New Media Writers and the role of the Writers Guild

Is it possible that future Australian Writers Guild AWGIE awards might include categories for Best WebSeries, Best Multi-Platform Script, Best adapted Screenplay for an Interactive Medium? 

Or are some of these categories redundant even before they exist? We might observe that within a decade any separating out of ‘TV-Series’ from ‘Web-Series’ will be defunct as TV over IP becomes the norm making all TV, in effect, WebTV. Yet a separation between interactive and non-interactive would seem to be a fair and viable distinction with longevity - though there will invariably be overlaps and hybrids; in a multi platform world any story is likely to be both in some form. The principles of Adaptation hold strong across all media and I would argue that Transmedia is, almost be definition, ‘adaptation’ - trans means to move and when a storyworld moves across platforms it Adapts….

Why this musing…? 

For both writers and their professional institutions, consistently and flexibly accommodating such shifting sands is integral to the job. The Australian Writers Guild, of which i am a member, is a crucial part of that process and requires that professional writers for any and all mediums, be part of the answer.

The digital world is a complex place and for screenwriters the complexity is wholly apparent in the very screens we write for. As i have written about in the previous posts, the challenge for writers and their professional bodies lies in how to define professional work in a hugely diverse ecosystem of multi-platform and interactive media. 

Writers Guilds build their strength as a collective voice to speak for, and work on behalf of, writers by venerating high standard work and having clear definitions of professional practice. In the past this has had distinct weigh-posts in the form of Broadcast Transmission and Theatrical Presentation. But of course the digital age brings this long standing duopoly undone with streaming, on-demand, online and interactive all being mainstream content for audiences yet outside of what we would otherwise perceive of as Broadcast or Theatrical. 

I outlined some of these challenges in my previous post and i thought it worth highlighting the case study of my own guild - the Australian Writers Guild - and how they have developed a process for inclusively embracing new media writers and adapting in a productive way to the changes wrought by digital technologies.

Aside from Associate Membership open to anyone, Full Membership of the AWG is obtained by satisfying benchmarks for professional work. In the case of theatre, film and radio this is 50mins of produced content and for TV its 45mins of broadcast. However for screen media and performance writing that sits outside these traditional frameworks the AWG has developed a very simple yet forward thinking framework, one that is both flexible and accommodating yet still retains professional benchmarks. This is by no means an easy balance to strike. Be too restrictive and you fail to embrace dynamic new forms that are increasingly the bread and butter work of writers. Be too open and you trade off the power of the guild to lobby on behalf of writers by undermining the status of professional writers.

The AWGs full membership criteria for Interactive/Multimedia states:

“the applicant may be required to have a number of screen credits or a range of interactive projects to gain accreditation. That is, 10 small platforms (1-5 minute) or 5 large platforms (more than 5 minutes of produced work or at the discretion of the Membership Committee, subject to specialist advice. Such material must be accompanied by a declaration from a producer that the writer was integral to the development of the story/script.”

The wording of the three base parameters here is important. The number and size of the platforms is a simple but effective way to begin to separate that most crucial of professional qualities - Labour Consistency. It is one thing to shoot or edit a great video and put it up online and attract a lot of viewers. It’s quite a different thing to produce quality video content week after week, to a brief, in collaboration and deliver on time for stake holders - be they producers, investors, clients or directors. For all the boon of inexpensive cameras, editing software and free-for-all online delivery; this simple separation between the occasional Amateur and the working Professional remains a yawning chasm. I have seen so many would-be cinematographers, directors, editors - with all the talent in the world - crash and burn because they failed to recognise this leap they had to make.

This seperation is no less significant for writers. The art of creative writing is something a great many people can, do and should, engage. Frankly the world would be a better place if more people expressed themselves in words and ideas. But the Profession of creative writing is a different beast requiring dedication to craft, discipline and the building of professional relationhips. Everyone can be a creative writer, not everyone can, or wants to, be a Professional writer; something as true in the new media space as it is in traditional media. 

The second part of the criteria “subject to specialist advice” speaks to the desire and ability of the framework to be flexible now and into the future. Anything more specific would chain the category to invariably narrow parameters and restrict the ability for writers to access and belong to the guild who are working in forms as yet un-quantified. More importantly this idea is essentially a kind of ‘jury of peers’ and as such borrows from the long-standing idea of peer-review that underpins science and academic research. In effect, to be accepted into the guild is to be judged by your peers to have produced work of a professional standard AND in a professional context.

There is the potential that this might be seen as ‘subjective’ but the alternative to avoid this perception is to instigate specific criteria in terms of what forms and formats are and are not acceptable as professional work. Such a stipulation is fraught with problems potentially much worse than any perceived subjectivity. Such would be invariably too conservative, restrictive and undoubtably need to be re-drafted on an almost annual basis. The challenge the Guild must take up is to ensure that any panel assembled to offer ‘specialist advice’ is suitably both qualified and diverse and whose decision making processes is both transparent and consistent. 

If anything is certain about the future of screen and performance media it is that the long-standing hierarchies will dissolve. The environment of only a select group of ‘forms’ and a particular structure to their dominance resulted in - amongst other things - business models based on scarcity, release-windows and territory sales. These structures are quickly dismantled when product copies are infinite, multi-platform releases happen in parallel simultaneity across media and the universal internet collapses any viable distinction of borders and territories. What’s interesting about this is that if we project forward it’s not too much of a stretch to see such simple and open frameworks as the AWG’s category for Interactive/Multimedia being applied across the board to all forms of screen and performance writing.

That said, there are two things that havn’t changed and are very likely to never change. The first is that writers - perhaps more than any other role in professional creative practice - are vulnerable to exploitation. Writers in any media are rarely visible. The second is that writers are only as good as the creative community they exist within and that they learn and grow from. Hence I would stress the crucial role of Writers Guilds around the world - when they are at their best they are both the pit-bull to fight your fights and the giant upon whose shoulders your work will stand; a source of continual development of craft, discipline and professional relationships. 

The catch however is that for a Writers Guild to have weight it must have members. And if a Writers’ Guild is going to have clout across new media forms, active professional writers in these forms must be well represented in the guild. Unfortunately many writers working in new media forms often feel that the concerns of the Guild do not extend past ‘film, theatre and TV’. I would hope that the existence of the interactive/Multimedia category of full membership in the Australian Writers Guild is sign that such perspectives are not true. And such a category is only a beginning as the AWG continues to explore an inclusive and holistic approach to creative writing practice into the future.

