Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Papo & Yo, and on Writing Emotional Journeys in Gaming

Interesting that so many of the game of the year nods this year were indie games.

Even more interesting that these were the games that went above and beyond. These games - some of the most innovative the industry has seen (in my opinion) have tackled some amazingly deep subject matter.

Even beyond that, that some of these do this in ways that film still hasn't yet to hit. From a writing perspective, that structure may seem difficult in gaming. After all it's just point, shoot, kill, right?

Ah, right, there's also some pretty pissed off birds in there too.

But, hanging just outside of the common games are these, dare I say it, emotionally intense games. And they're intense for entirely different reasons than you think.

Journey

With no dialogue or text, this game manages to create an immensely evocative world. The soundtrack was also the first ever nominated for a Grammy from a video game company. I mention this because it's relevant to the discussion of emotionally engaging game titles, even with absolutely no text or dialogue whatsofreakingever.

The soundtrack and the imagery are incredibly evocative, which creates a weirdly cinematic feel to the game.

Which takes us to the full sense of another game. Journey was a film-esque story in a lot of ways. You can easily beat it in the length of time it would take to watch a really (short to current audiences) film, but it leaves a lot in its wake.



Papo & Yo




This is the second time I have seen Vander discuss Papo & Yo and it's no less evocative or inspiring the second time around.

One thing that I've always found with hearing him speak, especially about this game, is how personal this story is - and beyond just what the game meant to make and create, but also how it's affected others.

Papo &Yo is, to a certain extent, a traditional platformer. Puzzles make up the gameplay, and the story progresses the further you go in. The story, however, is the not-so-traditional part of the gambit.

Minority Media, and Vander Caballero, have made a game that tells the story that is autobiographical in context. A story about a young boy and his abusive father, which metamorphoses into a young boy and a giant monster that gets mad when he eats 'frogs'.

Vander's story takes a story that is so often personal, and puts it into a place that games seldom go. Into a world of emotion that is so seldom touched by gameplay.

The emotions most commonly felt by game players.


Papo & Yo is a game that is marked by catharsis - something most often treaded into by filmmakers.

The player experiences catharsis in Papo & Yo for many reasons that would destroy the amazing arc of the game if I went into it, but it's something that takes something that we have seen in writing in film and TV and transcends it in some ways.

That said, Vander  discusses something that goes beyond making games - or even making emotionally engaging narratives - which is that one of the biggest issues in gaming that faces creators is that cinematics and game play aren't tied together at all - it's a totally different experience.

Part of what makes gaming engaging is that it creates an engagement from the player - and from the viewer - hat goes beyond "simply" watching. But, and the ongoing issue is apparent - there's a disconnect.

The emotional spikes in reaction come from gameplay - not from story.

Beyond that, gaming can expand - and if these games are any indication... has expanded. Developing these stories takes a deft hand - in any media - and it's the disconnect that can live when developing and making new games.

That's what companies like Minority Media are breaking down. There's a world now where the disconnect between cinematic and ongoing play can create dialogues. Reading reviews of the game speak to how personally people react to it - because you control what happens and how. One of the things that Vander speaks of is the idea to "Embrace empathy through interaction" which, as a way of creating new dialogues and new creates an almost Boal-esque way to develop and change the world around.

Papo &Yo is available on Steam and PSN.


The Toronto Screenwriting Conference series of posts.

Aaron Korsh On Progress, Suits, and Making It Hollywood

Aaron Korsh is not a traditional Hollywood success story.

Well, he is, because, obviously Suits. But beyond that he's a guy that quit Wallstreet because, apparently, Wallstreet is filled with a bunch of guys who kind of act like dicks (one might assume that's...obvious...) and it didn't work for him.

So like everyone in America he went out for the American dream - giving coffee to other people who are running massive shows in Hollywood. Working from the bottom to getting staffed over a period of eight years.

Just think on eight years for a while, while you watch this little clip from the show that guy made.





What Korsh did breaks the basic "rules" of Hollywood - he spent eight years making it from PA to writer's assistant to...writer's assistant to...and then, well more of a writer's assistant to eventually getting staffed. Eight years he spent as an assistant (which is a reminder to people counting their days now, that's 2920 days which is approximately also when Terminators will come and find your offspring in the future). All of this after an age when people say you "can't" break in. And even moreso - if you're not showrunning by 35, say some, well, good luck.

