This is part of an ARG (alternative reality  game) for J.J. Abrams new movie, Super 8.  If you haven’t participated in an ARG, you might be in for a surprise if you are the sort who likes real world puzzles and mysteries.  Or maybe just in for a surprise to learn this is one way how story telling is starting to turn.

If it weren’t for movieviral.com I would never have, in a million years, figured out how to get the thing to the next clue. So if you are doing this kind of thing on your own, you’d probably mark it down as a #fail.  If I got on to that DOS simulator site, and it never loaded, I would have likely put it down to how badly flash runs on a mac, and see you later.  Had I not know the rules of engagement.

The rules of engagement tell you that there are puppet masters behind the whole experience, and for once we don’t have this simple problem solving model where everything is spoon feed to you.

When you know the rules of engagement of an ARG, you know that there is mystery and that it gets solved with the help of the community.  That part of the engagement is trying to find out anyone else who knows what’s going on.

The strategy behind this is to engage your obsessive, diehard, early-adopter fans, the ones who love to be the first, the ones who are proud of geeking out to whatever content/problem solving, etc. that it involves and love to prove their knowledge and ingenuity.

Because these are the ones who are going to be talking about what they have learned to everyone they know.  Why?  Because it is often central to how they define their identity.  Of course, the trick is to provide an experience so involving that there is actually something to boast about, or something interesting enough to share that will encourage this core to in turn spread the news to anyone who will listen.

It’s an interesting concept as technology is perfectly poised to present this kind of experience in a rich way where the collective works together.  Puzzles, of course, are not for everyone.  Sometimes the question is how can you make transmedia ARGs more accessible when the entire experience is somewhat inaccessible by design.  Not only does the experience revolve around mysteries and solving clues, but that once it is experienced, you can’t really go back to it.

In other words, it’s an experience that is largely dependent on time.  The DOS site was found because a trailer was “leaked”.  Pausing on a frame towards the end of that trailer revealed the words (a clue) that lead to this site.  Once solved, the DOS simulator site loses its mystery, and no longer has any value, (although it’s possible that you may need to return to that site for additional clues and evidence).  When constructing an ARG, one needs to be cognizant of the money needed to develop these clues for this reason.

The trend of being the first to know is not new, of course.  But the culture of social media which values breaking news real time, (twitter, blogs, etc.,) and devalues content of the past in some ways has placed being in the know at a premium, especially for people who publish.  Just like the people you want talking about your transmedia project.  ARGs capitalize on this.

So the energy behind the thing is really the buzz, the exchange of information, and the knowledge that the “puppetmasters” have a plan in mind.   The question of accessibility may be a little misguided. Traditional thinking may lead stakeholder to  insist on making an ARG more accessible so more people can be involved.  There may even be hopes to make ARGs mainstream.  But that is missing the point.  Make a project by concensus, and you risk dumbing it down, and taking away those special properties that lead the early adopters to claim it as their own in the first place.  It’s less remarkable when everyone is doing it.  What you are really doing is activating your biggest advocates to create a word of mouth campaign.  The ARG is merely the mechanism and the reward for doing it.  Of course, it is key is to understand and capture the imagination of the right people.

What I like about ARGs is the transmedia elements that often bring in real life into the experience. At some point someone may need to go into the real world and discover something.  The rest of us will be waiting to hear about it. A transmedia experience like this is a real indication of both acceptance of the fragmentation, and reassembling of content as a real world and story world experience.

Unlike trailers which sometimes oversell a movie, and leave you disappointed about the movie, ideally an ARG, and the surrounding conversation creates the rich story world that will actually enhance the movie experiences, and create a deeper and richer experience for audiences.

For more on the Super 8 ARG, check out Movie Viral posting on May 13, 2010. This ARG is just unfolding, so depending on when you read this, you may want to do a search to find the latest.

In other words, while media funding agencies and other media supporters of crossmedia and transmedia stories are valuing innovation and looking for those requirements to be met, to what degree are we valuing novelty over storytelling?  When we hear legacy and innovation in the same paragraph, I even wonder how much is wishful thinking?  I wonder how much is weighed on something “new” vs. something that truly moves us?

Twitter fever has died down since its peak a year ago, but one of the reasons why I love twitter so much is because I get access to links to article I really want to read.   Of course.  But the other reason why I love twitter is because of micro-fiction.  The 140 characters limitation is a novelty.  But the micro format of micro-fiction reflects those moments of feeling we experience in our day to day lives, or those comments we get from others that catch us unexpectedly.  Often profound, sometimes simply silly, almost always fleeting, and like the hint of dreams when we wake: remarkably human.

People have talked about microfiction as being a new thing (although it’s not really).   But from that aspect, is microfiction simply a novelty that will fall to by way side?  Or did the twitter application simply allow us to discover (or rediscover, really) something about ourselves that feels relevant for today?

To me, this is how we must approach transmedia.  Transmedia should not be a distribution of a narrative property across platforms just because this is what transmedia is supposed to be.  It’s all to easy to say, wow, now that Transmedia producer has been recognized by The Producers Guild of America, shouldn’t we better get on the bandwagon with this cross-media thing and think of how to get our projects into the digital space.  And by golly, let’s do it in a flashy new way.  We have to be on facebook!  We have to be on twitter!  Have to have a mobile app! What’s this Chatroulette I’ve been hearing about?! (careful with that one, kids).  We need to see what is truly right for our audience.  What would be right for us, if we were them?  And even if we personally are not a huge mobile user, for example, we can certainly use our imagination to identify with the experience.

