http://asmith50.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/what-will-they-do-transmedia-producers-as-narrative-architects/
This is an interesting article that I stumbled across today as I browsed Google for more comment on Transmedia narrative.
In this blog we get a discussion exploring the difference between a traditional film producer and a Transmedia producer; the discussion arises as a result of the recent introduction of formal Transmedia producer credit by the producers Guild of America.
Traditional producer talents and skills setsare identified as involving management and finance; with some involved in the development of narrative extensions; but very few with expertise which cuts acrossdifferent medium platforms. The Transmedia producer has a different set of skills and one which draws connections across media platformsand involves conceptualising analysing and designing experiences at a macro level. The Transmedia producer is more than somebody who moves into the Transmedia realm with" a laundry list of media to explore, but actually has a deep understanding of the relationship between content context and culture.
Describes the Transmedial producer in terms of an architect somebody in the business of merging theory and practice to make up most of the points to Jeff Gomez who has long said that Transmedia storytelling in its purest form is simply the application of technique; the Transmedia producer specialise in bringing narrative materials sculpting intriguing mythologies and embedding satisfying revelations for those who want a closer look at the detail. Like an architect that Transmedia producer must consider the limitations and afforded series of the materials he is using, certain stories that lend themselves to particular media types and vice versa; as the narrative becomes more complex and threatens to impede comprehension that Transmedia producer must guard against blatant inconsistencies and contradictions. The narrative structure their design must be durable and organised as well as allowing for future construction in addition.
"Transmedia producers possess storytelling talent yes but they should also appreciate the complex relationship between story and game, author and audience openness and closure, art and commodity. They must be well versed in any sector of the entertainment industry as they are improper culture and banned as a whole."
Finally when they have done their job right as media producer design spaces not just people to admire but also to interact, play and collaborate.
And it when I've been developing the SEER I have found myself much more in the role of Transmedia architect than simple storyteller. It is in crafting Transmedia world robust enough to contain the various narrative strands of the SEER's story ,that I've come up against my biggest challenges. it is in my website www.theheath.net but I hope to create a space where people can interact play and collaborate in developing the SEER narrative.
I don't think there's anything really new in this blog but I did like the idea of a Transmedia architect and I also really like the way in which the writer encapsulating the idea of creating a space where consumers are able to play interact and collaborate in the Transmedia narrative. I think it fits really well alongside projects like Warner Brothers why so serious (see blog entry ).
Monday, 20 December 2010
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
reframing transmedial narratives
Once again starting to look at what is happening in the world of transmedial narrative. This is the first thing that I have looked at in a while and I have to say that in its own way it is interesting. William Patrick Wend's blog entry Reframing transmedial narrative. Probably the most intersting element of this was the referral to Christy Dena's PHD - which I will be looking out for , if and when she posts it. There is also a brief discussion of the concept of Cannon, in massive story / transmedial narrative ,cannon may be seen as the bible , the place from which the true story is drawn.
http://www.wpwend.com/2010/01/18/reframing-transmedial-narratives/
http://www.wpwend.com/2010/01/18/reframing-transmedial-narratives/
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
Developing the SEERs world
No great insights today into the theory of transmedial narrative simply a period of reflection for my self on what steps I need to take next if I want to push my personal project of the SEER to the next level , get it into production , and ultimately set it free into real world. ( still struggling with the loss of my computer equipment - but I can no longer be delayed by that). I need to keep chipping away at the mountain!
One significant area of progress has been the agreement with my tutor as to the question I hope to address within my MA - " defining transmedial narrative through practise"!
After having had a few days to simply consider the way forward for the Seer I have come to the conclusion that I need to develop some of back story , flesh things out, at the very least identify some of the key moments in the Miro-narratives that are going to orbit around the main Marco narrative of J.J the SEER.
Key Characters that need to be fleshed out / thier back story / and the specific media types which I intend to employ for each of these characters. Looking not just at what these micro narratives should be but also at how that will act as trails of bread crumbs leading my audience into the world of SEER.
More later
One significant area of progress has been the agreement with my tutor as to the question I hope to address within my MA - " defining transmedial narrative through practise"!
After having had a few days to simply consider the way forward for the Seer I have come to the conclusion that I need to develop some of back story , flesh things out, at the very least identify some of the key moments in the Miro-narratives that are going to orbit around the main Marco narrative of J.J the SEER.
Key Characters that need to be fleshed out / thier back story / and the specific media types which I intend to employ for each of these characters. Looking not just at what these micro narratives should be but also at how that will act as trails of bread crumbs leading my audience into the world of SEER.
More later
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Authoring a massive Narrative.
Third Person Authoring and exploring vast narrative
Unsuprisingly This book is divided into Authoring and Exploring. Each section is made up of a serious of essays/interviews with individuals who are either practioners , accademics or commentators on vast narrative. the first of these essays is titled
"Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the Rules of Dr Who Affect the Writing p 13- 24 by Lance Parkin."
This is an intersting essay discussing some of the issues and challenges faced by anyone attempting to take on the challenging of writing a character who is already part of a vast narrative. referencing in the main DR who ( the British SF program) Lance Parkin takes through some of these challenges.
The first issue raised is that of writing within the rules of a serious.
"A long running fictional serious requires a writer to take in to account a set of rules that don't apply to stand alone stories as well as almost all those that do.........As a serious becomes long running the involvement of the original creators diminish and the weight of the internal history and audience expectation begin to affect the story themselves.."
This certainly seems obvious and true for the long running TV serious , but can and is the same true for a massive transmedial project , which can and in the SEER does seem to compress much of the narrative energy that one would expect from a long running serious into a much shorter period. Is the weight of internal history and audience expectation increased exponentially when audience participation is part of the substance of the project? I think the answer must be yes. When creating a world as complex as that which compasses the SEER it is almost the pressure of internal history pressing in around the story that creates the world within which it lives. It is the interaction between different media streams which creates the world of the transmedial narrative.
Really the transmedial narrative is an example of what Lance Perkins calls the continuing narrative (Sherlock Holmes - Dr Who - Tarzan ) or unfolding text
" a fiction based around a common character, set of characters or location that has had some form of serial publication. The works that make up an unfolding text can often have a single author at the start as things progress they are typically written by many."
Again the transmedial narrative seems to compress the concept of unfolding narrative in sense of time and space . With different narrative strands operating simultaneously what would normally take months to unfold across a single narrative can unfold almost instantaneously within a transmedial narrative.
One of challenges faced normally by the writers of unfolding text is that of contempory taste - so keeping a character fresh when they have exsisted across a signifiant period of time - this is not a real probelm in the transmedial space , because although a massive narrative , the fact of compreshion , at least as regards time means that this at least for me is not one of the rules of transmendial narrative - clearly it could become an issue over time. I think what is far more important is consumer expectation. Making sure that there is some kind of consitatncy across the transmedial narrative. Again Lakin raises an intersting concept , metanarrative. A story about a story , and perhpes it is developing this idea of metanarrative , that we find the consistancy required to hold the transmedial narrative togther.
Another interesting idea raised is that of core conecpts - tso what makes a bond movie a bond movie , no matter what medium what are the core concepts within Batman? In some ways the idea of core concepts seems to equate to that of narrative rules that I mentioned at the satrt.
Core concepts for the SEER
1.Set in the heath
2.Contempoary setting?
3.Involves the battle between Drake and Hendrix?
more to come on this later.....................
Unsuprisingly This book is divided into Authoring and Exploring. Each section is made up of a serious of essays/interviews with individuals who are either practioners , accademics or commentators on vast narrative. the first of these essays is titled
"Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the Rules of Dr Who Affect the Writing p 13- 24 by Lance Parkin."
This is an intersting essay discussing some of the issues and challenges faced by anyone attempting to take on the challenging of writing a character who is already part of a vast narrative. referencing in the main DR who ( the British SF program) Lance Parkin takes through some of these challenges.
The first issue raised is that of writing within the rules of a serious.
"A long running fictional serious requires a writer to take in to account a set of rules that don't apply to stand alone stories as well as almost all those that do.........As a serious becomes long running the involvement of the original creators diminish and the weight of the internal history and audience expectation begin to affect the story themselves.."
