Cross-Media + Transmedia Entertainment

** SHORT VERSION: I’M NOW BLOGGING AT WWW.CHRISTYDENA.COM **

Well, not quite ‘death’ but an indefinite hiatus. I’m powering down this blog for a few reasons, one of which is my desire to finish my PhD. I’ve tried for the last year and a half to do PhD writing and work and this blog, but found the mindsets are somewhat incompatable. I’ve decided therefore to close this blog down. I don’t know if I’ll bring it up again and if I do when, or whether I’ll start another one. But I do know that I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging here these past few years. I have especially enjoyed meeting many of you because of the blog, and seeing ‘cross-media’ (etc) projects become ubiquitous. Thankfully, the area has alot more people looking at it now, from alot of different perspectives. Here are some blogs that will keep you informed:

• Networked Performance: research blog that posts about emerging network-enabled practice;
• You can read and listen to news about alternate reality games and just about any online extension of a film, TV or book property on the ARGNet blog and ARG Netcast (podcast);
• Henry Jenkins personal blog and the Convergence Culture Consortium blog has lots of goodies from a media studies perspective about ‘transmedia storytelling’ and ‘convergence culture’ in general;
• DeMontfort University share their investigations into what they term ’Transliteracy’ at their PART blog;
• Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner and longtime practitioner of ‘trans-media’ projects, is now blogging regularly about his insights and experience over at the Producers Guild of America blog;
• Monique de Haas blogs about ‘crossmedia communication’ occasionally;
• Tony Walsh posts semi-regularly on alternate reality games;
• Valentina Rao blogs about crossmedia games and anything related to that at Games Across Media, and will hopefully be starting her PhD on the subject soon;
• Johnathan Gray, Derek Johnson and Ivan Askwith are blogging about everything around TV and film at The Extratextuals;
• Crossmedia Dialog is a group blog that post regularly on crossmedia in Amsterdam and worldwide;
• Faris Yakob, Adam Crowe blog about ‘transmedia planning’ and other changes to the marketing industry;
• Jak Boumans posts every single day about stuff happening in the Netherlands and worldwide at Buziaulane; 
• Max Giovognoli runs everything to do with cross-media in Italy;
• MobileCrossMedia is a blog that looks at the different ways mobile phones can network with different devices and the real world;
• If you don’t already get it, the Convergence Newsletter has regular interesting newsletters about convergence in journalism and has been my favourite newsletter for the past few years;

I don’t plan to be blogging here about events or publications I’m involved in, instead I’ll pop them on my bio site. But for now, here are some events I’m involved with, in the not-too-distant-future:

• I’ll be on the ‘expert panel’ with Mark McCrindle and Tim Flattery at Mitchell Communications Group ’s launch of ‘While You Weren’t Watching’, a documentary on changes to branded entertainment etc in which I was interviewed. The launch is private but the documentary will be put online I believe in Nov; 
• I have my own panel on ‘Designing, Experiencing and Analysing Games in the Age of Integration’, and I am a panelist in Darren Toft’s panel on ‘What Happened to New Media Art?’ at the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Dec;
• I’ll be on the panel on ‘Cyber-Born Film’ at Megan Spencer’s Destination Festival (or DestFest) in Dec;
• In Jan 08, I’ll be a guest lecturer again for Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media, De Montfort University, UK;
• In Feb 08, my essay on ‘Tiering in Alternate Reality Games’ will be published in the special issue of Convergence edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze.

For now though, I will continue to be online in a different way. I’ve started a podcast, a podcast where I’ll interview talented people working in this area. My ‘birth’ podcast is a bit awkward, but the second is a great one: an interview with Stitch Media’s Evan Jones. At the site, I also provide sneak preview information about Stitch Media’s latest project.

That is it for me here, thankyou all for sharing this time with me. I’ll see you on the other side of my PhD.

Check it out: www.ChristyDena.com  

Check it out: www.UniverseCreation101.com

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, with links to a diegetic blog and a wiki. 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/

There is a new wave of cinema experiences emerging that points to the revival of the cinema event. Contrasting interactive film (which can be experienced by one person and the interaction is limited to a DVD or remote input), these cinema events require audiences to participate in some way in an event environment.

