Announcing This Year's "Digitas NewFront" and the "Digital Content New Fronts"

Read today's Wall Street Journal article on this year's upcoming "Digital Content New Fronts"

For the 2nd year running, The Hollywood Hill is a proud partner and supporter of the "Digitas NewFront" on April 26th in NYC - now part of the two week "Digital Content New Fronts"

Please find below a PDF version of the WSJ article announcing this year's Digital Content New Fronts (w/participants Hulu, AOL, Yahoo, YouTube, MSN, and Digitas), a two week event for the largest online media outlets to rival the traditional television Upfronts.  Also below is a WSJ article on some of the shows being produced in this new wave...

TV's Big Ad-Sales Bazaar Inspires an Online Copycat
(Digital Content New Front article)
It may be the biggest week of the year in television: five days in May when television stars and network executives converge in New York to tout their hot new shows for advertisers. Now, online video wants its turn. This April the biggest online media outlets—including Google Inc. and its YouTube site; Yahoo Inc.; Hulu LLC; AOL Inc., and Microsoft Corp.—are planning a two-week event in New York. Each company will take a different day to woo advertisers by presenting different marketing opportunities such as revealing plans for coming video programming. Coming as more companies are creating more original video programming specifically for the Web, the event signals an intensifying effort by the online video world to challenge television. "We need to show there is a new game in town," said Colin Kinsella, chief executive of the North America operations of Digitas, the Publicis Groupe-owned agency that came up with the idea for the event.
Wall Street Journal (requires login) or PDF

Web TV's New Lineup
Fueled by a wave of investment from Silicon Valley's deepest pockets, Hollywood players are lining up to create original online shows. Tom Hanks vs. piano-playing cats.
Wall Street Journal (requires login) or PDF

New Event Partnership: Games for Change Conference

Games for Change Conference
We have joined the Games for Change nonprofit organization as an Institutional Partner on their 8th annual Games for Change conference June 20-22 at NYU's Skirball Center in NYC.  Games for Change is the leading global advocate for supporting and making games for social impact. The annual Games for Change Festival is the largest gaming event in New York City and the only international event united “games for change” creators, the public, civil society, academia, the gaming industry and media.  Attendees of the Festival can enjoy over 30+ hours of keynotes, presentations, panels and more. Last year's Keynotes included the Honorable Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the first US Chief Technology Office Aneesha Chopra.  In addition to various live play sessions, this year’s event will feature a “Game Arcade”, highlighting the nominees for this year’s Games for Change Awards. And while the focus is on games, our Festival is the perfect place to network with decision-makers from the government and NGOs, innovative game designers and publishers, visionary thought leaders in education and global development and members of the media.  Updates on this year's programming to follow as well as discounted invites for The Hollywood Hill's members…
http://www.gamesforchange.org/festival-2011/

New Event Partnership: Digitas Digital Content NewFront 2011

Digital Content NewFront 2011
We have joined Digitas as a partner on their 4th annual "NewFront" event on June 9th in New York City.  Digitas is one of the world's largest digital communications companies and a part of the Publicis Groupe (see NYTimes article from last Friday). The NewFront, which was created to help advance and enable the emerging digital content landscape, presents the most advanced thinking around how to partner marketers with content creators, talent and distributors. Unlike broadcast TV where there is a distributor-driven “UpFront,” original online video and content creation has no formal schedule, is fluid with different financial models.  Now in its 4th year, it's an exclusive one-day event which includes keynotes, panels, surprises and social elements.  Last year's keynotes were Martha Stewart and Arianna Huffington... the year before Al Gore and Michael Eisner.  The NewFront is invitation only to approximately 700 attendees and the audience will be made up of some of the world's most prominent and respected innovators, provocateurs, thinkers and doers across technology, entertainment, media and content. Digitas partner clients include American Express, Delta and General Motors. The event will also be streamed live-- last year's stream attracted over 200,000 viewers.  This year's event will take place at Skylight Studio in Soho, NYC. Updates on this year's programming to follow...
http://www.digitalcontentnewfront.com


We're Starting A New Chapter...

