Teaching will be from international cross-media pioneers. Confirmed so far are:

• Christy Dena, a cross-media specialist who works as a narrative and game design consultant, strategist, educator and developer
• Ben Grass, producer of the award-winning drama Kirill and MD, Pure Grass Films
• Brian Newman, Consultant and Former President, Tribeca Film Institute
• Gregor Pryor, Digital Media Lawyer and Partner at Reed Smith

Applications will open on 15 February 2010.

Read on for session dates and times.

Monday, 15 Feb / HAU 2 at 14.00
EXTENDING THE STORY: AN INTRODUCTION TO CROSS-MEDIA STORYTELLING
(15 min presentations followed by roundtable and Q & A)

Moderator: Liz Rosenthal – Managing Director, Power to the Pixel
Speakers:
Martin Ericsson – Creative Director, The company P
Lance Weiler – Filmmaker, Story Architect and Digital Innovator
Alexandre Brachet -  Director, Upian

Tuesday, 16 Feb / HAU 3 (Top floor) at 14.00
EXTENDING THE FINANCE: HOW TO PRODUCE CROSS-MEDIA PROJECTS

Moderator: Liz Rosenthal – Managing Director, Power to the Pixel
Michel Reilhac – Executive Director,  Arte Cinéma
Lance Weiler – MD Seize the Media
Ben Grass – Founder & MD Pure Grass Films

Wednesday, 17 Feb / HAU 3 (Top floor) at 14.00
EXTENDING THE AUDIENCE: HOW TO DISTRIBUTE ACROSS MULTIPLE PLATFORMS
(15 min presentations followed by roundtable and Q & A)

Moderator: Liz Rosenthal – Managing Director, Power to the Pixel
Lizzie Gillett – Producer Age of Stupid
Timo Vuorensola – Director Starwreck in the Pirkinning

View the full list on The Wrap or on Ted’s blog Truly Free Film.

The term ‘cross-media’, or ‘transmedia,’ has entered mainstream business discussion but from a generally narrow perspective.

This Think Tank session aimed to debate issues in a much more open way – not just about the effect on the existing media and film industries but about the potential for new forms of creativity, finance, distribution etc.

The emphasis went beyond the technical to the real core issue of customer interaction with content.

In order to help shape the discussion, the event was split into four broad areas. This approach was an aide and guide but the Think Tank aims to enable open and free discussion.

The full report and outcomes from the day are available for download here.

In the final part of a short series reviewing the Power to the Pixel Think Tank in London, Michael Gubbins looks at how the panel believed value and business models could be derived from cross-media work.

As discussed in the first two parts, at the core of the cross-media movement are two ideas: the empowered content creator and the engaged audience or collaborator.

Terms such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘engagement’ have been somewhat devalued by overuse in marketing documents and consultancy reports. What the Think Tank – and indeed the whole Power to the Pixel London forum – aimed to achieve is to show these terms not as cliches but as the practical base for any future business models.

For the Think Tank members, however, this should not be the starting point for discussing a cross-media future. The main motivation is not to find a replacement for crumbling industrial models any more than it is replacing one media form with another.

The panel kept returning to something much more basic – the storytelling impulse.

Cross-media storytelling

“What I have learned is that our job is not making films but telling stories and storytelling is a fundamental human need,” said Michel Reilhac, executive director of Arte France Cinema.

This instinctive creation of narrative will not be tied down by the shackles of individual industry models or narrow windows of exploitation, according to the panel.

For a big majority of those who are, and will, use new cross-media opportunities to tell their stories, the term ‘model’ will be wholly irrelevant.  Most will have no desire to “monetise” anything.

Cheap tools, free distribution and dynamic new platforms will drive an explosion in audiovisual content, most of which will not be motivated by commerce.

A small proportion of this work may find its way to a bigger audience than the community for which it was originally intended but this will be a secondary issue.

But  all this cross-media activity which is growing as fast as devices are produced will generate interest in the more expensive and expansive work elsewhere – just as grassroots sport and music helps drive professional teams and live concerts etc.

Crowdsourcing and creative commons

At the next level, there will be those who are motivated by reaching large audiences for politicial reasons, such as Age Of Stupid; or as a means of sharing creative work. These may well be financed by supporters and fans (crowdsourced) and freely shared with money raised through donations, ancillary sales, such as merchandising, special DVD editions etc.

This is again not intended as a business model for all film but will be a part of a mixed economy of film-making and cross-media storytelling . Those already engaged in such activity have often discovered an enthusiastic community of supporters who show extraordinary generosity.

