Deep Media

B-Positive? Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan Have Something Special in Mind for You

Department of Human Management: "Meet B Positive Singles"

If the term Department of Human Management gives you a bit of a chill, check out the Web site. At departmentofhumanmanagement.org, you will find information on such topics as How To Live ("your guide to living, connecting, and interacting with our new environmental factors") and an About Us page that talks about creating "a support system for citizens to uphold our new status quo." A hint as to what that status quo involves comes from the bright red badge at the bottom of the page: "Give Blood Every 5 Days." Another hint comes from the crawl at the top: "Ignore the lies and propaganda of The Strain Trilogy." 

The Strain Trilogy, of course, is the horror series written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, the final volume of which was published last week. It's all about vampires, but not of the Robert Pattinson variety. The Strain vampires are about as hunky as the "prawns" in Neill Blomkamp's  District 9. They are sexless creatures with no hair, atrophied facial features, and a stinger under the tongue that has a range of six feet. The stinger feeds them, and the stinger infects you. Capillary worms enter the bloodstream, and in 24 hours a perfectly normal human becomes an undead vampire drone. 

The runaway epidemic introduced in The Strain (volume one of the trilogy) led to total disaster in last year's The Fall. By the time we get to The Night Eternal, which completes the trilogy, Earth has been consumed by a nuclear holocaust that blots out the sun. A vampire overlord rules the darkened planet. Life for the surviving humans has turned, well, grim. The Department of Human Management is there to ease the way. Its motto: "Health. Cooperation. Acceptance."

Created by Mirada, the studio del Toro opened last year with Mathew Cullen and Javier Jiminez of the LA ad shop Motion Theory and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, the DHS site takes the fiction a bit farther than the books do. If humans were essentially reduced to cattle for the vampires to feed on, how would that work? The concept was developed by Andrew Merkin, who joined Mirada earlier this year after getting a master's from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. "I was pushing hard to focus on the world-building aspect," he says. "You can imagine what this means, but you're not quite sure." 

It turns out to mean a lot of blood donation—too much, in fact. The average adult has about 10 pints of blood. The human body requires approximately 30 to 40 days to fully replace a lost pint. A person begins to go into shock at the loss of three pints or so and cardiac arrest at the loss of more than four. A pint every five days? You do the math. 

But DHS is not all doom and gloom. The site likes to focus on the bright side of human management, with cheery posters and useful guides like "6 Tips for a Healthy Body" and "What To Do During Your 2 Hours of Daylight." Personally, I like the video testimonials—like "Meet B Positive Singles," which introduces us to a healthy young couple with an extra-tasty blood type. 

"B-positive is the Kobe beef of blood types," Merkin explains. "The one that vampires love the most." 

So the young couple are breeders. But hey—that's all right. They have lots of sex, and they get better food rations to boot. "I'm proud to look forward to a healthy, reproductive future," Matthew declares. Katie looks at him adoringly, even as she's fighting back tears. Yes, it really is too bad the babies will be vampire food. 

From the moment H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, much of the best science fiction has been about humans being overpowered by a pitiless, alien force—a force that ends up treating us more or less the way we treat animals. This provides dependable fodder for dramatic action and is subject to endless variations. But it's also an intriguing thought experiment, propelled I suppose by equal parts guilt and fear. (Wells said The War of the Worlds—in which invading Martians overwhelm the mighty British military and terrorize Victorian London—was sparked by a conversation he had with his brother about the subjugation of Tasmania by colonialist forces.) An important subtheme in many such stories is what use the humans are put to after their inevitable subjugation. In The Matrix, their bodies provide an energy source. In The Strain Trilogy, it's nourishment. 

The DHM site is one of the first projects to emerge from Mirada, following Chris Milk's RO.ME—an experimental music video produced by @Radical Media, with Mirada providing 3-D animation and conceptual design—and IBM's THINK exhibit, an interactive experience in New York's Lincoln Center. As for del Toro, he's shooting Pacific Rim, his robots-v.-monsters film, which is set to open next May 10. Last summer at Comic-Con, he promised "to film the finest fucking monsters ever committed to film"—and also "to create the greatest fucking robots ever committed to film.” Best not to donate too much blood if you want to see it.  

