In my last post, I noted that the only truly interesting and innovative website for the new network shows this Fall belongs to Terra Nova. Why?

Well, first, let me offer a quick qualifier to the previous statement. Grimm’s website, while largely uneventful and de rigeur, includes what could become a neat little Production Blog, in which various production staff are offered a small amount of space to explain what they do in general and how that works on Grimm. It could provide yet another example of how paratexts teach production literacy, and are invested in a process of multiplying the number of supposed authorial geniuses working on any show … but they have three posts in one month, so perhaps they ran out of geniuses already? Anyways, go see it here.

Back to Terra Nova, though, while not wholly stepping (yet?) into the realm of being an alternate reality game, it does do a good job of setting up the alternate reality in which the show will be set. Almost buried away on the official webpage is a link to become part of the Eleventh Pilgrimage, and by clicking through, one is situated in the futuristic society from which our Terra Novans will depart. The show follows a “pilgrimage” of people from the future who are escaping that hostile future to try and reestablish the past and make better decisions in order to refashion the future (imagine if Wall-E won over the Terminator and the two started hatching ideas).

As the embedded widget above shows (btw, kudos to them for creating an embeddable widget, not just single videos – they’re clearly keen to design the frame, not just the core, and this blogger appreciates those who realize the importance of frames), the production team clearly have a schedule for the slow yet constant and continuing release of posters and videos. These combine to give us the sense of a world in which population is controlled through rigidly enforced laws about how many children families can have, and in which the environment as a whole seems to be collapsing. Elsewhere on the page, one can find weather reports for various American cities, only to see a mix of what we would see as uncharacteristically cold weather (36 degrees in Helena in early September?), and volatile weather. Amusingly, too, they’ve created new icons for weather, giving the idea of wholly new types of weather that changes daily.

Another link advertises the Rebreather 6000, thereby suggesting that citizens of the future now need extra help just to breathe. And one of the Top Stories on the website further suggests the dismal future, as it notes that “Experts predict that the Sun and Moon are visible in Terra Nova,” implying that they are no longer visible in the future. I’m especially amused by this process of showing without showing – we’re told a lot about the world, yet rarely shown it. Undoubtedly, the small budget of the web designers is largely responsible, but they work with it, to help create a world that the imagination must co-create, and which sounds quite horrible. I imagine that anything a TV (ie: LOW) budget CGI team could design, moreover, would be worse that what I can imagine.

Ostensibly, though, much of the website apparatus directed one to “enter the lottery” to join the Eleventh Pilgrimage to Terra Nova (I use the past tense, since they just changed it, and I find it hard to find this link now. Points off for that). And thus we’re invited to think of ourselves as voyaging to this new land alongside the other newbies. A series of quizzes promise to be released, of which only one was up when I checked the site last. There, its questions are mostly drawn from the Aptitude Test or Psychological Evaluation Test variety, not much like the quizzes discussed in my previous post. They don’t tell us much about the world of Terra Nova at all, nor even about the tone of the show (as does the Secret Circle quiz, by contrast, for instance). But they look a lot like the sorts of questions that Lost’s Dharma Initiative online quiz asked when that ARG was up and running, and hence they posit the futuristic government of Terra Nova as similarly mysterious, ominous, and controlling.

So here’s what intrigues me the most about this: it all sets up rich territory for extratexts, since presumably the series itself (at least, if the previews are to be believed) will be set largely in the past … yet knowing more about the future will help contextualize and explain what’s going on, and that might be largely the province of the extratexts. This strikes me as a wonderful way to create a product that will invite and encourage extratextual engagement, since it gives the showrunners one world to play with, and the website designers and others their own world to create and mould. Thus, I’ll be interested to see whether the division between web (with future) and TV show (with past) holds, and if so, whether this provides an innovative way forward for alternate reality and transmedia storytelling that lets the extratexts “count” without “messing” with the story in the show.

In no particular order, here are 14 of my top 20. I’m banking on having forgotten some biggies, so I’m hoping my readers will jolt my memory, and I’ll fill in the remaining 6 based on those. After the fold …

1. The Lord of the Rings Platinum Series Special Extended Edition DVDs

These are still the gold (platinum?) standard for DVDs, with an hour or more of extra footage per film, completely woven into the film with full post-production goodies, endless design stills, four commentary tracks, and so forth. They really laid down the gauntlet for what counts as a truly great DVD, and they made bonus materials de rigueur, changing the filmic text in the process.

