Last year, I wrote a post called “Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience.” In October, the post became the basis for a panel discussion event at the FutureM conference in Boston with me, Marta Kagan and Jan Libby. I have updated the deck from that panel, and am sharing here for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!
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today’s awesome ad (mashup) award goes to
Ad #2 (but watch them in order).
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UPDATE:
On December 1st, I received an email from a reader, Dave Clooney, pointing to an NBC Sports article which uncovers the truth about the Jordan ad:
Sorry, it’s a spoof. Someone has taken an old Jordan Nike commercial, “Maybe You Should Rise,” and mashed it with LeBron’s “What Should I Do?”, with pretty good results. But Sun-Sentinel Miami Heat beat reporter Ira Winderman confirms that it’s a forgery in this tweet.
Here’s the original Jordan Nike commercial:
Still, the mashup was so good that it fooled a lot of people. Others just threw it up there without checking. But as Winderman points out, there’s no way Nike is going to undermine its own efforts by letting one of its superstar endorser take a shot at another.
Reminds me of the awesome billboard mashup trend I’d been noticing before:
The Glitch Mob Drops The New-Tron Bomb
Back in the spring, when I was writing a post about Why Iron Man is The First 21st Century Superhero, I came across this awesome Iron Man trailer remix created by Mike Relm. The remix was so rad, in fact, that when Jon Favreau, the director of Iron Man, brought it to the attention of Paramount and Marvel, they hired Relm to do an official TV spot for the film in his signature style.
Some months later, I saw a beyond-epic 9-minute long video, called “The Apple Tree,” featuring VFX shots, action clips, and dance sequences from like 700 different movies in a mind-scrambling montage scored to The Glitch Mob‘s music. New York Magazine, which got a hold of the video in September, called it “intense,” and, indeed, if by the end of The Apple Tree you don’t experience the overwhelming need to get in your car and drive somewhere immediately with the volume up, the windows down, and the needle in the red the whole way, you’re probably dead. The first time I watched it I literally had to hit pause like every 30 seconds just to catch my breath. But more than simply an adrenalized ad for special effects, The Apple Tree video is really a piece of art, using montage not so much to tell a story but rather to relate sound to motion, each cut creating its own blast of synesthesia. Among the clips used in the video were a handful from the forthcoming Tron: Legacy sequel due out in December, which picks up where the classic 1982 movie left off.
And that’s when I got an idea… I brought this idea to The Glitch Mob, who got Khameleon808, the auteur behind the Apple Tree on board; we picked a track, Animus Vox, off their new album, Drink The Sea, and now, a few months later, I’m suuuuuper excited to announce this new piece of total fucking awesome!
Brace yourselves!
Khameleon808’s Tron: Legacy “REREZZED”
ft. music by The Glitch Mob
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UPDATE:
On November 23rd, Wired.com picked up the video, in an article titled “Fan’s ‘Rerezzed’ Mashup Earns Raves From Tron: Legacy Producer”:
A Tron mashup crafted by an unemployed movie fan made a big impression on Tron: Legacy producer Sean Bailey, who singled out the clip during a recent Los Angeles press conference.
While discussing Tron: Legacy’s viral-marketing campaign, Bailey saluted the trailer made by 31-year-old Josh Prescott. The DIY filmmaker took Daft Punk’s electronica as a stylistic point of departure for his own sequence of beauty shots culled from promotional trailers and music videos for the 3-D sci-fi sequel.
Prescott’s “Rerezzed” clip, which glides along on music by Los Angeles-based trio The Glitch Mob, caught the eye of Bailey and other Tron: Legacy filmmakers.
On November 24th, the video was featured on the official Tron: Legacy Facebook page, and Twitter account.
At the time of this update the video has been viewed over 85,000 times.
For my crimes in originating the idea for the video, Wired.com called me a “social media maven.”
Congrats to all those involved, Khameleon808 and The Glitch Mob!
March 2, 2011 – The cat is out of the bag: Pitchfork reports Walt Disney Records will release a remix album of the Tron:Legacy soundtrack, Tron: Legacy R3CONFIGUR3D on April 5th. The first track on there is The Glitch Mob’s remix of “Derezzed.” In case you’re wondering what that’s gonna be like, I’ve heard it, and it sounds like what this looks like:
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Eskmo music video – Cloudlight
A little (fashionably) late to the party on this one, but just had to mention this really hauntingly beautiful video for the new Eskmo (a.k.a Brendan Angelides) track, Cloudlight (single is out Sept. 6 on Ninja Tune). I’ve known Brendan, and Dugan O’Neal, who directed the video, from my days producing music festivals. Plus, you might recognize the DP handiwork of David Myrick, and the VFX wizardry of Brandon Hirzel (BEMO) from their collaboration on the Glitch Mob “Beyond Monday” video installation earlier this year.
Enjoy!
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Bret Easton Ellis Talks About Transmedia
Image: Jordan Chesney
I wrote a post recently about how Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience, which included the example of Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, the 25-years-later sequel to his debut, Less Than Zero, which creates a sort of closed-circuit loop by bringing both the original novel as well as the 1987 movie based on it into existence within the world of the book. By detailing his characters’ reactions to the original, darkly disturbing novel depicting their lives, and then to its sanitized film adaptation, Ellis effectively creates a narrative world that extends, and can be experienced across these multiple media formats, each one adding its own element to the complete story. There is, currently, an emergence of popular entertainment specifically designed to be transmedia experiences, to jump from platform to platform, and, in the process, intertwine the real world with the fictional, but Ellis, who became a published author when he was still in college, has long maintained that, for him, a novel is just a novel, approached and developed according to the dictates of its own medium. Nevertheless, Ellis has always had a penchant for referencing actual pop culture — movies, music, fashion, celebrities, night clubs, etc. — within his stories. It’s pretty much his trademark. His work has, all along, incorporated multiple other media into its fictional world, and, in turn, become an indelible part of the popular culture on which it comments.
In this fantastic interview on BigThink.com, Ellis muses about the possibilities for the future of fiction in the digital age and touches on what is, essentially, transmedia storytelling. It could, he says, “even possibly re-energize my faith in fiction.”
Have a listen. It’s great stuff:
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Bonus: a fun clip of Ellis talking about schooling his publisher on how to function in the “post-empire“… errr … in the social media age: