Transmedia storytelling tells a story across varies platforms with the goal of engaging the audience. Air Media has provided a list of transmedia stories that have received recognition and Kevin Moloney sums up the essence and goal of transmedia journalism in his blog dedicated to the practice.

The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American horror film written and directed by Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick and is often sited as one of the first transmedia projects. In addition to using what was claimed to be found footage they created an eight-minute documentary along with newspapers and news footage.

For you final projects as a way to reflect on DS106 and what you have learned in this class both technically and conceptually – I would like you to produce a transmedia project with 2-3 transmedia elements. Be prepared to discuss it in class and explain your process and your reasons for telling your story in this way. Consider your audience and what you want them to take from the experience. You will also be expected to reflect on your final projects as well as the course – A domain of one’s own in a final post. It may however be finished after the final critique.

I wanted to touch base – As many of you know I was unable to come to class last week due to an emergency. Despite my California experience ending in a “bang” I was able to participate or attend several interesting conferences pertaining to our class. In LA I got a scholarship to go to a conference called The Farmhouse Conf 4 which took place under an avocado tree in Hollywood. It was a cross-pollinating platform that could loosely be described as This American Life meets weird hacker space.  I want to speak about one of the presenters - Justin Oellette (from NYC yay!) because it connects to the conversation about infringement of copyright law - Fairness and Fair use  that Prof. Smith spoke about two weeks ago.  The story (Justin’s blogpost from 2008) was about an app that Justin created called muxtapes (a simple interface that made it easy to share playlists.) that blew up over night and then was shut down by the RIAA. The presentation culminated in a vivid description of a meeting with a large table. On one side sat about 12 musicians and on the other sat 12 lawyers. The musicians were all saying we love your app – we use it everyday and the lawyers were all saying we’re shutting you down tomorrow. How could industry stop progress?  He’s spent the last 5 years processing what happened – how could this contradiction occur? How was the world changing? And what did the future look like? According to Justin – It is inevitable that the integration of digital technology and human life will become increasingly seamless. (think about google glass as very rude and clumsy prototype) And as the human’s greatest instinct – survival – continues to do what it does best – survive – our digital and actual lives could live forever. He maintains that as evolution follows its own course – industry will have to loosen its strong hold. In his own words: The industry will catch up some day, it pretty much has to. 

Here’s an interesting listen on Data and the future of economy. Will Oremus reviews Jaron Lanier’s book Who owns the Future.

Hello Peeps, writing from sunny, sunny California. Just spent the week at the AERA (American Education Research Association) conference and saw as one might expect some fascinating presentations on technology and the future of education. The bay area breaths the internet and it makes for a very inspiring atmosphere. I was invited to go to a presentation on the role of Play, creativity and education: Players and professors: Exploring the Future of Digital Media and Learning. People were presenting various interactive platforms and games – some of which but not all were digital. A theme that kept reoccurring was the idea of digital media augmenting education rather than replacing traditional methods – a book in one hand and the mouse in the other. James Gee of Arizona State who considers himself an agitator pointed out that evidence stated that  the  text book was perhaps the least successful teaching tool ever invented and implored the audience not to make the same mistake with games and technology. There is no silver bullet – there is however strength in combining methods. He also speaks about collapsing the border between formal and informal learning – which in many ways is what DS106 is doing. In other ways our current education system sucks the joy and life out of learning. I must say that much of this sentiment seemed to be contradicted by another thread throughout the conference. Arne Duncan,  Secretary of Education delivered the keynote. After having spent what felt like a half hour talking about how teachers are cheaters (to room full of teachers — ahem) he continued to discuss the importance of high stake standardized testing and assessment. Apparently the feds are about to unroll yet another standardized test which just leads me to ask what exactly is standardized about comparing fourth graders to fourth graders if the tests keeps changing? I leave you with Henry Jenkins a leading scholar in the new media field. I’ll be back but in the mean time … any thoughts?

Last night I went to a monthly meetup (anyone can register) called Storycode. This is a group of people who are interested in exploring new ways of telling stories often using digital media and transmedia storytelling tactics. Jon Vidal  was one of the presenters and he started the award winning project The Tiziano Project which goes to communities around the globe, trains students on video equipment and then publishes their stories on a website. What was fascinating to me was the link between community and technology.

I also thought I would pass along the DS106 crew (including our very own Michael Branson Smith) discussing Gifs and their roll in storytelling. How I stopped Worrying and Learned to love the GIf. Here’s the link to Michael’s history of the gif.

It was good to see your videos yesterday and I’m eager to see how you end up using Popcorn Maker to tell stories with various perspectives and multiple meanings. I’ll be blogging more about this but for the mean time take a look at a post in Rhizome about Jill Magid’s work on stories that are caught on surveillance cameras.

Check out Prof Michael’s last post – Puppet Trolls including a detailed post about green screen in imovie. Check back later …

Here’s another example of a digital storytelling: The New Yorker published an amazing data visualization this week - Inequality and the New York Subways . It maps the average house hold income by subway stop.

