Toronto Panamania Series
The Business of Transmedia | TIFF Industry Conference 2013
SUCH a fun panel with Andy Merkin & Evan Jones!
Published on May 16, 2014
‘Monetization’ is now a dirty word. Transmedia experts will deconstruct the decision-making process behind the successful and the non-successful business models within the transmedia landscape. We will discuss the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind budgets, wire-models, deliverables, releasing schedules, and operating as platform-agnostic.
Siobhan O Flynn
Co-Founder, Canadian Rep, Transmedia Alliance (MODERATOR)
Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn consults on digital/interactive storytelling, is the co-creator of the online resource site, TMCResourceKit.com, & co-founder of Transmedia 101, a community building & education initiative for Canadian storytellers moving into the digital sphere. She has mentored across Canada, in the Digital Development Lab (CBC/BC Film/New Media BC), Melting Silos (NFB/SFU Praxis), and for the Sheffield Doc/Fest Design to Deliver, & with the Crossover Lab/Sheffield Doc/Fest Convergence Catalyst. She has published numerous articles, given keynotes, workshops and masterclasses around the globe on topics ranging from transmedia and crossmedia development and design and interactive/web documentaries. Siobhan has presented at MIT, StoryWorld SF, the NFB French Program, the CBC, the Screen Edge Forum, Auckland New Zealand, & Transmedia SG, Singapore. Siobhan was a Jury Member for the Sheffield Doc/Fest Innovation Award 2012, twice a Juror for the CMF’s Experimental Fund.
Evan Jones
Founder, Stitch Media
Evan is the founder of Stitch Media, an interactive media production services company which tells stories using new technology and timeless techniques. A two-time Emmy Award winner, Evan’s work combines television, radio, web, mobile, games & the real world and were recognized in the ‘Top 10 New Media Groundbreakers’ by the Bell Fund. Stitch Media projects range from interactive documentary to branded entertainment. Evan has guest lectured on the art & business of interactive story internationally at the Canadian Film Centre, the Australian Film, Television & Radio School and the University of Southern California. International clients include Microsoft, Disney, FOX, Discovery, CBC, Bell & The Movie Network.
Andy Merkin
Head of Special Projects and Transmedia, Mirada Studios
Andy Merkin is the Head of Special Projects and Transmedia at Mirada Studios. Overseeing cross-platform and nontraditional storytelling projects, Andy develops narrative for traditional and digital media and production management for the complete pipeline. Since joining Mirada in 2011, his production credits include the interactive music video, Ro.me; the THINK exhibit and mobile apps for IBM’s Centennial, the departmentofhumanmanagement.org site for The Strain trilogy, andMirrorWorld by Cornelia Funke on iOS. A true believer that interesting storytellers (hopefully) have led interesting lives, Andy’s previous work experience includes development and production for Sony Pictures Television, training teachers and entrepreneurs in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, performing improv, and educating students in zoo keeping for Busch Gardens.
Gaming the 4th Wall: Pied Piper, HooliXYZ & Silicon Valley’s Viral Genius
I hope you’re onto this as HBO is playing pure genius. Pied Piper, the fictional start-up in Silicon Valley, has been running IRL job ads on their site & on Facebook, billboards, and a very funny company blog (penned by high-anxiety Jared).
The ‘We’re Hiring’ post nails Jared’s insecurity-propelled verbal contortions:
HBO ran the ad on Facebook…
Clicking through and reading closely on the company ‘We’re Hiring’ post, some of the comments seem to be from applicants who appeared on the show… (ditto other blog posts)
The just-posted Pied Piper Workplace Harassment Policy is a gem, closing with:
Best of all, the icing on the transmedia viral cupcake is that Wired just picked up on the May 3 episode’s mention that Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti was about to be interviewed for a Wired profile. And they ran with it. And it’s hysterical. In-game & totally consistent. Doesn’t get better than this.
