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I’m excited to announce that I’ll be headed to the Sundance Film Festival with a new project entitled Pandemic 1.0 This marks the first step in a rolling release of a new storyworld that I’ve been building. It is part of what I’ve been calling a storytelling R&D (research and development) process.

Pandemic 1.0 Lance Weiler (U.S.A.)
Pandemic 1.0 is a transmedia storytelling experience that spans film, mobile, online, real-world, social gaming and data visualization. Over the course of the festival the story will unfold enabling viewers / players to step into the shoes of our protagonists. The story experience starts when a mysterious sleep virus begins to affect the adults in a small rural town, the youth soon find themselves cut off from civilization and fighting for their lives. Will they survive? Can you survive?

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Earlier this summer my writing partner Chuck Wendig and I were approached by SubmarineChannel and producer / director Tommy Pallotta (A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life) to design and write a narrative for a transmedia experience entitled Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy. Collapsus extends a recent VPRO doc entitled Energy Risk by taking elements found within the doc and presenting them as fact set in the not so distant future when a transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources throws the world into chaos.

Trailer for the Collapsus experience

Tommy Pallotta provides a walk through of the project:

Collapsus Introduction from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

CULTURE HACKER – FALL 2010   FILMMAKER MAG

by Lance Weiler -

The year is 2012 and the world is on the brink of collapse.Rolling blackouts, depleted resources, civil unrest, assassinations and political dissension have thrown the world into a state of chaos. We follow the adventures of a group of young people as they lead us into a world of conspiracy, treason and failing energy supplies. While it sounds like it could be the description of a Hollywood blockbuster, it isn’t. Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy is in fact a transmedia companion to a television documentary by Dutch broadcaster VPRO entitled Energy Risk. Collapsus takes theories and predictions from the Energy Riskdocumentary and transports them into a fictional story set within the not-so-distant future. Collapsus becomes a hybrid narrative that combines live action, animation, gaming mechanics and social entertainment in order to present a different perspective on the issues surrounding our struggle to transition from fossil fuels to alternative forms of energy. Tommy Pallotta, no stranger to innovative forms of storytelling (he helped to revolutionize independent animation techniques with his work on Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly), was tapped to directCollapsus by award-winning Dutch transmedia shop Submarine.

The opportunity to push an important global issue while at the same time forging new ground within broadcast television excited Pallotta. “The audience for documentary is dying. The average age of a television documentary viewer is 55 and up. Dutch broadcaster VPRO came to Submarine with the concept of making a simulation game in which the player experiences the impending world’s energy problems. The goal was to attract a different audience than traditional documentary viewers. We decided to take that even further and build a rich transmedia experience that not only entertained but hopefully provoked.”

Within Collapsus players/viewers are placed in crucial moments in time as they travel to London, the Ukraine, Teheran and the United States. Live-action footage combined with animation transports you into an energy crisis while at the same time providing insight into the complex issues surrounding global energy politics. The experience pulls you in by placing you in the shoes of the story’s protagonists. Players/viewers can access additional information on energy issues at the same time as the characters while game mechanics force you to make difficult choices that have a direct result on the world’s energy production.

Pallotta explains, “We crafted a multitasking and multilinear experience, and we blended genres like animation, documentary, fiction, gaming and interactivity all together in one story. This hybrid approach allows us to look at a serious documentary subject but also to shift from the usual talking head approach to something that better reflects our time.”

SCRIPTING FOR TRANSMEDIA

To create Collapsus’ narrative design and fictional story, Submarine and Pallotta approached me and my co-writer, Chuck Wendig. They wanted us to construct a narrative that built on the subject matter of the Energy Riskdocumentary while at the same time enhancing the Collapus experience that Submarine was developing.

When designing narrative for transmedia it is important to consider the original source materials, in this case the topics covered in the Energy Risk documentary. Since there are many moving parts to a transmedia narrative it is critical to ensure a degree of consistency not only with the subject matter but also with the goals of the interactive design. To do so we spent time reviewing materials that Submarine was using to develop the online components of the project. Another key was to identity transmedia hooks that can enhance the story experience. This was accomplished by looking at which platforms and devices could assist the focus and pacing of the storytelling. Once we had an understanding of all the source materials we created an outline of a conspiracy, worked on character backstories, wrote a treatment and finally funneled it all into a 60-page script.

