Reboot Day #3summary

So with the final Reboot day bearing down, this will be a short post!

Today's mentor was Lance Weiler, a filmmaker and storyteller who has been using digital technology to complement his work for more than a decade. Lance has worked extensively with Alternate Reality Games, and much of the work with the selected projects focused on how to build stories that cross over into different media (for example, from the web to mobile, or theatre to the web). <!--break-->Strategies for how to reveal elements of the story in stages (for instance, whether characters that are avatars should be revealed) were discussed. The central theme was transparency and respect for users - all 3 projects asked for a lot from users. Also discussed was a spectrum or pyramid of participation - creating different ways into the story depending on the level of audience engagement. Producers were asked to identify engagements for the most passive users ("watchers"), and those who were most committed ("agents"). Producers were also given technical advice for building their platforms - all were advised to flesh out the story as much as possible before committing to any technological platform, and taking advantage of as many free services as possible to test things out. As the focus of the day was on the new media projects, producers wondered how to pitch their TV component (or whether they wanted one at all!). Lance drew from his own experience to a) always let the technical details come out later - lead with the story, and b) make the TV/linear experience and the new media experience as seamless as possible. Make them feel that one can't live without the other. The pitchers then rushed out to prepare their pitches for tomorrow, and myself, your trusty moderated, sent 50 more emails.