UK-based Hi-ReS! (Handsome information - Radical entertainment Systems), founded in 1999 by Alexandra Jugovic and Florian Schmitt, have been creating amazing award-winning websites for the film, TV, music and marketing industries for a few years now. Some of their sites, like Requiem for a Dream and Donnie Darko, I mention in my article about ‘Filmmakers That Think Outside the Film‘ over at Lance Weiler’s WorkBookProject. Here is a listing of some of the sites they’ve worked on:
Any day now a book (with DVD), Hi-res!: Amantes sunt Amentes, detailing their projects will be published. You can preorder at: Amazon UK and Amazon US. Great stuff!
That got your attention. Playwright and screenwriter Jason Grote’s new play, 1001, is set to premiere in New York on October 22nd. Jason has done what not many playwrights have done (that I know of — tell me if not!) and created a fictional newspaper for the play. Although it isn’t an ARG, it certainly plays with the idea of creating a fictional universe as a precurser to the live experience.Check it out: http://1001nyc.com/
Those who have attended one of my presentations over the few of years will recall Peter Greenaway’s multi-platform project: The Tulse Luper Suitcases. One part of this massive work is the online game Tulse Luper Journey. Here is some info about the TLS and the TLJ from the game’s site:
Tulse Luper is the lead character in an ambitious series of projects initiated by film director Peter Greenaway.
So far, the project includes three feature films, a series of DVD’s, travelling exhibitions, books, publications and this online game produced by Submarine.
These are all part of a growing universe of stories, facts, fiction, history and drama based on the adventures of a man who spent most of his live as a prisoner - mistaken for someone important, a spy, a lover, an artist, a writer and an observer.
Greenaways statement that “cinema is dead” calls for new ways of communicating ideas. This game is part of the search for a crossover format that breaks the boundaries and rules that have been imposed by film, theatre, books, games and other traditional media.
Created by developers, artists and students from around Europe, The Tulse Luper Journey explores new boundaries of online interactive media.
The online game finishes on October 15, so all those “researchers” out there are prompted to hand in their findings pronto.
New Line Cinema CEOs Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne were interviewed on the Charlie Rose show. They talk about the importance of franchise sequels being equal to or better each time; online fans and Snakes on a Plane; digital on-demand cinemas; simultaneous release across media; audience testing; gambling on Lord of the Rings; merging with Ted Turner and then TimeWarner; the importance of passion…
From October 4th, 2007 a real street game, the Monkey Murder Mystery, will start in four Dutch cities. The Monkey Murder Mystery is a local interactive reality game, which gets gamers away from their computer. The gamers will hunt or be hunted, not with a water or paint pistol, but with a camera equipped mobile.
After my post about Danah Boyd’s exploration of the history of social network sites, Trebor Scholz has developed his own. It is pretty comprehensive:
This is a cross-cultural, critical history of social life on the Internet. It captures technical, cultural, and political events that influenced the evolution of computer-assisted person-to-person communication via the net. Acknowledging the role of grassroots movements, this history does not solely focus on mainstream culture with all its mergers, acquisitions, sales and markets, and the (mostly male) geeks, engineers, scientists, and garage entrepreneurs who implemented their dreams in hardware and software. It does trace the changing nature of labor and typologies of those who create value online as much as it searches for changing approaches toward control, privacy, and intellectual property. This history shows strategies for direct social change based on the technologies and practices, which already exist.
Emphasizing the role of women whenever possible, this history shows that the interests of those who used the Net as social platform shaped it in the interplay of military, scientific, entrepreneurial, activist, artistic, and altruistic agendas. The evolution of the Social Web was driven by fear, desire (to be with others), and fandom. By no means exclusively an American story, it shows instances in which users succeeded when striving for open access, jointly negotiating with corporate platform-providers.
X Timeline is a site that provides a system for anyone to create timelines of any topic, and embed them on another site. There are plenty for entertainment — in particular properties, technology timelines and so on. This technology makes it easier to share what fans and researchers have been doing for a very long time.
Mirjam Struppek has an investigation into the variety of screens available in her Urbans Screens project:
URBAN SCREENS is a concept developed by Mirjam Struppek. It investigates how the currently commercial use of outdoor screens can be broadened with cultural content. We address cultural fields as digital media culture, urbanism, architecture and art. We want to network and sensitise all engaged parties for the possibilities of using the digital infrastructure for contributing to a lively urban society, binding the screens more to the communal context of the space and therefore creating local identity and engagement. The integration of the current information technologies support the development of a new integrated digital layer of the city in a complex merge of material and immaterial space that redefine the function of this growing infrastructure.
