ABOUT "Run Street Artist Run"

RUN STREET ARTIST RUN

Ok. I hate making web pages so I decided I was going to put all this info on my blog for those that are interested in the project:

Run Street Artist Run: The Film in 4 Parts

The short films follow 3 street artists around the world as they put up their art in various cities. They are: 1. European Street artist 2. Urban American Street Artist 3. Female Intricate Painter Street artist. They all meet in the finale 4th part of the film and go and a huge mission in New York City. All sorts of humorous and adventurous situations arise on their nocturnal missions which I have taken in some part from my own experiences and in other parts inspired by other street artists adventures. This is going to be a non-stop music driven fast pace narrative.

Themes explored in this film are gentrification, politicians that seem to hate street art and spend their time passing bills about outlawing it, but not being concerned about crime, homelessness and so on. Also covered are constant barrage of ads we get in our daily lives in public spaces and perhaps this project acting as a happy solution to this in a symbolic way(see below for more info).

The plan is to allow people to watch each part of the film as an intro to the game. Also put it out on various video sharing sites and such with the end goal of getting people to come into the 3d spaces and play the game. And of course submit it to all the festivals in it's entirety.

The following gaming aspects of this project are browser based, with there being a down loadable standalone version and I am investigating developing this game for the iphone as a multi-player kind of experience. Stay tuned for word on that.

The Casual Game

Basically, I'm making a multi-leveled game where you use your skills of evasion and street running to access areas where you can either spray paint, stencil, or paste up your artwork on walls, subway stations, billboards and ads. This is going to be like the streets...while you can upload some work to use as either stencils are big stickers you have to place them. Also to be provided are paint brushes and spray paint tools.

You must avoid the police, irate gang members, overly annoying yuppies and hipsters that have moved into your neighborhood, corrupt politicians, surveillance cameras, and a bevy of other characters like the mysterious Street art vandal(based on the infamous New York Splasher). There is no violence and we want to make this all very fun to play. Your only weapon will be a can of spray paint that you can use to envelope and confuse those that pursue you.

The Network Game

The idea here is to create a common virtual space where people can put their art up all over what amounts to a blank city. The free area of this space is a huge abandoned factory where I hope people will put works of art, drawings, stencils, and so on.

There will be ads everywhere except this free area. When you deface an ad you are actually painting on a layer over the ad. The plan is to have markers that you can put in your blogs, Myspace pages or whatever that will navigate to those locations you have defaced and people can roll-over to see what the ad was before you went to work on changing it. In a perfect world you should get paid for this because someone is seeing the ad. I'm working out how to get this done with some folks. I should know by next week if and how this is possible.

At minimum we will have a place where people can express themselves. Perhaps the ad aspect of all this will also allow them to make a bit of money. We just will have to see.

Most likely there will be a huge free game level that people can try out and if they want to get into the network they'd pay 9.99 one time on the apple iphone app store. I am weighing the possibilities.

Advertisers

I am currently contacting advertisers to give me money to place their ads in the film and game to be defaced. Obviously we are looking for companies and people that have a good sense of humor about it and understand the potential of this idea to get their message seen while giving end users a say in the matter and being creative and in many cases adding or making the ad space more interesting beyond it's initial state.

Defacing in the films will be done by myself and will be in good fun where the viewer sees the ad and then sees the street artists work it over a new. A good example of this is one of my Spatz cartoons, seen here.

http://happyspatz.blogspot.com/2008/04/spatz-takes-on-madison-ave.html


It is common knowledge that internet ads are not really very effective and this project is inspired by The Bubble Project.
Every time I have ever seen an ad with a bubble pasted on it I one got kick out off what random people would write in them and I also paid attention to the ad rather than just ignoring it.

I thought this might be an interesting exercise in a new way of having ads pay for stuff and allowing users to interact with those ads in a creative and fun way. The money from advertisers will go towards paying the programmers to get the gaming parts done and making the film and game assets as well as dealing with the networking part of all this.