Why Transmedia Is like a Walk in Patagonia

A couple of years ago I found myself in a small town in Patagonia called San Martín de los Andes. The town lies in a fold in the mountains, but a short, steep hike through the woods gets you to an extraordinary vista point—the dry, scrubby buttes of the Patagonian steppes in one direction, the blue waters of Lake Lácar and the snowcapped peaks of the Andes in the other. But as with much of Patagonia, the journey is every bit as remarkable as the destination. In this case it meant following a seemingly random network of trails that wend their way up the ridge. About halfway up I encountered the trails' author—a half-dozen head of cattle. There was no "right" path, for the cattle any more than for the people. Instead, the paths all converged at a dusty spot near the summit where three old women sat on the porch of a cabin. As I approached, one of the women stood up and asked for a peso. I paid the toll and walked past a ramshackle house sporting a large satellite dish to the lookout, where I got to see a condor from above. Choose your own adventure indeed. 

I'm reminded of that walk whenever somebody mentions transmedia, the seemingly radical new approach to narrative that was mapped out several years ago by Henry Jenkins, then a professor of media studies at MIT and now Provost's Professor at USC Annenberg. Henry once defined transmedia in his blog as "integral elements of a fiction . . . dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience." (He didn't mention the satellite dish or the three old women and their pay wall, but they're part of nearly any entertainment experience these days.) Earlier this month, in a post called Transmedia 202, he attempted to explain how the trails work and, by the way, defend them against those who would try to pave and straighten them and/or get obsessed with signage. It's an important read. 

(For the record, the term "deep media," which I borrowed from Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown and others, overlaps considerably with Henry's concept of transmedia, the main difference being that one places the emphasis on the goal—immersiveness—while the other focuses more on process. For a more long-winded explanation, see the interview Henry conducted with me earlier this year. As I said then, I wouldn't be surprised if both terms disappeared once this form of storytelling became ubiquitous and therefore taken for granted. Does anybody still say "talkies"?) 

An idea is a fragile thing. And at this point, the idea that we're on the cusp of a new form of storytelling seems to have reached that weird place where much of the world still hasn't accepted it but many of those who have are too busy squabbling over the details to actually focus on doing it. As Nick DeMartino, formerly of the American Film Institute, noted in a recent post at Tribeca Film's Future of Film blog, the discussion devolved into an all-out flame war in the wake of the "New Worlds" panel at this year's SXSW Interactive conference. It was against this backdrop that Henry weighed in.

The most basic distinction he makes is between adapting a story from one entertainment medium to another—something Hollywood has been doing routinely for decades—and extending a story into other media. Borrowing a line from ngmoco founder Neil Young, he calls the point of this kind of story-extension "additive comprehension." As an example he cites Falling Skies, the summer sci-fi series that Steven Spielberg produced for TNT—an alien-invasion story that echoes the H.G. Wells novel War of the Worlds, which Spielberg adapted for the movies several years ago. Explaining the difference between extending and adapting, Henry notes: 

The Falling Skies graphic novel is a prequel which tells us about the disappearance of the middle brother [during the invasion] and thus helps to provide insights into the motives of the characters on the Turner television series. In this case, additive comprehension takes the form of back story, but the same graphic novel also helps us to better understand the organization of the resistance movement, which we can see as part of a world-building process. Most transmedia content serves one or more of the following functions:

• Offers backstory
• Maps the World
• Offers us other character's perspectives on the action
• Deepens audience engagement.

Another point Henry makes is that there's nothing all that new about this stuff. Falling Skies and its ilk were prefigured, he notes, by the works of Walt Disney, J.R.R. Tolkien, and L. Frank Baum, who extended his 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into various other media, including a stage musical (later adapted into the Judy Garland movie by MGM) and a slide show he presented on the lecture circuit. 

I'm as fascinated by early precedents as Henry is. But as significant as they are, I think the critical factor at work today is technology—both the influence of the Internet and the proliferation of screens (computer, television, smartphone, tablet, etc.) that access it. The historical precedent shows us that the impulse to tell stories across different media isn't new. But it's the proliferation of devices that deliver a variety of different media—audio, video, text—that makes it feel increasingly natural. 

It used to be that every medium was tied to a specific device. Television was something you watched on TV; radio was something you listened to on the radio; a movie was something you went to the movies to see. No longer. Transmedia is what happens when media become uncoupled from the devices that were invented to deliver them. It's an organic and inevitable response to the world we live in. Like, how else would you tell a story? 

Not that we're really there yet. That's the problem with the definition debate. To my mind, being free to walk different paths is key to the whole thing. To try to channel an emerging form of narrative into a single definition is not just a mistake; it's antithetical to the spirit of the time. "Many people are looking for simple formulas and a one-size-fits-all definition, trying to delimit what transmedia is," Henry writes. That's not what we need; what we need is to be open to experimentation and innovation: 

There is no transmedia formula. Transmedia refers to a set of choices made about the best approach to tell a particular story to a particular audience in a particular context depending on the particular resources available to particular producers. The more we expand the definition, the richer the range of options available to us can be. 