From the Wired feature:
“In person, Bighetti combines the visionary thinking of an upper-level Silicon Valley executive with the look and relatability of an utterly unemployable programmer. But the horizon wasn’t always so limitless. Mired as a cog in the admittedly plush Hooli machine, Bighetti’s talents were being wasted so thoroughly that he began pouring his efforts into NipAlert, an application nurtured at investor Erlich Bachman’s startup incubator that “gives you the location of a woman with erect nipples.” It wasn’t flattering. “I made a perverted, sexist useless thing,” says Bighetti now—an unfortunate squandering of talent by Hooli, at least initially.”
Everything Old is New Again…. It Follows & The Babadook’s Horror Roots
I adore horror. I blame it on watching Nosferatu (B/W 1922) when I was 7. Darkened room. Middle of the afternoon. Slept with my sheets over my neck for years (years) after.
I watched It Follows & The Babadook back to back & It Follows completely impressed me. No spoilers so all I’ll say is – A super simple horror conceit. Totally effective.
It creeped me out for days and I realized It Follows reworks a very simple horror device central to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that occurs in the moment the creature comes to life and looks at Frankenstein:
‘…by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs…..
He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs.’
Frankenstein’s horrified response is rooted in becoming (in Laura Mulvey’s terms) the object of the gaze and the shift in power that occurs in that instant. Lots more to say but you need to see it first.
The Babadook riffs on another classic in the supernatural horror genre, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. (minor spoilers). The film plays off the mother’s loss and her psychological state as possible set-ups for the horror as it unfolds. And like James’ Screw, the story plays out with delicious ambiguity. Of the two, It Follows is still creeping under my skin. Depending on the day, out of the blue, I’ll see someone & there it is. The best kind of horror.
Prufrock Descending: An Experiment in Collaborative Reading
Prufrock Descending documents an investigation of mood shifts in T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem, “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.” This interactive website is the result of a collaborative investigation in reading moods undertaken as a class project (150 students!) in ENG 287 The Digital Text (University of Toronto). We engaged in passionate debates re. tagging moods via phrases, lines, and stanzas, and wrestled with the subjective nature of literary analysis (training & expertise be damned!). The interactive poem offers three version reflecting more expansive and more fine-grained readings as there was no way to arrive a definitive single reading.
From the site:
From Conrad Aiken’s early 1916 review, Eliot’s dramatic monologue has had almost a century of being read as a psychological character study exploring the fluent mutability of an anxious, indecisive self-consciousness. Key to this interpretative approach is the dynamic interplay and range of emotions that Prufrock voices and which are readily discernible to both the scholarly and common reader (to borrow Virginia Woolf’s term). Undertaken as a collaborative TEI encoding project by the students in The Digital Text, a second year English course (University of Toronto, Fall 2014), our initial question approaching this text was whether we could map the moods articulated in the poem as we as readers perceived them? What would the aggregate of our collective readings look like? Would we see a marked convergence of opinion in our close readings? Or would we see striking divergences? What we discovered was both. Remarkably, as we dove deeper into our project, what was increasingly foregrounded was the ambiguity of reading and the instability of literary analysis as a methodological process. To paraphrase one student’s response, ‘the whole poem could be defined as expressing a single mood and then the TEI process challenges the reader to parse the nuances.’ The collaborative class process of deciding on a list of mood terms became an investigation of the rationales for individual close readings and a realization that there is no way to determine or argue for a definitive reading of mood and meaning in Eliot’s poem.
Stumbled on Voisins: a New Montreal Webdoc
CHAMERAN: A VILLAGE IN THE CITY
Just stumbled on this webdoc – Montreal based with an intriguing description
“The Saint-Laurent borough uses Picbois Productions to document the process of Integrated Urban Revitalization (IUR) underway in the Chameran neighborhood. The web documentary “Neighbors” allows to follow the evolution of this sector through neighborhood life and especially through the eyes of the citizens of Chameran the heart of this major project on a human scale.”