The Case of the Midnight Note

The Case of the Midnight Note was a project to raise money to help folks attend this year’s Webstock conference.

The project was a collaboration between Chelsea Hughes, Hadyn Green, Jed Soane, Jem Yoshioka, Timothy Greig and I.

Webstock is considered to be the web event of the year in Aotearoa/New Zealand. I can’t even begin to describe it or what it means to web folks. It’s something special. Most of us work for employers who either subsidise or send us to Webstock for free. We were interested in helping folks (starving digital artists/students/awesome-deserving people), who didn’t have employer assistance, and who couldn’t afford to go, go. So we held a fundraiser to raise money for them.

It started with a tweet

My application to attend Webstock was declined by my employer. In a moment of disappointment, I tweeted it. Enter Chelsea who read my tweet and was absolutely determined to help me get to Webstock. Within 24 hours, Chelsea had crowdsourced my Webstock conference fee through Twitter and a Google site she threw together.

While this was happening, Chelsea and I discovered that Timothy was in the same boat – his employer had also declined his application to Webstock. The three of us decided to meet to discuss how we could help other folks go to Webstock.

Initial fundraising ideas really did include cupcakes and teeshirts. In the end, we decided to stick with what we knew. We knew our Twitter community, and we knew how well attended Tweetups were. We decided to hold a Tweetup “like no other”. We settled on the idea of creating a noir-themed transmedia story that our community could follow online. The story would end at noir-themed fundraising Tweetup at a secret speakeasy.

We started to think about the story and how it could be told. Timothy has a background in gaming, and Chelsea in improv comedy. Watching the two of them weave a noir world from their imaginings was fascinating. We kept referring back to our community. How could we tell the story in a way that people could follow. How do we meaningfully include them?

The project included two major parts: a noir-themed transmedia story and a noir-themed fundraising event.

Midnight emails

The project really kicked-off in the New Year. Timothy had recruited Jem, an artist/illustrator, into our project team. Timothy had already been talking to Jem about transmedia storytelling and she was very keen to be included in the project. They took the lead for the story design – a slow release of characters and plot.

Jem gave Sam Spillane and Betty Back, our two characters, faces. Tim gave them voices on Twitter.

And that’s when things really took off!

We had decided early on that we wanted Sam and Betty to exist as “real life” characters. Chelsea was the obvious choice for Betty given her performance background, but we needed a Sam. Hadyn, well known blogger, script writer and good sport, seemed the perfect choice for Sam. We knew Hadyn through Twitter and we recruited him into the project team by text (we asked Hadyn if he wanted to dress up and pretend to be a noir private investigator – @gumshoesam – and he accepted immediately). Hadyn also had script writing experience – bonus! Hadyn subsequently brought Jed onboard. We wanted to document what we were doing. As far as we were aware this kind of transmedia storytelling hadn’t been done in New Zealand before. Jed was interested in helping us document our project through film and photography. As it turned out, Jed never got around to this because we started using his photos in the story itself.

It should be noted that the project team consisted of self-identified geeks but not developers (with the exception of Jed who is a programmer by day). Chelsea, Hadyn, Jed, Jem, Timothy and I were all members of the Twitter community in Wellington. We also had jobs or hobbies that kept us in the on-line space. We’ve all blogged, facebooked, flickrd, twittered and youtubed: We really knew our audience and we really understood this space.

The story was organically grown in real life through a number of meetings, photoshoots and voice recordings. The project team also collaborated by numerous chats, emails, texts and direct Twitter messages. We employed Google calendar/docs/sites to stay organised. Given the short project time frame (one month), we decided to use existing platforms with minimal hacking.

In retrospect, we should have called it The Case of the Midnight Email – The story was developed organically. We met, we discussed, we tweaked, and then we produced. Often in snatched and stolen hours (midnight!) because everyone had full other lives.

How did it work?

The story was not only told on Twitter, but also through Jem’s illustrations stored on Flickr. And through Jed’s photos , also stored on Flickr. From time to time, Timothy turned the photos into comics. We also experiemented with voice recordings.

What was the community reaction?

At first there was some suspicion around our motives. People asked us if we were raising money for ourselves. These suspicions were allayed by our relationship with the Webstock organisers. We were lucky because Mike and Tash from Webstock cottoned onto what we were doing very early on. In fact, they contacted us at the start to lend their support. They followed the transmedia story and even interviewed us on the Webstock blog. Through that they endorsed us in the eyes of the community.

Also, there was a sense of how does this work? I think it would be fair to say that we were met with confusion on the first week of launch. Our community didn’t really know what we were doing. We didn’t even know we were doing “transmedia storytelling” but we had to communicate that concept somehow. We created a Facebook fan page and used Out Of Character (OOC) communication to let our community know what was going on.

How did it end?

The Case of the Midnight Note concluded at Betty’s Function House and Bar. Wellington webbies who had been following or playing the game headed there in spectacular noir costumes: They witnessed the final showdown between Betty and Sam. This was absolutely the highlight of the project for me and we were incredibly lucky that Media 7 sent a film crew along to capture what went down.

In the end the Case of the Midnight Note, with the generous support Webstock and the Wellington web community, helped three people attend Webstock. <3!

Why was it special?

The chance to caper and to engage with our web community were two things that made this project so special for me.

That aside – the difference between this and other projects I’ve worked on was our approach to users. We spent very little time and focus on the technical solution. We used what we knew – a WordPress blog with minimal configuration. Focus instead was centered on users and the story. In many respects we were the users – The very audience our story was constructed for. It was therefore very easy for us to solve problems by putting ourselves in the scenario – Would that make sense for us?

In a nutshell, the focus wasn’t on technology. The focus was on the story and whether our users would make sense of the story.