DIY DAYS
MARCH 5
9:30AM – 4:30PM
The New School, NYC
FREE
Speakers include Wired Magazine’s Frank Rose discussing his book The Art of Immersion, Lance Weiler discussing his Pandemic project, Andrea Phillips on “The Ethics of Transmedia”, Chuck Wendig on game design and much more! Also, Caitlin Burns, Nick Braccia and I will lead a collaborative ideation session designed to help you think through creating Transmedia!
Info is here: DIY DAYS
**
SXSW Interactive
MARCH 11-15
Austin, TX
Conference Fee: $750

TALKING
Transmedia people making appearances include (and there are many more!)
Andrea Phillips doing a solo presentation called “Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction” Sunday, March 13 11AM
Steve Peters of Fourth Wall and Jay Bushman present “Transmedia Artists Guild: New Media Needs New Advocacy”. Sunday, March 13, 5PM
Anthea Foyer of the Toronto-based The Labs looks at “Transmedia: What’s the Magical Formula for Successful Design?” Monday, March 14, 11:15AM
Robert Pratten of Transmedia Storyteller is on a panel called “Interactive Narratives: Creating The Future of Storytelling” Monday March 14, 12:30PM

SOCIALIZING
Transmedia Social
Friday March 11th
7PM
Driskill Hotel Bar
Austin, TX
**
TRANSMEDIA NYC MARCH MEETUP
MARCH 22 (date to be confirmed)
7PM
Dexter: The ARG presented by Showtime’s VP of Digital Marketing Marcello Guerra
Join the Meetup: TransmediaNYC Meetup
Twitter: @TransmediaNYC
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Transmedia-NYC/137607629640537

As suspicious as I naturally am of these Hollywood suits and their flawed business models and bad personal style, I’ve still kept one eye on Disney for as a possible game-changer. When High School Musical and Hannah Montana came out of what seemed like nowhere, blew up to become a couple of the most recognizable brands in kids/tween entertainment, who didn’t wonder how the hell that happened? I remember seeing images of tween girl throngs at a Miley Cyrus concert and being stupefied that such a phenomenon could grow out of an original Disney TV character and Disney Radio star.

Granted, we’ve always known that children’s entertainment is the monster of the box office, the DVD and of franchise merchandising because, as we’ve come to understand, children’s tastes are often quite bizarre, obsessive and well, lucrative. This has always been Disney’s “vein of gold”. And when Iger acquired Pixar, he took that idea to an even broader level by acquiring a wholly independent, well-run animation house that again, was in the business of original characters, stories and thus, more franchises. So, despite their public differences, Pixar and Disney have managed to create some of the most memorable, adult-friendly animation in recent history.

Fast forward five years, and Iger again makes a move for Marvel, whose trove hadn’t been completely pillaged and remains filled with lesser known action heros but come with built in fan bases, the possibility of both animated and live-action fantasy content with serious transmedia potential. These moves seemed practical, if expensive, and Iger pulled Disney out of the quaint Mickey-Mouse world into the Pirates’ of the Carribean era. Then as if that wasn’t enough to show Disney’s shareholders that he meant (profitable) business, he goes and fired a whole layer of senior executives (read: old-school) that had been running the company for years and replaces them with a variety of new people, some of whom have little experience in the business of film and TV.

And just as the articles were circulating about his madness, Iger goes and pulls the Alice in Wonderland move: telling theatrical exhibitors in the US and UK that he would shorten the window between the theatrical release of the upcoming film and the DVD release–a move which terrified theater-owners and diminished the grand status 0f the theatrical window. This of course led to some strong words from the UK distributors, threat of boycott and all such manner of protest. Oh, then there was his refusal to make a sequel of the $315 million grossing Sandra Bullock movie, The Proposal which many including LA Times blogger Patrick Goldstein viewed as bizarre, since Hollywood is after all, the sure-bet-sequel town.

This of course begged the question: Is Iger a fool or a maniac? To which I reply: Neither.

The most cynical view of this strategy would be the one taken by critics like Culture Vulture’s Claude Brodesser-Akner, who sees this direction as an aggressive move towards merchandising driven entertainment. But I’m not sure that analysis in entirely correct. While I could never argue that Disney’s responsibility to it’s shareholders to be increasingly more profitable isn’t a driving force in these radical changes, I see the strategy as a real response to the way social media, branding and convergent media are changing consumer/viewer behavior.

Sure, Pirates of the Carribean can have a theme-park ride whereas Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds are pure passive entertainment–but is Iger’s decision to stick with properties that have cross-media opportunities really THAT crazy sounding to anyone who hasn’t been asleep through the advent of social media, interactive entertainment and yes, Miley Cyrus? All this hand-wringing really shows a lack of understanding that Iger’s sharp assessment about the future of entertainment includes the stark reality that for any property to be profitable in age of bit torrent and audience involvement, there have to be multiple streams of revenue that take engagement into serious consideration.

So, no, he is NOT mad. And perhaps somewhere in the wings his largest individual shareholder, Steve Jobs is whispering in Iger’s ear to check out the looking glass of the future.

I think the answer is yes. And I did some research to challenge my own assumptions.

