Australia is a place bubbling with enthusiastic new Transmedia talent and I was lucky to present and moderate a great panel at the Sydney Opera House early in July 2011 with representatives from pervasive film making, advertising, art and industry R&D. It was all about experiential storytelling and services and part of the Creative Sydney fortnight and a Metro Screen organised evening (more later).

The full panel video is embedded below including my opening ramble / intro (was told I had 15 mins +3 min video but just before we kicked off suddenly 5 mins?!) but some v.interesting conversations ensued with the panel, in areas around transmedia, pervasive entertainment, types of creators involved in the process and the old debate of game vs story, ludology vs narratology. I add a few slides and clarifications of my opening blurb below the video and at the end some presentations from students I taught last year, ‘Stories Across Platforms’. Enjoy

Are You Experiential? – Metro Screen with Creative Sydney from Metro Screen on Vimeo.

In my short intro I mentioned that experiential media have been with us for millennia and how ‘surround’ & interactive art, theatre and music has paved the way for more contemporary mass media examples (last 100 years!) such as:

Visual – Crowds experiencing something they thought was real in 1895 for the Arrival of the Train at La Ciotet “the audience was so overwhelmed by the moving image of a life-sized train coming directly at them that people screamed and ran to the back of the room”

  • Narrative – Audience so caught up in the 1938 Orsen Welles Company version of War of the Worlds radio narrative they actually believed it was happening “Newspapers reported that panic ensued, people fleeing the area, others thinking they could smell poison gas or could see flashes of lightning in the distance”
  • Marketing – How decades ago Starbucks were ahead in attaching experience to media as coffee houses aligned with cinema “They can look forward to us introducing them to the movie in a fun, experiential way. We believe that Starbucks can ultimately change the rules of the game for film marketing and distribution”. Howard Schulz
I rushed through broad definitions of experience from a users perspective, kind of in the street answers to the question “what do media experiences mean to you”?

…quickly talked about enabling technologies and showed a recent video of place based storytelling which included the ubiquitous Alternate Reality Games, Locative Scavenger Hunts, AR games and new kids on the block,  films in-situ or Locatinima as I keep calling them!

 

and finally revisited my five levels of experience, Physical, Mental, Social, Emotional and Spiritual to lead into areas that each of the panellists are exploring.

 

As promised too some presentations mostly from students last year who took part in a Metro Screen Transmedia 101 Workshop (The first 30 minutes) and also one group now company called Dog Money World (Anna Bay, James Boyce and Claire Evans) from the Multi Platform Producer Scholarship course (I am the main lecturer on) who present something (30 mins in) worked up in my course, very much in the pervasive/locative entertainment space – called ‘Crime Plays’. The last 12 minutes features Marcus Gillezeau of Firelight Productions a co-presenter/lecturer at Metro Screen.

At Creative Sydney 2011 – Storytelling 2.0: engaging an audience in a narrative takes a lot more these days. Meet a new generation of content-makers finding inspiration in an expanding, interactive space for stories.

Stories Across Platforms, with Metro Screen from Metro Screen on Vimeo.

As the video of ‘Crime Plays’ was not too easy to see in the above wide shot here is the teaser video currently up on Vimeo

Crime Plays… Do You? Mobile Application Teaser from Dog Money World on Vimeo.