If we want to ensure that narrative experience and rich storytelling continues to be at the very centre of multi-platform and interactive media we need the practitioners with the expertise in these forms to step up and become part of the Guild. Moreover, if we want the profession and practice of new media writing to mature and grow we need to make it part of the larger screen and performance writing community. 

Visit the Australian Writers Guild website

What is a Broadcast? The challenge of Writers Guilds.

I wrote last week about my recent nomination in the Australian Writer’s Guild AWGIE awards. Once the excitement of the nomination calmed down i was prompted to think about the role such awards and organisations like the Australian Writers Guild (along with its brethren guilds around the world) play in the online digital age…?

Writers Guilds serve a number of important roles in the professional lives of writers. There’s the obvious legal and logistical functions concerning contracts, copyright and minimum standards for payment and agreements. Then overlaying this pragmatic function is a wider role of industry representation and shaping policy concerning the creative arts and industry directions. And we also cannot overlook the vital role the Guilds play in developing talent and continuing education and development of writers and the culture of performance writing. 

In doing this Writers Guilds have long had a very specific and formal framework for membership and recognition of both writers and their work. Membership and Recognition was framed by Broadcast and Theatrical Presentation. Generally speaking, a writer can only become a full member of a Writers Guild once they have had a defined amount of professional material Broadcast or Theatrically presented. Writers without such ‘credits’ or ‘air-time’ cannot be full members but can be Associate Members until such time as they meet the requirements. In the age of Radio stations, Cinemas and Theatre Companies this framework made sense and it worked. The natural gatekeepers of theatrical release and broadcast served as a filtration process to separate out professional work and create a specific benchmark. 

The principle is, that it’s simply not useful for a Guild to be open to anyone without benchmarks of what qualifies for membership. It weakens the Guild’s power to influence and represent professional work, to lobby governments and industry with weight or to negotiate on behalf of writers with major corporate entities such as movie studios. So the high benchmarks to entry are crucially important and I would not be one to argue such benchmarks should be ‘lowered’.

But…. This is the online digital age. An age where the hierarchy that positions the Theatrical Release and the Broadcast Transmission at the top of a pyramid is quickly evaporating. In an age of multi-platform, cross-platform and transmedia online experiences what role does the Writers Guild play? More importantly, in an age where gatekeepers are dissolved and increasingly writers work directly to their audience without intermediary - such as Webseries and WebTV, online, downloadable, app-based and streaming media to a plethora of devices - how does a Writer’s Guild make distinction between what qualifies and what does not for Full Membership?

For example, it is very possible for a writer to have penned a 15 episode webseries that attracted hundreds of thousands of regular viewers, and even be presented under an exclusive license on a dedicated WebTV channel that feeds directly into major VOD platforms such as Xbox live - channels which have a significantly greater audience reach than a broadcast time-slot - and yet this would not qualify them for Full Guild Membership. 

In simple terms, a writer may have countless credits for online writing and yet because their work did not pass through the gates of Theatrical Release or traditional Broadcast, they may not eligible to either be a member of the Guild or be represented by the Guild in professional matters.

It’s hard to argue that the Theatrical release holds the significance it once did. In a great many instances theatrical release is little more than loss-leader advertising for DVD sales and broadcast rights. And I do find the idea of even discussing Opening Weekend Box Office numbers like some all-important measure, largely absurd in a multi-platform, time-shifted, on-demand digital age. But the more slippery term is this idea of ‘Broadcast’. In literal terms Broadcast simply means the sending of a message from a central point to many recipients; from a broadcast tower to many TV sets. But such a definition ties ‘Broadcasting’ to a very particular  (and arguably old-fashioned) technology - that of broadcast radio waves sent through the air in a time-slot.

In the online era; broadcast has become a much more complex and technology-agnostic idea. A feature film available on BitTorrent (such as recent Australian horror film The Tunnel), a WebSeries available as an internet stream, a video series delivered as a downloadabale App or through a VOD online store, these are all essentially forms of ‘Broadcast’ delivery by literal definition - from one point to many points of reception. 

But does this mean that anything put online qualifies a Writer for Guild membership? Few would ague the merits of that proposition. Yet to rule online work out altogether is plainly absurd, as is only recognizing online work if it is connected to, or under the auspices of, a traditional broadcaster.

One suggestion has been to treat online, multiplatform and interactive writing separately - operating under their own guilds. But i would argue this is dysfunctional as it it doesn’t  help either arm of the screen media industries in a positive way. It doesn’t  help skilled storytellers bring their craft to bare on new media forms. It keeps new media forms in a state of narrative immaturity. And it keeps a wedge in place to keep opportunities for paid creative writing work away from writers from other media. It also ignores the fact that before to long all ‘TV’ as we know it will be ‘online’; i.e. delivered over IP rather than Radio Waves. 

Moreover I would argue one of the great problems with so called ‘New Media’ is that it has too long been treated as ‘the other’ by its own practitioners as much as by those looking over the fence from traditional screen media forms. This ‘otherness’ drives a creative culture focused on perpetuating what is ‘different’ rather than building upon what is ‘consistent’. The result is a whole lot of ‘baby out with he bath water’ thinking that delivers new media, multi platform, transmedia and interactive narratives that are, frankly, all too often gimmicky, disposable and uncompelling because they fail or refuse to build upon our long narrative traditions. 

I was at a Writers Guild conference a couple of years go and heard a speaker present on he topic of writing interactive and multi platform narratives. They asserted that a) “we have to rethink everything we know about telling stories” and b) “life is not linear so why should our stories be?”

Now, these two statements concerned me greatly on a number of levels. The first was that the conference was full largely of very experienced writers of tv and film who collectively possessed a wealth of experience and expertise. Thus by asserting that we should “rethink everything we know” struck me as an intolerably arrogant thing to assert; hideously dismissive of a centuries of storytelling knowledge as if a new technology could sweep it into obsolescence. Moreover, as I have written about before, such verbose statements have no precedent in history. Never has a new technology for storytelling replaced or made obsolete any other form. Despite TV and the internet we still have move cinemas, theatres and radio. 

Worse still, the statement that “life is not linear so why should our stories be?” is painfully absurd and seemingly born from a desire for grandiose statements rather than clear thinking. Life is, in fact, utterly linear. Birth to Death it is entirely 1 directional. But beyond the semantics of a bad choice of phrasing it’s also a statement that fails to recognise that so called non-linear storytelling is, in fact, extremely rare. Any story still relies on causality - that A has to happen before B and that B happened because of A. Any so called non-linear narrative still absolutely relies on this principle. There may be multiple parallel narratives or an audience may be able to choose one direction over another and lead to a different outcome, but the outcome is still the result of a casual chain of events and actions. There is nothing “non-linear” about a story regardless of whether it is a Movie or a Video Game. A still has to happen before B and event B happens because of choice or action A. 

