Transmedia: Storytelling for the Digital Age

Mina Hochberg:  "A film’s success depends on perfect casting just as much as a company’s success depends on hiring the right talent. No one understands this better in Hollywood than casting directors" ...

Zachary Wigon: "Hollywood’s appetite for adaptations, remakes and sequels is growing. But the absence of mid-budget films from lists of the world’s highest-grossing films, which has become increasingly conspicuous in recent years, indicates that Hollywood’s model is changing."

Ben Fritz: "As Hollywood's major movie studios try to trim costs every way they can — including layoffs, mergers and slashed expense accounts and producer deals — there's one budget item that heads ever upward: the movies themselves"...

JOSS WHEDON does not consider himself an assertive person. “I’m not fierce,” he said. “I’m grouchy as hell.” But one subject that evokes the passion he has self-diagnosed as crabbiness is the decadent state of contemporary Hollywood entertainment...

That day, as Erwin scanned Reddit, a question caught his eye. It was posed by someone calling themselves The_Quiet_Earth: “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit]?” Erwin clicked on the question and a lively comment thread unfurled.

DRC: A "blow by blow" account of the Hollywood Dream.  It makes a great read.

"James Erwin, 37, [used to work] for a financial services firm in Des Moines, Iowa, writing software manuals."

"For several months, sometimes a year-plus, the studios behind these projects titillate fans with provocative sneak peeks — casting announcements, photos, trailers, alternate reality games — until it’s finally time to deliver the full monty: the movie itself"...

And, for a detailed look at the transmedia marketing campaign for The Hunger Games, visit How ‘Hunger Games’ Built Up Must-See Fever ... you may want to skip straight to page two of the article :)

On January 11, 1991, the then-head of Disney studios, Jeffrey Katzenberg, circulated an incredibly important memo about the state of the movie industry and the products they were making...

They're going to take over. If you want to suss one out, you have to listen for them. Instead of pitching ideas for pilots and features, they're hyping their next iPad app, social media site, mobile game or distribution platform.

[A look at the way technology may save Hollywood.]

My intention is to illustrate what my personal interactions with the studios have taught me about their general view of “transmedia”. (I put it in quotes because, at the time, we weren’t even calling it transmedia.It was just new, interesting avenues to tell stories.)

While you were busy last week debating Walt’s moral break on Breaking Bad, or preparing for the return of The Walking Dead, Hollywood was ushering in the beginning of a brave new era.

Young Americans would rather watch video on demand than go to the cinema to see unadventurous remakes such as Footloose and The Thing...

Adam Davidson: "There must be an easier way to make money. For the cost of “Men in Black 3,” for instance, the studio could have become one of the world’s largest venture-capital funds, thereby owning a piece of hundreds of promising start-ups. Instead, it purchased the rights to a piece of intellectual property, paid a fortune for a big star and has no definitive idea why its movie didn’t make a huge profit. Why is anyone in the film industry?" ...

"There’s a renaissance of sorts underway for videogames on film. Hollywood continues to fail in at every turn in translating our favorite interactive experiences into movies. But where big-budget efforts fall short, the internet prevails."

DRC: This is an interesting article for indie content creators ... no matter where your focus lies.

Making a hit movie on a budget is as hard as Hollywood makes it look. "We're in a business where the solution is almost always to write a check," said Joe Drake, the departing co-chief operating officer of Lionsgate, the studio behind "The Hunger Games."

DRC: A revealing look at the "story first" approach that drove financial decision making on The Hunger Games.

"The absolute last resort is solving something with money," Drake said. "Very often, that turns out to be the best creative solution. It requires you to deal with it in the storytelling."

A wise woman once said, "If they put as much attention to detail into making a movie as they do into marketing a movie, we wouldn't see so much crap coming out of Hollywood."...

[A detailed look at the artwork strategies behind the top 10 blockbuster films of 2011 - great infographic.]

Until it was over, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was one of the best-kept secrets in the history of Washington. Whether the Obama administration later went too far in spilling secrets about the operation to Hollywood is now getting at least a cursory look.

Hollywood has more tricks in its bag than ever with digital 3-D and other new film tools. Yet as the images on screen get bigger and better, movie crowds keep shrinking…

With cratering DVD sales dragging down home-video revenues, Hollywood is eager to find a way to persuade consumers to buy movies instead of renting them.

First Ultraviolet, now Hollywood is contemplating "making the experience of movie-watching different for those who buy discs than for those who rent them".

In 2006, Platinum Studios published the graphic novel "Cowboys & Aliens".  It was promptly optioned by Paramount and Universal.  That's a very long story that I will probably never get into h...