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Most of the younger folks in the biz express frustration that the “system” is resistant to change, particularly the type of change that might render some people’s entire professions obsolete. And I get it – the fear of change is natural in every entrenched industry. No one wants to be faced with the possibility that large amounts of human and cash capital investments might be lost.

But I think what saddened me the most is that the creative people – writers, directors, producers – people shaping the content are so terrified of the forces of the market (and audiences) that they seem to be more conservative than ever in their creative choices. I’m sure the same was true of the artists who worked in silent films, when talkies came along, and of the unrivaled film industry when television came along, and on and on…

When I consider what has driven change in entertainment over the years, I see seismic shifts due to technology or social disruption that the industry then hobbles to catch up to. Very rarely do I see an instance of the business innovating from the inside. And I’m not talking about 3D technology either. I’m talking about creative shifts – experimentation WITHIN the medium of film.

The French New Wave changed film in a very radical way; it was a push within the medium that spoke to the era. And it changed the way in which storytelling in film had functioned until that point. This is an example of artistic innovation within the medium – introducing new ideas into the lexicon and pushing the possibilities of film further. I acknowledge that the movement came from outside the “establishment” and only slowly seeped into the way mainstream films were later made and viewed; BUT the movement was a real, working consideration of film as a process and a form, as art that evolves.

We are in a very different predicament today.  Filmmaking itself as we know it may be approaching obsolescence and there is little happening inside the medium that is a direct response to this issue. The fact that blockbuster movies are looking and sounding a lot more like videogames is a strong indication that without meaning to, the medium will experience inevitable, perhaps accidental change. However, without the minds of artists whose job it is to think these ideas through and experiment with what film *could* be in the future, we will accept a mishmash that is little more than the residue of innovation in other kinds of creative endeavors like gaming and interactive play.

As those who follow me know, I am a huge proponent of platform agnostic storytelling – I am after all, a transmedia storyteller. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and respect the specificity and art of each individual medium. I love reading books and I adamantly believe that the experience is like no other. I don’t read because there’s nothing to watch. I read because I love *to read*. I play games when I want that experience. I go to concerts when I feel like I want to be surrounded by the energy and life of the audience and band.  So while I am fully committed to working with connective storytelling, I am still a filmmaker who would like to find a space in which filmmaking as an art can grow deeper, more meaningful and expansive as a medium.

If film is to survive, we need to aggressively experiment creatively with the medium. That is our job as artists, and for the folks who make money off the work, they too must understand that innovation is not a choice – it’s that, or perish.

In just a few minutes, the media onslaught began. And one can cynically regard the non-stop FoxNews and CNN live coverage as exploitation business as usual – after all, television news outlets have been known to run endless live news commentary on highway police car chases. But looking a little deeper into this event finds us inside a narrative with fragments across media, and a backstory embedded in the fabric of the web in a way that suggests a shift in how we understand these kinds of events.

It instantly became clear to me that we have entered an age in which the narrative of real time politics has gone beyond monolithic TV spectacle and entered into a complex mode in which the collective consciousness of a nation and a people surfaces with the kind of depth and breadth that was simply not possible in a pre-web era.

As I attempt to piece the fragments together, I discover an underlying narrative built around artifacts, not merely evidence in the sense of the law, and the justice to be meted for this crime but rather, a trail of moral imperatives, political certitudes and unspooled dogma. It looks something like this:

PART 1: AN INCIDENT

In March 2010, Gabrielle Giffords votes for the Health Care Bill. The Tuscon Sentinel reports that her Arizona office is broken into and vandalized.

On March 25th MSNBC interviews Giffords, and, she says does not perceive this as a serious threat. However, she expresses concern that Republican ex-Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin has targeted her publicly.

PART 2: THE CROSSHAIRS

Sarah Palin targets a handful of Democrats on her website using as a graphic representation, a crosshairs symbol that resembles that of a gun. Giffords is disturbed by this image and says in the MSNBC video that this is dangerous and may incite violence but the image stays up on the site.

