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DIGITAL MEDIA FROM THE INSIDE OUT: My focus is digital content -- production, distribution, collaboration, innovation, creativity. Some posts have appeared across the web (HuffPo, Tribeca's Future of Film, The Wrap, MIPblog, etc.). To receive these posts regularly via email, sign up for my newsletter here.

Entries in movies (24)

Thursday
Dec082011

• MOVIES, BOOKS, VIDEO, TRANSMEDIA, PREDICTIONS & MORE: My Weekly Round-up of Links 

It’s the end of the year, and I’ll be unfurling my favorite TV, films, software, and books of 2011 in a series of posts, beginning with television, here.

Speaking of lists, one of the most informative movie lists is from the BFI’s Sight and Sound, which polls 100+ critics to come up with the top movies. But the real fun are the critical commentaries that follow the main chart, where I discover lots of gems that I would otherwise never know about.

MOVIES: Speaking of movies, I for one can’t wait for the international coproduction of David Mitchell’s complex novel CLOUD ATLAS, which I just read. Evidently, the production financing may be as big a story as the ambitious movie itself, according to this report from the NY Times.

Meanwhile, Hollywood studios continue to roll out digital access to more movies via the UltraViolet “locker” project, with Sony releasing its first U.S. titles, and Warners expanding to the U.K.

PUBLISHING: Over in the disrupted world of books, Hachette tells the world why publishers are relevant in today’s digital ecosystem via a leaked memo, drawing a quick response from one J.A. Konrath, a successful self-published author. Makes for interesting jousting.

I learned more from a GigaOm post that shows how publishers have given “Amazon a stick to beat them with” by insisting upon DRM that locks readers into the Amazon walled garden. 

VIDEO: Online video viewing has crossed the threshold of 50% of the U.S. population this year, according to eMarketer.  

Beleaguered Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, on the offensive after a couple of brutal quarters, predicts that 50% of TV viewing will be on the web in ten years. He also announced that Netflix will stream more than one billion hours of video in Q4 of 2011. 

The web was abuzz with news and leaks about a planned streaming video competitor to Netflix from Verizon, which will team up with RedBox.  

Machinima.com, an online video site featuring (what else) Machinima videogame content, has hit an amazing one billion monthly views, according to my old pal Allen DeBevoise. While the gamer niche is certainly an aspect of the success of the site, the larger implication to me is the success of ultra-niche video programming channels. Machinima will be of the 100-plus new YouTube partner channels that will begin rolling out in 2012, much as cable introduced “vertical” programming back in the ‘80s.

Microsoft made news with a major upgrade of the Xbox 360 platform, adding functionality and content partners and prompting this love letter post on Paid Content, which coins yet another term: “engaged TV.”

TRANSMEDIA: Two deep and thoughtful posts went up from leaders in the transmedia storytelling movement. First, check out part one of Gunther Sonnenfeld’s piece about evolving investment strategies in emerging media markets. 

The second, from Conducttr founder Robert Pratten is a great post about “engagement-driven” narrative design.

PREDICTIONS: The New York Times published a killer interactive feature on the history and future of computing. A timeline dating from 1617 lays out key discoveries in computation, AI, Transportation, Lifestyle and Communications, and then invites users to submit their own predictions. You can also amend the predictions, which in effect constitutes a form of crowd-sourced prediction. It’s fun!

The Personal Computer is Dead, by Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, is a jeremiad against vertical integration and walled gardens (Re: Apple). 

This Business Insider’s post, entitled “The Death of Television May Be Just 5 Years Away,” is bound to send shock waves through some of my clients, as it cites various cracks in the current model. 

That's it for this week. Follow me on Twitter (@nickdemartino) for daily doses of info, or subscribe to the newsletter on my site to get updates directly to your inbox. 

Monday
Nov072011

• OF STORIES & WORLDS: What the Transmedia Movement has to Teach ... (And to Learn)  

If nothing else, last week's Story World Conference in San Francisco affirmed the reality of a new creative movement devoted to transmedia storytelling.

After years of building connections via online sharing and various ad-hoc collaborations, this gathering of the tribes of transmedia will certainly accelerate the movement by invigorating a cadre of practitioners and theorists, and generating buzz among content creators of many ilks. 

It's a very big tent that has been pitched, sheltering artists, theorists, academics, service providers, vendors and allies, many with contradictory values and beliefs. Don't expect a manifesto any time soon. 

And yet, listening to three days worth of panels, speeches, workshops, and networking (and 2000+ tweets), it's possible to extract some core beliefs of this movement that distinguish transmedia from "monomedia" -- the world of stories told in a single medium -- followed by some advice gleaned from more than 30 years in the indie film world.

Story World attendees on Day 3 at #occupytransmedia workshop

-- Story Worlds are not stories. This emphasis on worlds transcends the story and its traditional elements (character, setting, theme, plot, etc.) even while incorporating them. Because transmedia requires the audience to move from one medium to another, the emphasis in on "experience design," a job which is more typical in a game studio than on a movie set. 

-- Audience engagement drives everything. To transmedia activists, the audience is an engaged, participatory, and demanding collaborator. Storytellers must invite audiences to "co-create," not just as fodder for marketing or promotion.The release of narrative control opens the floodgates for new definitions of story, script, narrative. This frightens old-school story folks.

-- Stories live outside the silo. Media are produced and funded inside a single silo, so it takes a lot of passion and will to spend the extra time and money to build a multi-platform story vision from the outset. Finance loathes split rights, as Zak Kadison, Chairman, President and CEO, Blacklight Transmedia noted: "Ever since George Lucas, studios don't want to give up any rights."

Perhaps that is changing, said David Tochterman, Head of Digital Media, Innovative Artists"Transmedia is great because it gives me multiple ways to get a buyer to say yes," It also creates value for the filmmaker, according "conversation agent" Miles Maker who sees the emergence of "the attention economy." The story, themes, characters, and actors can generate content and audience engagement well before a film opens, though he admits, "filmmakers don't want to let the cat out of the bag."  

-- Software is the bottleneck. "The biggest challenge to physically distributed narratives was the bottleneck of the gatekeepers," said transmedia pioneer Jordan Weisman. "With the onset of interactivity modes, the bottleneck is software engineering," which has a much more limited pool of talent. The emergence of new production tools and platforms will help the non-techies, including Coincident TV and Conductrr. Lance Weiler thinks of his transmedia projects like software, labeling versions 1.0, 2.0, etc. Indeed, his DIY Days, which preceded Story World, sponsored a hackathon

-- Data is the new oil, metrics is the new gasoline. Most transmedia projects converge on the Internet, and most incorporate audience interactivity --  generating floods of very targeted user data which can be measured and can drive the revenue model and the story form itself. For the first time, audience becomes a strategic advantage for the content creator, not just the distributor.

-- Business models are a bitch. Whenever indies gather, they talk about money, and Story World was no exception. Virtually all successful models for transmedia to date have been financed as either patronage or commissions, as noted by Brian Clark of GMD Studios.  Clark believes that "the next wave of innovation in transmedia storytelling is going to be about business models rather than storytelling forms."  A popular tweet during the conference referenced the patronage model: "If you want to do transmedia, move to Canada." The emergence of an app market (for iPhones, android, TV and desktop) offers new avenues to test the willingness of the audience to pay for original and indie transmedia story experiences.

This movement is young and still in what one observer calls the "us versus them" phase, exemplified by a slogan I saw during one workshop: "After the big boys fuck it up completely, feel free to give us a call"  So as a veteran of the indie video and film movement of the 70s, 80s and 90s, I offer a few observations as encouragement for this one. 

Click to read more ...

Monday
Oct242011

• Your Virtual Self: Who Owns it and What’s it Worth?

Each one of us generates vast amounts of data – email, phone calls, social networking, photos, text messages, videos, browsing, purchasing and more.

Our data create a new form of identity, what you might call a Virtual Self – a concept that will determine the future of the web.

This virtual identity, and all of the bits of data that comprise it, has become an incredibly valuable form of currency – it’s the way the web exchanges value.

Companies aggregate your data in order to deliver advertising, commerce, content, and services to you – worth billions of dollars.

But who owns this data? Who owns your Virtual Self?

Right now, the identity wars are dominated by Facebook, Twitter, and Google – firms that have become what Mashable calls “large-scale consumer identity providers (a.k.a. IdP’s).”

“There’s a great burden placed on identity providers to police the media companies that connect with their users,” Robyn Peterson writes in a recent post. “There’s also a great burden on media companies to fulfill and not violate the trust of their end-users, and to behave appropriately.”

Right now, we’re all complicit in the creation of this Virtual Self -- we use our Facebook or Twitter account to sign in to other websites, which in turn use the components of your identity to construct their content.

