Meet And Greet Tour: Sierra Zulu goes SFO, LV, LA

It’s time indeed!
Roland Gratzer and Johannes Grenzfurthner want to invite you to informal formalities!

Want to be part of Sierra Zulu or just learn more about what’s going on? You live in the Bay Area, Las Vegas or Los Angeles?
Join the movement for a drink!

San Francisco: March 11, 8 PM @ The Orbit Room / 1900 Market Street (between Laguna & Guerrero), San Francisco,  CA 94102 / Facebook event

Las Vegas: March 14, 8 PM @ Insert Coin(s) Video Game Arcade Bar / 512 Fremont Street, Las Vegas, NV 89101 / Facebook event

Los Angeles: March 22, 8 PM @ Birds Cafe & Bar / 5925 Franklin Ave (Neighborhood: Hollywood), Los Angeles, CA 90028 / Facebook event

Earthmoving: A Sierra Zulu Prequel… now ONLINE!


Another day at the United Nations Offices in Vienna. The Austrian Foreign Affairs Ministry invited members of the European Protocol Service, the UN Strategic Command Center for Central Europe, the United States Air Forces and a regional politician from Lower Austria to talk about the future of Soviet Unter-WHAT?!

Want to learn to know our film team?
Well… have a look! Here is the entire list of our heroes of work!

How did we do it?
Here are all blog posts about the production of Earthmoving!

Sierra Zulu: Extending the Story Using Transmedia

An urgent dispatch from Tara Tiger Brown, our transmedia campaign specialist.

Every time I talk to Johannes about Sierra Zulu I keep thinking about all the ways to extend the film left, right, up, and down. He said that he can actually see the smoke billowing out of my head I’m thinking so fast.

If you are at all familiar with monochrom, you know that they are an extremely imaginative and experimental group and will try pretty much anything. The film has many layers – the comedic layer down to the philosophical layer and the characters are interesting and just as layered. That’s why I decided to work on this project, there is no right way to do Transmedia so working with people that will try new things and iterate are the ones that are going to figure out how to engage and reach their audience. I really believe that the Transmedia elements of this project are going to be new and fresh and totally off the hook.

What is Transmedia?
Well, it’s a lot of things, but the most important thing that it does is let you experience a story on multiple platforms, from different perspectives, and hopefully extends it beyond the main medium, in this case film. Here’s a blog post I wrote that hopefully explains it to you in simple terms.

So, how did I get myself into this? I’m one of the co-organizers for Transmedia LA and I thought that because Johannes helped me out with my project, Cat Workout, it was only fair to offer my services with his project. I’m also an expert in direct-to-consumer strategies and as this is an indie film, that’s a good skill to offer up. The most important reason of course is that the main character is Canadian and I want to be sure that the actor does the accent correctly.

BTW: I was excited to read that Ben Rock joined the project because he is in my Transmedia LA group!

This project is pretty open so if you have some fun ideas to extend and enhance this project or even want to help, please add a comment or ping me.

Tara Tiger Brown
@tara
http://tarathetiger.com

Hello First World!

My name (and it is indeed a very Austrian one) is Johannes Grenzfurthner. I’m part of art-tech-philosophy group monochrom and I’m the director and co-screenwriter of “Sierra Zulu.” We are developing this feature-length film together with multi-award winning production company Golden Girls Filmproduktion — and I can’t tell you how excited we are about this project.

I was always interested in strange and obscure concepts, even as a kid. I loved science fact (Carl Sagan is still my only media idol) and science fiction, especially John Brunner and William Gibson. And I was always interested in the political dimension of near-future sci-fi. It’s hard to imagine, but I became a punk and antifascist because I devoured cyberpunk novels and watched shows like Max Headroom.

monochrom was officially founded in the early 1990s. The project started as a print fanzine about cyber-topics, politics, bizarre art and covert culture. There was some stuff going on in the US of A — like Mondo2000 — but it was all too hippieish, too liberalish, indulging in what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron later called the “Californian Ideology.” monochrom wanted to share and propagate a reflective leftist European perspective in relationship to socio-technological change. We published a couple of issues, low circulation, and — as the name suggests — we were barely able to finance the black and white xeroxes. But we kept working, created our first internet site in early 1994, and shortly afterwards we decided that we didn’t want to constrain ourselves to just one media format. We knew that we wanted to create statements, create viral information, spread thoughts, and do it in an entertaining way — in the form of sugar-coated info-bullets. Some messages definitely work better as a computer game or art installation or puppet theatre or robot or performance, some should better be presented as ASCII files… and some are the right stuff for a feature film. And that’s where we are right now.

Creating a film is an exciting, yet dangerous task. But we decided to take the risk. The story we want to tell is our approach to the political struggles of postwar, post-industrial Europe.  We’re looking at the cracks in the foundation of knowledge society and transnational cognitive capitalism in a playful, grotesque and amusing way.

Get involved! Onward!