PART 3: A RANDOM GUY WHO LIKES MEIN KAMPF BUYS A GUN

Eight months later, on October 25th, 2010, Jared Loughner signs up for a MySpace page, on which he posts his love for books such as Mein Kampf. Less than a month later, on November 19th, Loughner purchases a Glock semi-automatic handgun in Arizona.

PART 4: THE SHOOTING

A surveillance video in a Tuscon Safeway captures the shooting of Representative Giffords and the other victims. The video is puportedly on Youtube but quickly removed as is the identified shooters MySpace page (screengrabbed above).  Bystanders instantly document the scene.

PART 5: WHO DID IT?

Police apprehended and identified Loughner on the scene. Artifacts from his Youtube channel, are found, downloaded and re-encoded by several youtube users following the removal of his channel.

PART 6: WHAT MOTIVATED THE SHOOTER?

At this point, little is known about the shooter or his motives. But then in the hours following the shooting, Sarah Palin’s name begins to surface and her map with the crosshairs makes its way around the blogosphere. Many commentators see Palin’s map as a call to arms and a violence-inciting graphic that could be related to the shooting. The Huffington Post reports that the map is taken down from Palin’s site and a controversy ensues about why.

PART 7: THE AFTERMATH

A few days later, Palin takes to her Facebook page to defend herself against any association with the acts of violence by Loughner.

Within hours of her video, President Barack Obama gives a speech memorializing the victims of the shooting. He calls for civility, and his rhetoric addresses a the wide swath of political animus generated in the previous days. His message: reconciliation.

PART 8: POST-MEMORIAL

At this writing, Representative Giffords appears to be recovering if still in critical condition. The shooter, Jared Laughner, is in police custody, awaiting his trial. In the six short days since the shooting, millions in America alone have watched video coverage and commentary, read accounts and opinions, stared at the web artifacts online, and written hundreds of thousands of comments on blogs, youtube videos and tv and newspaper sites. A Google search for “Gabrielle Giffords shooting” yields 87 million references, and a YouTube search finds nearly 5,000 videos.

THE MAKING OF A NEWS NARRATIVE

The core of the narrative cycle of this story has played out in so broad a field that it is almost impossible to catalogue it all. But what we can observe based on the myriad ways in which information was both generated and revealed is that we are no longer in an era where a handful of journalists report to the public what they have observed or what they consider “the facts” of the story to be. For example, had the presence of the Palin crosshairs map not been widely blogged about, then the disappearance of the map may have sounded like an outlandish conspiracy to defame Palin. Even the sudden emergence (by a youtube user) of the nearly year old MSNBC video in which Giffords refers to the Palin map is a function of a narrative that refuses to be corralled by any one source.

As information surrounding the shooting surfaced from social media, news, and first person sources, what became evident was that the substance of this tragic narrative –the story itself, would become one in which America both plays out and questions its love for and discomfort with the rhetoric of violence. After all, these calls to arms are documented in many places – every leader, in politics or media who has ever called for or suggested anything close to assassination of a rival or other public figure can be found online and studied and/or played ad infinitum. In what other era has this been possible?

And in the broader political scene that is a backdrop to this chilling story, many narratives are aggressively being played out including the one that pits Sarah Palin as a presidential contender in 2012 against Barack Obama. In constructing this narrative, political operatives on both sides will use as their tools, the artifacts of this incident, now over 87 million strong, to build the fabric of the presidential history of America and the moral tenor of its people. Within the chaos of it all, there are a number of stories, not the least of which is the question of how our rhetoric can so seamlessly become narrative.

