Transmédia, narrations interactives, fictions et jeux en réalité alternée.
Thoughts on transmedia, interactive narratives, fiction and ARGs.
PROCHAIN PETIT-DEJEUNER TRANSMEDIA
Il aura lieu le 12 janvier à 9H00 à CAP DIGITAL, 74 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 75012 Paris.
Le thème la gestion des communautés FAIT PARTIE DE L’HISTOIRE. En trouvant son public et ses relais, le community manager agit comme un rouage essentiel du storytelling et de l’écriture transmédia.
Inscription : ici
Jeremy Sahel /Jean-Yves Lemoine
(Source: thinkdigitalarchive)
Secret Cinema strengthens its transmedia strategy with this session.
- Creation of the fictional New Well Being Foundation
- … offering OL (social media + online tests)
- … IRL activities and contacts (telephone calls to characters, yoga classes
- … and creating bridges with other media (radio show)
- … climaxing with the “show” / event itself taking place in a asylum reconstruction.
Figs for this session: 6000 participants, 10 days.
Trafic secretcinema.org (info: alexa): Over the last month, visits to “secretcinema.org” have increased by 110%. The website audience is mainly female, between 25 and 34 of age, still studying (graduate studies) or working and browsing from work.
Reception:
. Blogs
“Secret Cinema is no glorified movie theatre; participation is key. […] The line between nailing such an ambitious, bold concept and it having the ambience of a sixth form amateur dramatics production (or worse still, a comical attempt at parody) is so fine my expectations were, well, not low, but dubious. But the scale (a film-worthy sized cast of actors, overwhelming set, intense attention to detail) and budget (thank you, Windows Phone sponsorship) meant that the evening – far from being disappointing – embodied the only kind of psychosis you’d willingly opt to be institutionalized for.” (artwednesday.com)
“The Wellbeing Foundation was home to November’s Secret Cinema embodiment – one of the most elaborate yet. […] Visitors were required to describe their earliest memory and a dream they’d had in order to register for an appointment. Those admitted to the programme met at Ladbroke Grove tube station in their dressing gowns. […] No detail had been scrimped on and visitors duely repaid organisers’ efforts by their openness to partake in the shared interpretative experience – to role act and to play at every opportunity that presented itself. Discovery of the pigeon holes containing patients’ files was one such moment of near-hysterical glee. Finding one’s file was an irresistible game, and reading other people’s dreams and earliest memories a further temptation of the forbidden according to rules of the real world.” (le cool london blog)
Read about the event’s making of on James Barnett’s blog (he was reponsible for the art direction).
. Press
“Since 2007, Secret Cinema has championed a new type of participatory movie event where viewers are sold tickets but not told anything about the film they are to see, only what to wear and where to meet.” (Reuters photoseries)
“Upon arrival we discovered the film was to be the Jack Nicholson classic, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and that’s when things started to get a little, well, mental. […] Everything from casually strewn medical notebooks to the staff and patients — thankfully played by actors — had been meticulously prepared to imitate the atmosphere and mise en scene of the film. […] Arguably one of their most ambitious events to date, Future Shorts has set itself a high bar for their next venture.” (esquire.co.uk)
Italy: La Republicca photo coverage
Participant multimedia contributions: photos: mikemike.co.uk, minusmilo, youtube contributions.
Don’t believe the hype: craft, maintenance and scale
Secret Cinema is honing its skills and continues to redefine theatrical experience through experimental art, collective entertainment, and playful media. SC will be back in February after cancelling the December session for licensing issues. Focusing on participation and nurturing a relationship built on trust is a strategy that proved to be fruitful (tickets cost between 20 and 30£) but challenging. The previous session, for Lawrence of Arabia, brought forth difficulties as to how to manage an increasing scale (of audience and production), a “live community” expressing dissatisfaction on Facebook and Twitter and expecting a response almost right away and a growing media attention. Maintaining quality is therefore a necessity for this type of relationship: unfortunately, benevolence doesn’t last forever and doesn’t shield you from high expectations coming from the other side, especially when things get bigger and “hyper”. But even if some events were not up to par with Secret’s Cinema’s reputation, each production is a high-quality and entertaining event worth the “risk” of buying tickets out of sheer faith. The latest issue was not due to “poor” quality but to service quality: the Dec. issue got cancelled, and moved to Feb. However, people were not fully refunded, mainly because of We Got Tickets (a “online box office” selling SC’s tickets) unwilling to refund booking fees. As a result, tempers flared a bit on Facebook and Twitter as Future Cinema tried to sort things out.
