EQAL Crafting CSI Creator's 'Dark Chronicles' Digi-Novel Experience

It’s basically become a no-brainer in Hollywood that if you want to create immersive drama online, you head to Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried—the guys who made lonelygirl15 a household name, essentially writing the book on these things.

Speaking of books, today came the announcement that the creative duo behind ‘social entertainment’ studio EQAL will be lending their crafty minds to the publishing world, developing an interactive site experience for the upcoming fall launch of Dark Chronicles. Written by the Emmy-winning CSI franchise creator Anthony Zuiker, Dark Chronicles is the first in a digital crime novel series that comes out on Dutton on September 8, 2009.

This goes back to August of last year when Zuiker inked a seven-figure deal with publishing house  to develop three of these suspense-thriller digital novels. Officially, they are calling it a “multiplatform ‘digi-novel’ series that will expand traditional book reading into a multimedia experience.” Sounds crafty, but what does that even mean?

Apparently, here’s what going to happen: Zuiker writes a 60-page outline for each book, which then gets handed over to a novelist who takes that and pumps out a 100-chapter book. Then there will be 20 “cyber-bridges,” written and directed by Zeiler, which are two-minute episodes of sorts that follow the book’s narrative. With a new cyber bridge every five chapters, readers will have to register and enter a code from the book to view videos, audio files and photos.

Where EQAL comes in is for the web site experience, where they will develop a rich social network, blog and  destination web site for the series at darkchronicles.com, scheduled to launch in July.

“We’re very excited about our partnership with Anthony” said Miles Beckett, co-founder and CEO of EQAL. “A web site dedicated to Dark Chronicles

is a great way to further engage readers by offering additional content and an interactive experience. EQAL is thrilled to be working with Anthony to expand his fan base online.”

The EQAL team are certainly keeping busy in 2009, and now even more in the hopper since we last caught up with them in January. Let’s recap—there’s the Polish drama web series n1ckola, the upcoming companion web series Harper’s Globe as the online component to CBS’ Jon Turtletaub TV series Harper’s Island premiering next month, a recently launched a community-sourced web series LG15: The Show Is Yours, and now Dark Chronicles.

That’s a heck of a slate. It’s just a hunch, but we’d expect EQAL to be posting an open job posting or two on the new Tubefilter New Media Job Board. Better update those resumes.