Category: Creative Practice & Strategy

On the 5th April, FremantleMedia launched Project V. Project V is a 12 week comedy told through six vloggers. They are real world performers (mainly comedians) from the UK and US who can vlog about anything. And they do. So, it has the realism aesthetic of ‘LonelyGirl15’ but without the deception; sometimes well executed comedy mixed in with casual (and sometimes boring) rantings; with a plot that is slowly emerging between them. Here is some info from the press release:

Project V showcases the lives and observations of six up and coming young performers from Britain and the US. The site features short-form video postings of each of the six performers – artists, actors and comedians -  talking to each other and to the audience. Audiences can post comments on the performers’ homepages and follow the clues to the unfolding story linking the site’s stars.

What is fun, as with all fictionalised realisms (!), is waiting for the veneer to break. When will we see the real person emerge behind the performance? When will they turn on each other? When will they turn on their producers? When will they turn on us? I’ve found an example of them turning of each other so far: Ruth Pickett’s mashup of her co-vlogger Chris Wydle. This project isn’t perfect, but it is a different approach to many web dramas. FremantleMedia got in performers and comedians for a reason.  Gary Carter, Chief Creative Officer for FMX is quoted as saying:

“As television audiences continue to fragment, it will become essential for producers to understand how to apply their skills to new platforms, learning from television without copying it. We created FMX to explore, create and produce non-linear entertainment brands and experiences for new media. Project V work is I think, a world first and a fantastic learning experience for FremantleMedia, as we exercise our industrial production expertise in this new space.   One of the areas which interests me most is the collaborative possibility opening up:  Project V allows us to collaborate with new talent in a completely different way from most of our work.”

It is an experiment, which is good to see.

Check out: www.project-v.net

The DIMEA 2007: Second International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts will be held on the 19th – 21st September 2007 in Perth, Western Australia. DIMEA 2007 is organised jointly by Murdoch University and ACM SIG CHI (Singapore Chapter).

DIMEA 2007 is a cross-disciplinary conference that will bring together researchers from the areas related to digital interactive media in entertainment and arts. The conference will accept different submission types that present new scientific ideas, improvements to existing techniques or provide a new way of examining, designing and using digital interactive media. Suggested topics for the conference include, but are not limited to:

Entertainment Art and Technology
New Media Emerging Technologies
Code Art
Digital Visual Media
Moving Media
Culture of New Media
Interactive Stories

Check out: www.dimea.org

This is definitely a time of monocle popping for me. I have just discovered a course dedicated to ‘transmedia story creation’. It is a core postgraduate subject in the Visual Language and Interactive Media MFA in Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. Dr Rudy McDaniel runs the course, which is described in the syllabus as follows:

In this class, we will explore the form and function of narrative. Using a variety of methodological frameworks gathered from fields as diverse as folklore, cultural studies, literature, computer science, film studies, media studies, and creative writing, we will immerse ourselves in both the production and consumption of narratives in a critical fashion. Using a combined approach of narrative analysis, critique, and creation, we will learn to appreciate stories – expressed across a variety of media – as rich encapsulations of human experience and as valuable vehicles for artistic and intellectual expression.

I’ve had some quick contact with Rudy and the course is an excellent mix of analysis (employing a fine range of fields) and practice. The course focuses, however, on the adaptation of a story in different media, rather than the expansion of narrative in different media. Both are important, because you cannot understand the second without the first. This missing element of expansion despite the course being called ‘transmedia story creation’ is completely understandable though. There is very little knowledge about this expansive phenomena in narratology (I plan to change that!), and the term ‘transmedia’ is not field-agnostic. Media theorist Henry Jenkins’s term ‘transmedia storytelling’ is different to the narratological meaning of transmedial narrative. Jenkins employs the term transmedia to describe expansion across media, narratologists employ transmedia to describe the study of media-specific narrative traits. There is a clash of semantics here. I thoroughly enjoy this diversity of meaning however. It helps me gain a greater understanding of the area and just proves that we really are in an age of diversity.

I am so thrilled to see the course that Rudy is running. It is quite a well-designed exercise in the theoretical and practical exploration of narrative and media. I’m even more thrilled that we all know about each other now, so the conversation (and expansion of ideas) can continue.

Check out: Transmedia Story Creation blog

[N.B.: Just saw the latest assignment and it does include a transmedia story exercise! Wohoo!]