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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