From PotterWar to Pottermore: The Extraordinary Ten-Year Evolution of Harry Potter's World

IT ALL ENDS JULY 15: Seldom has a marketing slogan offered such direct insight into the Hollywood psyche. July 15 was of course the day Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 opened, concluding a decade of Potter movies with, as it turned out, an enormous bang—$481 million in weekend ticket sales worldwide, eclipsing all box-office records and leaving studio executives gasping for adjectives. Clearly the slogan worked. But the end of a $7 billion movie franchise for Warner Bros. was hardly the end for fans. In fact, you could just as well say "It all begins July 31"—because that's the day fans can register for Pottermore, the aptly named participatory Web site that J.K. Rowling announced last month. 

When Rowling appeared at her press conference at the Victoria & Albert Museum, a Hogwartsian pile in West London, the big news was not, as generally reported, her decision to finally make the novels available as e-books. Yes, Rowling had long been the biggest holdout against electronic publishing, and yes, her decision to both publish and sell the books herself was a break with the way the industry does business. But a challenge to existing business models, however radical, is minor compared to a wholesale rethinking of the art of fiction. And in announcing Pottermore, that's what Rowling promised—an acknowledgment that the Internet makes possible an entirely new form of narrative, one that readers can not only consume but explore and build upon. 

What made Pottermore even more remarkable was its timing. Ten years ago, with the first of the Potter movies a few months from being released, the world of Potter fandom was riven by strife. The PotterWar—thus yclept by a London city councilman who leapt into the fray—pitted Warner Bros. against a citizen's army of Web-savvy kids. The movie studio was eager to protect the trademarks it had bought from Rowling; the kids were outraged that a giant corporation was threatening them with legal action for using the Potter name on Web sites they'd set up to celebrate the story. In the end, it was no contest: As Heather Lawver, the 16-year-old leader of the insurrection, told Henry Jenkins for his book Convergence Culture, "They underestimated how interconnected our fandom was." By the time the hapless company beat a retreat, it was being excoriated from British pulpits for placing children in its legal crosshairs.  

That was in 2001. This year, with the eighth and final movie about to open, Rowling threw open the doors, digitally speaking, and invited the fandom inside. It's not yet entirely clear what they'll find when they get there, since Pottermore won't open until the end of the month, and then only for a select 1 million fans; the rest of the world won't be let in until October, when the e-books go on sale. But Rowling's intent is clear. "It's the same story, with a few crucial additions," she says of Pottermore in an introductory video on the site. "The most important one is you. Just as the experience of reading requires that the imaginations of the author and the reader work together to create the story, so Pottermore will be built in part by you, the reader."

This isn't the first time Rowling has produced artifacts from the Harry Potter universe. In 2001 she published Quidditch Through the Ages, purportedly a book from the Hogwarts library, as well as a "textbook" called Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. More recently she came out with The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a children's book mentioned in the final novel. But for an author so tech-averse she wrote her novels out in longhand, Pottermore is still an extraordinary gesture. Especially given that Neil Blair, her literary agent, is the same Neil Blair who somewhat huffily represented Warner in Europe during the PotterWar. 

Despite its initially ham-handed response to the fans, Warner has done a remarkable job of shepherding the Potter saga over the years. The latest picture, with its extraordinary performances by Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort and Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, is no exception. As Rowling now takes the story into uncharted territory, I'm reminded of something the literary critic Robert McCrum wrote last spring in The Observer: When storytelling itself can evolve, "you know the medium in which you work is a living thing." What we're watching now is as revealing as anything we've seen onscreen—the storytellers themselves growing up in tandem with their characters.  

"That's Brisk, Baby!" (Part 2): What Needs To Happen for Branded Content To Work

Everywhere I go this year, I seem to run into a branded content discussion. From DIY Days in New York, to the “Brisk: Machete” panel I did with Robert Rodriguez and Danny Trejo at SXSW interactive, to the Branded Content Salon I spoke at at LBi London, to Morgan Spurlock’s POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold at Hot Docs and Sheffield, the idea that brands can commission entertainment instead of merely advertising in it keeps popping up. The subject is not entirely new, of course: the term “advertainment” was coined more than a decade ago. It’s the momentum that's changing—picking up in large part because (Spurlock’s clever satire notwithstanding) producers are embracing it as readily as marketers. 

The reasons why started to become apparent when two of America's most prolific and respected indie film producers, Ted Hope and Christine Vachon, sat down for a "fireside chat" at DIY Days in March. These are the people behind such ground-breaking and uncompromising films of the '90s and '00s as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Velvet Goldmine, and Boys Don't Cry (Vachon) and Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm, The Laramie Project, and Human Nature (Hope). So it was instructive to hear them speaking unabashedly about how attitudes toward commercialism have evolved in 20 years.

