Director Ridley Scott Working on Audience-Driven Interactive Sci Fi Franchise, "Purefold"

Ag8, an independent studio that was recently founded by David Bausola (who previously created "Where are the Joneses," a "social media sitcom" for Ford Motor Company, in which the audience influenced the daily production of a road trip to seek out 27 sperm donor siblings, and which was billed as "the first and largest branded media production to be licensed under the Creative Commons commercial license") and Tom Himpe (who was previously senior strategist at communications consultancy, Naked Communications), announced Thursday that it is working with Scott Free, a newly launched entertainment division of Ridley ("Blade Runner") and Tony Scott's RSA Films, on an audience-driven interactive video project called "Purefold," which it describes as "an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future."

According to Ag8, the "Purefold" franchise will consist of a series of short-format episodes, featuring interlinked storylines and set in the near-future, that will explore the subject of empathy and attempt to answer the question, "What does it mean to be human?" The episodes, which are slated to launch later this summer, will be directed by RSA Films' "global talent pool of directors," Ag8 says, and--most interestingly--will be "informed by real-time online conversations from the audience, which are harvested through FriendFeed, the world's leading 'life streaming' technology."

Ag8 says that the "Purefold" franchise will enable brands "to take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework." It also says that the franchise's content will be distributed on the Web under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving brands, platforms and audiences "unprecedented equal use rights through their participation"--i.e. allowing them to re-edit and redistribute them commercially, provided they do so under the same licensing terms. According to Ag8, "Purefold" is supported by FriendFeed, Creative Commons, WPP, Aegis, Publicis and Naked Communications.