RADAR a mobile and web series that I co-created and produce enters its' fourth season. New episodes ever Wed for the next 12 weeks www.babelgum.com/radar
.: wbp
Rodney Ascher explores the mystery and conspiracies surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining.
In 1980 Stanley Kubrick released his masterpiece of modern horror, The Shining. Over 30 years later we are still struggling to understand its hidden meanings. Rodney Ascher’s film Room 237 is an exploration of the truths concealed in The Shining.
Adam Wingard’s new flick You’re Next looks awesome. I was a fan of Pop Skull and this new horror / thriller looks to be genre eye candy. Fresh off a bidding war at TIFF the film will get a nice rollout from Lionsgate but you’ll have to wait to the fall 2012. Until then you can look at these cool shots from the film.
Family reunions can be a real bitch. All fun and amicable on the surface, yet underneath the tensions are ready to boil over. Welcome to the Davison clan’s opulent country house, where a get-together gets ugly and bloody — fast.
When Crispian Davison (A.J. Bowen) brings his new girlfriend Erin (Sharni Vinson) along to celebrate the wedding anniversary of his parents (Rob Moran and Re-Animator’s Barbara Crampton), the worst thing either of them expects is some awkward conversation and an inadequate supply of whiskey. But an evening of sibling rivalry and icy barbs at the dinner table is shattered when an arrow smashes through the window. Enter a gang of killers in animal masks, armed with machetes, axes and a crossbow, who begin to hunt the family down with brutal precision.
Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, who shocked audiences at last year’s Festival with their lo-fi serial-killer thriller A Horrible Way to Die, return to the scene of the crime with this solid shriek show tailor-made for Midnight Madness.
Looking forward to checking this out. It’s Amiel’s first narrative feature and it seems as powerful as his doc work. Plus the lead is a former convict turned actor.
The Cosmonaut is an interesting crowdsourced filmmaking project. The following video gives an overview.
The Cosmonaut in 5 steps from Riot Cinema on Vimeo.
Putty Hill is an interesting film that is intimate and packs an emotional punch. The fact that it is mainly non-actors is even more amazing. It has a wonderful feeling of being a doc but at the same time has a fluid narrative flow. It just opened this past weekend in NYC and will be rolling out to other cities soon.
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be headed to the Sundance Film Festival with a new project entitled Pandemic 1.0 This marks the first step in a rolling release of a new storyworld that I’ve been building. It is part of what I’ve been calling a storytelling R&D (research and development) process.
Pandemic 1.0 Lance Weiler (U.S.A.)
Pandemic 1.0 is a transmedia storytelling experience that spans film, mobile, online, real-world, social gaming and data visualization. Over the course of the festival the story will unfold enabling viewers / players to step into the shoes of our protagonists. The story experience starts when a mysterious sleep virus begins to affect the adults in a small rural town, the youth soon find themselves cut off from civilization and fighting for their lives. Will they survive? Can you survive?
While going through some older files I found this case study for an ARG that I ran in 2007.
CINEMATIC GAMES: The first version of the cinema ARG started with a number of mashup screenings of my newest feature film HEAD TRAUMA. Version 1.0 was a collision of music, movies, gaming and tech. Here is a story that Current TV did about the release.
INCREASING THE REACH
For HOPE IS MISSING the goal was to create a social media driven ARG. We wanted the game to have various levels of interactivity. For instance, someone might just watch the web series and do nothing more – others might choose to dig deeper.
HOPE IS MISSING consisted of four web films that were loaded with hidden clues. The videos were released on stage6, myspace and xbox. By design we wanted to make the ARG (alternate reality game) accessible. In order to do so, we created layers of interactivity that allowed viewers to go as deep into the experience as they wanted.
The Interactive Layers:
1. just watch the videos
2. read the forums
3. dig for clues
4. capture and share clues
5. create their own worlds – blogs, wikis, forums, and chat rooms
THE STORYLINE
Richard Chambers is searching for his fiancee named Hope who has been abducted. Hope returned home after receiving a series of strange late night phone calls from her mother. In the brief conversations her panicked mother is convinced that people are in the house and trying to kill her. After each call Hope phones the police but when they arrive they find nothing and Hope’s mother has no recognition of making any calls or the incident.
After Hope returns home she uncovers her mother’s strange nocturnal behaviors and realizes that her mother is not alone. Hope begins to dig deeper in an attempt to pull her mother out. But then Hope mysteriously disappears – abducted by a hooded figure – her last moments are captured by a surveillance camera.
As the date of Richard and Hope’s wedding approaches he becomes frustrated with the way the police are handling the case. He is determined to marry her on Oct. 20th. But as things are lucking grim Richard receives a strange package in the mail. Inside the package are a number of tapes that show Hope, a strange letter and a return address that only says Deep Throat. Richard reaches out the video sharing sites and social networks in an attempt to spread the word.
THE TAPES ARE RIDDLED WITH HIDDEN CLUES
We created four web episodes with the goal of releasing them leading up to the Warner Bros VOD release of HEAD TRAUMA. Each webisode was riddled with clues. There where audio clues that had backwards masking and subliminal frames that contained ciphers of varying degrees of difficulty. Once solved the clues lead to numerous hidden sites, blogs, social networking profiles and other media. They are what as know as rabbit holes in the ARG community which is a nod to Alice in Wonderland.
