Winning projects will get up to $25,000 and companies do not need to provide or source additional funds. Proposals that include “expert consultants” will have winning edge!

To discuss how BC Film Digital Readiness Program consultants at FanTrust can work with your company to build digital expertise, strategic partnerships, original content and active fans, please contact FanTrust President Catherine Warren, cath[at]fantrust.com; 604-724-4609.

Applicants must submit on a tight deadline by March 14, 2011.

Click here for the BC Film funding details and application form.

At the nexus of entertainment, business and physics, FanTrust president Catherine Warren talks about how a foundation in science prepared her for a career of risk-taking and entrepreneurship in the high-stakes world of digital media.

For the full profile click here.

Thanks to FanTrust clients Image Media Farm, which provided Global TV with its studios as the location for this shoot, and to eOne for supplying the slick Twilight trailer.

“The way children consume content is changing rapidly,” explained Pat Ellingson, Creative Head Children’s Media at TVO. “Traditional television continues to be a powerful draw. We are not decreasing our focus on providing a unique broadcast offering. However, the tastes and wants of the “kid” audience are changing and web-based entertainment is part of this change. Our research shows that kids 2-11 years old and their parents are spending more and more time online. We wanted to stay ahead of the curve and not just keep up with what others are doing but anticipate what kids will need and be there first.

Read the full article at nextMEDIA-source.

This fan activity may be your own, for example, if you have a website with respectable traffic stats; but you can also get great, relevant stats by pilfering fan data from show, film or game properties similar to your own.

I recently introduced 42 Entertainment’s executive team at VIDFEST 2008 (read VIDFEST’s “liveblog” of the session here). 42 Entertainment bills itself as an original content production company – media agnostic, focused on “monetized entertainment experiences” for distribution partners of all stripes – including broadcasters, broadband, telcos and publishers. Their work is legend, earning them a feature in a recent issue of Wired magazine for their ARG for Nine Inch Nails.

42 Entertainment lives (and pitches) by the mantra: “Experience is King”, “Content is Queen”, and “All the world is our stage”. With this resonating, content producers will hold court when pitching to a broadcaster, studio or game publisher.

Above: The Nine Inch Nails Resistance Meeting, part of the experience created by 42 Entertainment on the request of band frontman Trent Reznor, outlined at length in the December 2007 Wired article.

Think of digital fan communities as focus groups waiting to be mined.

• Count your fans
• Use fan reviews
• Cite fan forums
• Use fan art/fan productions

Package this up in a colourful pitch that demonstrates your depth of knowledge about your key audience, its demographics and psychographics. Show your buyer that you are ahead of the game when it comes to supporting publicity, promotion and sales efforts.

Ultimately, many buyers such as broadcasters and publishers, want to see your whole multiplatform plan built into your pitch. If your fan data and your multiplatform thinking does nothing more than help you land that traditional TV or game deal, then it proved to be your competitive advantage.

In her lunch-hour MIDMA Speaker Series session, FanTrust Entertainment Strategies President Catherine Warren will walk through:

• Case studies of how new entertainment companies are capitalizing on digital fans (and what some entertainment companies are doing wrong)
• Business and revenue models that have garnered critical success with fans – and profits
• How producers can grow their sales opportunities (and shorten their sales cycle) by seeking out new business-to-business relationships
• Financing: the usual suspects – and what investors are looking for

The MIDMA Speaker Series with the support of the Province of Manitoba Department of Science, Technology, Energy & Mines, Industry Canada and Red River College, will take place from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM at Red River College Princess St. Campus in the Great West Life Lecture Theatre, on Friday, April 25, 2008.

While we work with large public companies, start-ups and everything in between, the FanTrust approach is to build highly customized relationships with the corporate officers or owners, based on the belief that digital transformation must be championed at the top, with CEOs and CFOs. But, I’ll know that I’ve succeeded when, in five years, I’m also working with the Chief Fan Officers.