This certainly seems obvious and true for the long running TV serious , but can and is the same true for a massive transmedial project , which can and in the SEER does seem to compress much of the narrative energy that one would expect from a long running serious into a much shorter period. Is the weight of internal history and audience expectation increased exponentially when audience participation is part of the substance of the project? I think the answer must be yes. When creating a world as complex as that which compasses the SEER it is almost the pressure of internal history pressing in around the story that creates the world within which it lives. It is the interaction between different media streams which creates the world of the transmedial narrative.
Really the transmedial narrative is an example of what Lance Perkins calls the continuing narrative (Sherlock Holmes - Dr Who - Tarzan ) or unfolding text
" a fiction based around a common character, set of characters or location that has had some form of serial publication. The works that make up an unfolding text can often have a single author at the start as things progress they are typically written by many."
Again the transmedial narrative seems to compress the concept of unfolding narrative in sense of time and space . With different narrative strands operating simultaneously what would normally take months to unfold across a single narrative can unfold almost instantaneously within a transmedial narrative.
One of challenges faced normally by the writers of unfolding text is that of contempory taste - so keeping a character fresh when they have exsisted across a signifiant period of time - this is not a real probelm in the transmedial space , because although a massive narrative , the fact of compreshion , at least as regards time means that this at least for me is not one of the rules of transmendial narrative - clearly it could become an issue over time. I think what is far more important is consumer expectation. Making sure that there is some kind of consitatncy across the transmedial narrative. Again Lakin raises an intersting concept , metanarrative. A story about a story , and perhpes it is developing this idea of metanarrative , that we find the consistancy required to hold the transmedial narrative togther.
Another interesting idea raised is that of core conecpts - tso what makes a bond movie a bond movie , no matter what medium what are the core concepts within Batman? In some ways the idea of core concepts seems to equate to that of narrative rules that I mentioned at the satrt.
Core concepts for the SEER
1.Set in the heath
2.Contempoary setting?
3.Involves the battle between Drake and Hendrix?
more to come on this later.....................
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Transmedia - attractor objects and signal trails
I have been away for a while, as I explained in previous posting , I had a break and some bastard took my lap top .... Fcukers ... and be honest its taken me longer than expected to get my self back together. I haven't put pen to paper to advance my project the SEER really since the break in , but I spotted this article on the web and just had to blog about it.
http://goonth.posterous.com/transmedia-narrative-ecosystems-and-experienc
( I know it looks like I have missed a letter off the end of the sentence but trust me this link takes you to the site , so click and dive in, this takes the theory around transmedia narrative a step further, and certainly has made me think about my project in another way.)
"the analogy of ant and hive-like food gathering and pheromone signals to describe how the extraction & collaboration process gives rise to the evolution of new stories.
I am not really sure that I agree or even really understand this proposal, in essence it seems to be saying if you offer your potential audience an interesting enough narrative playground , and allow them to explore that world without restriction , then almost as an organic process new narrative lines will emerge from there exploration.
What is interesting is this idea of direct line between free exploration and emergence of new narrative. The exploration is encouraged by the discovery of attractor objects by the consumers - and these attractor objects are identified within the text as written narratives;mash ups;tagging and geo-tagging - these attractor objects effectively creating a signal trail which the consumer follows and adds to as he/she collects the attractor objects - drawing them deeper and deeper into the transmedial narrative.
The area that I am not so sure about is the idea that this free exploration ( is it freeif you have your viewers/consumers following a trail which you have laid out for them!) the of itself leads to the creation of new narrative. I am not saying that it does not simply that I would like to know how often this is the case? How does the saying go , give a room full of monkeys a typewriter each and enough time and they'll produce Shakespeare - the question is always how long to give the monkeys and how often do they do it. I suppose my question would be how long do you need to give your participants to participate and how often do they do it?!
The phrases attractor objects and signal trails really chime for me because they encapsulate one of the ways in which I feel transmedial narrative work. The micro narratives that surround and dissect the Macro narrative are the attractor objects which build over time into signal trails which lead reads/consumers into my transmedial world. SO in the SEER it will be the twitter feeds , blogs, and ,film , webisodes which act as attractor objects and signal trails leading people into the world of J.J and the Heath.
Time to start working on creating some attractor objects and signal trails!!!
http://goonth.posterous.com/transmedia-narrative-ecosystems-and-experienc
( I know it looks like I have missed a letter off the end of the sentence but trust me this link takes you to the site , so click and dive in, this takes the theory around transmedia narrative a step further, and certainly has made me think about my project in another way.)
"the analogy of ant and hive-like food gathering and pheromone signals to describe how the extraction & collaboration process gives rise to the evolution of new stories.
I am not really sure that I agree or even really understand this proposal, in essence it seems to be saying if you offer your potential audience an interesting enough narrative playground , and allow them to explore that world without restriction , then almost as an organic process new narrative lines will emerge from there exploration.
What is interesting is this idea of direct line between free exploration and emergence of new narrative. The exploration is encouraged by the discovery of attractor objects by the consumers - and these attractor objects are identified within the text as written narratives;mash ups;tagging and geo-tagging - these attractor objects effectively creating a signal trail which the consumer follows and adds to as he/she collects the attractor objects - drawing them deeper and deeper into the transmedial narrative.
The area that I am not so sure about is the idea that this free exploration ( is it freeif you have your viewers/consumers following a trail which you have laid out for them!) the of itself leads to the creation of new narrative. I am not saying that it does not simply that I would like to know how often this is the case? How does the saying go , give a room full of monkeys a typewriter each and enough time and they'll produce Shakespeare - the question is always how long to give the monkeys and how often do they do it. I suppose my question would be how long do you need to give your participants to participate and how often do they do it?!
The phrases attractor objects and signal trails really chime for me because they encapsulate one of the ways in which I feel transmedial narrative work. The micro narratives that surround and dissect the Macro narrative are the attractor objects which build over time into signal trails which lead reads/consumers into my transmedial world. SO in the SEER it will be the twitter feeds , blogs, and ,film , webisodes which act as attractor objects and signal trails leading people into the world of J.J and the Heath.
Time to start working on creating some attractor objects and signal trails!!!
Monday, 11 October 2010
Third Person Narrative
Well after a couple of weeks off air (becuase some bastard broke into my home and stole all of my computing equiptment !!!!***!!! - personal rant over) I am back online blogging about my exploration of the world of transmedial narrative.
Acting on the advise of my tutor colin Harvey I have recently purchased a copy of Third Person Authoring and Explioring Vast Narratives and as I move through the book over the next few weeks I will be blogging about its content and any impact that it has about my tyhinking as regards my own project "The SEER".
The Introduction drafted by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrio-Fruin, attempts to give you an overview of the book introducing you to some of the basic concepts which underline much of the writing and some of reasoning behind the structure of the book ( a serious of essays about Vast Narratives from across the spectrum - accdemic to hollywood prodcuers, and everywhere in between.
One of the early ideas about transmedial/cross medial works that is raised in this text is the concept of a CANONICAL text - ie. the idea that amongst the range of text and media within which the story resides there is one text from which all others are said to sprout. - so in Harry Potter it is the books that are considered the CANONICAL text - within narrative Universes such as star wars there is not said to be a CANONICAL text but more sections of a vast fictional quilt. I feel with the SEER that I am attemting to create something that has more the feel of a fictional qulit than one based on a single canonical text.
What immediatley struck me was this concept of the vast narrative , stretching across a range of different media, or even contained within a single media form, and the impact that it has upon both the creative and potential consumer. Although at this stage the authors are not really attempting to define the vast narrative what they do is by pointing to works such as tolkin's Lord of the rings or James Joyce's Ulyssess make it clear that the vast narrative is not simply the domain of the digital age but has been around in one form or another for many years.
I am also stuck by the feeling that in my attempts to push the SEER into the world of the transmedial narrative I have stumbled into the VAST narrative and now face the same issues of maintaining structure and narrative consitancy throughout a large number of different stories and media types!