A big factor in that evolution has been economics. As Vachon pointed out, the '90s were the heyday of international co-productions: The path to success was to get a script, wrangle some talent, and cut a lot of deals at Cannes. But eventually, that started to dry up--and then the recession hit. Attitudes changed accordingly. You can view this with cynicism, of course, but you can just as readily argue that artists, who live like the rest of us in a relentlessly commercial society, began demonstrating a refreshing lack of hypocrisy about it. As Hope said, "Who does it benefit to draw a line between art and commerce, marketing and content?" Ultimately, it's all storytelling. 

The obvious question is, does the branding sway the storytelling? So I raised it when Ted and I met for a drink a few weeks later. His answer was, sure--but so does everything else. He offered American Splendor, his 2003 biopic of comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, as an example: "I said, I'm going to make a film that's going to win at Sundance." (It did, and the film critics' award at Cannes as well.) "It gave me a higher awareness of market-based writing." 

But it's not just artists whose attitudes have evolved; it's also corporate marketers, a point Rodriguez made at SXSW. The panel--staged by PepsiCo, the corporate entity behind Brisk Iced Tea, at its Plugged-In Stage at the Austin Convention Center--paired Rodriguez and Trejo, the Latino star of last year's Machete, with Brisk brand manager Jamal Henderson and Ian Kovalik of the San Francisco ad shop Mekanism. (PepsiCo gets its own branded space at SXSW because it's a "super sponsor" of the festival.) Machete, introduced years earlier in a fake trailer that appeared in the Rodriguez/Tarantino double feature Grindhouse, was a hyperviolent actioner in the B-movie tradition--not exactly the sort of thing you'd think would inspire a corporate marketing campaign. Yet PepsiCo was happy to take the leap. A movie with an Hispanic star and a cult following among twenty-somethings, for a "value brand" (99 cents a liter) that hadn't advertised in nearly a decade? "From a brand perspective, it was divine intervention almost," Henderson told me before we sat down for the discussion. "We were trying to get back into the popular culture, and this seemed the way to do it." 

The success of their effort was apparent as soon as we ran the spot. People in the room, most of whom must have watched it a half-dozen times or more already, started whooping with delight the instant the reel began. The 60-second video is essentially a parody of a parody--a claymation version of Trejo as Machete, a Mexican federale who wields a wicked-looking pair of knives while yelling "Negotiate! Negotiate! Negotiate!" It's also very, very funny. Rodriguez, who had made stop-motion movies as a kid, not only gave his okay for the spot, he actually tweeted about it when it came out: 

Thank you @mekanism for making that killer Machete Lipton Brisk commercial. Fantastic work! Stop Motion is still king.
Updated via web at Thursday, January 06, 2011 11:06 PM

Meanwhile, Rodriguez was making some branded content of his own--a six-minute video for Nike's Kobe Bryant Collection, with Bryant in the starring role and cameos from Trejo, Bruce Willis, and Kanye West. The video was presented as a mini-movie--"Kobe Bryant Is The Black Mamba"--and advertised as such, both in 30-second spots and in a giant billboard on the Sunset Strip. Anticipating Spurlock's tongue-in-cheek approach to product placement by several months, Rodriguez framed the video as a director's pitch to the star/brand manager. Sample dialogue: 

BRYANT

So. Are there gonna be a lot of close-ups on the shoes?

RODRIGUEZ

Product placement gives us a bigger budget. Bigger budget, bigger explosions. 

"I don't usually do ads," Rodriguez said during the discussion. "I've done a couple of European ones with George Clooney, he's a friend of mine--they're more cutting-edge over there, you can do a little more different stuff. . . . And then this one came up because they said you can do whatever you want. So when I talked to Kobe I said, Okay, let's do something that deals with legends and icons--you know, you're a legend, Kanye in the music world is a legend, Bruce Willis is a legend, Trejo is a legend, the brand Nike has its own legendary status. So I wanted to do something that kind of put all that together." 

"They're actually cool shoes," Trejo said, putting his right foot forward to show off his swoosh. 

"Celebrities don't do commercials here because it's just not cool," Rodriguez continued. "But you make it cool, they'll show up. Nike couldn't believe it." 

"That thing was so cool, people were actually waiting for the movie," Trejo added. "People were asking me, Are they gonna do that as a movie?" 

Obviously, not every bit of branded entertainment is going to be stuffed with legends. But it can still be fun, as Philips demonstrated with the Nigel & Victoria Web series it showed off at LBi London. Created for the Dutch electronics giant by Hoot Comedy, a London shop that specializes in, yes, branded content, Nigel & Victoria is another arched-eyebrow production that seeks to tout its brand and mock it too. What makes it particularly intriguing is the way the whole series acts as a none-too-veiled metaphor for the increasingly if sometimes awkwardly intimate relationship between brand and content. 