The hyperbole of this kind of thinking of new media as the ‘other’, somehow fundamentally different from everything else, is so much of the problem. it speaks to the need for a unified and Inclusive approach of institutions such as Writers Guilds to ensure that our future screen narrative experiences are standing on the shoulders of giants rather than ignorantly re-inventing the wheel. When ABC are now commissioning iView WebTV exclusive content, ISP’s have become broadcasters, WebSeries projects are attracting Oscar Winning DoP’s, games are being designed by New York Times best-selling novelists and huge Hollywood stars like Seinfeld and Kiefer Sutherland are producing and performing in WebTV dramas and comedies, we undoubtably have a key role of Writers Guilds to play. The challenge is how to design a framework for membership that is inclusive of new media forms and define what counts in the online space as the equivalent of a ‘broadcast credit”.

Of Horror films and AWGIE awards

It seems I have been nominated for an AWGIE award for best unproduced screenplay for my Horror feature ASHES. For those unfamiliar, the AWGIEs are the annual awards doled out by the Australian Writers Guild and represent the highest awards in the land specifically for performance writing (theatre, film, TV and radio). So, it goes without saying that I’m pretty happy about this turn of events, and for a number of reasons. On one hand the AWGIEs are peer-judged, bestowed by an ‘academy’ comprised of previous AWGIE award winners. Since the AWGIEs have been running since 1967 thats a large body of experience. But, more than a boost to my ego and some kind of validation of my work, I’m particularly pleased with the nomination as the script is very much a personal project. 

The vast majority of writing and script development work i have done over the past decade and a half has been on ‘other peoples projects’. It’s not a unique scenario and is the staple of many writers. Moreover, there’s a significant part of me that probably thinks I’m a better adviser, editor and dramaturge than a writer in my own right. In any case, the nomination for a project that was purely a spec script i tinkered away on in the wee small hours without monetary, bill-paying, motivation, brings a certain kind of satisfaction. If nothing else the nomination allows me to legitimately bring this script higher up my priority list than it had previously been; to put its further development ahead of other work. In this light, it would seem that the AWGIE nomination has served its intended purpose of compelling the best spec scripts doing the rounds out into the light and give their writers good motivation to development them further.

The story idea itself was, quite literally, born from a dream. I awoke one morning shaking and sweating from a brutal nightmare. When I told my wife about it she blinked at me with half-awake eyes and said “that’d make a good horror movie…” Had she not planted that seed i might well have just lived with the nightmare residue of the dream rather than set about perpetuating it in script form. Over the next week we developed the story together and then over a couple of months in the hours after midnight, i knocked out the screenplay.

One particularly dark night I sat writing a distinctly scary scene and as i sat hunched over the keyboard with a dim lamp beside me there was a sudden flicker and flash and the light globe blew, my computer monitor flickered and flashed out and the window shutter rattled. In truth it was just a minor power spike but the effect of me virtually shitting myself and squealing suddenly like a little girl mid typed sentence, was none the less profound. After i had calmed down and retreated to bed for the night i remembered what i always say to my students in my Horror cinema classes at the Australian Film Tv and Radio School - if it doesn’t scare You it wont scare anyone else…. Perhaps i was onto something with this little tale.

The script itself is the story of 3 generations of women confronting a black-magic curse. The formal Logline reads:

A self-centred woman must confront a demon unleashed by her mothers war time transgression in the highlands of New Guinea to save the soul of her daughter. 

And the short synopsis which fleshes this out a bit further is:

Ashes is a horror feature film about parenthood and black magic.

In it, Samantha - a career-focused documentary filmmaker and single mother with a troubled childhood past - must discover the reason she is being haunted by the ghost of her estranged mother in order to protect her daughter or else loose her sanity and her life.

She confronts the truth of her Mother’s war-time experiences as a nurse in the New Guinea highlands and must struggle against the black magic her mother unleashed that has cursed her daughter to pay the price for the war time transgression.

And to make the pitch complete, the Tag-Line is…

‘Love is Sacrifice’

At a higher, conceptual, level the script (like my infamous Horror Cinema courses at AFTRS) is in many ways a response to the sad state of many Australian Horror films over the past few decades. There have been some successes - Wolf Creek drew a big crowd through deft direction, Snowtown was creepy and disturbing, The Tunnel was flawed but clever and Daybreakers was bloody awesome (albeit much more SciFi in concept and structure than Horror). But there have also been too many Australian Horror films in this period have been a triumph of banality and lowest-common-denominator splatter often left me scratching my head wondering “who the hell green-lit that..!??”.

As a lover (and, dare I say, aficionado) of Horror I am increasingly angered by the narrowing and dumbing-down of Horror to a niche sub-genre of torture-porn and monster-movies. Horror is a much broader church than these two extremes - a genre capable of significantly wider audience appeal than teenage boys. It is a sophisticated genre encompassing a complex array of audience experiences and desires, a genre that can engage profoundly with the depths of human psychology.

My concern with the too often appalling state of Australian Horror begins with an observation of the kinds of filmmakers who often make horror here; as I said in a recent interview on Screenhub - horror “is made too often by people who don’t really love the genre, who are more interested in subverting exploiting or hybridising it, and not enough in just honouring it…. There’s too many writers and directors who see horror films as a way to a credit, and they don’t really love the genre for what it is and what it can be.”

What this leads to is a fatal flaw in Horror concepts and the development phase of creating Horror films; the focus on a Scary Circumstance rather than a Scary Idea. I have written about this previously and to quote from myself…

“Circumstances are, by literal definition, the given events and parameters of a scenario; thus the Horrific Circumstances of a Horror film are those given events that are innately dangerous and scary. A monster from the deep attacking a city, a giant snake hunting human prey in the jungle, a ghost killing off the crew of a ship, a serial killer stalking a victim in the city. These are circumstances that have innately high stakes, a level of direct threat that induces Fear. Horrific Circumstances are where most horror film’s begin, originating with the ‘monster’ the force of evil at the heart of every horror narrative - be it ghost, demon, killer or creature.