Acting on the advise of my tutor colin Harvey I have recently purchased a copy of Third Person Authoring and Explioring Vast Narratives and as I move through the book over the next few weeks I will be blogging about its content and any impact that it has about my tyhinking as regards my own project "The SEER".
The Introduction drafted by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrio-Fruin, attempts to give you an overview of the book introducing you to some of the basic concepts which underline much of the writing and some of reasoning behind the structure of the book ( a serious of essays about Vast Narratives from across the spectrum - accdemic to hollywood prodcuers, and everywhere in between.
One of the early ideas about transmedial/cross medial works that is raised in this text is the concept of a CANONICAL text - ie. the idea that amongst the range of text and media within which the story resides there is one text from which all others are said to sprout. - so in Harry Potter it is the books that are considered the CANONICAL text - within narrative Universes such as star wars there is not said to be a CANONICAL text but more sections of a vast fictional quilt. I feel with the SEER that I am attemting to create something that has more the feel of a fictional qulit than one based on a single canonical text.
What immediatley struck me was this concept of the vast narrative , stretching across a range of different media, or even contained within a single media form, and the impact that it has upon both the creative and potential consumer. Although at this stage the authors are not really attempting to define the vast narrative what they do is by pointing to works such as tolkin's Lord of the rings or James Joyce's Ulyssess make it clear that the vast narrative is not simply the domain of the digital age but has been around in one form or another for many years.
I am also stuck by the feeling that in my attempts to push the SEER into the world of the transmedial narrative I have stumbled into the VAST narrative and now face the same issues of maintaining structure and narrative consitancy throughout a large number of different stories and media types!
Friday, 24 September 2010
A must see for anybody interested in Transmedia narrative
http://henryjenkins.org/transmedia_entertainment/
How New Media is Transforming Storytelling: A New Video Series
Check this out!!!
How New Media is Transforming Storytelling: A New Video Series
Check this out!!!
transmedia storytelling in television
Aaron Smith’s thesis for Middlebury College, Spring 2009. Some interesting ideas about transmedia Narrative in TV setting , certainly something to think about as I develop the Seer Narrative. Key here again is the idea of gaps in the narrative , with rewards for those who fill them. Can that reward be the deeper understanding of the story as it unfolds!
http://blogs.middlebury.edu/mediacp/2009/06/17/the-four-steps-of-transmediation/
Summary: Four Steps towards a Transmedia Narrative1To summarize, a television/transmedia creator can create a transmedia story by following four steps:
1.) Construct a fully furnished world in order to support multiple story lines. The transmedia world should not only have a complex history, but also implied spatial dimensions in order to encourage exploration and discovery. Hard-core fans can seek out transmedia content to flesh out the world, while casual fans can imagine a vast expanse.
2.) Insert strategic narrative gaps that are reserved for development in transmedia extensions. A television producer should give fans the opportunity to ‘produce’ deeper meanings and improve their experience of the show. Though the exact story of a transmedia extension may not be easily planned at the outset, leaving narrative gaps open for transmedia storytelling is an important part of the transmedia design process. Television is unique in that viewers can attempt to fill in these gaps while the show’s narrative is still unfolding. Sometimes these gaps can be easily filled (by following the migratory cues of the hermeneutic codes), other times they help viewers interpret or predict how the gap might be filled, creating a game of formulating and testing theories.
3.) Develop satisfying experiences in each individual transmedia extension. A transmedia text should stand on its own, making the process of learning new narrative information fun in its own right. Transmedia extensions should be carefully designed to reflect the capabilities of a specific medium and type of transmedia extension. New episode extensions can capture the core qualities of a show in a different medium, diegetic artifacts can capture the core qualities of a show and bring them to everyday life, and alternate reality extensions can play with threshold crossing, puzzle solving, and community building.
4.) Reward consumers’ efforts to explore a transmedia story by making passing references that validate the information they learned elsewhere. That way, stories can flow not just from the television show out to transmedia extensions, but also from transmedia extensions into the television show. This creates a pleasure in seeing how a transmedia text operates as a whole and how it creates opportunities for consumers to engage with a story on multiple levels. When watching with casual fans, the validation effect empowers hard-core fans to become ‘gatekeepers’ of information, allowing them to demonstrate their expertise and even encourage others to pursue migratory cues towards transmedia extensions.
It is not coincidental that this proposed model reflects the logic of many video games. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, many hard-core fans already approach cult television shows as if they are games. They scrutinize individual shots, construct and test theories, collaborate to solve puzzles, and create encyclopedic “walkthroughs” for the show. My model, then, is an attempt to harness this gaming culture through transmedia storytelling. We can see similar strategies at work in Halo, for example. Halo’s designers created an immersive world (a war between Covenant aliens and humans), provided goals or missions within the world (rescue a soldier, investigate a mysterious bunker, etc.), made the process of accomplishing those goals enjoyable (killing aliens with a weapons arsenal), and then rewarded the player for accomplishing the goal (a new cut scene that moves the narrative forward). This formula, when applied to transmedia storytelling, allows hard-core fans to create a deeply engaging experience that goes beyond watching television. In my model, hard-core fans enter an immersive world, explore the world with a purpose (to fill in narrative gaps), enjoy the process of exploring (by creating worthwhile experiences), and feel rewarded by seeing a more unified transmedia text come to life (through the validation effect).
6.To be clear, I am not suggesting that television shows should be more like video games. Television will always be an attractive medium simply because viewers can relax and sink into a storyline. Most industry professionals know that viewers do not want to literally interact when immersed in a television show. But transmedia storytelling allows hard-core fans to shape their experience and engage with a television show on a much deeper level. The trick is to subvert these gaming elements within a television show’s narrative so as not to detract from the casual fan’s experience. For more specific techniques in accomplishing this, we must examine the lessons from a television show currently experimenting with transmedia storytelling.
http://blogs.middlebury.edu/mediacp/2009/06/17/the-four-steps-of-transmediation/
Summary: Four Steps towards a Transmedia Narrative1To summarize, a television/transmedia creator can create a transmedia story by following four steps:
1.) Construct a fully furnished world in order to support multiple story lines. The transmedia world should not only have a complex history, but also implied spatial dimensions in order to encourage exploration and discovery. Hard-core fans can seek out transmedia content to flesh out the world, while casual fans can imagine a vast expanse.
2.) Insert strategic narrative gaps that are reserved for development in transmedia extensions. A television producer should give fans the opportunity to ‘produce’ deeper meanings and improve their experience of the show. Though the exact story of a transmedia extension may not be easily planned at the outset, leaving narrative gaps open for transmedia storytelling is an important part of the transmedia design process. Television is unique in that viewers can attempt to fill in these gaps while the show’s narrative is still unfolding. Sometimes these gaps can be easily filled (by following the migratory cues of the hermeneutic codes), other times they help viewers interpret or predict how the gap might be filled, creating a game of formulating and testing theories.
3.) Develop satisfying experiences in each individual transmedia extension. A transmedia text should stand on its own, making the process of learning new narrative information fun in its own right. Transmedia extensions should be carefully designed to reflect the capabilities of a specific medium and type of transmedia extension. New episode extensions can capture the core qualities of a show in a different medium, diegetic artifacts can capture the core qualities of a show and bring them to everyday life, and alternate reality extensions can play with threshold crossing, puzzle solving, and community building.
4.) Reward consumers’ efforts to explore a transmedia story by making passing references that validate the information they learned elsewhere. That way, stories can flow not just from the television show out to transmedia extensions, but also from transmedia extensions into the television show. This creates a pleasure in seeing how a transmedia text operates as a whole and how it creates opportunities for consumers to engage with a story on multiple levels. When watching with casual fans, the validation effect empowers hard-core fans to become ‘gatekeepers’ of information, allowing them to demonstrate their expertise and even encourage others to pursue migratory cues towards transmedia extensions.