"Even if it seems like you're making no progress, you are really are making progress even though it doesn't feel like you are."
Better things can't be said. Comparison is a death game in Hollywood, and each writer (producer, DOP, shiny person that could) is on their own path.

Beyond the story of getting Suits off the ground, which is similar to every other show in how dissimilar every getting show of the ground story is, Korsh spent time discussing some pointers he picked up along the way for newbies and other alike.

On Getting An Agent

Even with a few writing assistant jobs under his belt, Korsh (then in comedy) was getting denied from almost everywhere.

Instead he went and worked on his specs more, worked harder than every before (because there are 80 people standing in as PAs who would kill for you job) and eventually a writer on staff passed on a sample and that's how he got his agent.

On Being In The Room

"People will listen more if you say good things 90% of the time than if you talk a lot"

Korsh talked a little about his experience watching in the room, seeing people starting out talk too much talk and knowing they (the writer, obvs) shouldn't. We've all done it at one time or another - in a room pushing one thing a little bit too hard, in front of an interviewer when you accidentally mention that incident with the Margaritas that no one should know about - and while sometimes it feels unfair to haul ass to finally get in the room to be told to put up and shut up, the thing is, there's a reason Louie CK is saying older people are smarter:


"Even if they're wrong, their wrongness is rooted in more information than you have. If you're older you're smarter."
Because they've been around the block longer. Watching and learning is an important skill. So is patience.

On Making Scripts Better

Korsh's advice is probably some of the best pieces of advice that many writers don't get because, well, because.

 Read things out loud. Don't be scared of your voice 
Reading out loud is terrifying. But it's one of the easiest ways to tell if a scene is working.


A beat for breaking are what the additional information, action, emotional turn - what changed in the story in the scene.

On Making Suits

Korsh also spoke of the ups and downs of making suits. Suits was, loosely, based on his own experience in Wallstreet (as urged by his agent). It wasn't until USA got on board and said, "oh hai make it lawyers and we'll make it" that it got shifted.

The thematic for him was less about making a show about lawyers, but more about, in some ways, imposter syndrome. Even with a background from the Wharton Business School, Korsh always felt like he didn't entirely fit - and thus we have a show about a literal imposter now making his way up as a lawyer. It went through revisions, more than a few production companies before Korsh found a production company willing to take it on with the vision he wanted - and ended at USA network after more than a few giant NOs along the way.

The key here through is that he knew exactly who would let him build out the story that they wanted - and when to say yes to the changes.

- Posts from the Toronto Screenwriting Conference

Friday, April 5, 2013

Thomas Was Alone: How To Indie Game

Thomas Was Alone is one of the most brilliant indie games I've played in the last couple of years. The game itself is a simple platformer, with even more simple graphics. But the brilliant execution really makes the game pop.

That and the narration. The narration is brilliant. Don't believe me? Check it out.



Describe Thomas Was Alone.

Thomas Was Alone is an indie game about friendship and jumping. It is a low fi hobby game that, if I'm honest, got a little out of hand. In it you control a number of characters as they try to escape a computer system. Each character has different capabilities, and you'll need to learn how to use them together to progress.


What was the time from start to finish on developing the game?

The game was made over a year and a half's worth of evenings and weekends, around my previous full time job as a social game designer. It took over my free time, but it seems to have been worth it.
What was the hardest part of developing it?

Well, I couldn't code when I started. That was a challenge. But Unity is lovely, and I worked it out as I went. I ended up rewriting the core code roughly 3 times as I went, each time fixing the sloppyness of the job I'd done. If I ever make a sequel, I think I'll probably have to make it all over again.


What was the inspiration for the game?

I was just massively jealous of indie guys doing awesome work and getting to make exactly what they want. I thought I'd give it a go myself. I grew up on platformers, like everyone else, so I relished a chance to make my own take on the genre.
What advice would you give to programmers looking to make games of their own?

Do it. That's the hardest  choice to make. The second hardest is finishing it. Even if your first few games are crap, finish them. It's really important to learn those skills as quickly as possible.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

True Heroines: On Period Dramas and Goin' It Cabaret

You can check out True Heroines online, or live in Vancouver at their cabaret events.

Or, you can watch the episodes.



What was your development process like?