The Horrific Idea of a Horror film however is something different altogether; a terror inducing concept that goes beyond the monster, a fearful notion that is delivered by the presence of the ‘monster’ but which transcends it and invokes something deeper - something more human. Take Jaws for example; the Horrific Circumstance is a huge man-eating shark terrorizing a seaside summer resort town. Certainly sharks hunting hapless swimmers is a scary proposition but the massive success of Jaws, both critically and commercially, is not owed to this two-dimensional scenario. The Horrific Idea at the heart of Jaws is not the Shark but the Greed, Ignorance and Arrogance of the town in placing the ‘summer dollars’ of tourism above the safety of people. This central Idea is the essence that elevates Jaws above just fear of sharks and into a greater metaphoric fear of greed, pride and arrogance.”

Coming up with a scary circumstance is easy and it’s vacuous. Without metaphor the story is hollow. In the end I, as an audience, know that I’m not going to be eaten by a giant shark, but I cant escape the horror of Greed and Corruption that puts me in danger. And it is this bigger fear, for which the monster is a metaphor and manifestation, that sits with me long after the film is over and from which i cannot escape.

As one critic rightly observed about a recent (2010) Australian Shark horror film; “When the only thing at stake is the size of the body count, suspense becomes the first casualty.” Without a scary Idea that is more frightening than the scary Circumstance, the stakes can only ever be momentary and banal - entirely connected to fantastical circumstances, rather than deeply effecting us in our real lives, long after we’ve left the cinema. 

William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is another perfect example of conceptual horror elevating the circumstantial horror to a more universal and more deeply effecting level. The circumstances of The Exorcist are scary enough - the demonic possession of an innocent girl - but there is a much more complex array of Horrific Ideas beating through the veins of the film. More than half the film sees a mother exploring every medical, scientific and rational explanation for her daughter’s “illness” until ultimately she is faced with acknowledging a power beyond her comprehension and beyond her control. The Horrific Idea at the heart of The Exorcist revolves around our modern faith in science, logic and rationality being stripped away leaving us unarmed in facing and dealing with that which we cannot understand and rationalise.

Horror stories by nature deal with extraordinary circumstances, but the more extraordinary they are the more they need to be grounded in a Ideas rather than Circumstances; frightening ideas that are Universal and Truthful outside of the circumstances. Horror scenarios that aren’t grounded in metaphor are dismissible, disposable, momentary fleeting shocks without substance. And moreover, such films most often either fail at the box office or disappear very quickly from memory. The horror films that succeed and last and resonate with us over time are those, which as Stephen King saids, “trouble the night thoughts of a whole society”. 

Too many recent Australian horror films have failed to recognise they are NOT ABOUT sharks, giant crocodiles, serial killers or natural disasters (one forthcoming Australian film has 3 out of these 4 in the one movie making its circumstances clearly beyond ludicrous) - ‘monsters’ are just metaphoric vehicles for exploring something much scarier, much more tangible, much more present in our real world. 

So, returning to my own project, ASHES… the Scary Circumstance is a black magic curse cast down from mother to daughter based on a dark contract, decades ago, with a witch doctor. But, the Scary Idea is of human propensity to visit the sins of the mother upon the child and that humans are all too willing to trade off the future for the present. In the end I know my audience are not ‘really’ afraid of witch-doctors and curses. But they are very much afraid of the lengths they might go to save themselves, sacrifice others or repeat the sins of their parents upon their own children. These are the fears that keep me awake and night and for which a black magic curse is a great metaphoric vehicle of exploration.

Ok, enough said. Soap box now tucked neatly away…

Pleased I am with the AWGIE nomination but I know where the flaws are in my script. The idea is strong, the first act is good and the ending is solid and dramatically inevitable. It’s the middle structures that are wonky. But thats a good place to be for the next steps which the AWGIE nomination may compel me to engage. So I look forward to some more time after midnight, hunched over a keyboard scaring the shit out of myself…

—

An audio recording of one my Horror Cinema lectures - entitled The Four Fears of Horror - is availible as a podcast on the PODCASTS page of this site.

Wastelander Panda - Finding the Human in the Animal

Note to self: don’t underestimate young filmmakers or the ability for Pandas to display humanity.

What began as a low-budget internet trailer produced by a collective of young and ambitious filmmakers from Adelaide (under the name Epic Films), has become something of a phenomenon, gathering a huge online audience not only eager to see more but also willing to put their money where there mouth is to see it happen.

Wastelander Panda is the story of a mutant giant panda, the last of his kind, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Paired with a yong girl and a mission to find his brother, the pair confront the horrors of the wasteland - the prejudice, violence and redemption of humanity. The title of the project (aside from being great textual alliteration) is a definitive example of what film scholar Howard Suber calls a Bisociation - the slamming together of two things that don’t belong to generate immediate cinematic and narrative possibilities. The result is, in every way, extra-ordinary - a storyworld of the foreign and the familiar colliding in a hero’s journey across a battered wasteland.

There’s a lot to love and admire in this project. Fresh ideas, ambition, deftly executed style and tone. But with big ideas come big challenges and even larger pitfalls. How do you avoid the audience laughing at a guy in a Panda suit? How do you make the viewer believe in the high stakes drama of a Mad Max Panda without descending into parody?  How do you remain consistent with tone in a storyworld full of contradictions? How do you deliver an episodic narrative that is sustainable and satisfying; something more than a one-trick pony? Can this show honour and satisfy the conventions of the speculative-fiction, post-apocalyptic genre rather than failing - as so many have done before - because it was too busy trying to subvert the genre?

When I first saw Wastelander Panda i certainly loved what it was trying to do. But i feared for its failure, feared it could never satisfy or deliver on its promise. Considering the creators (Writer/Director Victoria Cocks, Producers Kirsty Stark and Ella Macintyre and DoP Vivyan Madigan) are still in the early stages of their careers I feared they were perhaps naive as to what they had in their hands, that their abilities could not carry through on the promise of their ideas.

And then i met them… 

At a recent event hosted by the Adelaide Media Resource Centre on webseries development, the Wastelander Panda team spoke about their adventures making the project, their crowd-sourcing campaign, their audiences, their intentions, their Storyworld… They spoke with such clarity, specificity and energy that no one watching could help but be impressed. Speaking to them further it was clear that, depsite my concerns, they really do know what they hold in their hands - both its potential and its challenges. Young they may be but naive they are not.

Moreover i have rarely heard anyone speak about crowd-sourcing and social-media campaigning with the degree of insight that this team hold. Frankly, most ‘social media’ gurus spout little more than vacuous, ambiguous, un-specific generalities peppered with enough weasel words and jargon so as to dazzle the ignorant and unwary. But not the Wastelander Panda crew, they detailed their approach with specific, active processes and actions they took to identify, target and engage in a meaningful way with their audience. They wholly committed to their audience in a way that modern TV broadcasters will never understand. No vague assertions just grounded practice. If you are looking for real insight on how to build a functional and effective social media crowd funding campaign you would do well to engage the services of Epic Films as consultants.

