Category: Creative Practice & Strategy

Sony Japan is jumping on providing manga comics on mobile phones. Rather than just provide the images, Celsys’ has developed a program, Comic Surfing, that shows each frame and slowly surfs over the whole comic, makes the phone vibrate on action scenes and will have sound. A video on the comics is online at Wireless Watch Japan. Sony have signed deals with 10 manga artists to provide over 300 comics. According to The Age, ‘manga maniacs spent an estimated Y100 billion ($A1.2 billion) on comics in 2004’. Viewers of the manga on mobiles will pay Y315 ($A3.80) to download five manga titles a month by an artist of their choice.

I was asked to keep news about this upcoming project quiet, but considering it has been covered in the Hollywood Reporter, and the producers were the special guests at the recent mo:life event, I think it is safe to talk.

Jim Shomos and Paul Baiguerra of Global Dilemma, have created the ‘world’s first “dramedy” to be shown simultaneously on TV, mobile and the Internet’ and apparently the ‘first Australian made live-action series released for mobile phone’ and the ‘first interactive comedy-drama available to an Australian mobile audiences’. Their drama, (Oz readers: in the style of Secret Life of Us), will be available over Hutchison’s ‘3’ network, pay TV station Channel [V] and the website. The contracts, Shomos and Baiguerra said at the LAMP workshop in Melb, were the first of its kind in Aust. The series will be x3 three-minute episodes each week with the audience being able to vote on what they want to see the next week. The scene will then be shot accordingly. This type of interactive drama is akin to the early experiments in Aust (and of course internationally) by Griffith University students: Voyear Motel and Hardboiled.

Apparently, it will be launched in Australia in early October. I have a 3 phone and so will watch the relationship (if any) between the platforms. This isn’t really cross-media storytelling of the kind I’m encouraging — it is the remediation of the same content over media rather than each providing different information — but it is a good start.

The SBS Insight program has run a discussion on the state of the Australian Film industry. Reel Drama will be broadcast on Tuesday 13th September at 7.30pm and then repeated on Friday 16th September at 1pm. I was interviewed for the program and put on stand-by to fly up, but wasn’t on the panel in the end. That cross-media storytelling was considered as a factor in a forum on the Oz film industry is a really good sign. For those not in Oz, Insight provide the program online after the broadcast.