The series focuses on Nigel, the handsome young "Philips guy" who's overseeing the production of some commercials for the company's consumer line, and Victoria, the comely blond actress who's been hired to star in them. Nigel has developed sort of a thing for content--er, Victoria--and his bumbling courtship seems destined to go on indefinitely, or at least until the end of season one. (Season two, which began two weeks ago, takes a different tack.) Will Nigel win Victoria's heart? Will his clumsiness turn her off completely, or can he charm his way into her affections? Will they ever make squalling, red-faced little brand-content babies? Stay tuned for the next episode. 

If there's a lesson in Nigel's courtship of Victoria, or in Rodriguez's pitch to Kobe, or in Machete's exploits for Brisk, it's that you can never bullshit the viewer. Forget the sales pitch: Nobody cares any more. The litmus test, the thing brand managers have to accept if they're to survive in this cool new world, is that branded entertainment has to work as entertainment if it's to work at all. Don't take your brand too seriously. Go with your gut, assuming you have one. Otherwise, you're just making television spots for viewers to TiVo through. 

Robert Rodriguez, Danny Trejo, PepsiCo, and Machete: "That's Brisk, Baby!" (Part 1)

"Creativity, Celebrity and Brand Strategy: A Brisk Discussion of Ozzy and Machete" takes place at 4:30 PM Monday at the Austin Convention Center's PepsiCo Plugged-In Stage. 

What happens when you blur the line between advertising and entertainment? In the case of "Brisk Machete," a minute-long stop-motion video in which Danny Trejo reprises his role in Robert Rodriguez's Machete on behalf of Brisk Iced Tea, something very funny indeed.

On Monday afternoon at SXSW I'll be talking about how it went down with Trejo, Rodriguez, Jamal Henderson of PepsiCo, and Ian Kovalik of Mekanism. 

The "Brisk Machete" video, which first appeared on YouTube in late December, kicked off a campaign for Lipton Brisk iced tea—a brand that last advertised ten years ago in a still-remembered stop-motion campaign. Last summer, with sales already rising dramatically, the brand managers at PepsiCo decided to kick things up a notch. They went to Mekanism, a San Francisco-based creative agency well known for its animation work, with the idea of reviving the stop-motion campaign.

Henderson had just been to the downtown LA premiere of Machete, where he saw Trejo ride up on his chopper at the head of low-rider procession. So when Mekanism suggested  a Machete take-off to launch the Brisk campaign, it seemed like serendipity. 

Trejo was game, and Rodriguez gave the project his blessing. But as Trejo eventually discovered, there are responsibilities that come with being a spokesLatinsuperhero. The other day he was outside a 7-11 in the San Ferdando Valley when a little girl walked by with her mom. When the girl realized he was drinking a Pepsi, she did a double-take and declared in the most gravelly voice she could manage, "That's not Brisk, baby!" 

The Legacy of TRON: Legacy: Theme Parks, ARGs, and the Ever-Shifting Art of Immersion

A ScreenBurn presentation at SXSW Interactive, "The Art of Immersion: TRON" takes place at 5 PM Sunday in Room 12AB at the Austin Convention Center.

Decades before anyone thought to create an alternate reality game, Walt Disney invented the theme park. Disneyland and its successors—Walt Disney World, Universal Studios Hollywood, and their clones—were conceived as narrative architecture, purpose-built to provide an immersive entertainment experience. Nowadays, you don't need to walk through Sleeping Beauty's Castle or go on Jurassic Park: The Ride to find yourself in a real-life simulation of a fictional narrative. But the theme-park experience still appeals to plenty of people, as the lines at Disneyland attest.

Now, with ElecTRONica at Disney California Adventure, there's an alternate reality experience inside a theme park. An outgrowth of the Flynn Lives alternate reality game that played out at Comic-Con and elsewhere in the 18 months leading up to the release of TRON: Legacy, ElecTRONica is a movie transmuted into an ARG reborn as a theme-park attraction.

So, how does that work again? On Sunday afternoon at 5:00, I'll be exploring this question at SXSW with Justin Springer, coproducer of TRON: Legacy; Susan Bonds, CEO of 42 Entertainment and producer of Flynn Lives; and Doug McIntyre, director of show development and production at Disneyland. 

