remixable

I’m often asked about social media and how it can effectively be used to create awareness around a particular project. For those that aren’t familiar with Social Media, it represents a change in the way people create, discover, and share content online and off.

The following power point is an overview of how one can use to social media to extend a story and generate a conversation around their work. In the end social media can be an effective way to build an audience / community around a project and / or a body of work.

Download the PDF

Last year, DIY DAYS traveled to LA, San Francisco, Boston, NYC and London. This year things kick off with the biggest DIY DAYS event to date. On Saturday August 1st, DIY DAYS will come to Philadelphia. Filmmakers, musicians, game designers, software developers and entrepreneurs will join for a day of talks, roundtables, think tanks, speed presentations, and case studies. The overall theme of the day will be how to fund, create, distribute, and sustain from one’s creative efforts.

The WorkBook Project and PIFVA present

www.DIYDAYS.com

WHAT: A FREE day of talks, panels, case studies, roundtables, think tanks and speed presentations

WHERE: UArts - 211 S. Board St, Philadelphia, PA

WHEN: Saturday AUGUST 1st
from 8:30am to 6:30pm - followed by a social mixer from 6:30 to 8:30pm

Registration is now open

SPEAKERS

The following speakers are confirmed for DIY DAYS Philadelphia. Check back often as we’ll be updating the list on a regular basis. Full schedule details coming soon.

Scott Macaulay (film producer and editor of Filmmaker Magazine)
Dan Goldman (Shooting War and founder of Dandelion)
Esther B. Robinson (filmmaker, producer and founder of Art Home)
Brian Newman (CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute)
Lance Weiler (Founder of WorkBook Project and culture hacker)
Scott Kirsner (journalist - Variety, Wired, Boston Globe and author of Fans, Friends, and Followers)
Lina Srivastava (creator of the Transmedia Activism framework)
Michael Monello (co-founder of Campfire Media and producer of the Blair Witch Project)
Alex Johnson (co-founder of WBP Labs, co-creator of RADAR)
Brian Clark (founder of GMD Studios)
Brian McTear (music producer and founder of Weathervane Music)
Arin Crumley (filmmaker Four Eyed Monsters and As the Dust Settles)
Anita Ondine (writer / producer / CEO Seize the Media)
Chuck Wendig (writer / developer of games, film and TV)
Hunter Weeks (Director/Producer 10 MPH, 10 Yards, Ride the Divide)
Noah Harlan (film producer and mobile app developer)
Leah Kauffman (editor of Phrequency)
Jesse von Doom (founder of CASH Music)
Geoff DiMasi (founder of P’unk Avenue)
Vicki Callahan (author and co-creator of Transmedia Activism framework)

Check back as we’ll be updating this on a regular basis over the next few weeks.

Know of someone you think would be a good speaker OR if you know someone who would be interested in volunteering behind the scenes to help make DIY DAYS Philly happen let us know.  work@workbook.com

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 distributed?

For more from the OVC visit www.openvideoconference.org where all the videos from the two day conference can be found.

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 know which of the two women to trust. The Queen is certainly a witch — but her stepdaughter may be something even more horrible…

Alabaster is a form of interactive fiction that sets about to retell the tale of Snow White from a somewhat different perspective. The story is told through text, and you are given a prompt to enter responses. The story then reacts to what you have just told or asked it. Additionally, Alabaster includes illustrations that change in accordance with the mood of the story. This collaboration between 11 different authors is a sophisticated tapestry of dialog and plot. In all, 18 separate endings are available, depending on the choices the player makes.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to explore the world of interactive fiction, or IF, you’re missing a treat. If Alabaster whets your appetite, give the classic Zork series a shot next. Theatre of the mind at its finest.

Nawlz
Another sort of storytelling entirely, Nawlz is an online graphic novel. Nearly every panel features some sort of animation and sound, and some have interactive hotspots that readers can play with. The cyberpunk setting “follows Harley Chambers as he kicks thru the futuristic City of Nawlz engaging in overlaying virtual realities, mind-bending drugs and other strange techno-cultures.”

What’s interesting about Nawlz is that the panels are not static. Items and elements appear and rearrange themselves within the panels as the reader navigates through the story. This gives a totally new dynamic to the experience and is exciting even for graphic novel neophytes to navigate through.

Survive the Outbreak
When the zombies attack, are you dead meat or will you be leading your people to safety? Chris Lund’s Survive the Outbreak let people put their best armchair zombie quarterbacking skills to the test, providing a choose-your-own-adventure style interactive movie that allowed viewers to make the decisions what to do next. Unfortunately, the high quality version seems to be a victim of its own success (or perhaps it’s a vast undead plot), but a reasonable facsimile of the movie/game can be found on YouTube complete with the decision tree. According to the designers, there are eight possible endings - but only two where the protagonist lives. As Homer Simpson would say, “I like those odds!”

