Transmedia storytelling at the Open Video Conference

This presentation featured 2 filmmakers whose latest projects have extended traditional storytelling beyond a single screen.

First up, Lance Waller, a self-described filmmaker who has become a story architect‚
talked about last film he made 'Head Trama' the first ever project to go through the Sundance Institute as a transmedia project. Head Trauma as a project started with interactive comic, then feature film, then live events. People were instructed to share their cell phone number and could interact with other audience members to solve puzzles presented by the film. After the screening, a game designed to build on the film experience loops them into conversation with others who had shared a theater screening experience. Then video on demand was released as a free download, again bringing people in 2.5 million people -- a core of whom continue to interact with games and add-on experiences about the film. The idea: no one piece of the storytelling tells the whole story. By engaging in these different places where parts of the story are being told the public becomes a collaborator.

He then described his latest project, Hope is Missing that will feature mobile episodes micronarratives and a mobile geo-location based app to put people in place of the film protagonist a child in a post-apocalyptic future who has to scavenge by day and make nests by night. His insight: When people buy in to this they give data points GPS info, make model of handset/ email address/phone no/ and storytellers can track their impact from amount of usage.

He also spoke about another of his projects:

www.Workbookproject.com

A community that he started originally to help share his knowledge about creating this kind of storytelling but has now become an active online community helping people to better fund/create etc. Looks great.

Waller ended by arguing that we are at a point where the value of content is dropping but the social/collaborative experience of storytelling is thing that will have most value going forward.

Tommy Pallotta, producer of A Scanner Darkly spoke about how he unwittingly became involved with transmedia storytelling through a trailer remix contest for A Scanner Darkly. This yielded such rich results that he decided to make a graphic novel using these files. He then decided could make a mobile app. After the movie had been released for several months he couldn't understand why his audiences were growing in size not diminishing. At a screening in Korea he asked who had seen the movie before:it turns out many had on bit torrent. This made him then release a bit torrent of film American Prince. His latest piece is an energy conservation story told as part feature part doc part rotoscope part geo-data and website www.collapsus.com.

OK Go at Open Video Conference

Damien Kulash of OK GO spoke at the Open Video Conference on the band's experiences of leveraging, sharing and the social web and their split with EMI following the label's decision to remove embedding feature from their videos.

One of most interesting nuggets: pitching idea for 'Here it goes again' treadmill video to EMI digital media head: "If this gets out you're sunk". The video took 10 days, cost $5K for treadmills and has had 200 million views.

Kulash also discussed the making of 'This too shall pass' (see video above, if you don't already know and love this piece!) -- and the fact that the video took 89 takes, that they got to the end of the Rube Goldberg machine 3 times, and that no: it is not one continuous shot: start and end are separate shots and the elevator shaft sequence was an additional separate edit.

Kulash talked about the group's belief in fan-remixing --OK Go's videos have been remade by almost 400 groups and the band are strong believers in open video. OK Go have spoken at the House Judiciary Committee and has met with Obama's team on net neutrality issues.

Build an HTML5 player at the Open Video Conference, 2010

At the Open Video Conference 2010, Chris Blizzard of Mozilla set the scene for what is at stake with HTML5 'we are just at the beginning of understanding what video on the web could be: imagine a video-rich wikipedia, or the ability to translate any video on the web into any language' HTML5 and WebM offer this potential. In order to demo what video could be they ran a called Flight of the Navigator in HTML5, Javascript and the Mozilla Audio API -- no plug-ins required.

Processing.js ( www.processingjs.org ) is used for animated textures, WebM video for videos and BeatDetektor.js ( www.beatdetektor.com ) for audio analysis and visualization.

The demo that Blizzard ran picked up real time flickr and twitter streams of images/video tagged #ovc10 (the twitter #tag for the OVC conference) and featured them in screens within an animated city scene and timed to be syncopated with the soundtrack. Very impressive!


Phillipe de Hegaret of W3C then demoed how to build your own HTML5 player using opensource screen vector graphics authoring 'inkscape' tools in just 10 mins!

Tim Wu "The Master Switch" at the Open Video Conference

In the 2010 Open Video Conference's Keynote, Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law and author of The Master Switch: The Invisible Wars for the Information Empire argued that we are now at a time when screens dominate our lives but we have to understand that each of the 3 screens originates from a different founding principle and economic model. The first of the 3 screens: TV, was founded on idea of quality and unity = one nation under 1 schedule, but morphed into other founding idea: entertainment that sells.

