Ah, Photoshop contests. They’ve been goin’ on for years. What’s more fun than remixed movie posters?

This Worth1000 thread was inspired by the impulse come up with better, anagram alternatives for the latest, poorly named Bond flick. This kind of remixing is old hat, but there’s something incredibly satisfying in jumbling up one image and its requisite verbiage, whether for poignancy or just the bliss of plunder, and telling a totally different tale. The crew does justice to Bond, but this Pirates one is my favorite. (Bob the Priest in a Carafe).

Welcome to Culture Hacker’s new look! My name’s Nick Braccia and I’ll be leading CH on the editorial front. Culture Hacker will showcase innovative storytelling formats, technologies and techniques in a conversational style. We’re not here to overwhelm anybody with theory or Martian vernacular, I promise.  We want to help traditional storytellers take advantage of new opportunities, identify practical tools and develop stronger relationships with larger audiences.  Culture Hacker will include contributions from an established crew of interactive industry folks as well as interviews with digital DIY experts and frequent updates on noteworthy transmedia efforts. Check back often and comment as much as you’d like to keep the conversation going.  Specific questions you’d like addressed? Comment away!

Nick Braccia reports – I’m new to the WBP crew and wanted to kick-off my involvement with a brief and practical outline of introductory steps to help you make the transition from mono-media storyteller (in this case, film) to transmedia storyteller. In time, this evolution will help you to grow (and strengthen) your audience.

Like many contemporary transmedia story architects, I was first exposed to this expansive medium back in 2001, when I googled “Jeanine Salla: Sentient Machine Therapist”, a cryptic title strategically added to the poster for Spielberg’s A.I. This clue was one of three entry points to a transmedia experience—in this case, an Alternate Reality Game. Since that day, I haven’t thought about stories in the same way. However, picking up the vernacular, and diving deeper into these experiences (and the culture around their design) took time. I was so used to developing linear narratives, that understanding these experiences—fractured narratives with plot points scattered across media, space and time—proved imposing. What follows are three very basic steps to introduce you to this landscape.

1) Let Go

If you’re on WBP, chances are you’re a filmmaker, and probably strongly identify with that title. You’ve spent years mastering the incredibly involved set of skills filmmaking requires.. But, for the purposes of expanding your audience and taking advantage of the opportunities in the transmedia space (as nicely outlined in David Beard’s last post) let’s forgo such a craft-specific title. Why? Our primary concern is your self-identification as a storyteller—one willing to employ a vast and disparate set of tools,not just those from the filmmaker’s kit, in order to expose the world to the potency of your narrative. As Yoda said, “you must unlearn what you have learned.” But don’t worry, I promise you’ll get to re-learn it later. ?

2) Read Up

There are several books that can help shift your approach to content creation, media culture and the power of audience involvement. Over the last couple years, a few key texts have eschewed pedantic language and theoretical discourse to convey wonderfully clear insights and advice. You’ll identify with these texts rather than feel alienated by them. Trust me, they helped ease me (a slightly techno-phobic copywriter) into the cross media space with more direction and confidence than I, otherwise, would have had.

The books:

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (Henry Jenkins)

Fans, Blogger and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (also Henry Jenkins)

This is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (Dave Szulborski)

(more…)

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 story might be represented using the following graph. This depicts declarative statements about an 8 year old female character named Red Riding Hood.

Such structures can also describe associations with other entities.

Notice that the description of the character is independent of any stories within which it might be implemented. That is, we’ve described Red Riding Hood without reference to her role in the eponymous fable. This approach lends to the portability of the character’s representation across multiple instances, types, and modes of story delivery.

The characteristics of such entities can be conformed to data structures that describe their significance, and the rules by which they can associate. These rules might be specific to a period of time, a location within the story, or the story world as a whole.

For instance, you could describe a character’s friends and enemies, and then define rules for how the character can interact w/ each of these classes of entities. These rules would be encoded so that they can be interpreted by both humans and computers.

There are several potential benefits to such an approach.

Discoverability

Semantically rich descriptions of stories, and their constituent elements, improve the ’searchability’ of these resources and provide a framework for describing the mutual associations among resources. They also facilitate the integration of story elements to other application contexts such as social networks and indexing services.

Story Path Coordination

Abstracting the definition of story elements facilitates the updating and synchronization of these elements, and their associations, across diverse paths and/or views of the story. For example, it’s easier to update the state of a character ( e.g. from living to dead ) across all instances of the character if these instances all reference a common definition of that character.

Context Sensitivity

Defining story elements independently of a specific implementation facilitates the customization of the presentation of those elements across diverse presentation contexts. For example, let’s say that a given story location must be presented through both a standard web browser and embedded micro-browser. This location may be associated with several media assets but not all of these assets can be presented in the micro-browser context. The presentation to micro-browsers can be defined to present only those media assets suitable to this context. This is possible because the definition of the story location is not dedicated to a specific type of presentation.

Story Element Recombination and Resequencing

Here again, the abstraction of story elements enables a more sophisticated execution and delivery of a story. If each element is defined as an abstract entity and the relationships among elements are described using rules that are valid regardless of a specific story implementation, it’s much easier to change the selection and interactions of these elements within a story. Similarly the sequence in which they are presented can be altered without necessarily breaking the logic of the storyline.

I’ll address these ideas more fully in future posts.

David Beard is the Chief Technical Architect of Seize The Media LLC. Prior to joining STM, David had served in various executive and technical roles with companies in the media and technology sectors. He has also provided firms with technology and business development expertise as an independent consultant. His designs and solutions have been integrated to products and services ranging from electronic cinema transport and exhibition solutions to distributed computing frameworks and media delivery platforms. David has also been published by Wrox Press and participates in a variety of Open Source projects.