It is not coincidental that this proposed model reflects the logic of many video games. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, many hard-core fans already approach cult television shows as if they are games. They scrutinize individual shots, construct and test theories, collaborate to solve puzzles, and create encyclopedic “walkthroughs” for the show. My model, then, is an attempt to harness this gaming culture through transmedia storytelling. We can see similar strategies at work in Halo, for example. Halo’s designers created an immersive world (a war between Covenant aliens and humans), provided goals or missions within the world (rescue a soldier, investigate a mysterious bunker, etc.), made the process of accomplishing those goals enjoyable (killing aliens with a weapons arsenal), and then rewarded the player for accomplishing the goal (a new cut scene that moves the narrative forward). This formula, when applied to transmedia storytelling, allows hard-core fans to create a deeply engaging experience that goes beyond watching television. In my model, hard-core fans enter an immersive world, explore the world with a purpose (to fill in narrative gaps), enjoy the process of exploring (by creating worthwhile experiences), and feel rewarded by seeing a more unified transmedia text come to life (through the validation effect).
6.To be clear, I am not suggesting that television shows should be more like video games. Television will always be an attractive medium simply because viewers can relax and sink into a storyline. Most industry professionals know that viewers do not want to literally interact when immersed in a television show. But transmedia storytelling allows hard-core fans to shape their experience and engage with a television show on a much deeper level. The trick is to subvert these gaming elements within a television show’s narrative so as not to detract from the casual fan’s experience. For more specific techniques in accomplishing this, we must examine the lessons from a television show currently experimenting with transmedia storytelling.
ARG or not ARG? That is the question.
Is the Seer an ARG or not? Does it need to be an ARG or can a transmedial narrative stand alone without involvement within an ARG setting? If the SEER is an ARG what are the rules, how do you win? I am really not sure anymore about these . What I am sure about is that I have set off on a course of discovery within transmedia and I intend to follow it as far as I can.
Excerts from Paper by Tom Abba on Hybrid Stories Examining the future of transmedia narrative
www.dcrc.org.uk/publications/hybrid stories
In my veiw this is an important essay identifying many of the issues within transmendial narrative. I will not attempt to capture its essnse in this blog , but I must say I will be returning to it again and agin as I push forward on my joureny into the dark heart of the transmedial narractive. . I have included a number of early excerts from the piece and the questions it has raised for me about my own SEER project.
In his review of Southland Tales (Kelly Germany/US/France 2006), The Guardian’s John Patterson argues that its ....really, in all of our minds these days narratives are not confined to the medium they were born in; they are part of the larger collage that we all construct from the fragments of everything we watch, read, hear and surf.
In an ARG, the narrative reality of these source storyworlds is taken as genuine, and website material and real-world interactions combine with filmed media to produce a form that responds to player interaction,
becoming, when employed successfully, both an adjunct to the original and a multimedia narrative experience in its own right.
Nicknamed The Beast by its creators, the first recognisable ARG was conceived as a promotional tool for A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. It drew upward of 10,000 players from around the world into a mystery set in the film’s fictional future. Websites presented the story, a participatory narrative comprised of scripted elements, email messages, video clips and puzzles.
Q. Am I being to narrow in the scope of the Seer!
While The Beast appears relatively immature by today’s standards, its technical elements forecast much of what followed in the field. Set fifty years afterthe events of Spielberg’s film, it presented a murder mystery within an sf setting,drawing on the tropes of film noir thrillers and other recognisable film forms in order to produce a consistent world environment. Players interacted with characters, emailing and telephoning remote locations and unknown addresses in order to uncover the truth of an unsolved, and unnoticed, murder. At the end of the game’s twelve-week run4 the players had discovered thirty websites central to the unfolding plotline, and had cracked puzzles and mysteries whose solutions required them to draw on knowledge as varied as binary software encryption and the tablature specific to lute music.
Q Should I be telling the story of an earlier SEER somewhere? Is the scope of this project beyond the bounds of an MA do I need to divide this work into slices , with the ultimate presentation of this project forming the heart of a PHD?
The next ARG tied to the release of a major movie was Metacortechs, which drew on the fictional universe of the Matrix trilogy and played out during October and November 2003......While the word-of-mouth power of Metacortechs was rooted in its players’ knowledge of the universe of The Matrix trilogy, its characters had no knowledge that their reality was a fiction and, indeed, were engaged in their first steps toward uncovering that knowledge. This positioning of the reader with regard to the narrative object is peculiar to an interactive, participatory form.
Q. This is the position of the characters in the SEER , therore by design and or accidnet I am following this accepted rules within Transmedial narrative.!
Q.Has the Seer like the Matrix become a decentralised narrative structure? is this another rule of transmedial narrative.
Are these narrative decisions that I have made by choice or does the medium demand them. Is it true of all transmedial narrative or is it simlpy true of transmedial narrative that is ARG!
www.dcrc.org.uk/publications/hybrid stories
In my veiw this is an important essay identifying many of the issues within transmendial narrative. I will not attempt to capture its essnse in this blog , but I must say I will be returning to it again and agin as I push forward on my joureny into the dark heart of the transmedial narractive. . I have included a number of early excerts from the piece and the questions it has raised for me about my own SEER project.
In his review of Southland Tales (Kelly Germany/US/France 2006), The Guardian’s John Patterson argues that its ....really, in all of our minds these days narratives are not confined to the medium they were born in; they are part of the larger collage that we all construct from the fragments of everything we watch, read, hear and surf.
In an ARG, the narrative reality of these source storyworlds is taken as genuine, and website material and real-world interactions combine with filmed media to produce a form that responds to player interaction,
becoming, when employed successfully, both an adjunct to the original and a multimedia narrative experience in its own right.
Nicknamed The Beast by its creators, the first recognisable ARG was conceived as a promotional tool for A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. It drew upward of 10,000 players from around the world into a mystery set in the film’s fictional future. Websites presented the story, a participatory narrative comprised of scripted elements, email messages, video clips and puzzles.
Q. Am I being to narrow in the scope of the Seer!
While The Beast appears relatively immature by today’s standards, its technical elements forecast much of what followed in the field. Set fifty years afterthe events of Spielberg’s film, it presented a murder mystery within an sf setting,drawing on the tropes of film noir thrillers and other recognisable film forms in order to produce a consistent world environment. Players interacted with characters, emailing and telephoning remote locations and unknown addresses in order to uncover the truth of an unsolved, and unnoticed, murder. At the end of the game’s twelve-week run4 the players had discovered thirty websites central to the unfolding plotline, and had cracked puzzles and mysteries whose solutions required them to draw on knowledge as varied as binary software encryption and the tablature specific to lute music.
Q Should I be telling the story of an earlier SEER somewhere? Is the scope of this project beyond the bounds of an MA do I need to divide this work into slices , with the ultimate presentation of this project forming the heart of a PHD?
The next ARG tied to the release of a major movie was Metacortechs, which drew on the fictional universe of the Matrix trilogy and played out during October and November 2003......While the word-of-mouth power of Metacortechs was rooted in its players’ knowledge of the universe of The Matrix trilogy, its characters had no knowledge that their reality was a fiction and, indeed, were engaged in their first steps toward uncovering that knowledge. This positioning of the reader with regard to the narrative object is peculiar to an interactive, participatory form.
Q. This is the position of the characters in the SEER , therore by design and or accidnet I am following this accepted rules within Transmedial narrative.!
Q.Has the Seer like the Matrix become a decentralised narrative structure? is this another rule of transmedial narrative.
Are these narrative decisions that I have made by choice or does the medium demand them. Is it true of all transmedial narrative or is it simlpy true of transmedial narrative that is ARG!
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
Why so serious - impact on the Seer
http://www.deusexmachinatio.com/2010/04/why-so-serious-lessons-in-transmedia-worldbuilding.html
Why So Serious: Lessons in Transmedia Worldbuilding
This is an interesting blogg which attempts to unpact some of the reasons why this was such a successful campaign. Amongst the comments that were made the one which resonates for me were the comments:
"The most successful transmedia experiences are the ones where there is space for the player to live in the world. Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings; these are all worlds that are very much bigger than the action on the main stage. And that's what we do in the ARG space; we provide walk-on roles that let people live in our worlds, while not requiring them to step onto the main stage themselves."