So after meeting the ‘Pandas’ i thought it worth taking another good look at the Wastelander Panda Prologue Trailer. And what was clear upon this revisiting was that within the imagery and ideas was something that spoke to a much more sophisticated understand of why we watch, why we care and why genre films of this kind matter, how - at their best - they stand on the shoulders of giants (or Giant Pandas in this case).

The trailer is full of compelling imagery and engagingly lyrical narration. Yet these are not the things to make me ‘care’; to genuinely and emotionally connect with the story im absorbing. That’s a much bigger challenge and one made all the more difficult when the concept calls for me to ‘care’ about a guy in a panda suit.

In the trailer there’s a moment, a brief moment, that delivers on the promise of what Wastelander Panda can be. Trapped in circle of a leering mob, the Panda is threatened, backed into a corner with no where to run. He will have to fight but somehow we know he does not want to fight. A thug from the crowd charges at the Panda. The desire to avoid the fight gives way to the size, weight and power of the creature and a massive forearm smashes the man to the ground in a clash of drumbeats and screams.

This is NOT an Action moment as it would be in the hands of lesser filmmakers. Even from a trailer, this is a CHARACTER moment. And the difference is that which separates banality from brilliance, the insipid from the profound.

Any ideas of the passive fluffy wandering panda are dispelled when the power size and potential of violence coiled and concealed inside him is pushed to explode. The act of aggression is enveloped in conflict - not external physical conflict, but internal conflict as the Panda unwillingly unleashes his more base nature. It’s a moment when we Care, not because he’s in physical danger of being hurt but because we fear he may be pushed to loose his humanity. The great irony, not lost, of a mutant Panda being the embodiment of humanity in the face of humans who have lost theirs. 

It seems what we have in the creators of Wastelander Panda are creative minds who understand Metaphor and Allegory, Character and Catharsis - qualities all too often lacking in scifi, horror and fantasy narratives. It fills me with hope that Wastelander Panda is not a one-trick pony or a part of the milieu of glossy Vimeo showreels that are a celebration of glitz over guts. With an impressive crowd-funded war chest and the investment backing of the South Australian Film Commission, I cant wait to see the next step in Wastelander Panda - a 3-part webseries. Stay tuned…

Transmedia. It's not a brand. It's not a campaign. It's not fucking advertising!

I recently encountered uWall.TV; an interesting visual interface approach to accessing a music library. Its cool, simple, highly effective.

A collaborator I am currently involved with in developing a large multi-platform project sent me a link to it and posed the question of how we might use such an interface in the context of the multi-platform storyworld experience we’re currently developing. 

As I am prone to do I got a little carried away in my response. Too much time spent teaching screen production has embedded a nose for the ‘teachable moment’ into all my work. And my response was not just to confirm or deny my opinion on the relevance of the idea to our project but rather to examine the long-standing issue I have with the techno-centric cart-before-the-horse thinking that dominates soc much of the discourse around multi-platform and new media projects. 

My response went like this…

uWall.TV is an interesting way to access what is essentially a fancy song play-list. The ‘emotion’ mechanic is not unique or original but it is effective. Adding a voice-command from your microphone doesn’t change or make the experience better, just perhaps more efficient. 

There is an important distinction to make about such a device however, which is to ask; is it a an ‘Experience’ or is it a ‘Tool’? In the case of uWall.tv it’s really just a tool. A way to build a custom playlist of music different from other extant tools (manual, automatic, theme-based, etc). What it’s not is an ‘experience’. I would only come back to uWall if I found it useful in sorting my music and choosing what to listen to. I wouldn’t come back for the ‘experience’ of using uWall - there’s no motivation or reward in that. This distinction is crucial if we are to build an effective storyworld that is engaging, satisfying, embraces technology and yet is more than just a flash-in-the-pan curiosity or oddity. Substance over show.

The crucial thing  to remember about a multi-platform storyworld is that technology without narrative imperative is useless. The interface of something like uWall.tv is very valid and intriguing but unless it serves a Narrative function it isn’t helpful in a storyworld and works only as a stand-alone toy.

5 Questions to ask of any technology or platform idea we may have…

1. Is the audience dynamically motivated and compelled to engage? (motivations)
2. What dramatic or narrative questions are they mentally asking? (dramatic questions)
3. How does the platform answer and extend that question? (answers and revelations)
4. How is the audience rewarded for engaging? (reward)
5. What ‘Role’ does the audience play in the platform? (solve, fight, escape, capture, detect, etc) (role-play)

In this way I think it very important that we conceive and develop our project with an independent and agnostic approach to technology and platforms. There is undoubtably a technology for any kind of experience we want to create but our ideas for experiences will be forcibly curtailed if we try and put the cart-before-the-horse and go to the technology first or try and use the technology to inspire an experience. 

The articulation of the specific Experience we want to generate leads to the selection and filtration of the best platform and technology to deliver that experience. Moreover it does so in a way that puts audience motivation and narrative questions at the centre to ensure that the ‘experience’ is not arbitrary or disposable; a story ‘experience’, not just a tool, gimmick or token gesture. A motivated and rewarded experience for which the technology is in service.

Thats probably a long winded response to the idea of the uWall.TV interface but experience in this space has taught me that there are an awful lot of multi-platform projects that fail miserably to be anything other than a collection of disposable and eminently forgettable ‘toys’ when they go to the technology first rather than mining down on the Experience they want to create.

What this response of mine (to an otherwise simple question) also speaks to is the frustration I feel with the general discussion around ‘Transmedia’; the hijacking and diminutisation of the word that seems to happen at the same time as it is venerated as a great holy writ. In this, the real tragedy is that those who so often proclaim the ‘great transmedia revolution’ do so by citing an endless litany of examples and case studies which are all nothing more than ADVERTISING..!  Please dont try and tell me about the great Dark Knight or Prometheus Transmedia Campaign like its some sort of master narrative work… Stop deluding yourself. Dark Knight and Prometheus are FEATURE FILMS and all the shit around them is just ADVERTISING to sell tickets to the FEATURE FILM.

There are two words I am very tired of hearing used by so called Transmedia practitioners - ‘Campaign’ and ‘Brand’. Vile, detestable words. A ‘Campaign’ is what marketing companies do to Sell you Shit you don’t need or want. Your multi-platform creative project is not a fucking ‘Campaign’, your creation is not a fucking ‘Brand’…! What tedious weasel words they are. Your project is a Creation, an Experience, a Story, an Idea, its a Feeling State, its Something to Say and an Audience to Say it To and the moment you try and trade the complexity of Creation, Experience, Story, Idea, Feeling State, Premise and Audience in for a ‘Brand Campaign’ you FAIL to elevate transmedia out of the mire of banality its is so deeply trapped in.

