Calling all (fellow) geeks!

Above you’ll find the Indiegogo video pitch for my friend Nastasha Baron’s graphic novel GREY SEAL.  This talented local producer is finally pulling back the curtain and letting everyone in on what’s been brewing for many months now.  I’ve been following developments since the early days, and offered some narrative and branding advice where appropriate; now, they’re more than half finished the 5-issue epic, but really need our help to complete the saga and share it with the world.

Click here for all the juicy info, and please SHARE the fundraising campaign with your friends and networks.  This is a true passion project for Nastasha, and the story’s themes touch on exciting territory that fans of FRINGE, PROMETHEUS, and GRAHAM HANCOCK (Fingerprints of the Gods) can really sink their teeth into.

Thanks in advance for your help, and stay tuned to this space for regular updates concerning Grey Seal and its transmedia evolution!

Warrior…Cripple…Alien?

For me, this was a heartbreaker.  I’ve made no secret for my love of all things GREEN LANTERN. I was raised on the character, weaned on the socially conscious Lantern/Arrow era of the 70s, and the goofy Challenge of the Superfriends show in the early 80s:

I’d never be a tortured billionaire playboy.  The odds of being bitten by a radioactive insect in the Big Apple were astronomically against.   And, though adopted, I’m pretty sure my cultural roots don’t reach across the stars to the House of El.

But I had willpower…and the potential to overcome great fear…and dreams of being a part something greater than myself.

It appears I wasn’t alone.

Green Lantern (GL to us comic geeks) had millions of fans, thanks in no small part to DC’s go-to writer (and current Chief Creative Officer) GEOFF JOHNS revamping the character a few years back.  In fact, his run on the emerald warrior was so innovative and successful that it singlehandedly convinced WB execs to fast-track and ‘green light’ – pun intended –  a $200M+ feature film.

Hallelujuah…right?

Dammit…the ingredients were all there.  A killer IP (WB was calling it ‘their Star Wars’).  A solid director.  The complete backing of its blockbuster studio and parent company.  Legions of faithful fans, eager to evangelize.   Heck, they even landed an effortlessly charming lead who caused avalanches of multi-quadrant buzz in his first major Comic-Con appearance:

So…what went wrong?

First off – say what you will about the film.  Many have.  But we’re talking about transmedia here – getting to the atomic structure of a narrative property or brand.  Going back to the gemstone analogy for TM that I proposed when relaunching the site, we can’t necessarily say that the entire diamond is worthless just because one of the facets wasn’t properly cut.   Instead, its about honoring the core structure of the stone itself.

So what did the creative braintrust at DC/WB do?

• SAY THE OATH - hard to understand the logic behind inviting fans and newbies to record themselves performing the sacred GL oath on webcam.  You risk alienating the cool-kids/casuals with the awkwardness of it all…and you piss off the hardcores every time they open a clip and see some mactor/mactress (the H’wood term for model/actors hired to lend a glimmer of glamour to a campaign) butchering their equivalent of John 3:16.
• ENGAGEMENT CAMPAIGN - cobbling together a series of loosely related Flash games aimed at ‘educating fresh eyes and rewarding the faithful’ is a prime example of LCDM (Lowest Common Denominator Marketing).   This felt like nothing more than a collection of one-offs, destined to ‘engage’ 6-12yr olds at most…rather than stoking teen tastemakers like Warners surely intended.
• GL APP - what do you get when you slap together a collection of archived comics, bare-bones character summaries, behind the scenes imagery, readily available film clips, and in-app purchasing for future issues?  This.  Whee.
• POSTER CAMPAIGN - it’s marketing 101 now (ever since the Lord of the Rings trilogy did it) to break out ‘unique one-sheets’ to showcase character names, designs, and a complex IP’s cast scope.  But, other than showing off snazzy suits and reminding us we’re heading into sci-fi/alien-infested territory, how are we engaged by this?
• VIDEOGAME:  Rise of the Manhunters may feature star voices from the film and ape God of War‘s game mechanics in space – all cool on paper – but why do we care?  The Manhunters in question (the Guardians of the Universe‘s original police force) are never referenced in the flick, the finished product felt rushed, and the core of the Lantern experience - creating/doing/executing almost anything imaginable through sheer force of will – fell far, far short of the mark.

As a hardcore Lantern wannabe – sorry, but I’d trade this workaday life for a ring and space sector in a heartbeat - none of the above inspires FEELING.  Where’s the awe?  The imagination?  The history?  The stakes?  A clear understanding of the world’s rules and goals?  How can an audience dig deep and bathe in the glowing emerald wellspring of Lantern-ness if they don’t view this weird new IP as anything other than the next tired exercise in marketing and toy-pimping???  Cleverness will only get you so far, even in Rio…

Okay, okay – I hear you.  Short of handing out thousands of actual ‘magic rings’ (ie: finger-sized, multi-image green laser projectors…yes, they’re coming), this is a challenging property to create tactile engagement with.  There’s no Hogwarts equivalent to visit.  No Bat gear to help you protect your city on two wheels.  No Iron Throne to claim as your own.   But you need to give them something.  To hold.  To treasure.  To make the audience feel like they’re in on a secret - a secret laden with history, and gravity, and complexity – and privy to a world reserved for those special enough to ‘get’ it.

