Category: News (Page 63 of 183)

Mail Call: Go Forth and Buy Some Charcoal Briquets

October 5, 2009 / Michael Andersen

graysonozias Over the weekend, I posted an article about Levi’s upcoming treasure hunt, the Go Forth Fortune Experience. The hunt is scheduled toÂ begin atÂ 5PM PST tonight. TheÂ treasure huntÂ raises a $100,000 question: who was Grayson Ozias IV, and where is his fortune? I received a few answers today in my mailbox, althoughÂ the information I receivedÂ raised just as many questions.

graysonozias2 When I opened my mailbox this evening, I found a brown package from the Levi Strauss and Co. Archives in San Francisco, California bearing aÂ logo with the words “GO FORTH.” Inside, the package included a photograph of Grayson Ozias IV with the address LEVI.COM/GOFORTH printed on the back along with a handkerchief bearing the question “Who Was Grayson Ozias IV and Where Is His Fortune.”Â In addition to the photo and hadkerchief, I receivedÂ an empty 10 pound bag of Royal Oak charcoal briquets.Â I can onlyÂ presume I’m being asked to fire up the grill for a night of burgers, beerÂ and brats. So whoÂ exactly wasÂ Grayson Ozias, and what does he have to do with charcoal briquets?

graysonozias1 While the answer to the latter question will sadly remain a mystery for now, Levi’s has released some information on theÂ enigmaticÂ man behind theÂ treasure hunt.Â Grayson Ozias IV, according to the company,Â wasÂ an American adventurer who journeyed across the country before vanishing into the wilderness in 1896. He was also fast friends with Levi Strauss’s nephew Nathan, who recorded the details about Grayson’sÂ exploits that hint at the location of his considerable fortune. The search for Grayson Ozias IV’s treasure will take players through cities and towns across America in order to solve an elaborate cryptogram requiring a combination of knowledge, skill and determination.

In addition to the $100,000 prize for the winner, participants will have the opportunity to win a number of other great prizes along the way. They can also nominate and vote for a U.S.-based non-profit organization to receive an additional $100,000 at the end of the campaign. Frequent readers of ARGNet will recognize one of the names attached to this project, as Jan Libby (Sammeeeees, lonelygirl15) is working with Wieden+Kennedy and Levi’s to bring the Go Fourth Fortune Experience to life.

For more photos of the package, click here to view the Flickr stream.

Levi’s G.O. IV Fortune Treasure Hunt: Who Was Grayson Ozias IV?

October 3, 2009 / Michael Andersen

goforth Back in July, advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy Portland unveiled a new direction for Levi’s with its Go Forth campaign. Drawing heavily upon the poetry of Walt Whitman and the frontier spirit, the campaign seeks to bolster flagging spirits (and blue jean sales) with tag lines such as “strike up for the new world,” “this country was not built by men in suits” and “will work for better times.” While Advertising Age remains skeptical about whether the “bootstraps ethic will find a receptive audience in a dustbowl economy,” the chance to discover $100,000 in buried treasure might help convince people to “Go Forth.”

In two days, the hunt for Grayson Ozias IV’s treasure begins as part of Levi’s online component to the campaign. Details about the G.O. IV Fortune experience are scarce, as the contest rules were not available at the time of this article. However, you can get a feel for the interactive component by checking out New Americans: A Portrait of a Country, a collection of user-generated text, images, audio, and video responding to challenges such as “take a picture of you high-fiving a parking attendant” and “re-create Old Glory for today’s America.”

The aptly named G.O. (the) Fourth has a twitter account, and you can sign up for notifications on the countdown page. It remains to be seen whether the hunt for Grayson Ozias’ fortune will tell an engaging story.

A New “Trick” from Universal Studios: Evelyn Offscreen Presents a Real Treat

October 2, 2009 / Carie Ward

EvelynOffscreen Halloween is fast approaching, bringing with it costumes, candy, and the macabre. If you live in Orlando, it appears as though Universal Studios is bringing one final “treat” to your homes with the launch of its horror-themed alternate reality game Evelyn Offscreen, a new “interactive Halloween adventure” that is being run to promote Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights.

Evelyn Crane is a classic horror movie actress who has been in seclusion for the past 37 years, after an incident where a movie critic called her “too old”. Ever since then, Evelyn has been searching for the secret of eternal youth so that she can reclaim her old glory as an actress. Based on her facination with Elizabeth Bathory (the Hungarian countess who, as legend has it, bathed in the blood of hundreds of murdered young girls in order to retain her youth), it would appear as if Evelyn might just go to any sort of lengths in order to reclaim her beauty, youth and position. A perfect sort of story for Halloween.

If that wasn’t enough, there is also the mystery surrounding a series of deaths at the Universal Palace Theater, where many of Evelyn Crane’s movies have been shown. Julian Browning was the usher at the Palace Theater from 1922 until 1940, when he was found hanged behind the screen at the theater. Ever since then, he has been reported to be “present” at many of the other tragedies that have befallen workers and patrons of the Palace Theater.

Visitors to Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights will be able to visit the Universal Palace Theater via the Silver Screams haunted house in the theme park. The Evelyn Offscreen website promises that live scenes will be playing in Orlando, Florida, but whether this means just in the Silver Screams haunted house or possibly elsewhere remains to be seen. However the online campaign will be available to everyone, so even if you can’t get scared half to death at the Halloween Horror Nights, you can still get scared in your own living room.

