FUTURESTATES Returns for Final Season with
Eight New Sci-Fi Stories and Redesigned Interactive Website
Premiering May 14, 2014
First of its Kind Cross Media Web Series Transports Audiences
To Take Part In Immersive Futuristic Storyworld
First Look at FUTURESTATES Season Trailer:http://bit.ly/Qc15U7
San Francisco, CA — Wednesday, May 7, 2014 — ITVS (Independent Television Service) announced today that FUTURESTATES the acclaimed, groundbreaking series of online digital shorts, is back for its fifth and final season with a revolutionary new approach, envisioning a singular futuristic world with interconnected stories from a diverse group of indie filmmakers and digital storytellers on an immersive new website. For a first look at the FUTURESTATES, trailer check out http://bit.ly/Qc15U7.
This season’s FUTURESTATES aims to take interactive fiction storytelling to the next level with a radical new design, video artifacts, shareable media, news clips, and more, with each film giving viewers a bigger sense of this visionary world. The narrative begins on Twitter at @FuturestatesTV, (https://twitter.com/FuturestatesTV) where the enigmatic Dr. Evelyn Malik has reached back through time with a message. She wants you to help her change the future. Find out why, when this year’s series of eight stories debuts online to stream for free only at futurestates.tv on May 14, 2014.
“This isn’t just a reboot of FUTURESTATES, but a reboot of the entire web series genre,” said Series Producer Karim Ahmad, also the Senior Digital Content Strategist at ITVS. “I’ve long felt that the new opportunity with web series is to really unleash the user experience potential of the web to tell a nonlinear story in serialized form that is guided by the user. Our upcoming and final season of the FUTURESTATES series does exactly that.”
“The short films are independent, yet interconnected,” Ahmad continues. “And the storyworld design is immersive and mysterious – a puzzle for you to explore, filled with supplementary videos to help flesh out the nature of this futuristic world and offer clues as to how it came about. And even though the series is in its final season, this is just the beginning for ITVS. Hot on the heels of FUTURESTATES, we’re launching the ITVS Storylab, a one-of-a-kind cross-media web series incubator for independent content creators to develop similar series concepts along a myriad of different themes and genres.”
The ITVS Storylab promises to yield a portfolio of innovative content in the months to come. For more information, please visit: http://beyondthebox.org/hacking-story-at-itvs/
The series concept for FUTURESTATES was conceived by ITVS, with the new interactive site designed and developed by New York based digital studio, Murmur. and features films by Tanuj Chopra, Nisha Ganatra, Tina Mabry, Trevin Matcek, Greg Pak, Alex Rivera, and Aldo Velasco.
ABOUT FUTURESTATES
FUTURESTATES was developed by ITVS in 2008 to bring a greater range of voices and new styles of storytelling from young and diverse filmmakers to public media. In recent years, the series began to accept proposals for interactive media projects as well as films, and is now in its fifth and final season revolutionizing the fictional web series genre by blurring the lines between film and interactive media. For more info, go to http://www.futurestates.tv/about/index.htm
ABOUT ITVS
Independent Television Service (ITVS) funds, presents, and promotes award-winning documentaries on public television, innovative new media projects on the Web, and the Emmy® Award-winning weekly series Independent Lens on Monday nights at 10 p.m. on PBS. Mandated by Congress in 1988 and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, ITVS has brought thousands of independently produced programs to American audiences. For more visit itvs.org.
Contact:
Tiffany Woolf Jayan Kalathil
tiffany@woolfpr.comjayan_kalathil@itvs.org
917-532-3366 415-356-8383 x455