2011 will certainly mean choices for Future Cinema as Secret Cinema cannot afford this type of feeling to spread and question the value and quality of the event:
“Lindsey Arnold Jon, I agree. I haven’t even received any info on the change of dates, the first I knew of it was when I read people commenting on here! It would be nice to know what is happening?!! I feel like my money is sitting in someone else’s bank ac…count while I have to wait 3 months for an outcome, when really I’d like to have my money back in my own account please. Can this be done? I felt a bit cheated by SC following Lawrence of Arabia (we went on the first night when everything went wrong) so I thought I’d skip the next event…by looking at pictures on here you seem to have restored SC back to it’s former glory! But now I’ve been let down again by this :(“See discussion
transmedia media cinema celebration entertainment art playful social community
Incarnating mythology - transmedia storytelling (Harry Potter)
(Source: cations, via rainydaywomen-deactivated201108)
@zewiskas selected in top 100 French brand content managers & strategists (most followed in 10/10). Still not sure about what “brand content” means. Cool video about rock b(r)ands though :)
twitter communication marketing listed zewiskas psst le vide poches france brand content transmedia digital storytelling
… via loudpoet.comWhy “limit yourself to just writing and publishing a book?” Guy LeCharles Gonzalez asks over at loudpoet.com. The ever burgeoning array of media channels is encouraging a new era of writers, storytellers who see the transmedia evolution as an exciting and promising…
The plan is to start with the feature film, and then create a bridge to the second feature with a season of TV episodes. That means the feature cast—and the big star who’ll play Deschain—also has to appear in the TV series before returning to the second film. After that sequel is done, the TV series picks up again, this time focusing on Deschain as a young gunslinger. Those storylines will be informed by a prequel comic book series that King was heavily involved in plotting. The third film would pick up the mature Deshain as he completes his journey. They will benefit from being able to use the same sets cast and crew for the movie and TV, which could help contain costs on what will be a financially ambitious undertaking.
(Source: deadline.com)
Pour le premier petit déjeuner de la rentrée, nous avons le plaisir de recevoir Mr. Alexis Blanchet qui viendra nous parler de son livre : « Des pixels à Hollywood » publié chez Pix’n Love.
Cet ouvrage est le fruit d’un travail long et pointu puisque dans le cadre de sa thèse, l’auteur a mené des recherches sur les relations industrielles et culturelles entre les secteurs cinématographique et vidéoludique, des années 1970 à aujourd’hui. « Des pixels à Hollywood » raconte de façon ludique les échanges techniques, culturelles, artistiques et économiques qui ont toujours existé entre l’industrie du cinéma et celle du jeu vidéo et nous explique comment ces deux mondes se nourrissent mutuellement.
Ce petit déjeuner se déroulera dans les locaux de Cap Digital,le 23 septembre de 8h30 à 10h00
Lien pour l’inscription: ici
Lien sur Pix’n Love: ici
Lien vers le blog d’Alexis Blanchet: ici
(Source: thinkdigitalarchive)
conference games hollywood cinema storytelling transmedia france paris
And speaking of video games, studios still don’t understand that, by and large, adaptations of their tentpole releases rarely satisfy. Of course some become hits, but simply getting your gaming division to use the same story structure and characters won’t work when the story is lacking and competition in the games arena is so high. In this regard it’s heartening to see interest in Hollywood coalescing around transmedia.
media production cultural industries hollywood games adaptation transmedia
A note on artefacts
“Just a barrel, a dark depository where are kept the counterfeit, make-believe pieces of plaster and cloth, wrought in the distorted image of human life. But this added, hopeful note: perhaps they are unloved only for the moment. In the arms of children, there can be nothing but love. A clown, a tramp, a bagpipe player, a ballet dancer, and a major. Tonight’s cast of players on the odd stage known as the Twilight Zone.”
