As reported earlier, I’ve been selected as an Industry Insider Guest of Honor at this year’s GenCon in Indianapolis, August 16th-19th. My seminar schedule as part of the program has been finalized and is now viewable to all attendees, so I figured I’d give a run-down of my seminars here.
Thursday, August 16th
How To Publish A Game Without Going Broke:3:00pm, ICC 210. Want to publish your own tabletop RPG? This panel goes beyond Kickstarter, we’ll talk about everything from motivation to finish the game to how to source printers. James Ernest, Dominic McDowall-Thomas, Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat, Gareth-Michael Skarka.
Kickstarting Your Game Q&A:6:00pm, ICC 210 Join our Industry Insider Guests who will share tips and tools for using Kickstarter to get your game project funded. Dennis Detwiller, Matt Forbeck, T.S. Luikart, Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat, Gareth-Michael Skarka.
Friday, August 17th
+5 Sword of ePublishing:1:00pm, ICC 210 The games industry was an early adopter of the digital publishing business model. Join our Industry Insider Guests as they discuss ways you can bring your game project to life as a digital release. Wolfgang Baur, Susan Morris, Gareth-Michael Skarka, Stan!
Freelancing in the Game Industry:2:00pm, ICC 210 Want to write for games? Our Industry guests have years of freelancing experience & will share their wisdom on how to find work, how to get more work, & how to succeed as a game industry freelancer. Matt Forbeck, Steve Kenson, Ryan Macklin, Gareth-Michael Skarka, Christine Stiles.
Saturday, August 18th
Doing Kickstarter Right:11:00am, ICC 210 Talk with successful Kickstarter publishers on how they did their Kickstarter. Topics discussed are: lessons learned, mistakes made, and plans for the future. Ryan Macklin, Gareth-Michael Skarka, Richard Thomas.
I’ve also submitted a seminar on Far West — if it is approved, it will appear in the on-site program book.
Beyond that, I’ll be with Adamant Entertainment at the Cubicle Seven booth in the Exhibit Hall. Drop by and say hello!
Here we go again, some of the stuff that’s been kicking around my headspace recently.
Been listening to a bunch of my 2 Tone ska stuff again — curse of being in one’s forties, I suppose. You dig out the music of your misspent youth. My favorite group was always The Beat (although, I’ll admit that I still think of them as The English Beat, as they were known here in the US). I loved other bands from the movement — The Specials, The Bodysnatchers, Madness — but none (for me) had the unimpeachable cool of The Beat. The Beat – “Mirror In The Bathroom.”
We’ll stick with the sad-old-bastard nostalgia for a moment. I heard this track again recently, and I was surprised at how little airplay it gets now. Olivia Newton-John was pretty much on constant pop radio rotation in the late-70s (along with the Bee-Gees), but (like the Bee-Gees), only a couple of songs appear to have made the “officially approved nostalgia playlist”, despite the popularity of her other stuff. This song is a great example — heard it *constantly* in 1979, and have barely heard it since. I unabashedly love this tune. Oliva Newton-John – “A Little More Love.”
A big part of my listening of late has been FAR WEST-related. I have a playlist of (good lord) nearly 700 tracks which I listen to as I work on the project, and that list is constantly growing as I discover new tracks, either on my own or suggested by fans. Here’s a couple of recent additions:
A track by a pair of Australian singers that appeared in the soundtrack to an episode of AMC’s western series HELL ON WHEELS, which immediately grabbed me: Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson – “Rattlin’ Bones.”
A very spaghetti-western-ish intro leads into a piece by the UK band The Heavy (best known over here for “How Ya Like Me Now?”), which I like quite a bit: The Heavy – “Short Change Hero.”
Here’s a piece that I’m slightly ashamed to say wormed its way into my brain via a commercial for Internet Explorer 9. A pop track with just the right amount of dubsteppy goodness added to it, from a London-based singer-songwriter. Alex Clare – “Too Close.”
