, it’s terrifying to think that we may have closed the gap on the evolution of the myth. Social media and reality TV have brought everyday lives of people front and center on the world stage. Minor tragedies and small miracles have unfolded before our blue-streaked faces and glossed-over eyes. Western civilization now witnesses its own history rewrite itself, in 142 characters or less.

But, could there be a bright side to all of this democratized chatter? Perhaps, if we are creating a new path to mythology altogether, together. The ease of pushing out the contents of your thoughts by virtue of smart phones and computers, usually within arm’s reach, is still ephemeral phenomena that big data analysts are clamoring to understand.  The viral, rapid-fire sharing that happens is still a modern msytery that all of us are still trying to wrap our collective heads around.

So, if this is the new architecture for present and foreseeable future of mythology, what does that mythology look like? Is it going to be an endless stream of “Real House Wives of the Future”, or some sort of open-sourced reality show we co-create together? (Actually, that would be an awesome experiment now that I say that out loud.)

In much of the world, we all our hands full with an entire tool shed of capabilities to create our own interpretation of the world, but, often we choose the ease and mediocrity of ‘share buttons’ over thoughtfully crafting a narrative with devoted attention. Painstakingly methodical photos that would take a week or more to develop can now be pushed out to the world with just a few flicks of the thumb. To a certain degree, the learning capabilities of autocorrect finish your thoughts for you. Our presence of mind takes a back seat to the immediate gratification of “likes,” possibly at some expense that we have yet to know. And truthfully, these new tools can be both exciting and terrifying.

So, how do we change that? How do we engage and empower our audiences and start telling different stories and doing so, together?

In our April 29 event, Transmedia SF  will attempt to answer some of these questions.

In order to start exploring the topic, I created the “Transmedia Mythology Map” – as seen above.  In the tradition of continuing the work of those who came before, I borrowed from the wonderful Gary Hayes:

“This is a new world of Transmedia and of User Generated Content (UGC) where one cannot predict where the next Gangham style

meme will come from and ideas spread like wildfire and circle the globe.”

We are in the present shock time – everything happening now, is happening RIGHT NOW.

I’d like to leave you with this questions to think about for our next meeting: 

How do we take a big step back and take in the 30,000 foot view of the world we are creating to examine exactly where we are going?

I believe we start by asking ourselves – where do we want to go?

What storyworld do we want to create and how do we create it together?

Edited by Alex Sten

Our April event, Transmedia Transformations on April 29th, promises to be exciting, exploratory and intriguing.  We’ll look at memes, myths and the molecules of story making, story telling and audience participation.  We’ll embrace ARG (alternate reality games) and UGC (User generated content) and explore how these have been integrated into the total and encompassing realm of building a transmedia storyworld.  Our speakers, including guest blogger, John Maccabee, come from different worlds and have referred to what they build by other names, but what’s in a name?  We believe that even the “transmedia” moniker will disappear as the multi-screen trend becomes the norm.  Once we all begin to build for this eventuality we’ll surely come to call it simply media, just as surely as the horseless carriage became the car.

John Maccabee is the founder of CityMystery, a game design company that provides strategy, narrative and implementation for  games known  by several names; ARGs, transmedia and mission-‐based games. He will be presenting his work On April 10th  at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab be our guest speaker on April 29th – http://tmmyths.eventbrite.com/

Six years ago the games I designed were called ARGs, then the name morphed to transmedia, which seemed more palatable to media folks than Alternate Reality Games. But now, what I design exists somewhere in and among ARGs, transmedia and mission-based games. These are game narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, and live components, which make the games inherently theatrical. This mix of real time and virtual changes storytelling and stories can exist anywhere, at any time. This blog post could have a clue embedded in it that drives a larger game. Does it? Or is the blog post just a blog post? I don’t know. This could be a rabbit hole. The line between what is real and what is imagined is what draws people into the story, and the story unfolds like a Google search, something that is stitched together. The audience can still be called the audience but participants is the better word. And that is how mission-based games enter the conversation.

What social media hath wrought is that there are now more and more of us willing to share more and more of ourselves  – some of it good, some awful – that’s not the point.  The point is we now have audiences willing to do things. And by doing something I’m not talking about anything major unless you have the talent, time or ambition to provide it. It could be as simple as uploading a photo, or as complex as making a piece of jewelry. In the two games we designed for the Smithsonian [ghostsofachance.com, app.pheon.org] the players made simple and complex things to influence, unlock or advance the game. What we have found is that what constitutes interaction is entering the narrative through your own willingness to create along with it.

