Via Hypebeast

After a long morning reading various accounts of corporate copyright douche-baggery, I needed some cheering up. This did the trick. Not only is this piece of vinyl totally awesome in every possible way, it’s also a great piece of marketing for Street Fighter IV.

Sue your fans, they’ll wage war against you. Give them battle weapons, they’ll go out and fight for you.

Illustration by Matias Vigliano, nicked from Wired.

In his latest column for Wired, Scott Brown rings the death knell for storytelling. “Hollywood, vendor of Story in its most denatured form, is most at risk” he writes. “The film industry is slowly but steadily being forced to part with quaint artifacts like the “hero’s journey,” Joseph Campbell’s so-called Monomyth.”

I think Brown is dead wrong.

Networked storytelling is going to become more and more prominent, I agree. But the death of the hero journey? Pure fantasy.

First off, the traditional story format is not at risk, at all. Hollywood had its biggest ever year domestically in 2008, despite the deluge of digital content now competing for our attention (not to mention pirates, who may even be helping). The biggest selling film was The Dark Knight, a Cambell-esque monomyth of the highest order and pretty much all the Oscar nominees – Slumdog, Benjamin Button, Milk, The Wrestler etc etc are all hero myths of one sort or another.

Brown gives a tongue-in-cheek example of what might replace traditional story structure:

“Die Hard will look like this: John McClane, NYC cop, arrives in LA to reconcile with his estranged wife—but we already know all about their failing marriage from the ARG we’ve been obsessed with for the six months leading up to the movie’s release. (McClane’s potemkin Tumblr blog was especially illuminating.) With exposition rendered obsolete, we open instead on a Sprite commercial, which transitions seamlessly into furious gunplay. We don’t even see McClane in the flesh, but our handsets are buzzing with his real-time thumb-tweets: “in the air duct. smelz like dead trrist in here lol.” The film then rewinds to McClane Googling “terrorists” to read up on his adversaries. We then flash-cut to the baddies’ POV, which we’re familiar with (and sympathetic to) thanks to the addictive Xbox hit Die Hard: Hard Out There for a Terrorist. This is all part of the Action-Happening Plateau, an intensifying mass of things and stuff leading up to the Mymaxtm.

“The Mymax is not a lame old Freytag climax but a hot Escher mess of narrative possibilities suggested by you, the audience. With a mere click of your handset (and a charge of 99 cents), you furnish a Youclusiontm to your liking. This is how McClane somehow ends up defeating terrorists—and winning American Idol—with his ultrasonic melisma. McClane and Holly then celebrate by making a sex tape. (Awww!)”

That doesn’t sound like a good movie, it sounds like a bad video game with a Sprite commercial in it. No one will pay 99 cents to finish a movie like this, because by that point no one will be left in the theater.

The reality is that new tech and transmedia are making traditional storytelling stronger. The point Brown misses is that the fundamentals of storytelling haven’t changed much with new tech, which is why Joseph Campbell’s work on ancient myth has been so relevant to screenwriting all these years. Not to get all Robert McGee, but story is not about the media through which you experience it as much as it’s about conveying a sense of meaning and/or truth that audiences can relate to.

The media we use to tell stories is changing, no doubt about it. But from what I’ve seen so far, film and TV writers seem to be using new technology and media platforms to extend the traditional model of storytelling further, not replace it.

Take Cloverfield for example. The viral video that kicked it off? A very traditional act one set-up sequence, inciting incident included. What was different was where it was broadcast and how. Those crazy websites about seemingly unrelated stuff that kept everyone guessing - Tagruato Corporation, Slusho, MySpace pages for characters etc? All part of the back story. Screenwriters have always written elaborate back stories to develop character and plot, what’s new is these pieces of writing didn’t have a viable commercial outlet before.

Or look at Heroes – story arcs stretch across different formats, creating a totally new kind of immersion experience, but they are still just story arcs. In days gone by some of these might have been left on the cutting room floor, but now they can be revenue-generating graphic novels instead. That’s awesome, but fundamentally it’s still traditional, myth-driven storytelling.

