Follow The Path

Hey Pathers,

We've got another exciting Creative Room session coming your way. Valentine's Day has come and gone, but this coming Monday we're heating things up again by talking about love and romance in The Path.

Join the conversation with co-creators Kay Reindl and Erin Maher, and creative director Jay Bennett in a live conversation hosted by Lauren Bird.

The 5th Creative Room is taking place Monday, March 4th, at 10pm EST / 7pm PST at www.thepathworld.com

Did you miss the live chat on Monday February 25th with the Creative Team?

This week we learned more about the characters Delaney, Linnet, Ian and Logan and got an exclusive look at Erin and Kay's series Bible.

We also revealed Linnet's vision board, created with the content YOU submitted and announced the winner of the draw for the 8-film Harry Potter Box set (congratulations Andra!!!)

Artist Derek Sharpe has created another awesome rendering of Linnet based on Kay and Erin's description from the last Creative Room Session.

We're looking for the perfect song to be the soundtrack for this character. What song would you choose?

Yesterday we posted an inspiration drawing of The Path's best friend character Linnet (which you can see here). Based on this illustration, we asked fans to tell us who they would choose as the actress to play her character. 

Ebru Evermore said Ksenia Solo from Lost Girl would be her choice. Himay Eh Ahveeless told us he thought it should be Taylor Momsen from Gossip Girl.

In the last Creative Room session (which you can watch here), we asked you for your input on Linnet, our main character's best friend. We will be creating a vision board with your ideas which will be unveiled during our next talkback with the creative team.

Why participate?...Well that's easy! Each contribution (artwork, comment, soundtrack suggestion, etc.) that you send us will be added to a draw. The prize is the complete 8-film Harry Potter Collection (pictured below). Your chances of taking the prize home increase with the number of contributions you send. So, what are you waiting for? Upload your submissions to our Facebook page or tag it with #ThePathLive on Twitter and Tumblr. The winner will be announced at the beginning of the next Creative Room session.

Another fantastic Creative Room Session for the books!

Last night we chatted about the influence Fandom will have on The Path, as well as who Delaney's best friend will be and received tons of great questions and feedback.

This week there are two ways to participate:

Visit our Facebook page and vote to let us know who you think should be the inspiration for Delaney's best friend (from a list of 8 great female besties from series past and present).

Submit your own content to The Path's Facebook page - It can be fanfic, any kind of fanart, music, etc. that you think could contribute to the shaping of The Path's bestie character Linnet. The submissions will not only be used to create a "Vision Board" for the character, but each submission will be counted as an entry into a draw for all 8 Harry Potter movies.

The date for the next Creative Room will be announced soon - Stay tuned!

Host Lauren Bird invites you to join The Path team for the 3rd installment of The Creative Room this Monday, February 11th at 9pm EST/6pm PST at thepathworld.com.

We're changing it up this week and putting you in the driver's seat! Head over to The Path's facebook page and vote for the discussion topic you want to talk about. Hurry - The poll closes Friday (that's tomorrow!).

Hope you can make it on Monday,

Hey everyone, 

We're excited to announce that the second live-streamed Creative Room session will be taking place on Monday, February 4th at 9pm EST at www.thepathworld.com or on Twitter (@ThePathTT).

Chat with THE PATH creators Erin Maher and Kay Reindl, as well as Creative Director Jay Bennett - Ask us your questions and let us know what you want to see in a new digital series.

RSVP to the event on Facebook

Why engage with your audience during development?

Before I say anything else, I want to extend the warmest of thanks to all those who were able to join us in-person and online for The Path’s very first Creative Room event on Jan 19th!

So why do we at The Path value fan input so much? Here are our top 3 reasons:

1. Fanning forward, not backward

The most common model for creating an audience for shows works something like this: creators research and develop a compelling story, they produce it and release it. Usually, audience interaction happens within the fan communities after the show is released, with little or no interaction between fans and the creative team.  

With The Path, we’re trying a different approach. Rather than building a fan base after the series is in the can, we want to involve our audience beforehand and have them move with us through the creative process.  Our goal is to build a story world that fans feel they’ve played a part in shaping, which we hope will bring them closer to the story. We think of it as investing in our audience, or “fanning forward”.

2. Giving our audience a VOICE!

By inviting the audience to the brainstorming process, we’re able to test our potential audience’s temperature and allow our creative team to come up with ideas that are interesting to you. Here’s an example some conversations that kept us up all night:

3. Keeping us on our toes

At Smokebomb (The Path’s production company), we try to look at challenges in ways other people wouldn’t. Thinking outside, around, and away from the box is the realm we like to live in and we feel our alternative fan model fits this preference quite nicely.

We enjoy the feedback and the tough questions – so by all means, throw them at us. You keep us jumping, and that’s just the way we like it!