Interestingly enough, with all this new media landscape, the business model is as old as radio and TV. Sponsorship. But instead of the story being sponsored, mission-based games suggest that the missions themselves, what participants actually do for the game, is sponsorable. By sponsoring missions, a brand tells its own story while providing the point of engagement for the player. Sample mission: Get yourself invited to someone’s house for dinner, then sing for your supper, having your host videotape your performance as proof of completion. Who are likely sponsors? How about something you would bring your hosts to thank them? A bottle of wine? A six-pack of beer? A box of candy? The brand, the game, the narrative, the participant – all elements meet in the mission.

In February, at a digital conference in Germany, I unveiled a way to package missions for corporate training and education. Missions ask participants to go into the real world to create proofs that underpin their knowledge of a subject. For training purposes missions can be designed around skill sets like leadership, sales. Edu games feature missions that free students from screens and keyboards. They’re designed around curricula. They’re inherently cross-disciplinary and can be multi-institutional.

Hello Transmedia SF community, we’d like to announce a must-see, virtual four-panel discussion happening on Friday 12th. Our friends at Transmedia Hollywood are hosting four part panel featuring quite an impressive  list of notable leaders who are using Transmedia to enact global change, TH4, Spreading Change. We are extending their invitation to attend their panel from your laptop .

Please follow this link to view the conference online on April 13.

The all-day panel starts at 9am PDT. It  would be a huge undertaking  to cover to go into all of the reasons that you may want to just clear your entire Friday to engage with the incredible people who comprise Friday’s panel, but you should probably clear your entire Friday to watch these discussions.

As many of you know from attending our events, we often discuss social change as a pivotal focus for transformative narratives. THR, Spreading Change will feature discussions from important leaders who are using Transmedia to deliver narratives that are enacting change in places humanity may need it most. Transmedia is about delivering a global momentum to voices that may have been previously underserved. Here is a brief overview on just some of the panelists we would like to highlight:

Henry Jenkins

Moderator –   Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School for Communication

Emerging from a lifetime of education and works exploring modern culture and storytelling, Jenkins is currently involved in Project New Media Literacy where he discusses the importance of assessing the technology around us, and incorporating the idea of living in a participatory culture.

Denise Mann

Moderator – Associate Professor, Head of Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Mann focuses on contemporary entertainment industry practices as well as critical studies seminars on film and television history and theory.  She is routinely invited to deliver talks at scholarly conferences and delivers industry talks at international film festivals and conferences such as the Tokyo International Film Festival and Shanghai International Film Festival and at major universities in Asia and Europe: Beijing Broadcasting Institute, Shanghai University, Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne and Institut National de L’Audiovisuel.

Jonathan Mcintosh

Pop Culture Hacker and Transformative Storyteller.

Todd Cunningham 

First researcher to be named Marketer of the Year by Brandweek Magazine, Todd Cunningham brings more than 25 years of experience leading successful translations of consumer insights into positive business outcomes for Fortune 500 businesses and non-profit organizations.

Yael Cohen

Founder, president, and CEO of F–k Cancer, a cancer education organization aiming to activate Gen-Yto engage with their parents about early detection, preventative lifestyles and communication around cancer.

We encourage you to survey all of this year’s TH4 panelists if you can. There are too many incredible leaders in Transmedia to adequately cover.

Here’s Friday’s schedule of the live stream.

If you’d like to attend this even live in Los Angeles, tickets are still available here.

Our Transmedia SF group first started working with swissnex San Francisco when our own Alice Gillet got in touch there to host an event that she moderated called, “From Coding to Stories:  The Medium to the Message” in September of 2012.  http://codingtostory.eventbrite.com/  We’ve been pleased to partner with these wonderful people and host multiple events at their lovely Montgomery Street headquarters ever since.  Transmedia SF and swissnex SF share a focus on innovation and bringing world class education and informational programs to our communities.

Our partnership with swissnex SF enriches our capacity to bring our communities of media, technology and storytelling together in one hub.   With the highest ratio of R&D expenditure to gross domestic product, Switzerland is a global leader in innovation and technology[1]. The driving forces of Switzerland’s Universities, the incubators of R&D, are the same principles of autonomy and openness that guide the SF Transmedia community. As an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland, swissnex San Francisco stands as a locally accessible hub of innovation, technology, and storytelling. Lucky for San Francisco. Lucky for us!

And, we’re just getting started:  This is a story that begins with you, our growing community. We are grateful for the opportunity to continue building our community  as we develop the future of storytelling together.

