Month: December 2011

Reality: Transforming USC Film Students’ Freshman Year Into an Addictive Game

December 29, 2011 /

Image courtesy of Ben Chance

By Nathan Maton and Rebecca Thomas

School changed this year for the majority of freshman at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Driven, talented future media makers normally waited until their sophomore year to produce any major media through the program, but this year USC partnered with Ph.D. candidate Jeff Watson to produce Reality, an alternate reality game focused on media creation.

Reality, which just completed its first season, is one part trading card game, one part media creation tool, and one part web portal. Three hundred unique cards, color-coded by type and designed to fit together, were handed out to students who unraveled a series of clues leading to the game’s secret campus headquarters or tucked away for discovery as the game progressed. As students discovered other students who were playing, they made “deals” by trading or pooling cards that led to collaborative projects and then published their work to Reality’s web portal so other students could rate and review the projects. Winning projects earned interesting rewards, like meeting industry professionals, for the creators.

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World Gold Council Takes Lost Ring Hunt to Twitter

December 25, 2011 /

On Miranda’s recent vacation to New York City, she lost her gold wedding band in Times Square. And she’s so desperate to recover the band, she’s offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to its safe return. Miranda is encouraging good samaritans across the country to turn to Twitter to help her in her search.

Miranda’s lost ring is part of the Lost Ring Hunt, an interactive contest sponsored by the World Gold Council. Starting tomorrow, a billboard in Times Square will display Miranda’s desperate plea, kicking off an adventure that will have both New Yorkers and online participants interacting with the characters to uncover clues leading to the ring’s location. And while the missing ring might not be real, the reward most certainly is: the first person to submit the proper response to the email address disclosed though the story will win a $5,000 cash prize and a trip for 2 days and 1 night in New York City to participate in a promotional shoot for the campaign.

Interested in following along? Keep an eye on the game’s Twitter account, LostGoldRing, as well as the Gold Ring Hunt tab on the World Gold Council’s Facebook page, which houses the official rules for the contest. And if you’re in the area on Boxing Day, feel free to take to the streets and see what information you can drum up on Miranda’s lost ring.

Mouth Taped Shut Wraps Up Final Package

December 12, 2011 /


Image by D. Christensen

Columbia Pictures’ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will have its wide-release premiere on December 21st alongside two other blockbuster films, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn and Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Embracing its self-proclaimed status as the “feel-bad” movie of the season, David Fincher’s adaptation of the best-selling Stieg Larsson novels developed an elegiac, mysterious transmedia campaign to help break through the clutter centering around the Tumblr account, Mouth Taped Shut. The campaign came to a conclusion last week, rewarding players who saw it through to the end with free advance screenings of the film in select cities.

A number of websites branched off of the Mouth Taped Shut tumblr account, most strikingly What is Hidden in Snow, a collection of photographs featuring 47 artifacts from the film recovered by players over the course of the campaign. The site takes its name from a translated Swedish proverb, “What is Hidden in Snow, Comes Forth in the Thaw,” and captures the film’s central mystery. In the movie, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) hires Millennium journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) along with investigator and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) to find out what happened to his niece Harriet. Harriet was murdered 40 years before the start of the movie. Her body was never found. Vanger has since received a beautifully mounted framed flower from the dead young woman each year on his birthday.

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Robot Heart Stories Sends Kids on Cross-Country Trek Fueled by Imagination

December 7, 2011 /


Image by Mike Hedge and Tiffani Bearup

Lance Weiler’s most recent project began with a simple yet provocative question: can a robot reboot education? To answer that question, Weiler collaborated with fellow Workbook Project contributor Janine Saunders in creating Robot Heart Stories with a team of more than 50 creative professionals.

For the project, students in a Los Angeles elementary school class and a Montreal media workshop teamed up to send Laika, a small female robot scientist, from Canada to California. As a team of award-winning photographers drove the robot across country, the 42 students fueled Laika’s journey with stories, videos and letters. Photographers and other artists brought the children’s work to life and, in turn, uploaded their work to the website.

While this ambitious project focused on the two groups of students, aspects of the campaign were open to the world. Anyone could create a heartpack, origami robots that could be painted, colored or photographed in different settings. Those images were also uploaded to the Robot Heart Stories website. Other classes used the project for experiential learning projects. This collaboration had virtual and real world implications. The website notes that “everything you submit helps the robot’s heart meter reach full strength, AND it helps raise money for underpriveledged [sic] students.”

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