I went to a amazing conference 3 years ago.    I don’t know about most of you, but for me conferences are often these great trips where I meet really interesting colleagues and then try to stay awake during their talks.  So, imagine my complete delight to show up at a conference where every talk is immediately applicable to my interests, every speaker is fantastic and the whole affair has lots and lots of people who want share their knowledge.

The conference was the 2011 Cross Media Forum put on by IFP and PttP, or Independent Filmmaker Project and Power to the Pixel for the uninitiated.    It was this amazing confluence of ideas that came out of Henry Jenkins and MIT’s Media Lab nearly twenty years ago, filmmakers, techies, and artists.

Having seen quite a lot of the really interesting interactive media and content coming of the Media Lab while at MIT, I immediately grasped how powerful the effect new media would be on shaping the entertainment, learning, and information sharing landscapes.   This was going to be a paradigm shift.

I typed up so many notes from that event, that a colleague said, “You should really do something with those.”   And so I am, 3 years later!

April 2011
I just attended the single most useful conference I have ever been to. The fantastic information, the networking opportunities, the overwhelming interest in supporting our projects…. you name it, it came out of that conference.

In the short version,

This is where the industry is going.  For example, NFB (National Film Board of Canada) no longer accepts projects that are not transmedia.  Literally – they won’t even consider a film that isn’t part of a transmedia experience.

Transmedia is a whole paradigm shift in storytelling.  It is so much more that what we have been thinking about.  We are in the perfect place at the perfect time. XXX’s writing and directing skills, YYY’s publishing and game development skills, and my finance and technical background are all going to be instrumental.  We’re going to need two more people: a designer and a programmer.  More on this later….

To get a sense of all that I learned at the conference, I’m going to blog to you all day.  I have quite a few contacts to follow up on as well and an advertising pitch to give to ZZZ, so I’ll be writing off and on.  One of the the things that I learned at the conference is that transmedia is very visual, so in addition to my descriptions, I’d like to take you to an event:

http://www.meetup.com/Transmedia-New-York-City/events/17282430/