Please join us on Thursday, March 28^th for our third event with Swissnex in their beautiful space in Jackson Square to discuss The Future of Games and Entertainment. Game developers know that they are an important component in Transmedia storytelling.  Well-produced games can serve as way to connect with audiences on a deeply enriching level, as they become the focus of the narrative. As the Game Developers Conference (GDC) lands in SF at the tail end of March, we invite game developers and enthusiasts to join our upcoming discussion.

We’ll explore the future of games and entertainment both with our student game exhibitions and our special keynote/fireside chat with film, television and games industry expert, Chuck Eyler.  There won’t really be a fire, but the sold out event will be hot with the usual refreshments with a special guest sponsor Moreno BHLV http://www.morenobhlv.com/ pouring champagne for the celebration.  And of course there will be interesting discussion and a serious examination of what the future of entertainment will bring.  And as futurists and media technologies all know well – the best way to predict the future is to invent it!

Just last week I completed two different workshops providing an overview and introduction to transmedia. One was for a group of Swiss professors and content creators (available here: https://swissnexsf.webex.com/swissnexsf/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=6470137&rKey=6db34a045466e6fc) and the other a group of US university film school students. Not long before this, in preparation for our Start-Up Weekend Transmedia, we offered a Transmedia Producers workshop, taught by Susan Bell, and this class sold out in no time and received high praise from attendees. Add to this the fact that I (along with my co-founder of Transmedia SF, Maya Zuckerman) did a panel in January for the International Association of Business Communicators, and prior panels for documentary films festivals, the Bay Area Women in Film and Media coalition etc, and one can see a pattern emerging: More and more people are interested in what is transmedia and are interested enough to spend their time and energy at panels and in workshops.

Since the demand is so high for this type of training, we at Transmedia SF have decided to respond and give the people what they want: We’ll now be offering transmedia workshops in addition to our regular meetups. These workshops are a more intensive, small group experience than our normal meetups which can boast 150+ people. Our intention with these classes is to provide a place where our community can come and learn from working transmedia experts and professionals – like Susan Bell – and get insights into trends and exposure to case studies, as well as practical hands on experience with transmedia tools, techniques and platforms.

For our first offering in the series, we’ll be bringing back an expanded version of Susan’s original workshop, entitled, “How to Create a Transmedia Project.” You can sign up for this class here: http://transmediasfproject.eventbrite.com/

But we’d also like to hear from our community: What type of training and workshops are YOU interested? Hands on tools classes? Vertical industry specific classes? Let us know. We’re constantly on the lookout for ways we can improve ourselves and our community and we’re open to not only teaching – but learning too.

Last month’s event, Winning the Story Wars with the wonderful Jonah Sachs , we focused on the importance of storytelling and how it translates in marketing, specifically on how effective storytelling can shift the current marketing paradigm from Inadequate Marketing tactics to Empowerment Marketing.

We continue the storytelling thread in February’s talk, Pitch Perfect: Pathways to Funding, which discusses how founders can craft an authentic story that resonates with funders resulting in tangible pathways to funding their business ideas, specifically in the realm of Transmedia.

The shift from traditional media to Transmedia indicates that a new era of storytelling is emerging. Situated the intersection of technology, creativity, and those who want to fund them, developers, creatives, and filmmakers are etching out a unique frontier in merging their collective brain power to tap new audiences like never before.

Behind every effective pitch is a person strategist who knows how to ask the right questions. Today’s fast-moving industries require adaptability. Thus the answers may change from time to time, but revisiting these important questions is a key differentiator between a visionary armed with a solid business plan, and a well, just another idea that never wins a serious audience.

Pitch Perfect was designed to an interactive conversation between the visionaries behind I Smash SF, a city-centric board game and winners of  the audience and office award of the first ever Startup Weekend Transmedia.  Other contestants were CityX Project ,  Hear it Local,  The Campaign, and m.soundscreations.
At the core of the conversation were the important questions asked by our panelists to the founders. If you weren’t able to make this month’s talk, we’ve compiled a list of important questions that every entrepreneur needs to be able to answer before embarking on your pathway to funding.

What IS my product? Marketing? Tangible? Technology?
What are the emotional reactions I want when I talk about my product to funders?
How does my product scale?
How can I bring value to the person I’m pitching to?
What is my ROI model and what is my methodology for prediction?
Who is my target audience and how do I reach them?
Does a community already exist for the product I’m building for, or would my product ideally foster one?

Tiffany Hopkins, CMO of Groofi, reminds us that venture capitalists are people too: “Don’t’ overwhelm (funders) with your 5-year plan and shackle them to a relationship on your first meeting. Instead, treat your meeting like first date. You don’t start by talking marriage and kids on your first date. Be interesting. Be engaging. Show what you’ve got first, then you can go into the nitty gritty details later.”

