Meet Jay Bushman | Writer & Creative Technologist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jay Bushman and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jay, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally?
On some level, I didn’t really feel like I had a choice. It was always an impulse and drive that I felt. The few times when I’ve tried to ignore that impulse it’s only come back stronger and stronger.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
It’s always a challenge to describe the work I do. I usually just tell people I’m a writer, since writing is at the core of everything that I do. But my expertise and passion lies in storytelling in new and evolving formats, especially when it’s powered by new forms of technology.

I was on the road to a traditional creative career – I studied theater in college and then went to film school. I’d moved home to New York and was making off-off-off-Broadway plays with friends and shooting short films on my credit cards. Then, in 2001, I got drawn into playing what is now considered the first Alternate Reality Game (or ARG), a viral marketing campaign around the movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The experience knocked my sideways, and showed me how the internet and new technology was going to change the ways we told stories. So I left in with both feet and pursued this new path, even though there wasn’t much of a path to speak of.

There were a lot of experiments, a lot of failures. One thing I learned along the way was that it’s easier when you don’t go alone — I found a whole community of like-minded people who were looking for ways to push the frontiers of storytelling forward.

Along the way, there were a ton of discoveries and accidents. I found myself gravitating towards the early incarnations of Twitter; I wrote one of the first Twitter novels, and produced several interactive storytelling events on the platform. I started getting hired to work on interactive marketing campaigns, learned to write branching narrative experiences, and worked on a million projects that never saw the light of day. This kind of work coalesced around a buzzword: “transmedia storytelling,” a term that has provided as much confusion as clarity, but one which I’ve come grudgingly to accept.

I spent a decade stumbling in the dark, feeling like there was something to this nascent transmedia work, even though nobody could easily explain it — or make the case that it was a profitable endeavor. All that changed in 2012, when two things happened. I was hired as a writer and experience designer by one of the first native transmedia companies, Fourth Wall Studio, which was run by some of the lead creatives from that original A.I. ARG. And I joined a project called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a modern transmedia adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. Fourth Wall had an amazing two-year run, and I got to work with some of my heroes and closest friends in the community, to contribute to a dozen different projects and create an animated pilot of my own.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries became an online sensation, attracting an audience of millions and becoming the first YouTube series to win a Prime Time Emmy Award. But most importantly, I saw that we’d been able to give to our audience that same kind of transformative experience that I’d had participating in the A.I. ARG. I still meet people who tell me how much LBD changed their lives. I even meet people who tell me that after the show, they changed their college major to study transmedia (I usually tell them to tell their parents I was sorry.)

Since then, I’ve been fortunate to continue to work on amazing and wildly varied kinds of projects, many of which combine some sort of interactive technology with a gigantic storyworld. I’ve creative directed ARG tie-ins to big movies, worked on several interactive television projects and narrative games, and helped to build the infrastructure and narrative design for immersive VR experiences. I’ve also continued to write more “normal” things: a few years ago I published a book, “Novel Advice,” a collection of advice letters written by characters from famous literature (and yes, one of them has a puzzle hidden inside of it. No one’s found it yet, as far as I know.)

These days, I’m splitting my time between my own creative work and projects where I help build systems and infrastructure, using new and developing technologies to create experiences that resonate with audiences. It’s a lot of “building the plane while flying it.”

I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned along the way is that no matter how brilliant or exciting a concept is, it takes a lot of slow, careful, persistent work to make something great that is also sustainable. Building sustainable processes and systems is something that I never anticipated I would care so much about, but it’s become a linchpin of my approach to creative work. Because at the end of it all, no one can succeed on their own. It takes partners, allies, collaborators, and an entire creative community. I feel privileged to have been a part of several great communities, and I hope that I can give back even a fraction of what I’ve received.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I live in DTLA, and I would spend most of our time in the Arts District. Eating at Wurstkuche, Cha Cha Cha, and Girl and the Goat. Getting drinks at The Obscure. Getting coffee at the Concierge. Then I would take them on a tour of the vibrant immersive theater scene in Los Angeles — looking at the listings on Everything Immersive and No Proscenium to see what was playing, going to the Stashhouse Escape Room, Two Bit Circus, The Nest, and if time and scheduling allowed, Ghost Town Alive at Knotts Berry Farm. And definitely a stop at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, followed by lunch at Akasha (not only because it’s great, but also because it was the original Flynn’s Arcade in Tron.)

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
The Cloudmakers – the self-organizing player community around the first Alternate Reality Game – who helped me to learn that anything was possible

Website:  jaybushman.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaybushman/

Other:
‪@jaybushman.bsky.social (I have abandonded twitter)