Surveillance cameras, skeptics and spirits — Inside The Bxx’s production of “Haunted,” a group of characters investigate a creepy house for paranormal activity. It’s a very linear story with a non-linear interface, with multiple feeds to keep an eye on the characters in the house. It’s very “Big Brother,” and while at first you may find it difficult to sink it to, after about an hour’s worth of watching, you’ll be hooked.

The interface for watching video is an overhead layout of the map, with a timeline slider on top. You can select a segment within a hour within the total 48 hours. When the slider shifts to a segment, the characters are placed in new locations on the map, and video feeds can be tuned into to see what happened in that room during that segment. 

“Carnivàle” Daniel Knauf headed up this project, and in this interview with MediaShift, provides an in-depth explanation of why he took this on in the name of “Transmedia” storytelling, and more about the story. 

As per his suggestion, if you’re looking for a taste of what the experience is like, go to Saturday, Hour 5, Segment 6, and check out Camera 1. Then, go look at the cameras in the bedroom to see what she saw. There’s also piles of other documents within the site to check out to get a full look at the story, their logs, and more.

Overall, a very, very exciting project, and makes me very hopeful that Hollywood may get inspired to start telling stories in very new and very challenging ways.

(Source: bxxweb.com)

A look at our transmedia storytelling world, and the (mostly) successful approaches to engage audiences in a deeper way, “The Art of Immersion” by Frank Rose is a must-read for anyone in the creative industry today. Rose accounts for a wide variety of approaches that have met in an intersection of video games, board games, movies, tv, advertising and more, illustrating the reality of today’s entertainment that storytellers must not ignore in order to engage the widest audiences who demand multi-platform engagement.

Rose is a long-time contributor to Wired magazine, a former contributor to Fortune magazine, and a seasoned veteran of the media conference circuit. 

In “The Art of Immersion,” Rose picks the brain of pioneers in immersive storytelling, including Jordan Weisman, a video game designer who likens his work to “Dungeons & Dragons,” Elan Lee, who opines on what kind of entertainment the internet is telling us it wants, Howard Roffman and the creation of a canon “Star Wars” universe, Ian Schafer, CEO of AMC’s digital marketing agency “Deep Focus,” Damon Lindelof, one of the producers behind “Lost,” NBC execs responsible for bringing “The Office” online, “CSI” creator Anthony Zuiker, ad minds behind “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” and experts in neuroscience and gaming. 

Overall, the book is an inspiring look at those who’ve attempted to create story worlds, and the pitfalls they faced, and how they were overcome. Big examples Rose examines are the universes of “Star Wars” and James Cameron’s “Avatar,” and looks at reasons why “Avatar” failed as a game franchise while what worked for “Star Wars” and its multi-platform extensions.

When exploring cases in engagement in television, it’s interesting to hear from Lindelof and his fellow “Lost” creators, and how they more-or-less stumbled into transmedia, and how “The Office” turned to the web to whip their fans into a frenzy. 

There are two lessons that I took away from “The Art of Immersion.” The first is the importance that any story, be it one rooted in film, TV or advertising, needs to have a well-thought out mythology — or at least room for one to exist and be invented at a later time… these are the very flesh of where fans will grab on with their fascination, keeping them engaged and engrossed until the storyteller reveals their latest twist.

The other is the need for transmedia producers, and those who adapt stories for online and other platforms, to become stewards of these universes and stories; to ultimately understand the narrative, the themes, and the smallest of world-details in order to wholly deliver this content in a meaningful way to audiences. You need to know the details of the world, but you also need the bigger picture.