The Hollywood Hill is about to start a new chapter.  We're eliminating pesky membership fees, expanding to NYC, and co-hosting some hot events...

No Membership Fees
The Hollywood Hill is changing its membership model.  Effective March 2011, we ended our monthly and annual membership fees (membership will be complimentary and will continue to be restricted to entertainment industry-only).  To offset this change, our event cover charges will be priced slightly higher.  But this will ensure that members are only paying for those events they wish to attend.  Membership will still be restricted to accredited entertainment professionals.
*Recently paying members will have their event cover charges waived for a future event.

NYC Expansion
The digital media space is heating up and many of the larger marketing firms are based in NYC as are many TV networks that are developing a larger presence online.  NYC is also home to the corporate offices of many of our media conglomerate owners and for all of these reasons, it seemed like a good time to expand our own presence in the NYC entertainment community.  For the past several months, we've been spending time laying the groundwork for The Hollywood Hill's expansion into NYC.  Our events will be based at the Norwood Club (see below), and The Hollywood Hill will be partnering/co-hosting upcoming NYC events this summer (see next postings).

New Event Venue
For those of you familiar with the NYC social scene, you'll be happy to learn we will be hosting our events at the Norwood Club.  The Norwood Club is a private club for creative professionals located in a chic four-story townhouse in Chelsea.  They have a screening room on the top floor as well as a restaurant and bars.  Their plans include the expansion of their club to an LA location later this year so we'll be using it as well for our LA events when it opens. Our events will continue at the ICM Screening Room at MGM Plaza in Century City until then. More details to follow.

Jason Blum Breaks Record; Mike Werb Joins Amazon Studios Film Production Review Panel

We've been a little slow on posting lately, so we're going to try and catch-up.  Two big recent stories with Hollywood Hill members involved...

• Producer Jason Blum's ("Paranormal Activity", "The Reader", "Toothfairy") Paranormal Activity 2 took the number one spot it's opening weekend earning $41 million, while breaking the record for the biggest midnight gross ever for an R-rated movie.

• Also, writer/producer Mike Werb (“Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” “Curious George,” “Face/Off,” “The Mask”) has joined the review panel for Amazon's new film production outfit Amazon Studios, that has a first look deal with Warner Brothers.

From TheWrap:

Under its new online Amazon Studios program, announced on Tuesday, filmmakers and screenwriters will be invited to submit their full-length movies and scripts; if the response to a project is enthusiastic enough, the company will help get the movie made through a first-look deal with Warner Bros.

If Warner's passes on a particular project, Amazon Studios can then try to sell the project to another studio.

In addition, Amazon will offer a total of $2.7 million in awards to the top submissions received by Dec. 31, 2011.

Advisor Mark DeLoura moves to Google for Games

Today, Hollywood Hill and Play4Change Lab Advisor Mark DeLoura announced is moving to Google as "Developer Advocate" for games.

From Game News Site Gamasutra:

This is the one of the first times in recent years that Google has hired someone into a position that focuses specifically on game development and game developers.

It highlights the growing importance of the company's current gaming-related initiatives such as Google Android, Google's open source 3D API called O3D API, Chrome and Chrome OS.

"I personally feel that Google hiring someone specifically to focus on games is a signal from the company that they recognize the growing importance of games as a medium," said DeLoura in a statement to Gamasutra.

"Now how do we make it easier for developers to express themselves and share the experiences they create?" The position of developer advocate for games at Google is "both inward- and outward-facing," he added.

DeLoura is well-known within the video game industry. For the past three years, DeLoura has been performing CTO-level game technology consulting for a variety of companies, and has been writing about game engines and middleware. He's also on the board of the International Game Developers Association and the OneBigGame charity, and served as a judge for the Independent Games Festival and the recently-announced White House-backed Apps for Healthy Kids Competition.