A multifaceted experience, specifically designed for the brave and the bold.   (See what I did there?)

WHAT COULD’VE BEEN

The Book of OA.  

It’s the mystical repository of the collective wisdom of the Guardians of the Universe, containing all moments of History.  We’re talking everything from The Celestial Hand cradling the nascent energies of Existence, right up to Hal Jordan not getting laid last week.  Everything.  In text.  Images.  ’Recorded Memories’ (animated and video).  Historical quotes.  The Corps’ highest highs, lowest lows, and greatest hits.   A complete registry of every lantern that ever was, and how the 3600 sectors of space are allocated.

It responds to queries with an AI-like omniscience.

It cross-references between similar characters and key events in its database.

It’s searchable.

And it’s a big-ass, otherworldly, IP-specific…glowing book.

You’re welcome, DC.  You’re goddamn welcome.

TCS RATING:  C-

Last month, we were brilliantly teased with a TED talk…from the future:

This laid the foundation for the film’s mysterious Weyland Industries, and the prime directive of its founder.  And now?  We get to see a (compelling) example of ‘real world’ corporate branding, philosophy, and engineering:

This seems like a natural evolution of WB’s ‘corporate web’ campaign for AI, and what Bad Robot tried to do with the Hanso Foundation/Dharma Initiative sites for LOST.

Consider me intrigued…and my calendar marked.

It’s a property close to my heart.  I read the first book in the early 90′s, and George R.R Martin’s fascinating tale of political intrigue, medieval warfare, and ‘mature fantasy’ captured me in its singular gravity.  Sadly, ‘life’ got in the way (as it so often does), and with no widespread Internets to keep abreast of series developments, A Song of Ice and Fire fell off the narrative radar.  But my time in Westeros would not be forgotten…

Flash-forward nearly 20 years.

I caught wind of the show going into development at HBO in 2007.  My biggest concern – you know, aside from the obvious ‘How the Hell are they going to pull off the sheer scope on TV???’ - was with audience awareness.  Sure, the books were best-sellers – and ‘fantasy’ had gotten a much-needed boost thanks to Tolkien going mainstream – but what about the masses? How were they going to reach the kind of audience numbers that would keep a show like this on the air, justify the hefty per-episode budgets, and make it must-see appointment television?

A SPANDEX SOAPBOX

It should be common knowledge by now, but I’ll say it again for the flat-Earthers who still have hairy-knuckled fingers in their collective ears:  Geek is in.  Genre properties are no longer the embarrassing indulgences of pasty-faced basement dwellers wielding 20-sided dice and polybagged variant covers; sci-fi, fantasy, comic book, and cult IP have seen massive growth in public mindshare in the past decade.  There’s much debate as to what lit the fuse on this pop-cultural explosion;  did Star Wars/Star Trek nerds, now in positions of power and respect, shape the modern media landscape?  Were The Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies effectively uniting the once-disparate scifi and fantasy sub-cultures?   Did female-embraced cult hits like Twin Peaks, Buffy, and The X-Files pave the way for broader acceptance?  Were the Muggles amongst becoming a minority?  Were seismic cultural shifts making it so vampires and zombies could finally step out from the blood-soaked shadows..?

There’s no right or wrong answer.  But when did the questioning itself reach critical mass?  In what arena did genre IPs slay the competition and claim the box-office/TV-rating/best-selling crown?   What did established media properties like Lord of the Rings, Batman, Iron Man, and Harry Potter have in common with unknown upstarts like Heroes, Fringe, LOST, 30 Days of Night, and The Walking Dead?

COMIC-CON.

The marketing gurus at HBO knew they had to tap into this make-or-break audience from square one – not only to energize the books’ existing fans, but to bring potential legions of genre flag-bearers to their standard.   Somehow, they had to establish a unique brand presence amidst deafening (and competitive) signals and noise, build unique in-the-flesh buzz for the show, and have the experience be personal, shareable through social media, and immediately iconic.

The Iron Throne campaign (2010 – current) is an ingenious gimmick for 3 core reasons:

1. It lets established fans fulfill a long-held dream of taking the true seat of power in Westeros, with photographic evidence.
2. Newbies to the IP are immediately acquainted with the core imagery/branding of the upcoming series:  title, font, throne, and tone.
3. The whole thing was designed to be SHARED on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social networks.  Each person who sat in throne and posted their pic became a brand evangelist by association – a living advertisement.

WINTER IS COMING

The gears were now in place, and HBO launched an aggressive Twitter campaign in the summer of 2010 to post the ‘best’ Iron Throne pics live from the show floor.  An active Facebook fan page wasn’t far behind. Both entities felt personal - like they were speaking directly to fans as a trusted friend, and encouraging their involvement in a growing but selective community.   Genre fans were made to feel like they were getting in on the ground floor of something special.   Buzz continued to grow with exclusive photos, set reports, and collectible contests.  Book sales from the four available tomes began to see unmistakeable bumps…

And then came The Wall:  this brilliant (and FREE) interactive experience – dubbed The Maester’s Path - introduced thousands of fresh eyeballs and mouse-clicking fingertips to the mythology and tone of the series.  This wasn’t your mother’s rainbow-hued fantasy project; things were going to be bleak.  Cold winds…mountains of ice…black ravens…grim pledges…whispers of monsters, and fates worse than death…all wrapped in the language and vocabulary of the existing books AND upcoming series.  A grim yet delicious appetizer, but one concocted primarily for a gamer’s discerning palette.