Click Here for the Evelyn Offscreen website
Click Here for Evelyn Crane’s twitter
Click Here for Evelyn Crane’s blog
Click Here for information on the Universal Palace Hotel

Not Your Ordinary PICNIC: Exploding Media

October 1, 2009 / DaniÃ«l van Gool

PICNIC 04 Itâ€™s time for day two of PICNIC, and a new day means a new theme: Exploding Media. The theme brought with it an exciting schedule, filled with more on social media, but this time focusing on trying to find parallels between social media and brands and marketing strategies, as well asÂ on games and interactivity.

The first speaker wasÂ movie director Chris Burke, who is also the creator of This Spartan Life, the worldâ€™s first and only â€œtalkshow in game spaceâ€. I hadnâ€™t previously heard of This Spartan Life and thus wasnâ€™t familiar with theÂ show’s format, where a host (Burke)Â interviews a guest (in this case, Gerri Sinclair, CEO of the Center for Digital Media), while playing Halo.

Apparently,Â This Spartan Life has been a big Â hit since 2004 and has gathered quite a bit of praise for its innovative presentation. I can see how the concept might work well with smoothly edited episodes showing Halo game play supplemented by added voiceovers. However, as a live concept, I thought itÂ came off asÂ a forced way of trying something new. The Halo backdrop compounded by the clumsiness of Sinclair trying to master the controls of the game were so distracting that I hardly followedÂ the actual interview.

Sinclair, hailed by Burke as a â€œgaming professor who actually knows what sheâ€™s talking aboutâ€ has a great track record when it comes digital media and narrative . Most of the times when the interview took an interesting turn, though, the conversation got interrupted by shrieks of â€œOh no! I fell of a ledge!â€ and â€œsomeone is shooting at me!â€ or with Burke trying to keep track of where his interviewee went in the Halo level. It’s a shame, because I would have loved to hear more of what Sinclair had to say on gaming and the changing ways of delivering narratives.

Not Your Ordinary PICNIC: Turning Points, Part 2

September 27, 2009 / DaniÃ«l van Gool

PICNIC 02 Onwards to part two of the first day of the PICNIC conference schedule–this section of three consecutive panels and presentations was all about the shifts in demographics: the role that race and ethnic background play in producing theatre on Broadway and in emerging online communities, and the role of a changing audience and the way that audience divides its attention on â€œtraditionalâ€ media.

First off was a presentation by renowned producer David Binder, who talkedÂ us through his experience bringing Lorraine Hansberryâ€™s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun back to Broadway for a modern day revival. AsÂ A Raisin in the Sun is a classic African-American play, Binder wanted to honor its roots, which to him meant that he had to find an African-American director. Broadway isnâ€™t exactly brimming with diversity (of the 40 directors active on Broadway last season, 36 were men and only one person of color), so Binder had his work cut out for him.

What followed was a mildly interesting relay of his quest for a director (he ended up working with the then relatively unknown Kenny Leon) and cast (he managed to snag Sean Combs aka P DiddyÂ for the lead role). I think my appreciation of Binderâ€™s excited monologue was slightly hampered by the fact that my knowledge of all things Broadway is virtually nonexistent and the fact that as a European, Iâ€™m a lot less used to such a heavy emphasis being placed on race, soÂ some of his points sounded (literally) rather foreign to me.

On a personal note, Binder gets a lot of creditÂ from me for having the creative guts to bring The New Island Festival to New York City. The festival is based on two important Dutch theater festivals, Oerol and De Parade. From what I gathered from his talk, reviving a play like Raisin in the Sun took a lot more guts than that.

Not Your Ordinary PICNIC: Turning Points

September 26, 2009 / DaniÃ«l van Gool

PICNIC 01 Not your ordinary PICNIC:Â thatâ€™s the tagline I found plastered all over the Westergasfabriek terrain during PINIC â€™09. And PICNIC indeed is something quite out of the ordinary.Â

I arrived Wednesday around 11:00am, a few hours before the official opening of the conference part of PICNIC, which meant that I could take some time to explore the impressive central area of the festival, the PICNIC club. A place to meet, to eat, to tweet (there was a Twitter tree set up in the main area, with UTP cables hanging down its branches) and to look at all the interesting stuff that PICNICâ€™s official partners, includingÂ UPC and Microsoft, were showing off.

The area was brimming with activity. During the morning, several sessions of PICNIC Young had already started, which is a collection of workshops and seminars for teachers and students, exploring technology and creativity and their possible adaptation to school programs. PICNIC Young is only one of many â€œtracksâ€ running alongside the main conference schedule of PICNIC, and if you wanted to cover all of it, you would need at least 5 or 6 people on the ground.

Other interestingÂ events wereÂ also already going on at the various PICNIC Labs that were scattered among the conference area, like the Digital City Special, or the Augmented City Lab, exploring present and near-future adaptation of various mobile augmented reality technologies. I did not attend any of these sessions, but if youâ€™re interested in what augmented reality can do today, check out the iPhone 3GS app that the folks at Layar have launched at PICNIC.

The main conference has a different theme for each of its three days. The first dayâ€™s theme was â€œTurning Pointsâ€, focusing on social changes that have their impact on society and social media, and kicked off with a familiar face: Israeli conductor Itay Talgam. I had heard Talgam speak at PICNIC last year and his ideas on leadership really stuck with me. The one-liner he kicked his talk off with this year: â€œIn these times of insecurity and crisis, people are sick of leaders. Itâ€™s about communities now.â€