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How to build a cinematic universe!

A special event on digital storytelling. Bülent Turgut, producer and founder of T World Entertainment & Production A.Ş. will meet with Bilkent University students in a live event during the Bilkent Media Future Initiative Day on April, 8 at 12:30 in FB 309, Faculty of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture.

T World Entertainment & Productions is a TV and Feature Film production company in Turkey. T World E & P is focused on creating a cinematic superhero universe, fantastic content and concept, producing them, applying successful gaming networks, creating new opportunities for companies and brands to turn their possessions into content and use them in a more interactive and integrated market through developing communication techniques, and offering new media platforms.

T world is a unique world of superheroes with distinctive mythology—through film and television series production, gaming, and merchandising.

“We knew from the get-go that creating a vast superhero universe from the ground up was not going to be easy. A serious investment in research and development, an all-encompassing and ongoing process for us, is necessary to tackle such a large-scale project,” said Bulent Turgut, creative producer and founder of T World Entertainment and Productions. (2019)

T World Entertainment on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/tworld.tv/

Bülent Turgut on IMDB – https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2097182/bio

Pieter Snapper to deliver the opening keynote for BMFI ’22

We are pleased to announce that Pieter Snapper will open the BMFI 2022 event.

Dolby Atmos Music Recording in the Real World: Fazıl Say in Izmir 

Researchers have developed impressive models of the perceptual and psychoacoustic underpinnings of immersive audio recordings, and a number of theoretically ideal systems have been described by Hyunkook Lee and others. Applying these systems to record a specific artist in a specific acoustic environment, however, is another matter entirely. How can theoretical ideals be mapped to the messy world of on-location recording? What if the microphone types in the models don’t sound great in the concert hall? This talk will be a case study of theory vs. praxis in Fazıl Say’s recent Dolby Atmos recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” for Warner Classics at Ahmed Adnan Saygun Sanat Merkezi in Izmir. 


Pieter Snapper is an American-born recording engineer, producer, and composer who moved to Turkey in 1999 to help found the Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM) at İstanbul Technical University, where he then taught for over 18 years. 

Snapper is perhaps best known for recording and producing nearly 20 albums with pianist Fazil Say, but his projects range from hip hop to pop to jazz, and have included artists as varied as Ibrahim Maalouf and Peter Murphy to MFÖ, Sertab Erener, and Ajda Pekkan. He was a founding partner of Babajim İstanbul Studios & Mastering, and is now based with his family in Eskişehir, where he teaches at Anadolu University. 

Save the date – BMFI ’22

Exciting News! We are getting ready for the new edition of BMFI – Bilkent Media Future Initiative on April 8, 2022. Talks and round tables on music recording, immersive sound, Dolby Atmos, HDR imagery, and the future of Post-Production live @ FFB 08 COMD BITS STUDIO and via YouTube. Stay tuned! More to come!

A trigonal bond: TV – Brands – Social Media

The new reality is that if people aren’t talking about something online, then they’re probably not talking about it offline either. Therefore, social media and advertising has become today’s marketer’s peanut butter and jelly. The recipe for a successful campaign is one that considers different mediums a key ingredient in its amplification strategy, with brands standing to grab the attention of a collective audience of over a billion active users. In this talk, Gencay K. Evirgen [CEO of Somera] will mention different cases from Turkish market around the TV – brands – social media triangle in a keynote on Friday, 18th at TTGV.

Egbert van Wyngaarden Interview

BMFI CCC Title Page Screen Shot 2015-09-12 at 22.40.43

  • What is the significance of the Bilkent Media Future Initiative?

I’m greatly honored and pleased to be invited to head the BMFI. It’s a fascinating challenge to work with young Turkish storytellers, filmmakers, designers and scientists on innovative media projects. We’ll be working with a human-centered design approach, which means that we closely look what media users actually need and like to do around the ideas we’re going to develop. The participants will build prototypes of new media experiences and test them with their target groups during a field day. This is quite a novel way of working. Also, we’ll be really approaching media from a digital point of view, which means making them very social, mobile, participatory and integration new technologies wherever possible.

  • How and why did you decide to head this workshop?

Andreas Treske and Ahmet Gurata invited me and gave me carte blanche. They said, we’d like to do something really new, please make a concept and we’ll organize it for you. That’s exciting, no? So I thought of creating an environment where storytellers, games designers, social media experts, creative technologists would accompany the students and help them approach their media projects from as many different perspectives as possible. A sort of writer’s room for the 21st century really. Bilkent University is near Cyberpark and major players in the fields of technology and media, which is a great context to work in.

  • What are your expectations from the workshop? From the participants and events?

Well first, it’s up to the participants to tell me what they would be really excited about. They are the ones making the media of the future! The BMFI team will then help them develop their ideas as well as we can. I hope we’ll find themes that are really relevant to people in Turkey, and that we can find original and compelling way to engage audiences for these themes. Create, Connect, Change is my motto. Create great stories and media experiences. Find inspiring way for people to connect to that. And then use the transformative power of digital media to affect positive change.

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  • What will be the contribution of this sort of university workshops to the development of media?

The participants will basically learn a new, more interdisciplinary and agile approach to media making. I use a lot of design thinking techniques that help people from different fields of expertise to work creatively together and to really understand what media users need. This is what future media making is about: creating relevant experiences for the people out there.

  • Why “transmedia storytelling” is so powerful? Why is it such an important technique?

I avoid speaking of transmedia nowadays as the word is very confusing. It basically means that in the digital space we have content, platforms and people and the question is, how do you combine the three in a way that makes sense to the audience, sense from a creative perspective and economic sense too of course. With so many different devices, media and platforms at our disposal, creating projects that cross borders and transcend single formats now is the natural thing to do.

