Articles in culture hacker
by Nick Braccia – About 5 years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Polly Frost and her husband Ray Sawhill through our mutual friend, Steve Vineberg. Immediately, we hit it off upon realizing we shared a passion for horror, sci-fi and pulp. I have to admit I was a little intimidated; both Ray and Polly have pretty intense journalistic, critical and creative resumes. Polly was featured in James …
by Peter Katz – Here’s my interview on branded content with Creative Director Tim Roper from award winning advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. We met at UCLA Media & Entertainment Week.
What do you feel are the biggest misconceptions about branded content?
The biggest misconception is how easy it is to conceive it in a fresh way and then how willing people are to consume it when it’s not fresh. Even …
By Robert Pratten – I’ve been working with two entertainment properties and a media start-up the past couple of months and I wanted to share the business models I developed to explain where we’re heading.
Here’s what we already know: pulling in an audience is tough but pulling in finance is tougher.
The Old Days
In the “old days” – as shown in Figure 1 – raising finance was what you did …
The WBP network will be growing in the coming months as we bring on additional contributors and finalize a new site design. The following are some recent posts by contributors.
Over at the New Breed
The SABI Festival Strategy
by Zak Forsman
STEP ZERO: ASK YOURSELF WHY
Be honest with yourself and ask why you want to do this. It will be a financial, emotional and physical drain to be sure. So you must define …
By Haley Moore – Smoking Gun Interactive is taking its new ARG Exoriare very seriously.
Just because the game is intimately tied to the release of a new graphic novel and a planned console game, they aren’t about to treat it like an advertising campaign. In fact, they’ve been sending out press releases, writing stories for BoingBoing, and talking to The Guardian in anticipation of the ARG, rather than waiting …
Power to the Pixel, an influential conference for the art and craft of digital storytelling has just announced a call for entry. The Pixel Pitch is looking for cross-media projects that have a film focus. I was fortunate to take part in the first Pixel Pitch with my newest project HiM. This innovative program offers an opportunity for those who are experimenting with cross-media storytelling to connect directly with funders, …
This past weekend at the Open Video Conference Ted Hope producer of (21 Grams, The Ice Storm, Adventureland) and writer/director Lance Weiler (The Last Broadcast, Head Trauma) discussed how technology is impacting the art and craft of storytelling. As the industry shifts and audiences move from passive to active collaborators how does the art of storytelling change. What will emerge as new formats and how will they be funded and …
Dee Cook reports – How are you telling your stories these days? Here’s a small rundown of three entirely different kinds of narrative frameworks using online media – and the audience – in new and sometimes unexpected ways.
Alabaster
The Queen has told you to return with her heart in a box. Snow White has made you promise to make other arrangements. Now that you’re alone in the forest, it’s hard to …
Steve Peters has experienced designed some of the most well know ARGs of the last few years. From “Why So Serious” for the Dark Knight to “Year Zero” for NiN – Steve has carefully crafted elaborate experiences for audiences / players that involve extending story and characters across devices and into the real world. Now Steve and a number of others from 42 Entertainment have broken off to form …
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Christopher Rice reports – Here at Culture Hacker, we’ve touched on the ARG (Alternate Reality Gaming) world, the creative side of cross-media storytelling, and a lot of what’s new to the collective tech & story scene, but I think now’s a good time to let it all collide – KABOOM!
As a story analyst and writer working primarily in the film platform, I’m more interested in the creative process behind the …
Dee Cook reports – Ken Eklund is an author and award-winning game designer whose 2007 serious game, “World Without Oil,” took the internet by storm. The game presented the world with a premise: there has been a glitch, and oil supplies are running short all around the globe. How does it affect you personally? Participants were invited to submit their experiences in any variety of electronic …
This edition of TCIBR is made possible thanks to the support of IndieFlix – Jason Rohrer is an independent game designer and developer. His games Passage and Between challenge the convention of what a video game is. Instead of relaying on graphics which are a staple of AAA games, Jason is drawn to game mechanics that create a sense of emotional weight. In our discussion Jason shares his vision …
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Dee Cook reports – Remember liner notes? They were the best on double albums because you could flip open the album cover like a book and read it. This is vinyl, back in the days when everyone knew how to squeeze a little more life out of a phonograph needle by putting a dime on top of the cartridge. Anyway, lots of times the liner notes would …
You enter the CULTURE HACKER SHRINE. The floor is littered with the SKULLS of old media. An ARTICLE with a CLEVER LEAD is here. What will you do?
Comics and games have always had a symbiotic relationship. There are games about comics, and more than a few comics about games. Chasing the Wish even brought comics into the ARG scene a few years ago. These two media tend to collide often, …
By Christopher Rice – Storytellers of all trades, including novelists, filmmakers, musicians, game designers, and even bloggers, currently face a greater challenge than telling a compelling story in their medium; it’s called change, and like evolution in general, it’s simply inevitable. While storytelling will continue to forever thrive as one of the best sources of entertainment reflecting the human condition and emotion, the way audiences are consuming these stories and …
By David Beard – There are interesting parallels between the aspirations which drive innovation in the Transmedia space and those of developers of the Semantic Web.
The Semantic Web is a set of theories and implementations dealing w/ the representation and relations of web resources. It addresses ways that these resources can be structured and described to facilitate their organization, analysis and composition by software algorithms.
For instance, a character in a …
There are so many exciting things happening in the independent gaming scene. It calls to mind what indie film was like in the mid to late 90’s, when technology became accessible and anyone with a camera and a story could make a film. Something that I find of particular interest is how gaming allows audiences the abitily to role-play and shape the storyworld as it evolves in real-time. This creates …