2. The Disney Princess Line

In the 00s, Disney created its own All-Star team, not of basketball or hockey players, and not for Olympic glory, but of “princesses” for mass profit. It’s an intriguing idea: can you imagine if, for instance, Indiana Jones, John McClane, Dirty Harry, the Terminator, and Jackie Chan all teamed up in one product line? Why limit your extratextuals to one show or one character, in other words? And as anyone with a young girl, a friend or family member with a young girl, or any awareness of pop culture, for that matter, knows, the Disney Princesses have been remarkably successful, uniting from their landmark movies to have all sorts of other adventures in other platforms.

3. Where the Wild Things Are’s entire advertising campaign

Many remember the Arcade Fire song from the trailer, but the rest of the trailer was fantastic, as were the posters, all of which wonderfully captured the other-worldly character of the film. In the process, they helped send a swarm of adults to the film.

4. The Beast – The A. I. ARG

Alternate reality games hardly existed as a form before The Beast. But this wasn’t just one of the first; it was particularly impressive.

5. The Martha Stewart Empire

The post-Star Wars Eighties of host-selling televisions shows such as My Little Pony, Transformers, and GI Joe helped to destabilize notions of what the central product in a textual entourage actually was. But this was all for kids. Martha’s legion of craft and cook books, magazines, linens, utensils, and so forth has shown how lucrative an “after-market” merchandise can prove for adults, too. Transmedia is often seen as an older fanboy or younger fangirl domain, but Martha’s supreme success challenges this.

6. The Iron Man trailer

With multiple million views online, this really is a superb trailer, and is surely responsible for a significant portion of the box office draw by this film of what is otherwise a rather B grade Marvel hero played by a star with a rough past (don’t get me wrong: I really like the film, but I think the trailer played a huge role in getting many other viewers and I into the cinema). The proof is in the pudding of The Onion’s clip here.

7. Lord of the Rings’s Requiem for a Dream song (“Lux Aeterna” / “Requiem for a Tower”)

This piece of music didn’t appear in the trilogy, and its natural context was in a film about strung-out people fucking up their lives in all sorts of nasty, disturbing ways … but it became the theme song for the highest yielding trilogy of the decade, and indeed of film history. It’s also appeared in trailers for Avatar, I Am Legend, Assassin’s Creed, and Lost, and in several ads, the NHL All-Stars skill competition, Sky Sports, numerous mashups, and the Moscow State Circus, amongst many other things.

8. Lost’s transmedia

When a representative of a make-believe company in your television show appears on a talk show to respond to the accusations against said company made by a tell-all novel by a fictional character, you’ve got a pretty elaborate storyworld on your hands. When a billboard for a make-believe airline in that show appears in another show (Flash Forward), when fans can take recruiting exams to join a foundation in that show over the summer, and when your reruns appear with pop-up descriptions of past events, you’re doing even more impressive stuff. In its wake, Heroes learned a lot, as did many other fanboy shows.

9. LiveJournal

A key site for lots and lots of fandom. There’ve been complaints aplenty, power struggles, massive missteps in terms of the site’s policies and running, and its history hasn’t been a peaceful one, but so very much discussion of popular media occurs on LiveJournal.

10. Star Wars Videogames

According to the list in Wikipedia, approximately 60 Star Wars games hit the shelves in the last decade, quite a monumental achievement, and a sign of why that galaxy is never really much further away than the local Game Stop. Moreover, the games range in genre from MMORPGs to educational titles to first person shooters to flying games and so on. To understand Star Wars as a film franchise alone is to sorely underestimate the power of the trilogies’ extratextual Force.

11. Enter the Matrix

When the Wachowski Brothers decided to write their Matrix sequels across media, they created a licensed game that wasn’t simply a run-of-the-mill game with character and place names from an established franchise plastered on them. The game became an active site for the storytelling, with original scenes with the film’s cast members, and with references to the action of the game in the Matrix sequels. It was also a relatively fun game

12. The Family Guy DVDs

The successful sale of these DVDs brought the show back from the dead. Now, in the show’s eighth season, and with it regularly rating extremely well in the Nielsen rankings, it may be hard to remember that once upon a time, FOX canceled it. The heft of those DVD sales forced many to reconsider exactly what counts as meaningful sources of revenue for television, and helped in its small way to decenter ratings as the all and end all.