The True Heroines is a concept created by Paula Giroday, Jovanna Huguet, Fiona Vroom and Joel Sturrock, who back in 2010, brought on Michelle Ouellet to direct and Nicholas Carella, Lawra Robertson and Nicholas Simon to produce. At that time, the group had scripted a pilot and had some ideas as to where certain story lines would go and it was at that point in development that we settled into the roles we occupy now. Anyhow, on a budget of less than $6000, we managed to shoot our two part pilot...but that's it. We shot and had no money for post production, which was ok at the time, because based on the footage from the unfinished pilot and the overall concept, we had signed an pitch-option agreement with Breakthrough Entertainment out of Toronto. So, naively we thought "well, our work here is done. HBO here we come".   After getting no bites, we found ourselves at the end of 2011 with this great idea and great footage and no gameplan. Fast forward to the IPF application (at which point Andrew Burke had joined our team), for which we were short listed,
which was truly the turning point in getting our show released. Once we were short listed, we felt our chances were pretty good (actually we thought we were a slam dunk- gotta love our confidence!), but wanted to show that we could make good on our own fundraising promises and launched a very successful indiegogo campaign. We figured that with the $20,000 we raised through crowd source funding and $100,000 from the IPF, we would be able to secure whatever other private financing we needed to shoot ten epic episodes to complete our first season. After we found out that the we weren't going to be funded by the IPF, we just sort of said "I guess we're getting to episode 6 on 20 grand". And we're happy with what we were able to pull off.

What did your crew look like normally?

On any given day we probably totaled 30 people, when including cast and crew. Some days, when we were convincing family and friends to come and do background, we totaled over 60 (and if you watch closely, there are some PRETTY SUCCESSFUL actors filling the backgrounds of our frames). Since our budget was quite low for what we were trying to accomplish, we had a lot of folks trading off positions, but we were lucky to keep our key crew consistent, even over our 18 month hiatus.


What were the biggest hurdles you had to jump being a period piece?
Shooting a period production is both fun and challenging. We obviously ran into budgetary issues in that our total production design budget never broke $2000. The team has done a good job of collecting 1940s and 50s items over the years, so most props, set dec and costumes came out of personal collections. Michelle did an excellent job of highlighting the items we did have, setting up the frames to feature key pieces and staging the action to maximize the impact of said items. If you start a shot on an authentic 1950s stove, in a kitchen with wood cabinetry, who's to say that it's not 1951? From a writing standpoint, challenges presented themselves in many ways. Mostly having to fact check and ask "was that invented yet?". Since the oldest member of our team was born in 1979, safe to say, we had a lot to learn. Any conceits are easy to explain away though, this IS a world where housewives have superpowers after all.

How long was the script development?

Well the first ideas were born when Jovanna, Paula and Fiona finished a stint at another Vancouver cabaret and, along with Joel,  came up with the idea for the three housewives fighting crime in a utopian town when a mysterious milk man arrives. They put together a pilot and some ideas for future episodes. When Michelle and Nicholas C. (we have two Nicholas') came on board, the idea for the pilot was refined, as they felt that perhaps some future ideas that were quite strong were being saved for no reason. So Nick asked if he could do a pass at the pilot and the group was quite receptive. After shooting the pilots, there were a series of meetings around Christmas to try and work out a comprehensive history of The True Heroines and it was at this point that the reins were handed over to Nick who has sort have had creative carte blanche with where the story have gone from episode three onwards. That being said, in many ways, story ideas are still somewhat collective. Many story lines were born out of the what came out of the live cabaret- which Nick, Joel and Michelle collaborate on in a story capacity- and some immediate responses from the audience dictating which characters should be explored in the web series. Both Leah Gibson and Graham Coffeng's characters came about this way. Graham in particular is the most loved/hated villain of the live cabaret (which was by design, but never to this extent) but only hada walk-on role in the pilot. As far as future scripts go, the first season was supposed to run 12 episodes, so the first half of season 2 is complete (and just getting more and more grandiose) and the back half is underway.  It's getting nuts:)

What is your release strategy?