  • Transmedia works began early but we actually understand what it is now, and still they are rare around the world. Therefore, transmedia storytelling seems like offering small possibilities because of huge financial, technical and intellectual needs. How can traditional producers deal with this and meet the expectations of young consumers?

Before the Internet, there was a scarcity of content and an abundant audience. Media producers could so to speak make whatever they wanted and would always find customers. Today there is an abundance of content, which makes it much harder to reach people. So what traditional producers and distributors must learn is to empathize with their audiences and to design media experiences that are based on a deep understanding of the people they are made for. Transmedia is nothing rare; it’s the new standard. Every successful project, be it a film or a game or a novel, extends in one-way or another across different media and platforms. If it’s not part of the concept, people will create extra features themselves. Think of what happens around really popular stories. People write fan fiction, they create wikis, they make characters speak on Twitter, and often there is an enormous dynamic in social media.

  • TV shows, movies like Matrix, Harry Potter, TV series, games, even cartoons such as Pokémon… All are examples of transmedia practices. But, all these are also commercial and these practices somehow expand the potential market with different audience segments. They do not point out any common value or aim. So, how can transmedia create value in digital age?

This is a really important question. Value in digital media is no longer just that you sell a product. Content is cheap to reproduce, people don’t want to pay so much for content anymore. But they will pay for something that can’t be reproduced so easily, that is unique: great experiences, being part of story worlds, participation, contributing. The basis for value creation today is fan culture. So how can you build your project in such a way that an audience will really want to be part of what you’re doing? One secret certainly is that you have to propose a theme that is important for your audience, something that appeals to them on a deep, emotional level. Stories have always done that, it’s what makers them timeless and universal.

  • At the most basic level, transmedia practices are stories told across multiple media in an interdisciplinary way. However, these practices almost are not in real world, they are most in possible worlds like in games or fictional productions. How can transmedia storytelling be used in news as the medium of reality?

If you think in terms of story worlds rather than single stories or media formats you’ll begin to see that transmedia storytelling is everywhere. It’s not a new gimmick; it’s something that naturally happens as soon as people engage with themes. It’s a way to make human experience accessible, to create an environment in which we can ask questions and get answers that we wouldn’t get somewhere else. Religions, political movements, sports events, cultural festivals, brands, even small and big historical moments: they all can be understood as narrative frameworks in which many stories, many protagonists, many mediatic forms, many ways to interact can be included. Reality is full of story worlds, because story worlds give meaning to life.

  • The pace of the world is so fast; everything changes easily in every minute. Media is one of the best reflections of this pace. What do you think about the near future of transmedia, where do you see transmedia five years from now?

First of all, whatever the developments, we’ll always need strong themes and compelling stories and characters. That will never change. The biggest transformation I expect to happen is that the way we interact with media will become still more personalized and intuitive. What you do, what you experience through media will more and more depend on the context you’re in. This sounds a little abstract but what I mean is that technology will become increasingly invisible and that the way we interact with stories, games and storyworlds will become fluid and natural. I’d like the participants of BMFI to be really visionary and to really think hard about how storytelling and media can be put at the service of the people they are intended for and to really help them improve their lives.

[Interview by Burcu Cura, Bilkent COMD]

Thank you.

BMFI Balon Uçurma ve Teaser Çekimi

11218829_10153538889707180_2910363992236329322_nBilkent Üniversitesi İletişim ve Tasarım Bölümü tarafından 16 – 19 Eylül 2015 tarihleri arasında düzenlenen Bilkent Media Future Initiative (BMFI) etkinliğinin Teaser çekimleri için sana ihtiyacımız var!

Sen de gökyüzüne bir balon bırakarak videoda yer almak istersen 12 Eylül Cumartesi günü saat 16:00’da Speed Cafe’nin önünde bizimle buluş.

Etkinliğimiz süresince Sanatsal Etkinlikler Topluluğu ve Bilkent Medya üyeleri de sizlerle tanışmak için orada olacak.

Çekimimize vakit ayırabilen tüm arkadaşlarımız için etkinliğinin hemen sonunda kokteylimiz gerçekleşecektir.

Etkinliğimizde Bilkent Medya Klübü tarafından katılımcılara GE 250 için 20 puan yüklenecektir.

Görüşmek üzere!

Bilkent Media Future Initiative
www.bmfi.bilkent.edu.tr

Bilkent İletişim ve Tasarım Bölümü
http://comd.bilkent.edu.tr/

Bilkent SET
https://twitter.com/bilkentset

Bilkent Medya
http://facebook.com/bilkentmedia

[ English Description ]

We need you for the Teaser Production of Bilkent Media Future Initiative (BMFI) event which will be hosted by Communication and Design Department between 16th and 20th of September 2015 !

If you want to took part in our video while releasing balloons, meet us in front of Speed Cafe on Saturday the 12th at 4pm.

During the event, student groups of Sanatsal Etkinlikler Topluluğu (SET) and Bilkent Media will welcome you.

We also have a cocktail after the shooting session for the ones who have time to participate this event.

The Bilkent Media Club will give 20 points of GE250 to the participants.

See you there !

Bilkent Media Future Initiative
www.bmfi.bilkent.edu.tr

Bilkent Communication and Design Department
http://comd.bilkent.edu.tr/

Bilkent Sanatsal Etkinlikler Topluluğu (SET)
https://twitter.com/bilkentset

Bilkent Media Society
http://facebook.com/bilkentmedia