Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, it’s kaput—or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture.
So begins Scott Brown’s satiric eulogy to the classic Freytag Pyramid model of storytelling in this month’s issue of Wired. With Freytag buried, Brown steps in with a model of his own making – Brown’s Ziggurat (in 4-D!)tm. To “stress-test” the Ziggurat, Brown runs the “classic hero’s journey,” (Die Hard, natch), through both story machines and parses the chunks. While the Freytag view is bor-ing, the Ziggurat’s breakdown includes a pre-movie ARG, Tumblr blog, XBox game, Sprite commercial, and real time tweets. And, to top it all off, the whole thing ends with the Mymaxtm, “a hot Escher mess of narrative possibilities suggested by you, the audience.”
Warner Bros. recently released this great viral video of a faux 1970’s newscast for their highly anticipated film Watchmen. The movie hits theaters on March 4th.
Cowrite is a new, open-source screenwriting competition that is encouraging participants to develop a community created movie script. Every other week the best ten-page script entry selected by the Cowrite judges will be added to the developing story until the screenplay is completed and ready to be sold.
Each submission costs $10, with “packages” available ($40/5 submissions, and $75/11 submissions). Every submission that is chosen and posted will win $2,000, and one winner will receive $5,000 at the end of the process to help rewrite the script and attend the 2009 LA Film Festival.
The premise?
Determined to be a high-level Jason Bourne type operative, an awkward teenager enlists the help of a mysterious, supposed ex-CIA agent in his hometown and finds himself entangled in a dangerous plot that is way over his head.
Hmmmn. The first ten pages will be posted on January 26th.
Penguin UK is sponsoring Bookcamp, a user-generated conference centering around the future of books and “book-like technology” that will examine the role of books as delivery mechanisms for stories, information, and entertainment.
Our plan is for this to be a day of talking and doing – examining the role of the book as an object and as a delivery mechanism for content. We’re inviting authors, typographers, cover designers, printers, technologists, retailers, literary agents, publishers and geeks to come along and consider if and how technology can transform and perhaps improve on The Book. Will print on demand mean the end of the bookshop? Will ebook technology allow everyone to be their own publisher? Will printed books go the way of vinyl and become collectors objects? Are games the new novels? And does format matter or, to paraphrase Berry Gordy, is it what in the groove that counts?
Participants and guests will choose the agenda for the day, breaking into groups to discuss and create. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Director of Digital at Penguin & a listed participant, was behind last year’s We Tell Stories – a storytelling experiment that sought to create stories designed specifically for the internet.
From Jeremy’s post on the Penguin blog today:
It’s quite hard to know what to expect from Bookcamp which is now only a few days away… we’re hoping to see lots of things people have made or hear them discuss what they might like to make in the future. I’m looking forward to following discussions about how we get children hooked on reading, hearing about authors’ fear of the internet and learning why everything on the internet is the opposite of how it is in print! And I’m excited to meet some new people who share an interest in and passion for books and stories and, yes, technology.