As much as Collapsus is a hybrid of documentary and interactive experience, the approach is rooted in a story that is about characters and conflict. Pallotta explains, “The scientific perspective about the future of energy is basically horrific, no matter what scenario you look at… The heart of this experience is though the characters, not data. This was very important to us, to tell a story from a human perspective and experience that we can all understand.”

BRINGING THE EXPERIENCE TO LIFE

In order to produce Collapsus, Submarine assembled a team of more than 60 people to write, shoot, animate, build and design a complex transmedia experience. The core of the project took over six months and was budgeted at under a million Euros.

The roles within transmedia production vary based on the project. In Collapsus’ case an interesting mix of talent was assembled. The project made use of a researcher with energy policy think tank experience, an interaction designer and a game designer in addition to traditional/interactive production roles such as writers, producers, animators, illustrators and designers. A diversity of experience was key to designing an engaging transmedia project, says Pallotta. “You want to have a diverse team. For instance, interface is still the area that I think we can learn the most from. How do you create a more pleasurable experience? Simplicity and intuitiveness is not as easy as it seems in design. Having an interaction designer on the team is key. It is important to design with interface and user experience in mind. Then you find the balance of how the story comes into play. Interactivity in storytelling can be seen in many ways. Most people talk in terms of how videogames ‘work.’ You control a character and the actions change the outcome. We tried a different approach to interactive narrative design, one that used an annotated approach to information. How and what information you choose is how you interact with the story. It mirrors daily experiences and choices we make in real life more than the fantasy ‘chose your own adventure,’ which is often confused for transmedia.”

If you happen to be in the UK the August issue of Wired Mag has a comprehensive cover story about transmedia storytelling. I was interviewed a few months ago about the work I’ve done around my films and how my new projects are embracing transmedia design, production and distribution. The article features a number of interesting practitioners, production companies and projects.

Here’s a section that covers the work I’ve been doing and what I’m developing…

Click image to read the article.

Over the last year and half I’ve produced 42 shorts that capture creativity and storytelling across multiple disciplines. Occasionally I’ll direct an episode as was the case with I HATE PERFUME.

To see more episodes visit babelgum.com/radar

2010 is off to amazing start.

Last month I had an opportunity to attend the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. My newest project HiM was one of 12 projects selected out of over 2,000. It was an honor to attend and my co-writer Chuck Wendig and I had an wonderful experience. It marked the first time that the Lab has supported a feature film / transmedia project. In addition to focusing on the script we also had a chance to discuss various parts of the storyworld that we’re constructing around the project.

In addition to developing a new feature film, I’m also hard at work on a new TV series. We’re currently writing the pilot for a large network and if all goes well – we’ll hopefully be stepping behind the camera later this year to shoot the pilot. It’s an exciting project that we’ve been developing for the last two and half years and I’m chomping at the bit to share more details.

While in Park City I had an opportunity to speak at Sundance and Slamdance. At Sundance I spoke on a panel entitled The Doctors Are in the House. The WorkBook Project, Slamdance and the Open Video Alliance combined efforts to produce The Filmmaker Summit which brought a number of innovative minds together from 5 different countries to talk about the future of film. I hosted the day and helped to pull together the programming for the whole event. Over 1,500 people tuned into the live stream and the event was projected live at USC and Columbia in addition to a number of other schools in the US and Europe.

Last week I was at the Berlin International Film Festival where I took part in the Talent Campus. I gave three talks on the subject of transmedia and had a chance to unveil parts of a mobile app that we’ve been working on. I’ll be writing about the app and geolocational services and their potential for storytelling in the Spring issue of Filmmaker Magazine which hits newstands in a few months.

