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This is a walkthrough of the Mime Academy Mini-Experience. Use it only if you get stuck.

1. Start: Once you enter your information and click the Submit button, check your email inbox. Momentarily, you’ll find a message from Colette-Therese Fromage, the headmistress of the International Mime Academy. Clicking the link at the bottom of the email will take you to the International Mime Academy website.
2. International Mime Academy website: Exploring the website, you’ll find information about the Academy, along with the history of mimes and information about the Director of the academy, the Master Mime. On the Contact Us page, you’ll find a phone number. Call it.
3. Phone message: Here, you’ll hear a message from Colette-Therese Fromage. Suddenly, the message is interrupted by a plea from someone who Needs Your Help. A young mime student named Oswald tells you to find out more information at his website: A Terrible Thing To Waste. So, go to www.aterriblethingtowaste.com.
4. A Terrible Thing To Waste blog: This is the blog of young Oswald, the fledgeling mime. It seems he’s in trouble and left you a clue here. If you look carefully, certain letters on the site are highlighted. Putting the highlighted letters together in order spells out YouTube Oswald the Mime. Entering this into your browser as www.youtube.com/oswaldthemime leads you to his YouTube channel, where there is a video message from Oswald, explaining his predicament.
5. Video: In the video, Oswald tells you that he’s locked in a basement at the academy, and that there’s a specific lock keeping him from escaping: A Kryptonite Evolution 2000, and that if you can help him to email him at “oswald at my website.” So now, Google “Kryptonite Evolution 2000.“
6. Research: At the top of the search results, you’ll see a link to an actual Engadget article about this particular lock and how to open it. It seems that you can use a Bic pen to open the lock. Better get that information to Oswald! Email him at oswald at aterriblethingtowaste.com and tell him that he needs to specifically use a Bic pen to hack open the lock. If you don’t give him clear enough instructions, he’ll let you know.
7. Success: If you’ve done everything right, you’ll have given Oswald all the info he needs to escape the evil Master Mime! You’ll know you’ve succeeded if you get a reply from Oswald thanking you for your help. Congratulations! But if you think that’s the end of the story, you’re in for a little surprise….

That’s it! If you enjoyed our quick example of the possibilities of transmedia entertainment, tell your friends.

But beware the Master Mime…

Well, this is the obligatory SXSW Panel Picker Post. There are lots of great Transmedia/ARG panels up for voting this year (including three by NMM partners), and here are our favorites, for your consideration:

FILM:

• Transmedia Production: Making the New Frontier – Behnam Karbassi (No Mimes Media)
• Documenting your Transmedia Project: The How and Why – Brooke Thompson

INTERACTIVE

• Your Life is a Transmedia Experience – Jenka Gurfinkel
• ARGs Don’t Work: The Future of Transmedia Stories – Maureen McHugh (No Mimes Media)
• Battlestar Galactica and Transmedia: A Case Study – Craig Engler
• Transmedia Artists Guild: New Media Needs New Representation – Jay Bushman
• Hoax or Transmedia: The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction – Andrea Phillips
• Audience Engagement in the Transmedia Age – Steve Peters (No Mimes Media)
• City as Platform: Gameplay in the Third Space – Sara Thacher

If you’re a transmedia fan, please take a look and vote!

ETA: Sara Thacher’s panel

From ARGNet: Our own Maureen McHugh’s no holds barred keynote, complete with a menacing lightning backdrop!

Near, far, wherever you are – ARGFest 2010 in Atlanta, GA was a blast. Whether at ARGFest or its virtual Twitter counterpart #PretendARGFest, the annual…(read more)

Why transmedia? Why not watch a movie? Or read a book? Because video games have taught a whole generation that it is possible for the audience—in this case, the player—to interact with the story. The interaction is extensive in video games. Without it, there is no experience.

But the story is also pretty limited. Video game interaction is repetitive, limited, and often tangential to the story. For many players, story interrupts the game, just go online and read about any video game that doesn’t allow the audience to skip the cut scenes. It’s the experience, the shooting, the driving, the changing the radio station, the exploring, that engages the audience most.

Interactivity is a double edged sword. We don’t put video games on TV because watching them is, frankly, boring as hell. Doing them, despite their often repetitive nature—shoot that, now shoot that, now shoot that—is fun. Read more

Conventions are essential to transmedia work. Stories that have shapes familiar to the audience. The damsel in distress. The disappearing person. The murder mystery. Transmedia is also establishing conventions for itself.

Many of the conventions of transmedia are borrowed. And many of them are rather old conventions that have fallen out of popular use. Transmedia is a new, naive medium, and so it makes fresh some existing conventions that have become clichéd or technologically obsolete. Read more

As I said in Part 1, because the artform takes stories and shatters them into pieces, it’s a lot easier for the audience to put the story back together if it’s a kind of story they recognize. If it’s, in other words, a conventional narrative. So, say, detective mysteries tend to make pretty decent transmedia stories. In print stories, I like to break conventions, use less well understood conventions, and generally fart around. In transmedia, I’ve had to learn that I can make the character as complex as I want, but the structure of the narrative better be pretty simple.

The funny thing about transmedia storytelling is that for all it’s reliance on conventions, the artform itself doesn’t yet have many established conventions. And the ones that it has are probably conventions that will fall away as audiences learn the artform and as technology gets better. Read more

Click to Download Video

Last month, Maureen and I were honored to be part of a day-long series of panels put on by USC and UCLA Film Schools called Transmedia Hollywood: S/Telling the Story.

Now, videos of the entire day have become available. You can download our panel, ARG: This is Not a Game…. But is it Always a Promotion? (Jordan Weisman, Will Brooker, Ivan Askwith, etc.) directly from their site, or go here to catch all the videos from the entire day (they’re still in the process of adding all the videos).