Big Voice launches the voice of collective storytelling at Project Connect August 27 in Auckland

New Zealand transmedia company, Big VOICE, is creating a new wave of documentary, advertising and authentic storytelling skills to create potent content and experiences that provide a VOICE for businesses, individuals, groups and organisations to cut through the clutter.

“The world we live in is no longer a simple one. Artists are businesses, entrepreneurs collaborate with creative industries and marketing is integrated with social communication. The line between art, filmmaking and advertising is smudged. The wall dividing business and the creative sector has shifted,” so says Serena Stevenson, director of transmedia company, Big VOICE and the instigator of Project CONNECT.

Project CONNECT will be launched at a unique interactive, multi-media event on 27 August that will showcase how a multi-dimensional story can be created and told collectively.

“There’s a whole new way to tell stories from dye sketches on cave walls to oral storytelling, scrolls, books and documentary. We live in a post-advertising world in an age where storytelling has become global and collective,” she says. “We’re using Project CONNECT to cross the boundaries of traditional media forms, creating a transmedia storyboard and exhibition relevant to today’s multi-faceted world that invites participation and content from everywhere.”

The official Big VOICE Project CONNECT launch is a side event to We Can Create and starts at 6.30pm on 27 August at the BizDojo in the Ironbank Building, 150 Karangahape Rd, Auckland.

Event collaborators include anyone who can upload content via www.facebook.com/bigvoice.tv and Threaded Media, musician Stevie Starr, graphic designer and typographer Paul Stothers, Virtuo, Transmedia A:M/P:M, Ministry of Green, textile storyteller Margaret Lewis, Unguarded Intersection and Eleni Papdopoulos from Why Beanie.

Guests will view a large public projection by Unguarded Intersection and be encouraged to experience it from an unexpected, transplanted perspective. Avante-pop musician, Stevie Starr will invite his audience to manipulate his backing tracks using modified Wii remotes to bridge the traditional divide between performer and audience.

From old fashioned oral storytelling by Eleni Papadopoulos to a Skype based game of chat-roulette from Virtuo, and an immersive QR code experience by Transmedia NZ, Project CONNECT will develop a live story of human connection today from collaborators, people who send in their contribution via the web and guests at the actual launch location, Serena Stevenson says.

“We use high end digital technology, design and filmmaking. Presentation pieces will be interwoven, much like chapters in a book or scenes in a film. Participants who come to the launch can bring along their phones or communication devices, and something physical that represents connection for them – it might be a photo, a card, a poem, or a piece of fabric so they can co-create and be part of the magic.”

Big VOICE is using a range of technology and media to launch Project CONNECT to the public and provide a vehicle for participants to submit their thoughts, voice, images and text to the project via the FaceBook site.

“It doesn’t stop with the launch event. Transmedia storytelling evolves and we’ll continue to add content or chapters with Project CONNECT via Facebook, Twitter and a variety of other media platforms that will culminate in a global story of human connection in 2012,” Serena says.

To participate go to www.facebook.com/bigvoice.tv or www.projectconnect.me