Last week we began the process of creating mockumentaries. Spinning off of last weeks assignment of creating a mashup with five of the same archetypes from different films this week the class broke up into small groups to conceptualize, shoot and edit  a mockumentary  which would include a skit of an interview with an archetype. Don’t forget to include a sound track and credits. Here’s the uploaded assignment. Don’t forget to tag it correctly and provide commentary.

a classic example …

Hello – I’m excited to have moved on to video – good stuff.

So this week, you are once again expected to complete ten stars from the video bin including the video blitz we completed: One Archetype, Five movies, Five seconds which is worth 3 stars. I just posted another mashup idea x vs x. I mean what if Sam Neill and Laura Derne saw Rihanna instead of a dinosaur?  (ok – I’ll get on it) Here’s Robo Cop versus Terminator.

We discussed archetypes and I thought I would offer several additional thoughts and resources on the topic.  . Archetypes are universally understood symbols, characteristics or patterns that are found in storytelling, myths, psychology and philosophy. Carl Jung established  archetypes as belonging to a collective unconscious and influenced many scholars including Joseph Campbell author of  The Hero of a Thousand Faces which popularized the concept of the hero and his journey. In turn he has had a profound influence on Hollywood, and most famously George Lucas who credited him as influencing the shaping of Star Wars.

Below is a video that unpacks the stages of The Matrix through the lens of a hero’s journey. Some of the comments refer to it as formulaic. Has this become actually Hollywoods eminent formula?  

And here is the Starwars Call me Maybe Mashup

So, we used imovie to edit in class but feel free to use an video editing program you have access to. Here are Apple’s Imovie tutorials.

Amanda Palmer talks about alternate forms of cultural funding – crowdfunding and the art of asking for help. Sometimes when we ask we are actually including people in our artistic process – we are asking them to become part of the vision and this can create community and a sense of empowerment. The problem as stated in a New Yorker article is that when too much money becomes involved the rules change – and the artist/entrepreneur is put in the position of having to use her/his power responsibly.

Crowdfunding might not be the whole answer addressing how we as a society pay artists – as many will not be able to raise nearly as much as Amanda Palmer but as far as I can tell the music/film/art industries as they stand are also very exclusive, leaving nearly all aspiring artists out of the equation. My preferences lean towards a model which lets me as a cultural consumer decide what I want to be produced. Any thoughts?

Thought I would share this video …

Diy days is coming to NYC on April 27th, for a FREE day of talks, workshops & networking.

This event looks amazing. I will unfortunately will be at conference in San Francisco but highly recommend it for all you digital storytellers.

Spring break is great time to catch up, complete unfinished homework and make sure that your blogs are following some of the best practice guidelines. This class is about charting the process of your growth as you become a digital citizen. All assignments should link back to the DS106 assignment so, that people can easily see what it is you were doing. You should also spend some time reflecting on your process — what is that you learned? Also please make sure that everything is tagged correctly. If you have any questions please feel free to shoot me an email or tweet it. There is a DS106 community who is regularly on twitter and someone there may just have the answer. Also, now that you are more comfortable with WordPress please take the time to design it and clean up the breadcrumbs (There is no reason that people should have a sample page still appearing in the menu).

Some thoughts …  I am in Texas presenting my film, Admissions at the University of Houston Downtown - excited to be some place that understands the concept of spring. Will let you know how it goes.

I also wanted to spend a minute recapping my experience broadcasting on DS106  Radio. It was also my first time using much of this technology, so there was a learning curve. The two programs I downloaded inorder to make this function were ladiocast and soundflower. Ladiocast  allows you to set your output to soundflower which then acts like a rudimentary submixer. I feel like I need to do it at least one more time inorder to really understand what the workflow is … I really enjoyed listening to the podcasts once again. Of course there is lots more information on the DS106 site …

Also, there has been a lot of buzz around the 3D printer – what do you guys think of the 3D printer?

So, today was exciting! It was great to see the whole room buzzing with ideas and creative collaborations brewing – and I’m really excited to see how your radio shows come out.

If you were absent please contact me and I’ll try to place you in a group …

So, in addition to the clarifications and lovely, sparkly unicorns that Prof. Michael posted on the CT101, I would like to spend a little time discussing the nature of satire. According to Wikipedia- although satire is usually meant to be funny, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon. The Yes Men in 2009 created a fake New York Times that was so utopian that it was funny but also made us think … The Onion does this all time. (with all due respect to Iowa…) 

At the core of humor is the concept of understanding the internal logic of something and then just pushing it to its utopian or dystopian limits. Anyway, excited to see how the Zombies, taxi drivers, dubbed anime folks, worst bosses and top ten count down radio hosts solve our problems!

The CT101 post also has some really good tips about how to create an atmosphere by blending and layering sounds.

For those of you who are having trouble posting your sound pieces on your blogs this is the trick: Upload a plugin called Sound Cloud Gold to your page and activate. You should then be able to post your sound pieces … and they won’t show up as ugly URL links.

Also thought that maybe some of you journalists would be interested in seeing this video and podcast from: Convergence Journalism? Emerging Documentary and Multimedia Forms of News