Of course, now with the heavily rumored and anticipated i-something (maybe iTablet or iSlate) device from the happy people at Apple, it seems the transformation of reading is perhaps closer than we might have imagined. As is often the case, technology will drive the charge and likely change user behavior and only then will creative ideas for the product follow suit. Looking beyond the cool gadgetry of the new Apple toy, let’s just consider it another gateway into the world that Amazon’s Kindle has already established with e-reading. We can be sure of one thing though: it will likely be a user-friendly, very portable device that makes the crossover between text and image very appealing.

So there we are, sucked into the magical interface, switching between a Youtube video,  the latest issue of Vogue magazine and pages of Anna Karenina, making leaps of imagination and information that may have been a little more difficult when those materials were tactile. And I describe a scenario in a sequence that has actually happened for me. I have the Kindle for iPhone app, and I confess, I am currently reading Anna Karenina on that tiny, tiny screen on the subway and sometimes, I switch tasks and watch a randomly unconnected  video, then quickly flip through a fashion magazine all in the time it takes to get from Soho to Grand Central Station. So, essentially I contradict myself.

So I’m a media zombie, a self-proclaimed future filmmaker. But a book purist, right? Yes and no. I wonder how I would feel if there was an option to watch a dramatization of Tolstoy’s novel within my app. Would I do it? I’m not sure. But I think most people would if it made an old Russian novel accessible. And for that reason, companies like Vook and Fourth Story Media are emerging in the hybrid book space with titles ranging from how-to’s to teen novels and popular adult fiction. I downloaded and sampled the Sherlock Holmes double Vook and gave it a whirl. Frankly, launching a documentary about opium use during late 19th century London was really distracting to me when I wanted to follow the characters. But I found that I liked the interface when not actually engaged in the narrative. My conclusion is not that the Vook concept itself is flawed, it’s just that turning a classically structured narrative into a multimedia experience is a complex creative challenge. And I can’t say this particular title succeeded.

However, if a title was written by the author with the intention of creating a multimedia narrative in which the text and video where simultaneously conceived, the same way we do when writing screenplays intended for filming, then I think it would be an entirely different proposition. And I actually look forward to the birth of a new form with as much creative and intellectual rigor as good literature has traditionally had. As Bob Stein, whose Institute for the Future of Books says in an LA Times piece, “We’re going to see an explosion of experimentation before we see a dominant new format. We’re at the very beginning stages” of figuring out what narrative might look like in the future– “…the very, very beginning.”

This is an amateur movie made by a member of the The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society in 1947. Strange, you may think, as it seemed to me when I first watched this one of several films created by members of this Society as a way to analyze their dreams.

Initially, The Lion Dream struck me as the tender, heartbreaking story of a son (possibly Jewish) who lost his parents in WW2 Germany and then as an adult in 1947, attempts to re-visit the fear he harbored as a child that something devastating was about to happen.

But that’s only part of the story.

I selected this film from the materials that comprise the project  “Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, 1926-1972” because I found it haunting. Who is Teddy Weisengrund? Did he really dream this story? Or did he simply imagine it as an exercise in Freudian psychoanalysis?

The artist Zoe Beloff seems to be asking that question and many more about this curious group that was active in Coney Island between 1926 and 1972. What is not immediately apparent but which I later learned, is that this film may or may not be the ACTUAL film Teddy Weisengrund created in 1947. And maybe there was a Teddy Weisengrund or perhaps there wasn’t…

I was introduced to Beloff’s work by Mike Monello, who showed me a delightfully rendered book “written by” members of the group. It seemed for all intents and purposes a “genuine” work. But upon further investigation into Beloff’s project, I discovered it was in fact deceptively simple. As Monello astutely pointed out, this project is an unidentified piece of Transmedia storytelling – a kind of creativity without media boundaries, filled with such enormous passion for these stories and characters that you almost don’t care if it is “real” or not.

Zoe Beloff is one of those wildly creative figures whose ambitious work lives in a space somewhere between filmmaking and installation art. Her multimedia exhibition that showed at the Coney Island Museum this past summer was a combination of objects, films, drawings and writings about this visually prolific group of amateur psycholanalysts whose interest in Freud led them into all manner of activity, including trying to resurrect DREAMLAND a razed Coney Island museum and fashion it into “the first amusement park ever devoted to the elucidation of dreams in accordance with the discoveries of Doctor Sigmund Freud M.D.”

According to the New York Times article on the exhibit, Beloff, who works with found footage and objects, accidentally discovered relics of this fascinating bunch of psychoanalysis enthusiasts, and began this project to reconstruct their world. The article discusses Beloff’s prior interest in the relationship between the real and fictional, noting that most of her work “incorporates film and video in multimedia projects and environments in which the boundaries between historical fact and creative interpretation — what really was and what might have been — tend to blur.”

For the project, Beloff set about reconstructing these films, made for dream analysis purposes and imagining how each member (fictional or real) might have created his/her film. It seems Beloff has combined found home video footage with some new images fashioned in the style of the time and of the individual authors who puportedly created the films, to complete the ideas that make up the Dream Films 1926-1972 .

Beloff’s work, as wild and bizarre as it sometimes seems, illustrates what can happen when storytelling is released from the bounds of specific media or the constraints of the fictional versus the real. To me, The Lion Dream is a beautiful, understated testament to the quiet terror of a child in a moment of uncertainty made even more poignant by the possibility that it was recreated by one person in memory of another, in honor of two others.

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.