Ted Hope, Producer & Co-Founder of This is that corporation, was the first speaker at today’s conference. He talked about how storytelling is changing. Here is a summary of his main points.

Cinema in its current concept is no longer the complete and representative art form for the world which we inhabit. It is not a location-centric passive experience to us any more, as this is so different to the media experiences we have in our everyday lives. People are embracing the fact that they are both audiences and creators now.

We can now therefore define a new art form that can also become a new business model. No matter what it’s gonna be called (cross-media, cross-platform), it will be founded on transparency and access.

We all have to participate in this new way of cinema. Cinema is a process, not just the narrative, it is the experience that resonates and carries on way after you have left the theatre. It’s a dialogue between audience and content. Those who are historically involved in distribution have inhibited the content producers’ access to distribution, but limited them to production. There has been a demarcation between markting and content, and that is now changing, as both of them are linked – storytelling-wise! There needs to be a dialogue between production and marketing, art and commerce, which will benefit the product (the content), the audience and the distribution of said content.

By extending the narrative into what was once called the marketing of business, cinema goes further than it used to, it can become a bigger influence on our lives, across multi-platforms and multi-media, and by changing a monologue to a dialogue with our audiences  we earn their trust and support in return.

For our art form and our business to reflect the world we are living in we need to experiment to find a new business model, we have to erase the lines between art and commerce, content and marketing. Ted Hope doesn’t have an answer yet, but he thinks it will involve these pillars:

Content and production

Discovery

Promotion

Participation

Presentation

When it comes to content and its creation, the narrative needs to be extended, from features to add-ons that will enable an ongoing conversation in a whole story world. Opening up the narrative is important, as audiences want to engage in different time(zones), media and ways.

The discovery process is important, and this needs to be expanded from blogs and Social Networks to other forums, so we can provide our audience with a more proper contact point for appreciation. We can help them understand how the work we do now fits into culture and facilitates cultural change.

Gaming, and how the players can interact in a gaming world, are also becoming more important. And we have to provide interaction on multiple levels – ask ourselves when coming up with the story: what could be a great application or widget? We need to design characters that can easily travel into other creator’s hands. Spreadibility is the key word.

Finally, content creators are not just creators but enablers. Building a fanbase of (extended) friends and family by sharing information openly about the creative process will help promote the content greatly. And filmmakers have to work to keep experiences alive much longer than we used to.

I think it was a solid first lecture for the day, hopefully setting the tone for the day. Though not news to me, I think it is inspiring to content creators who are now diving into the digital sphere, and are creating projects right now.

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