As I have been recently reviewing and constructing feedback coverage on a large number of multi-platform, interactive and transmedia projects, I have encountered two further key mistakes creative developers in this space make with alarming regularity. The first is directly connected to my little rant above; that they mistake Promotion and Marketing for ‘Transmedia’. Creative media designed to draw attention to a promote the sale of another work of creative media is not ‘Transmedia’. Its just fucking Advertising and Promotion. Accept it for what it is and move on. The second mistake is to assume your audience are ‘fans’ before they actually, or indeed before you even have an audience. If your various multi-platform elements rely on the audience being ‘fans’ who want to “find out more about the…..” then you’ve got a very wrong-headed cart before the horse. I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve heard a Transmedia pitch that consisted of a single creative element (usually a feature film) surrounded by a whole lot of “stuff for fans”. The central problem with this is that such thinking entirely lacks any kind of engagement with the audience to motivate them to become Fans. It assumes the audience are already Motivated Fans, and that is a very dangerous assumption to make that will not help you solve the key narrative and audience experience questions you will need to answer in order to make your Audience into Fans. If you’re going to distribute your narrative across media platforms then give each platform a REASON TO BE and have it driven by clear audience motivations. If you do not have a clear audience motivation for a given platform then get rid of it. Its a boat anchor not helping you. 

I could go on, but I shall refrain before my rant becomes incoherent.  But my frustration with the transmedia discourse perhaps explains why the 5 Lies of Transmedia that Brian Clark wrote about not so long ago, spoke to me on a very deep level.

• Stories don’t move between media. We all knew that was a lie, a conceptual overstretch, and we all went along with it. The Harry Potter movies don’t change based upon whether or not you’ve read the books. “Story worlds” are nothing more than the boring work of continuity management. “Story Bibles” are just a pile of ideas you haven’t even executed yet. Sometimes people make things that really do require attention across multiple media to make sense of: those projects are shambling Frankenstein monsters, novelty acts or inaccessible conceptual art. That’s why there’s never been a big “transmedia hit”

• Not everything is media. We all knew that was a lie, the way an android would think rather than the passionate world of flesh and blood, and we all went along with it. Live theater is not media. Food trucks are not media. “All of life” is not media. Stories do not require media to exist and pretending that everything with a story in it is suddenly media is disingenuous at best.

• None of this transmedia stuff is new. We all knew that was a lie, that storytelling hadn’t changed at all, let alone “forever,” and we all went along with it. We babble about transmedia activism, as one example, as if it were new because we thought about it, rather than using the phrase media activism that has been around forever. We use the phrase “transmedia” as an excuse to believe we’re inventing stuff and thus don’t need to learn what came before.

• Transmedia is just multimedia after all. We all knew that arguing otherwise was a lie, a con job, but we all went along with it. This is revealed most plainly when people say that something can be entirely Internet based (one media delivery channel) and still be transmedia, but television (where you could do most of those same things) isn’t. We let ourselves get so excited about inventing the future because the comic book character has a Tumblr as a multimedia marketing campaign.

• If everything is transmedia, than nothing is transmedia. We all knew that was a lie, like a psychotic seeing the number 13 behind everything, but we all went along with it. If the fault of the phrase “alternate reality gaming” was that it was too narrow like “bluegrass” – break one rule, and it isn’t really an ARG — transmedia suffers from the other extreme like “noise” because there are no rules: anything is transmedia, everything is transmedia.

Television and remembering what TV really is.

TeleVision is a simple idea - A Vision from Afar. Just as a TeleScope allows us to See from a Afar; when images can be sent through the air to become a vision for someone at a distance we have TeleVision. 

Yet of course the notion of what we think of as Television is not so simple. From the technical infrastructure of Broadcast Towers and TV studios, through the makeup of TV in the form of Schedules and Episodes, to the tone and  culture of TV as a creative cultural institution - TV is a complex idea.

This is of course leaving aside the all together even more complex concepts leveled upon TV by the digital age - TV Series on DVD box-sets, Video on Demand, HULU and iTunes, streaming media, social TV, interactive TV, second screen, downloadable and time-shifted TV. Not to mention WebTV and the very contemporary idea of Webisodes and the Webseries.

As with much of my thinking around new media expressed on this site, I tend to baulk at overt expressions of ‘newness’. In essence I don’t believe it helpful or useful to extol and perpetuate ‘difference’ as it is to connect with ‘similarity’ and extend upon it. I’ve given a number of public presentations of late that have dealt with this perspective - the Sydney Film Festival panel on Interactive Narrative, the London Literary Conference on immersive experiences and the forthcoming London Futurebook Innovation workshop. 

When we get obsessed with the ‘newness’ and focus on difference, we loose sight of the point. When it comes to online, interactive, multi-platform, social, transmedia, streaming, WebTV… Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater: Everything a good writer knows still counts. Character, drama, tension, action, catharsis, conflict, genre. They as much a part of new forms of narrative as they are of books, plays, TV and movies. Despite the oft-cited rhetoric of new-media ‘gurus’ there is no precedent in human history for a new technology or platform ever changing what a story is. No technological change has ever been so humungous as the introduction of Radio to an otherwise theatrical and oral narrative culture. Yet radio did not change any ideas of character, drama, tension, action, catharsis, conflict or genre which are the substance of all narrative irrespective of medium. Nor is there any precedent for a new narrative medium replacing or supplanting a previous medium. Despite the glories of of online and interactive technologies we still have radio, theatre, cinema and TV. Each platform adds to the others rather than remove them. Writers in the new media space should concentrate more on technology agnostic core principles of what motivates a viewer to watch, play or interact - what makes them give a shit about the story - and less on shinny newness or platform specificity

And this is what leads me to thinking about WebTV. In the rush of excitement over SocialTV, Interactive TV and Transmedia TV its worth remembering the ‘TV’ bit and in doing so remind ourselves to engage with the core essence of what makes ‘television’ so damn compelling. Ultimately Television - meaning a Vision broadcast from Afar - has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with episodic storytelling. Things such as TV schedules and time-slot viewing will disappear, broadcast towers will be replaced by streaming data as the infrastructure of transmission, but Episodic Narrative will remain. 

