Stonefrenge™

The Greatest Story Never Told™

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Origin

The Greatest Story Never Told

The origin of STONEFRENGE began on October 15, 2003, during my years as a flash pioneer and guru. I had just launched T.G.S.N.T. (The Greatest Story Never Told), a flash storytelling competition designed to encourage and promote storytelling using FlashMX 2004. At the time, I was in my 3rd year of producing FlashTV, a website and brand I created that became the premier site for emerging artists, animators, and filmmakers who embrace FlashMX as their authoring tool for creating original, compelling stories.

I launched FlashTV under the URL https://www.iwantmyflashtv.com, back on July 20, 2001, with forty original flash-animated stories by some of the top animators in the world. My hosting partner was MediaTemple, the bad boys of web-hosting for creatives. As a result, FlashTV would rack up countless awards and honors from the Flash community. It would also become the firestarter for T.G.S.N.T.

With the full support of Media Temple and their Media Strategist, Jason McVearry, I challenged flash storytellers by giving them three months to produce an original story using FlashMX or any 3rd party software that exports to the .swf platform.

Their story had to be an original idea and based on one of the twenty genres of FlashTV. I opened the competition to novice and advanced Macromedia Flash animators and filmmakers worldwide.

Macromedia, a graphics, multimedia, and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, and makers of Flash and Dreamweaver, sponsored T.G.S.N.T., with additional (prize) support from 5inch, Alien Skin, Avid, Discreet, Electric Rain, Final Draft, Hewlett-Packard, Killersound, New Riders, Peachpit Press, SXSW Interactive, and TechNow. Macromedia would eventually be purchased by its rival, Adobe Inc., on December 3, 2005.

PSNEXT

PSNEXT – Issue 002

August/September 2003

“Kill your television. You don’t need it anymore. You’ve got Flash TV. And there’s enough content here to keep you busy until the web gets banned by overzealous politicians.”

– Paul Douglas

As the participants worked on their entries, I began working on the backstory for T.G.S.N.T., an idea I kept inside but needed to get out. I knew that some of the earliest evidence of storytelling came from prehistoric cave paintings, so I decided to create a character for the festival, a caveman or cavedude™ named Leno. I called him ‘Leno’ after one of my favorite songs for snowboarding, Poor Leno (2001), by the Electronic duo, Röyksopp.