Your attention is required at 4:00 for the Ninja cameos, and then again, at the dramatic turn of events at 4:27.

I would comment but I’m speechless, helpless and now slave to the charm, tunes and brilliant dramatics of Ismail YK, German-born Turkish pop star with a serious love of Facebook.

The powerful web-based platform that has emerged as the model to watch is Kickstarter, describes itself as “a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors” hosts projects by “artists, filmmakers, musicians, designers, writers, athletes, adventurers, illustrators, explorers, curators, promoters, performers”

I love the idea, and the fact that as an artist, you have to justify why you should be funded, and exactly what the money will be used for. AND, your patrons only get charged if your project is fully funded within the set time frame. It’s brilliant. And I think it works for everything from those really crazy estoteric ideas to those creative social change ideas – because communities gather enthusiastically around the entire range. Here are two projects that are fully funded and worth taking a look at:

Stories for Changemakers, a documentary series showing organizations and individuals doing remarkable work all over the world. It is even more remarkable that the footage is also handed over to these “Changemakers” to use for their organizations’ media outreach.

A truly out-of-the-box story based board game called The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands

But, I still issue this disclaimer: feel free to break the rules – so long as you have passion, vision and the drive to create.

1. SUCK IT UP AND LEARN SOCIAL MEDIA

If I hear one more of my film school colleagues who emerged from the last decade of digital trauma (!) say “social media is about popularity not art”, I will personally show up with a baseball bat and knock the sense out of them (for a small fee, I can do that for you as well). Social media is here to stay, and it is your friend, not your foe. Master it, and it will make you relevant. And if you have to ask me why, then you are in more dire need of this advice than I thought.

2. YOUR BRILLIANT IDEA MAY NOT BE A FILM

Deal with the fact that with the vast possibilities in media, the grand vision of your idea of a film MAY NOT be the smartest. And I’m not denying that certain ideas are far more brilliant on the big screen. However, as we move to the era of ubiquitous smaller screens, consider seriously if/how your idea might play on an iphone (yes) or a computer screen, or if an interactive element might serve your film better. Just sayin’. Let go of the visions of grandeur and worry about how to get your vision to the public. Film is cool but don’t get hung up on it.

3. PROFITABILITY WILL HELP YOUR CAREER

Ok, kids: the era of raising silly money from from your Wall Street buddies or the dentist who wants to go to a movie premiere IS officially over. And even if you do, you better know how you’re going to recoup that plus at least 10-15 % . Yeah, Madoff screwed it up for you. Everyone is suspicious of any investment opportunity that promises upwards of 110% return so if you can deliver that, you WILL have a career. Even if you have to sell 40,000 t-shirts to make it back, it will make you a less risky investment for your next project.

4. UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE A BRAND

This is not me selling you out to the world of advertising. This is me telling you that Your Identity, Your Persona, Your Creative Work form the CORE of what makes you appealing to audiences. Think seriously about what makes you unique and that is what will make you stand out in a sea of many other media-makers, some of whom may have similar ideas to yours. We live in an era where you simply cannot afford to hide behind your work or assume that someone else – a publicist, studio or production company will define who you are – step up and figure out how you need to position yourself to get the job done.

5. FIND THREE GREAT COLLABORATORS INSTEAD OF AN AGENT

Let’s just get some facts out of the way: Hollywood is a machine that does certain things well: mass distribution, financing, profiteering. There are other things it doesn’t do so well: nurturing new talent, grass-roots audience building, niche brand-building. If your hope is that you will get “discovered” by Hollywood, don’t worry, they will find you once you have done all the work. They can make you bigger, offer you a better paycheck, fame and a ticket to the Oscars. But not before you’ve worked your tail off. You need to accept the fact that they cannot do for you what 3 great peers (or 1/2 multi-talented ones) can do for you. A dedicated team with the following skills will get you wherever you want to go: A) Creative Supporter/Critic; B) Audience Building Strategist; C) Clever Business Brain/Monetization Strategist.

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.