And some of the panel believe that far from a radical departure, such approaches mark a return to the way that stories were told in previous generations.

What technology has provided is a means to reach beyond national boundaries and industry models to find communities selected by common interest rather than an accident of birth.

This opens up the potential for more diverse content, with groups finding each other throughout the world, a fact already being exploited by some diasporic communities.

Business models

As suggested above, the cross-media movement is not about an alchemistic search for a grand solution to the problems of today’s crumbling industrial models.Yet most of the panel are convinced that strong commercial models will emerge and are already taking shape.

The challenge to the industrial status quo from the cross-media movement is to see beyond the idea that value can only be based  on licensing, rights, territories and windows.

The focus should not be about trying to prop up the system but on audience.

The business model of the film industry is not broken because of lack of demand, goes the argument,  quite the opposite. It is that demand cannot be financially channeled through the current narrow rights and windows-based models.

The Think Tank suggested that value will be derived from turning the relationship with audiences into business, shifting from a licensing to a services model.

Cross-media business ideas are based on stimulating demand, and working to service that demand by understanding audiences and behaviour. Where possible, that extends into sharing ownership and collaborating with that audience.

Interaction

“Closing the gap between author and audience should be seen as a business boon,” according to Slava Rubin, Co-Founder of IndieGoGo, who was bullish about the financial prospects.

“This is all opportunity and a chance to make more money than we ever have before. I can test plotlines in advance and can build a fanbase,” he said. “If you can get 100, 000 followers, you’ve got a career.”

It is an argument that at least should be understood by those working today in creative industries, even if they remain sceptical.

If you can know your audience, you can create tailored content for a known fanbase; collaborate with that audience and you gain an engaged community on which to base business; aggregate audiences and you begin to see the basis for bigger-budget models.

Cross-media value

Taking the narrative across different media platforms offers different opportunities to engage audiences.

Sometimes, as with live-action role-playing games (LARP), it is possible to give the audience a very literal active role.

Each platform offers a new means to draw audiences into an immersive and collaborative relationship with the content which opens up commercial opportunities and a dynamic relationship which can be taken into other ventures.

“The story will drive the value propostion across platforms,” says Lance Weiler, who has been doing pioneering work in this area. “The ways that you bridge devices will bring new possibilities.”

The success of iPhone apps and texting, it was suggested, shows how digital platforms can generate income.

Data and brand building

A bi-product of interactive relationships is freely-exchanged data, which carries a value.

Weiler again sees big potential: “The more data you have and the more that you can use it to connect people, the more you generate value. The question is how do we protect that data and use it in innovative ways?  We’re talking about building audiences, but I think it’s about you facilitate those connections.”

This generation and use of data is an obsession in other areas of the media, including the advertising world, says Ben Malbon, Managing Partner and Founder of BBH Labs, although he warns ”most people don’t even know what data is”.

“In advertising, we try to work out what’s most important and get rid of the rest.  The movement within advertising is around adaptive branding – live campaign creation.  It’s very challenging, but it’s something film storytelling could learn from.”

The biggest cultural change for film will be in creating business which is transparent.

“Openness leads to trust,” says Malbon. “Maybe that’s where you get generosity and people wanting to be involved.”

Looking forward

Obstacles remain to the progress of the cross-media movement.

Perhaps the biggest is the pressure for restrictions on the web to protect copyright-based business. Net-neutrality is a major tenet of cross-media philosophy and plays an important role in the models being developed. There is a potential fight between the existing proprietary business.

Then there are technical problems in terms of standards that allow easy movement across media platforms.

One of the driving forces that will make business possible is a sense of optimism in stark contrast to the resigned protectionism of much media industry debate.

The reality of close, collaborative relationships with audiences and the proliferation of tools and methods of distribution gives the cross-media movement a sense of purpose.

Rather than trying to hold on to anything, there is a sense of renewal and a removing of psychological as well as economic barriers to progress.

“It’s rare to feel that anything can happen but that is the sense now,” says Reilhac. “It’s up to us to make it become a reality and that is a real privilege.”

