Zen Films

Transmedia Workflow

 

The first part of this post is over at Culture Hacker.

The diagram below shows provides an overview of the workflow for delivering a transmedia project. You can view a better quality version here.

Many of my earlier posts have looked at the development phase where we're trying to define the entertainment we hope to provide. This diagram looks at the full spectrum of activity from scoping your idea to delivering it.

The process has been developed with brand clients in mind but it's easily adapted for filmmakers creating transmedia for themselves. What's nice about this workflow is that there's a tollgate at each phase - allowing the client to sign off on the project before moving to the next level of detail (and hence cost).

If you right-click this link and "save as" you can download a project reference template (the "bible") that's already structured with this workflow.

Please let me know if you think you've found anything in delivering working transmedia entertainment that's not covered.

Transmedia Story Development

 
 

Here's something I created to further explain how we're developing the transmedia project, Lowlifes.This is Part 3. Click these links to find Part 1 and Part 2.

Transmedia Story Development

View more webinars from Zen Films.

Buddhist Writers! Call for Entries -- "Lit Crawl" 2010

Dear friends, We're writing to let you know that the SF Buddhist Center will be hosting a Lit Crawl event in October and is looking for a couple of Buddhist writers to participate. The organizers expect the event to be packed!

The criteria is simple: that you identify as a Buddhist, you are a writer, and you perform great work to a live audience. If you're published, all the better. The writing does not have to be Buddhist or about Buddhism. 

The event will take place on Saturday, October 9, 8:30-9:30pm.

Here is some more info:  http://litquake.org/get-involved/authors-publishers

To apply, please send

• a couple of short writing samples
• any publications and reading or stage experience 
• short bio

to SFBCwriters at gmail.com on or before June 2. If you are selected, we will let you know by June 16.

Questions? Email info at sfbuddhistcenter.org or call 415-282-2018

Transmedia: Platform Selection

 
 

Downloadable Content

• The full article as a PDF and it's also available on Scribd
• Excel spreadsheet tool for ranking platforms

---

PART 2 of 2

The first part of this article is at Culture Hacker - it's here.

How do I motivate audiences to cross platforms?

Having decided your objectives, how do you motivate audiences to jump platform?

Digital content can have a nice layout and a URL to prompt action but what about a  live street theatre performance – how do you get audiences to cross platform from the street to, say, go online? Possible solutions with this example might be:

·         flyers with your URL on it (potentially lacks social/real time web)

·         flyers with QR code and Twitter #tag

·         merch/pins (badges)/bookmarks and other give-away with QR code or #tag

·         performers wearing a t-shirt with a QR code or #tag

·         the performers verbally encourage the audience to go online (e.g. shout at them!)

These suggestions answer the mechanics of “how” and assumes that the live audience has mobile phones (so make sure the online landing page is small-screen friendly). But they don’t address “why?”

Motivating the online involvement in this example ought to stress the urgency or immediacy of the situation – don’t let the crowd disperse and hope they’ll connect later: integrate the online component into the performance. Now you’re incentivizing cross-platform activity with the promise of online participation in the live show.

If this isn’t possible or appropriate, you need to consider other incentives ranging from blatant bribery with gifts or prizes to simply the promise of satisfying the audience’s curiosity about what happens next or explaining what on earth the performance is all about.

Figure 3 illustrates a way to think about what you might need to do to motivate audiences to cross or combine platforms. The diagram shows the audience being acted on by two opposing forces: the incentive to migrate (positive force) and the disincentive to migrate represented by “friction” (negative force). By friction I mean anything that makes crossing platforms a pain: increased cost, additional keystrokes, diverted attention, low bandwidth and so on.

Figure 4 and Figure 5 illustrate the consequences when the opposing forces are of different magnitudes.

Figure 3 Incentive Vs Friction: Motivating the Audience to Cross Platforms

Figure 4 When Incentive > Friction Audience Crosses Platform

Figure 5 When Incentive < Friction Audience Doesn't Cross Platform

 In the example of the street performance, the live activity creates attention and a call-to-action gets them online - but what now? Sell them a DVD? Get them to join a social network or mailing list? It’s going to depend on where you are in the project and I’ll address this in the next step.

4. Platform Timing

Unless you have unlimited resources it’s likely you’ll have to prioritize how platforms are released and to do that it will be helpful to define your objectives. Set your objectives with reference to your business model and resources.

Table 5 and Table 6 provide examples of roll-out strategies dependent on different business models. Note that the steps can and may need to be combined or they may overlap. There’s no hard and fast rule – the purpose of the approach is get you thinking logically and covering the bases.

Table 5 Example Platform Release Strategy 1

 

Table 6 Example Platform Release Strategy 2

 

Until now very little has been said about the story. It hasn’t been ignored – it’s been there as a touchstone throughout these five stages – but now is time to see what we might need to do given our platform preferences.