• Kinoautomat (movie vending-machine), 1967… 2007

This 1967 work by Radúz Çinçera, One Man and His House, is a film that was screened at the Montreal World Fair in a specially-constructed cinema with buttons for the audience. The film continually stops at certain points, two of the actors then come on stage and ask the audience to make their choice of direction.  This is regarded as the first interactive cinema work and is interesting too because the film was specifically designed for this interaction. However, it should be noted that the interaction (like many interactive works for various technical and skills reasons) was only the illusion of interaction. As Media Art Net observes, although a different filmic sequence was shot and screened based on the audience choice. The next choice was always the same. It has recently been revived with an English version being screened in Prague. An interview with Radúz’s daughter, Alena Çinçera , and more pics is here.

Image sourced from Media Art Net. Copyright Radúz Çinçera

• Cause and Effect , 2002/…

Inspired by Kinoautomat, Chris Hales has been creating short ‘interactive cinema performances’. Cause and Effect has been running specially-created short films since 2002 and is currently touring Poland and Finland. There is a video available for download on the site, and here is a basic description from the main page:

We experiment with various techniques of group interaction and the types of interactive film that are commensurate with it. Although using sophisticated methods, the show is designed to be portable, tourable, and suitable for most venues. Currently interaction methods enable audiences to influence films by shouting, passing around bright or coloured lights, using mobile phone handsets, waving, singing soprano and humming. A typical performance consists of around eight short interactive movies (chosen from a substantial repertoire) covering genres of video art, drama, non-fiction, education, and music. The show is both entertaining and intellectual and appeals to a wide audience demographic. It is constantly developing, with varied modes of interaction being explored and new films being regularly created. Certain films are customised for the actual theatre and the language of the country in which the show takes place during a rapid pre-production phase when we arrive at the location. This localisation adds to the audience’s surprise and involvement with the films presented to them.

Image sourced from Cause and Effect

• Lance Weiler’s “Cinema ARG”, 2006/…

As I’ve mentioned here before, Lance Weiler created a unique theatre experience for the screening of his latest film, Head Trauma. His ‘cinema ARG’ involves special screenings of the film with a band playing the soundtrack live, actors and props from the film in the audience and mobile phone interaction. It has been touring across the USA and is now expanding to the web. His latest description:

This fall the HEAD TRAUMA cinematic gaming continues. Players will interact with the film’s characters; offline, online, and via mobile devices in what is a cross between flash mobs, urban gaming, and ARGs. The game starts in late September with the airing of a special web series. The series will run across a number of outlets such as myspace, xbox, twitter, eyespot, stage 6 and opera. Then on Oct. 20th, live cinema games will play out in 10 cities across the country. Within the series are clues aka rabbit holes that lead to hidden sites, blogs, social networking pages and media. A full list of cities will be released in the coming weeks.

• MSNBC’s Newsbreaker Game, 2007

As I’ve mentioned before in my post that includes stats on its success, this example is an interactive cinema advertisement. They actually call the work ‘interactive crowd gaming’ in movie theatres. It was created by SS+K in collaboration with Brand Experience Lab for msnbc.com. Here is a video of one of the cinema events:

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All of these works show without doubt the reinvigoration of the embodied and multi-modal cinema experience. What I find exciting are the fact that many of these works (and more to come I’m sure) are being specially designed. Do you know of some other interactive cinema performances/gaming?

Last Sunday I presented at the Revelations Film Festival in Perth on Second Life art in the panel: ‘Second Life & Beyond: Virtual Communities and Making Media in a Digital World’.  During that presentation I mentioned a dance film, Thursday’s Fictions, that will be broadcast on the ABC this Sunday @ 3pm, which will be followed by a Q&A in Second Life and the opportunity to experience the Second Life version of the storyworld. This Sunday I’ll be moderating the Q&A panel @ ABC Island.

The work, Thursday’s Fictions, began as a multimedia stage production in 1995 (which was also on radio), became a poetry book (which became the primary text in this multi-platform work), recently became a dance film and has just had a Second Life rendition created. I’ve been speaking to Richard James Allen for a while about the development of this project and his creative approach is quite interesting. Although each iteration is more an adaptation than a continuation of a narrative, it is interesting to see a project that was conceived to be expressed across a number of artistic forms from the beginning. I don’t know how much we’ll get to talk about this on Sunday, but for those interested you can join us inworld (at ABC Island Ampitheatre) at 3pm EST, watch it being streamed live or view it afterwards at SLCN.tv.

