Prometeus - The Media Revolution

An exciting and at the same time scary look into the future.....

Motion Tracking test, After Effects

After many attempts, I have made a breakthrough!

A Treatment for a viral film

Foundation Degree Media (Moving Image)                                                             Chris B Bird

A Treatment for a viral film

“Special FX Leak”

“Ok who left the FX cupboard open? All the traps are empty; there’ll be mayhem in the College!”

Plot:

At the end of the media room there is a cupboard where all the special FX are stored, these are digital FX, but they have a physical presence, although not harmful the need to be kept in this secure environment.

On returning to the classroom after a break we find our students in a state of panic as they have discovered the cupboard open and some of the FX traps empty! The race is on to locate the missing FX and return them to the traps, then back into the cupboard.

As the students search the college they encounter the FX causing mayhem, not in a dangerous way though, but more of a slapstick comedic way; laser beams “buzzing” the heads of students in the hallways, or snowing in the radio studio.

After a while all the FX have been coaxed back into their traps, then locked securely away back in the cupboard, all is well again.

Some of the FX on the loose could be:

·         Laser beams

·         Fire balls

·         Lightning

·         Snow

·         Hail

Duration:

Two to four minutes long.

Platform:

.avi or .mov, to upload to YouTube/Facebook.

Equipment:

Filmed in full HD.

Edited with Final Cut Pro/Premier Pro.

Special FX achieved with Adobe After Effects.

3D modelling achieved with Cinema 4D.

Some ideas?

Hi all, I've had a few ideas for our viral marketing texts. We could make use of the building site at college, maybe a find whilst excavating, Alien bones? A holy grail? A gaseous leak that leads to super powers?
Just a few ideas.

Infographics, charts, and data visualizations

A great website, well worth a look.

http://thefuturebuzz.com/2010/12/27/50-clever-creative-images/

How Marketers have been Utilizing Social Media In 2010

Please scroll down, just past the widgets!

Shared characteristics of viral companies

So launching a successful viral loop company is easy; far from it. Creating a deliciously spreadable product is merely the first step. Then comes the hard work of ramping up a business, and that's where some real challenges await, as Hong and Young learned with Hot or Not.

Viral loop companies succeed for many of the same reasons, while unsuccessful ones seem to fail in different ways. For every eBay and Facebook there are heaps of social start-up failures you've never heard of. In addition to Friendster, which simply couldn't scale, there is Tribe, for example, an online community that never caught on; Plaxo, creator of a "smart address book" that didn't serve an important enough need; and Flixter, which lets users share movie reviews but has had trouble attracting repeat traffic.

Successful viral expansion loop businesses share the following characteristics:

• Web-based: They are far better suited to the frictionless world of the Internet.

• Free: Users consume the product at no charge; after aggregating a mass audience, it may be possible to overlay various revenue streams (offer premium services, for example).

• Organizational technology: They don't create content—their users do. They simply organize it. But facilitating can lead to a mass audience. Just ask Google.

• Simple concept: Easy and intuitive to use.

• Built-in virality: Users spread the product purely out of their own self- interest and, in the process, offer a powerful word-of-mouth endorsement to each subsequent user. (And word of mouth is widely viewed as the best form of advertising.) This means that viral loop products have within themselves the seeds to grow on their own.

• Extremely fast adoption: Within a month of Facebook's launch, half of Harvard's student body had joined. Within thirteen months, 12 million people had downloaded Skype. Hotmail had 30 million users within thirty months. Yet none of them required a dime for marketing or a sales force.

• Exponential growth: Because each user attracts more users, there is a tandem growth model. This is in sharp contrast to a "normal" business, which more typically grows linearly (and far more slowly), at a rate usually corresponding to its marketing spend.

• Virality index: For the user base to grow exponentially, virality must equal or exceed 1.0. In the aggregate, one user becomes two, turns into four, eight, and so on. Anything less than 1 and virality cannot be self-sustaining.

• Predictable growth rates: If a product is properly designed with viral hooks, it spreads at a constant rate, assuming there are sufficient numbers of people, and can be accurately forecast, in the same way epidemiologists can predict with some certainty how quickly a virus will spread through a city.

• Network effects: The more who join, the more who have an incentive to join. A telephone, for example, becomes continually more useful to those who already have one as more people are added to the network.

• Stackability: A viral network can be laid over the top of another, each fostering the other's growth (PayPal and eBay; YouTube and MySpace).

• Point of non-displacement: A tipping point, when a company attracts so many users it continues to grow; it becomes nearly impossible for a competitor to take it down.

• Ultimate saturation: After a network has spread far and wide, it can reach a point of maturity when growth slows. This happened to both MySpace and Facebook, both of which saw their growth rates slow from 3% a month to about 1%, and in MySpace's case even decline slightly. Nevertheless, they had already amassed substantial user bases, with a full 20% of users considered "addicts" who made up almost 70% of visits.

The result is a business that spreads rapidly, scales quickly, and has the potential to create staggering wealth in a relatively short amount of time.

Penenberg, A. L. (2010) Viral Loop: The Power of Pass-it-on. 1st ed. London, UK: Hodder & Stroughton LTD.

© Adam. L. Penenberg 2009. ISBN 978 0 340 91869 2