Over tea in Brooklyn’s train-rattling DUMBO neighborhood, Monello and I spent a few lively hours discussing a broad range of ideas surrounding the practice of Transmedia and what it means to the form and art of the story when we cross into the wild, expansive possibilities of narrative without boundaries. Again and again, he cited examples of  audience engagement AS art, performance, and not simply the necessarily evil creative people have to suffer to get their work seen by audiences. I recognized that as artists, especially filmmakers, the “art” of audience engagement may be the hardest one to embrace yet in constructing the full Transmedia experience, Monello demonstrated how critical it is.

What struck me as we spoke was how accessible and practical Monello was but then I remembered that it was he and his group of collaborators after all, that were responsible for the savvy, practical and explosive phenomenon known as The Blair Witch Project. (He calls that an early, unidentified Transmedia project – which spawned lesser known books and games that expanded the story and appealed to varying audiences) Yet as the same time, I found myself his unbridled love for story and his zeal for the challenge of creating compelling, immersive experiences rather infectious.

Because it was my obsession with rapidly shifting world of narrative form and content that led me to start writing this blog in the first place, I bombarded Monello with questions about how he and his partners at Campfire manage to do what they do, convince brands to let them create cross-platform stories and experiences; badgered him for the requisite end-of-year 2010 predictions; and pestered him for speculations on when Transmedia might go wide. He was gracious and patient with his extensive answers – a limited selection of which I am posting here.

WHAT IS A STORYTELLER WITHIN TRANSMEDIA?
Rejecting the limitations of titles such as “filmmaker”, Monello says stories can be anywhere and on any platform so he privileges the term “storyteller” above all others. When a storyteller is effective, s/he is “conducting” and “orchestrating” a creative narrative experience for an audience, no matter where that might be. He is adamant that audiences should be able to engage as lightly or as deeply as they want, and that all engagement experiences should be built with that in mind – value at very level. Emphasizing that a Transmedia narrative might have a component as low-tech as a paper invitation (which Campfire used in the True Blood campaign), the goal is always to allow the audience to engage, and dig deeper if they so desire.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE ARTIST/AUTEUR’S VISION IN TRANSMEDIA NARRATIVES?
In designing the narrative experience, Monello says, “the dirty little secret of transmedia narratives: creators have far more control over the story than anyone really lets on.” In more cases than not, when an audience engages with the intention of building/contributing to a narrative, they are playing a role that has been designed by the author of that story. So to all those auteurs nervous about crossing into the abyss of a creative world run by crazed mob fans, there’s nothing to fear. On the contrary, encouraging fans to engage can only increase the value of one’s brand.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR TRANSMEDIA NARRATIVES TO BECOME MAINSTREAM?
Right now, he says he still struggles with mainstream marketing teams resistance “to constructing a convergent multiplatform narrative” because of the splintered way agencies handle all their platforms–hardly ever basing a campaign vision on a unified cross-platform story. Despite challenges on the brand side with which he works,  Monello thinks the Transmedia road is still a lot tougher on the Film and TV studio side where one might expect there to be more story innovation. The ideal scenario, he says, is that a powerful showrunner will initiate a Transmedia project across the board and turn it into audience gold but doubts that will really happen. He believes a more likely scenario is that the “game-changer will come from an indie creator,” not unlike a Blair Witch scenario of the next decade who “with the force of the fans will reformulate the system”.

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.

Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies: Unlike other forms of media the Internet will not destroy the pay-TV model. Consumers want a high-quality video experience across platforms (mobile device, laptop, monitor). Consumers will demand quality and ease of use.

Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel: Consumers are getting closer to the type of content experience they want when it comes to video. Winners will be twofold in this world: those that create compelling content and those who can figure out how to build a business model around that content. Allowing the media companies the control and flexibility to manage and monetize their content will help content creators survive this transition.

