“When I first heard [The Amanda Project] described I immediately thought about Star Wars – people love the characters from Star Wars and extend them outside of the official intergalactic regulatory commission. They write, draw, dress-up as and discuss their favorite characters. Some franchises fear this loss of control and work against it – but how much smarter is it to embrace this fervor? Sure there’s a loss of control, but creators suffer this loss of control as soon as their book hits the shelf or their movie hits the big screen. The Amanda Project embraces this loss of control and allows the story to evolve within the community.
The Amanda Project also challenges our story about the future of publishing in more direct ways. While they’ve innovated and turned the audience on its head, they also have an editorial staff (“who are equally comfortable with traditional and brand-new forms of storytelling”) and a varied distribution model (“we believe that great stories can survive—and thrive—by finding their readers where they are: in bookstores, on websites, on cell phones, and in new media forms that are only just beginning to develop.”). Distribution is messy and always evolving, and there’s room for print, I suspect, well into the future. Even for the next generation.”
We’re big fans of SXSW Interactive here at Fourth Story Media, and this year we thought that in addition to attending the festivities, and sitting on a panel, we’d try out a little storytelling experiment…
Starting this Friday, March 12th at 10 AM central time, we’ll be hosting an interactive storytelling exquisite corpse-esque competition over at The Future of the Story. How it works:
Follow us on Twitter to receive the kickoff sentence for each story (contributed by some of your favorite web storytellers)
Every round, the winning sentence becomes part of the story and it’s time to write the next!
Once each story closes, we’ll be adding it to our story archive where it will be given a title and illustrated by Figure-1. AND (just to make things super extra saucy fun) we’ll be choosing one contributor from each story at random to win a choice of radtastic books (either Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More, or Jeffrey Zeldman’s A Book Apart), AND the original, signed illustration that accompanied their story!
Anyone and everyone is invited to play. We’ll be starting things off easy with two stories on Friday (new lines added approximately every 30 minutes, second story up around 4 PM), and we’ll ramp up from there depending on how feverishly you type. If you’re at SXSW, be sure to look for our buttons inside of your Big Bags, and watch for FSM’s Lisa Holton and Erin Kissane handing out our limited edition totes (both pictured here). Whoohoo! UPDATE: The first story “Bearly Noir” is complete! Read it now. Read all of the finished stories!
“We’ve been waiting for an opportunity to use all these visual tools at our disposal to tell these stories in a way that is efficient, that is multi-dimensional. But, we also think it’s an opportunity to reset the economics for the first time. People may value this experience so much that they pay for it.”
We recommend watching the whole thing (it’s not that long, and there is some sweet music), but at least check out the:
Dual access navigation (sidescroll from page to page, downscroll to dig deeper into a story) – 1:50
My Milk Toof: A story about the adventures of a small tooth named Ickle, and his buddy Lardee told through daily pictures (see photo)
Purefold: Ridley Scott’s new project that will scan social networking sites for online conversations across social media to be “used by brands as the basis for storylines that are fleshed out and rewritten by professional scriptwriters.”
Guillermo Del Toro’s quote about the Story Engine: “In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment – film, television, video, games, and print – melding into a single-platform ’story-engine.’”
Skeleton Creek is Real (from The Land of Elyon’s Patrick Carman) is a ghost story told through both journal entries (published by Scholastic) and short videos hosted at www.skeletoncreekisreal.com. The first book came out February 10th, with a sequel to follow this September.
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.”
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.
Tim Meany has a lengthy (and quite excellent) post about the future of the story that recently blew up our Twitter feed with it’s large shout out to The Amanda Project & Fourth Story Media. An immensely quotable piece, it touches upon everything from the future of publishing, to paid content online, to Star Wars:
We’re big fans of 
