In Episode 9, Greg VidChats with Fourth Wall Studios Chief Designer and Co-founder, Elan Lee about his career path as an Alternate Reality Game Designer, Fourth Wall's innovative experience platform, RIDES, and Elan gives us a glimpse of a few exciting projects that Fourth Wall currently has in development.


On Episode 8, Greg VidChats with Jeff Gomez, Transmedia Specialist and CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment based in New York.  Jeff walks us through his childhood beginnings as a storyteller, how Japanese culture influenced his career and opens the door for you to continue the transmedia conversation with him directly.

Episode 7 skims over the rift between Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines inviting comment on how SWA handled the debacle as a brand and looks forward to a new personalized ad targeting technology for your cable box from NDS in the UK.

Courtesy: Apple, IncFor storytellers, both young and old, this is a new delivery mechanism that requires further study.  Forget about photos, email, calendar and iWork integration for now and let’s just focus on iBooks.  iBooks is a new application that gives Apple an entirely new storefront to sell stuff to us through - this time in print.  It’s slick looking, will easily dip into your credit card information attached to your account and take your money when you find a piece of content that you “absolutely” must have.

Paging through the books themselves looks to be a pleasurable experience as well, but at the end of the day, the pages are just that.  Pages.  With text.  Nothing really revolutionary about that.  Evolutionary, maybe.  But not revolutionary.

Enter Vook. 

If you haven’t heard of Vook yet, you will.  From their website:

Vook is a new innovation in reading that blends a well-written book, high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story.

Imagine paging through a novel as you normally would on any e-reader and then coming to a page that gives you the option to click play on a video from within the book.  The video starts, giving you a significant piece of backstory critical to a character’s development that the reader can access right there without ever having to leave the story.  Add the integration of a web browser into the experience and an entirely new set of options opens up to you.  Think of the additional layers of depth and realism you could add to your storyworlds through the use of video, audio and the web: Fictitious websites and digital documents which add color to the evil corporation highlighted in your story, audio and video podcasts or blog posts from a character in your story who is desperate to get his message out.  Again, all from the comfortable confines of the story itself with the ability to stop reading on your e-reader and pick up where you left off on your mobile phone when you still want to stay engaged with the story but don’t want to pack the reader.

Add GPS integration which opens up the possibility or geo-caching and geo-tagging and suddenly, your audience is out in the real world discovering physical assets strategically placed in every corner of the globe.

Alternate Reality Game designers are already creating digital and physical assets like this which are tied to printed works, advertising campaigns, films, etc.  Imagine J.C. Hutchins’s ground-breaking transmedia storytelling effort, Personal Effects: Dark Art with digital asset integration into the story in addition to the physical ones that were packaged with the hard cover.  The market for companion content grows for films, comics, books, magazines, novellas, even ad campaigns.  If the content is compelling, the fans will always want more.  This device gives Creatives the ability to do just that.

As the iPad and other web-enabled, multi-media e-readers make their way into mainstream society, I believe ARGs, Extended Experiences and Transmedia storytelling campaigns become much more accessible to the masses.  And this benefits us all.

Have a great week.