Think Tank members

CHAIR: MICHAEL GUBBINS, journalist and consultant (UK); SCILLA ANDREEN, Co-Founder & CEO, IndieFlix (USA); OMID ASHTARI, Agent, CAA (USA); PETER BUCKINGHAM, Head of Distribution & Exhibition, UK Film Council (UK); CHRISTY DENA, Director, Universe Creation 101 (AUS); MARTIN ELRICSSON, Producer & Creative Director, The company P (SWE); TED HOPE, Producer and Co-Founder, This is that (USA); MAUREEN McHUGH, Writer & Partner, No Mimes Media (USA); BEHNAM KARBASSI, Producer & Partner, No Mimes Media (USA); BEN MALBON, Managing Partner & Founder, BBH Labs (USA); BRIAN NEWMAN, Consultant and Former President, Tribeca Film Institute (USA); NINA PALEY, Filmmaker, Sita Sings the Blues (USA); MICHEL PETERS, Co-Founder & CEO, Content Republic (UK), STEVE PETERS, Experience Designer & Partner, No Mimes Media (USA); SARA POLLACK, Entertainment Marketing Manager, YouTube (USA); MICHEL REILHAC, Executive Director, Arte France Cinéma (FR); LIZ ROSENTHAL, Founder & Director, Power to the Pixel (UK); SLAVA RUBIN, Co-Founder, IndieGoGo (USA); DAVID VARELA, Producer, nDreams (UK); HUNTER WEEKS, Filmmaker, 10MPH and Ride the Divide (USA);
LANCE WEILER, Filmmaker, Story Architect and Digital Innovator (USA).

The first part of the report from the Power to the Pixel Think Tank in London centred on the engaged audience as the driving force of a cross-media movement.

The theme for the second report is empowerment of the film-maker, content creator or storyteller. As Michael Gubbins reports, engagement and empowerment and creator and audience were inextricably linked for the Power to the Pixel Think Tank, which met at the RSA in London.

The cross-media vision extends some way beyond the debate about “democratising” film.

Putting low-cost, and often free, tools for the creation and distribution of content is certainly a significant step which will inevitably have an effect on the culture of film-making and other forms of content creation. But the cross-media movement puts two other dimensions to this democratisation:

• The linking of tools for production and distribution with others for discovery and collaboration with audiences
• A cross-media perspective meaning that the narrative can transcend any single discipline, such as film

Empowerment then, is about a culture of creation and participation where the gap between creator and audience  - and between participation and consumption – is blurred.

Participation not consumption

Analogies were drawn by some of the panel with the rise of Punk Rock in the 1970s. Although the term is now used to denote a genre of music, at the time it had more of a sense of a movement: music was not a product to be consumed but a means of expression.

For the first time in history, the means to create audiovisual material is in the hands of everyone – at least as ubiquitous as guitars in the ’70s. How these recording materials are used will be decided by all kinds of criteria such as cost, technical standards, file-sizes etc.

As many other media have discovered, what will not hold sway in this new world, according to the panel, is the narrow interests of industries built for a top-down, rights-driven analogue age.

The audience will have the final say in the development and success of new creative forms and the experience of the music business is that these forms will challenge industry business models.

The temptation – seemingly irresistible to many in the industry establishment – is to see these participatory digital developments as mere amateur tinkering that will have no impact on “real film”. But for the Think Tank, such thinking misses the point.

They paint an optimistic picture of  a dynamic and free exchange between storytellers of all kinds and audiences. Out of this vast increase in activity will come a range of new business models – but the economics will emerge from demand and collaboration rather than being shoehorned in from the current single model.

“In a free culture, we should be able to participate in the things we enjoy.  It will eventually become its own form that has many different ways of developing,” said multi award-winning US film producer Ted Hope.

Technology is already empowering new formats and bringing together different disciplines to create coherent narratives.

Martin Elricsson, Swedish Producer and Creative Director at The company P, which has been developing games and participatory drama, said creative people were reaching similar conclusions from different perspectives and coming together with a real sense of  momentum: “To us this doesn’t feel like a time of film crisis but a renaissance. We’ve been doing our own thing and finding similarities with others’ work. The common thread is closing the distance between artist and audience.”

Power and responsibility

The enthusiasm of the cross-media pioneers and the logic of the argument will not win over everyone.

Indeed, it is probably fair to say that the majority of established film-makers would be happier if the whole digital revolution would quietly go away. Mainstream interest is not really driven by enthusiasm.

“The reason why people are talking about transmedia is because they are confronted by the fact that the system is no longer working.  There’s no money.  Big sales companies are not paying what they promised they’d be paying.  Only light in this dark system is this blinking thing of transmedia,” says Michel Reilhac, Executive Director, Arte France Cinéma.

He acknowledged that film-makers in particular were often motivated by being part of a system that is rapidly disappearing: “Most people fell in love with the atmosphere of the industry and they want to be a part of that.  They are not about storytelling.  They are about being a member of the film community the way it has always been.  Part of a mythology.”