I’ve been involved in digital media for 23 years now and I’ve seen a lot of changes since the early days of digital holography and computer music. But perhaps the greatest change has taken place within the user community; the expectations and creativity that digital consumers apply to entertainment.

What I want to talk with you about today — and what our clients want — are 360-degree digital strategies. And fans are at the core of all great digital plans. You’ve probably each heard the saying that 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers. But now these core consumers can engage with your content in numerous ways. Not just on consoles or on-air, but on rich media websites, on social networks, on YouTube, mobile phones, through alternate reality games, and the list goes on. Choosing the right mix and defining the goals – whether revenue or reach – is critical. And one of the biggest challenges is establishing how entertainment IP transforms for different channels—content can no longer be ported, it must be recreated again and again to address consumer demands and behavior.

But what are the attributes of content transformation? At its most basic you have, for example, a TV series packaged for broadband or mobile distribution. Even this simple migration of linear content needs tender loving care. On the technical front there is the encoding and tagging – one mobile company estimates 300 “industry standard” formats! On the marketing side there is the call-to-action – do you want your episode to drive DVD sales, leverage international TV sales, build your studio brand or achieve another, measurable objective?

To build community, linking strategies and social network tie-ins are critical. Underlying all of this is your deal structure with your aggregator or digital channel. Are you securing the best mix of licensing, revenue-share and marketing?

Of course as soon as you move beyond trafficking linear content to crating interactive entertainment, the strategies, opportunities and pitfalls grow exponentially. Taking time to plan your new media production and distribution is worth the investment. It pays off in many fronts: staff benefit from collaborating across departments to achieve convergence goals; business development opens into a new world of strategic partners; and C-level executives continue along the path of future-proofing their companies.

The industry is still in the very early stages of discovering what works and what doesn’t when it comes to recreations.

Ultimately, TV producers’ interactive spin-offs may reap higher rewards than their original shows. The Alternate Reality Game for the series Regenesis just won an Emmy Award as did the User Generated Content Game Zimmer Twins. There were no Emmys for the TV series. As an international judge for the interactive Emmys, I was inspired by the built-in fan engagement advanced by many of the nominees. Will this year finally be the watershed for fan relations?

Even if you are in the business-to-business space, understanding your digital consumers is critical to staying competitive. Business-to-business relationships are changing, broadcasters are becoming game publishers, giving game developers brand new sales avenues and challenging TV producers to broaden their product offerings. In Canada, YTV has recently launched a multiplayer game space called The Big Rip; and Cartoon Network has hired a community director in anticipation of launching a multiplayer environment in 2008.

TV producers are also deploying games to support TV fans between seasons or fill in plotlines. “24: The Game” answers a slew of questions left unanswered in the three year gap plotted between Seasons 2 & 3.

When entertainment fans don’t have interactive content options, they will happily make their own, without any nod to entertainment rights. FireflyFans.net, the show’s premier fan site, has generated an endless stream of fan fiction, art, blogs, pod casts, meet-ups and even a fan-produced documentary — all fodder for a Firefly Multiverse game.

Interactive fans represent an enormous unpaid marketing team. They’re out there flying your freak flag – communicate with them and they will do more. Pay them and, well, the sky’s the limit.

To kick off the FanTrust blog, “where fans and entertainment meet”, it had to be The Simpsons. There is no better example of multiplatform success, gigantic demographic appeal and a Mobius strip of life-imitating-art-imitating-life in licensing deals.

The characters got their start as video shorts in the Tracy Ullman show (I breast-fed those little devils,” she once said), wound up as the longest-running American sitcom, sold record-breaking numbers of DVDs , spawned a billion dollar merchandising industry and will soon appear on the big screen with the launch of The Simpsons movie.

Bart, Lisa, Homer and Marge, and their mind-bogglingly big community, have inspired legions of fans the world over. Fansites such as Snpp generate 8.5 million monthly hits.

