R/O Institute Opens Hunt for New Storytelling Talent

R/O Institute is an international institute established to help storytellers, artists and designers create their own transmedia universes. Yearly, up to 40 project teams are selected to participate in a bootcamp and pitch their storyverses, after which 10 of the participants are offered to develop their projects for a 5- to 6-month period at the R/O Institute itself. Now, R/O wants to open things up to the public and any potential candidates that would like to take part in this event! The 2018 program is open to anyone anywhere who is able to come over to Belgium for an extended period of at least 5 months, so please do check if you are able to get the required visa.

Further information can be found at: http://www.ro.institute

More info on R/O Institute: http://www.ro.institute

R/O Institute presentation video: https://youtu.be/1BqGI4QaQG4

Background

There’s no doubt about it: the media revolution is in full swing. In the past, we usually talked about films, series, books, games and comics as self-contained worlds, featuring a set of characters living in a single medium. Sometimes, their stories would converge, expanding their reach. In other cases, they would cross over into other media, but with the advent of VR and with more traditional media becoming more readily available, shared multimedia universes are becoming more common than ever. Never has there been a time when so many different devices and outlets were available to the general public, never has there been a time when stories had this high a potential to reach a global audience and never has there been a time when entire fictional universes were able to spread out to so many different media, building upon their own cast, canon and mythology.

With this revolution has come a new generation of passionate designers and storytellers, eager to create and share their vision with their audiences. However, often, deciding on a course of action, getting a team together, pitching the idea, coordinating a group of people, attracting investors, finalizing a budget and finding distribution stop creatives from ever developing the ideas they originally have in mind. Many of them feel constrained or overwhelmed. Others lack the networking skills or social knowhow needed to reach out to potential partners. That’s where R/O Institute comes in.

About R/O Institute

R/O Institute was established with a very specific goal in mind: to help tomorrow’s storytellers create original content and develop their Narrative Intellectual Properties (NIP’s) throughout multiplatform storyverses with full support of a host of resources and professionals.

The institute seeks out new talent, providing them with the means to get their vision out there: a film that is also a comic book, a novel with an added virtual dimension, a television series that is supported by a game, a graphic novel that powers an entire cinematic universe or any other combination of platforms. Oftentimes, these visionaries get stuck trying to juggle different skill sets and navigate business models that distract them from their creative core. R/O Institute aims to help these designers by not only showing them how to navigate the quagmire of the development process, but also alleviating much of the burden of having to take so many factors into account at once.

Success

The success of R/O Institute can be measured by the number of projects that get developed, relative to the number of participants. Each year, R/O Institute will be selecting 10 participants or groups of participants from different cities, countries and possibly even cultures out of a few hundred applicants. Having a good vision helps, knowing how to tell a story, draw up enticing visuals and/or design great-looking presentations is also a plus.

How We Do It

After pre-selection phase, R/O Institute grants about 40 projects access to its bootcamp, which includes curated conferences and participative Q&A’s introducing the applicants to the possibilities of the convergent market and to what R/O Institute can do for their Narrative Intellectual Properties.

Out of that first phase, 10 project teams will be selected and invited to stay at the Belgian institute for a period of 5 to 6 months (the 2018 group will be welcomed to our facilities for a 5-month period). During this period, the participants learn how to develop their ideas through 6 different skillsets, supported by 50 to 80 international experts. Additionally, there is constant coaching by the R/O Institute staff and feedback given through a high-tech evaluation app that allows talents, experts and fellow participants to communicate with each other and watch the progress on each project.

After their stay in the R/O Institute, the participants continue to be supported, usually during  a period of about 18 months, as the institute’s agents are submitting their projects to partners and marketplaces all over the world.