Machinimania

As brand new shows found audiences online, established web series had already proved the viability of the medium as a career launchpad: Broad City, a New York-based comedy about best friends Ilana and Abbi, was picked up by Comedy Central; Children’s Hospital, a kind of nightmarish Scrubs, is now shown on Adult Swim; and Burning Love, a Ben Stiller spoof of The Bachelor, won an Emmy. They all began as online series, in the wild west web, where anything goes.

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Here is some really good one's - click to read more.

Gregory Plotkin, the director of the upcoming Paranormal Activity 5, is working on a newfangled project at a massive special effects studio in the San Fernando Valley.

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Other art forms aren't as well equipped for data-infused criticism. “Art historians already have trouble writing about digital art forms because their usual descriptors don’t work anymore,” says author and media theorist Dr. Charlotte Frost. 

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 Tara Sorensen, Head of Kids Programming at Amazon Studios:

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"We're not asking them to sit in front of the television and tie them to a block of programming [like with standard broadcast television]. They can pause it.

They can rewatch it. It offers up a nice amount of flexibility, so I don't think it's just about keeping them in front of a 'screen' for us."

The Internet and digital filmmaking tools have opened up new possibilities of crowdsourcing material–Life in a Day, Declaration of Interdependence, One Day on Earth, even the interactive Star Wars Uncut–and given new life to the omnibus/anthology film format. The latest project to adopt the form is 50 Kisses, a film created by the London-based Chris Jones and hundreds of collaborators from around the world.

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If you're an active Vine user, you've probably seen some of Dylan Blau's incredible work. The 20-year-old stop-motion animator is famous for making extraordinary CGI-free Vine videos, often with basic material like clay and paper.

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Transmedia Story Stream, the Zynga of ebooks, is a revolutionary platform which blends Facebook video game mechanics with ebooks to allow authors to build, distribute and engage fans in multi-media story worlds. Instead of downloading a static, dead ePub, readers can log onto story worlds that are alive with fans and friendship and earn rewards while reading. Don’t just read a book – play it!

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If television is the brash younger sibling of cinema, then online web series are its screaming newborn grandchildren. As it's a medium still very much in its infancy, a whole host of questions remain unanswered. How long should an episode be? How do you keep fickle viewers coming back for more? Will they ever make any money? Until those answers are found, online filmmakers will continue to explore the possibilities of the nascent form, occasionally with wonderful results. Here are the best examples from 2013.

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Ryan Lewis is one of the co-creators and producers of "Chosen," an original series starring Milo Ventimiglia that airs exclusively in the U.S. on the streaming site Crackle. The show, which is written and directed by Ben Ketai, is a rarity in the digital space outside of Netflix, where comedy and short form still rule the day. "Chosen" is an action series made up of six half-hour episodes that take place at a breakneck pace, with Ventimiglia's character plunged into a mysterious kill-or-be-killed game.

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Adding a social element to AR is another interesting development. For example, AR is being used by a start-up company in San Francisco called CrowdOptic that can recognize which direction a crowd of people have their phones pointing. They can then invite others using that app to see what all those phones are seeing. For example, at a NASCAR race, fans who can’t see the entire track could point their phones at a distant turn and get photos and videos gathered by others who are closer to the action.

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Video game technology and video games are acknowledged by Bafta now, and are rightly getting credit for what they are, which is extraordinary pieces of art.

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“We wanted to think about ‘What is the future of television? Where is the future of television in an on-demand world?’” Chris Jaffe, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, told WIRED while giving a demonstration of the new TV interface’s capabilities. “We also look at this as the first step of a lot of our television innovation to come.”

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Over at TribecaFilm.com, Julia Pugachevsky serves as the Vine correspondent, compiling a weekly round-up of the10 Best Vines of the Week. She regularly profiles expert Vine users. Most recently, she spoke to Frank Danna, whose stop motion experiments on Vine have gotten him work making stop motion Vines for brands.

Vine and Instagram have provided unique platforms for users to showcase their creative ability. While a few seconds with a cellphone camera seems very limiting as a way to share videos, users continue to astound these social networking communities with their unique and clever approaches.

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 Each app’s features help craft an original, engaging story and the way people use those features will define the other metrics under debate.

I just love the way these guys are thinking :

“It’s such a wild, wooly world out there in online video,” says Hullum. “We don’t really think of competition in that capacity.” He describes an employee of the company they found through videos he’d made that were similar to the ones Rooster Teeth makes. “We could have been, like, Oh, this guy’s trying to do what we’re doing,” he says in a mock-disappointed voice. “Instead, we said, Oh, this guy’s doing cool stuff like we do! Let’s talk to him! And he’s a great guy to have on the team.”

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Social networks - we love them and we hate them. We have our favorite and most of us need them as a part of our life in 2013 - 

Check this Info graphic - it's one of the good ones :-)

Interesting consept - i need to find out more :-)

With Vine, you have six seconds to really impress a viewer. Thankfully, six seconds is more than enough time to dazzle someone, tell a story or share a laugh. These tips range from technical best practices to creative guidelines.

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Films, like many things in life, come in all shapes and sizes. Tribeca Film Festival gave new meaning to short films this year, however, when it challenged people to create six-second films using Twitter's Vine app.

From the comments: 

"A great lay of the land. And in doing so, this points out in bright neon letters what is wrong with the vast majority of web series today" -

Very inspiring reading -

Comic book geeks: Marvel loves you. But it wants to expand its social circle. Don't worry. Whether it's debuting Wolverine's Japanese adventures or adding adaptive sound to your reading experience, the company will always hold you diehards dear. But at this year’s SXSW Interactive festival, Marvel unveiled five digital initiatives to woo non-fans, too.

Interesting - Click the headline for the full story.