Join in the SteamPunk interactive adventure AURELIA

One of the most interesting genres of fantasy storytelling is steampunk, generally with characters set in the Victorian era when the world was powered by steam and enlivened by inventiveness in science and costumery.

If you're one of the genre's many fans, you should check out Lisa Walker England's Aurelia: Edge of Darkness, a steampunk-fantasy interactive web drama officially debuting online today on Theatrics.com. Inspired by her illustrated steampunk-fantasy serial Rise of the Tiger, the show invites anyone to create and develop a character to help tell the story of the doomed city of Aurelia.  With a run scheduled for 12 weeks, fans will create characters -- citizens of the city -- using Theatrics’ collaborative video communication platform. Their video and other content posts will drive the ongoing story.

Walker, who works by day as a digital marketer, has assembled a team of illustrators, performers, and supporters from her home base in Milwaukee. Many of her collaborators are afficianados of the live-action role-playing communities in the region, and have already begun to perform in character on the Aurelia site. 

She has also created a blog in order to share the backstage evolution of the project and the community which will help the story unfold, here.

Map of AURELIA, one of many back-story items to discover on the new show site.

Aurelia: Edge of Darkness follows the citizens of a self-sustaining, steam-powered city as they battle a deadly energy crisis.  Each week, fans will receive new calls to action that invite them to react to plot twists and tell the story from their character’s unique point of view.  Fans are also encouraged to post photos of the costumes, sets and props they are developing for their character to Facebook and Twitter with the hashtags #aurelia, #aureliaspoilers or #aureliaprops.

The story of Aurelia: Edge of Darkness begins after the once-utopian plains of Aurelia were transformed into a cold, uninhabitable wasteland, fit only for monsters and the almost dead. The citizens have been forced to flee to a central mountain where they have built a fortress and named it Aurelia after their lost home.  Inside its walls, their civilization has flourished through scientific inventions and the power of steam, but now, Aurelia faces a serious energy shortage. If the city’s boilers fall silent, another paradise will fade into Darkness.  As fans take on the personas of Aurelia’s citizens, they must overcome political intrigue, social unrest, and strange magical happenings to find a new source of power... before the lights go out, forever.  

Week's Best Reads - Digital Media Biz, Transmedia & Higher Ed

This post looks at recent trends in three areas that I'm tracking, the overall digital media business, the impact of the internet on higher education, and storytelling forms (transmedia). Please share, and post your comments.

THE MEDIA  BUSINESS

Readers of this blog will remember my post last year when Warner Bros bought Flixster in which I argued that the studios needed to use the data generated by audiences to create relationships that move beyond their historical "wholesale" business model. Instead, we learned, Flixster was turned into a storefront for the studios digital locker project, Ultra Violet, and clumsily at that. 

Now, finally, Flixster is launching "Social Movies Targeting," an initiative that crunches user activity on its sites to predict future trends and to improve targeting for advertisers, according to this interesting Media Post report.

As the web world and the finance world (hell, the entire world) focuses upon the pending Facebook IPO and the enormous wealth being created, it's interesting to understand why. One factor is the ecosystem of startup companies creating apps for the FB platform, as this thorough article by Mike Swift of the Mercury News articulates.

Gunther Sonnenfeld examines what it means to distribute and scale stories across multiple platforms in a series on his blog that you'll find very thought-provoking. I know I did, in part because he positions today's "transmedia" storytelling paradigm within the history of distribution and story formats. 

Legendary investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel teaches at Stanford. I stumbled across this summary of his lecture (by Stanford Law student Blake Masters)  on "distribution" which is comprehensive and fascinating. This is dense, but may be worth the trouble if you want to understand the critical and changing role of distribution in the digital ecosystem. 

Speaking of distribution, its dominance in the digital universe helps Ben Elowitz make the case for the "Chief Audience Officer" in a world where "Content is No Longer King."

As ISPs start restricting Internet band witch, this post asks, "Is Web TV's Free Ride Over?" Not if the trend towards original web programming continues to gain traction.

The rise of made-for-broadband video content also means an upsurge in M&A activity, exemplified by the acquisition of Revision3 by mainstream cable broadcaster Discovery Communications. 

Two posts that look at crowd-funding trends from different perspectives: "Has Kickstarter become just a storefront?" in which the writer argues that the premiere crowd-funding site is star-struck. And "What does crowd funding mean for the VC business?" asks investor Fred Wilson, and then answers. 

EDUCATION

Education is yet one more industry in the throes of revolutionary change as the web and entrepreneurial innovation upend many of the historical institutional verities. 

Last week Harvard and MIT announced edX, a platform for online courses, mostly lectures. This alone is nothing new, with similar initiatives dating all the way back to the first dot-com bubble days. (Here's some perspective in a smart post from BostInno.com.)

Could online learning, along with accelerator-style education and various web-based continuing education platforms spell the end of the MBA, a cash-cow for many universities? This is a well-reasoned case for just that.

While MIT, Harvard and other prestige universities are porting their lecture content to the web, Stanford is undertaking the real revolution in education, according to an interesting Tech Crunch post, by embracing the "flipped" classroom model pioneered by Khan Academy. 

This surge in web-distributed college courses will only become significant, argues this provocative post, when we "jailbreak" consumers from the full degree. Why can't accreditation occur at the course level?

In another online education move, Washington University's Law School will offer a master's degree entirely online, in partnership with a commercial company 2tor.com, reports the NY Times. 

TRANSMEDIA AND STORYTELLING

Fourth Wall's interactive web series "Dirty Work" debuts with a lot of attention, and with a lot riding on it and the RIDES.tv platform (pun not intended).

Transmedia is on the rise in television, or more specifically in ad-supported television, according to this post from ad agency JWT. 

StoryCode.org, the group that grew out of the NY Transmedia Meet-up, held a "story hack" a few weeks ago, stimulating a flurry of posts by the transmedia true believers (like this one from Queen Spade Creative). This Washington Post story does a nice job of contextualizing the event, and why it's ground-breaking.

Transmedia Storytelling Berlin interviews USC prof and transmedia theorist Henry Jenkins, who is now on a European tour. I would expect more as he makes his rounds.

"Prison Dancer" is a transmedia musical (and YouTube phenom) that launched back in 2007 with a video of prisoners jailed in the Phillipines dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller. Now you can interact with a 12-part web series, as described in this extensive post from KCET.org.

"Steampunk Holmes" is a new multi-platform fiction project from a group in Minneapolis that looks like a lot of fun, and which just raised $43K on Kickstarter. HT to @randyfinch