The relationship between the fans and Fox hasn’t always been any easy one – more mutually assured destruction than comfortable symbiosis. But in forcing Fox to test its limits for fan tolerance, The Simpson fan base is also partially responsible for the conglomerate’s other digital advances, including American Idol and 24.

From my vantage as a Monday morning quarterback (I have worked with FOX, but not on this series), The Simpsons is a case study in multimedia excellence: great writing and original animation led to a franchise way beyond TV, with games, comics, home entertainment, the movie and even an amusement park ride in the works.

The bar for creators is getting ever-higher, with everything from Web 2.0 to 360-degree content strategies influencing production orders. Today’s aspiring Matt Groening’s have the added challenge of interactive development and positioning from the get-go. But without story, everything else is a non-starter.

During this twenty year run, fortunes have been made by Rupert Murdoch, Matt Groening, writers, voice actors, merchandising artists, and eBay traders. Now 7-11 convenience stores are cashing in, with some outlets transforming to Kwik-E- Marts, Springfield’s fictitious corner store. This latest hall of mirrors for The Simpsons franchise is part of a campaign to hype the July 27 movie premiere. A dozen of the stores and most of the 6,000-plus others in North America will sell goodies, reports the LA Times, which until now existed only on TV: Buzz Cola, KrustyO’s cereal and the Squishee, itself a knock-off of the 7-11 mainstay Slurpee.

The Simpsons Movie will premiere in a real Springfield, picked from among 30 eponymous American towns. Fox has challenged Springfields across the country to prove how they typify the cartoon landscape and culture. The LA Times reports that various Springfields are weighing in with bona fides that include doughnut factories, proximity to Matt Groening’s birthplace and even a home-grown bald-headed, beaked-nosed power plant executive.

Everyone who has seen The Simpsons has a favorite character. The inconvenient truth is that mine oversees Springfield’s nuclear power plant and is the leader from hell. I live for his keyword “eeeeexcellllent” and the mesmeric tenting of his fingertips. Charles Montgomery Burns represents everything reprehensible about corporate management. And I love him BECAUSE I KNOW I CAN FIX HIM. (It’s a consultant thing.)

What does all of this success have to do with fandom and digital fans in particular? For that we turn to Chris Turner, author of Planet Simpson, who said on a panel that I moderated at VIDFEST that the interplay between TV, the VCR and the Internet allowed for a new kind of storytelling, and a new level of fan engagement. From the beginning Matt Groening built layers of pop culture, politics and in-jokes into every episode, making them rich viewing for video playback. Eventually, at the end of one episode, a fictitious news program broadcasts a list of dozens of corrections that scroll by in a couple of seconds. In no time, loyal fans trolled through the show in slow motion, transcribed all 34 jokes and posted them online.

The current Springfield contest takes fan community to new heights and may not have even been conceived, let alone possible, before the web. The series recently celebrated its 400th episode. In an era where no one can seem to feed the hungry maw of broadband, this, my friend, is a lot of valuable digital content.

Twenty years ago, when The Simpsons first went from their couch into our zeitgeist, there weren’t enough friends with modems to propel them along. Today, a quick Google search reveals 31.8 million results for the show name alone. If your idea promises to be the next Simpsons, you now have the hat-trick: connectivity, culture and fan community.

The movie, which will probably be bootlegged in real time, may unleash more digital firsts and fuel the next generation of digital fans. We do know it includes cartoon nudity (full frontal Bart), and claims a PG-13 rating for “irreverent humor”. Would that we were all known so well.

This announcement marks yet another collaboration on digital delivery and cross-platforming of HD entertainment, not to mention, the increased partnering of video games and films. This was a no-brainer for Disney given that in seven months Xbox Marketplace has seen 10 million downloads and the game platform already has a built in and engaged audience. As for Microsoft, movies have been available for digital download for some time now on rival iTunes, but not immediately in HD. It looks like in this case Microsoft is one step ahead of Apple.