This is an ever evolving model for us. In fact, the landscape of tv for the web has changed so dramatically from when we started to our release, that we feel that by the time this is read, the
strategy might have changed. The nice thing about being on the web is that once it's posted, it exists there. If the content is good, people will talk about it and be able to find it. However the biggest change in the last few years has been that people are not seeking out their media. Media needs to be brought to them. Our strategy thus far has been to try and bring our show to influencers who are already interested in our content- sci fi, pinups, indie production, superheroes, dancing- and hope that they like it and share it. We are confident enough in our product, that if an authority in any of those niche markets sees our show, they will vouch for us and WANT to share it. We are not taking a position where we want to convince people to watch, we want to bring the show to people who inherently want to see it. The other Nicholas (Nicholas Simon) heads up our marketing and has been making waves thus far.  He seems to be having fun figuring out exactly how to execute this plan.  He has a real opportunity to be a trailblazer here.  The internet is the wild west at this point.

Is the tie in cabaret successful at raising awareness about the show?

As mentioned above, the live cabaret has served us creatively first and foremost. It's important to us that it not be seen as a promotional tool for our webseries, even though it has served us well in that capacity. We have played to sold out crowds in Vancouver for over two years and it has definitely helped raise awareness for the webseries locally. The eventual vision, is to tour our shows to cities where our webseries is popular. What we offer that other webseries don't, is that viewers will have the opportunity to meet and interact with their favourite characters in person.


What is the best part of working on the series?
Our set is extraordinarily familial. The tone is set by director Michelle Ouellet, who is practically a magician. She has a very gentle touch, but ALWAYS gets what she wants. Michelle values the contributions of her cast and crew around her and is very open to working with people's strengths and incorporating them into her existing vision. Since she also edited 4 of the 6 episodes, the look, pace and tone of the show sit squarely on her shoulders and she embraced that challenge in a way that allowed everyone to have confidence in what they were doing. We all new Michelle had a clear idea of what was going on, so we could trust in that. The idea of family really extended across the entire cast and crew- we had EPs cleaning garbages, our first AD coiling cable- the built in hierarchy of a film set was often abandoned for the sake of the project. We all had a sense something special was happening here.






What were you shooting on?

We shot the series on the Red One. Funny enough, we were actually going to shoot on a much worse camera, but we had a technical difficulty and lost 5 hours on our first day and then Red One was only one we could grab in a pinch. When we went back to shoot one Big Rig productions and Sim Digital made sure we could have the same cameras again. However, as we've learned from working on other projects, that without the right lenses and creative team, your show can look like garbage with the best cameras. That's a real tribute to our director Michelle Ouellet and cinematographer Lindsay George. Our show looks phenomenal, because the are phenomenally talented.

What was it like working with such a massive cast?

The cast is just going to get bigger! We also have so many friends who have appeared in the live show, or who we know from working here in Vancouver, who we just NEED to incorporate into the show. All of our Heroinettes, for instance (who are wildly popular in the live cabaret) will debut in season 2. The fact is, the world is massive- our full story spans from 1910 until well into the 1950s, so we have enough content to support a full season of one hour shows. So if future budgets allow, that is where we are headed. As far as the cast we've already been blessed to have, it has been truly amazing. Our supporting cast is literally made up entirely of series leads and regulars and there has not been a modicum of ego on our sets. We have no trailers. We have no rides for people. But we have good food and good times, and we have been truly blessed that that's been enough.

Have you found work in this media, which is technically indie, different from the TV or film work you've done?

Well, first things first- within the next five years, the web will be the mainstream source for media. It's probably closer than that. But for us, it's been liberating. We didn't have to pitch this idea to anybody. We didn't have to convince some person in an office that the audience was going to care. We are letting the audience decide whether or not we should shoot more. Creating for the web puts the creative people at the top of the pyramid. We are getting to create and put our work out there and let the audience decide if its worth while.

Any advice to other creators?

Your content is king. Make the show you want, not the one you think will get the most hits. People want quality. We are banking on that. We may not get a ton off traffic in the first week, but over time, the product speaks for itself. Arrested Development proved this to be true. Once the audience gets to decide what they watch, instead of just what's scheduled for them on any given night, they will seek out the good stuff. But once they find it (and this is one of the areas we are trying to succeed in AFTER the fact) is creating enough content that the audience will keep coming back.  That would be the second piece of advice- create enough content to fill the appetite of your viewers, or they might just forget about you.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Post-ARGs: ZedTO, Visitations and the Mission Biz


 Trevor Haldenby, of the Mission Business, sat down to chat about ARG and interactive play ZedTO, as well as their new project Visitations.
Describe ZedTO

ZED.TO was an eight-month cross-media simulation of the end of the world... and of one possible future.

