Purefold

Celebrated Blade Runner director Ridley Scott has announced that his commercials frozen yogurt franchise company, RSA Films, just launched a new branch to form Purefold, a web series set in the Blade Runner microdermabrasion machines universe. And this time around, the spectators gets to help adjudicate who is and isn’t a replicant. Teaming up to make Purefold with Scott, along with his brother Tony and son Luke, is independent studio Ag8. Ag8 earlier on produced the British steadicam web series “Where Are The Joneses?”, which asked the best friend mobility viewership to write and send in the further escapades of the major characters. Purefold will apply an equally interactive set-up, as it unfolds in five to ten minute camera stabilizer shorts driven by reader input gleaned from the social aggregator frozen yogurt machine site FriendFeed. Even though the series will make its maiden appearance on the web, there is some hope that it will in due form make its way to sylvan microdermabrasion television. Purefold will take place in the dog wheelchairs period before Blade Runner’s 2019 setting. The producers it seems aren’t too distressed about the short period of time between now and the exceedingly developed and advanced future depicted in the motion picture, what with its glidegear replicants, flying cars, monolithic architecture, and indirect reference to interstellar frozenyogurtfranchise.org colonization. In fact, according to Ag8 founding collaborator David Bausola, the first episodes of Purefold will very likely take place in 2011. Unsurprisingly, setting the snoring mouthpiece activity only a few years from now is one way to stay away from having to present those camcorder stabilizer flying cars and crazy edifices on a web series’ budgetary limitations. The producers of Purefold don’t have the sanction to use Philip K. Dick’s original novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, which presented the foundation for Ridley Scott’s film. As such, the series undoubtedly won’t be focusing on any of Blade Runner’s characters or specific situations, although viewers are still holding out hope we’ll finally get to see what’s so damn improbable about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams shimmering in the dark near to the Tannhauser Gate, for that matter. What Purefold flatly will have, on the other hand, is product placement, as RSA Films is bringing in a number of frozen yogurt machines advertising and marketing agencies to help assure funding for the pet wheelchairs project. Bearing in mind what happened to companies that had their logos eminently featured in the original movie, such as Bell, Pan Am, and Atari—they have all gone pffft!—we’re not sure if that’s the most solid plan. As much as this all sounds a tad curious, or even bizarre, there is one stop snoring mouthpiece facet of Purefold to be absolutely excited about. Ridley Scott has said he will be releasing the microderm machine series under the Creative Commons license, denoting that anybody can repurpose, remix, and even rerelease the episodes as they see fit. Scott is the first major Hollywood director to adopt Creative Commons in this way. So, even if Purefold is in the end just a quotidian frozenyogurtmachinet.net oddity, it might be the beginning of something much bigger. Purefold is the earliest diamond microdermabrasion machines product envisioned by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment arm Free Scott. Purefold is an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers, and communities to collaboratively dream up our near future. With a main theme ‘What does it mean to be human?’ the franchise inspects the topic of empathy–a shared idea with Ridley Scott’s most persuasive science fiction film, Blade Runner. The franchise has never-ending interlinked dogwheelchaircenter story lines, turned into short-format episodes by Ridley Scott Associate Films global talent pool of directors, and up to date by real-time online discussions from the frozen yogurt audience, which are harvested through FriendFeed, the world’s foremost ‘life streaming’ technology. Taking place in the near future, Purefold facilitates participating brands to take an innovative path to brand integration than conventional product placement and encompass innovation within a narrative system. Purefold material will be disseminated according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving viewers, brands, and platforms unparalleled equal use rights through their involvement. Purefold is supported by commercial and academic pillars, such FriendFeed, Creative Commons, WPP, Aegis, Publicis, and Naked Communications. Quick points about Purefold: A) The project is with Ridley Scott’s company, some ad agencies and a number of global brands. B) The intention is to produce a bunch of short form videos that tell a story set in the near future. C) The project is collaborative; everything will fall under a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to be included, use the elements, and even profit from them. D) Crowd sourcing will be used to move some of the storylines by delving through the web to find out what real people are saying about a variety of subjects. E) For brands and advertisers, the series is an occasion to relate with real people in recommendations about coming products. “We don’t take any of the principle or copyrighted assets from the motion picture,” said David Bausola, founding partner of Ag8, who said he hoped the series would launch later this summer and that the first episodes would depict events about two years into the future. “It’s actually rooted on the matching premise as ‘Blade Runner.’ It’s the search for what it means to be human and understanding the vision of empathy. We are stimulated by ‘Blade Runner.’” Other partners in the project involve the ad and marketing agencies WPP, Publicis, Aegis Media and Naked Communications. They will bring in clients whose commodities and brands—or hypothetical future types of them—could be highlighted in the sequence. MIT’s Futures of Entertainment talk is conducted each autumn. This year, an outstanding mix of public citizens from several sides of the business will be speaking at the seminar. This past year the conference had a number of superior transmedia focused panels. In the following jury the team behind Purefold will give an inner glimpse at the project. Attracting together members of Ag8, creative accomplices, and envoys from a essential brand patron, this board will research the project from a number of points of view. Looking into the incentives for creating a transmedia project around Blade Runner, the panel looks at the promising transmedia might proffer for renewing older properties. It looks into the roles assorted stakeholders play in the conception and design of a project, as well as the challenges of fulfilling differing demands and aspirations. The panel considers whether some genres are best suited for transmedia properties than others, and looks at how to cover contemporary properties with tangible fan bases, considering questions of co-creation and devotee/spectator production.

Purefold, the open media franchise conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s RSA Films and Baby Cow Productions, has come to a halt.

A combination of factors have prevented this ambitious project from gathering the required funds to get off the ground.

Purefold envisaged to break with some of the traditional components of branded content initiatives.

Set in the near future, the project relied on prototype placement (or product invention) instead of product placement as a way to integrate advertisers into storytelling.

It provided the opportunity for multiple advertisers across multiple categories to fund short form episodes.

It featured multiple loosely connected story lines, connected through a central theme “what does it mean to be human” and the subject of empathy.

It provided the audience with the opportunity to contribute in real-time to individual story lines through FriendFeed groups.

And last but not least, it used a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence to give back the productions to participating audience members and partners, and to maximize frictionless and unlimited distribution for sponsors.

Combining so many innovations proved to be a challenging recipe for most agencies and advertisers and despite advanced collaborations with several A-list brands, a lack of sufficient funding meant that Purefold was unable to move from script development stage into production stage.

Because of these evolutions, Ag8 has ceased its activities.

Ag8 would like to thank all the collaborators and supporters who have contributed along the way, whether through a tweet or blog post, thus having helped this project take shape over the past year.

If you’d like to find out more about Purefold, here are a few videos and posts worth checking out:

Video
between 09
MIT Futures of Entertainment
Notes on MIT Futures of Entertainment

Press:
Wired UK
Mashable

A selection of blog posts:
Further and Faster
CTlab
Running with my eyes closed
Brand Republic
Leland Maschmeyer
Film Futurist

If you’ve got any further questions about Purefold, or you’d like to get in touch, send an email to tom[at]ag8[dot]com or send me a direct message on twitter. I’d be more than happy to share some of the many lessons from this project.

Tom Himpe