That certainly explains part of the reluctance to embrace new forms of creative expression. The waiting for some mythological single internet Business Model is also a strong habit too.

But Ted Hope believes there is another unspoken factor – fear.

“Most of the film-makers I talk to are complete Luddites.  They need to understand what the most simple tools are and that they need to not be afraid to engage. “

It is not just or even primarily technophobia that is the problem. “Resistance isn’t to technology it’s to the audience,” says Brian Newman, consultant and former President of the Tribeca Film Institute. “People are scared that they have to engage with their audience.”

Christy Dena, founder of Australia’s Universe Creation 101 said there was a changing dynamic in the relationship between artist and audience that undermines a long-established culture.

“People are afraid of losing control.  And it is a skill to design a work that involves interactivity.”

The mission for Power to the Pixel is that knowledge is shared and tomorrow’s report will look at how a cross-media movement might emerge to act as a community for all film-makers in a changing digital age.

Think Tank members

CHAIR: MICHAEL GUBBINS, journalist and consultant (UK); SCILLA ANDREEN, Co-Founder & CEO, IndieFlix (USA); OMID ASHTARI, Agent, CAA (USA); PETER BUCKINGHAM, Head of Distribution & Exhibition, UK Film Council (UK); CHRISTY DENA, Director, Universe Creation 101 (AUS); MARTIN ELRICSSON, Producer & Creative Director, The company P (SWE); TED HOPE, Producer and Co-Founder, This is that (USA); MAUREEN McHUGH, Writer & Partner, No Mimes Media (USA); BEHNAM KARBASSI, Producer & Partner, No Mimes Media (USA); BEN MALBON, Managing Partner & Founder, BBH Labs (USA); BRIAN NEWMAN, Consultant and Former President, Tribeca Film Institute (USA); NINA PALEY, Filmmaker, Sita Sings the Blues (USA); MICHEL PETERS, Co-Founder & CEO, Content Republic (UK), STEVE PETERS, Experience Designer & Partner, No Mimes Media (USA); SARA POLLACK, Entertainment Marketing Manager, YouTube (USA); MICHEL REILHAC, Executive Director, Arte France Cinéma (FR); LIZ ROSENTHAL, Founder & Director, Power to the Pixel (UK); SLAVA RUBIN, Co-Founder, IndieGoGo (USA); DAVID VARELA, Producer, nDreams (UK); HUNTER WEEKS, Filmmaker, 10MPH and Ride the Divide (USA);
LANCE WEILER, Filmmaker, Story Architect and Digital Innovator (USA).

The potential for a  participatory, collaborative cross-media movement that can renew creative industry models or strike out into new territory was the key theme of the 2009 Power to the Pixel Think Tank in London. Michael Gubbins reports.

The Think Tank was made up of a range of leading thinkers and practitioners in the cross-media field from around the world.

The tone of the discussion had clearly moved on from previous years – driven by a sense that the business models for existing media were already failing both audiences and content creators and could not grasp the opportunities of a changed world.

But the Think Tank was set up to avoid a moribund debate about what was wrong with today’s media industries, choosing instead to take on the more active challenge of envisaging a shape for a new cross-media world.

The earlier Power to the Pixel forum attended by hundreds of film-makers and part of The Times BFI London Film Festival, reinforced the need for looking forward rather than revisiting well-worn debates.

The Think Tank itself was made up of those who have already been through the discussion about the decline of existing models and had already taken the leap into reinventing new means of working.

But the question for many film-makers and content creators at the forum is whether these cross-media pioneers are an exclusive hardcore or whether they are marking out a trail or trails that others can follow.

In other words, are we at the beginning of a cross-media movement?

These articles look at the key themes in the Think Tank discussion.

From consumers to collaborators

The audience is the essential starting point for discussion of a cross-media world.

A demand-led consumer culture is among the main factors that have undermined existing industry business models. From piracy to release windows, the creative industries have tried to work out ways to hold back the tide of demand.

The cross-media world, however, is about working with customer trends rather than restricting them.

Specifically, the panel questioned the future of a system in which value resides in the selling of rights to a restricted territory and for a single platform. The rethinking of value as something that is based on relationships with audience will be explored later in these Think Tank reports.

The idea that the point of interaction with content should be the choice of customer is contentious. In film, for example, it denies the almost religious centrality of the theatrical window.

