For the last 3 days, from October 31st to November 2, 2011, Witchfactory CEO Lauren Scime Gable and EVP Philip Anthony Gable attended the Storyworld Conference at Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco, CA.
A few key highlights for us at Witchfactory:
On Oct. 31st at 1pm, Lauren pitched Adore at the InProduction Showcase, showing off the property to a room full of new (and some familiar) faces, which spurred quite a bit of interest from producers, publishers, and other media industry folks…
The morning of November 1, 2o11, Jeff Gomez, CEO of Starlight Runner presented Worldbuilding & Mythology, taking us intimately through his own personal journey into transmedia storytelling, simultaneously illustrating several key points about developing engaging stories. (Jeff and Starlight Runner are partnered with us to produce Adore).
On the morning of November 2, Jan Libby and Brian Clark had everyone in the conference room making signs to share their transmedia grievances, tweeting about the experience, shooting photos and taking video to illustrate interactive storytelling. As part of an #occupy trend that’s been going on all over the world (and has been told throughout the web and in live social events, documented and is, in its own right a transmedia phenomenon), the “panelists” had us create a live social event with interactive digital media under the hash tag #occupyTransmedia. A refreshing change after 3 days of panels and presentations – nice to be out of conference chairs – even if we didn’t raise a real fuss that denoted police attention.
Overall, the conference was a great experience, offering a wealth of opportunities to meet with creatives, financiers, technologists, social media writers, and producers of all kinds. Friendships, collaborations, and potential deals were forged. Information was shared. Tweets were made, and social outings ensued each day.
Panel topics ranged from business oriented topics like capturing and using data across platforms, funding transmedia projects, copyright issues, IP sharing models, licensing and other legal caveats to creative production topics – story world building and creating effective mythology, narrative superstructures, social writing and Twitter as a storytelling platform. It was wonderful to have so many transmedia people in one place, discussing the issues around distributing stories across multiple media platforms. In fact, to paraphrase Jeff Gomez, it was nice to be with a group of people who don’t need an explanation. We all just “get it.” However, it’s becoming more and more obvious that its only a matter of time before the rest of the world gets it as well. The concept of transmedia (either by that name or some other) is not going away anytime soon; in fact, it’s apparent that this is just the beginning of a real media revolution.
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