Computer : in the early 70s founded on idea of openness and users, a different model to TV's idea of viewers‚ also founded on the idea that the computer would make you free but then very quickly based on commerce : first software then internet advertising becoming the means by which it earns its money.

Finally, the personal mobile device, built on usage, like a utility.

What Wu argues is that as technology converges we are beginning to see the faultlines of a battle between founding principles of these 3 screens and how technology will be compensated.

Autotune The News on "how will creativity be conpensated?" at the Open Video Conference

Perhaps the most amusing panel at the 2010 Open Video Conference dealt with the thorny question: can you build a business model around free content? Gregory Bros Autotune the News described their unexpected itunes payout model for the Bed Intruder song ˆ and revealed that they are sharing proceeds with Antoine Dodson (if you haven't seen the video check it out here) and Carla Jovine described how her film
www.thecosmonaut.org
has not only been crowd-funded and bypassing traditional distribution but also how the website makes everything available including scripts , aethetics dossier, budget, transmedia plan: everything is out there. Looks really interesting

Social Media 101 tips from the folks at Transmedia Activism

Social Media Won't Save the World... But It Might Make the Job Easier

View more presentations from lksriv.

The medium’s message- article by Georgette Gouveia at Westchester Business Journal

The Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville has a new program for nonprofits in which the medium is, in a sense, the message.

In Reel Change for Nonprofits, teams from area organizations – consisting of staffers, volunteers and even board members – hone in on what they’d like to convey about their institutions and then craft those themes in videos they learn to make in the 12-week course.

“We enroll institutional teams of two: That’s the ideal,” said Theresa Dawson, curriculum designer and a faculty member at the Burns Center’s new green Media Arts Lab, where the program is held. “The reason we look for two is to build that institutional capacity and also, they can be a filmmaking team.”

Since the program began in April of last year, Reel Change has worked with 20 organizations in Westchester and Fairfield County, Conn., including the Greenwich Music Festival in Greenwich; My Sisters’ Place, a White Plains-based organization that aids victims of domestic abuse; and the Westpac Foundation in Pleasantville, which is committed to peace and justice.

“The first thing we start with is that this should be a piece of advocacy,” Dawson said of the videos. “It’s not a laundry list. We’ve all seen those films at the gala dinners. So we ask them, ‘What do you want to do and how could video craft that message?’”

Helping answer those questions is the ability to target an audience.

“Knowing the audience and what you want the audience to do is the most strategic journey I’ve taken these organizations on,” Dawson said.

As the teams identify their audiences and master video techniques, they also learn that not everyone longs to be in pictures.

“Most of the organizations have some issues of sensitivity,” Dawson said. “Some people are happy to tell their story, just not on camera.”

When My Sisters’ Place decided to make a video on human trafficking – an issue that sadly touches places like Westchester as well as a Mexico or a Thailand – the team realized it could not use real people. So it drew in part on archival footage of this criminal activity, said a member of the organization’s board of directors who participated in the program.

For the Westpac Foundation’s video on hydrofracking – a potentially toxic and thus controversial means of extracting natural gas from deep in the earth’s watershed – the organization decided to include American Indians’ views on the sacredness of the land.

“That’s what gave the piece wheels,” said Tracy Basile, a Westpac volunteer, who heads up the organization’s Friends of Turtle Island – non-Native Americans in support of this country’s indigenous peoples.

Both she and my sister's place have nothing but praise for Reel Change and curriculum designer Dawson.

“Theresa (and the Burns’ staff) were extremely helpful and supportive and continue to be so,” said Basile, whose organization’s video has gotten the attention of the Westchester County Board of Legislators and actress/activist Debra Winger.

As for My Sisters’ Place: “It opened our eyes to opportunities we weren’t taking advantage of. All of these nonprofits suffer from the same thing – not enough money, not enough people to do things.”

The idea of making a video that would raise an institution’s profile without hiring a professional filmmaker – something many nonprofits could not afford to do – was a great concept.

Now he and the other teams’ members are also learning what film students from NYU to UCLA have to figure out – that filmmaking is just part of the challenge. You have to distribute your product, whether by placing it on your website, getting it play on YouTube or holding screenings. Distribution isn’t easy.

To help program graduates weather their growing pains, Dawson said, the Burns Center has created a second program, Reel Exchange.

My Sister's Place for one would gladly sign up for it: “In today’s world, video is a great way to communicate.”