Five Characters In Search of An Exit, The Twilight Zone, S3E79
This note is based on a Culture Hacker article about a artefact workshop that took place during this summer’s ARGFest. Also based on some of my dissertation’s analyses on ARGs (humanities point of view).
Making physical objects / clues to fit your transmedia plot.
“At ARGFest 2010, Michelle Senderhauf and I ran a workshop on game artifacts – how to use them to tell a story, deliver puzzles, and reward players. We invited our workshoppers to create artifacts to continue an ARG scenario I cooked up, and lead the players to the next part of the game using physical objects.”
It’s interesting to see that it is possible to spend nearly nothing in object and artefact production: most of the objects created during the workshop seemed ready to use without any more modifications. Most of these were found in flea markets or second-hand shops (also antiques shops), and were then fiddled with for dramatic, play and aesthetic purposes. This “wear” (meaning used, old aspect) grants these objects “artefact status”: they’ve been used, they feel personal. There’s a great article about patina and the emotional load (la charge émotionnelle) contained in worn objects, that you can read on BERG’s blog.
From a storytelling point of view, artefacts always tell a story, whether in archeology or in a museum. In ARGs and transmedia narratives, they have this transitional purpose: they’re UFOs from this other world that we’re exploring, playing with, as we get acquainted with a fictional universe of an ARG. They’re familiar to our world but they come from another one.
Artefacts are also a piece of craftsmanship, which may be different from ours. Ultimately, they need to testify, materially, of a human’s touch, of a person’s use.
They’re unique. And it is this emotional bond, from belonging and being a piece of someone’s life to being found and given - from a thing of the past to a present - that turns them into precious, valuable items, no matter how trivial they actually seem.
That’s what makes them powerful alternate reality objects. They’ve been used so they must be true, they must be real.
In a way, I’d also say they resemble totems, more or less like the ones in “Inception” (NB: totems in that interpretation have a specific role: to discriminate reality from “non-reality”, call it dream or fiction) or Harry Potter’s portkeys. They’re immersion facilitators incarnating the audience relation to the fiction, that is made palpable but hidden. Hence the hacking process (détournement des objets) when making transmedia artefacts and using them on the players’ end. In transmedia fiction, whether subtle or blatantly obscure, these objects display some oddities (“something not quite right” - you can verify that with the pictures’ captions) that one can spot after a closer look. Because artefacts need to be looked at, handled, hacked, deconstructed again. They are puzzles in disguise, a piece of game mechanics, and sometimes a means of communication: in the workshop, all these objects form a system, a map delivering a message to get to a certain location at a certain time.
For the audience, they can also represent valuable objects that can last beyond the time of the game or the telling of a story, like a nice souvenir. Artefacts embody a universe, a world in all its complexity (relations, history, use, culture): the persistence of a moment that somehow happened or simulate this “coming into existence”. They’re a memento, a personal object: like toys you liked playing with and withholding secret stories.
From a philosophical and anthropological point of view, all artefacts are fakes, even archeological ones: they’re all manmade, artificial, cultural items. “Something viewed as a product of human conception or agency rather than an inherent element”. Paradoxically, in this example (artefact-making) they emulate reality under a fake “naturalness” (triviality, patina, use, wear, etc) but also offer a reflexion on what is reality, since even “real” artefacts, from the distant past or objects which use we don’t understand, are “artificial”, a concentrate of images, something that is not “natural”.
Artefacts are non-objects: “A structure or finding in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error.” A simulation, an icon: an indexed reality (like ARGs as an artistic form of reflexion of reality?). A sign, an image, made into a trivial thing by the hand and imagination of man.
Le règne de l’imaginal sensuel (realm of the imagery, of the trace) et le désert du réel (desert of the real, Baudrillard).
transmedia ARG festival workshop physical content objects artefacts anthropology narrative
