Tag Archives: Campfire

October 18, 2012 · 10:50 am

Alone in a Dark Place: Building Byzantium for Cinemax’s Hunted

When you complete each stage of the process involved in ByzantiumTests.com, an immersive website experience for Cinemax’s new series Hunted (which debuts tomorrow night at 10/9c) that positions the user as a test subject for diegetic organization Byzantium Security International, it asks you whether you want to share your process with any number of social networks.

When I was completing the tests, however, they struck me as intensely personal. Even though the data being collected is far from the precise scientific personality test that Melissa George suggests in the video material accompanying the site, it nonetheless asks us to reflect on ourselves more than anything else, and I’m not sure that’s something I’d want to share with the world at large. One portion of the site asks you to connect the site to your Facebook account, drawing images from profiles—including your own—to probe further into your thought process. The results of the test are rigged in the sense that everyone can make it to the end, but the personalized nature of the test ensures that it’s evocation of the exclusive “1% that matters” highlights the individual nature of the accomplishment (which is part of why I wasn’t interested in sharing my results).

In the previous two campaigns—for Game of Thrones and Bag of Bones—that I’ve discussed from Campfire, who also developed the Byzantium campaign, the goal has been to engage fans and potential viewers in a shared experience of interpreting and participating in a broader activity. We can see a similar strategy in their campaign for USA’s Political Animals this summer—which I didn’t write about given my busy schedule at the time—wherein the community-forming potential for a newspaper’s audience is used to create immersive weekly experiences that nonetheless allow for different people to experience the same basic content. Whether it’s gathering Maester’s for the cause, or working with others to spot the various secrets in the dark stories being told, or sharing fictional political editorials the same way you’d share real ones, the notion of “shareable” speaks not only to the capacity for the pages to be posted to social media, but also the ability for the “experience” to be shared with others like you.

While the Byzantium campaign relies on word of mouth, which is why a wooden puzzle with a flash drive hidden inside arrived at my doorstep late last month, it also relies on potential viewers finding the time to visit the site, take part in the test, and engage with the world-building on display.

Which describes the experience of watching television, in a way. Continue reading →

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November 21, 2011 · 9:00 am

Transmedia Legitimation: Dark Score Stories and the A&E Brand

Transmedia Legitimation: Dark Score Stories and the A&E Brand

November 21st, 2011

When I was alerted to the existence of Dark Score Stories, the transmedia marketing initiative that serves as a prequel to A&E’s upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, I was interested for two reasons.

The first is that Bag of Bones, a two-part miniseries starring Pierce Brosnan and Melissa George (among others) was actually filmed in my home province of Nova Scotia, which resulted in a large number of Brosnan sightings for friends and family and which meant that the photographs that comprise much of Dark Score Stories were in many ways a trip “home.”

The second, meanwhile, is that the campaign is being handled by the good folks at Campfire, who were kind enough to send along their work for their campaign for HBO’s Game of Thrones, and who have been equally kind in assisting me with further research in that area since that point. As a result, I was curious what their next major television project would entail, and how some of the transmedia lessons on display there have been transferred over to this initiative.

However, as effective as I think the campaign might be, I’m somewhat more interested in exploring the existence of the campaign than the campaign itself, although the two plainly go hand-in-hand. Looking through the book of photographs that A&E has sent out for the project, and the Dark Score Stories website, it is clear that Campfire has offered a vivid entry point into King’s fictional community, capturing the author’s trademark style while simultaneously introducing characters that will become more important in the film itself (which I have yet to see, but which I am interested to check out in December).

What intrigues me most, though, is the idea of how these kinds of transmedia experiences function in relation to channel brands, and in particular how those functions might differ with a television movie as opposed to an actual series. Obviously, there is an element of promotion to any initiative like this one, and the wide range of media coverage around the site was likely in many cases people’s first exposure to the film’s existence. However, while the momentum gained from Game of Thrones‘ campaign will carry into fans’ long-term engagement with the series over a number of years, Bag of Bones is an example of “event” programming, which to me creates a different set of expectations both for potential viewers and, perhaps more importantly, for the cable channel in question.

Continue reading →

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February 27, 2011 · 3:27 pm

Achieving Authenticity: Unboxing (the Unboxing of) Game of Thrones‘ Maester’s Path

Achieving Authenticity: The Maester’s Path

February 27th, 2011

Map of WesterosThis week, an assortment of critics and bloggers received what is considered the first part of an ongoing “experience” called the Maester’s Path, a transmedia initiative to support the April 17th debut of HBO’s Game of Thrones. The fairly intricate wooden box features a collection of maps and other scrolls meant to be artifacts of Westeros, as well as a collection of scents that when merged together capture the olfactory essence of different locations.

I was lucky enough to receive one of these boxes from HBO, and I spent yesterday morning mixing scents, taking pictures and poring over the scrolls. This was, after all, what I was instructed to do by the scrolls within the box, and so I journeyed to King’s Landing (which smells of summer fruit and parchment) and the Dothraki Sea (which smells of campfire and “Khal’s herd,” which smells as you would imagine).

However, while this level of personal experience is encouraged by the hands-on nature of the activity, there is another step to this process. That step is telling all of you about my experience, sharing my pictures and detailing my impressions: it’s the step which is encouraged by the letter from HBO which sat on top of the box, rather than the scrolls from Westeros which were found inside, and it has manifested as a large collection of extensive “unboxings” which allow fans who did not receive a box themselves to still experience this “first link in the chain.”

The question now becomes at which point these fans will be able to walk the path themselves, rather than living vicariously through a chosen few.

Continue reading →

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