So what works?  Are we really going about telling our story in the right way?    What we know about ourselves may need teasing out.  It may even need new circumstances to force it out.  But I have always said, and will continue to say, that while technology has changed, and behavior has changed, fundamentally humans have not.  We will always love novelty for novelty’s sake.  But we experience the world and re-imagine those experiences.  We think and conceptualize the world in stories.  Pay attention to yourself.  Look inwards.  Answers are there.

“Take a one-eyed filmmaker, an unemployed engineer, and a vision for something that’s never done before and you have yourself EyeBorg Project. Rob Spence and Kosta Grammatis are trying to make history by embedding a video camera and a transmitter in a prosthetic eye. That eye is going in Rob’s eye socket and will record the world from a perspective that’s never been seen before.”

So I went to the EyeBorg site to see what was there. It opens with the short promo that he showed at the pitch. It conveys the humour, and gives you a sense of what a traditional documentary could be.

What I found in short supply from his site, was that so present at the pitch, energetic presence of Rob himself.

As one person tweeted during his pitch, “I think i’m in love with @eyeborg. ” (sorry, A, you can’t take that back now ;). Now it might have had something to do with the fact that Rob was naked for the pitch – or at least he claimed to be – we could only see a head and shoulders shot of him on screen.  But I don’t really know if women are easily impressed by nakedness (the eye-patch maybe). Maybe she was a friend, or even a seed. But for me, I think it was Rob’s character that sold me on the project. Ok, the eye-patch and the headphones might have helped.

But one of the reasons why I thought this was such a good project was because it had that hit of outrageousness that people are drawn to. He has one tag line that got attention during the pitch but since it’s not on the site I won’t share it here. But enough to say that the outrageousness was perfect for the web.

Having worked in digital marketing for several years, and dreading every time I saw “viral” listed as a tactic (I’m sorry, “viral” is not a tactic), I know that its not enough to have a good idea online to attract people to your site. And before you start accusing me of being too marketing centric, think about what you share. We share what is remarkable. If people are talking about it, that’s a pretty good measure of success.  The tag line opened up a world of discussion for me.  Which… um, not sure I can discuss.  Yet.

But the real question is, of course, how can you convey that roller coaster journey of hilarity and seriousness that would be in the EyeBorg documentary in an interactive digital environment? I am not sure I have the answers because, although I remember there being some interesting digitals initiatives pitched, I think the picture I took home from the pitch was of a linear story. And perhaps this is why it didn’t get chosen at ReBoot.

Strangely enough – because I should sure know better – as soon as I hear interactive these days, I think of a game-like environment and someone with a mouse, click, click, clicking, or typing something in, or whatever. I can’t help but think that this clickity-click is the direction that people think we are “supposed” to go in the online space with that word. But I wonder if perhaps that is a early adopter thing when value of innovation and novelty is still very high and therefor required.

In fact, I even think there is tons of potential for a game-like environment for EyeBorg. As a second tier roll out. In other words – I’d think of it the same way as I would something like merchandising. As in – after the fact. After all the tech heads and geeks have been saying, you got to see this! or creating their own avatars, even. As in – forget the game for now.  It won’t tell the story.  Ok, so there are a million other ideas.  But how does this idea live digitally?

This is the big question that is pushing into the lives of documentary filmmakers that have spent years honing their skills crafting the linear story.

For me, now that the internet can deliver such high quality video, I am moving away from the click click journey aspect of online and more towards an experience. This is purely subjective of course, and maybe a result of my television deprivation. And may be at odds with documentary somewhat because we are somewhat suspicious of documentaries that causes us to feel (think manipulation, think propaganda). A balanced view means we push out of the emotional realm and into the intellectual.

Experience doesn’t necessarily exclude interactivity, but I am not sure yet, that interactivity should be at the top level of considerations.  I am not sure yet that interactivity doesn’t impact the illusion of story telling, the same way self-reflexive techniques in film making (seeing the crew, disruptions to the editing etc.) can interfere with the suspension of disbelief we desire to make stories meaningful.

I just think we need to be cognizant of the fact that we have an audience that has access to plenty of other interesting things, including Facebook when they are on your site.  So I don’t have the answers yet.  Its an element I am currently struggling with on my own journey of creation. Perhaps I just have a biased view of what documentary are supposed to be at the moment.

But if it were me directing it, I’d like to see the EyeBorg Project more like David Lynch’s Interview Project.  (without the advertising)

Not exactly like that, because the interface of that site is pretty traditional.  But as soon as you play one of the videos, you hear that record needle, you are in the world of David Lynch.  And then David Lynch introduces the videos, and those simple introductions for me, sets the tone of how to read the video.

If it’s a single destination, I’d like to see a sparseness with the EyeBorg site.  Emblematic videos.  That David Lynch rack focus into a heightened awareness, and for EyeBorg perhaps that twitchy, awkward, I don’t know whether I should laugh or not, can’t quite believe he’s doing it, can’t believe he thinks that way without self-consciousness kind of thing.

I’d like to see a series of videos, or even a vlog with Rob. Without all the traditional explanation that you see on sites, updating you about every last detail, and making the world ordinary. I don’t want ordinariness. I want mystery. I want to see a different world, I want to experience a different reality. I want short videos.   I’d like to see his whole post of Sep 6, 2009 strung out into a series of short films.

If someone feels there should be a behind-the-scenes, let his entourage do it (create an entourage). Let Rob remain a character, a celebrity in his own world. I’d like to see someone else do a blog on him… “Rob had the audacity to bang on my door and wake me up after a measly three hours of sleep…”

But there you go. That’s my vision, not Rob’s.  If I had an eye socket I could stick a camera into, and Rob’s charisma and comfort level with attention, maybe that’s what I would do.

But EyeBorg – I’d like to know why you haven’t set up a Facebook Fan Page??

(we do crowd-sourced spelling around here – if you catch a typo let me know.  thx!)