Over the holidays I spent quite a bit of time watching videos from MIT’s Futures of Entertainment conference. I was particularly taken by the case study of Purefold, a project which seems to defy description.

It’s a transmedia project in its early stages that has no elevator pitch and is the antithesis of high concept. The principals talked for a very long time in the video (embedded below) and slowly a vision of what they are doing emerges. And it is COOL.

Here are some things that I can tell you:

• The project is with Ridley Scott’s company, so ad agencies and some global brands.
• The goal is to create a bunch of short form videos that tell a story set in the near future.
• The project is collaborative, everything will have a Creative Commons license that lets anyone participate, use the elements and even profit from them.
• Crowd sourcing will be used to inspire some of the storylines by mining the web to find out what real people are saying about certain topics.
• For brands and advertisers, the series is an opportunity to engage real people in discussions about future products.

Aside from the video above and the one below, there isn’t a lot about Purefold yet on the web — no actual videos and I haven’t found a wiki yet, as far as I can tell, although I found a FriendFeed discussion.

Here’s what it says about Purefold on the Ag8 website:

Purefold is the first product conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment division Free Scott. Purefold is an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future.

With a central theme ‘What does it mean to be human?’, the franchise explores the subject of empathy – a shared theme with Ridley Scott’s most compelling Science Fiction movie, Blade Runner.

The franchise contains infinite interlinked storylines, turned into short-format episodes by Ridley Scott Associate Films’ global talent pool of directors, and informed by real-time online conversations from the audience, which are harvested through FriendFeed, the world’s leading ‘life streaming’ technology.

Taking place in the near future, Purefold enables participating brands to take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.

Purefold content will be distributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving both audiences, brands and platforms unprecedented equal use rights through their participation.

There’s a LinkedIn discussion going on about Purefold in the Transmedia Network Group.

This is definitely a project to watch.