The HOPE IS MISSING ARG took a decentralized approach to releasing the game elements. ARGs typically will have many hidden sites and digital assets. For instance the 42 entertainment ARG for the THE DARK KNIGHT, the newest Batman film, has 10 different sites (as of 11.24.07). In order to increase our reach we gathered a number of partners and releasing outlets to help expand our reach.
Media Outlets:
http://myspace.com/hopeismissing
http://stage6.com/hope-is-missing – this site is no longer active
http://eyespot.com/promotion/headtrauma – the site will only be live through Nov.
Characters:
http://hopeismissing.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/jdoeadc
http://www.myspace.com/northdash
http://twitter.com/northdash
Hidden sites
htmob.com
denial.htmob.com
anger.htmob.com
bargining.htmob.com
acceptance.htmob.com
americandistro.com
alert.americandistro.com
SECRET SCREENINGS
As the game unfolded we leaked clues detailing a number of secret HEAD TRAUMA drive-in screenings. In order to find the the locations players remixed a collection of media through http://eyespot.com. As they remixed, certain combinations of footage unlocked hidden clues. These clues provided information about screening locations and point to additional hidden assets.
One of the subtle builds of the game was to blend the storyline of HOPE IS MISSING directly into the VOD promotion of HEAD TRAUMA. As a reward to players we offered a number of free screenings. The screenings were held in Milwaukee, San Francisco, San Raphael, and LA.
I was at the LA screening and over 70 people attended. The audience was a mix of people, some who were playing HOPE IS MISSING, others who discovered the location through friends that were playing, and some had simply stumbled upon the location and saw a movie playing.
The audience was a mixture people. There where those who were playing HOPE IS MISSING, others who discovered the location through friends that were playing, and finally some who had stumbled upon the location and saw a movie playing. During the screening audience members used their mobile phones to interact with the film’s characters. Then after the audience left, the movie followed them home. A couple days after the screening we called and texted everyone with a number of game related messages.
PLAYERS HELP TO SHAPE THE GAME
As players cracked the clues they were lead to hidden media, sites, blogs, and social networking pages. In some cases clues were multi-leveled and required keys in order to crack them. Often these harder clues would lead to a special call-in number that allowed the first 96 players into a special conference call. The calls included players and a number of moles from the game. During the calls players discussed clues and their theories around the game.ARGs are driven through community interaction so it is common to have moles or people within the game who assist with story or in some cases game direction. Players often help to shape game-play and in the case of HOPE IS MISSING we experience an interesting range of interactions as players created their own blogs, wikis, and forums around the game.
THE STATS AROUND THE GAME
Some of the videos break into the top 10 most watched clips on the Web – Vidmeter 10.18.07
*Player interactions based on aggregation of forum posts and video comments across known outlets (myspace, stage 6, eyespot, etc.) – does not include player generated sites, blogs and forums.
Thanks for sharing this! I have been wondering how this type of project is developed and implemented, and this sheds a great deal of light on it. I still have a lot of questions…one of the main ones is: how do you get people engaged in the first place? Google Ads? Facebook posts? Posting on forums?
In the spring of 1971 the Rolling Stones departed the UK to take up residence in France as tax exiles. Keith Richards settled at a villa called Nellcôte in Villefranche-sur-Mer and this became the venue for the recording of much of the bands masterpiece Exile On Main Street. Stones In Exile tells the story in the bands own words and through extensive archive footage of their time away from England and the creation of this extraordinary double album, which many regard as the Rolling Stones finest achievement.
Powerful film that show’s what’s possible with limited resources and lot of heart. It is now on DVD – pick up a copy or rent it well worth the watch.
The WorkBook Project launches a new Discovery and Distribution Award – after the success of FROM HERE TO AWESOME which assisted 22 films in reaching theaters, living rooms, mobile devices and computers we’ve decided to expand the concept into film, music, gaming, design and software. The first edition of the WBP Discovery and Distribution Award will give a filmmaker a week long theatrical run in LA with full PR, Street Team and Social Media support. The filmmaker keeps 100% of the box office. In addition 20 feature films will receive a digital distribution package that will place them on Hulu, Xbox, iTunes and NetFlix. For more info visit http://www.workbookproject.com/award
I recently contributed a post to Thompson on Hollywood. There’s been quite a bit of talk about the woes of the industry and I thought I’d contribute something to the discussion that focused on some simple steps towards the future.
Where the industry goes from here is going to require a rethinking of the infrastructure that supports it. To realistically move forward, innovation, experimentation and R&D is needed to help create an OPEN framework that will improve the funding, creation, distribution and discovery of truly independent work.
Here are some thoughts:
1. Keep it Open. As the industry shifts, it is key to build the next generation of discovery, creation, and distribution upon systems that embrace the following:
– Open software/hardware that encourages innovation and rewards improvements on functionality.
– Open business models that enable filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, and audiences to sell, trade, and share films in ways that directly reward performance and encourage a healthy sense of competition.
– Transparency: In the age of connected devices and the real-time web, there is NO reason why tracking, performance and reporting can’t be accessible in real-time.
:: Read More
Got the vinyl out and spinning some pixies. This song reminds me of a time when I was shooting film with Mario Sorrenti, Amber Valletta, and Juliette Binoche. Spring wound bolex, reversal film stock, southern plantations, prop planes over panama, and many long hours on islands in the middle of nowhere.
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mike ambs 9:04 pm on February 26, 2011 Permalink
This looks beautiful – I can’t wait to watch the whole film.