Wondering how confident MTV is that its Eventful campaign for Savage County will reach 100,000 Demands, thereby leading to a television premiere?
Here’s how confident it is: The network has hired Nina Bargiel, who masterminded the Streamy-winning transmedia experience behind Electric Farm’s Valemont, to create another interactive web-based narrative to accompany the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired slasher film.
Savage County Official Trailer from Savage County on Vimeo.
“The transmedia experience isn’t a full-fledged [Alternate Reality Game], but there are ARG elements,” Bargiel said via chat. “There’s a full narrative if you pay attention, with clues embedded throughout.” The “trailhead” can be found at SavageCountyGazette.com, the small town newspaper for the area where the film’s mayhem takes place. Links there take you to a number of Twitter and Facebook accounts, and clues there will lead to at least one other website within the experience. (Bargiel hinted that the personals section might be key there.)
And this isn’t even “the main course” — that’s waiting on the approval and launch of a Savage County iPhone and iPad app, which will bring with it even more content. “The one scary part of this is that they can take however long they want to approve the iPad app, so I have to be flexible with the story,” Bargiel said. “But that’s why I’m a writer!”
While Bargiel did not work with the MTV New Media team on Valemont, Savage County director and MTV new media producer David Harris said that internally, she had a lot of admirers based on her work on that project, which led to her being approached for the project. And while the project’s only been online for a week, Harris said that the page views have been pretty high so far, and the early traction has come from fans of Nina and her work. “I think it marks a level of sophistication in the audience that they care about who makes this stuff,” he said via phone.
Harris said that the budget for the transmedia experience makes up a significant part of Savage County‘s marketing budget, but that it’s been given license to experiment with the project to see what kind of audience it can capture. “The great thing about the Eventful campaign is that people feel real ownership over the fate of Savage County. If they can also feel ownership of the story then it’s a win-win,” he added. “We’re bringing in people who care about a world more than about a genre.”
The question is — can a website be as scary as a horror film? “Because the audience member structures the pace of the experience, it’s a different kind of scary than the film,” Harris said. “It’s like picking a scab and realizing the wound is much larger than you thought is was. We can’t jump out at you when you see what’s coming, but we can plant something horrible for you to find if you go digging. It’s more like a haunted house than a movie.”
“While you want this to feel REAL, there’s an ethical question about making it too real. There was some stuff that David and I ended up nixing because while it would have been downright terrifying, it also would have resulted in people calling the cops,” Bargiel said.
Harris expects the Eventful campaign to top 100,000 Demands by either the end of this week or next week, thanks to some upcoming email blasts. If that proceeds accordingly, Savage County may premiere during the first week of October, just in time for horror movie season.
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The BBC released the latest version of its iPlayer on Monday, with more social capabilities and integration with more connected TVs, Blu-ray players and other devices. The new design is aimed at making the player more personalized and driving user engagement by allowing users to more easily interact with friends.
The Beeb is releasing the new iPlayer several months after enabling users to access it as part of a public beta in May. In that release, the public broadcaster sought to enable users to make the site their own, surfacing more personalized content so that users don’t have to search too hard to find the videos they want to watch. The new iPlayer also has more a more social feel, connecting with sites like Twitter and Facebook so that users could share what they were watching with friends, and quickly tune into what their friends were watching.
While it’s still early days, the BBC has seen some takeup of the new social features. According to a blog post on the BBC Internet blog, the broadcaster had 18,000 beta users connect their accounts with their Twitter or Facebook profiles. Beta users added more than 700,000 programs to their favorites, with an average of 2.5 favorites a piece. Beta users quickly made up 8 percent of all iPlayer usage, which jumped to 10 percent before the new features were rolled out as a more general release. And beta users watched slightly more programming on the beta site than users of the old iPlayer, with 2.4 programs per day compared to 2.3 for old iPlayer users.
In addition to rolling out social features on the web version of the iPlayer, the BBC announced that it is working with consumer electronics manufacturers to make the application more widely available on connected TVs, Blu-ray players and other devices. At the IFA show last week, the BBC announced that it was partnering with computer manufacturers like Sony to pre-install the iPlayer AIR application on its laptops. The broadcaster is also working on an app for the iPad, after the BBC Trust granting it the ability to release mobile apps.
While the BBC said it would work with CE manufacturers like Toshiba on iPlayer implementations, it is relying on the big-screen iPlayer, which is accessible from devices that have web browsers — such as the Sony PlayStation 3 or the Nintendo Wii.
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Two guys start filming their friend/younger brother as he enters into an online relationship with a young artist and her family — that’s the genesis of the documentary Catfish, which enters wide release on Sept. 17. Given that the movie is mostly shot with handheld digital cameras, when I got the chance to interview “star” Nev Schulman and directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, it made sense to bring along my own Flip cam.
Tagged as “the other Facebook movie,” Catfish is hard to explain but hard to forget, and the twist the film takes makes it hard to discuss it without actually seeing it. In keeping with that trends, in this interview we don’t talk a lot about what the film’s actually about. However, we do discuss the technology that made the film possible, especially the way in which digital storage affected their filmmaking, and why people don’t believe the film’s events really took place.
By the way, if you’re in San Francisco, you can check out a free screening with the NewTeeVee and GigaOM team this Thursday night — just RSVP at Universal’s site.
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