"So why was Why So Serious such a big deal? It's because it took a world that did not have space for an audience to live inside it -- Gotham -- and created canon spaces where players could dwell, for the first time. They became voters and accomplices. It turned a property that was previously not very well suited to a transmedia experience and created one that suddenly is. It's not just Batman and his allies and enemies anymore."
In my work on the SEER I have already accepted that the world I create "must be much bigger than the action on the main stage" what I am not so sure I have created is the "space where particpants can dwell". Differeing access points to any transmedial world are clearly important , along with a chose as regards how a particpants follows the story / explores the world, what this blog has opend my mind to is the creation of space within the world in which the particpant can dwell. Up until this point I considered the hunt for story elements and the construction of a personal narrative by the reader as enough to draw people in. I am now considering whether this is infact enough , or whether I need to provide an oppotunity for potential consumers to particpate directly into the SEER's world. Twitter and face book have been my obvious access points but now I am considering whether something more creative is required?
Why So Serious: Lessons in Transmedia Worldbuilding
This is an interesting blogg which attempts to unpact some of the reasons why this was such a successful campaign. Amongst the comments that were made the one which resonates for me were the comments:
"The most successful transmedia experiences are the ones where there is space for the player to live in the world. Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings; these are all worlds that are very much bigger than the action on the main stage. And that's what we do in the ARG space; we provide walk-on roles that let people live in our worlds, while not requiring them to step onto the main stage themselves."
"So why was Why So Serious such a big deal? It's because it took a world that did not have space for an audience to live inside it -- Gotham -- and created canon spaces where players could dwell, for the first time. They became voters and accomplices. It turned a property that was previously not very well suited to a transmedia experience and created one that suddenly is. It's not just Batman and his allies and enemies anymore."
In my work on the SEER I have already accepted that the world I create "must be much bigger than the action on the main stage" what I am not so sure I have created is the "space where particpants can dwell". Differeing access points to any transmedial world are clearly important , along with a chose as regards how a particpants follows the story / explores the world, what this blog has opend my mind to is the creation of space within the world in which the particpant can dwell. Up until this point I considered the hunt for story elements and the construction of a personal narrative by the reader as enough to draw people in. I am now considering whether this is infact enough , or whether I need to provide an oppotunity for potential consumers to particpate directly into the SEER's world. Twitter and face book have been my obvious access points but now I am considering whether something more creative is required?
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
World Building
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/16/behnam-karbassi---tr.html
( Chris Arkenberg is co-founder of Augmented Reality Development Camp, strategic adviser to Hukilau, and a visiting researcher at Institute for the Future. Elsewhere: URBEINGRECORDED.)
Chris Arkenburg writes a short but interesting peice on the challenges of transmedial world building within a Hollywood setting. He discusses the process he and his team undertook in the creation of "why so serious" the highly successful transmedial campaign that he put together around Warner Brothers BatMan movie.
http://www.whysoserious.com/
"Why So Serious was by far the most incredible movie marketing I'd ever seen, much less, been a part of. I think that's because it went way beyond marketing, it extended the story of the Batman reboot, bridged the gap between the two films, and most importantly, made millions feel they were actually citizens of Gotham City."
I feel that this is the essence of the challnge I face in the Seer, I want to do more that tell the SEER's story I want the viewer to feel that they are actually a citizen of the Heath. Even a brief glance at the why so serious website gives me ideas about how to make the Heath website work.. I will be expolring this website in some detail over the next few days and will blog nmy thoughts.
I also felt that some additonal is added to the discussion on transmedial story telling by his attempts to define the transmedial story tellers role:
We've spent the last year meeting with and helping educate studios, networks, brands and agencies on the potential of transmedia. We're very happy that it's catching on, because we really do believe it's the future of storytelling. But there has been a lot debate over the definition of transmedia, especially since the PGA's bold move to add transmedia producer as an acknowledged position. We've whittled it down to a three-fold explanation:
1) franchise transmedia: extending a story world across media
2) marketing transmedia: stories that support another brand or transmedia
3) native transmedia: stories intended to weave across media from their inception
The holy grail for us is, of course, native transmedia, but both funders and audiences have to change their thinking before it is widely created and accepted.
This idea of a native transmedia is an interesting one and one that I intend to explore within the Seer. I feel it is in its "native" form that transmedia offers its most interesting oppotunities to the independent story teller. Challenging you to explore forms and technics of story telling that are alien to you but that provide you with a way of making your characters sing!
( Chris Arkenberg is co-founder of Augmented Reality Development Camp, strategic adviser to Hukilau, and a visiting researcher at Institute for the Future. Elsewhere: URBEINGRECORDED.)
Chris Arkenburg writes a short but interesting peice on the challenges of transmedial world building within a Hollywood setting. He discusses the process he and his team undertook in the creation of "why so serious" the highly successful transmedial campaign that he put together around Warner Brothers BatMan movie.
http://www.whysoserious.com/
"Why So Serious was by far the most incredible movie marketing I'd ever seen, much less, been a part of. I think that's because it went way beyond marketing, it extended the story of the Batman reboot, bridged the gap between the two films, and most importantly, made millions feel they were actually citizens of Gotham City."
I feel that this is the essence of the challnge I face in the Seer, I want to do more that tell the SEER's story I want the viewer to feel that they are actually a citizen of the Heath. Even a brief glance at the why so serious website gives me ideas about how to make the Heath website work.. I will be expolring this website in some detail over the next few days and will blog nmy thoughts.
I also felt that some additonal is added to the discussion on transmedial story telling by his attempts to define the transmedial story tellers role:
We've spent the last year meeting with and helping educate studios, networks, brands and agencies on the potential of transmedia. We're very happy that it's catching on, because we really do believe it's the future of storytelling. But there has been a lot debate over the definition of transmedia, especially since the PGA's bold move to add transmedia producer as an acknowledged position. We've whittled it down to a three-fold explanation:
1) franchise transmedia: extending a story world across media
2) marketing transmedia: stories that support another brand or transmedia
3) native transmedia: stories intended to weave across media from their inception
The holy grail for us is, of course, native transmedia, but both funders and audiences have to change their thinking before it is widely created and accepted.
This idea of a native transmedia is an interesting one and one that I intend to explore within the Seer. I feel it is in its "native" form that transmedia offers its most interesting oppotunities to the independent story teller. Challenging you to explore forms and technics of story telling that are alien to you but that provide you with a way of making your characters sing!
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Old notes on Henery Jenkins
Notes on Henry Jenkins
Revenge of the Oragami Unicorn: Seven Core
Concepts of Transmedia Story tellinG:
Henry Jenkins talks about Transmedia story
telling.
Frank Rose talks about Deep Media
Frank Rose and Friends on how the Internet is
changing Storytelling:movies, video, games,ads
need to get updates and review this blog
Christy Dena Talks about Cross Media
Check out this sight and begin to read the blogs
- she is doing a PHD in Transmedia.
Everybody is currently trying to understand, the
interplay between different media systems and
delivery platforms (and of course different media
audiences and modes of engagement.)
Check out these sights: Narrative Design
Exploratorium (http://narrativedesign.org/)
has been running a great series of interviews
with transmedia designers and storytellers) and
websites created by transmedia producers, such as
Jeff Gomez, to explain the concept to their
clients.
Check out:
Six years ago Matrix introduced shocked fans to
the concept of transmedia story telling, today
fans have an expectation of some kind of
transmedia link to their favourite programs.
Henry Jenkins points to fan unrest at the hit TV
sho Flash Forwards failure to provide fans within
indepth transmedia product.Henry Jenkins goes on
to question whether we have now reached a point
where media franchises are going to be judged by
quality of transmedia product they bring with
them.
Henry Jenkins defines
"Transmedia storytelling represents a process
where integral elements of a fiction get
dispersed systematically across multiple delivery
channels for the purpose of creating a unified
and coordinated entertainment experience.
Ideally, each medium makes its own unique
contribution to the unfolding of the story."
Henry Jenkins accepts that this model of a
structured and coordinated model of transmedia
story telling can be complicated and pushed out
of shape by the impact of fan response to the
transmedia product that they are experiencing.