Through live-action theatrical performances, online video, social networks, and a myriad of websites, the project explored what it might be like to live in a future where a corporation called ByoLogyc redefines what it means to be human through "lifestyle biotech" products.

Between March and November of 2012, thousands of Torontonians got to experience the rise and fall of ByoLogyc, and the birth of the planet's first synthetic pandemic, first-hand.... as interns and board members of the fictional corporation, soldiers in their private security force, or members of an anarchist organization trying to bring an end to their vision of a darker tomorrow.

What was the experience of working on ZedTO?

ZED.TO couldn't have happened without an army of collaborators. For the most part, my experience of the project was one of total amazement - as we brought intimate and interactive experiences to increasingly engaged audiences that often then joined the project as assistants, co-creators, and even performers.

I'm currently a graduate student at OCAD University, studying strategic foresight... which is a complex term of referring to the study of the future. Bringing the ByoLogyc scenario about commercialized transhumanism to life for thousands of eager participants was an incredibly satisfying process, and brought a much-needed dose of creativity and social collaboration to a domain of increasing importance - the study and design of better futures.

The project was an entertainment experience, to be sure, but it was also the foundation of my thesis research at OCADU. Bringing creative pursuits together with business innovation together with science-fiction storytelling (or should I say science eventuality?) was a dream come true.

How did the idea come to fruition?

In early 2010, I left my job as Producer of interactive projects for the environmental education organization Earth Rangers. I'd been working on the development of educational and entertaining
videogames and online platforms for several years, and yet kept daydreaming about my roots in the theatre... and more importantly, how to bring the two worlds together.

As it turned out, a number of close friends from high school had also been eager to explore new ways to bring entertainment together with design and education. Over a series of lunches and late-night workshops, we would get together and brainstorm new ways for our different creative passions to come together - some of us were writers and editors, others designed theatre shows, and some were getting into business development.

Over a year or two, we whittled the group of close collaborators down to 5 - and together we incorporated as The Mission Business, an adventure laboratory dedicated to smashing videogames and social media into theatre into experience design to create a new hybrid form of entertainment.

How many people were involved with the ARG elements of ZedTO?

.... and as it turns out, what we landed on in terms of a cross-platform multi-disciplinary entertainment format was rather close to what some people were calling an ARG, or alternate reality game!

The core of ZED.TO's most ARG-like aspects was designed by The Mission Business, though we leaned heavily on the skillsets of our collaborators: graphic artists like Patrick Stolk-Ramaker (who helped us finesse the ByoLogyc brand), and Dara Gold (with whom we created the graphic novel ByoOptic that revealed our fictional company's backstory); performers like the members of the Southern Ontario Zombie Squad (who played ByoLogyc's "Sanitation and Containment Divison" - their corporate secret police); and documentarians like Stefan Kuchar and Jake Roels, who took time out from their own creative storytelling projects (Stefan as a filmmaker, Jake as frontman of the awesome band Alphabot) to breathe life into our story world across multiple media platforms.

Of course, the ARG aspects of a project like ZED.TO can be hard to draw boundaries around... so credit also has to go to some awesome people at Autodesk and TED who have helped us extend the ByoLogyc story into award ceremonies from the year 2025 at Autodesk University and the 2013 TED conference in Long Beach.

The new project, Visitations, seems an obvious next step - though perhaps a bit more contained. Any reason for that?

Nothing seems more appealing when you're coming off of an epic 8-month transmedia apocalypse like a slightly more contained project. ;)

The folks at the Drake Hotel saw our final performance in the ZED.TO story, ByoLogyc: RETREAT, and had a number of questions for us about how we might approach a similar storytelling and design philosophy on their turf.

After exploring the history of the Drake itself, as well as a number of key figures in the early 20th century world of the occult in Toronto that surrounded an earlier version of the hotel, we decided there was an amazing story to tell - a haunted-house experience updated for what savvy 21st century audiences really wanted... to be scared, but also to unravel a mystery and explore an intricate network of characters, conspiracies, and cool phenomena!



VISITATIONS will be run 12 times, for audiences of 24. Each show will be slightly different than all the others, due largely to the unique set of participants who will ever-so-slightly (but significantly) influence the way the story and experience unfolds. Within such an intimate design canvas, we hope we can offer really meaningful experiences and interactions to our audience participants.