In fact, most of the participants are confident that cinema has a future but that its value will be based on its social setting which, far from needing protection, gives it a unique position if it can offer customers choice, an experience, comfort etc.

But at heart, the cross-media argument is  that audiences ultimately decide the hierarchy of platforms. The music industry learned the hard way, that where and when product is used was simply not in their gift, and business models based on restriction suffered.

The engaged audience

Consumer control in cross-media terms takes that power to new levels.

Audiences will decide at what level their engagement takes place but their centrality is crucial – in an internet age, audiences become communities.

“Every project creates its own federated group of people,” says Michel Reilhac, Executive Director, Arte France Cinéma. “Audience can invent itself.”

The active audience is not then necessarily one that takes a direct part in the financing or creation of content, even though crowd-sourcing has taken the headlines.

As Sara Pollack, Entertainment Marketing Manager at YouTube rightly pointed out, the large majority may be happy as consumers.

But the notion of the “engaged audience” can be defined widely. In the modern media, audiences choose what they see, whose recommendations they follow, on what platform they wish to see content.

A number of people pointed out that the very fact that audiences assemble socially online and make up communities that can be understood, mobilised and serviced, represents a sea change from the analogue age.

Turning engagement into value

If value will be drawn from servicing an audience rather than just exploitation of rights, this is an area that film-makers need to understand.

The panel mostly rejected the term consumer or customer as inadequate with audience as a more neutral term. Film-maker, story architect and cross-media pioneer, Lance Weiler talks about audience as collaborators.

“I think about the audience in a way that I can collaborate with – how can I make something that means something to them,” he said. “I want to empower them - and in letting go you do things differently.”

The idea of the audience as collaborator – particularly a collaborator with whom content is freely shared – goes against the grain of the entire rights-centred approach of the existing media.

There have been accusations of naivety about the approach but large areas of the media are struggling with these issues and, as Weiler points out, there are commercial independent models in the open-source software world.

If collaboration also means collecting freely-given data about audiences, then Weiler suggests, we are entering a field that is the obsession of many other businesses.

Ben Malbon,  Managing Partner and Founder of BBH Labs, which has been doing pioneering work in marketing, said that advertisers and marketeers were having the same discussions about where true value resided in a multi-platform, demand-led world.

For the film industry, in particular, the discussion is often polarised. Perhaps that is partly because there is a growing realisation that you cannot simply integrate the new forms of distribution with the old business, as had been done with VHS and DVD.

“We have an entire new paradigm but we’re breaking it by trying to fit it into our old models,” says Brian Newman, consultant and former President of the Tribeca Film Institute.

Some of that reluctance goes beyond technology, he suggested: “Resistance isn’t to technology, it’s to the audience.  People are scared that they have to engage with their audience.”

Power to the Pixel founder Liz Rosenthal puts it more bluntly: “Audience is a dirty word, connected to consumer.”

This is not an easy subject in Europe, where cultural exception is used to justify production but not distribution – which is mere trade.

Audience collaboration is a culture shift with big consequences for business and policy-making as we shall see in the next two parts of this short series. But the direct connection between content creator and a collaborative audience is already having a profound effect on those who have experienced it.

The Think Tank panel:

CHAIR: MICHAEL GUBBINS, journalist and consultant (UK); SCILLA ANDREEN, Co-Founder & CEO, IndieFlix (USA); OMID ASHTARI, Agent, CAA (USA); PETER BUCKINGHAM, Head of Distribution & Exhibition, UK Film Council (UK); CHRISTY DENA, Director, Universe Creation 101 (AUS); MARTIN ELRICSSON, Producer & Creative Director, The company P (SWE); TED HOPE, Producer and Co-Founder, This is that (USA); MAUREEN McHUGH, Writer & Partner, No Mimes Media (USA); BEHNAM KARBASSI, Producer & Partner, No Mimes Media (USA); BEN MALBON, Managing Partner & Founder, BBH Labs (USA); BRIAN NEWMAN, Consultant and Former President, Tribeca Film Institute (USA); NINA PALEY, Filmmaker, Sita Sings the Blues (USA); MICHEL PETERS, Co-Founder & CEO, Content Republic (UK), STEVE PETERS, Experience Designer & Partner, No Mimes Media (USA); SARA POLLACK, Entertainment Marketing Manager, YouTube (USA); MICHEL REILHAC, Executive Director, Arte France Cinéma (FR); LIZ ROSENTHAL, Founder & Director, Power to the Pixel (UK); SLAVA RUBIN, Co-Founder, IndieGoGo (USA); DAVID VARELA, Producer, nDreams (UK); HUNTER WEEKS, Filmmaker, 10MPH and Ride the Divide (USA)
LANCE WEILER, Filmmaker, Story Architect and Digital Innovator (USA).

