Transmedia: Storytelling for the Digital Age

Tasha Robinson: "Until now, the studio behind the Toy Story movies, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Wall-E, Up, and more has never made a movie with a female protagonist" ...

Mark Wilson: "With just an SLR and a Kinect, these striking, 3-D avatars come to life. So what does tech like this herald for the future of film-making?"

Mike Ryan: "In honor of the landmark film's landmark birthday, I asked a group of influential filmmakers -- responsible for projects such as "The Hunger Games," "Iron Man" and "Lost" -- what the biggest influence the original "Star Wars" had on them professionally or personally"...

Making a hit movie on a budget is as hard as Hollywood makes it look. "We're in a business where the solution is almost always to write a check," said Joe Drake, the departing co-chief operating officer of Lionsgate, the studio behind "The Hunger Games."

DRC: A revealing look at the "story first" approach that drove financial decision making on The Hunger Games.

"The absolute last resort is solving something with money," Drake said. "Very often, that turns out to be the best creative solution. It requires you to deal with it in the storytelling."

For nearly 60 years, Roger Corman has been making indie films with budgets that wouldn’t even cover the catering costs of multiplex fare like Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol...

[For more, read Roger Corman on producing 400-plus films and why the audience is always right at http://wapo.st/wQaft1]

Since the turn of the century, director Brad Bird has galvanized Hollywood with animated masterpieces The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille...

James Iliff: "While on the second night of the incredible 5D Flux Conference on transmedia at USC two weeks ago, Henry Jenkins moderated a discussion with a number of luminaries from the previsualization and motion capture industries [...] The topic was on digital design and world building in the narrative media landscape – a topic that is vitally relevant to virtual reality, and couldn’t have been more timely."

Jeff Gomez: "Our love of team-ups, in fact, dates back to the Stone Age. Early man imbued all things around him with animus, and the coolest things — the sun, the moon, the ocean — were either the incarnations of, or controlled by superior beings, gods. It was just a matter of time before pantheons formed, relationships got complicated, and villains arose to challenge the benevolent"...

Beth Carter: "A common hysteria surrounds the inevitable switch from analog to digital, regardless of the industry" ...

The Sound of My Voice is the story of a journalist and his girlfriend that are pulled into a cult whose leader (Marling) claims to be from the future.

[A look at the "use of immersive digital elements like hot spots and clickable video that take you deeper into the story world."]

Movies shot faster than the standard 24 frames per second have startling clarity and emotional impact. Peter Jackson and James Cameron have taken note.

The late Kim Jong Il was so passionate about the North Korean film industry that, according to the BBC, he once kidnapped a South Korean director and his actress wife and forced them to make films for him, while also imprisoning them separately for over five years...

[What can one say? ...]

"From the critics through to the studios all the way through to the DPs, we’ve won a big battle with Hugo," said Pace. "At a time when there’s been a lot of discussion about the 3D medium and is it good enough and does it enhance the storytelling, Hugo has paid off...