Jam3 Creative Director Pablo Vio has been invited to participate on a panel at the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Association’s (SMPIA) Multi-PlatFORUM 2011, a day-long event in Regina focusing on creation of digital content across multiple platforms.

On April 14 at 9:30 AM, Pablo will showcase 2 Jam3 works. The first, ’Autotopsy’, a series of online films that takes the viewer through the events that lead to a devastating car wreck — www.autotopsy.ca/. Autotopsy is a great example of how content created uniquely for digital can complement and enhance film and video. The second, ‘Baxter’, is the online site for a “Glee meets Saved by the Bell” themed kids series. The site, hosted on Family Channel, www.family.ca/baxter plays on the theme of ‘making things your own’ and allows users to customize all levels of interactivity throughout their experience. Kids can decorate any page of the site, create custom levels for games that can be shared with friends, vote on possible outcomes for upcoming webisodes, implement their name and face into videos and more. Baxter was an instant success with tweens (over 400,000 visits) and shows how the ability to edit and interact with digital will keep kids coming back for more.

Pablo and fellow panelists will take questions from film and TV executives in the audience eager to learn more about how digital content can support marketing efforts for movies, documentaties and TV shows. Other speakers and guests includes representatives from the National Film Board of Canada, DHX Media and the Canada Media Fund.

Last night was an awesome night for Jam3 at the 2010 ADCC Awards. 5 projects we produced nabbed 7 awards in total with the grand tally being 1 Gold, 5 Silver and a Merit. A big congrats and thanks goes to everyone at Jam3 whose passion and savvy are what make these projects stand out from the rest.

During Geoffrey Roche’s (humorously long but insightful) speech I found myself nodding with approval at times as we’ve always preached a few of the exact same things. It’s all about passion, if you love what you do it will show in your work and to always put the extra effort forth because you’re only as good as your last project.

Gold: Buick Behind the Beauty (Maclaren MRM) – Motion Graphics
Silver: Buick Behind the Beauty (Maclaren MRM) – Business to Consumer
Silver: The Autotopsy (Whizbang Films) – Online Video Single
Silver: Waterlife (The NFB) – Non Profit & Public Service
Silver: Waterlife (The NFB) – Education & Information
Silver: Petro Canada “Olympic Wave” (TBWA) – Special Events
Merit: Stemcell Foundation “Renew the World” (Manifest) – Non Profit & Public Service

It’s also worth mentioning that in addition to the ADCC’s, we also picked up a Gold this Tuesday at the Digital Marketing Awards and were nominated for 2 Gemini’s in the same night! What a week!

For his part, Pablo presented Jam3′s brilliant interactive project The Autotopsy. This worked as a lesson in funding across platforms as it’s an interactive experience that drives viewers to the TV show, Cra$h and Burn but also works on its own as an interactive story. Although it won’t be as close to the real experience, you can see Pablo’s slides below:

Pablo had a great time on the panel and enjoyed the discussion with the other presenters:

– Norm Bolen, President & CEO, CMPA

- Wendy Bernfeld, Founder, Rights Stuff BV

- Robert Caouette, Sector Advisor – New Media, Export Development Canada

- Joanne Gordon, VP Media, Professional & Business Services, Royal Bank of Canada

- Mark Bishop, Executive Producer/Partner, marblemedia

I know this because he told me. I heard it straight from his mouth.

It’s also worth noting a tweeted response to the presentation:

This year the company is not just attending and volunteering en masse we are speaking in three separate sessions. Mikko is speaking on Monday at 2:30pm “Radiohead Thinks This Stuff is Cool” and again at 10:50am Tuesday at “The Cool Shit Hour”. At the same time on Tuesday, Adrian’s session “Standing out in a Sea of Interactive” will be across the hall.

Be sure to check out the sessions, there is something for everyone creative and developers alike.

See you at FITC, and welcome to Toronto!

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Case Study #1: Adrian Belina’s presentation will discuss Jam3’s recent award-winning website for the NFB’s Waterlife and the development of past & recent projects, including Autotopsy.com the stand-out web-extension of the TV series, Crash and Burn.

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Radiohead’s House of Cards was made entirely out of Voxels, they must be cool right? What on earth is a Voxel? During this presentation Mikko will go into more detail on the Voxel Engine he built called Fancy Engine, which will also be featured during the “Cool Shit Hour”. Along with voxels he will delve into the technical side of Jam3′s latest award winning projects Waterlife.nfb.ca and autotopsy.ca. While getting down with Voxels Mikko will be talking about the following: Inspiration for the Fancy Engine, Under the hood of the Fancy Engine, Datasets and Parsers, Optimization optimization optimization

I’m very proud to announce that we hit gold again on FWA. It is the third one in the last 6 months, not that I’m counting or anything. Psst…between me and you if you visit back this Sunday we’ll have some other great news to announce.

Link: http://www.autotopsy.ca

Autotopsy: “Point of Impact” from Jam3 on Vimeo.

For this week’s Hotshot Toronto-based collaborative studio Jam3 craft an immersive online experience to showcase gritty TV drama Crash & Burn.

The online experience at autotopsy.ca puts the viewer in the driving seat as the show’s main character and a young insurance claims adjuster Jimmy Burns is hot on the tail of a multi-vehicle pile-up. The viewer is taken through his journey step-by-step to piece together the complex jigsaw, and invited into a hellish crash scene that allows them to delve deeper and witness the moments leading up to the crash.

Part-game, part-narrative experiment, the sophisticated site serves up an array of interactive video content alongside character case studies that provide hints and distractions alike.

“We knew this had to be more than just an online video, and we wanted users to be able to experience in whatever order to their liking,” explains Jam3 creative director Adrian Belina. “It begins with the end or ‘aftermath’ and essentially sets up the ‘WTF?’ premise of the site. From there viewers fly through our frozen moment in time and can stop at any person involved in the accident and view three things: the approach, Jimmy’s two cents, and the case study.”

These are essentially the before, during and after elements of the site, which evolve the more the viewer explores. Users are given different options to interact with the site, such as a stylized 3D overview of the accident built in Papervision that allows people to jump to any point within the accident. Users can also drag the scene frame-by-frame with their cursor, jump to a point on the timeline or fast-forward with the mini-navigator.

The site took five months to complete from conception to the finished product, and Jam3 had the challenge of fitting the construction of the site in with the show’s timeline schedule. “We spent about a month conceiving the story, working out how to make it interactive and how the accident would unfold. We essentially sat in a boardroom with dinky cars running over different scenarios of who hit who first,” recalls Belina. “Interactive fiction is a fairly new concept and I think what attracts people to it is the notion of piecing together a puzzle. They are controlling what they see and how they see it.”

You can check out the intro film from the site below, and if you’d like to play detective and experience the interactive elements in full, visit the site at autotopsy.ca.

Link: http://www.autotopsy.ca