Networked storytelling is a cool new part of the equation for sure - involving audiences can add value in a million ways. But the bottom line is new tech and new media platforms are making traditional storytelling more complete. Transmedia is allowing content creators to take monomyths to dizzy new heights, to tell monomyths in stereo. Our method of telling stories is as old as we are, and has worked for different cultures and generations for thousands of years. It’s going to take more than a half-baked twitter feed to change it.

MY speech from Pop!Tech last week has just gone up. I talked about a few other things besides competing with pirates, including virtuous circles, a subject I’m getting really interested in. There were so many great speakers there - two others worth watching are Juan Enriquez’s “10 commandments” talk on the state of the economy, and Benjamin Zander, who was sort of talking about virtuous and vicious circles too, and was just incredible.

Sanza-Hanza Official Trailer from Greg Passuntino on Vimeo.

My good friends Jamie James Medina, Nadia Hallgren and Matt Salacuse just made a great short film about train surfing in Soweto. Train surfing is the semi-suicidal act of climbing on top of and sometimes underneath moving trains to perform improvised dance moves. In the South African ghetto of Soweto, it has become an underground sport not unlike skateboarding in the 1970s. It’s a fascinating look at how harsh environments breed harsh forms of youth culture. There’s also a great book to accompany the film, and an exhibition opening tomorrow in Montreal.

If we are now capable of turning memes into entire product lines in less than 12 hours, maybe we are smart enough to fix the economy. Vote that one!

Baltimore’s DJ Karizma is playing at Cielo on Friday night, if you live anywhere near New York City and are the least bit interested in electronic music, you should go see him. Karizma has long been one of my favourite producers and DJs, the soulful house and garage he has put out over the years with DJ Spen under their Basement Boys alias is some of the finest music to emerge from the genre. But in more recent times, Karizma’s harder-edged solo productions have been making waves across the pond, shaping and informing the new strain of funky house music that’s been quietly evolving on the London pirate stations, and has now all but replaced the grime scene as the music du jour in the capital.

Karizma’s music is rugged and stripped down, yet hauntingly soulful (the influence of J Dilla’s work is clear and present). This year and last, tracks like ‘33rd Street Anthem‘ and ‘Twyst This’ (the track in the video above) have been hitting hard on the pirates, while leading lights in the London scene such as Rinse FM’s DJ Perempay cite Karizma as a huge influence on their work. Tickets for Playtime with Karizma are $10 beforehand or $20 on the door. Check him out if you’re nearby, he’s an incredible DJ.

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

I love, love, LOVE this!

I was recently asked by Penguin to put together a story for a project they are doing in the UK called We Tell Stories, a series of short stories by six different Penguin authors, told over a period of six weeks. Each of us had to come up with something based on a Penguin Classic, and each story was told in an interesting way online somewhere or somehow.

My brief was to come up with a story based on Hard Times, the Dickens classic which illustrates the growing pains of the industrial revolution. My story was to be about the growing pains of the information revolution, the subject covered in The Pirate’s Dilemma. If that wasn’t an intimidating enough way to enter the world of fiction for the first time, the story also had to be told as an ‘info-graphic novel’, using mostly statistics and numbers, mirroring Mr Thomas Gradgrind’s (the main character in Hard Times) obsession with cold hard facts.

I didn’t end up writing a story at all. Try as I might, I could not get my head round creating a piece of fiction that worked in this way, using mostly numbers, that would somehow be comparable to the work of Dickens. That’s kind of a tough one. Instead I took some of the numbers and quotes from Pirates and tried to tell a factual story of change and revolution using as few words as possible. I was lucky enough to work with designer Nicholas Felton on this, famous for his incredible annual reports. Nicholas put the information together as a slick-looking statement, describing some of the changes we are currently experiencing as a society. It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever written by a long shot, in fact it was more a case of quote and stat-pulling than actual writing, but I think Mr Felton’s sharp design looks pretty cool. You can download or view the finished article here. The other stories (which are all actual stories) are well worth checking out.

Current TV just put up an interview I did a few months back with Brooklyn producers John Carluccio and Mark Kotlinkski - They dug up some cool slides I haven’t seen before. Mark also has a production outfit called 88 Hip Hop which does some great stuff - look for his film The Mural Kings about legendary graffiti artists TATS CRU - which is well worth checking out.