We do it willingly. In exchange for data about our friends, locations, interests, behavior, and preferences, we get content served to us that seems eerily relevant -- courtesy of the companies whose algorithms process the bits of our virtual identities.

Of course we’ve seen flare-ups over privacy and identity, but they haven’t changed the trend for consumers to share our Virtual Self, which is getting pretty comprehensive.

Own Your Own Data

“It represents our actions, interests, intentions, communications, relationships, locations, behaviors, and creative and consumptive efforts,” according to The Locker Project, a non-profit start-up unveiled last week as part of a set of initiatives aimed at allowing people to have “ownership over their personal data and clear control over how it’s protected and shared.”

I love their slogan: “Data is Life. Own Yours.”

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Dec122010

• LIST-MANIA

‘Tis the season.

Not the season for holidays. No, the season for LISTS.

We’re awash in them: Lists of top stories; Lists of best movies; Lists of best books; Lists of best this, best that.



Consider the list-makers at TIME Magazine, who earlier this week offered up 50 different lists of 2010’s “best.”

Apparently, they’ve cast themselves as a never-ending slide show of superlatives, hoping to grab some attention on the internet which is littered by ranking and enumerating everything, no matter how trivial. (Quora.com offers discourse about this phenom under the question: why do people like lists? )

Nowhere is list-mania more worshipped than in the entertainment industry.

Earlier today the American Film Institute (AFI), where I worked for more than 20 years, announced its AFI Awards, a list of the top ten movies and television program for 2010

Also today, we got the Los Angeles film critics awards and tomorrow, we’ll get the NY critics, followed with numbing regularity, hundreds of other lists released by various critics and publications, bloggers, entertainment unions and guilds — all playing a role (to a greater or lesser degree) in the entertainment industry’s biggest sweepstakes, the Oscars (Nominations announced: January 25; winners on Feb 25.  Here is a sampling of awards season highlights.


I have a love/hate relationship with the Lists, the Awards, the two months of high holy days that the movie biz becomes until the Oscars is over. We all know this is simply a giant publicity mill, a venal and self-serving celebrity sausage-factory. And yes, we know that it is foolish to believe that any single work of art is “BEST.” 

Nevertheless, movie list-mania is endemic, not among the casual moviegoer, the putative audience for the Oscars and for the ultimate winners, but rather among the most ardent movie freaks — those of us who truly love the experience of the movies.

We read the critics and follow the handicapping precisely because we are, like any addict, chasing that high — the experience of a transcendent cinematic moment, or even simply a great afternoon of entertainment.
Like sports fans, we movie freaks find great comfort and profound validation from the structure of statistics that accumulate during the season leading up to the big game. We argue passionately with our friends with whom we disagree. We read obsessively about the impact of each successive round of winners on the final outcome. We comb the DVD release dates to see if hard-to-view foreign or documentary titles might be released for viewing before late February. We borrow DVD “screeners” from better connected friends, even this is verboten by the piracy-obsessed studios. We monitor the box-office, knowing that Hollywood loves a picture with financial credibility.

Specialty websites can be checked compulsively to see what movie or talent is up or down. Kris Tarpley’s IN CONTENTION site begins the countdown for the coming year’s Oscars the day after this year’s. An aggregate of critics comprise a veritable morning line of handicapped odds at Gold Derby. Once the Oscar nominations have been announced, the real fun begins, culminating with on-line and F2F Oscar pools, often with considerable stakes. Once year I won several hundred bucks at somebody else’s Oscar pool.

More than the money, of course, comes the bragging rights. Just like in sports.

In my great wisdom, and with a tiny bit of luck (a lot, actually), I am master of the universe because I can best predict the outcome of a completely arbitrary list of arcane movie categories as determined by a really insanely contradictory set of rules. Oh my, ain’t I smart?

Having confessed herein that, yes, I fall victim every year to this mania, you might wonder: where the hell is my list. Well, this will be another post because, of course, I haven’t seen all the movies that everyone tells me I need to see — unlike the movie editor of the New York Times, or even a humble blogger (who probably makes more than I do as a result of the revenue generated by the hits that I provide to him!).

I do see a LOT of movies, but not enough to make my top-ten list, which all of my other movie-freak friends have been doing for years. I used to poo-poo such lists among the non-voting hoi-polloi. But no longer. Check back in January. List-mania lives, right here.








 








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