13. American Idol’s Deal with AT & T

How awesome a deal does AT & T have, when every person who wants to vote for American Idol does so by spending money for them. Evil genius. And while I was about to say that the text messages hardly create meaning for the show, thereby falling short of counting as true extraTEXTuals, in truth I’m sure that they help to personalize the show and one’s control over it, amplifying its pitch at being intimately related to all its fans.

14. The Miley Cyrus / Hannah Montana Best of Both Worlds Tour

There’s devious brilliance in how Disney have seemingly learned to control every aspect of their properties, even the living ones. Hannah Montana is case in point, and the concert tour of Miley Cyrus both in and out of Hannah character (though perhaps not out of Miley character? Or is there even a there there to go in and out of?) blazes a path for their future work (witness the Jonas Bros), and helped to affirm the spinoff concert tour as much more than just an oddity.

I’ve waited a bit to post what follows, since it’s still thinking in progress. But, hey, that’s what a blog is, right? So here goes anyways:

All panels circled around issues of monetization in one way or another. Back during the strike, I was frustrated by the degree to which Disney and others suggested that new media were good only for promotion, and that they were barren when it came to revenue generation. This seemed a bad faith bargaining position, to say the least. But at the DMS, new media was again and again talked of as a site for promotion, for brand management, of the shows, yes, but even moreso of Disney, ABC, and ESPN, following a directive from on-high (Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO) that these core brands are what’s being sold. Thus, while I’m not ready to completely drop the bad faith notion, I do see things differently now. I think what we have is a profound shift in business logic, which results in a profound shift in languages used too. Let me explain, and in the process I hope to challenge that new logic somewhat:

If the brands are what Disney thinks it is selling, not the shows per se, then it’s meaningless to make distinctions between new media and those shows. If the “old” job of the network or media conglomeration was to attract viewers to advertisers by producing great shows, then those shows deserved special treatment, and we could easily make distinctions between shows and promotion. But if the “new” model is to regard all elements of the corporation as engaged in the same process of selling the Disney, ABC, and ESPN brands, then everything is promotional. Your station identification snippets exist on the same level as your shows. And so if you’re Disney, and you don’t pay royalties to those who make the station idents, it must seem unreasonable and annoying to have to pay those other “promo” makers, the writers, directors, and actors.

While there’s something to this logic, there’s also something wrong with it. The former first. As you may have gotten by now if you read this blog, I’m a big believer in the creativity in and importance of all sorts of paratexts. I think that designing a good trailer is a creative act. Ditto with movie posters. Even hype campaigns. If it’s done well, it contributes to the text. It doesn’t just sell the text – it makes the text. So I’m sympathetic to the notion that we should or could start to break down the conceptual wall that exists between promotion and creativity, realizing that often the former is an involved part of the latter.

However, precisely because I’m arguing that good paratexts don’t just sell the text, they make it, rather than remove the semblance of creativity from writers, directors, and actors, I’m more comfortable with making creativity a larger umbrella that also covers good trailer makers, good poster designers, etc. In other words, while Iger’s philosophy risks leading naturally to the notion that “creatives” get rolled in with “promotion,” mine is that “promotion” could be rolled in with “creatives.”

There’s a key problem here, though. Above, I wrote of good paratexts. “Bad” paratexts are just promotion. Paratexts can contribute to a text, but they can also contribute nothing. But this can be extended to the shows themselves, if we regard them, as Iger’s philosophy suggests, as promos for the brand. Good shows do contribute to the brand, and sparkle with their creativity. Bad ones don’t: they just sap money and labor, with no good return on investment (for industry dollars or viewer watching hours). Of course, different viewers will disagree on what is good and what is bad, but since I’m not using specifics here (I’m avoiding referring to Cavemen or Big Shots, in other words), that’s by the by. What I’m getting at instead is that it is only good, creative shows and only good, creative paratexts that will help or sell the brand. Reworded, as much as it may seem this way to some observers, it isn’t promotion that helps or sells the brand, it’s creativity. I can open my window right now and yell to all of Sunnyside, Queens that they should watch a certain show, but that doesn’t sell the brand. Only creativity will.

I said I wouldn’t talk specifics, but to break that rule and return to the Digital Media Summit, the panel that examined Lost as a case study was telling. Carlton Cuse noted the challenge to get good content into marketing, and many of their examples suggested that they have succeeded. Lost’s ARGs, evocative promotions, and so forth all impressed the room of largely non-Lost-watchers. Both Lost AND its paratexts sell the ABC brand, since both are good (and if you disagree that they’re good, well that doesn’t hurt my point, since that only shows that they don’t help your notion of the brand).