Advisor Lawrence Bender blogs on "Countdown To Zero"

Today's HuffingtonPost features Hollywood Hill Advisor Lawrence Bender discussing his recent Washington screening of Countdown To Zero, his new doc with Participant Media and Director Lucy Walker on nuclear proliferation.

The film is an edge of the seat wake up call about the global nuclear threat. We scheduled the screening for the lead up to President Obama's global nuclear security summit, which is taking place today, convening almost 50 heads of state in Washington. We wanted to ensure that the conversation about the movie helps to create a sense of urgency at the summit. Adding to the momentousness of the past few days, the screening actually ended up taking place on the eve of the historic signing of the new START treaty -- the bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Russia, which, if ratified, will bring about the largest reduction in strategic nuclear arms in a generation.

Today is Launch Day for Armchair Revolutionary and You Are Invited

Today is the official launch day of Armchair Revolutionary! (armrev.org)

We've been working on this a long time, and it's finally here. Today we go live to a national audience and we begin to scale up our projects, activities, and feature roll-outs.

Beautifully explained today by CNET's Daniel Terdiman, Armchair Revolutionary is...

"a Web-based social activism platform designed to harness large-scale crowdsourcing and the boom in social gaming in a bid to support a wide variety of science and technology ventures that could benefit the world at large."

TODAY'S PRESS

You can currently find us online (links below) on the homepage of USA Today, CNET, Variety, and ReadWriteWeb, as well as the national Print editions of USA Today and Variety.

USAToday
"Digital Download: Join The Armchair Revolutionaries"
http://bit.ly/al0brQ

CNET
"Crowdsourcing Start-Up Aims To Change The World"
http://bit.ly/awghsv

Variety
"Activism Website Targets Gamers:  Armchair Revolutionary Merges Doing Good With Playing"
http://bit.ly/9jT6Ka

ReadWriteWeb
"ArmRev: Hollywood Games The Web For Social Good"
http://bit.ly/a36Cmo

USEFUL LINKS

For everyone, sign-up here to join the site:
http://www.armrev.org (use invite code "hhill")

If you know a brilliant scientist, technologist or innovator with a great idea to the change the world, send them here:
http://www.armrev.org/submit-a-project

If you know a talented illustrator, photographer, or animator who'd like to create artwork, send them here:
http://www.armrev.org/artists

The Hollywood Hill will have a significant roll to play as production house for Armchair Revolutionary's online media content and documentary film projects. The Play4Change Lab (The Hollywood Hill's new game lab collaboration with USC's Game Institute) will also play a role as production house for Armchair Revolutionary's games-for-change, serious games, and alternative reality game projects. We are pleased to have a wonderful group of advisors in place to assist in the development of these films and games. And as you all know, we have two great events coming up discussing online film financing (one with Kickstarter.com and one with a mystery company launching in May) and we ourselves are about to jump head first into that arena.

Thank you for your support in getting us here.  We're looking forward to your creative input, ideas, and suggestions as we move this exciting venture forward attempt to shape the future, one revolution at a time!

For additional details on Armchair Revolutionary's unique business models, as well as how The Hollywood Hill and the Play4Change Lab (The Hollywood Hill's new game lab collaboration with USC's Game Institute) fit in, you can visit our press page for some helpful bullet points:
www.armrev.org/press

Film Financing on Kickstarter.com - Success Stories

In preparation for our upcoming April 15th event Film Financing Online with Kickstarter.com CEO Perry Chen, Kickstarter has put together a handful of success stories for review by The Hollywood Hill's members.  These will no doubt get everyone primed for an energetic conversation.  Enjoy...

• Jens Pulver
• Reunite the Kinks
• Mister Rogers and Me
• Dear Mr. Watterson
• LaPorte, IN Feature Documentary

Congrats To Our Partners at USC's Video Game Program

USC's video game design program just got ranked #1 nation-wide by Princeton Review.  We're pleased to see they've received such terrific recognition.  We'll be annoucing our jointly-run Play4Change game lab in the next few weeks.