We’re excited to announce that we’re opening our doors to beta testers for Flame Court. Head on over to the main Flame Court site to reserve your spot.

Sure, it’s just a launch page, but it represents the first public-facing sign of all the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes to bring the Internet’s online courtroom to life. We’ve been coding, talking with partners, defining visions, customers and testing our assumptions and it’s exciting for all of us to start the process of sharing what we’re up to with the world

Anyhow, go visit the site, sign-up, tell your friends. Heck, tell your enemies!

One of the things we’re interested in here at JStrike is how technology can be used to increase human connection. A lot’s been written about how Facebook and social networks like it simultaneously make us more connected while isolating us further, but not much has been said about “how” Facebook pulls off this feat. Too often, Facebook’s alienating effect is just chalked up to it being on the web.

The real problem is that it does not facilitate real human connection.

Its success is based on exploiting the fulfillment of the need to impress, rather than the need to express.  It’s a shallow need for external validation, with which we are all personally familiar, and which Facebook exploits with splendor by making everyone a content broadcaster. Put another way, Facebook is nothing more than a never-ending, ever-more-wearying show and tell session, with everyone shouting “Look at me now!” as loud as they can.

I don’t know if anyone has put an obsessive Facebook user in an FMRI scanner yet, but I’m willing to bet that it would show increased activity in the mesocorticolimbic center upon receiving notification that someone “like’d” their post. That’s the place in the brain housing that part of the dopamine reward network, which lights up like a christmas tree when an addict gets a fix. All that relentless activity of posting, liking and commenting is little more than the digital equivalent of a hamster getting a pellet for performing a behavior. For Facebook, more actions equals more clickthroughs, but as a user-experience, it’s pretty lame.

Facebook is about getting that quick attention fix.  This is why you rarely see a discussion on a post last longer than a week.  Facebook is the place where weak memes go to die a hasty death. It feeds on the massive quantities of weak memes born of insecurities we all share.  In the Facebook universe nothing lasts.

-Pete Chudykowski is the Tech Architect of JStrike Studio

If you’re a digital filmmaker like us, you’re always looking to get the biggest bang for your buck. DSLR cameras allow us to create images that would have been prohibitively expensive even a couple of years ago and digital distribution allows everyone to be a storyteller who can reach a global audience. In the process of creating our own shows and campaigns, we’ve come across a variety of online tools that we’ve integrated into our production workflow. Some of them approximate old school filmmaking tools in the digital world, while others we’ve tweaked to fit our own style. Here are some of our favorites:

Basecamp

Managing the creative and technical sides of a production is hard enough for a regular production studio, but most digital filmmakers don’t have the luxury of all being under one roof. We use Basecamp, a project management service, as our virtual production office. It’s where we keep our files, milestones and agendas, as well as a rotating series of whiteboards that allow producers, art directors and digital designers to collaborate. Having one central place where everyone on the team can go and get a picture of where all the moving parts of a production are at really empowers our various department heads to own their responsibilities, which is key for any production, big or small. We’re also big fans of their book, Rework.  Get Basecamp here.

Bits on the Run

YouTube is great for nyan cats and autotuned news, but if you’re looking to have control over your content, as well as the ability to create your own ads and sponsorship opportunities, you need to be serving up your video on your own. It’s the difference between amateur viral videos and professional web series. For Foodies, we used Bits on the Run to host our videos, as well as create the players that serve them. One of our favorite features is that the service tracks the numbers of viewers watching over the course of an episode, letting us know which parts of an episode people watched over and over again (see image at top), as well as what parts turned them away. Get Bits on the Run here.

GroupMe

This group chat service just got scooped up by Skype, but we use it during production as an internal walkie-talkie system. We create a group for our production team that lets everyone on the set know what is happening in real time. If you’ve ever worked on a set, you know that time gets lost finding people and relaying information. GroupMe solves the problem by instantly alerting the whole crew. Looking for a missing cast member? Now they have nowhere to hide. Get GroupMe here.

Dropbox

When people ask what our post-production process is, we answer “Dropbox.” For Foodies, our editor, sound guy and colorist all existed in three different states. We shipped each team member a hard drive of the raw footage and then relied on Dropbox to sync up our Final Cut files throughout the post-process, allowing the entire post team to collaborate in a way that would have been incredibly cumbersome and messy were it not for the ability to access a central location for all our project files. Get Dropbox here.

SL Director’s Viewfinder

A lot of our work involves coming into locations quickly and shooting a very rough and ready style. While it would be great to walk around with a director’s viewfinder everywhere you go, this Android app has come in handy more than once. Able to simulate a variety of lens and cameras (including Red and Canon DSLR’s), this app is what we use when scouting locations, since in one major way it beats the traditional viewfinder: You can save your shot as a photo for future reference. Get SL Director’s Viewfinder here.

Got an app or online service we should be checking out? Share it with us in the comments below.

What if everyone on Earth was a storyteller? What stories would they share? Who would they share them with? These are the questions that I started asking myself recently. As technology has made it cheaper than ever to create and share content, there never been more potential for new forms of storytelling. Everyone knows that the future of storytelling can’t look like the past, but nobody seems to know what it will be.

Unfortunately, what have so far are dramatic chipmunks and television studios putting old episodes of Battlestar Galactica on Hulu.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the radical changes the Internet has brought us have a much-wider potential for innovative storytelling. Up until now, we’ve been doing the same things we did on television and film, just on the Internet. It’s as if, at the dawn of the television age, producers just recorded live performances of radio shows and broadcast them on TV.

And in fact, that’s exactly what happened. Over time though, the story changed to fit the medium, becoming something entirely new. That’s where we’re at now. It’s like the era of the talkies, with everyone experimenting with new ideas, models and techniques. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I have some ideas of where this is all heading.

