Filed under: Progressive Entertainment
A brief update from the Grandfather of Transmedia Storytelling and Media Convergence: Henry Jenkins. This upcoming event, in April 2011, will surely have some follow-up videos for peeps like me that can’t make it.
Henry Jenkins:
Excerpt:
We hope to break down the project of developing transmedia content into four basic design challenges:
- What does it mean to structure a franchise around the exploration of a world rather than a narrative? How are these worlds moving from the film and television screen into other media, such as comics, games, and location based entertainment?
- What does it mean to design a character that will play well across a range of different media platforms? How might transmedia content re-center familiar stories around compelling secondary characters, adding depth to our understanding of the depicted events and relationships?
- What does it mean to develop a sequence of events across a range of different media? How do we make sure that the spectator understands the relationship between events when they are piecing together information from different platforms and trying to make sense of a mythology that may span multiple epochs?
- What does it take to motivate consumers to invest deeply enough into a transmedia franchise that they are eager to track down new installments and create buzz around a new property? How is transmedia linked to a push towards interactivity and participatory culture?
As with the first event, Transmedia, Hollywood: Visual Culture & Design will bring together comic book writers, game designers, “imagineers,” filmmakers, television show runners, and other media professionals in a conversation with leading academic thinkers on these topics.
Filed under: Cloud & Collaboration | Tags: cloud, collaborative, Stroome, video editing, webtop
Stroome.com is a webtop — rather than a desktop — cloud based non-linear video editor and collaborative community. After a quick sign-up, you can begin uploading video and working solo, or allowing specific people, or the entire Stroome community to access, borrow or co-edit your project. The cloud based software means you can log-in, from any computer attached to the internet, using a web browser and work with your video or other people’s video. Exporting to youtube or facebook is easily done and explained clearly in Stroome’s FAQ (Frequently asked questions). Their video tour is a great place to start.
Stroome provides a powerful tool for artists, citizen journalists, community projects or home video. With more and more home-made music videos, such as this and this, and independent film productions emerging, its no mystery as to why: technology and software is incredibly easy to use and access. With this in mind, I intend to post my on-going video experiments and collaborations.
Filed under: A/V 4002 | Tags: cultural engagement, education, Gaming, hegemony, Henry Jenkins, interactive media, intermediality, learning and games, MMO, new-media, participatory media, web 2.0
Our instructor, Joseph Lipsett, created an interesting and engaging course which included weekly-blogging assignments responding to film or TV screenings, a graphic novel, class discussion and a welcomed final project: construction of a 10-week course syllabus and a 15-page write up on our film/reading choices. We also did ‘speed-pitching’ with our classmates which had us changing partners every few minutes — a great way to summarize and give/receive feedback. I think the success of the course was in how we engaged the material, which did not stick to the old ‘essay/final-exam’ model. Getting us to fashion our own course-ware, in relation to media-convergence, was a lot of work but much more engaging and encouraged us to see/make links between academic concepts and cultural trends. So here is my mock syllabus:
(Mock Syllabus)
FILM 3901 – Transmedia Storytelling & Hegemony
Course Description:
The recent surge in transmedia marketing and storytelling will become ubiquitous to the entertainment industry. The economic aspects are important in this renewed mode of reception, also known as adaptation of narrative, and so looking at three main groups of spectatorship will be explored from the traditional-passive to a more participatory role. An important distinction between transmedia-marketing or ‘tie-ins’ and transmedia storytelling will be demonstrated and give us a better understanding of progressive versus indulgent narratives. The technologies permitting these new levels of engagement will be examined and help explain the growing push towards participatory receivership and ultimately a more engaged and critical culture.
Learning Goals:
-To understand the differences between open and closed transmedia storytelling
-To distinguish the varying levels of engagement with transmedia storytelling
-To examine the roles that studios, filmmakers, and fans play in the creation, consumption and collaboration of these new media
-To underscore the rewards of an engaged culture in the loom of Hegemonic strategies and binary opposition propaganda.
Course Outline:
Week 1: Introduction: The Interactive Digital Frontier
Screening:
eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999)
Reading:
Grusin, Richard. “DVDs, Videogames, and the Cinema of Interactions.” Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet. Eds. James Lyons and John Plunkett. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007. 209-221.
Week 2: A brief history of ‘tie-ins’ and Transmedia Storytelling
Filed under: A/V 4002 | Tags: Cyborg Mother, Derrida, logocentric moment, Panopticon, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Jaimie Smith-Windsor’s article The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary reads like part journal and part theoretical analysis. She incorporates her experience of giving pre-mature birth to her daughter into a parallel with Cyborg theory. The incubator that keeps her baby alive becomes a physical and ideological surrogate. Smith-Windsor’s fears come true when she realizes that “the interface is the (more…)
Filed under: A/V 4002 | Tags: Anne Haraway, Cyborg manifesto, Darwin, fractals, Kevin Warwick, Metropolis
Donna Haraway‘s Cyborg manifesto explores some angst about heteronormative conditioning and how “cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms.” (p. 37) She discusses issues relating to how technology is already all around us and that it has become invisible. It is almost impossible to live (more…)
Filed under: A/V 4002 | Tags: 5 seconds films, Cronenberg, eXistenZ, Gamer, The Matrix, Videodrome
This week has some interesting elements involving how a narratively starved culture is ripe for visual/physical over-stimulation and hungry for distraction. As explored in Gamer (Neveldine-Taylor, 2009), eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999), and The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999), the level of engagement with cyberspace causes the physical body to atrophy and become weakened. Gamer presents game-users diets as a white-bread and sugar spread regime, which also shows us a womb-like setting as the environment of game-console interaction. The absence of nutrition and exercise makes it easy for (more…)
Filed under: A/V 4002 | Tags: Art engine, Dead Space, democracy, Graffiti research, Henry Jenkins, Iceland, MMO, Open Frameworks, RPG, transmedia storytelling, WOW
Lev Manovich’s chapter on “the poetics of augmented space” defines the differences between traditional cinema and open art installations and their, often dynamic, three dimensional quality. Art installations and their challenges to a stationary spectatorship encourage active participation over passive consumption. Exemplified through artists and workshops at Artengine, through works from John Cage, and initiatives such as Beautiful City Alliance that promote new ways of creating funding for art in public (more…)
William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” (1994), soon to be a feature film according to imdb, explores a future world where urban decay and wired realities co-exist.
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- Neuromancer (2011)
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- Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
Gibson’s prose is detailed and reads like a stream of consciousness not unlike James Joyce or Virginia Woolfe’s use of it. However, the content’s crass quality still manages to entertain and explore notions of enlightenment through excess. The nerve damage that ensues from these excesses, digital or other, is (more…)