Going back to the WGA and negotiations in an economy where promotion and creativity are merging moreso than before, good paratexts (frequently produced by non-unionized workers) profoundly challenge the line between the supposed “creatives” and the supposed promotional side of the business. This allows the industry to conflate the two, and see the differential treatment as silly, thereby justifying (in their eyes) lowering creators to the level of promotion. Bad texts similarly (or even especially?) inspire the conflation, since a good paratext/“promo” can do more for the brand than can a bad text. But only good stuff, only creativity, will truly help the brand, and hence it needs to be compensated as such. And only royalties do this, since otherwise you are paying the producers of shows that contribute nothing to your brand the same as you are paying those of the shows that help your brand.

Tired of grading and writing papers? Ever wanted to visit “Portland”? Evidently, the Dharma Initiative is hiring, not only at this year’s Comic-Con, but also at www.dharmawantsyou.com. Pass 17 questions and you can register. The questions are suitably creepy, very befitting of Dharma, as are the odd incantations and hangar-announcer-in-another-language style that accompany the test.

Their boast of wanting “a better tomorrow for everyone” hardly sounds like the Benjamin Linus I’ve come to know. Yet the neat Flash trick of changing the dimensional perspective of their logo is thematically appropriate to the world of Lost. A fun little bit of transmedia, let’s see where it leads.

I’m sitting in a session about branded entertainment that’s using Axe’s Game Killers as a case study, and I find myself in an odd position. They clearly did a fantastic job, very successfully using multiple media and seamlessly moving the text across these various platforms. But the text is about dudes trying to hit on women and getting blocked. So this marks one of the first times when I’ve seen a masterful transmedia presence for something about which I don’t care for one iota. The resounding cynical question in my head: aren’t guys on the prowl usually their own perpetual alternative reality game already? Usually, a good transmedia attempt excites me, but not here. More after the fold…
But another key difference lies in how these people are talking about the text – it’s all “franchise,” “content,” “branded entertainment.” Nobody on the stage seems to have passion about the text, and I haven’t heard anyone speak about it as anything other than a way to sell Axe deodorant.

(Ironic but necessary interjection: as I typed that previous paragraph, an odd question from the floor interjected considerable passion, as one woman burst onto the microphone clearly with no intent other than to pimp her show to the audience [a lot of that happens here, but hey, what’s different from academic conferences?], and she ended by glowing about Axe that: “It smells so good. My boyfriend used to wear that, and he got me into bed everytime.” Wow. Thanks for sharing, but let’s observe the privacy line, please).

I contrast this session to a great session yesterday afternoon with Stephen Andrade, Senior VP of Digital Development and General Mgr. at NBC.com, Patrick Crowe of Xenophile Media, Inc., and Matt Wolf of Double Twenty Productions, about alternate reality games. Despite the topic, this was one of the few sessions I’ve been to here where I felt back in my own reality. Crowe and Wolf actually make ARGs, so from their mouths, I heard words like “story,” and they talked of “connecting with” audiences, not just “monetizing” them, “growing” them. I’ve heard a lot of people in various panels talking about “making the pie bigger,” but Crowe and Wolf were two of the only people who’ve reflected on what that pie tastes like. Even Andrade (the designated suit on the panel) seemed genuinely enthused about transmedia, stories, and storyworlds, and eager to keep the discussion going afterwards.

Fair enough, that at an exec convention, my favored words and frames won’t be used, but Andrade showed that you can talk monetization and fan interest without automatically making the latter a mere tool to achieve the former. As for Crowe and Wolf, each have developed really intriguing and cool ARGs, the former developing ReGenesis, the latter Fallen (see the lead photo). Both won Emmys for them. And both legitimately “made the pie bigger” if by “the pie” we mean the story, the text, and what audiences really get enthused about. An Axe pie, by contrast, sounds a little gross, doesn’t it?

Oddly too, given the WGA strike, these guys were two of the only (North American) writers here this week. Which makes me wonder how long until their work is regarded highly enough to be seen as more than just promotion, branding, franchising, and/or backroom baking, and instead respected as creativity and as storyworld construction. When are alternate reality games seen as real innovation and artistry?