Like a courting process, your goal should be not a packaged sound bite, but an authentic conversation backed by a solid trajectory of projects that show that you are passionate and focused. Saad Khan drilled this point when he said, “I don’t even look at the pitches. I look at the bios. You gotta make yourself look badass.”

Another important point that Saad mentioned was alternative options to secure funding. As crowd-funding platforms like KickStarter and IndieGoGo have gained tremendous momentum in the last 2 years, would-be founders have access to more pathways for funding as well as a larger reach to gain worldwide traction on a scale never imagined before.
Ephraim “Eph” Lindenbaum agreed with Saad when he said that there are so many alternative ways of raising funds for projects and companies these days than the VC route and people should be open to explore those ways.
One of the final notes that the panelists left us with was this:
“Hopefully you all get a little bit of time each week to just MESS AROUND. Because that’s how you learn.”

Written by Alexandra Sten || @xandria

Storytelling is as old as language itself, and was the first technology developed by humans specifically to store and share information. From moral abstracts to detailed religious ritual, stories were the only way for a culture to preserve information. The passing of millennia has seen the improvement of the medium; from the early oral tradition of story sprung the new media of song, visual art, epic poetry and theatre. All of these offered unique methods for storing information in the memory of storytellers and the cultures they lived in, much like transmedia seeks to continue today. Why? Because we are arguably hard-wired to seek information through story. In order to make critical decisions in the world around us, we not only want to know what something is, but also where it came from and how it became that way. Like the people who told and listened to those oral traditions so many generations ago, we best learn and remember values through effective storytelling. Something without a story is barely something at all. A brand without a story is forgotten.

So how do we make a brand into a story that becomes part of our memory—and even better, our culture?

Jonah Sachs, CEO and co-founder of Free Range, has written extensively on the topic in his recently published book Winning The Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (And Live) The Best Stories Will Rule The Future. In it he discusses things such as the “Myth Gap”, which is the lag between myth (culturally agreed upon stories which convey truth) and cultural and technical advancements. Jonah has asserted that marketers have stepped in where once priests and heroes gave us our myths. Want an example? The simple word “organic” is now a culturally agreed upon story as to the healthy and morally correct origin of an apple. This could only occur in an age when the myth of the Wholesome American Farmer has developed a gap from industrialized farming.  “Organic” has become mythic. “Organic” is what filling the Myth Gap looks like.

What can we learn about people’s compulsion to pass a great story along that can be applied to a brand’s story? What can we learn about why some stories come to life in people’s minds and some don’t?

The best stories make us want to be a part of them, to participate in the ongoing development of the story, to somehow feel we can contribute. Think again of “Organic”. When people buy Organic produce and meat, they have come to feel that their purchasing choices contribute to bettering the world, not just bettering their own lives. This is the opposite of traditional marketing which manipulated consumers into a desire to “get ahead” of everyone else.  This desire to participate in a brand’s success and relate it to the betterment of society is one of the roots of what has become known as Empowerment Marketing.

Join us at our January 28 meetup, “Winning the Story Wars – an Evening with Author Jonah Sachs”, to learn more about this and other valuable traits of Empowerment Marketing, such as exposing the lies of inadequacy and appealing to the hero.

As a writer myself, I’m curious to know what other specific tools of storytelling Jonah is able to illuminate within successful marketing campaigns. What are the nuts and bolts of successful brand story? As a survivor of the irony and cynicism drenched 90s, I’m especially interested in how skillful Empowerment Marketing appeals to our better natures and whether it’s part of significant cultural shift. In any case, this should be a thought provoking and informative exchange, along with good food, booze and conversation of the like-minded.

Register for the event at http://winningthestorywars.eventbrite.com/.

This post was written by Caroline Pandraud – content team for StartupWeekend Transmedia – a StartupWeekend event brought to by Transmedia SF.

Transmedia SF event -November 27 2012 – join us!!!

When I first learned of the concept of Transmedia something awoke in me. The idea of orchestrating media was not alien to me. As a visual effects artist, I worked in everything from film, animation, commercials, games, online, offline, and television – creating, producing and directing and even spent a stint in stop motion.

But the concept intentionally spreading your storyworld in the expanding world of multiscreens was extremely exciting to me. So who orchestrates this magnificent storyworld?