Naturally, studying the thread of this narrative made me question how it is that some of the most relevant moral and social issues of our time are patently NOT present in the more “constructed” narratives that we consciously create for television and film.  There is something here, inside this story–this wide-ranging “news” narrative that floats from Facebook to FoxNews to the rabid comment section of the Huffington Post and beyond which I think we ought to observe very closely. We are in an era that spins constantly – it is not the “web” for nothing, after all. Though the loom has become invisible to us with our tethered devices and time-wasting digital blithering, let’s not forget that we are weaving rapidly, frequently and without conscious regard for what the fabric is saying. Yet that fabric is where the handwriting of our story lies.

Yet every time I hear the “TV Everywhere” chorus, I wonder who made this “the moment”. Because it most certainly does NOT seem to be any kind of definitive moment for me. I still watch the shows I like, exchange the content I dig up online, no matter whether the cable is connected, wrapped, cut or hanging out behind my TV. Perhaps TV Everywhere is a song based on the agenda of cable providers desperately trying to figure out how to keep subscribers, and big content providers trying to make sure they keep their prized demographics.

But seriously, is cutting the cord and watching content across various platforms/devices really the issue when considering what comes through to whatever screen? Do platforms really matter in that context? Does the fact that Google TV wants to offer an all-you-can-eat content buffet really alter my tastes in any profound way? I think not.

As audiences, we care about whatever our interests are at the moment, not so much about the gear, or the platform. Although certain platforms make the experience of entertainment smoother and more convenient to our lifestyles, the truth remains that we follow that which moves us. And sometimes those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about technology and content in a slightly abstract way forget this. Yet, ask any TV programming executive and you will hear them say they are looking for content that audiences are drawn to. This is not to say these guys get a pass – after all, their blind spot has been their unwillingness to experiment with content that doesn’t look like old-school TV. That makes me wonder really HOW committed they are to meeting the demands of a sophisticated and fast-changing viewership. But I digress.

Let’s go to the watercooler for a second — that famed watercooler which has become extension of the shared entertainment experience we have alone or with personal friends in our private spaces – our home, or their homes. Then we seek to share and/or relive the “best of” moments when we engage with our work colleagues in a not so intimate environment called the workplace. Now with social networking in the workplace (and all the gear to make it possible even if the bosses don’t like it), the act of sharing entertainment is an activity that can be experienced not just with the folks you physically SEE in your office, but perhaps your buddies on the other floors, or a that rival company, or “friends” you added on Facebook one drunken night at a bar and now trade viral videos with. The range is wide and features feathers of every color: From long popular lo-fi gag photos LOLcats to Josh Groban singing Kanye West tweets and the occasional political moment that grabs the country’s attention such as the indefatigable Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ 8 1/2 hour speech, these exchanges connect us virtually and physically in laughter, outrage, mockery, sadness, wistfulness and all manner of diversionary emotion.

One thing is constant: every content creator wants a piece of the watercooler Holy Grail – the sticky phenomenon…the thing that gets people talking. Surely that’s why advertising, after suffering the fate of the mouse-click strove hard in 2010 to legitimately become part of that rainbow of emotion that is a valuable commodity in the marketplace. Occasionally it succeeded with campaigns like the Old Spice Guy. And it is perhaps what Hollywood tries to invent when it births a new franchise (or re-hashes an ancient one). But 2010 was also the year in which that fountain of “real entertainment” notoriously failed to create a marquee entertainment brand that had folks gathering around the water cooler.

So what exactly is it that we as a voraciously media consumptive society (at least in North America) are engaged by? A quick cobble-together yields a picture it that looks something like this: zombies (The Walking Dead), cats doing anything, famous people making fun of other famous people (Josh Groban/Kanye West), old people telling dirty jokes (Betty White), politics served with jokes (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert), regular people saying what everyone thinks but doesn’t say (The Rent Is Too Damn High Party’s Jimmy McMillan). All these people engage us in ways that entertain and/or inform, often provoking or titillating the senses.