DIY DAYS comes to NYC on April 3rd. If you happen to be in the New York area we’re holding a DIY DAYS event at the New School. This marks the 7th DIY DAYS event. We’ve held them in LA, San Francisco, Boston, NYC and Philadelphia. The conference is free and we have an exciting schedule planned with over 25 speakers and more than 20 different talks, workshops and presentations. We’ll also be testing out a new incubator format – more details soon http://diydays.com

A few weeks ago I received a mention in an article entitled “Talking About a Revolution (for a Digital Age)”

“Game changers like Lance Weiler, a D.I.Y. visionary whose 1998 mock documentary “The Last Broadcast,” directed with Stefan Avalos, was the first movie released in theaters digitally, understand that younger audiences can’t be reached the way that their Fellini-loving grandparents once were. Younger audiences might not be more active moviegoers than their grandparents (watching a film is never a passive experience), but they live in an interactive, media-saturated world. These days “everyone is his or her own media company,” Mr. Weiler wrote in Filmmaker Magazine. “With the push of a button they can publish, shoot or record and moments later it can be online for the world to see.” This audience, in other words, has its own D.I.Y. ethos, and sometimes can be part of a movie’s creative process. The major studios certainly are paying attention to what Mr. Weiler and other do-it-yourselfers have to say.” – NEW YORK TIMES

Meanwhile we’ve been producing the third season of RADAR a mobile / online series about storytelling and creativity. In 2009 we produced 24 episodes in addition to staging some offline RADAR experiences that brought the series to life. This year will be doing more offline experiences and we’re currently developing a 4th season of RADAR in addition to two other projects that are running through WBP LABS.

CULTURE HACKER – Winter 2010   FILMMAKER MAG

by Lance Weiler -

More than a decade ago it was “search” that was driving innovation and large investments in both infrastructure and talent. When Google first started indexing unique URLs in 1998 there were already 26 million. Two years later the amount of indexed pages had crossed the billion mark. Flash forward to this winter and the amount of unique URLs exceeds 1 trillion.

We are swimming in a sea of data. On average Americans wade through 34 gigs of information a day according to a recent report by researchers at the University of California, San Diego. The ability to “filter” this information will drive future innovation. How people are posting, commenting and clicking will greatly impact the ways films are created, curated and shared over the next decade.

The desire to tap into social data is evident in recent deals that have Google, Microsoft and Yahoo lining up to access Twitter’s feed in an effort to improve their own traditional search results. The fact that three leaders in search are interested in something as small as 140 characters of information points to the value of social streams. From breaking news instantly, in many cases before traditional outlets, the power of word of mouth threatens to devalue massive ad spends by the studios; the ability of people to connect and communicate in real time through handheld devices is challenging many established industries while at the same time enabling a new form of social curation.

Discover From Those You Follow

When I reach Maria Grineva, one of the founders of the Russian startup the Twitter Tim.es (TwitterTim.es), the company is just about to open its service to the public. The operation is a passion project by four software developers who believed that Twitter messages, also known as “tweets,” could be an excellent source of news if filtered correctly.

The Twitter Tim.es creates a custom “newspaper” based on tweets by people you follow on Twitter. The service uses an algorithm to filter messages that contain only news-related links. Results are then weighted and matched back to your interests. The more people you follow on Twitter the more interesting your personalized Twitter Tim.es newspaper will be.

What impresses me about the Twitter Tim.es is its interesting use of Twitter’s API (application programming interface). Many companies have built services to extend the functionality of Twitter — currently there are more than 50,000 registered Twitter applications. But unlike many of those developed around Twitter, the Twitter Tim.es is creating value around the people you choose to follow.

Extending APIs around social services like Twitter have a direct relationship to the discovery of films. For instance, a similar approach could be applied to the filtering of tweets related to what people are watching, the films they enjoy, the trailers they’ve sent to friends or the actors they like. This type of social curation is of particular value to independent filmmakers who have little P&A when it comes to releasing their films and who live and die by word of mouth. However in order to extend APIs and build the tools that filmmakers require there needs to be new forms of collaboration between those making films and those developing software.

The Point Where Films Find Audiences

OpenIndie is a screening on-demand service that matches audience to films. A recent example of innovation arising out of necessity, OpenIndie is a collaboration between filmmaker Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters, As the Dust Settles) and software developer Kieran Masterton. The venture is not bootstrapped from traditional investors but instead raised its funding via a kickstarter.com campaign targeting other filmmakers looking for new ways to reach audiences.

