Northern Voice 2009 Evolution of Storytelling James Chutter

The name for this session per the Northern Voice website was “Mash Media Storytelling” and having recently seen RiP: A Remix Manifesto, I’m definitely interested in this topic. That, and I also caught James Chutter speak at Interesting Vancouver this past summer and would love to hear more.

Update: In 2004 James graduated film school at NYU, at the same time Tim O’Reilly coined the term web 2.0 noting that just as he received all his professional training the tides shifted, and now “some kid in his basement who didn’t finish high school is making better films than you.” He looked up “web 2.0” and saw that one of its largest elements is participation.

His first example is radio and how War of the Worlds mashed what radio was — news and audio theatre — and how Orson Wells was a storyteller that understood the technology of radio and also the distribution of the medium, creating what was a great mash-up.

“Now this is the slide I call ‘Don’t do what Doug does,” Doug is the CEO of Universal Music. A short while ago he realized he made a mistake by throttling the music industry and it’s all about getting, sharing, re-using, and interacting. As a result, the online music channel for Universal is now widely popular.

Whether you’re in music, art, film etc. how do you get it out to more people and networks? James Chutter calls it Mash Media: Appropriating media to reach a mass audience. “Let’s use the content that’s already out there.”

Update: With regards to sharing content and re-mixing it (and a concerned person in the audience when it comes to original content and copyright — and also keeping the quality of the original work), James personally believes “if you don’t want someone participating with your art work, then don’t put it out there.” I just added that this is why Creative Commons exists, so that people can give you permission (and publish under a license) that allows for re-mixing, depending on the levels you set.

Another comment from the crowd says that sometimes new works, based on others, might actually bring more attention to the original creator — you may not have seen the original but maybe now you’ll look it up based on what you’ve seen. It’s turning into a Q&A session so everyone decides to let James proceed with his presentation.

Update: James pulls up more examples from art work to We Feel Fine, a site that scrapes the net for the words “I Feel” and then re-posts those statements.

James’ next slide actually tells the story of a band that was promoted by a mash-up artist, whose own fan base included someone who worked at Apple and then used a song from the first band in an iPod Touch commercial (which pretty much ties into a comment we heard from the crowd just a few minutes ago).

He introduced MindsOnTwitter.com which is his little mash-up story using Tweets from people on Twitter.

James’ presentation has concluded and now the copyright and re-mixing discussion continues in the room.