This response can take the form of unauthorised
extention to text / script. Henry Jenkins also
invites us to explore the tention between between
the franchies value of diversity over coheresion.
Henry Jenkins identifies narrative as only one
kind of transmedia spectrum. He identifies a
range of others "including branding, spectacle,
performance, games, perhaps others - which can
operate either independently or may be combined
within any given entertainment experience", all
which he states must be considered when thinking
about transmedia entertainmnet.
He also identifies there be a difference
betweentransmedia storytelling and transmedia
branding, e.g star wars breakfast cereal does not
take the star wars story any further!
we need to distinguish between adaptation, which
reproduces the original narrative with minimum
changes into a new medium and is essentially
redundant to the original work, and extension,
which expands our understanding of the original
by introducing new elements into the fiction.
Derrick Johnson has made strong arguments that
the current transmedia moment needs to be
understood in relation to a much longer history
of different strategies for structuring and
deploying media franchises.
Find out more about Derick Johnson...
IN response to the argument that Felix the Cat
Cartoon Character is an early example of
Transmedia character. Hery Jenkins:
We might well distinguish Felix as a character
who is extracted from any specific narrative
context (given each of his cartoons is self-
contained and episodic) as opposed to a modern
transmedia figure who carries with him or her the
timeline and the world depicted on the "mother
ship," the primary work which anchors the
franchise - so its not about a character
appearing across a range of media , but a
cohesive story that covers a range of of media
out lets each adding to the one before it.
1. Spreadability vs. Drillability
Henry Jenkins sees Spreadability and Drillability
as key elements to Transmedia story telling.
Spreadability relates to those consuming the
transmedia product to use social networks to
activly engage in the process of circulating the
media content and so raise its economic value and
cultural worth. So this is more that just telling
people about it and spreading the word , its
about consumers activley pushing the media out to
other consumers to view and ehgage with.
pread-or-drill
JAson Mitchell in his seminal essay on
drillability points to the fact that for
tranmedial product that has a more complex story
structure it is often the consumers ability to
drill down into story and not their ability to
spread it across You tube that is the key to
there success.
"Narrative complexity and drillable engagement is
not an entirely new phenomenon, but rather an
acceleration by degree. Highly serialized genres
like soap operas have always bred fan archivists
and textual experts, while sports fans have a
long history of drilling down statistically and
collecting artifacts to engage more deeply with a
team or player. Contemporary examples are notable
for both the digital tools that have enabled fans
to collectively apply their forensic efforts, and
the demands that mainstream network programs make
upon their viewers to pay attention and connect
the narrative dots."
The opposition between spreadable and drillable
shouldn’t be thought of as a hierarchy, but
rather as opposing vectors of cultural
engagement. Spreadable media encourages
horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without
necessarily encouraging more long-term
engagement. Drillable media typically engage far
fewer people, but occupy more of their time and
energies in a vertical descent into a text’s
complexities
--
James Gbesan
Transmedia storytelling
This is a note I wrote some weeks ago , but I still think its worth posting so here goes.
- Transmedia Storytelling:
Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding
in Contemporary Media Production
CARLOS ALBERTO SCOLARI
University of Vic
Catalunya, Spain
International Journal of Communication 3 (2009), 586-606 1932-8036/20090586
From resources website
Very interesting slide show workshoping transmedial idea
This is nuts. can I do this with the SEER??
story line:
Vader is the group of children playing with the ball- is he the boy who is knocked over -ben's brother- is this the confrontation between the 2, J.J knows him- so when they meet in the street .this is the confrontation:
Back to the children playing. Now Ben is the danger.
Big d
Ben ,
No vader!
So we are back in the playground
when J.J eneters the kitchen the picture of jesus has changed to one of jimi hendrikx!
J.J notices and questions but nobody else can see it!
watching henry Jenkins talk is really opening up my mind- local paper on line for the heath! who would create! what would it say? Local Pirate station for the heath - how ?
Not a paper a radio station - hearing the voice of the heath before we even meet the SEER
The radio station being played in the opening sequence is infact the vioce of the heath, it is the same vioce that we can listen two now.
Link for kris
its vader
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
My rights as a creator :CopyRight Authorship Property Rights within a Transmedial Narrative.
As the SEER has progressed as a project ,I started to think about property rights. My Property rights . What are they and how do I protect them in a space where in order for the piece to work the audience must participate in its very creation.
Sampling, Copyleft, Wikipedia, and Transformation of Authorship and Culture in Digital Media
http://www.hz-journal.org/n9/hayashi.html
A really interesting article which opened my mind to some of the key issues surrounding property rights within a transmendial environment. Dealing with issues like sampling ,appropriation and the origins of copyright it begins to frame the arguments around IP in this area.
Modernism with its quest for authenticity and originality viewed the artist as the self contained genius the Author god - is challenged by the poststructualism Barthes in his work "Death of the Author" which points that when using the words the author is relying on the fact that we understand their meaning - ie the concepts and story's behind each word within which there meaning is found and from the combination these concepts and story's that the author wants create new meaning.
"the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture"
So nothing is truly original!
For anybody that has read any of my blog so far the question has to be asked what has all this theory got to do with property rights within a transmedial space? And the answer is Copyright and Intellectual Property. Copyright is law which in essence " a right to [protect and benefit from] the ideas ones generates and the art one produces."
Copyright
"The right to reproduce...adapt or derive other works from it, the right to distribute copies of the original work, the right to perform and display work......"
Originally this area of law stems from the idea that you need to protect the rights of the author to encourage the free flow of ideas .... does that work is it even possible in transmedial world? How does it fit into a situation where the audience of a piece of work , by the act of consumption go onto create that piece of work!!
I clearly don't have all the answer yet , but I have started thinking and will certainly continue to explore this in the future.
Sampling, Copyleft, Wikipedia, and Transformation of Authorship and Culture in Digital Media
Sachiko Hayashi
http://www.hz-journal.org/n9/hayashi.html
A really interesting article which opened my mind to some of the key issues surrounding property rights within a transmendial environment. Dealing with issues like sampling ,appropriation and the origins of copyright it begins to frame the arguments around IP in this area.
Modernism with its quest for authenticity and originality viewed the artist as the self contained genius the Author god - is challenged by the poststructualism Barthes in his work "Death of the Author" which points that when using the words the author is relying on the fact that we understand their meaning - ie the concepts and story's behind each word within which there meaning is found and from the combination these concepts and story's that the author wants create new meaning.
"the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture"
So nothing is truly original!
For anybody that has read any of my blog so far the question has to be asked what has all this theory got to do with property rights within a transmedial space? And the answer is Copyright and Intellectual Property. Copyright is law which in essence " a right to [protect and benefit from] the ideas ones generates and the art one produces."
Copyright
"The right to reproduce...adapt or derive other works from it, the right to distribute copies of the original work, the right to perform and display work......"
Originally this area of law stems from the idea that you need to protect the rights of the author to encourage the free flow of ideas .... does that work is it even possible in transmedial world? How does it fit into a situation where the audience of a piece of work , by the act of consumption go onto create that piece of work!!
I clearly don't have all the answer yet , but I have started thinking and will certainly continue to explore this in the future.
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Friday, 27 August 2010
TRansmedia story telling getting started
http://workbookproject.com/culturehacker/2010/07/07/transmedia-storytelling-getting-started/
This articles suggests some of the basic questions that anybody underatking a transmedial project should ask themselves before they set pen to paper , or click the mouse!
This articles suggests some of the basic questions that anybody underatking a transmedial project should ask themselves before they set pen to paper , or click the mouse!
Taking risks and dancing with the audience.
http://remotedevice.net/blog/taking-risks-and-dancing-with-audiences-andrea-phillips-on-writing-for-transmedia-and-args/
This is an intersting blog , in which Jeff Waston talks to ARG writer Andrea Philps about the chanlleges faced by writers entering into the transmedia story telling. Although in the main it focus is on the issues surrounding ARG ( Augmented Reality Gaming) some intersting things are said about the roles of a writer in this space which I feel are directly applicable to any writer attempting to create a transmedia narrative.
