Emails sent by famed designer Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club are now inviting members to participate in his experimental television project, which will engage viewers in the creation of the show's storylines.
An invitation sent Saturday morning tells its recipient they've been selected to participate in an unnamed project, but given recent news, and the fact it's cosigned by production partners from Current TV and Worldwide Biggies, this is "The Creation Project."
The invitation says "the project involves a fusion of the web, storytelling and television" and asks them to pick a username for use on the project's beta site. A search of the web shows they've been going around since the beginning of the month, although our tipster got his yesterday.
Update: Here's a follow-on email sent to the same tipster:
Welcome to our grand experiment, Current TV's "The Creation Project."
Ever want to create your own TV? Or even cast the Characters? Have you ever yelled at your TV, wishing your favorite show followed your direction instead? Well, now you can! Together we will re-invent TV storytelling and production.
This new type of TV production will be collaboration between us, the TV production team and you, the Web story community.
You, the community will use our website to create a branching tree of possibilities for each episode. Then, explore, discuss and vote for the best plotline from this pool of ideas. We will then shoot this plotline as our pilot!
Here are some basic deal points…
We're developing the pilot for a half hour, weekly show.
The Network is Current TV, which is available on most cable and dish networks.
It's going to have sponsors so we'd like the community to come up with innovative ways to really integrate them into the show.
Since its experimental, we don't have all the answers on how this is going to work. We're expecting the community to help us figure out the best way to bring this show to life. We don't have a huge budget some of our choices will be limited.
Thinking about these parameters, we'd like to get your input on a few things to get us rolling.
We'd like to engage you, the beta community, in the development of the show concept. We're posting four different treatments for the TV Show and we'd like you to discuss and debate the merits of each one, then vote on the one you'd like us to pilot. Or, if you have better treatment ideas that we should consider, then we'd like to hear them.
After that, we'll develop the idea more fully including the genre (tone) character bibles, location, production design and sponsor integration. Then, finally, you will use our Storymaker to create the pilot story.
That's the nuts and bolts of the project. Welcome! We are happy to have you aboard. We hope you will participate actively, on time, and respectful of our mutual roles.
You will receive an email shortly with instructions on how to login to our beta site. This will be our temporary home as we're building out the final site.
Looking forward to an exciting and innovative collaboration. We promise to make every effort to make your TV show come alive!