 

5. Changing the story

Think of the story has having two components:

·         “the story”  - the whole world that’s created with all the characters stretching out in chronological order

·         “the experience” – how the storyworld is revealed to the audience (timing and platforms).

Note that the story might be much larger than the project you’re working on now.

Our objective throughout this process is to have the story and the experience of the story integrated with the business model.  Although you started with the story in mind, platform selection has rightly focused on the experience. Now is the time to sanity check the experience and see if there’s any missing story, story that now needs adapting or story + experience that can be improved.

For example, now you have a roll-out strategy for your platforms (the experience), iterate back through the story and looking for these types of opportunities (in no particular order and please add more of your own):

·         Twists

·         Surprises

·         Cliff hangers

·         Inciting incidents

·         Reunions

·         Breakups

·         Conflict

·         Discovery

·         Exposition

·         Reversals

·         Suspense

·         Threats

·         Complications

·         Conclusions

Transmedia and the Independent Filmmaker (Sacramento Film Festival)

 
 
Here's the presentation I was due to give to the Sacramento Film Festival. Unfortunately I was in the UK at the time of the volcanic ash cloud nonsense and became stranded on England's south coast!

Sorry about the sound quality - it's poor because I'm speaking into a webcam from a hotel room! 

View more presentations from Zen Films.

You can download the presentation from SlideShare or download the audio below.

  

Download the MP3 file here.

Evolutionary Entertainment: Developing Transmedia Projects

I've just posted a 5-stage development process for transmedia projects over at Culture Hacker.

This will be part of the presentation I hope to be giving this weekend at the Sacramento Film Festival.

A volcanic ash cloud has kept me prisoner in the UK for the past 2 weeks when I'd only popped home for a stag weekend! 

 

Undeterred, if all goes well I should be making my presentation remotely on the Spoilrr Ustream channel... which I've embedded below :) If you click the widget you should be able to chat live and follow on Twitter.

Online video chat by Ustream

Transmedia Story Development – Part 2

This post is about the transmedia project LowLifes I'm developing with Simon Wood.

Where we are now is we have 5 chapters written for the novella and an outline of 5 videos. That means we’re less than 20% through but progress should gather pace now and hopefully complete the first draft in the next two weeks.

In part 1 I revealed the business model and the following “design constraints”:

• we have three characters and each character’s perspective is told in a different media
• each media has to stand alone as entertainment without requiring the audience to read/view all three
• anyone that does read/view more than one media receives heightened benefits/pleasure/rewards

Some transmedia stories might place each media at a particular time in the story’s history – for example, the comic book tells the prequel, the movie presents today’s events and the toys tell the future story (what happened after the movie ended). This seems to be the most typical approach.

We’ve chosen not to do this. All the perspectives are told concurrently across the same time period. Each media starts the story on the same day #1 and ends on the same day #x.

Each perspective (and hence media) has its own protagonist: detective Larry Hayes is the hero of the novella but he’s a supporting character in the web series. It’s Lauren Ortega who’s the protagonist in the web series. This is important if each media is to be self-supporting and have its own arc without relying on the other media.

So far, although the characters share the same world (the location, other characters) they don’t actually share the same moment in time and place. What I mean by this is, if Hayes is at the crime scene then Ortega isn’t. She may talk to a SOCO (scene of crime officer) at a later time but she doesn’t witness Hayes at the crime scene. To do this would create repetition and in a 1 to 3 minute video episode it’s something I’ve been keen to avoid.

Another consideration we hope to complete successfully is that the story time in the novella chapters doesn’t directly match the web series. Hence there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between media and there’s no concept of a “story bridge” as there is in Level 26 where the reader has to watch video clips before reading the next chapter.

Spoiler…

I mentioned in Part 1 that we hoped not to have explicit calls-to-action from one media to another and we’re trying to get the plot to do that work. That is, the whole project is presented to readers/views as a three-media experience so the savvy reader will think that if an event begs a question, chances are that the answer lies in another media. It seems like it could work.

In one scene Hayes visits his drug dealer and we discover that an unnamed woman has already paid the dealer a visit and killed his dog. I wonder who the woman might be? Could it be Ortega or the ex-wife? The answer lies in the other media. It sounds a little prosaic here on the blog but when the event occurs in the novella it’s one of those OMG! moments that make you want to read on… or in this case switch media.

What Else?

The community site for LowLifes is now up and running and there’s a sample opening chapter should you care to read it. Please feel free to sign-up and ask questions or add comments.  I don’t expect the site to get much traction yet while we have very little content but I felt it was important to provide a home for the readership as early as possible.