So take note, storytellers - every day there is someone out there finding another new and innovative way of captivating an audience. What’s been most interesting has been to see the shift from author-driven story to author/audience collaboration. Giving your audience a stake in the story is a sure-fire way of building a very strong relationship with them. Finding interesting ways of doing that is the challenge - and the fun part.

Dee Cook was elated to discover the world of interactive storytelling because, at that moment, she finally discovered what she wanted to do when she grew up. A fish out of water with lofty ideals and meta-theorizing, Dee finds herself most at home with her sleeves rolled up and the grease of a good story under her fingernails. In the last several years she has written, designed, and consulted on over a dozen alternate reality games, extended realities, and marketing campaigns, most recently World Without Oil, True Blood, Dead Space, and My Home 2.0. You can find her online at Addlepated.net.

Nina Paley wants you to see her film which is exactly what most filmmakers desire. But the way in which Paley is releasing her debut feature Sita Sings the Blues is a bit different. She wants to give it to you for free via a creative commons license. In fact she is encouraging her audience to take and distribute the work and if they profit she just asks that they share some of the revenue. As Paley experiments with a free hybrid model that also includes a paying theatrical release (which was landed after her theatrical distributors saw the demand for Sita) she intends to be open and transparent about her findings. In our discussion we cover a range of topics - music clearance, copyright, how culture wants to be free, and turning your audience into distribution hubs.

Related:
Understanding Free Content

To listen NOW click the play button below.

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 their own shop called No Mimes Media. In our conversation Steve explains how he builds a universe around a project, the need to find better ways to measure success and how to make the experiences accessible to wider audiences.

To listen NOW click the play button below.

We’re excited to be a partner of the upcoming Open Video Conference. The conference takes place June 19th and 20th at the NYU Law School. What makes OVC a must attend event is the combination of tech, creativity and policy issues that will be addressed during the two day conference. Full details after the jump.

Open Video Conference, June 19-20, NYC
40 Washington Square South (NYU Law School)
http://openvideoconference.org

Register now @ http://openvideoconference.org/registration/

on Twitter/Identi.ca: @openvideo
on Facebook: http://is.gd/xeL8

The Open Video Conference is a two-day gathering of thought leaders in technology, business, public policy, art, and activism from around the world to explore the future of the moving image.

Thanks to a proliferation of tools for recording, editing, and distributing video online, anyone can be a broadcaster. Sites like YouTube are bursting at the seams with user-created content. Individuals armed with cell phone cameras are effectively citizen journalists. And emerging artistic forms like video commentary and remix/mashup create new vocabularies for creative and political expression.

Yet as the medium matures, we face a crossroads. Will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture—one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture? Web video holds tremendous potential, but limits on broadband, playback technology, and fair use threaten to undermine the ability of individuals to engage in dialogues in and around this new media ecosystem.

Highlights

Bestselling author Clay Shirky will give a talk about the disruptive effects of the web. Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain (TBC) will moderate a discussion on industry perspectives with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen, Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack, and representatives from YouTube and Adobe. Lizz Winstead, activist and co-creator of The Daily Show, will discuss web video as political commentary. Legendary hacker Jon Lech Johansen (DVD Jon) will address data portability. Mozilla, makers of the Firefox web browser, will highlight what it’s doing to cement open video standards. You’ll hear from Anthony Falzone—executive director at Stanford’s Fair Use Project and counsel to graphic artist Shepherd Fairey—about the new battle lines drawn around fair use. Voices from the blogosphere, public media, and traditional media will explore the ways to make their content work in an open video ecosystem. Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, will highlight the ways telecom policy hinders independent media, and much more.

This is just a peek—have a look at our schedule page for more details: http://www.openvideoconference.org/agenda.

In addition to two full days of high-profile programming, you can expect a slate of workshops and behind-the-scenes technical working groups with leading edge video developers from projects like VLC, Ogg Theora, GStreamer, Blender, PiTiVi, Miro, Kaltura, Firefox, and many more. This event should interest anyone with a stake in art, culture, technology, policy, journalism, or online business.

Registration

Registration entitles you to all conference benefits: talks and presentations, workshops, screenings, two lunches, and a cool afterparty featuring video turntablists Eclectic Method. Plus you’ll get to mingle with thought leaders in online video and take home a cool bag of schwag! Don’t wait—register at http://www.openvideoconference.org/registration.

Organizers

Our conference co-organizers are Participatory Culture Foundation, Yale ISP, iCommons, and Kaltura. Our partners include Mozilla, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Free Press, Creative Commons, Big Think, NYU Information Law Institute, Intelligent TV, The WorkBook Project, FGV Brazil CTS, NEXA Italy, and more.

For more information, contact conference@openvideoalliance.org