Flynn Lives—which last night became the first ARG to receive a Thea award, given out by the Themed Entertainment Association—took the sucked-inside-a-computer conceit of TRON to Comic-Con and brought it to life. So does ElecTRONica. DJs, dance crews, lasers, a re-creation of Flynn's Arcade (lots of '80s arcade games) and the End of Line Club (for programs, but now for humans too)—this is a long way from E.T. Adventure at Universal Hollywood. 

Like movies themselves, conventional theme-park rides were the product of an industrial mindset—they were personal experiences stamped out by the million, day after day. This was Hollywood's idea of participatory entertainment: You'd get on a tram or a boat, bolt yourself in, and spend the next few minutes being shuttled through a building where you'd be terrorized by dinosaurs, fly into space with E.T., or whatever. There was no room for variation, and certainly no way for the audience to have any say in what happened. 

Still, it was a first-hand, real-time experience, at a time when there was no other means of creating one. So it’s not entirely a coincidence that 42’s president spent years engineering such rides.

After an early stint at Walt Disney World and several years at Lockheed Martin's famed Skunk Works, Bonds returned to Disney as a creative director in its Imagineering group, building theme park rides like Indiana Jones Adventure, which opened in 1995. “People want to be involved in stories,” she told me. “And Disneyland is about bringing stories to life.”

But you could go only so far. Bonds came up against the limitations of theme park rides when she was working on the Mission: SPACE ride at Disney World. She wanted to create a ride with multiple endings because, as she put it, “the generation today wants to be able to control what happens.” But how could you do multiple endings on a theme park ride and still achieve a throughput rate of 1,600 people per hour? The whole thing was frustrating. A few years later she landed at 42. 

In an odd way, the new TRON and ElecTRONica close the loop on the Disney legacy. When the original TRON was released, in 1982, it seemed utterly alien to Disney and what it stood for. At the time, the company was struggling to find its place in the world; Walt had died in 1966, but "What would Walt do?" was still the mantra in the executive suite. That such a futuristic film, not to mention a computer-animated one, got made at Disney back then was a fluke of the first order. (The studio brass wasted no time getting rid of Tim Burton and John Lasseter when they surfaced on the lot in the same period.) Yet Disney himself was both a serious techie—he pushed the invention of Audio-Animatronics, for example—and a pioneer of the alternate reality experience, in the form of Sleeping Beauty's Castle and Main Street USA. It's a measure of how far Disney has come since that it would put a TRON experience at the center of Disney California Adventure.

The Imaginarium of Guillermo del Toro

 
It's always a little hard trying to keep up with Guillermo del Toro, but the past couple of weeks have been tougher than usual. First he opened a studio to produce stories that, as one of his partners put it, "fuse together" the disciplines of movie, video game, and Web production. Then he announced a partnership with THQ, the game publisher, to create a trilogy of horror games called inSANE. All this while prepping The Haunted Mansion for Disney and All the Mountains of Madness for Universal and Trollhunters for DreamWorks Animation, finishing part three of his Strain trilogy with Chuck Hogan, and having to explain why he pulled out of directing The Hobbit in May after two years of work and endless production delays.

Of all these projects, it's Mirada, the Los Angeles-based "idea factory" that opened its doors December 9, that's the most tantalizing. An accomplished filmmaker who has made no secret of his love for video games, del Toro now seeks to transcend the limitations of movie studios and game studios alike. Mirada is a four-way partnership with his longtime cinematographer Guillermo Navarro and with Mathew Cullen and Javier Jimenez of the innovative LA ad shop Motion Theory. "We are creating a storytelling engine [note the game reference] in the form of a company -- an imaginarium, where we are free to explore the practical possibilities of transmedia without compartmentalizing our artistic process," del Toro said in a statement. "Mirada will be an adaptive entity, constantly in transformation. We see a different model that looks beyond what the market is doing right now to where it will be in ten years."

Del Toro has long had such ambitions in mind. In a 2009 interview in Wired he said, "In the next ten years, we're going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform 'story engine.' The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It's going to rewrite the rules of fiction."

 

I got my first inkling of what this sort of storytelling might mean in 2006 when I interviewed del Toro at Cannes, where Pan's Labyrinth received its premiere. It was your standard film-festival encounter, 30 minutes at best out of a grueling day spent fielding questions from international media types. But as we sat in the courtyard of his hotel del Toro showed me his leather-bound notebook, every page of it crammed to bursting with scribblings and sketches. It seemed raw and unprocessed, a leap of the imagination captured in mid-flight between synaptic spark and finished film. I was transfixed. 

I was equally transfixed by the movie itself. Filmed in Spanish for a reported $19 million, Pan's Labyrinth is the story of a young innocent caught in the brutal aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. But what it's really about is the transporting power of imagination. At its core is a little girl's need to deal with the horrifying reality around her by creating an alternate reality, a fantasy world—half dream, half nightmare—that would enable her to process the unfathomable. 