I’ve actually copied a similar structure to the one I developed for an adventure game I’m doing the transmedia for – you can check that out too to compare, if you fancy. The transmedia is still in development and the game site is quite new but we have several hundred Kickstarter patrons to migrate over soon so hopefully that’ll gain momentum much more quickly!

Publisher who refuses text-to-speech on Kindle called a "shortsighted dinosaur".

I've just finished reading Michael Connelly's novel The Poet. It was recommended to me by a friend - I hadn't read any of Connelly's work before -  and I really liked it. 

I bought The Poet on my Kindle and half read it and half listened to it using the text-to-speech function. At the end of the day when my eyes are tired the text-to-speech is a nice compromise. It's not perfect but it's good enough when I'm into a book and I don't want to put down!

I liked The Poet so much that I thought I was sure to end up reading all of Connelly's books. I browsed his bibliography and bought another... only to discover after the book had downloaded that the text-to-speech function has been denied by the publisher! What? I've bought the book - I paid for it - why can't I let the Kindle read it to me?

I'm just so very angry about this. Why am I being prevented from enjoying Connelly's work the way I want to enjoy it? The only possible reason I can think of is that the publisher thinks text-to-speech cannibalizes revenue from audio books. 

But does it really? They're not actually delivering the same value are they? I buy a lot of audio books and a lot of regular books but most are on my Kindle and since I've had the Kindle I've been buying more of both. [side note: In fact I've listened to audio books and then bought the printed version as gifts or bought the digital text version as a reference source (easier than searching through the spoken word).]

If the publisher thinks there's cannibalization, could it be the ludicrously expensive pricing on audio books? $26 is a typical price and that's outrageous compared to, say, the pricing of DVDs. Is the publisher trying to tell me that it has a higher cost on audio book production than a feature film?

No, it's value-based pricing. But come on, audio books are priced at around 3-4 times the paperback. I think that's blatant fleecing the customer. It's an arrogant disregard for readers/listeners to be honest.

For the purpose of this post I checked the torrents. Sure enough, 20 Michael Connelly novels available in one handy download - for free.

So here I am, willing to pay for content but being treated with disrespect, contempt and mistrust. 

Well I like text-to-speech because it suits my lifestyle and I'm not buying any more from Connelly until this permission is enabled. Publisher, you're a shortsighted dinosaur and I look forward to reading more from authors who want a direct, respectful relationship with their audience.

One Transmedia Tool to Rule Them All :)

 

It's quite apparent from many cross-platform, transmedia and ARG discussions that managing all the usernames, passwords, digital assets, dates and time for a multitude of sites quickly becomes an exercise in wrangling technology - starting with a spreadsheet and expanding across whiteboards and post-its.

I've been wrestling with this problem for sometime now and I'd now like to solicit help from all the knowledgeable folks out there who have or would like to have a storytelling tool that worked across platforms and relieved a lot of headaches - allowing them to focus on the storytelling.

Please checkout www.transmediastoryteller.com for a look at what I've been developing. We're about ready now to roll out over the summer and what I really like to do is focus on delivering the most popular features first. Please join the forum to request your top five features, email or Tweet me - I'll take the feedback in whatever format you'd like to deliver it ;)

Ps. I've got a better name for the service lined up but right now this kind says what it does on the tin.

Spotify - take-aways from the Daniel Ek keynote at SXSW 2010

If you're living outside of Europe you may not have heard of Spotify yet... but it's coming to you soon. One reason its not in USA yet is because of the tapestry of rightholders and gatekeepers that have to be approached rather than, say, a single collection agency as it is in the UK.

Simply put, it's music service that can be "free" (ad supported) or subscription-based. Once you have an account, songs can be listened to on any platform - desktop, mobile, console etc.

Here's the advert :)

 

 Here's the bullet points I took...

The numbers

• 7 million users. Of which…
• 320,000 paying subscribers
• 100 million playlists of which 30 million are albumns.
• 15-18% of Swedish population uses Spotify and sales of music CDs and downloads have increased. Same trend is seen in other countries. Spotify’s conclusion: we increase music sales, not decrease it.

Recommendations

Uses collaborative filtering to serve adverts. It discovered that two people with the same demographic who listen to similar music are likely to have the same brand preference.

Spotify will ultimate use “social discovery” for recommending songs (e.g. make recommendations based on your network of friends), not just an algorithm that guesses what you like.

Playlists can be shared and collaborative (think mix tapes). Music journalists in UK are publishing their playlists for others to download and start listening immediately.

Technology

Uses P2P and that’s fast and why it’s a downloaded application. Also, Spotify users consume more bandwidth than the total bandwidth available in Sweden. Spotify is based in UK and if songs had to be streamed from London to Sweden it would block the whole UK-Sweden network link.