It’s on this topic that i’ll be speaking at the mercury theatre in Adelaide as part of the Media Resource Centre WebTV Seminar on the 7th of July. The 1-day program brings together some very interesting experts and practitioners in the space and serves as the foundation for a develop fund for Adelaide WebTV makers to apply for to bring their ideas to fruition. 

The program is a partnership between the MRC and YouTube and aims kickstart emerging WebTV producers, writers and directors with cash investment and in-kind production sponsorship in equipment and resources. From the WebTV program website:

Featured speakers at the Let’s Make Web TV seminar include Mike Jones, AFTRS Senior Lecturer, on serial narrative and the secrets of how to construct a successful webseries; Simon Britton, MediaWave Editor and Content Strategist, discussing online branding, content awareness and crowd-funding; and Wynston Alberts from Google/YouTube, offering advice on the hows and whys of marketing webseries for profit and partnerships with YouTube. 

The seminar also features Q&A case studies from successful South Australian YouTube content creators Dario Russo (Italian Spiderman), Jeff Wong and Vihn Giang (Encyclopedia of Magic), Kirsty Stark and Victoria Cocks (Wastelander Panda) and Alex Williamson (‘Shooter’ Williamson Comedy).

Cinematic Normalisation: the Shape of Things to Come @ Sydney Film fest

The Sydney Film Festival is one of the great long-standing and diverse film festivals of the world. Moreover it is a public event that comes out of a long history of such Celebrations of Cinema. But this word ‘Cinema’ is a very slippery thing and does beg the question in the 21st century of What exactly is Cinema and What defines a Cinematic Experience? 

Is it a place, a building - the cinema theatre - embodying the public gathering to worship the big screen? Is it a particular technology, a specific mechanic for viewing moving images? Is it a type of experience - that something is ‘cinematic’? Indeed is it some sort of artistic ‘brand’ a way to define a particular moving image art work as ‘high art’ (a weapon leveled for many years by ‘Cinema’ against Television). I’ve explored these ideas before in a post entitled ‘A functional definition of cinema’ where I have argued that such definitions are based on cultural constructs and specific technologies which largely have no scope to evolve. If Cinema means ‘sitting in a cinema theatre watching large screen projection’ then what of all the other forms of Moving Image Narrative Media that are still by literal definition Kinema? (Kine from the Greek meaning Movement). And moreover, what of this idea of the ‘cinematic’ - a term connected to ideas of scale, grandeur, big stories, big ideas, high quality visuals - by these measures how can Game of Thrones, Bioshock or Asylum 626 be considered anything but wholly ‘cinematic’; yet they are a TV series, video game and interactive online adventure respectively. Nothing to do with Projection, on a Big Screen, in a dark Public Theatre.

‘Cinema’ as connected to either place or technology, is perhaps a word that needs re-evaluation if it is to effectively describe the experiences audience’s seek from modern moving images on modern screens (be they large, small, multi or interactive). And so, into this years Sydney Film Festival we get a broad injection of new ‘cinema’ creations with a focus on Interactive Storytelling and Immersive experiences offered by multi-platform and online productions.

As I blogged previously, I hosted a panel at this years Sydney Film Festival where some of Australia’s leading creators, producers and thinkers around interactive narrative shared their ideas and perspectives on the brave new world. Such works were not made to be shown in a ‘cinema’, nor were built for a technology we otherwise associate with the ‘cinema theatre’, and yet in ideas, engagement and visual deftness they were arguably rather ‘cinematic’.

The event was kicked off by Ruth Harley CEO of Australia’s peak screen development and investment agency, Screen Australia. Dr Harley outlined the diversity of new media, multi-platform and interactive projects that Screen Aus is investing in as part of its Digital Ignition and All Media Fund programs. The range is certainly rich and bodes well from a continued strong and sustainable presence of Australian practitioners in this new media space.

Following Ruth Harley I presented on the work I’ve been doing with Portal Entertainment in building immersive horror-thriller interactive experiences for mobile devices. Drawing upon the highly successful Immersive Writing Lab programme and its associated International Storyworld Writing Competition, I framed the discussion around interactive storytelling with a set of key principles we’ve developed as our in-house mantra on our forth-comming projects Nightwatch and The Craftsman (below).

Following my tub-thumping efforts was Managing Editor of SBS Online, Nick Doherty. Nick has been responsible for a swathe of highly successful, and even more highly regarded, online and interactive works from SBS - including the multi award-winning GoaHippyTribe. In some cases parallel and supporting projects to broadcast productions, in other instances, wholly stand-alone digital works. Nick presented a public premiere of their online interactive documentary The Block which is both lovingly presented in its visuals and emotionally compelling in its characters. 

Staying with Documentary, Anna Grieve discussed her award winning Big Stories Small Towns which not only presents an interactive documentary in the electronic sense but also a project that sees deep interaction with the communities that are the basis for the stories. Filmmakers in residence, community digital story-telling workshops and public events all form part of a broad multi-platform and interactive ecosystem.

Researcher, critic and filmmaker Julia Scott-Stevenson, fresh from this years SXSW, gave a report on where we’re headed, what’s interesting from overseas and made some sharp observations about the challenges of producing sustainable and engaging multi-platform works.  

Mike Cowap, Investment Manager with Screen Australia, who holds particular responsibility for developing talent and projects in games, online and multi-platform, gave us the low-down on where the Australian industry is at and leveled 5 key points to keep in mind:

• We fund it
• Australia’s good at it
• You need to consume it to understand it
• Use existing platforms
• Take crowd-funding seriously

Rounding out the session was Justin Wight from digital production studio Monkey Stack and their animation-based project, Double Happy vs the Infinite Sadness. 

Double Happy Rabbits

Aside from being a brilliantly realised project at a visual and conceptual level, Justin’s multi-platform and interactive project Double Happy makes for a highly compelling case study of how to clearly identify your audience and build dynamic community relationships that bring vast amounts of eyeballs to your story.

The presence of such creative practitioners and their inclusion in the Sydney Film Festival program speaks to the most important element for new media forms in 2012… Normalisation. No longer the ‘other’, the ‘fringe’ or the beaten red-headed step-child no body talks to, digital interactive and multi-platform is simply moving to the centre and being normalised as common, mainstream audience-focused experiences. Screen-based creations that have every reason and means to be cinematically engaging and enormously satisfying.