Avner Ronen CEO and co-founder of Boxee: It may be the year of TV Everywhere, but the future is Internet Everywhere.   Storytelling will change. There are no limits on the length of a story, and viewers will be able to direct their viewing experience. One can also run parallel stories within a show. By 2015, there will be an Internet show that will be bigger than a TV show today. You will have more Apple subscribers than Comcast subscribe. People will watch more video and they will pay more for it.

Jeremy Reed, SVP Content and Editorial, Demand Media: Next big thing is trying to understand there is an imbalance between supply, need and cost. You need to understand the ROI before you greenlight content. Is it quality and relevant to a community? And increasing the competitiveness — in a search world is a social world.

And perhaps the MOST controversial was James Spare’s demo of “my TV is watching me” (watch demo close to the end of the video). Everyone screamed Big Brother!

James Spare, president and CEO of Canesta: We’ve invented technology that can track objects in 3-D space. The market for 3-D is huge. A new market is 3-D input, which can, for example, have a screen detect your motion and then be able to interact in a 3-D environment. (Shows video of TV watcher moving channels with hand wave gestures). This will give rise to a whole set of new capabilities.

In surveying the various projects out there, I found myself drawn to Twistori, which is an interesting take on this  trend. By limiting their tracking to only real time uses of the words LOVE, HATE, THINK, BELIEVE, FEEL and WISH, the project draws your attention to the verbs that create human emotion. Below, I have simply screen-grabbed whatever came through the feed in the 2-3 minutes span I was watching it scroll through.

The makers of this project acknowledge that their inspiration comes from another project called We Feel Fine which actually tracked emotions mined from all over the web in the form of text and image, and then organized them into a fascinating compilation and creative analysis of human feelings. It took me a while to wrap my head around what they were actually doing. I should say that the the authors of the project Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, are together a combination of computational, creative and sociological whizkiddery. But don’t let that deter you from looking through this project, and apparently their soon-to-be-published book on the project. In their explanation of the project and its methodology they say:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

I surmised after reading through their material, that they are in fact going about storytelling in a quasi-scientific way – and I say “quasi” only because while data is real, what they are seeking to document is really the range of human emotion.  So while they do uncover patterns in people’s feelings/behavior, it never quite seems that the purpose of the project is purely statistical despite their use of all this computational skill and technology.

There are fascinating ideas in the individual words and images here and it begs the question, “where does science/technology meet art and storytelling”?

The conversation continues.

So here’s where I step back and ask: was the success of Paranormal an anomaly in the Blair Witch manner, or is it in fact the beginning of a wave? While I get that this film is probably scarier in a “real” way than say, Saw VI, that paragon of torture porn which it trounced at the box office, I have to wonder if the convergence of all these phenomena at the same moment spells more than just “great content”. There are a lot of “firsts” here: certainly the use of Eventful.com, which until now has been used primarily for live music events; there’s the suddenly powerful force of immediate social media like twitter and of course, there’s the sheer desperation of the studios to make a buck, any buck in the midst of a funding crisis akin to none other in recent Hollywood history.

Assuming that none of these factors are changing anytime soon – ie, access to social media, immediate audience responses (that can make or break opening weekends), and a cashflow issue not likely to be resolved so fast, will models like this soon become ubiquitous? It seems inevitable to me. I’ve always been dubious of Hollywood test screenings and the magic scores that determine whether a movie gets released or not, or if characters or endings should be changed. It seems that at a certain price-point (an din this case rather extremely low), these studio people should be delighted to have ways of gauging audiences interest in their films. It’s such a low-risk strategy that I wonder if Paranormal’s success will send a message to the powers that be.

But of course, the million dollar question remains unanswered: is this a marketing/distribution strategy that will work for a film without this sort of draw – the horror, the midnight screenings, the sheer “viral-ness” of it? And will there emerge other platforms, such as Eventful.com, which can perhaps draw different groups of people to an event they can feel they have participated in bringing to the rest of the public? Certainly, there are some indie film communities springing up around various audience engagement concepts. And I wonder how those will shake out in the months and year to come – since that is really how quickly I believe we will see vast transformation in the world of audience-content relationships.