From your community cultivator friend, Carrie

On January 19th, we hosted the very first Creative Room session with our creative team. The insights from the focus group and the conversations that we had with you online inspired us to re-adapt and keep moving forward  with THE PATH (Boy... urban fantasy fans have really strong opinions about what they like and what they don't like!)

The video is a quick overview of what happened during the session and an invite to the next one happening in February.

More updates coming soon! 

Cheers,

Veronica

Series writers are often the fuel that lights the creative fire behind the shows we come to love. Many people wonder how writing partnerships come to be - here is Erin and Kay's story:

Both native Californians, Erin Maher and Kay Reindl met while working as assistants in the story department at Universal Pictures and became television writers when they were hired for the second season of Millennium. Since then, they have been on staff of numerous shows, including Legend of the Seeker, Haunted and The Twilight Zone. They’ve written freelance episodes for Moonlight and The Dead Zone, sold six television pilots and were selected as participants in the Writer’s Guild’s prestigious Showrunner Training Program.

Recently, they’ve written episodes of Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated and Beware the Batman, a new animated Batman show that will air in 2013.

They say that if time travel were real, they would travel back to the 1960s and buy career romance books (with dust jackets) and vintage Barbies, mint in box.


2013 is off to a great start for THE PATH! As our writers Kay Reindl and Erin Maher (Legend of the Seeker, Millenium) are working on the series story world from L.A., our Smokebomb team is developing the beta version of THE PATH’s website and the social media channels.   To thank you for your interest in THE PATH, we would like to kick off the year giving you exclusive access to our very first Creative Room session with THE PATH’s team. We are very excited to meet you!   If you’re in Toronto, ON, Canada and would like to attend the session unfolding in-person, send an email to [email protected] with your full name and contact information.   If you’re supporting us from somewhere else around the globe, we want to meet you too! Watch and participate in the live interview with Kay, Erin and Smokebomb’s Creative Director Jay Bennett through our website.   Add it to your calendar! The Creative Room When: January 19th, 2013 at 2pm EST / 11am PST Where: Online or in-person

See you soon...

Here at The Path, we throw this word around a lot – fandom –but we haven’t talked about it extensively yet nor even explained what we mean by it. We hear a lot of buzzwords these days about “social TV” but let’s bear in mind that fandom as we know it has existed for decades. People were writing Star Trek fanfics pairing Kirk and Spock in the 1970s and would mail it to each other. Fans were “vidding” – a fannish term for mashing video content to music - before the dawn of the digital age.

So, you ask, what does Fandom mean? In a nutshell, you have a fandom when two people are talking to each other about an entertainment property. It refers to a community – fans talking to other fans. It means having a laugh with people who have the same interests as you, and participating in a creative, transformative culture that spans writing, photoshopping, manipulating video, and remixing loved properties. Most of all, it’s having a ball. We have our own vocabulary, our own platforms, our own cross-fandom competitions, and a tendency to overanalyze our favorite series. We like to get excited about things!

In the last two years or so, fandom has gotten a significant amount of mainstream attention – 50 Shades of Grey, for example,started as a Twilight “alternate universe” fanfic. The walls are coming down between TPTB – a fan term for The Powers That Be, the show creatives – and fans. MTV’s Teen Wolf, for example, held a slash-friendly fanfic contest – rewarding and legitimizing transformative fanworks.

For the uninitiated, fannish activities beyond discussion break down into three main components:

1) Fic – short for “fanfiction” – is self-explanatory. Sometimes people fic (yes, it’s used as a verb) to explore underused characters or situations, but most often fic is written to “fix” a part of the show that you don’t agree with. There are fic competitions, contests, community prompts and groups of beta readers to proofread your work. It’s a very social way of writing – fic is often released in installments, with comments and two-way feedback if it’s popular. There are also communities devoted to “rec’ing,” or fic recommendations. You’d be surprised how many famous authors were ficcers – like these ten  mentioned in a recent Daily Dot article. A handful of successful TV writers also got their start in fic, like Doris Egan.

2) Fanart & Fanmixes range from simple GIFs to complex photo manipulations (you can make your favorite characters become pirates, ya know? It’s like having your own minibar.)

                                                                              pic from the Swan Queen fandom (I ship it) 

3) Vidding means editing video content to music to make your own mini-narrative. Some are great, some are god-awful. There are even fan conventions dedicated to vidding – like the popular VividCon.

Here's one of my favorite vids, chronicling the relationship between Cara and Kahlan on Legend of the Seeker. In three minutes, Brad managed to tell his own story within the world of the show. 

                                             Aja Romano of the Daily Dot has a handy “intro to fandom” post – How To Speak Fangirl From “Plot What Plot” to “Alternate Universe” fics, the article will demystify what we do (and make you laugh in the process.)

If you’re interested in fandom’s remix culture a good place to start is the Organization for Transformative Works. 

 In my next post, I’ll speak in greater detail of my own adventures in livejournal-land and fannish activity – and being a fangirl working in television and digital media.  

 Stay tuned!

 Cheers,