And lastly, Slash has a new album coming out at the end of May, in collaboration with vocalist Myles Kennedy and his backing band The Conspirators, called “Apocalyptic Love.” The first single is getting pretty heavy rock radio play, and damned if it isn’t a nearly-perfect slice of “Use Your Illusion”-period Guns n’ Roses. I’m sorry… Axl who?Slash, feat. Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators: “You’re a Lie.”
As more and more creatives start to realize that the walls that separated them from their audience are crumbling, and that the traditional gatekeepers are risk-averse and prefer to recycle the same safe properties and methods over and over again, you’re starting to see a real movement towards insurgency, not only from new independents, but from ‘traditional-model’ creatives as well. From time to time I will spotlight these efforts — because
It’s always good to realize that it’s not just you, that other people feel the same way and are going through the same things you are;
Some of these will undoubtedly inspire you towards your own efforts and ideas; and
Without the weight of studios behind us, we can all use some promotion, so we should share each other’s efforts whenever possible.
Darren Bousman (a fellow graduate of the Shawnee Mission School District) is a director, best known in Hollywood circles as the man behind three films in the Saw franchise. Among a smaller niche, however, he’s known as the producer and director of Repo! The Genetic Opera, the 2008 cult movie musical that mashes up horror, sci-fi and rock-opera (a favorite of mine).
Bousman teamed up with many of his co-creators from Repo! and has created The Devil’s Carnival, a short horror/musical that serves as the opening episode to an ongoing series. The trailer:
Hollywood, of course, had no idea what to do with this. The strange subject, the short running time, the future episodes, etc. — so Bousman and company decided to take the show on tour, themselves. He wrote a blog entry today about how it’s been going.
“This tour, this whole experience is a drug. And I can 100% with conviction tell you, as a filmmaker and artist, I am addicted… It fuels me… it keeps me wanting to fight. I am Popeye, and this is my spinach.
Gone are the days that we have to accept the fate handed down to us… If I can get into a van with 6 of my friends, and create what we have created, then so can anybody else…
Gone are the days where I bitch about lack of support, or ‘the man’. There is no man… There is only ME standing in front of MYSELF…
The only thing stopping people from seeing my films is ME…”
The tour rolls through the Kansas City area on the 5th of May, at a theater a stone’s through from Bousman’s old high school. I’ll be there.
Daniel Knauf was the creator of the amazing HBO series Carnivàle, which mixed gnostic mythology with the 1930s dustbowl… and carnies (noticing a theme here?). Cancelled two years into its proposed six-year run, it entered the all-too-long list of “strange wonderful things cancelled because they didn’t appeal to a mass audience.”
Now, Knauf has jumped into the realm of transmedia, with his new company, BXX. PBS has an interview with him, titled “Carnivàle Creator Bypasses Hollywood.”
His new effort, Haunted, is a fictional story that follows paranormal investigators working inside an abandoned house tormented by supernatural events, and is experienced via multimedia elements such as research documentation and investigators’ blogs, multi-camera video, and a navigational timeline allows viewers to manipulate how they view the story.
Knauf is trying to make internet-based entertainment more than just TV on a different screen, by experimenting with how a narrative can be delivered:
“The traditional entertainment industry is not known for their humility. They tend to think they are the end all. You don’t take a TV show and put it on Hulu and call it Internet content. No, it’s not. It’s a TV show you’re watching on your computer. Hulu’s not really Internet, Funny or Die is not really Internet; those are just TV being watched on a different screen. For me, I wanted to invent a narrative that there was absolutely no way you could have done it if the Internet wasn’t invented. That was the goal I set myself.
In the end, I just got tired of trying to convince them this lives and breathes on the Internet. I got tired of explaining finance models to them and I thought, let’s just do an inexpensive version of this and show them.”
The interview is worth reading, and touches on crowdfunding, audience building and more.
The ground continues to shift. Get out there and create.
As reported earlier, I’ve been selected as an Industry Insider Guest of Honor at this year’s GenCon in Indianapolis, August 16th-19th. My seminar schedule as part of the program has been finalized and is now viewable to all attendees, so I figured I’d give a run-down of my seminars here.
