Integrated Communications

The two main forces that shape my professional communications work is "integration" and "community building" through the use of technology. As a matter of principle, I always work through collaboration, either in the physical or digital realms, striving to inspire participation, engagement and a sense of ownership by the participants. To accomplish this, I draw upon research skills, key uses of existing and new technologies and outlets for social media on the part of brands and their fans themselves.

I focus on bridging the physical with the digital, text with image, sound with visual, and digital interactive clicks with physical information design.

By not limiting work to one platform, a delicious palate emerges that encompasses all means of expression ensuring that the road less traveled bears the most aromatic fruits.

Please review some "master quality" case studies for an in-depth exploration of integrated communications and media through the refined use of technology and society.

Technology

Each of my campaigns, including those that I either design, produce or deploy, has three beginning points:
1) the communication needs
2) the participant
3) the space

Clearly, each communication need, whether branding, marketing, sales, informative, artistic or human development will draw on different technologies and techniques to meet its audience, the participant in the broadest sense, whom can take the form as fan, customer or client.

The larger question is in what space the communication and audience interact. What are the right questions to ask seeking the targeted group of people. Is it a digital space? Is it a physical space? Is it a space that has two halves, one digital and one physical? Is it a social media space where each participant comes together as lone role-players rehashed through digital interactivity or, in fact, one in which a group of individuals are connected in a live-event social media experiment where they create social media, socially?

Pinhole from Cortlan McManus on Vimeo.

I begin the process of imagining the participant in the "space," either the 3d physical space of sights, sounds and smells or the digital space of flowcharts and interactive non-linear narratives controlled by the parameters of the architecture and the input of the user. After learning of how the participant will be embedded within the media communication, deep ethnographic research is conducted to ensure a full-term experience. And then its off to the races through the quick dissemination and delivery of the digital or social environment and the interaction of the participants. The offer is delivered, the message is understood.

My integrated communications can be found through social media campaigns, information design, 3d virtual worlds, physical space flows, or installations that bridge the physical and digital worlds.

Be sure to check out some case studies that offer a deeper appreciation of the above thoughts in action.

Cine.ma

Integrated Communications are those that use aspects of the cine.ma of the 21st century integrated with the movement as found in the physical space of society, that is social media on the screen, whether mobile or laptop, silver screen or projected onto a square in the heart of NYC.

Cinema from the 19th century and early to mid 20th century, was effectively anything that was in movement on a screen. This was originally thought of as taking place in movie houses and later on, TV screens either through broadcast or the playback of recorded media.

Cine.ma in the 21st century still involves movement on the screen but many times, it is connected to networks through the device/human relationship. Unlike prior cinema, 21st century cine.ma now includes the interactivity and user generated movement to both propel a piece forward through its non-linear narrativity as well as the movement that occurs happen-stance through the incorporation of both designed and random interactions with different pieces in movement. That is a web site is cine.ma; an interactive narrative is cine.ma; a film project on a screen with a physical "out of movie house" component that matches an audience member's socializing ability is cine.ma; even twitter, facebook and other social media components are cine.ma.

This is digital connection. My ten years of research working on-line, off-line and in-person has reinforced that a person's connection to either a haptic feedback keyboard or a mouse is never enough to sustain lasting connections. Nor is such a connection possible with a website or an online social environment. It needs to be deeper to deliver the opportunity for an ongoing relationship to develop, nourish and persist between brand and engaged participant customer.

Unfortunately many technology planners today don't truly understand people per se. The digital technology that could bridge physical people together, many times is off-putting and short sighted. Heaven forbid, I'll be researching this all too common trait for more then a decade http://cine.ma/blog/mexico.

Divisions: From the Aztecs to the 21st Century from Cortlan McManus on Vimeo.

Digital directors, whether account or creative, many times will place more importance on content versus context. Most of the time community is forgotten altogether. These statements are said with long term planning at the heart of it, not just for one project that runs for one week. Alas, that is why, both as an anthropologist and an artist trained in communications, I take a different approach. Success does not even enter my brain patterns when one new user, follower or friend is added to a brand's Twitter, Facebook or whichever faux social online account. Lasting success comes from strategies which bridge the digital and physical, the real and the faux, the short term with the long term, honesty with transparency, dialogue with participation.

Cine.ma, as we know it in the 21st century, does bring the memories of what was possible but also shows us the way of what will be possible once people and technology are truly connected through the social.

Be sure to check out some case studies that offer a deeper appreciation of the above thoughts in action.

ReBirth Cinema

Cortlan McManus - Reel from Cortlan McManus on Vimeo.

CONTENT
Cortlan McManus's cinema productions are produced through the Push Art Boom! division of his company ReBirth Cinema LLC.

Beginning with our first feature screenplay that was developed as an undergraduate thesis working with famed playwright Gus Edwards, my cinema work fuses narrative devices into a creative arrangement of fiction and documentary.

CONTEXT
Our trademark genre of productions are called ethno-visual narratives.