And for the rest of us..?

 

The GoT-inspired food truck campaign was another brilliant move.  Have a celebrity chef with ‘urban snob’ appeal – and an established brand (TOP CHEF) – showcase his culinary chaps crafting a selection of the dishes described in mouth-watering and period-accurate detail in Martin’s books.  The trucks would make limited appearances in major media cities (Los Angeles and New York), on a first-come/first-served/social-media-driven basis.  Smart.

Once the traditional marketing machine started rolling into gear late 2010, it should’ve been obvious they had a hit on their hands.   The first episode of the show aired to entirely respectable ratings – but Game of Thrones soon became one of the only premium cable shows in history to grow in viewership over its first season.  Even replays and extra airings were snagging great numbers.   Giddy, HBO gave the green light to Season 2 within days of the premiere.  And all the while, the social media campaign kept the fans energized and engaged with show trivia, episode quotes, favourite moments, and links to fan-made GoT homages:

And things didn’t stop when the first season came to a close; with the long-overdue fifth book in the series about to launch, the transmedia machine was now running on all cylinders:

• Game of Thrones Series Companion App
• HBO-Go Interactive Viewer
• Interactive ‘Areas of Control’ Map
• mobile Game of Thrones ‘Weather Skins’
• Thrones-inspired Fashion
• Game of Thrones ‘War of the Five Kings’ sigil tattoos!

Not to mention this:

The Game of Thrones Graphic Novel is a REAL THING.

And this:

With such a creative and multi-tiered transmedia strategy, and such capable execution on all fronts, is anyone really surprised by the results?

TCS RATING:  A

(though I must admit…I kept expecting a moose to appear somewhere in the Scandinavian subtitles )

The glorious absurdity of it immediately struck me, so I made a playful (yet completely throwaway) comment, as I often do when cat wackiness is involved.

Within a few hours, some of my friends were commenting on the picture – one which I hadn’t officially ‘shared’ yet.  Another friend one-upped the absurdity quotient by saying, “This needs to be a religion…”.  I joked back that it would make the perfect stained glass window in our future church.

A few hours later, an old associate from my game industry days posted this:

Mind = Blown.

And immediately, I smell a meme.

We’ll see where this goes…

Transmedia seems to have become the go-to term for what has been an evolving label since the internet content explosion of the late 90s.  In realizing the potential for the Web to leverage traditional entertainment IPs beyond the limits of their original representation (ie: book, TV, film, comic, etc), buzz-word lovers have burned through a host of potential monikers.  Multi-media.  Cross-media.  Cross-platform.   But they were all trying to express the same concept:  telling some form of ‘story’ across more than one medium.

It’s a cool concept, for sure…but why all the naming fuzziness?  The questions and confusion?  Why don’t people – specifically content producers and studios – seem to grasp what it is, and how to harness the damn thing to its full potential?  For me, the key to understanding a paradigm-busting concept depends primarily on how one can visualize it. If you have an accurate representation – or a clever metaphor/analogy – of what something is, creative AND business types can grasp it on more completely from their respective sides of the production equation.

There have been lots of attempts to do this.  Webs.  Venn diagrams.  Branching ‘trees’.  Intense ‘Wheel and Spoke’ structures.  Not inherently ‘bad’ models.  But I believe they’re missing the essential point.  By having the Original Property (OP) as an external thing - the hub of the wheel, the head of the octopus, etc – and the other expressions as extensions of it, you fall into the trap of building a creative hierarchy.  The extensions become slaves to the OP. It’s kinda like special features on a DVD/Blu movie – an amusing distraction, at best – or akin to stapling rough sketches and artist notes to the frame of the Mona Lisa, at worst.

But for me?  I’ve always thought that if transmedia should ‘look like’ anything, it should be this:

With this model, the underlying CONCEPT is the raw gemstone itself, and the facets that are carved from it become the various REPRESENTATIONS of said concept.   Some facets will naturally be larger, and have more prominence.  Others will be more supportive, incidentally decorative, or structural in nature.  But, when scrutinized in the light, they ALL sparkle and shine – greater than the sum of their parts – reflecting the stone’s true quality and nature from all angles.

This is the beauty of transmedia:  showcasing the original idea from multiple angles, but never straying from its IDENTITY.

Which is the whole point of branding in the first place, right?

The southeast Asian adventure continues…

Special props must be given to Canuck indy sensations BEND SINISTER for the awesome tunes.

Keep on rockin’ in the free world, folks!

8)

B

My friends in Rawai asked me to whip up a wee vid from their charity kickboxing show. Now all can savour the fruits of my tropical labours 8)

Happy Holidays to all…and keep on rockin’ in the free world!

B(e)