Crowd-sourcing Fragments of Friday

I confess to being a bit skeptical about Crowd-Sourcing. Sure, there’s hundreds, nay thousands, of projects that got off the ground and are up and running from kickstarter. And there’s a wonderful warm glow that flutters over me at the idea of democratic investment of the people in creative endeavors that speak to them. I love too, the audience-centric focus of creative projects (and creators themselves) when engaging with crowd-sourcing campaigns. Screen arts in particular - indie features and short films - have too long been motivated by internally navel gazing and insular thinking, rather than open engagement with audience and having something that needs to be said. All this is good, But I wonder how sustainable it is? I fear for its fragility. I’m dubious that it is ‘the answer’, a replacement economic model for previous capitalist ideals. 

Yet as a ponder whether crowd-sourcing is a flash-in-the-pan or a long term answer, I cant help but impressed with the quality of the projects that come through my computer screen and enticement me to contribute. Latest case in point is a web-series project by a former student of mine, director Kacie Anning entitled FRAGMENTS OF FRIDAY.

More than just being a good concept, with deft execution and solid laughs; Fragments of Friday speaks to a recognition of what online delivery allows that a path through the gate-keepers of conservative television broadcasting would not. Without such gatekeepers and content monitors, shows can be edger, sharper, sexier, they can be the kind of shows that likely wouldn’t get picked up by a TVs yet still speak to a broad audience. 

Fragments of Friday is a brand new web series in development from Australian writer / director Kacie Anning.

Slated for 7 webisodes, Fragments of Friday follows the friendship of two 20-something housemates Alex (Kacie Anning) and Sophie (Sarah Armanious) as they write themselves off each Friday night, and are forced to spend their Saturdays piecing back together the night before.

As a result of their Friday-night-antics, Alex and Sophie’s friendship takes a left-turn and suddenly they find themselves fighting to re-piece together the fragments of their friendship. Told with humour and poignancy, the story of Fragments of Friday speaks to the great tradition of female friendship through the scope of hazy memories, drunken honesty and above all, affection.

Its a rocking good show idea with a very talented and ambitious team at the helm. I look forward to seeing the show in full and encourage you to stop by their Pozible campaign page.

Aerial View: putting the Kine back into Kinema

When discussing great motion picture cinematography its very easy to think first of moody and emotive lighting, balanced and deliberate composition of the frame, arrangement of figures in deep space or complex shifts in rack-focus between subjects. Yet, too often I find our contemporary appreciation of, and discourse around, the moving image seams to neglect the core element that is the very origin of the word cinematography itself. The word Cinema derives from Kine, meaning motion. And as I have written previously about the GoPro camera “All the the DSLR’s F3’s and RED’s in the world will, of themselves, prompt your creative imagination no further than how sharply you can rack-focus and how pixel-dense your image can be. But pick up a GoPro and you immediately stop thinking about framing and focus, and instead start imagining images and sequences in terms of Space, Motion and Perspective. Hence I feel compelled to suggest that the most ‘cinematic’ camera released in the past few years is NOT an F3, or a 5D, its not a RED Epic or an Alexa, It’s the GoPro.”

I have recently been conducting research and background reading on the history of the middle east and the city of Jerusalem as part of large scale project I’m co-writing, and in doing so I came across this video - part of a forthcoming IMAX film on the Eternal City. 

Now of course, it wasn’t shot on a GoPro, but the same visceral feeling states are conjured up by hyper-real kinetic delight of motion on screen, of a camera moving through space in a way that defies our gravity bound, human body proprioception. This kinda of engagement with camera movement through space speaks to the uniquness of cinema, to the kinds of experience it can offer that noother medium can. Lots of mediums can tell a story, lst of mediums can delivery compelling imagery and ideas, but no other medium can transport you bodilly through space in a visceral experience.

Sometime ago I engaged in trying to develop a conceptual way to think through the effect and motivation of different camera movements and, in particular, to unite the technological apparatus of camera movement with the embodied aesthetic of that technology when deployed as a technique. Camera in Motion has been published in various print forms and is available here on my site as well. Perhaps useful for those looking to make their choices around camera movement motivated by more than just what ‘looks cool’.

Immersive, Interactive and Digital - The Literary Conference

The great lie of contemporary trans, multi, cross and interactive media is that it supplants, diminishes or replaces established media forms. This falsehood has given rise to entirely ridiculous (yet all to commonly used) terms such as ‘legacy media’ and ‘heritage media’ to describe those forms that pre-date the digital newness. The truth is that history defies any argument of supplanting, diminishing or replacing older media forms with newer ones.  

No media technology has ever been so radical in its impact as the arrival of Radio to a world that knew only the written word and the theatrical stage. And yet despite the rapid growth and proliferation of radio neither the written word, nor the theatre were ever supplanted or replaced. Along came the cinema and the moving image, and though the world went nuts for cinematic stories on the silver screen the radio did not disappear nor cease to be relevant and people continued to read books and went to the theatre. And so then Television, computer games, the internet, and still their predecessors remained in tact. Altered, shifted, modified possibly, responsive to their new position in the stew, but none the less vibrant and relevant.

What this tells us is very simple, very important and very powerful - new media do NOT replace old media. Rather the palette of media possibilities continues to grow and expand with each new form adding the spectrum of possibilities. In this light ‘Transmedia’ is simply the study of how a narrative can exist across and exploit this smorgasbord of platforms rather than only within just one form. 

See, its really not that complex. And from this simple observation we can recognise a few other home-truths that seem to go astray when the new-media guru-speak takes over the conversation. Most notably that character, drama, tension, action, catharsis, conflict and genre - all those things that have long been the guts of narrative writing, publishing, theatre and film - still count. Such things can be and are as much a crucial part of transmedia and interactive entertainment as they are for books, plays and movies. 

I raise this topic in light of the London Literary Conference: Writing in a digital age where I’ll be speaking this coming Friday (8th June) as part of a panel entitled ‘Not just a pretty page: How multimedia brings book to life.’ Now, I confess I have some concerns over the title of the session; firstly that the term ‘multimedia’ is so 1999 and more importantly that it implies books are somehow lacking life or need to be ‘brought to life’. Quibbles over titles aside, I am indeed very excited to be part of this panel that aims to examine some perspectives and principles of how writers, whose traditional domain may have been novels, plays and short stories, can bring their skills and knowledge to the brave new world of transmedia, immersive and interactive digital fiction.

In particular I’ll be speaking about my work with Portal Entertainment, developing interactive experiences and the Immersive Writing Lab project with its international Storyworld writing competition.

It promises to be a great event bringing together writers, publishers, editors and new media practitioners. The stated aim of the conferences is to:

“make sense of all the possibilities facing writers today. Making and selling ebooks. Self-publishing v traditional? Emerging international markets. How technology changes literary forms. Social media, and other promotional tools”

You can see the full program and range of speakers at the conference here