Hail the Transmedia Producer

According to the PGA:

A Transmedia Producer credit is given to the person(s) responsible for a significant portion of a project’s long-term planning, development, production, and/or maintenance of narrative continuity across multiple platforms, and creation of original storylines for new platforms. Transmedia producers also create and implement interactive endeavors to unite the audience of the property with the canonical narrative and this element should be considered as valid qualification for credit as long as they are related directly to the narrative presentation of a project.

So what exactly is this new role that has been created from necessity?

There lies the rub.

It is a very hard role to define – even more than the regular amorphic role of the “Producer”.

This is why we decided to bring 4 amazing women producers to discuss this same question – what is a Transmedia Producer, where is this role evolving to and how come there are so many lady producers?

Our event on November 27 2012 will try and answer these questions:

http://transmediaproducer.eventbrite.com

• Susan Bell - Creative Technologist for Transmedia Storyteller Ltd.

• http://www.charonpictures.com

Susan Bell has thought of herself as a storyteller ever since she won an elementary school writing contest. She is currently a Creative Technologist for Transmedia Storyteller Ltd., designing interactive stories told across social media and mobile platforms. She jumped into the transmedia world following seven years as a producer and production manager in stop motion animation including work with Oscar-nominated director Henry Selick (‘Nightmare Before Christmas’) and four seasons on the Emmy-winning ‘Robot Chicken’.  She’s also written and directed multiple short films and in 2010 formed Charon Pictures Inc. to develop supernatural horror/thriller properties such as ‘Los Angeles Ghost Patrol’. A recent Bay Area transplant from Los Angeles, Susan holds a MFA from Florida State University Film School and is a member of the Producers Guild of America and Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

• Esther Lim  - Executive Director of Digital Experience

•  http://www.gpj.com/

Esther Lim is a well respected Digital Marketing Leader, Transmedia Producer, Social Media Strategist, and Game Analyst. She has over fifteen years of combined interactive agency and consulting experience creating digital, social media and transmedia storytelling programs for Fortune 500 brands. Esther is currently the Executive Director of Digital Experience at George P. Johnson, a global experience marketing agency, and producers of the alternate reality games, The Threshold and The Hunt.

Prior to joining George P. Johnson, Esther founded The Estuary, a digital marketing agency working with Fortune 500 brands to develop new forms of multi-platform interactive engagement, social media, and community programs. Her projects include PIE Theory, Sun Microsystem’s alternate reality game, Cluetracker, ABC Family’s alternate reality game for the Kyle XY pilot, Verizon Surround/Verizon Presents, Verizon’s entertainment portal, community and concert series, and more.

Esther is an active international speaker on transmedia storytelling, storyworld community development and co-creation, and social media analytics at SXSWi 2011, SXSW Digital Domain, 2012, X Media Labs: Bath and Perth, Kreative Asia, Murdoch University, Cinekids Professional and StoryWorld Expo + Conference. She also blogs for Girls in Tech and has been quoted by Forbes in articles on Women in Gaming, The Wire Magazine on Interactive Narratives, Digital Book World on Co-Collaborative Interactive Narratives and Social Media Today.

•  Lin Tam  - Co Founder, Spazzmania

•  http://spazzmania.com/

Lin Tam is co-founder of Spazzmania, a mobile iPad app helping gamers find IOS games in the crowded app market. As co-founder, Lin is responsible for guiding the company’s strategy and growth through entertainment partnerships, technology innovation and market visibility. Bringing years of experience from the entertainment and technology sectors, she has been instrumental in the new media convergence for the mobile gaming market. Lin holds her Bachelor of Journalism degree in Advertising from University of Missouri-Columbia.

•   Elise Baugh  - Co-Founder & CMO of Innovent Transmedia
• http://innovent.tv

Elise taps 12 years of Art Direction, brand integration, specialized content creation, and team management to guide Innovent’s transmedia productions. Her approach to every project blends art and social change, with the goal to inspire and activate audiences. Her areas of expertise include: New media strategy, brand integration, design & art direction, multiplatform engagement, transmedia production.

Elise co-founded ‘My Monteur’, a video-centric transmedia platform that was showcased in Lance Weiler’s transmedia pioneering “Pandemic 1.0″ at Sundance 2011. Her work as a transmedia producer has been selected to feature at prominent institutions including Sundance 2011 and2102 , The Brooklyn Museum Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and The Oakland Museum.

The drive to effect social change using transmedia as a conduit has driven her work with organisations that overlap visual arts, educational reform, and human rights issues. She currently serves on the advisory board for Illinois Jacquet Foundation, International Poetry Library of San Francisco, Ocean Studios Film Collaborative & Question Bridge.  She is an active member of the transmedi