While preparing for the pitching, I could honestly say that the experience was pretty nerve wrecking as it move out of my comfort zone. It made me nervous for several reason because first of all, I was pitching an idea that wasn’t fully developed, and towards and audience that I’ve only spent 2 months getting to know. As a cinematographer, I believe that your work shows your talent, and precisely why I’m not really comfortable pitching to others, especially a large crowd.

In the process of getting ready for the pitch, my teammates were really supportive in helping to prepare my role in the pitch. Although it was my role was just to pitch the idea about how the framing and angles of the film will be shot, it proved to be a challenge just to speak in front of a new audience.

While preparing the storyboard, our teammates would usually just meet in class to discuss about the idea of the film. Due to the difference in everyone’s busy schedule, the only time that we could compromise upon was the class time, so attending classes proved to be vital in the development of the story to the film.

We started off by developing our main character, Keith then later made a story that revolved around his life. His character has been based off a video game that one of my team member, Jamie played. We wanted to emphasize on the theme of depression and overcoming depression as it proved to be an interesting topic that caught all of our attentions.

Overall, it was a very fun and new kind of experience for me. Now that I know how pitching for a new crowd feels like, I can be better prepared for the next one.

It is important that every member in the group played their roles. Once the group was formed, we established the roles and duties to everyone, and for me personally, I volunteered to play a role as the cinematographer. Having experience from working in a production house, it was important for me to contribute as much as I can as I’m weak in certain aspects in making film, especially pre-production.

When we first started planning for the film, building our main character was important. Once we established the characteristics of the main character, we then move on the build a story that revolved around his life. Going around the theme of depression and giving a second chance in life became our story as we created the story bit by bit.

To explain a little more about how we plan to use transmedia storytelling, we must first know the synopsis of the film. The main character of the film (Keith) is a guy who wakes up every day of his life, thinking about how depressing life is. He has a repetitive lifestyle, which is wake up, go to work, then come home and play video games. Although he’s trying to change he’s trying to change to a healthier lifestyle, Keith never really felt motivated enough to start the change. In his working place, he has a colleague named Ryan, who constantly tries to push his healthy lifestyle on to others especially Keith. Keith not only feels irritated by it, but he still constantly make fun of Ryan’s advice and ignores it.

As mentioned above, his life revolves around videogame and work, so as a falling off point of the film, we decided to make the working place that he is in as a Facebook page, to further extend the story and also to give more details about Keith’s everyday life at work. Besides giving audience’s a different view of Keith’s life, the Facebook group also serves as a satire for the life of the main character. By posting up “inspirational quotes” on the page, the Facebook group believes to inspire their workers, but if viewed on Keith’s lifestyle, it doesn’t seem to be very effective.

We picked Facebook as another transmedia platform simply because it’s easily accessible and used by many people. Followers of the film wouldn’t have to struggle as Facebook is an easily accessible platform and commonly used by people all over the internet.

From this project, I understood better the use of transmedia storytelling and how a wider story could be told from different platforms. Just like the dark knight campaign, the Facebook page doesn’t revolve around the main character, but an actual working place as a whole. By expanding the storytelling platform, we are allowed to enter a whole new world built upon the director’s vision. As a filmmaker, I find this very interesting and I’m definitely looking forward for this film to be completed.

Alter reality gaming is an interactive networked narrative that uses a real world platform to give a transmedia storytelling experience to participants by delivering a story through their participations. The purpose of this is to bring a story created by a game/film to a real life experience for participants to anticipate.

An example would the recent rise in Esports, Dota 2. The International is a international Dota 2 competition hosted by Valve themselves. In the attempt of making the event a success, Valve came up with a strategy to get casual players involved in this competition by getting them to participate by “game predictions”. At $10.00, a player can purchase a compendium online, also known as E-book to show their support of the team and country. Every victory that they predict through the compendium, the players will be rewarded with an in game item, which could be sold at a high price depending on rarity. For every E-book purchased, $2.50 goes to the prize pool of the competition, and just last year the prize pool came to a staggering $10.7 million.

Besides using the compendium as getting active gamers involved, they hosted the event at Seattle. In the event, a “secret shop” was set up for players to purchase merchandise. These merchandise carry with them a code which can be further used to receive items from the game. By taking these steps, Valve is “rewarding” players for supporting the game. Besides that, the Dota2 tournament designed it’s structure according to the game’s map. the middle lane is where all the actions happened, and there is precisely where the competitors compete for the prize pool.

In this report I’ve picked up a few new things about transmedia storytelling and the crazy amount of work that was put in to the Dark Knight campaign in order to make it a success.

To build a story that involved 10 million people across the world and doesn’t revolve around the main character definitely took my interest in this report. As mentioned in class, the people who participated in the campaign help built the story to the release of the film. The I Believe In Harvey Dent campaign that rallied the streets all over the world demonstrates the support of Harvey Dent even in the film, making the whole Dark Knight campaign feel like a prologue to the story that the film intended to be.

It was also quite interesting how 42 Entertainment (The viral campaign organizers) spent 15 months prior to the movie in order to get 10 million people worldwide to participate.

Overall, the report thought me the importance of utilizing multiple platforms in order to expand the way a certain story is told. The Dark Knight campaign demonstrated that when the use of multiple media is used correctly, an amazing story and experience can be told to an audience. It is no wonder why the Dark Knight became the top grossing film of 2008 despite the competition it had ( Marvel movies, etc).