One of the key issues is scale. It is one of the issues which I have come across in my own work on the SEER and one which I feel aevrybody looking into transmedial story telling must confornt. Transmedial worlds are often large and complex , infact so large that it can be difficult for one writer to deal with all tyhe story elements on thier won. As Andrea says about a project she worked on
"there were so many writers on the project that its hard to know whose hand is guiding the wheel."
One of the ways that Andrea sees as solving this problem is the dividsion of the writers role into narrative designer and world designer.
"The first step would be looking at the kinds of roles game writers and transmedia writers fall into right now, to see if we can find common structures. In games, there’s a lot of support for the title ‘narrative designer’ right now. That’s the person who comes up with the spine of the story, whether or not they ever write a word of player-facing copy. Maybe we need to go in that direction, and separate the narrative designer from the world designer."
I found this to be an interesting and I feel very useful way of dividing the work load within transmedia authorship.It is something that I will explore in my own work and seek to find out more about.
Another issue raised within the blog concerns the often event - driven time-released nature of most current ARG's ( so normally a situation where you need to do a certain thing at a certain time to progress the story). This is a significant problem for the ARG creator since it means that once played the ARG is effectivly dead. It cannot be replayed or even reviewed. Andrea sights the creating of mini webisodes ,in which the actions of those particpating in the ARG are filmed as a partcial solution. Allowing others to review the game at a latter dated and although this viewing experience will be completely different from actually playing the game, it does provide the ARG with a longer tail / shelf life. For me this raises issues of access and longevity issues that I feel are important to anybody in this space.
This is an intersting blog , in which Jeff Waston talks to ARG writer Andrea Philps about the chanlleges faced by writers entering into the transmedia story telling. Although in the main it focus is on the issues surrounding ARG ( Augmented Reality Gaming) some intersting things are said about the roles of a writer in this space which I feel are directly applicable to any writer attempting to create a transmedia narrative.
One of the key issues is scale. It is one of the issues which I have come across in my own work on the SEER and one which I feel aevrybody looking into transmedial story telling must confornt. Transmedial worlds are often large and complex , infact so large that it can be difficult for one writer to deal with all tyhe story elements on thier won. As Andrea says about a project she worked on
"there were so many writers on the project that its hard to know whose hand is guiding the wheel."
One of the ways that Andrea sees as solving this problem is the dividsion of the writers role into narrative designer and world designer.
"The first step would be looking at the kinds of roles game writers and transmedia writers fall into right now, to see if we can find common structures. In games, there’s a lot of support for the title ‘narrative designer’ right now. That’s the person who comes up with the spine of the story, whether or not they ever write a word of player-facing copy. Maybe we need to go in that direction, and separate the narrative designer from the world designer."
I found this to be an interesting and I feel very useful way of dividing the work load within transmedia authorship.It is something that I will explore in my own work and seek to find out more about.
Another issue raised within the blog concerns the often event - driven time-released nature of most current ARG's ( so normally a situation where you need to do a certain thing at a certain time to progress the story). This is a significant problem for the ARG creator since it means that once played the ARG is effectivly dead. It cannot be replayed or even reviewed. Andrea sights the creating of mini webisodes ,in which the actions of those particpating in the ARG are filmed as a partcial solution. Allowing others to review the game at a latter dated and although this viewing experience will be completely different from actually playing the game, it does provide the ARG with a longer tail / shelf life. For me this raises issues of access and longevity issues that I feel are important to anybody in this space.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Another interesting Post.
http://blog.social-marketing.com/2010/06/transmedia-storytelling-for-social.html
Interesting idea
http://www.mobilebehavior.com/2010/01/25/bank-run-is-a-mobile-activated-transmedia-storytelling-experience/
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Pitching the Seer
http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/commissioning/victoria-jaye-bbc-multiplatform/5008477.article
Going to pitch the SEER to Victoria Jaye
The Seer kidulthood meets The Watchmen!
Going to pitch the SEER to Victoria Jaye
The Seer kidulthood meets The Watchmen!
Transmedia:Entertainment re-imagined.
First appeared on wired website:
Transmedia: Entertainment reimaginedBy Tom Cheshire and Charlie Burton|08 July 2010
This article was taken from the August issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Esther Robinson got off the R train in Astoria, Queens, and started walking to the American Museum of the Moving Image. It was a warm July evening in 2007 and Robinson, then 37 years old and a filmmaker, had come with a friend to see a movie, Head Trauma. As they approached the cinema, she noticed that the payphones were ringing -- all four of them. “You forget payphones exist,” recalls Robinson. “That was the first thing I noticed.” She picked one up: all she could hear were fragments of a conversation, “sounds of madness”. Outside the cinema, a preacher in short sleeves and a tie was raving, handing out apocalyptic comic books to passers-by. He pressed one into Robinson’s hand as she hurried past, anxious to get to the film. The opening credits prompted the audience to send in a text to a given number. As the film rolled, they started receiving “weird text messages”; phones were ringing.
The film was about a drifter who inherits his mother’s house and starts to lose his mind. The next day, back in Brooklyn, Robinson found the comic in her handbag. On the back was written: “Do you want to play a game?”, along with an address, headtraumamovie.com. She typed it in to her computer. What she found was an online game that continued the story. “In the middle of it, the phone rang,” she says. She recognised the voice. It was the film’s “hooded villain”. He started asking questions: “Do you feel guilty? Have you ever lost consciousness?” Last, he asked Robinson to tell him her darkest secret. Her answer started playing back on a loop through her computer speakers. Robinson clicked on the exit box. She kept clicking, but nothing happened. Her phone buzzed with a text: “Where are you going? We’re not finished yet…” At that point, Robinson was dumped into a conference call with other cinema goers who had just gone through the same experience. “We were all like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It was totally nuts.”
Unwittingly, she had just participated in an emerging form of mainstream entertainment. Lance Weiler, the creator of Head Trauma, had programmed software to make all the payphones on the block ring. The preacher was an actor, a lead in the feature. Based on the participants’ responses to the automated phone calls, audio and video launched on the desktop screen. The exit box was a fake. Clicking on it sent that last text. For Weiler, a 41-year-old New Yorker, the experience “demonstrated the fluidity of an audience. After the movie ended, it followed people home.”
This is transmedia storytelling. Large studios and broadcasters, as well as independent filmmakers such as Weiler, are building fictional worlds that smash through their frames on to multiple platforms. Unlike quick promotional spin-offs, this new type of tie-in extends, rather than adapts, storylines. It tells various parts of the story using distinct media, exploiting the qualities unique to each platform. So when you watch a TV show, you might follow a sub-plot that spills on to the web, then read the dénouement in a graphic novel. Yes, writers have long created worlds that go beyond the page -- L Frank Baum did as much with his 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, whose story world he expanded into a musical and other books. But today’s transmedia producers are planning for multiple platforms from the start. They design fictional universes that are consistent however the audience engages.
The trend is already reconfiguring the industry, affecting everything from how stories are made, down to titles on business cards. In April, the Producers Guild of America, which represents production staff in TV, film and online, ratified a new credit: transmedia producer, which codified these characteristics. Jeff Gomez, a videogame producer, was instrumental in pushing the credit: in 2000, after becoming excited by the multiplatform genre, he had left his job as an editor at Acclaim Entertainment to start Starlight Runner, a transmedia production company. After he successfully extended the Hot Wheels brand across videogames, TV and film in 2003, a string of Hollywood studios asked him to create multiplatform worlds for the likes of Pirates Of The Caribbean, Avatar andTron 2. This side of the Atlantic, broadcasters are taking the lead, using transmedia to invigorate small-screen titles such as Emmerdale and Doctor Who. In a world of multichoice TV, mobile and the web, competition for viewers has never been greater, and audience attention never more fragmented. That’s why many content creators are betting that transmedia will focus it once again.
