The Creepy Side Of E3– Kotaku's Tina Amini shares tales of gross behavior at this year's expo.
Man of Steel: The New American Way– If Superman is the embodiment of America, our projection of values and power out into the wider world, this film reflects back how the world must see us. (Heavy Spoilers.)
The Electronic Entertainment Expo exists in a kind of ahistorical limbo. Suspended between a nostalgic past and an unfathomable future. Like its host city, Los Angeles, just what E3 is depends entirely upon your point of view. The event exists on multiple levels at once: trade show, PR war and fan festival.
This is the first of two parts, in the second I'm going to get into the vision of the future that managed to leak out of E3 but first I feel the need to address the presence of the past. The ghosts that haunted the Los Angeles Convention Center and environs for four days last week.
Oculus VR announced that they closed a 16 million dollar round of venture capital funding, which can be used to accelerate the arrival of their Oculus Rift headset into the hands of the gaming public.
Wasn't it just yesterday that Forest Whitaker was being named to the Indiewire Influencers list for being one of the founders of alternative film production platform JuntoBox Films?
Today the company is back in the headlines because they've announced their latest feature film production, a film called "The Driver", a noir-ish sounding crime flick that will be their fifth to reach production.
JuntoBox made the list thanks to their innovative crowdsourcing model for film production. The basics: they've built a community that filters ideas and scripts into the hands of the production company while sharing with that community organizational tools that make filmmaking more efficient.
Check out the whole of the press release, for completeness' sake, after the jump.
The latest Filmonomics column by Colin Brown is out over at Slated, and is–as always–worth a gander.
Brown the current national focus on privacy as a cue to take up the issue of transparency in the film business.
Data transparency has never come easily to movie professionals. Instead of sharing information for the collective good, the tendency is to massage, manipulate and even muddy those figures for individual gain.
Spoiler alert: he thinks a more open approach would serve all filmmaker well.
Today Indiewire, the independent film focused website, captured the current moment in indie film with the release of their Indiewire Influencers list.
Readers of Turnstyle will find a lot of familiar names on that list… ah heck, I'm just going to list them all off:
Lance Wieler, Emily Best, Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky, Ingrid Kopp, Hadrian Belove, Joe Swanberg, and the folks at Juntobox. That's just the folks I've had the honor of talking to over the past few years.
The list makes me incredibly excited. It both gives definition to the outline of the indie movement, and acts as a kind of challenge to go further and discover more.
Check out the whole list at Indiewire, where they've laid out the list with a beautifully designed sub-site. I've also slapped the press release after the jump for the extra lazy amongst us.
I had the pleasure of meeting Mahyad Tousi at this year's Transmedia Hollywood. There Tousi shared the work his company BoomGen Studios (@BoomGenStudios) is doing with a property called AJAX, which is an exploration of the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran which overthrew the democratically elected government and restored the monarchy.
In this TEDx talk Tousi speaks to the power of a transmedia approach to exploring history. AJAX uses graphic novels, internet archives, and game theory to offer multiple ways into the material. Tousi isn't just making a pitch for his company and story here, but for the power of the approach to better serve the teaching of history and use storytelling as a way of healing cultural wounds.
Nothing says how serious the web video world has gotten quote like the amount of money that's moving from the venture capital world into the multi-channel networks.
The latest to harvest a big investment crop is Fullscreen, who announced today that they closed a round of Series A funding with The Chernin Group, Comcast Ventures and WPP.
Fullscreen notes its own profitability in their press release, and says that this round is for expansion: more tech, bolstering their sales division and–most intriguing from a creative standpoint– developing "owned-and-operated" content.
Fullscreen's has built its success on the back of shrewdly aggregated content. The marketplace, however, is increasingly defined by recognizable–if home gown–stars and brands.
Amidst rumblings of a YouTube creator revolt, stirred up by new media entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, Fullscreen's expansion is worth watching. There is a growing sense that the online video ecosystem we know today may be radically different sooner than anyone thinks.
Now streaming: the archive of our Google Hangout On-Air with Jesse Vigil of Psychic Bunny, one of the designers of the new audio adventure game FREEQ (iOS/Android).
I first encountered Sifteo Cubes back at IndieCade last October, and spent some time playing around with the little blocks which I first mistook for iPod Nanos.
