same way that having a cellphone completely transformed picking someone up from the airport – a convenience that you wonder how you lived without in the pre-mobile days.

But here’s where mobile AR leaves the realm of purely informational and begins to have real implications for the idea of SEEING, EXPERIENCING and STORYTELLING: Imagine if your mobile phone’s AR potential meant that you could simply “encounter” a story, rather than say, sit down in front of your television and watch a story, or go to Broadway and watch a musical, or even the very interactive experience of playing your Wii at home.

I think that when the mobile device leaves the realm of exclusively being a communication/information tool, it enters into the realm of being connected to a digital persona, in even the crudest of ways. Say, for instance, if I were to enable a virtual persona on my device (maybe I took it from The Sims, or Second Life, or heck, even Facebook, if I had some online identity that wasn’t me), within some sort of application that connected me to other people who were doing the same thing. What would happen to my experience of the world around me, or the people I am interacting with when I walk down the street? Is it possible that rather than “me” Aina, walking to the subway, my AR personality could be anyone I fictionally created, and I could interact with people IN REAL LIFE as someone else within a mobile story/game?

While this all may sound completely bizarre and unnecessary in the world of storytelling, it’s obvious that this development will invariably happen sooner than we all imagined. Even if you choose not to participate in that AR world, it still begs the question of how that AR capability alters our way of seeing “fictional” or “real” stories? In the same way that having a mobile phone changed our social behavior, I think we are bound to see a shift in the way we both view, consume and create fiction.

There’s no denying that feisty chef Anthony Bourdain is a compelling character to watch. Which is why he has his own show on the Travel Channel in the first place. So I was fascinated to discover (via @laughingsquid) this trailer for his new show, Anthony Bourdain’s Alternate Universe which is as you can see, animated! It looks like a fictional foray into his crazy, spice-flared, slightly inebriated brain. I love the idea for a couple of reasons: first, it’s a clever way to expand the Bourdain brand and second, it’s one of those life-meets-fiction experiments that blurs the line between real and the imagined. Looking forward to the fun of Mr Bourdain’s brain!