With so much competing for our eyeballs and minds, we are now in the habit of curating viscerally and without regard for the classification of content. Invariably, hybrids emerge, and a blurring between content forms begins to take hold. For example, the blurring of the line between so called “information” and “entertainment” is increasingly evident. Certainly, to some this signals the death of “real news” and journalism. Some others, like the very tabloid styled Huffington Post lose no sleep over this distinction and move forward into a future that seeks to engage, at any cost.

While I’m not arguing for the tabloid-ization of everything, and I value ideas and engagement that push the brain beyond titillation, there must be a way in which cross-pollination becomes an opportunity to re-think the way we see form. Forget about TV being on my Android. Who cares? We MUST think beyond platform and medium into content itself, and the audience that seeks out all the things we as media creators bring them – news, jokes, social change, stories in any and all forms.

We’ve already seen the result of a powerful hybrid news-entertainment personality in “fake news” guy Jon Stewart, whose laudable actions on behalf of the 9-11 Responders yielded real political and practical impact. I’m not sure Jon Stewart as a figure could have been considered America’s “most trusted newsman” in a pre-digital, pre-social media world. Of course there are some who consider comparisons between Stewart and Cronkite a travesty of epic proportions. While I myself might wait a few more years to crown Stewart, I think the reach of his work speaks for itself.

Onward, sans-idea boundaries, into 2011!

The world of mega-influencers is no doubt an elite one, and Oprah is a phenomenon like no other – she is the gold standard for measurable influence. As her daytime show comes to an end I wondered if there could be, in the digital era, an influencer as powerful as Oprah. She is no doubt a one-of-a-kind, and her combination of empathy, support and self-improvement struck a cord with individuals who sought a powerful connective point in their increasingly isolated worlds.

Incidentally, over the weekend, as I led a discussion group for filmmakers about using social media to promote their films and build their audiences, it occurred to me that the spheres of online influence are quite different from those of the offline variety. So much so, that despite Oprah’s 4.5 million fans on Twitter, her rank on influence metrics site Klout is 65 (out of 100) and her “amplification” level, defined as “the likelihood that your content will be acted upon” is 0.

Clearly, this does not reflect the true measure of her power. If Oprah says jump, the reverberations are felt throughout the mediasphere- so the idea that she cannot motivate people to act based on her words is inaccurate in the offline world if somewhat true in the social media world. But it begs the question of who the mega-influencers will be when audiences are more diffused across media platforms. Personalities like Ashton Kutcher, whose real fame quotient is lower than an actor like Brad Pitt, wields enormous influence online, based solely upon his building his influence quotient as one of the first “celebrities” to embrace the influencer role in social media.

When I talk to artists and marketers about reaching influencers, I speak almost entirely in terms of niche. Niche has become the holy grail of the web marketing and social media game and it is enormously empowering. But what artist, author or guru wouldn’t want to have access to the online version of Oprah, and see the kind of enormous effect that her stamp of approval has on one’s life and career? The question is whether that kind of mega-influencer is even possible in our ever-fragmented digital world. But I look forward to that kind of phenomenon…and to seeing who will be the digital Oprah.

Before I saw the video below, I had never heard of the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), which despite having existed in England since the 1700s has been quite invisible to many on this side of the pond. Enter Youtube, and now a trove of their animated videos can be found on the RSA Channel.

Matthew Taylor, who heads RSA is also the voice behind the animation. This may be the least “fun” video I have posted as a curation but I urge you not to be daunted by the fast-talking Englishman! The ideas Taylor proffers here are provocative and challenge accepted philosophies behind prevailing 21st century modes of commerce, lifestyle and progress. In the RSA’s words, the group’s function is to “encourage public discourse and critical debate by providing platforms for leading experts to share new ideas on contemporary issues” and with their projects and fellows to “generate new models for tackling the social challenges of today.”

I could write many posts on the ideas in the piece and your thoughts are certainly welcomed as comments. But suffice it to say for now that watching philosophy animated is a beautiful thing to behold.

(I highly recommend watching a couple of times to appreciate both the text of the speech and the beauty of the animation.)

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

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.”

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.

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.