There's nothing new about movie directors' sketchbooks. What was striking about seeing del Toro's was the hint it offered of a story beyond the story—a hint that was partially borne out in the movie's Web site, which augmented the film by reproducing pages from the notebook and inviting people to submit their own sketches as well. Pan's Labyrinth grossed a fraction of the box office total that big-budget del Toro flicks like Hellboy pulled in. But just as he invited me into his world during a superficial interview situation, del Toro invited his audience in as well. He liked the result so much he named eleven winners instead of the five they'd planned for. 

Deep media storytelling has come a long way since then. It's captured the imagination of everyone from Christopher Nolan, who recently announced plans for an Inception video game (“I always imagined Inception to be a world where a lot of other stories could take place," he told EW's Inside Movies blog), to Anthony Zuiker of CSI. Through the involvement of 42 Entertainment, it's enabled millions of people to engage directly with such stories as Year Zero, The Dark Knight, and Tron: Legacy. And with Tron: Legacy producer (and LivePlanet cofounder) Sean Bailey now in charge of production at Disney, it's even gained a foothold in the Hollywood studios. Truly getting there requires a warp drive Hollywood has yet to invent—but Mirada seems the most concerted effort yet to make the jump. 

Oakley, TRON, and the Power of Merch

Just in case 3-D wasn't immersive enough for you already, Oakley has come up with a way to make it even more so: polarized specs with wraparound lenses that minimize the chance any pesky non-3-D imagery will get to your eyes. Two years in development, the glasses were ready just in time for the $150 limited edition Tron: Legacy tie-in that was announced in late October. Since then they've been made available in a non-Tron edition as well. Either way, the point is the same: "to create a better immersive experience," as Oakley CEO Colin Baden put it, by minimizing distortion while widening the field of vision.

The arrival of high-tech 3-D eyewear represents a milestone of sorts, both for 3-D and for Tron. For 3-D, glasses that aren't throwaways are yet another sign that the illusion has arrived, or at least that manufacturers are willing to bet on it. As for Tron, offering a pricey 3-D tie-in is a nifty way to underscore the retro-futuristic appeal of a movie that's obviously intent on making Atari-era computer graphics look hyper-cool. 

I saw Baden when he flew to New York earlier this month to show off his wares. Installed in a penthouse suite at the Thompson Columbus Circle, he came equipped with a new 47-inch 3-D television screen from LG and several boxes of the Tron glasses, which are black and zippy-looking and have a few lines of decorative computer code on one arm.

Oakley ventured into 3-D at the urging of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation. That was in 2008, the year Katzenberg announced that, starting with Monsters vs Aliens, his company would be making all its movies in 3-D. Having committed to the extra $30 million per year that would require, the famously relentless Katzenberg started working the phones to make sure he wasn't out on a limb by himself.

"He was focusing on us as part of a luxury portfolio," said Baden, "and he was fairly animated about our entry into the zone. I said, give us a few months. It took two years." And in the meantime? "I got a lot of calls from Jeffrey."

The hard part, apparently, was figuring out how to make lenses that would curve around the head. The curvature was necessary to create a wider field of vision and to minimize backside reflection. But to bend the lenses you need to heat them, and heat degrades the polarizing filter that produces the 3-D effect. The solution was to develop a way to produce the curvature without heat--but it took awhile to figure out how. 

From Oakley's point of view, the delay wasn't all that terrible; not only have 3-D theaters proliferated in the interim, but 3-D video games and television sets have arrived as well. The irony is that Oakley ended up tying its first 3-D glasses not to a DreamWorks movie but to one from Disney, the company Katzenberg was forced out of 16 years ago. (It took a nasty legal fight, but Katzenberg eventually collected a reported $250 million as his share of the profits he earned for Disney.) 

Of course, 3-D glasses are hardly the only merch Disney is rolling out for its Tron reboot. Oakley is offering a hardshell backpack, not to mention a $750 pair of sunglasses. And that's just the start. There's T-shirts and jackets and hoodies from Adidas, snow boots from Burton, a whizzy-looking iPod dock from Monster, all sorts of action figures, a choose-your-own-adventure book, a graphic novel, storybooks, belt buckles, earrings, pendants, and of course the $995 motorcycle suit (available for men or women). 