Scheduled to launch in the spring, OpenIndie will enable filmmakers to list their films on its site in hopes of harnessing audience demand. Audiences will be able to discover and bookmark films they’re interested in, request a screening in their area or stage a screening of any film on the site. OpenIndie describes audiences as individuals or groups, but it also will make the service available to theaters, exhibitors and festivals. The site will attempt to build value for both filmmakers and audiences by providing a framework to measure, visualize and share the data that surrounds its participating films and the audiences who demand them.

Masterton explains, “OpenIndie believes it is beneficial to everyone for data pertaining to requests, screenings and audience attendance to be open. This is simply because the more applications that are built to utilize that data, the more attention a film gets, and the more the audience for that film grows. Whether it’s an iPhone app that tells you where you can find the nearest screening or a number-crunching Web app for market-research purposes, it’s all of value to the filmmaker and the audience.”

The same data that Masterton describes can be used to power social interactions that recommend films and connect film lovers. In an age where filmmakers are struggling to understand the digital “attention economy,” the old adage that content is king doesn’t apply. In a world where devices and people are connected like never before conversation is now king.

We Feel Fine

But the data surrounding conversations can also tell stories, as demonstrated by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s project “We Feel Fine.” Started as an attempt to show what type of humanity could be found within the data that travels daily across the Web, Harris and Kamvar wrote a program that crawls blogs and Twitter every few minutes for sentences that contain the words “I feel” or “I am feeling.” By 2008 the project had captured more than 12 million emotions in a database, along with information about location, gender and age of the people feeling those emotions.

This winter they released a beautiful book entitled “We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotions” that further visualizes the data they collected. In looking through the book and having spent time on the site wefeelfine.org, I’m struck by the emotional power and the sense of story the project has. I had a chance to ask Sep Kamvar some questions about the project and in particular what type of role he sees for data and storytelling in the future. He said, “We Feel Fine is a story authored by millions of people who don’t know each other. The result is a coherent, authentic story. And this is not the only story that can be told this way — the story of love, the story of hurt, the story of helplessness. There are thousands of stories waiting to be told collaboratively by millions of people who don’t know each other. When we talk about this kind of scale, the most appropriate way to tell these stories is by building tools — tools that allow individuals to tell their personal stories in a meaningful way, and tools that collect, curate, recombine and edit these stories to form the stories of the collective. Most data analysis has focused on the macro level — statistics, trends, clusters, etc. These give important contextual information and meaningful insights, but rarely do they provoke a visceral, emotional reaction. On the other hand, many individual stories provoke an emotional reaction or social connection but lack the context that data analysis brings. For us, it’s important not only to present the high-level data analysis, but also to present the individual stories behind the statistics and allow for the user to seamlessly shift between the two.”

The Emergence Of New Models

If we take a moment to look at current trends within other industries, it’s not hard to see that creative uses of data and date filtering are at the center of emerging models. But data is sometimes seen as a foreign element to the creative process of storytelling. Therefore finding ways to apply it will benefit from experimentation.

The following are some suggestions to help get you started. If you get up and running make sure to let me know @lanceweiler.

BusinessWeek named me one of “The 18 People Who Changed Hollywood.” It’s surreal to be sandwiched between Steve Jobs and Mark Cuban. Others on the list include Edison, Lucas, Coppola, and Cameron. But I have to say, sharing a place on the list with William Castle was a special thrill. I’ve been a Castle fan for years, The Tingler is a classic and I’ve often said that some of the Horror 2.0 elements that we’ve brought to Head Trauma were inspired by Castle. Here’s what Business Week had to say:

The 18 People Who Changed Hollywood
Hollywood is hardly ever thought of as a hotbed of innovation. The industry is more likely to try to battle a new technology with lawsuits (see the Betamax recorder, YouTube) than embrace it with open arms. But the movies wouldn’t have survived for more than a century were it not for the tenacious innovators who introduced new tools, new ideas, and new technologies. Here’s our list of the most influential.