Generally speaking, these ethno-visual narratives, our films, draw upon the following:

1) Social anthropology through ethnographic fieldwork and/or participant observation
2) A historical text revisited and re-envisioned in the present day to offer a new and more profound reading
3) A use of cinematic language informed by the masters and challenged by finding new forms

COMMUNITY
Having worked in more then twenty countries and across countless spoken languages including English, Spanish, German, Gaelic, Arabic, French, Persian and Berber, relying on our ability to collaborate with all communities, our successes have been amplified through these great partnerships.

Please explore our films and comment on them as we join hands extending the community even further.

Ethno-Visual Narratives

An ethno-visual narrative is the name I call my films. *

Influenced equally by anthropology, literature, technology and film, all ethno-visual narratives have some commonalities:

1) Re-surfacing a tale/mythology/story from the past
2) Using ethnographic film techniques to document human relationships
3) Fuse the two (i.e., one from the past, one from the present shaping the future OR one documentary, one fiction forming the shape of an ethno-visual narrative)

* All films by Cortlan McManus and his production company ReBirth Cinema are ethno-visual narratives, a registered trademark of ReBirth Cinema LLC. ReBirth Cinema is a registered trademark of Corltan McManus. My mom would want me to tell you that I'm her registered son but I told her that would be kind of crony. She won out.

Case Studies - Integrated Communications & Cinema

The best way to learn about what we do is to first picture a pie.

Any pie, it could be a cherry pie, apple pie or even a key lime pie.

Do you smell the freshness that only can come after doing research into the perfect combination of ingredients; organizing that information into a recipe to keep our eyes on the prize (and stomachs ;-); preparing the production always watching the timer and making sure to mix the best ingredients at the best value; and finally taking the pie out of the oven and letting its post-production cool down until it reaches the perfect temperature. Finally, my favorite part, distributing and disseminating each piece until it is savored and remembered by those who see and experience it.

Do you see the pie? Now let's break it down into little pieces.

What follows will be case studies to give you a full idea of what it is we do.

Case Study - Alicia Keys

Stripped - Alicia Keys

The Stripped series is an example of an Integrated Cinema Campaign.

By drawing on both terrestrial radio, live in-studio performances at the legendary Legacy Studios, distributed online and allowing people to interact, share, comment and interact with in the digital and physical realms is a successful example of such a campaign that can be assimilated to other markets.

Working on the Stripped series added an addition level of love for the documentation of live music videos. Not only have I loved every second of the Alicia Keys shot, but also enjoyed Patti LaBelle, Sean Kingston and other Grammy award winning artists. I even enjoyed C+C Music Factory ;-! Serving in many different roles, including Assistant Producer, Assistant Director, Cinematographer and Editor.

Case Study - Lost Museum

The Lost Museum

The award-winning* interactive site, "The Lost Museum," is an example of a product that combines interactivity, non-linear narratives, education and 3d design into a cohesive experience that fulfills the needs of engagement, community and participation.

The intellectual problem was how to present historic texts and information relating to post-bellum US society and make it both relevant and engaging to audiences of today.

The solution was to design an immersive media project that integrates a 3d recreation, user directed interactivity and historic texts and ephemera that both engages new visitors and,equally important, re-engages returning visitors to fully explore the experience time and time again. As one of the creators, I can tell you that a participant could return time and time again discovering new documents, life histories, photos and other digitized primary records with each visit revealing more and more about US society and culture at this moment in time.

Using the infamous P.T. Barnum Museum as a starting point, a user can learn about the history of slavery through the story of Joyce Heath, early public performances including Tom Thumb and a plethora of other cultural artifacts.

My role and output of this project was as both the co-information designer of the site flowchart as well as the 3d animator of P.T. Barnum's office. For the narrative of his office, I wanted to add a touch of personality and a realism that would present the everyday of his office.

I, along the many collaborators who contributed to the success of this project, were thrilled to win so many prestigious awards and recognition!

* Selection of awards and publicity

AWARDS

In 2006 The Lost Museum received the Center for Digital Education Digital Education Achievement Award.

In 2005 The Lost Museum was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities EDSITEment Citation.

In April 2005 The Lost Museum won the Platinum Award for Interactive-Educational New Media at the 38th annual WorldFest Film Festival. Worldfest, one of the oldest competitive international media Festivals, was held in Houston, Texas.

In April 2005 The Lost Museum was the recipient of an Honorable Mention Award for excellence in interactive media production in the Horizon Interactive Awards competition.

In 2000 The Lost Museum won the 2000 New York Metropolitan Archivists Roundtable Prize for "the most innovative application of archives to the Internet."