ZED.TO taught us that it's hard to pull of a scary / suspenseful story for an audience of 250... or up to 3,500, as in our Nuit Blanche immunization clinic at the Church of the Holy Trinity. Visitations will allow us to focus our efforts, and pull audiences deep into a more personal story.

What's been the reaction to the structure between what is ostensibly theatre mixed with an alternate reality game?

Generally, the reaction has been really good.

Critically, reviewers seemed to love the amount of detail we were able to infuse into our theatre by incorporating everything from cellphones to Twitter to document archives to online videos. Providing theatre-goers with a storytelling environment that is 21st century rather than 18th century really seemed to engage people... you could watch them light up as they explored environments rather than stared at them... and as they met characters rather than passively consumed them.

We also feel like ARG's can benefit from the kind of in-the-flesh and focused expertise that performers can provide. It's one thing to suspend your disbelief about an interaction you're having in a physical environment, and quite another to be invited to INVEST belief and to be rewarded for taking the leap. We found that the amazing cast of performers we had on ZED.TO were crucial to creating a stimulating ARG-esque experience for mass audiences.

It also helps to have a network of "lead players" (or "pro" players) who have been on a number of other ARG's, from Conspiracy for Good to TorGame's Waking City - they become influencers who can really shape the active engagement of an audience with experiences and spectacles that might otherwise become passive promenade-style theatre moments as in Punchdrunk's Sleep No More.

There's a tiered process for ticketing for Visitations - what was the reasoning behind it?

We experimented with a tiered ticketing system on ZED.TO, offering audiences the choice to attend the series' final event as an evacuee, a saboteur, a private security force officer, or a ByoLogyc Board Member. Each ticket came with a unique experience, and the higher you went in price the more intense and elaborate the roleplay tended to become. We wanted to make sure that we could offer our most eager "customers" an experience that matched their appetite and expectations, and increasing prices allowed us to work sustainably on an exponential curve of elaborate engagements.... at the high-end, we had a relatively small number of people getting fully immersed in the environment, and at lower price points, we had mass audiences experiencing spectacles that really came to life because of the crowd or mob in which they were experiencing them.

With VISITATIONS we're trying to continue that exploration - are audiences interested in paying more for a ticket so that they can keep a prop or costume item at the end of the show? What is the value of the keepsake or takeaway in the digital era? What appetite (literally) do people have for being served drinks and dinner within the story experience? Is 21st century dinner theatre about feeding audiences while putting on a show for them, or serving them food and drinks by characters within the world of the story? There's plenty of experimentation to be done in this domain, especially within the context of a venue and partner like the Drake Hotel.

It's also only running for a week - is there a hope to make that longer?

The show is actually running over 2 weeks - Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday (21, 22, 23) of April, and then the following Sunday and Monday. Our hope is to extend the run if response is really good, as we only stand to benefit from increasing the number of performances and proving the popularity of the experience we're offering to the Drake.

The Mission Biz is doing some innovative work in the space - what are the next steps?

Next steps are... plentiful!

We're working with some A-list storytellers in Canada, the US, and Europe to explore how they could extend their tales (both fiction and non-fiction) into full-fledged media ecologies, where audiences can get involved as co-creators within the story world. Margaret Atwood was one of our biggest advocates during the crowdfunding campaign for ZED.TO on IndieGoGo, and we're really interested in the idea of working with her on adaptations and extensions of her work.

We're also working with some of the world's leading technology innovators to explore how they can harness science-fiction storytelling as a really powerful tool for understanding the "actual" future of technology, design, and creativity. How could we simulate various future scenarios, trying them on for size while getting a better understanding of how they fit with our social values, emotions, and strategies? Tom Wujec's book Imagine Design Create has been a real inspiration on this front, as well as Brian David Johnson's book Science Fiction Prototyping. This is the domain I'm focusing on with my thesis at OCADU.

Beyond Visitations and ZedTO what's the background of the team?

An excellent question. As I mentioned, we all met about 15 years ago as performers and students at an amazing arts-enriched high school in Unionville. Since then, we've each gone our separate ways, and two years ago re-connected around the incorporation of our design firm and "adventure laboratory", The Mission Business.



