Month: January 2006

Spreading The Secret

Christy2 Comments

The Secret logoI am very much behind the times, because I was unaware of a viral campaign that has been out for a few months. I do recall a “secret” but who knows what teaser or ARG I could be thinking of?? This viral campaign is designed to gather interest in two things: The upcoming worldwide broadcast of a movie called “The Secret” and what “the secret” is. There is a main website, www.whatisthesecret.tv and a blog. There are two short films, which each provide more information: clue 1 and clue 2.

In its launch week, (the third week of October) the website was ranked 12,627 of all sites on the web by Alexa [source: blog]. They have worked to facilitate its viral status by :

It is basically, a dummies guide to using the Net. You can also receive email updates and for those with bad internet connections, you can watch a slideshow version. There are people who claim to know what the secret is, and the weirdest thing is they’ve left what appears to be the solution in the comments on the blog. I’ll let you search that, if you want to. There is also a blog post by one of the people who are in the movie. There is also a forum that discusses the project, along with stats supplied by those involved. I’ll let you find that too. But what is weirder, for me, is that the production company, Prime Time Productions, is actually in Australia, in Melbourne.

The movie is to be aired on Feb 15th then a Tv series meant to be following, along with a DVD. It is apparently in the ilk of What the Bleep, but more accessible. You can see, here, how subscribers to site has grown.

Cross-Media Researchers 2: Andrew McKenzie

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christyOne Comment

This is the second post in a series of posts about new cross-media researchers. Introducing…

Andrew McKenzie, PhD candidate, Creative Media, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Here is his description, from a listserv conversation:

My research is into areas of narrative structure and content creation. For my PHD I’m going to be devising theories surrounding the way that narrative and content must adapt for 3g Mobile Video technology. I’m using my thesis screenplay from my MA in Creative Writing as a foundation and template to producing content for Mobile Video.

As a case study I intend to examine Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series in various forms including radio plays, novel, computer games, stage play, television series, and feature film and devise theories surrounding the relationship of character to narrative and exposition.

Andrew will be changing his website to be a blog soon. I look forward to catching up with him when he’s in Melbourne, and discussing narrative & cross-media. Yay!

Cross-Media Researchers 1: Anja Bechmann Petersen

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christy

Many blogs have posts about predictions for this year (including me!), and some have round-ups of the previous year. This post is the beginning of a round-up of last year. Not a round-up of cross-media projects, cross-media in the news or the cross-media industry; instead, over the next few posts I’ll be doing a round-up of academics I’ve discovered are researching cross-media (in no particular order).

Anja Bechmann Petersen, PhD candidate, Dep. of Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus, Denmark

Anja is investigating “flermedialitet”, which I’ve just found out is cross-media in Danish! Her PhD is titled Cross-media – interplay between media and is described as follows:

The aim of my project is to make a theoretical conceptualisation of cross-media through different theories of media and production analyses at Nordjyske Medier in Aalborg and DR in Oerestaden. […]

Methodically and theoretically the project uses theories of singular media to describe the media characteristics of newspaper, radio, TV, internet and mobile phones (the media types present at Nordjyske and DR) and the satellite terms (discourses) of convergence, divergence, resonance, transmediality, remediation and intermediality to coin a theory of cross-media and the possibilities of interplay between media types.

To supplement this conceptualisation the project will make empirical studies at Nordjyske Medier and DR to see how cross-media are understood (what are their understandings of possibilities as to interplay) and executed both organizationally and physically.

Lucky for me, Anja is coming over to Sydney, Australia for a few months to do some study here. I look forward to chatting more then.