PUBLICITY
September-October 2005 Review in "Higher Learaning: Technology Serving Education":
"The Lost Museum"
"Beware: if you visit The Lost Museum, a Web site developed by the New Media Lab (NML) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), you may never return. Just as one can spend an entire afternoon in a regular, brick- and- mortar museum, the NML’s virtual take on P.T. Barnum’s 19th century American Museum, once found in Lower Manhattan, might cause a visitor to lose track of time, online.
The Lost Museum, constructed by CUNY’s Graduate Center students, is a fascinating, interactive 3-D look at what was once the United States’ most visited museum – until it mysteriously burned to the ground in 1865. Visitors can explore the virtual reconstruction and embedded resources, which can be used with classroom lessons, along with clues to the mystery of who set the fire.
Educators, students and history enthusiasts alike can access a rich archive of historical documents and present-day scholarships that delineate the marvels and scandals surrounding Barnum and his museum, as well as the social, political and cultural history of the mid-nineteenth century city. Learn about tiny Tom Thumb, the Feejee mermaid, the Circassian Woman and many other wonders – and hoaxes.
Not only is this an informative, educational Web site, but the rich images, graphics and animation make you feel as though you’re a 19th century patron, visiting the American Museum in person."

October 2005 Review in Common-Place, an online history journal, by Thomas Augst, Volume 6, No. 1 "Finding Barnum on the Internet: An antebellum museum in cyberspace"

July 1, 2000 A Museum to Visit from an Armchair, New York Times, Tina Kelley

July/August 1999 AAA World, Magazine of the Automobile Association of America , The Lost Museum, Kate Muhl

September 1999 CBS Sunday Morning Show

Case Study - United Nations

2015: Millennium Development Goals from Cortlan McManus.

Synopsis of 2015

This multi-media project was shot in Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and Morocco documenting the Millennium Development Goals and funded jointly by the United Nations and the Arab Gulf Fund. For the first time, a philosophy of "development cinema" was used which not only recruited non-professional cast and crew for as many positions as possible but also paid each person at least their country's average monthly wage for each day that was worked. Shot at the the Great Pyramids, Wadi Rum where Lawrence of Arabia was shot, in Thula, Yemen, one of the world's oldest villages, and in Casablanca on the ground's of one of the world's largest mosques, "2015: Millennium Development Goals" was produced with the hope that the MDGs will be accomplished by 2015. For more information of the project, please visit:

www.2015mdg.org

2015 - Millennium Development Goals

More Information on the Millennium Development Goals

Case Study - James De La Vega & Become Your Dream

Become Your Dream - James De La Vega from Cortlan McManus

Synopsis of Become Your Dream - De La Vega

Shot over a year's time, this experimental documentary examines both the art of New York's most famous urban artist as well as presents the ethics of documentary. De La Vega is known as a sidewalk provocateur, a mural master and a Cornell educated painter. Born in Spanish Harlem, De La Vega is personally familiar with living the life in the urban jungle: poverty, AIDS, and violence mixed with a side of ingenious wit, good natured humor and a propensity to produce massive amounts of work. "Become Your Dream: James De La Vega" also examines and reflects on the ethics that rule all documentaries: who's economic gain; political representation of self and the other; and most importantly, the differences in vision that can result between subject and object. Captured and presented for the first time so that a broader conversation can begin about the ethics of documentary.

Cineaste Statement

My first documentary started off as must do: an unflinching desire to find out about a person or subject, building a relationship and documenting and revealing that with others through a cinematic expose.

When I first moved to NYC, I first resided in a neighborhood called Spanish Harlem. Each day I walked to the bodega or metro, I would see a new mural or a sidewalk all written or painted by someone simply named, "De La Vega." Little by little I discovered about this identity culminating with spending two years with James De La Vega documenting his becoming his dream: the most successful urban artist in New York City.

Through these two years, the political implications of documentaries also bore its fruit. Many times docs are sold to the audience as "truth at 24 frames per second" and that no compensation was exchanged between subject and object. Clearly, the subject is the individual(s) that are being documented whereas the object is that of the camera.

In my experience, I generally don't like flies. I sure don't like flies on the wall. Whenever I see a fly on the wall, I always have the urge to squash it with whatever magazine I can find. I am not always successful in my haste, but sometimes little fly wings and squirted blood is left behind.

I do not attempt to be a fly on the wall. Instead, I document the building of the relationship between subject/object and inspire to meet my equal through honesty and integrity.

De La Vega is skeptical of others' intentions and rightfully so. Historically, the Latino community has been taken advantage of by elements of the system: judicial, economic, social, linguistic and educational. Although I have never practiced nor subscribed to these types of racist ideologies, De La Vega did not initially know him as an individual but more a reflection of my genetic baggage: a United Stater descended from what on the surface some would describe as a light-skinned dude. Breaking that barrier took time. Capturing that political divide was an indirect result and one accomplishment that I most relish.

Rarely, if ever, have I come across other docs that are so honest in their depiction of what occurs between every subject and the capturing camera: who benefits from the doc, both monetarily and its exhibition prestige; who controls the edit of the doc and the right to the depiction of one's life; who remembers when the camera is running and when it is off; who controls the destiny of the interaction; which of the two is the pawn?

Not only does Become Your Dream - De La Vega reveal the subject's pursuit of becoming the best known and respected NYC working urban artist on his own terms, but it also presents for the first time on cinema the relationships that are so deep seated to form the relationship between subject and object.