A version of this story aired today on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Thousands of Americans lined up last night, not to vote, but to buy one of the most anticipated new video games of the year. Halo 4 is the latest installment of the popular franchise for the Microsoft XBox 360. Some gamers refer to Halo as their Star Wars.
Now, after five years, the game’s hero, the Master Chief, returns. And the fantastic world the Master Chief inhabits is hardly confined to just the screen. The game’s publisher hopes that this latest installment will be an evolution of the franchise. (more…)
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http://soundcloud.com/turnstyle-news/stewart-hendler-director-of
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One of the downsides to broadcasting is that sometimes, no matter how much you like something, you have to cut it for time.
Such was the case the our story on today’s Morning Edition about Halo 4. As part of the research for the piece I had an excellent discussion with Stewart Hendler, the director of the webseries Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn which can be found on Machinima Prime. Hendler is an on-the-rise director who was turned his career on its head. He’s gone from making feature films inside the studio system that got a modest amount of attention to making web series like Forward Unto Dawn and H+ The Digital Series that cannot be ignored.
Hendler and I spoke at the NPR West Studios in Culver City.
You can read an expanded edition of the Halo 4 story here, or view our earlier exploration of Halo’s transmedia campaign.
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Remy Schwartz on Monday, Nov. 5th
by Remy Schwartz
The 2012 presidential race has been a leading news item for more than 22 months, and I’m ready for it to be over. The election has grown far beyond television ads and news articles. I can’t open my email without a plea for money at the top of my inbox, and nowhere is less safe than my Facebook or Twitter feeds. David Kaufman is the president of the College Republicans at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he’s experienced a similar onslaught of election-spam.
“There’s always something from Romney, always something from Paul Ryan. There’s always something sponsored on Twitter that he’s paying for, something trending. Believe it or not, a lot of people my age get information through memes,” Kaufman said. (more…)
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The Green Ruby Pumpkin from miguel ortega on Vimeo.
Here’s a Halloween themed FX treat for the weekend from filmmakers Miguel Ortega and Tran Ma. A tip of the hat to the Vimeo Team for making this a staff pick and bringing all of our attention to this ghoulishly delightful short.
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The film adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas has been on top of our “most anticipated” list for a while now. Not only does it feature The Wachowski’s– creators of The Matrix– return to the realm of speculative fiction, this ambitious project also brought along Tom Tykwer director of the 90′s cult smash Run Lola Run.
It’s a total 90′s love-fest, one with a run time of 164 minutes and features an all-star, international cast who play multiple roles in this story that revolves around the idea of reincarnation. Men play women. Halle Berry plays a blonde white woman, and Hugo Weaving plays an Asian character.
And this is where we run right into a big cultural iceberg.
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Marvel: War of Heroes
My name is Kurt Collins and I’m a geek. Being a geek brings along with it certain cultural expectations. In my case, those cultural expectations fall somewhere in the arenas of comics, role playing games, card games and technology. So imagine my excitement when Marvel finally released Marvel: War of Heroes.
Before all you real geeks get up in arms because of its deficiencies (the main one being that it’s a cheap Mob Wars knockoff as far as game mechanics go), let’s look at the fact that we get to put heroes and villains on the same team so can get our PvP (player vs player) action on from our iPhones. And if that doesn’t make you happy for at least one week, then there’s nothing I will be able to do to persuade you. Bonus track here. -Kurt Collins
Yo, Is This Racist?
Probably! At least that’s the most common answer you’ll get from this new call-in advice show. (more…)
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Look, I don’t hide the fact that I’m pretty deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem. That started years ago when I got serious about Pro Audio. Of course the landscape has changed dramatically since then. While Apple was the choice of creative professionals back in the 90′s, they’ve become the biggest consumer focused electronics company on the planet. There’s a downside to that… which I’ll save for another day.
Today belongs to the iPad mini.
I mean, sure, Apple announced a whole slate of new hardware. All of it thinner and lighter than the generation before. They even broke out a new 4th Gen regular iPad, just six months after the 3rd gen. This has some people gripping about how their iPad 3′s are now pieces of crap. More fodder for Saturday Night Live’s snark on tech snark, I guess. (more…)
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For years now PC gamers have been able to enjoy the retro wonderland that is GOG, properly known as Good Old Games. GOG is a digital storefront that specializes in older PC games, wrapping them in an emulator package that enables them to run on modern hardware.
You might not be that familiar with the retro game scene, and thus might not realize how valuable the runtime environment that GOG constructs for their games is. However, if you’ve ever tried to run your old Wing Commander games in the PC you bought last year you know just what I’m talking about. I remember trying that one time, only to find out that I was going to need the reflexes of The Flash just to steer the ship. (more…)
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DC Comics relaunched their entire line of superhero comics last year, and while there have been some big successes not everything has worked.
Trickiest of all remains Superman, that strange visitor from another planet whose adventures in Action Comics have proven popular while those in his self-titled book have struggled to catch on. While Action has focused on the adventures of the Man of Steel set five years in the past, as chronicled by comic’s superstar Grant Morrison, the Superman book– set in the present day–has seen a revolving door of top tier talent that just hasn’t managed to find Mr. Kent’s groove.
This Wednesday the publisher hopes that their SuperWorries are over when the latest creative team of writer Scott Lobdell and artist Kenneth Rocafort have Clark Kent quit the Daily Planet and start a whole new chapter in the life of Superman’s alter ego.
It’s not like Clark hasn’t quit the Planet– the newspaper that he’s worked at in one incarnation or another for half a century– before. It’s just that in this day and age working for a newspaper feels more and more like an anachronism. In a lengthy USA Today interview Lobdell talks about the career change:
“I don’t think he’s going to be filling put an application anywhere,” the writer says. “He is more likely to start the next Huffington Post or the next Drudge Report than he is to go find someone else to get assignments or draw a paycheck from.”
This career change will actually bring the “present day” Superman-starring Kent into line with his depiction in the “five years ago” Action Comics. That of a fiery crusading journalist, not the ink-stained wretch of the past few decades. While they’ve pulled this gag before, something about this time feels different. If for no other reason than a major metropolitan newspaper like The Daily Planet feels like it is increasingly as much a fantasy as a man who can fly.
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I talk a lot about transmedia here at Turnstyle, and will be talking about it even more this week when I head to StoryWorld. With that in mind, I wanted to create a little primer on the topic, but that felt altogether too academic.
Instead I’ve decided to explain what transmedia is by way of example. Instead of focusing on techniques used by a variety of creators, I wanted to give you a holistic sense of what we mean when we talk about transmedia. It is my conviction that the secret sauce of transmedia is this: a property is more that the sum of its parts.
By mixing different mediums and storytelling techniques the world of the story takes on extra weight. More platforms mean more perspectives, and those points of view suggest something touched on in the classic film Rashomon: that reality is something altogether different from what any one of us can perceive all by ourselves.
Still, I needed something concrete to talk about, a popular entertainment property that successfully uses transmedia storytelling techniques. Lucky for us, there’s a gem that’s coming back into vogue: Halo.
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As you all undoubtedly already know, Google Glass is finally here.
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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).
We’ve featured dancer Matt Luck’s work before.
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.
Over the weekend I was having a conversation about the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum that’s been announced.
