#fourth wall studios

Today is #TransgenderDayOfVisibility, and I find myself recalling “Dirty Work” and working with the amazing Jamie Clayton.  

As part of the initial writing team that developed the show, I was the one who pitched the idea of making one of the three leads transgender.  (If memory serves, @MaureenMcQ had been writing something else that had her researching a lot about transitioning, and specifically the financial costs associated with it, which inspired me to suggest we incorporate that into the show.) Which is how the character of Michelle was born. 

We patted ourselves on our backs for how inclusive we were being, but honestly at that stage Michelle was the epitome of a token – all of her stories were about being trans, and there were many, many jokes constructed around that and nothing else.

Fourth Wall Studios, a Culver City company that creates massively multiplayer online games, augmented-reality worlds and other forms of experiential entertainment, has secured an investment worth as much as $215 million from Los Angeles' richest man, billionaire entrepreneur Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.

The deal, announced Tuesday, includes a $15 million direct investment and access to $200 million in funding, allowing the company to launch its Alternate Reality Entertainment studio.

Fourth Wall's new studio will focus on developing properties for a variety of platforms -- with several projects expected to be announced during the next year. The firm will create original content and partner with film, television, and video game companies to develop other properties, said Jim Stewartson, chief executive of Fourth Wall.

"We feel we are just at the right time, right at the crux of where this kind of entertainment will come into its own," said Stewartson, who co-founded Fourth Wall in 2007. Previously, he founded 42 Entertainment, where he worked on branded entertainment projects, including several alternate reality games. "To be able to partner with Patrick to have the resources to build the properties, it is just a very good time for us."....

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Jackie Turnure

Veteran transmedia producer Jackie Turnure (Fourth Wall Studios) joins J.C. and Steve in this jam-packed episode. Their discussion spans her past Alternate Reality Game projects for LOST, Flash Forward, Salt and more, and leads up to an in-depth conversation about Fourth Wall Studios’ just-released project, Dirty Work and their new transmedia platform, RIDES. Jackie talks about what makes Dirty Work different, and the unique challenges that a transmedia entertainment studio faces.

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By request, here's a rebloggable version of this answer:

aeternamente asked: What are your thoughts on Gigi using the company channel to talk about personal/private issues? How is that similar to/different from Lizzie and Lydia talking about personal/private issues on their vlogs?

  I’m not going to comment or speculate on that- it’s up to you guys to decide how you feel about it.  But what I will do is give you a little bit of backstory on how the Gigi spinoff came to be.

As some of you may know, up until recently I worked for Fourth Wall Studios, a transmedia studio creating original online content.  At Fourth Wall, I helped to create the series Dirty Work, which won an Emmy last year for original interactive content. I also created and wrote the pilot for a show called Airship Dracula, an animated steampunk reimagining of a section of Stoker’s novel, voiced by Alan Tudyk and Tammin Sursok.

Both of these shows were built on a proprietary platform called RIDES, that synchronized web video with your mobile phone through calls, email and text messages.  Later on, there was a companion app that handled synced content in a single place, so it wasn’t at the mercy of the phone networks or text services and offered us greater control of the experience.

When I first came on board the LBD, I brought Bernie in to meet with Fourth Wall to see if there was a way to work together. (And also, honestly, because I had been already pitching a P&P adaptation internally and it wasn’t getting much traction.)  They passed on it, but more importantly I got their blessing to join the project outside of work. 

Cut to a few months later, and the show is now, y’know, THE SHOW. And we we’re looking ahead to the Lydia downfall arc and thinking of some of the adaptation issues inherent in novel vs. dramatic story structures.  It seemed that we needed to see at least something of what Darcy was up to, rather than just having him completely offscreen for the whole time and then finding out later.  Something that we’re constantly wrestling with in this adaptation is the agency of the main characters.  We want things to turn out well, and we want to stay true to the source material, but we also want our characters to be modern and believable. And let’s face it, all the problems in Pride and Prejudice are solved by really rich men fixing things with their money.  So finding a way to make all of these conflicting requirements work is a continuing challenge. Sometimes it seems impossible. Which is why I’ve started referring to this story problem as the “Patriarchy Maru.” You’ll let us know if we end up finding a way to make it work. 

Anyway, I brought Bernie into Fourth Wall again, and this time we pitched them on a Gigi spinoff that - rather than YouTube - would be seen on the RIDES platform.  It would feature Gigi vlogging, and then you would receive phone calls from Darcy and text messages from Fitz, etc.  We were pretty close to nailing that down when Fourth Wall hit a rocky patch and ended up halting new production.