Unexpected Media

2008 Crossover Programme is recruiting…

August 5, 2008 – 3:06 pm
We're now looking for participants for this year's Crossover programme. Crossover is an extraordinary series of ‘innovation labs’ for creative professionals from a diverse range of backgrounds: game developers, tv and film producers, web designers, animators, theatre practitioners and others. Each Crossover lab is an immersive, five day incubator fostering new collaborations and original ideas for cross platform media content and services. We are now looking for people to take part in Crossover Docs and Crossover Kids. Crossover Docs (October 5 - 10) Social media, social networks, alternate reality games, serious games, user generated content and participatory story-telling: are there new ways to engage audiences with factual topics and documentary subjects? In Crossover Docs, factual and documentary film and television producers will work with games developers, web and interaction designers to invent innovative projects for cross-platform delivery. A focus of the five day, residential lab will be on interactive projects which address big ideas and ...

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Crossover C4

July 22, 2008 – 12:39 pm
It’s been a bit quiet here in the last couple of months partly because it’s been a very busy period.  Mostly because I’ve been neglectful. I’ll try to catch up with reports and observations from some of the work we’ve done with Channel 4,  the BBC, Nesta and Crossover over the next few days. At the beginning of June we delivered the first of three Crossover Labs for Channel 4 at Buxted Park Hotel in Sussex. The primary purpose of this sequence of four-day workshops is to persuade the channel’s tv commissioners to engage with the challenge and opportunity of new media. Channel 4 has not until recently seen its online activity as part of its public service remit and, as a consequence, its websites are not paid for or creatively owned by  the people who commission the shows they are intended to support. Television commissioning editors are only interested in ...

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Cinema’s punk era?

May 30, 2008 – 8:08 am
In Göteborg for the launch of Crossover Nordic at Lindholmen Science Park, my presentation was preceded by a talk from Michael Gubbins, Editor of Screen International. His theme was the inevitable shift from theatres and DVD to digital download as the primary means of distribution of feature films.  To date, Hollywood’s solution to the bottleneck caused by too many movies competing for space on a limited number of screens has been to make fewer, bigger films. But this is a short-term fix which will inevitably give way to more profitable distribution models based, in part, on less costly product reaching smaller audiences. Gubbins didn’t see the move to sales direct to the home as a threat to cinema ticket sales, citing the example of football where the live, social experience still beats the more comfortable and, in many ways, superior experience of viewing a match on TV. He suggested that an economic ...

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“hard work and deep thought”

April 22, 2008 – 8:09 pm
The third of this year's BBC Innovation Labs finished on Friday with Jason Daponte, the BBC's Managing Editor for mobile applications, saying it was the best set of presentations he had seen in the three years they've been running. I tend to agree, although the southern lab last year was also very strong. Four of the ten teams got the funding they had asked for and two more were told that their projects would go forward subject to further discussion. The lab has been covered in blogs by Noam Sohachevsky of Mint Digital (here), Stuart Varrall of Fluid Pixel (here) and Tom Evans from Numiko (here). Visitors for the pitching day included, for the first time, a senior manager from BBC Vision. I had to introduce him to the commissioners from Future Media and Technology: while the BBC is better adapted to multi-platform publishing than many broadcasters, it has some ...

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MipTV: the labs come to Cannes

April 16, 2008 – 11:17 am
Unexpected Media has had an extraordinarily busy couple of months including a visit to Winnipeg to run a workshop for the National Screen Institute of Canada, a "meet the players" session at the European Media Event in Brussels, three Innovation Labs for the BBC (with one more still to deliver) and a lab in Cannes in the context of the Content 360 pitching contest at MipTV. The Lab in Cannes, which was for the six contestants in Ogilvy’s cause-related marketing competition lasted for two and a half days: half the time that we normally have for a BBC Innovation Lab. The participants were all working on ideas that associated a good cause with brands selected by Ogilvy from their accounts. The projects that made it to the final were proposing projects for Fanta, AmEx and BP. The format was a public pitch of all the projects on Tuesday morning, two ...

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“Crazy but rather lovely”

April 3, 2008 – 2:30 pm
What is Tim Wright up to?

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Nesta: The Innovation Edge

March 31, 2008 – 7:08 am
You can keep a blog for three years without mentioning NESTA and then it pops up twice in successive posts. They've asked me to point out that registration to their 'flagship innovation conference' is now open: The Innovation Edge Conference – Tuesday, 20th May 2008 NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference is an unrivaled opportunity to get under the skin of innovation in the UK – and consider the impact it will have on our future. The conference brings together a powerful mix of experts from industry, culture, politics and academia. Bob Geldof, Lord Puttnam, Helen Alexander, Michael Birch and urban artist ‘Inkie’ are just a few of those who’ll be fuelling the discussion. Be a part of it. The Innovation Edge is free to attend. Register now here.

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NESTA: Digital Innovation in Film

March 29, 2008 – 7:26 pm
We've been working with Jon Kingsbury at NESTA to support the development of a new programme designed to encourage innovation in the distribution of film. In a first phase Unexpected Media facilitated a workshop to help define the scope of the project and inform the drafting of the 'request for proposals'. The Digital Innovation in Film project plans to team-up film businesses with specialist partners to help them digitise, market and distribute their films to audiences around the world in new ways. Over the next 18 months up to 10 film businesses will be selected from across the UK, to take part in a project that is designed to focus on business growth. A unique combination of workshops and one-to-one support from "innovation partners" will encourage the companies to explore emerging opportunities for new revenue streams. The pilot, which is being developed in conjunction with national and regional development agencies, aims to ...

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Innovation Labs 2008

March 14, 2008 – 8:27 am
It's pitch day at the first of this year's BBC Innovation Labs and we're back at Forest Hills Hotel near Aberfoyle. The Scottish Labs always seem to engage the most technically proficient, not to say geeky, teams of all the labs. Last year we had one group both whose members had PhDs in string theory. There are also a surprisingly high number of people here whom I've worked with before including Fearghas McKay, who more or less introduced Artec to the internet more than 15 years ago and Richard Harris, who was CTO at the Digital Village. There's been some blogging here, here and here.

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Meet the Players

March 6, 2008 – 3:33 pm
Meet the Players was part of the European Media Event, held in Brussels between 3th of and 8th of March. The aim of the week is to turn a spotlight on the independent documentary sector and it's relation to the public broadcasters, but also to try to draw attention to new ways of developing, financing, producing and distributing documentaries. Several directors and producers were invited to participate in a two day workshop, developed by Franz Grabner of ORF. This preceded the Meet the Players speed dating session where the participants to met important players of the world of traditional and "new" media and platforms.

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