The obvious precedent for this kind of merchandising blitz is Star Wars, the movie franchise that not only saw characters become action figures but action figures become characters. (Call it the Boba Fett effect, after the mysterious Mandalorian bounty hunter whose popularity as a toy far outstripped the role he played in the movies.) In fact, however, movie merchandising predates George Lucas's space opera by a good four decades. As Edward Jay Epstein put it awhile back in Slate, 

Disney put all the elements together back in 1937, when he made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.... Snow White had multiple licensable characters (the dwarves, the wicked witch) who took on long lives of their own, first as toys and later as theme-park exhibits. So, here was Hollywood's future: Its profits would come not from squeezing down the costs of producing films but from creating films with licensable properties that could generate profits in other media over long periods of time. 

For Disney, then, those Tron glasses are simply the latest iteration of something they've always done. And what's behind it is not simply the realization that merch can be a license to print money; it's that T-shirts and action figures are another medium for storytelling. Give people something to take home from the theater and they'll make your story their own. That's what immersiveness is all about. 

Flynn Lives: The Care and Feeding of TRON

From left, Tron: Legacy co-producer Justin Springer, Travis Nicholson, Garrett Hedlund, Susan Bonds, Frank Rose. Photo by Andrew Runyon.

It used to be that after the movie was shot, the actors went home. But last spring, months after Tron: Legacy had wrapped, I found myself on the tarmac at Oakland Airport with Garrett Hedlund, who plays Kevin Flynn's daredevil son in the upcoming movie. A camera crew was on hand to shoot Hedlund as he packed up a parachute in front of a black helicopter with a bright red "Encom" logo emblazoned on its side. This time Hedlund was playing Sam Flynn in a video that would be "found" online a day or two later, explaining the bizarre events at an Encom press conference and, by the way, introducing his character to Tron fans. Directing the whole operation was Susan Bonds, the head of 42 Entertainment, the company behind the alternate reality game Flynn Lives. 

I was on hand to report on this for my book, The Art of Immersion (current and final title), which is being published in February by Norton. But I was also starting to think it would be a fun topic to explore in a public forum, which is why I've proposed a discussion on the topic for SXSW Interactive in March. The tentative line-up for the panel is Susan Bonds; Tron: Legacy producer (and Disney production chief) Sean Bailey; and screenwriters Adam Horowitz and Eddy Kitsis, who were also executive producers of Lost. The proposal is up for voting until August 27 at the SXSW Panel Picker. 

Flynn Lives is 42 Entertainment's biggest ARG since Why So Serious?, the game that led up to The Dark Knight. But Batman had been around for nearly 70 years, so the main task that game had to accomplish (aside from generating excitement about the movie) was to tie the new film into the saga. Tron has been on hiatus since the original movie came out in 1982, and story was hardly its most memorable feature even then. What people remember about it is the visuals—the powerful, abstract iconography of the grid and the lightcycles coursing through it—and the idea of being sucked into a computer and living in a purely digital world. Making all this real has been the primary focus of Flynn Lives. 

Avatar: It's All About the Eyes

One of the most intriguing comments I heard while reporting the making of Avatar for Wired came not from James Cameron himself (though there were plenty of those) but from Richie Baneham, the film's animation supervisor. Richie, revered among animators for leading the breakthrough realization of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, was describing his technique for avoiding the "uncanny valley," the weirdly lifeless look that creeped out viewers of earlier performance-capture productions like Beowulf and The Polar Express. “We as human beings will process an image to see if there’s something we need to look at,” he said in his soft Irish brogue, “with an emphasis on finding eyes.” This observation fascinated me: What does it say about us that we're hardwired to seek out these small, photosensitive, very expressive, mostly gelatinous orbs? And what does it mean for the movie? 

There's an obvious evolutionary benefit, of course. That's on display early in the movie, which I saw in 3-D at Friday's New York press screening. Jake's avatar, lost and alone at night in the hostile Pandoran jungle after he's wandered away from his comrades, finally succeeds in lighting a pitch-dipped stick—and realizes to his horror that staring back at him are dozens if not hundreds of eyes. Where there are eyes there are teeth, and these eyes belong to a pack of viperwolves, a particularly vicious Cameron-invented species that's sort of a cross between a hyena, a greyhound, and a meat shredder. Unfortunately, this realization comes too late for Jake to do much about it—barring a miracle, he's not going to survive the night. (Don't worry, there's a miracle: Her name is Neytiri, and she kicks viperwolf butt.) 

But this isn't the first time in the movie that Cameron focuses our attention on eyes. The opening shot is an extreme close-up of Jake (Sam Worthington, seen above in a detail from the French movie poster). What we see is one of his eyes, viewed from above in a clinical fashion, the camera seemingly just inches away. This is followed by an even more discomforting shot of the same eye viewed from the side, so close you can make out the cornea resting atop his iris. It's safe to assume that a lot of what Cameron wants to say in this picture has to do with eyes, or seeing, or both.