Author: Gerry Maravilla
It doesn’t take a money hungry music or studio executive to tell you that the Internet has created a problem in terms of their profit margins. The world of media 2.0 allows us to share and download music and movies at incredible speeds, even before they are officially released. While there are leading innovators in the field such as Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and the suits at Warner Bros. who funded The Dark Knight viral campaigns and accompanying alternate reality game (ARG), most do not see the light. While from an economic perspective this puts Hollywood’s business departments in difficult situations. They fail to fully understand the incredible potential in creating more engaging storylines and active fan participation while adhering to their classic business models.
As a filmmaker and new media junkie myself, I could not wait to tap into these new methods of storytelling. Whether or not you know you it, you’ve been a part of an experiment. You may not have knowingly participated, you may have not engaged at all, but I hope you have at least been marginally aware of it. The experiment took its first step with the spring ’09 issue of Steez that features a piece entitled, “1221: Prologue.” However, it really started on April 1, 2009, at the Occidental College Film Festival. Before the films started and the trailer for senior comps was shown, there was an odd advertisement for the “Trauma and Treatment Facility”, a medical institution that promised to replace traumatic memories with rejuvenating ones. The commercial ended with a URL (www.whatdoyouwanttoforget.com) and a phone number. It is an actual working URL and working phone number. It is a website for this facility that supposedly exists in the year 2012. The website provided a working phone number with a voice mail and it also had a link to a Twitter page for the Trauma and Treatment Facility.
Experienced Internet users could uncover another hidden link on the website. This directed them to the blog of a young man, struggling to cope with the death of his mother in the year 2012. Soon after, fliers went up around campus that had an image of two hands holding up a brain. The fliers displayed the same URL and phone number. Perhaps the most attention-grabbing component of the experiment were the fake newspapers featuring headlines such as, “Russia Invades Afghanistan!” and “Supreme Court Upholds Marijuana Legalization.” On the back of this fake news publication, entitled The National Tribune, there was an ad for the facility and that same ad appeared on the Letter to the Editor page in the last issue of the Weekly.
So what’s the point? Well, last week on the Trauma and Treatment Facility’s Twitter, Doctor Gray announced that there would be a special presentation on the treatment on April 25, 2009, in Thorne Hall at six in the evening. Those of you who attended will know that this is the exact time and location of senior film comps. The point was and still is to tell an engaging expansive transmedia experience surrounding my short film “Patient 1221.”
Transmedia is a $500 word meaning a single story or event that takes places across several multimedia platforms. This includes websites, movies, television, print journalism, etc.
While initially it appears that these business types in the movie and music industry can use viral marketing and transmedia as another way to squeeze more money out of your wallets, there is potential for much more. Rather than merely having viewers sit back and passively experience the art, ARG’s allow audience members to actively participate and become directly involved with the fictionalized world created. The Dark Knight campaign asked people to uncover clues on websites in order to discover new photos of the Joker, Year Zero included a component involving a secret underground concert and the ARG for my film asked users to submit videos of things they wanted to forget. These different multimedia components connect fictionalized worlds to reality. It provides audiences various points of entry for their work and allows artists the opportunity to surpass the constraints and limitations of one medium. It is an Art History and Visual Arts requirement that all senior comps films do not exceed a ten minute run time. Transmedia storyteling provided a loophole to tell a larger and more comprehensive story.
However, it is important that filmmakers, musicians and other artists keep one thing in mind: make sure your movie, album or other work can stand on its own. I hope that viewers of “Patient 1221” who participated in the ARG, and those that did not, both enjoy the film. I did not want to rely on the other multimedia components to tell the rest of my story for me. Films such as The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions relied too much on the sum of its part that the plot-lines at the very center of their two major films suffered because of this.
Maybe I was ultimately unsuccessful in luring you into the world of my film. Regardless, it was an incredibly fun, relatively inexpensive and engaging way as an artist to keep myself consistently interested in my project while simultaneously bringing in the perspectives of different artists. While perhaps Hollywood may use this transmedia and ARG’s to empty the bank accounts of fanboys around the world, I sincerely hope others use it in a way to bridge the gap between artist and spectator, between art and reality.
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