For the last four years, I have been diving head first into the deep end of digital entertainment. I started out as a journalist deeply interested in digital technology, but since then I’ve dusted off my old film degree and worked for innovative companies like Vuguru, EQAL and Electus — all along the way, learning how traditional Hollywood was adapting to the digital revolution.

Last year I decided to take a crack at it myself. The result was FOODIES, a three-episode web series “pilot” that got picked up by The Village Voice, Eater, The Globe & Mail, you name it.

Along the way, I found great collaborators to work with and we began to create branded content for companies like BCBG, Pop Chips and American Express — all the while dedicating ourselves to bringing fantastic production quality and innovative storytelling to the digital sphere.

This spring we were invited by Intel and Katalyst to pitch the “next big idea” in digital storytelling. Our concept, an online courtroom TV drama called Flame Court was selected as a winner by a panel of judges that included YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, among other people. It was a good sign that we’re on the right track.

To say it’s been a learning experience is an understatement. Along the way, I became less concerned with simply telling my own stories and more concerned with helping other people tell their stories. In the digital age, everyone is a storyteller. We’re moving away from the model of a theatre, with a passive audience and an active stage and towards the model of a campfire, a place that people gather around to share and participate in the act of telling stories.

The future of storytelling is social. It’s about creating shows that star you and your friends, that merge fantasy with your daily reality and which exist 24/7. In the past, films could take you away for an hour and TV shows created a world that came around once a week. We now have the ability to create shows that fuse into your life, becoming a part of it.

I’m convinced this is the next step in the evolution of storytelling. In many ways, it’s a return to the kinds of stories we told each other thousands of years ago, where tribesman would sing of their exploits over a nice mammoth BBQ. It’s also something entirely new. If we can enable everyone on Earth to tell their stories, what will they tell us? Having been a journalist for many years, I know the power  of stories to cast light on people and ideas that we might never consider.

The future of storytelling is not another gimmick or distribution channel. The future of storytelling comes in empowering people to tell their own stories; to find engaging and entertaining ways to connect people through narrative and to take the vicarious thrill of watching a hero on the screen and transform it into the living experience of being a hero.

This is why I started JStrike Studio. It’s one thing to see the future, but quite another to bring it into the world. In the past few months, we have begun assembling a team, meeting with potential partners and clients and creating a game plan to make this vision a reality.

Starting today, we want to share that experience with the rest of the world. We’re big on openness and conversation and we’d like to invite you to come along on this ride with us. We’ll be blogging here at www.jstrike.com as well as on Facebook about our journey and hope you’ll not only follow along, but share with us your thoughts and ideas as well.

-Japhy

Created as part of Intel’s 48-Hour Idea Jam, Flame Court is an interactive show that brings the drama of courtroom TV to your computer and mobile device. Got an online beef with someone? Take it to Flame Court.

Flame Court is now accepting request for beta invites! Visit www.flamecourt.com to sign-up.
Watch our presentation below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwDZQAD9MTI

And see what industry leaders have to say about the show:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4w6PDZcoTk

Sign-up to be a beta tester to learn more and be the first to play.

When PopChips was looking for a way to publicize their “President of Pop Culture” campaign with Ashton Kutcher, they came to us to develop a viral video that played on the political angle of the campaign. We created an “attack ad” on Ashton, questioning whether he’s fit to lead the Pop nation. This then led to a campaign for a search for the “Vice-President of Pop Culture.”

Max Azria Campaign Ad

Herves Leger Campaign Ad

Max Azria was looking to expand beyond their traditional photo based campaigns for their lines and hired JStrike Studio to create videos that would air in-store as well as on the fall line’s sites.

Working with the campaign art directors for Max Azria & Herve Leger, we came up with the strategy of shooting the videos concurrently with the campaign photo shoot. In both videos, we used the photographers and fashion shoot as part of the video and for Herve Leger we created an animated version of the iconic square logo that’s used by the company to this day.

For their first album, Brooklyn-based indie band Grizzly Bear wanted a video that captured the band’s lo-fi “found sound” collage aesthetic. JStrike created a music video designed for online play using nothing more than a tape camcorder, a handmade anatomical man made out of a department store mannequin and World’s Fair footage from the public domain.

The result became the band’s first widely seen video thanks to our distribution and coverage by leading music sites.

Today, they play major arenas, late night talk shows and their music is used as the soundtrack to VW commercials and episodes of Gossip Girl. The video played Copenhagen Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (October 2007), Mostra Internacional Gai i Lesbia de Barcelona (July 2007), London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (March 2007).

JStrike Studio’s first original scripted web series, FOODIES follows the adventures of a group of L.A. culinary enthusiasts whose passion for food spills off the table and into their personal lives. Featured on Eater, L.A. Weekly, Huffington Post and more.

Written & directed by Japhy Grant and produced in association with Boardhead Brothers, FOODIES tells the story of Danny, a know-it-all food blogger whose life is upended by his ex-girlfriend’s new fiance. The first three episodes won the 2011 NYU Alumni Web Series Showcase and the show and our specially branded site, complete with recipes, blog posts in character as well as behind the scenes “scoops”, and discussion chats and forums site received over 350,000 users in the first month. JStrike not only produced the show, but developed the social media platforms for the site, as well as building out the universe on Facebook, Twitter and the Food Section of The Huffington Post.

The show was created on a less than $10,000 budget over three months– and that’s going from the beginning of scripting. We believe it represents the future model of digital entertainment, that exists not just once a week, but as a part of your daily life.

After the initial three-episode run, we are developing the platform further. Stay tuned.

Visit the FOODIES site to begin the experience.