Brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski became overnight sensations in 1999 when they created a comic book to sell Warner Brothers on producing the original Matrix movie.

And along the way, the Matrix franchise grew to include a video game, DVDs and a host of other lucrative mass media products.

Now Vancouver-based Keith Turner of Dream Detective Media Properties and new media producer Zeroes 2 Heroes Media are bound for New York’s Comic Con this weekend (Oct. 8 to 10) to unveil their own potential comic book-to-film or -TV transplant, entitled Are you Awake.

Around 50,000 Comic Con attendees will receive a 32-page comic book through which they can connect to a multi-platform noir detective property that includes social media, an augmented reality game, a motion comic, an upcoming web series, a digital soundtrack and even an apparel line.

The property is the brainchild of Turner, an investment banker-turned-content producer who has first-round funding from distributor ContentFilm and is looking to bring on board a major studio partner.

“I wanted a fresh approach to unveiling this property and quite literally, we are reverse engineering the usual entertainment business model,” Turner explained.

“That meant lining up distribution before shooting the live action, and producing many of the transmedia elements in advance,” he added.

Matt Toner, President of Zeros 2 Heroes Media, said Comic Con attendees will be able to move beyond the comic book to go deeper into a multi-layered detective mystery storyline by connecting to an alternate reality game via social media channels and mobile apps, for example.

Here the comic book is only one layer of the Are You Awake property.

Back-story, music and clues to solve the detective mystery are hidden in the comic book pages and can be uncovered using advanced augmented reality technology, including mobile apps with QR and AR tags for smartphones.

The tags allow players to unlock clues that can be used to acquire rewards on the social network and ultimately act as a tool to dig deeper into a mystery that goes far beyond the original printed page.

At the same time, Toner insists the transmedia storytelling for the Are You Awake property does not requires audiences to fully consume a host of mass media products to get deeper into the mystery, as with the storyline for Wachowski’s Matrix franchise.

“To really understand the [Matrix] story, you kind of had to do everything, you kind of had to play the game, and the game was a little hard at times,” Toner recalled.

“We like to find those places where people opt in on their own for greater engagement, for example, by watching a web series or just reading the comic book,” he added.

Turner and Toner have created a three-minute online animated video to illustrate their graphic comic in motion and introduce key characters and story points.

And the project hinges on www.areyouawake.tv as an online hub to allow potential investors and production partners to consider participation in the venture.

The transmedia project also has a model in Sanctuary, the Vancouver-based sci-fi TV series that started life online in 2007 as webisodes about a 158 year-old scientist that were reworked into a successful TV pilot for the SyFy Channel. The TV series is now in its third series.

At the same time, the Are You Awake property will not wait for the web series to pop, as with Sanctuary, before rolling out other mass media products.

Instead, Turner has conceived a property with near-simultaneous roll out of digital products to build a fan base that can be dangled in front of potential backers of a movie or TV project.

“We’ve been careful in the construct of this property to look at our characters, to look at our story and to build it into a moral fable to appeal to several types of properties, and to potentially appeal to more than one kind of watcher, one kind of reader and perhaps even more than one kind of generation,” he explained.

Besides a comic book, the transmedia property includes from the get-go a live action comic book based on an Apple application.

“That’s particularly easy to to monetize,” Turner said of the smartphone app.

And while the Are You Awake franchise is looking to migrate from the Internet to live action, Turner is also looking to build a multiplatform brand along the way.

“There’s being lots of web movie series and several have gone to live action, that seems to be what people do,” Turner said, adding the web series creators pick up executive producer fees along the way.

“What we’ve done is launch across several different media in the hope that one or two or more pop. And usually with one or two pops, they may all pop,” he added.

Turner and Toner are also building a fan base for their transmedia property via social media sites to attract new production financing and partners.

“You’re way less speculative when you build an audience, and you reduce the chances that someone will steal your property,” Turner said.

“If we eventually bring everyone from the social networks across to the dream detective world, or the Are You Awake world as we’re calling it, we can turn around to potential investors and say: ‘We’ve written a detective story and we’ve made some live action pilots, and we think it’s going to be a hit,'” he explained.