Hacking Stories - How You Get to an Audience Can Change Things

Jennifer is principal of LeanForward, a consultancy helping businesses, agencies, media companies and individuals understand the huge potential of engaging consumers in rich digital experience; and executive director of The Project Factory, a producer of creative multiplatform/transmedia projects across web, mobile, social media, games and virtual worlds.

She is the author of several books and papers exploring the digital space: actively encouraging the telling stories through digital. She has deep expertise in designing and building digital solutions in the health and wellness space to help support positive behavioural change; in the entertainment space to engage audiences and extend their experiences; and in the corporate space where building true rapport with the customer is often not valued as highly as it should be.

Jennifer is passionate about engaging with audience across multiple devices, linking these to create both more meaningful experiences as well as better outcomes across all age groups. In the last year, Jennifer has worked on projects as varied as teaching doctors better communication skills, helping people become non-smokers, reducing the recovery time from a knee replacement, linking people in life limiting situations with their community to reduce social isolation, helping people understand if their drug use really is a problem, teaching storytelling skills to young children, building a scary interactive online drama and creating tools to capture Indigenous languages before they are lost.

She has worked on projects as diverse as Sherlock: The Network, the official game for the hit BBC series; My QuitBuddy, an extremely successful and effective quit smoking app developed for the Australian Department of Health; Ringbalin River Stories, an SXSW nominated app bringing Indigenous stories to life; Breaking Bad News, an AI-based project teaching doctors how to be better communicators; How We Get to Next, a website funded by the Knight and Gates Foundations to foster innovation; Julian Fellowes’s Belgravia, a revisioning of the book as an interactive app and site in text, video, images and audio, serialised more like a soap opera than a novel; PhoneBook, an interactive feature film told in chapters via mobile devices; and Activate TKR, a CSIRO clinical trial to reduce the recovery time from knee replacement.

In 2013, Jennifer was awarded ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Digital Industry’ by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association. She sat as a council member for the Screen Producers Association for over three years; has been a panel member of the NSW Innovation and Productivity Innovation Council since 2012; has presented a TEDx talk on Curiosity; and continues to be inspired by (and curious about) the human-centred ways that story seems to underpin how we process the world.

She will be exploring this further at Vivid 2017 in a session on ‘hacking story’.

Jennifer spends her time between Sydney & London.

Mike Jones is a writer and creative producer working across screen, page and interactive media. He is currently story-producer on upcoming youth-drama series Deadlock, script-producer for ABCTV’s Long Story Short slate of iView originals, and regular collaborator with boutique TV production company, SweetPotatoFilms, whose recent success was the multi award-winning mystery drama series, The Kettering Incident. Mike has worked in script development with companies including the WarnerBros, EveryCloud and Princess Pictures, and is story consultant to ABC Signature studios in the US. 

He was co-creator of the virtual-reality detective-thriller VRNoir: A Day Before the Night with StartVR, and is co-writer of forthcoming speculative-fiction VR experience, Awake: First Contact. As a novelist Mike is author of The Transgressions Cycle, a series of supernatural gothic novels published by Simon&Schuster. He was previously development consultant with Screen Australia and lectured in story and writing at the Australian Film TV & Radio School. 

Ella Macens is one of four female composers currently participating in the inaugural National Women Composers' Development Program at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Over the course of the two year program, Ella is working with The Goldner String Quartet, The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and percussionist Claire Edwardes, as well as a variety of other soloists and ensembles.

Ella has been composer in residence with the Sydney Youth Orchestra and Trinity Grammar School, and has received both national and international commissions for a variety of ensembles. Her portfolio of chamber, orchestral, choral and solo works is performed in both Australia and Europe and her compositional style is heavily influenced by both classical and popular music genres. 

As a solo singer-songwriter, Ella composes music in a popular music style for piano, voice and ukulele. She is also a part of a duo with Melbourne-based musician Ivars Štubis, and together they celebrate their shared Latvian background by arranging and performing traditional Latvian folk songs alongside their original acoustic works. Ella composes music for film, television and multimedia, and is currently working on a score for a new game, set to be released in 2017.