A survey commissioned for next week’s Screenwriters Festival in Cheltenham revealed that more than 70% of writers questioned worked more than 10 hours per week on their feature film idea and nearly 40% more than 20 hours.

And the fruits of this extraordinary labour for nearly 70% of those correspondents?  Nothing, not a penny.  Just over 4% were making what might be called a decent wage.

It begs the question ‘why?’ – a question that could be asked of many of those working in the current system of finance, production and distribution.

The answer, of course, is that many have bought into the whole notion of the dream factory, inspired perhaps by riches, red carpets, statuettes or of being, figuratively speaking, up there on the ’68 barricades with Godard.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about this year’s Power to the Pixel was that it asked a different question –  ‘How?’

Doing not dreaming

The cross-media approach to content creation is essentially about doing rather than dreaming. Cut through an alarming number of acronyms and jargon (a habit that surely needs shaking), and the film-makers, games developers, storytellers etc at Power to the Pixel are essentially engaged in circumventing creaking industry systems and media limitations to find their way directly to interact with the audience.

What they are doing is the antithesis of the hit-and-hope culture of film.

For multi award-winning US producer Ted Hope, this makes cross-media work exciting – allowing the reinvention rather than replacement of cinema.

“Cinema is no longer the most complete and representative art form for the world that we inhabit; it no longer mirrors how we currently live in the world;  cinema is now a rarefied pleasure requiring us to conform to a location-centric, abbreviated, passive experience that is nothing like the world we engage with day to day.”

Hope makes a case for a broadening of the mission of cinema:

He suggests six pillars for cinema – discovery, content, production, promotion, participation and presentation – and believes that until now creators truly only participated in two of them: content and production.  (click here for more)

Film-makers need to reach out and take responsibility for a much greater part of the process. The question is how.

Grasping the opportunities

What Hope and all the delegates at the forum were offering film-makers and other content creators is an invitation to grasp opportunities. The message was that the future is not something that happens to you but something that you can help shape.

Whether cross-media change is characterised as evolutionary or revolutionary – an extension of existing business or the development of new creative forms – it is about action; indeed Power to the Pixel did not spend a second talking about when the existing industry might “recover”, which has been the obsession of many media conferences this year.

But taking control instead of waiting is not always comfortable. Even those who have embraced the potential of cross-media film-making recognise that the task can appear daunting at the outset.

Scilla Andreen CEO and co-founder of online platform Indieflix spoke for many when outlining the fears of many film-makers: “beyond trying to make a great movie, I have to think about how to digest it or ingest it.  Is my movie going to apply in all the different ways?  It’s overwhelming.”

Cross-media work certainly seems to demand a change of perspective and to learn new skills outside the industrial disciplines of any single media.

A sharing culture

The key to acquiring these skills according the speakers – and it was a strong commitment at the Think Tank – is in sharing knowledge and ideas. The roots of many of the cross-media pioneers are in open-source software and web networks, where collaboration is simply the dominant culture.

What can be shared, suggested the forum, was:

• Knowledge of tools, readily available and cheap
• Best practice – what projects have learned
• Consumer behaviour
• Each other’s expertise in networks and communities

A generous sharing of ideas and tools and a commitment to democratising processes is characteristic of cross-media work. That is partly because those on the stage are real pioneers in areas of work where no rules have been written. There is also a basic instinct to freely publish and share.

There is a bigger picture though. In the current film industry with its limited potential for distribution, film-makers are in competition. For all the talk of culture, film is often a fight for elbow room on a crowded, heavily-policed route to the customer.

Cross-media with its much broader distribution is a fight, not with each other, but for a share of audience time.  In such a world, mutual interest outweighs competition and so film-makers will find easy access to knowledge.

And as Steve Peters, partner at No Mimes Media puts it, “if you don’t know how to do it yourself, find someone who does.”

The audience challenge

The truth is that reskilling is not the hard bit. It is the collaborative means of working that represents the real culture shock.

Power to the Pixel posits a world in which business models are based on interaction. There is no comfortable hiding place – this is a world that begins with that missing link of the traditional film industry – transparency.

In the final part of the review, we will look at what the Pixel Pitch of new projects tells us about the future, the questions raised at the Think Tank and a conclusion about the direction of the cross-media movement.