Lance Weiler
Tight budgets force lots of indie filmmakers to experiment with new technologies. Weiler has been more persistent than most. The Last Broadcast, released in 1998, was shot with video cameras, processed on PCs so it looked more like film, and shown on a digital projector—one of the first time ticket-buyers saw a digital screening. Lately, Weiler has been showing his movies at flashmob-organized underground drive-in screenings, and building alternate reality games around his latest release, Head Trauma.

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at Power to the Pixel, a leading conference centered on digital innovation held in London. The following is my presentation on the evolution of storytelling

From the program:

THE EVOLUTION OF STORYTELLING
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? How does one develop stories and characters that can travel across screens and devices? What will emerge as new formats and how will they be funded and distributed?

Lance Weiler was awarded the Arte France Cinema prize here at this year’s Rotterdam Cinemart. In his remarks when presenting the award, Arte’s Michel Reilhac said that the award acknowledged the visionary nature of Weiler’s project and noted that it speaks towards the type of new thinking about audience and platforms that will be necessary if our world of specialty cinema is to survive in the coming years.

Weiler’s project is described by him in the program book thusly:

HIM is my newest cross-media poject — a collision of film, gaming and interactive technology that continues with my horror 2.0 series, placing the viewer literally in the shoes of the protagonist. This is a new type of social entertainment experience that fuses storytelling and gaming in a way that enables audience members to become collaborators within the story world.

My newest project is headed to CineMart next month. Held in conjunction with the Rotterdam International Film festival, CineMart is a co-production and finance market. This year 36 projects from all over the world were invited to attend. My project HIM is the only one from the United States. I’m excited to return to Rotterdam – hard to believe it will be 10 years since I last attended with my first film THE LAST BROADCAST.

HIM is a transmedia project that is a feature film at the core but also a fusion of gaming, live events, serialized shorts and graphic novel content. I’ll be detailing the project more here in the coming months. Already there has been tremendous interest in the project which will be a continuation of my Horror 2.0 experimentation. I look forward to CineMart and I’m honored to be the first transmedia project to take part.

In other news:

Last month I traveled to MIT’s Futures of Entertainment to speak about transmedia storytelling and the franchising of media. It was a lively discussion. Here’s the description from the program. “Media convergence has made the complex intertwining of multi-platform media properties more and more common-place, yet the creation of storyworlds that extend beyond a single text is not a recent development. With a history that includes sequels, spin-offs, and licensed products, what is the future for the media franchise? Is there a material difference between creating media franchises or transmedia properties?

What is the role of television programs or films in anchoring wider narrative franchises, especially when they extend beyond media and into the “real world”? What is the significance of the creative individuals who contribute to franchises, including creatives, professionals, and fans?”

- Excited to report that HEAD TRAUMA is airing on Showtime.
- The transmedia approach to HT was just covered in MovieScope magazine.

- The Workbook Project (WBP) an open source project I run has been growing in a number of exciting ways. Here’s what Seven Magazine had to say:

Support networks, allowing filmmakers to offer and receive advice, share ideas and resources, are gradually evolving into influential production forces. One notable example is The Workbook Project; founded by Lance Weiler, a filmmaker and “self-distribution pioneer”, the project’s goal is “to create a free resource for content creators that will become a user contributed repository of information.” Describing itself as an “open source social experiment”, The Workbook Project offers extensive information about funding, production values, clearance and delivery issues, how to create a fan base and a buzz, how to make TV deals and deal with sales, and how to target emerging markets. It is essentially a support network, and offers invaluable assistance to filmmakers starting out and following alternative funding and distribution routes.

A few weeks back I spoke at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment conference.

Program description

Media convergence has made the complex intertwining of multi-platform media properties more and more common-place, yet the creation of storyworlds that extend beyond a single text is not a recent development. With a history that includes sequels, spin-offs, and licensed products, what is the future for the media franchise? Is there a material difference between creating media franchises or transmedia properties? What is the role of television programs or films in anchoring wider narrative franchises, especially when they extend beyond media and into the “real world”? What is the significance of the creative individuals who contribute to franchises, including creatives, professionals, and fans?