Thursday’s Fictions in Second Life Credits:

Director: Richard James Allen
Writers/Producers: Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman
Second Life Producer and Designer: Gary Hayes
Conceptual Artist: Kate E. Wills
Story Consultant: Jackie Turnure
A Physical TV Company Production
[and Tony Walsh was the guardian mentor of this project when it was developed at LAMP]

Lance Weiler, the director of the film The Last Broadcast (which has been described as the “original Blair Witch Project”) released another film last september: Head Trauma. What is interesting about the project is the STACK OF GREAT THINGS HE HAS DONE with the film!! Firstly, he or the film has a presence on many social networking sites, such as MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and faciltiates community with his blog and vlog. He gives back to the community too, by providing information about DIY filmmaking on the DVD and has an “open source repository on filmmaking“. 

Second, he has a great graphic novel on the main website, which is half comic/half vignettes of the film. It feels like a cross between the “webler” that was created for Peter Greenaway’s transmedia project The Tulse Luper Suitcases using stills and audio from the film and the graphic novels used in the Heroes 360 Experience (I love the integration of the graphic novel and film narratives by the way).

Thirdly, he has created an alternate soundtrack of the film ala Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of Oz. Lance describes it at the HTMySpace site:

We created an alternate soundtrack for my newest feature film HEAD TRAUMA. The soundtrack CD is meant to be cued up with a special scene on the DVD of the movie. So if you turn down the volume on the TV and turn up the volume on the stereo you’ll get an alternate soundtrack experience.

Here is their movie describing the process. Lance calls it “a natural extension to the narrative”. This extension actually seems more like the album Haunted that accompanied Mark X. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. But back to Head Trauma. You have to go another website (www.parkthevan.com) to find the secret scene to synch the music with…and the synch scene is perfect. I really like the way link love is shared with this distribution of clues. Rather than create a whole lot of sites yourself, embed clues in sites of fellow crew etc. Share the link love. Lance sees the alternate versions, the remixing as being integral to the story too:

Philadelphia Weekly Online reports:

You’ve released a Dark Side of Oz-style alternate soundtrack CD of your film called Cursed: The Head Trauma Music Project with people like Dr. Dog, Bardo Pond and Sun Ra’s Marshall Allen. Is this screening a continuation of that?

“Yeah. Because Head Trauma deals with the fragmentation of memory, I thought it’d be cool to create other versions of the film. Movies kind of get stuck by being the same thing over and over again. A band can go and play and reinterpret their music, or fans can reinterpret it by doing covers. Films don’t have that option.”

This interweaving of snippets of memory and remixing (and sharing the filmmaking etc) is something that the team behind SMSSugarman in South Africa have been developing too. But, one difference is what Lance offers as a new cinema experience. This is where we get to cool point number four. I’ll let the the press release tell the good news:

In what has been called a cinema ARG (alternate reality game) HEAD TRAUMA is taking a hybrid of music, movies and gaming on the road for a number of special event screenings 

The event consists of three core elements.

1. A screening of HEAD TRAUMA with a live soundtrack performance by Bardo Pond, Espers, Fern Knight, Marshal Allen (Sun Ra), Steve Garvey (Buzzcocks) and others. The music is mixed live with the dialog and sound effects tracks from the film to create a new alternate soundtrack.

2. Various props and sets from the film are setup on stage and certain characters from the film will emerge from the audience.

3. During the course of the film a phone number appears on screen. When viewers call the number they begin a game that will last through the film and follow them home.

They receive a number of cryptic clues as they are asked to solve a series of riddles. The interaction involves phone calls and text messages from the characters of HEAD TRAUMA that will lead viewers to hidden clues spread across the Internet.

“We’re trying to change the cinematic experience. We want to take the concept of narrative storytelling and move it across multiple devices and screens, so it is engaging the audience in new and different ways. People have been calling it a cinema ARG and the response to the initial screenings has been amazing. Not to mention I’m always looking for new ways to scare the audience.” Says HEAD TRAUMA creator Lance Weiler.

Bravo Lance.

HT Main site: http://www.headtraumamovie.com/

I wrote about an installation launch with a performance in the virtual world Second Life in the latest issue of SlateNight. Border Art is now online, as well as a couple of interesting articles on the philosophy of the avatar and an inworld Shakespeare performance in development. Check out SlateNight.

A heads up from Mysdirection informs me of this wonderful prank performance created by the Improv Everywhere team. Their latest mission was to have a team member act lost at the Yankee stadium during a game. He kept appearing but just couldn’t hear his mates yelling and waving at him. This continued for a while until whole sections where waving and screaming to help Rob get back to his seat. They describe the event and have pics and videos at the mission page. Lots of fun.