Jay Bushman // Works

Multiple roles and projects at a groundbreaking interactive transmedia entertainment studio, including writing and development of creative projects, experience design and development of the RIDES.tv platform and oversight of social media strategy, .

Selected Projects:
Airship Dracula
Dirty Work
RVC
6:14
Whispers
Home: A Ghost Story

AIRSHIP DRACULA Creator Writer A radical reimagining of Bram...

jaybushman — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 08:50:00 -0700

AIRSHIP DRACULA

Creator
Writer

A radical reimagining of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, in a steampunk world revolutionized by a 19th century version of the Internet.

Starring Alan Tudyk, Tammin Sursok and Paul Sorvino.

Trailer

DIRTY WORK An interactive dark comedy series and winner of the...

jaybushman — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 21:41:00 -0700

DIRTY WORK

An interactive dark comedy series and winner of the 2012 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media-Original Interactive Television Programming

As Associate Producer, I helped to write and create the world of the story, worked on developing the interactive and transmedia elements, and oversaw the campaign to extend the storyworld over multiple social platforms.

Case Study Video

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS Mike Daisey’s...

jaybushman — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 18:16:00 -0700

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS

Mike Daisey’s controversial theatrical monologue about the cult of Apple and Chinese labor practices, adapted into a stream of consciousness Twitter drama.

THE #SXSWESTEROS CONFERENCE A Twitter mashup of the 2011 SXSW...

jaybushman — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

THE #SXSWESTEROS CONFERENCE

A Twitter mashup of the 2011 SXSW Interactive conference and Game of Thrones

CNN coverage

UNDEAD PRIDE DAY We call it Halloween, but for the...

jaybushman — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

UNDEAD PRIDE DAY

We call it Halloween, but for the misunderstood monsters, creatures and ghouls, it’s a day to make their voices heard.

A massively collaborative social media story event for Halloween 2011.

#SXSTARWARS Characters from the Star Wars Universe invade the...

jaybushman — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

#SXSTARWARS

Characters from the Star Wars Universe invade the 2011 SXSW Interactive festival

Coverage from the Official Star Wars Blog and io9

TRANSMEDIA LOS ANGELES Founder Board Member At the end of...

jaybushman — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

TRANSMEDIA LOS ANGELES

Founder
Board Member

At the end of 2009, I co-founded a meetup group for professionals and people interested in learning more about transmedia. The group has grown into one of the largest and most active transmedia organizations in the world.

TLA Meetup Group

CTHALLOWEEN A massively collaborative social media story event....

jaybushman — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

CTHALLOWEEN

A massively collaborative social media story event. The monsters from the works of H.P. Lovecraft rise to take over Twitter.

#SXSTARWARS - ATTACK ON THE DEATH STAR A realtime reenactment...

jaybushman — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

#SXSTARWARS - ATTACK ON THE DEATH STAR

A realtime reenactment of the end of Star Wars over Twitter.

Variety coverage

Spoon River Metblog

jaybushman — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:37:00 -0800

When they first appeared serially in the magazine Reedy’s Mirror in 1915, the poems that make up Spoon River Anthology were a scandal and a sensation. A poet named Webster Ford, visiting the cemetery in his fictional hometown of Spoon River, Illinois, hears the testimony of the local dead. Each individual poem is one person’s epitaph. Some of them have attained wisdom in their passing. Some cling to the grudges of their living days. Some cry for justice. Some ask for forgiveness. Many relate their part in the culture war between liberals and conservatives that split their town in two. Most, but not all, are unquiet. Each individual testimony reveals more detail about the larger stories occurring in the town, with people augmenting or contradicting their neighbors. Rather than using ornate and high-flown poetic language, Masters used plain and blunt language to describe their inner, secret lives, touching on topics such as abortion, murder, infidelity and atheism, and ripping the veneer off the image of idyllic small town life. When the poems were assembled, augmented and reordered in book form in 1916, it became the second best-selling volume of American poetry of all-time. Today it is a standard text in many high school English classes and acting schools, and its stage adaptations are regularly performed.

“The Spoon River Metblog” updates this complex narrative while returning to the original serial form of distribution. In this version, the town is a different Spoon River, a microcosm of our shrinking America. Here too, a culture war raged, secrets were kept, people loved and betrayed and murdered. We hear the departed bear witness to the meaning, or lack of meaning, of their lives. Our guide here is not a poet; instead, a writer named George Dillon Davidson records the epitaphs of the dead in a kind of syllabic prose. And in his writings, there may be hidden meaning to discover which reveal even more about the history of Spoon River. The story is told in the form of a Metblog. Metroblogging is a worldwide network of city-specific blogs, where groups of authors write stories about life in their city from a personal, hyper-local perspective. Bode Media, the publishers of Metroblogging, have built a fictional Metblog site for Spoon River, and the epitaphs as relayed by Davidson are published as individual blog posts. Readers are free to comment on the individual epitaphs, and draw connections between the different characters.

I am indebted to several people for helping in the creation of this project: Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo at Metroblogging for giving it a home; Mack Reed and the Creative Thinkers for invaluable support and counsel; Andrea Phillips for understanding better than anyone; Shannon Ramsay for her usual graphic design brilliance; John Hallwas and Kathy Nichols from Western Indiana University, and Kenneth Kitchin in St. Louis for crucial research help; the WTF team at Shadow Unit for constant inspiration; the seething mass of awesomeness that makes up the BarCampLA community; and B, for putting up with it all.

The Spoon River Metblog was published in cooperation with the Metroblogging Network and Bode Media.

The Good Captain

jaybushman — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:35:00 -0800

The Good Captain is an adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno.” Melville’s original story relies upon the main character’s first-person perceptions of the events that unfold in front of him. This reliance on P.O.V. is why I chose to distribute the story using the web service Twitter. Twitter limits updates to 140 characters of text, and so this story is broken up into small, 2-3 line paragraphs. The temporal nature of this storytelling method required that the story include frequent reminders of previous events, to help keep readers aware of the context of the events. This was especially important given that the time span of the bulk of the events is about twelve hours, and the length of time that the story ran for was four months. The Good Captain began broadcasting over Twitter on November 3, 2007. It concluded on February 29, 2008. The original page can be viewed at www.twitter.com/goodcaptain. It is also available in multiple formats: A paperback book edition is available at Lulu

There is a downloadable version available for the Kindle

You can also download a free PDF version.

THE GOOD CAPTAIN A sci-fi adaptation of the Herman Melville...

jaybushman — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

THE GOOD CAPTAIN

A sci-fi adaptation of the Herman Melville novella Benito Cereno. One of the earliest experiments in using Twitter as a storytelling medium.