There are five of us at The Mission Business, and we each have codenames that describe what we do:
Trevor Haldenby (Designer, Evangelist, Time Traveler)
Elenna Mosoff (Director, Ringleader, Adventure Bandit)
Martha Haldenby (Administrator, Champion, Ambassador)
David Fono (Designer, Technologist, Game Master)
Byron Laviolette (Writer, Visionary, Wonder Junkie)

Each of us comes from a different professional background, from theatre to game design to strategy to organizational administration, but we're all passionate about bringing stories to life.

If you could give advice to creators getting into this space what would you say?

Our motto for ZED.TO, our first project together as The Mission Business, was "Go big or go home." We believe in making a splash, and in setting a vision for success that is complex and significant. ZED.TO was possibly the scariest project we could have undertaken - we had less than $20,000 in budget to execute an 8-month project involving literally hundreds of collaborators, and that we projected to cost over $100,000 by the time we were done.

By setting the bar high, we were able to attract a lot of attention and positive support, and the project... step by step... became a reality.

ARG player and transmedia social innovator Carrie Cutforth-Young has an interesting idea about how we grew the project, saying that participating felt like moving in an orbit towards a "story horizon", rather than in a straight line or through a maze (as I gather many ARGs feel like). By systematically redefining, expanding, and scaffolding our story world, we were able to grow with our audiences and supporters, designing an experience that resembled the pandemic at the core of ZED.TO's story.

Now that we know how it feels to go "viral", I think we're ready to bring some skeletons out of the closet, with VISITATIONS, exploring the past rather than the future, and creating another entertainment experience that Toronto audiences will love.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

IPF Pitch - Secret Societies Suck

The Society is a series that we're pitching for funding to the IPF:


You can see the rest of the pitch over here, as well as the optional "ARG lite" option in place on the site. Spot the clue!

One of the things the IPF is looking for is proof of concept, and proof of ability to release video/get audience/comments.

We're really happy with the entire concept, and would love to know your thoughts. Share, watch, comment and more!

Monday, February 25, 2013

Crowdsourcing Web Series: From Pilot to Sci-Fi Series in Out of Time

Making a web series isn't easy, and with more of them coming out every day, it's hard to differentiate in the sea of crowdsourcing, funding and more.

The team behind Out of Time have been doing a lot of work promoting a pilot for their innovative sci-fi-ing time-travelin' web series. Check out the campaign video here:




What's been the best part of travelling with the pilot before shooting the entire series?
Being able to take the pilot and screen for different audiences really gave us a chance to get audience feedback about what they liked and didn't like.  We screened it as a complete edit so it was more of a 30 minute short film and shows in as a short film isn;t quite the same as showing it as an episode so that was a bit of a challenge. When we made the cut to the 15 minute episodes it cut exactly at the point I;d always envisioned and more than anything affected the impact of the story.  So audience reaction to that was different as well and we've had people telling us that they enjoyed the episodic cut a lot more than the short film edit.   So right away I already know that the audience is really going to enjoy what they watch and want more, wondering what else can we do to possibly top what we've already done… but there is so much more we have coming in the series and its going to blow away anything else we've done.

What's been the hardest part of working in sci-fi on a budget?
It's actually been pretty easy.  We knew what we were getting into and since we were in charge of the story we purposely wrote for what we could afford to pull off.  So there were no major set pieces, it's not set in the future or anything outrageous.  It allowed us to really setup the rules of the science in the story and follow those as closely as possible.  Some effects I already knew that I could pull-off, since I'm the one doing the VFX, so it was a matter of planning certain thing.  It allowed us to think of how certain technology would be used in a realistic way, so  it actually became seamless, part of the action and the story instead of distracting.  

What are you hoping to get out of the indiegogo campaign (other than, of course, your funding)?
We're trying to let the world know that we're here, we're coming and we have a plan.  Funding is a huge part of it and will allow us to have a much smoother production run over the 33 days we have scheduled as well as having an easier post-production period, but it's not the be all and the end all.  We're making this series.  We have the capability, the drive and the dedication to make the series on a limited budget or on a bigger budget.  It will just take longer and push the release of the series back a little further without any funding, but when we come out people will know we're coming and they'll want to see what we've got.

What choices did you make for the incentives?
We wanted to keep the incentives realistic.  A lot of it is advance screening opportunities as well as getting a chance to come and hang out with us during production via Google Plus Hangouts and then actually in person when we go on our little 10 city tour around Canada and the US.  We want a chance to meet the fans and the supporters and show them that they really helped to make something awesome happen.