The envelope–stamped with the phrase “Nobody Knows It Yet”–piqued curiosity among its recipients. The card inside the envelope read, “But It Has Already Started,” a message printed on top of an image that appears to be a block of ice.
While an answer to the initial query, this cryptic message on a card hardly solved the mystery. The other side of the card, though, provided a path to a possible solution, a URL for a Facebook page that in turn led to a website, which thrusts us into another world.
That world resides in an alternate reality game (ARG) “Ready for the Big Chill,” which debuted last month and over a period of 24 days has offered a transmedia experience that told in real time the story of Magda Cerezales, a vulcanologist studying an enormous yet supposedly dormant volcano in Peru. However, as the tale unfolds, Magda and her colleagues suddenly realized that the giant volcano was going to blow, which could trigger the recurrence of events that took place centuries ago, causing extreme consequences to the global climate. Back then, a massive eruption blocked the sun, resulting in the Ice Age. Could that happen again?
ARG players are drawn into the current disaster, able to ask questions and propose courses of action for survival in an interactive “idea community.” Offering food for thought and prompting conversation are such characters as other vulcanologists, geologists, a videographer/director and a conspiracy theorist who all keep tabs on the Peru volcano and concurrent events worldwide that could lead to a catastrophe.
“Ready for the Big Chill” is an inspired transmedia narrative that–disseminating some 550 pieces of the story on many original vlogs and sites as well as several social media platforms–deliberately blurs the line between reality and fiction, allowing the users to participate and offering them opportunities to shape what develops and transpires.
There’s another overriding mystery, though, that goes beyond the geological, humanity-in-peril storyline–namely who is bringing us and/or sponsoring this ARG experience and why?
That question was answered today with the reveal of a new name and website for the longstanding production house Mia Films, which has been rebranded and become RedMagmaMedia, a moniker change which reflects a spreading of the company’s creative wings into transmedia.
Indeed RedMagmaMedia’s transmedia wherewithal is clearly showcased in “Ready for the Big Chill” as is its production acumen which deftly navigated shooting and logistics across three large active volcanoes in Costa Rica along with on-location lensing in Miami and Mexico City.
Storytelling evolves
“In the new environment dominated by social media, the production companies need to add new capabilities to their structures and form bonds with new types of creators,” said director Massimo Martinotti, a principal in what was Mia Films and is now at the helm of RedMagmaMedia. Martinotti served as transmedia director on “Ready for the Big Chill.” He noted that the development of platforms, the community management, the writing (a script of nearly 100 pages) and the design were integral to “Ready for the Big Chill.”
“The project was an especially interesting test of our capabilities to manage an always-on narrative that unfolded across multiple platforms and multiple time zones,” related Martinotti. In fact the fictional characters of ‘Ready for the Big Chill’ were twittering 24/7 from New York, Peru, Tanzania and Indonesia. We could achieve everything in house thanks to a quite unique structure spread in four countries [U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina]. We are indeed working on new areas of expansion–in the next few days we will announce a new office in Europe, and in the next few months we will incorporate new technical capabilities.”
Martinotti has a unique perspective on how production companies need to evolve in that for several years he chaired the AICP.next committee which explored and made inroads into that very proposition vis a vis the brave new media world.
“We know that in the next few years our challenge will not consist uniquely of making incredibly good commercials but commercials that people want to share on Facebook, embed on their blogs, comment in their tweets, recommend on Stambleupon and watch on their mobile devices,” related Martinotti. “In addition to unbelievably good commercials, we need to be able to generate also other types of spreadable, embeddable, bloggable, tweetable and sharable, bookmarkable content such as webisodes, games, applications, comic books, live events, TV shows, short films, documentaries and feature films. I believe that we have to embrace a new way of telling stories and that transmedia storytelling is the territory that we need to explore passionately. This means creating worlds in which many macro-stories and many great characters can live together, worlds in which stories created by our clients can live together with the fantasies of their fans, worlds in which the main franchise is surrounded by many other narrative elements such as backstories, flashbacks, parallel, peripheral and interstitial stories.
“We recognize,” continued Martinotti, “the inherently migratory behavior of today’s users who are willing to go wherever they can to find a story they want to be part of, and we are fascinated by the idea of creating ever-evolving story universes capable of engaging passionate communities of fans. We know that, to achieve these goals, we have to generate stories so large that they cannot fit in one single medium, so explosive that they cannot be bounded or constricted. For this reason, we decided that having the word ‘Films’ as part of the name of the company was a bit limiting, and we began to look for a new name. We liked the idea of exploring options related to volcanoes: I shot at least ten times on volcanoes all around the world and I always loved the feeling of being in a gigantic crater and realizing that just a few meters underneath, a magma chamber the size of several football stadiums is pushing up trying to release its massive energy. As soon as we decided to change the name of the company from Mia Films to RedMagmaMedia, it was natural for us to chose an ARG like ‘Ready for the Big Chill’ as an opportunity to establish the new identity and define the personality of the production company.”
Indeed the ARG has proven engaging and has started to engage its following to the new rebranded company that created and realized the project. RedMagmaMedia opens with a group of international filmmakers, such as French director Pierre Morel whose credits include the 2009 theatrical feature box office hit Taken starring Liam Neeson, and spot/short film/beauty director Olivier Venturini. Michel Sassoon serves as executive producer of RedMagmaMedia.
Among those contributing to “Ready for the Big Chill” were producers Marisol Soto and Mauricio Gamboa in Costa Rica, Flor Vega in Mexico and Sassoon in Miami; transmedia experience designer Andrea Phillips; screenwriter Carla Pravisani; writers Peter Maez, Lisa France and Enrique Arroyo; editor Rodrigo Alfaro who also provided original music; community manager Marieth Campos; web designers Jorge Peraza and Andres Zamora; developers Daniel Jimenez and Geovanny Vargas; art director Santiago Zarate; scientific consultant Carlos Jose Ramirez; and consultants Cesare Fracca, Luca Babini and Gaby Marine.
The cast included Martha Solorzano who portrayed Magda, and Roy Lynham, Diego Jimenez, Ryan Thor, John Trapani, Ike Seamans, Jotham Oyange, Evi Sirega, Raul Rios, Rolando Arroyabe, Ayreen Sanchez, Juan Joacobo Bernal, Nelida Huaylla and Cecil Junior Thomas.