In 1998, The Blair Witch Project proved -- accidentally -- that even small-scale multimedia efforts could pack a hefty punch. Made with handheld video cameras and presented as a documentary, the film followed four fictional student filmmakers as they tracked the mythical Blair Witch in Burkittsville, Maryland. “It was improvised, so we developed this mythology to give to the actors,” says Mike Monello, 41, one of the film’s five coproducers, who now runs a transmedia marketing company in New York called Campfire. “But whenever we cut away [from the handheld footage] to give you information about it, the momentum of the movie started to die. We tested a long cut instead, and the response showed that people were grabbed by it, so we went with that. Then we had some clips shown on Bravo’s Split Screen, and John Pierson, its presenter, played along. He said, ‘So are the guys attached to the film pulling our leg, or is the Blair Witch something that we should be concerned about?’” Split Screen’s message board flooded with chatter.
In June that year, excited by the buzz, the producers put the rest of the back-story online and wrote themselves into the narrative. Supposedly, the families of the missing students had asked Monello and his collaborators to compile the discovered footage. When the film was released in July 1999, they already had a hungry audience -- with minimal marketing spend. The result: wider distribution than they could ever have achieved with their tiny budget. “We didn’t have access to film-festival programmers or distributors,” Monello says. “But as we were saying, ‘The film’s going to open in New York, Chicago, LA’, we had all these fans who were like, ‘Well, when am I going to see it in Atlanta? Or Alabama?’ All we could tell them was to call their local theatres and ask for it, which they did.” Made for $25,000, it grossed $249 million worldwide.
Although Blair Witch was transmedia-shaped, nobody was using the term. That came in late autumn 2002, when Henry Jenkins, a media professor at MIT, went to an Electronic Arts workshop held for Hollywood producers and game designers in Los Angeles. “There was enormous excitement there about the prospect of deeper collaboration,” says the 52-year-old, whose work on convergence culture became a touchstone for transmedia theory. “They were groping towards a reimagining of what entertainment could do in an era of networked communications, but lacked a conceptual vocabulary. My job was to sum things up at the end of each brainstorm. So I tightened my own thinking.” He wrote an essay, Transmedia Storytelling, on the plane journey back. It was published in MIT’s Technology Review in January 2003 and gave the movement a language.
As broadband-internet adoption started to hit TV ratings, the networks began to see the new digital platforms -- YouTube, MySpace, Habbo -- as potential tools for building audiences. In 2006, the NBC network used the new sci-fi drama Heroes as a testing ground. “The dotcom division of NBC had a mandate to push content on to the digital space, which happened to coincide perfectly with the launch of our show,” says Tim Kring, the show’s LA-based creator. “There was very little precedent for what we were doing, and for a long time we were able to indulge whatever ideas we had.” From midway through season one, the story began to snake from the TV episodes to comics, through games and fake websites, expanding its borders at every turn. For example, says Kring, 52,“We had a character called Wireless, who could pick up wireless communications out of thin air. She was introduced online in a comic, and then she showed up as a character in the show, about 15 episodes into season one. In some ways having a character migrate from one platform to another is the holy grail of transmedia storytelling. It works on a story level for anybody who had just watched the TV show; but for people who had followed online, they understood this woman’s backstory. So when she showed up they had a much deeper connection to her.”
Meanwhile, in New York, Lance Weiler was planning Head Trauma. He didn’t have much cash to burn (the film cost $126,000), but wanted an equally engaging experience. Weiler’s answer? A pervasive game. “I started to experiment with it not being a film in traditional form -- how could I put people into the shoes of the protagonist? How could the story move from one experience to another in ways that created some degree of social interaction?”
In its limited US cinema release, Head Trauma consistently sold out. So Weiler planned his next project, a post-apocalyptic mystery called HiM (short for Hope is Missing), as transmedia from the outset. It launched in 2007 as a blog set up by a man to find his missing fiancée, Hope Wilcott; the quest became an alternate reality game. It proved popular: the blog attracted 2.5 million views. Weiler is now working on an augmented-reality app for Android phones which continues the story. And this autumn he’ll shoot the HiM feature film with Ted Hope, producer of 21 Grams.
Today, dedicated transmedia production houses are starting to win contracts from broadcasters and studios around the world. Los Angeles remains the biggest hub: Imagine, the multiple-Oscar-winning studio run by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, recently struck a deal with Blacklight Studios, a transmedia startup, to get first refusal on film rights to its projects. Grazer says he signed Blacklight “before transmedia had penetrated Hollywood’s consciousness, because it represents a new model, from both a creative and business standpoint.” On the east coast, Jeff Gomez’s Starlight Runner, and Fourth Wall Studios -- whose founders worked with Steven Spielberg and Microsoft to produce alternate reality games -- are now creating their own entertainment properties. Jim Stewartson, Fourth Wall’s president, aims “to take transmedia to the masses. The market is going to be as large as the industry itself.”
In the UK, the BBC too is experimenting -- although “it’s very early days,” cautions Victoria Jaye, head of multiplatform commissioning. Her office in BBC Television Centre in west London is plastered with screen-grabs from The Adventure Games, a new Doctor Who video game. Still, Jaye is optimistic -- not least when it comes to the bottom line. “For the two-hour drama you get in every Adventure Game, it’s a fraction of the cost of television drama. And we’re looking for an increase in visitors to the website -- a significant increase.” But it’s not just that. Jaye claims it’s a worthwhile creative experiment in itself. “It’s very much about innovation in storytelling, and using gameplay to reimagine stories.”
She points to the success of E20, a web series that offered a transmedia take on EastEnders. At the end of each episode of the soap, viewers were directed to online videos varying from three to 16 minutes in length which explored the storylines of peripheral, younger characters. Its four leads debuted in the TV show before going on to star in the web series. E20 garnered 3.3 million viewers in the two weeks it ran, securing the second series announced in April. “I realised, ‘My God, the audience really want this,’” says Jaye.
Channel 4 sees transmedia as key to reaching audiences with its factual and educational programming. “We’re commissioning for attention, not platform,” says Matt Locke, who is responsible for the channel’s cross-platform strategy -- and he wants to find viewers wherever they are. The channel’s younger audience, in particular, is engaging online: 1066, a warfare-strategy web game commissioned alongside a history documentary of the same name, has been played 16 million times, for an average of 20 minutes per session, since May 2009.
Transmedia has blurred the divisions within organisations: Locke says that he stopped making those distinctions long ago (he insists that his commissioning team is “platform agnostic”). And at the BBC, for example, multiplatform producers are embedded with the traditional production teams of each show; television writers work alongside games developers. Even the distinction between platforms may disappear as audiences increasingly engage with separate platforms simultaneously. The market-research firm Nielsen estimates that in December 2009, US viewers spent an average of three hours and 30 minutes watching TV while also using the internet. That’s nearly an hour longer than a year earlier. As new technology such as tablet devices built for sofa surfing and web-enabled TV become ubiquitous, they will make consuming transmedia content more natural.
Nor is the revolution confined to the living room: its pioneers are excited by the new wave of mobile-web apps, which will bring the transmedia experience to wherever the audience is. “The ability to have a device which knows where you are and who all your friends are gives us a tremendous opportunity to tell stories in the real world,” says Kring. “And the rise of augmented reality is going to be fantastic: imagine seeing someone’s face appear on your mobile screen in a three-dimensional way, telling you what to do next or giving you some piece of the story.” He will experiment with both in his next project, Conspiracy For Good.
For Gomez, storytellers who embrace these possibilities will define pop culture. So what will happen when transmedia’s fledgling audience comes of age? He gets whimsical. “We’re going to see our transmedia Mozart. We are going to see visionaries who understand the value of each media platform as if it’s a separate musical instrument, who’ll create symphonic narratives which leverage each of these multimedia platforms in a way that will create something we haven’t encountered yet.
“And it’s going to be magnificent.”
Charlie Burton edits Wired's Play section. Tom Cheshire is editorial assistant.
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Thoughts about the SEER teaser
On the train this morning I started to think of a teaser trailer for the SEER that I could create.
I think I am going to go with the idea that Kris and I came up with at one of our morning tea chats - the SEER runing through the Heath as she touchs people she gets a flash of there past or there future. With the music to much to young by the Special's playing in the back ground. The clip of action will be shot from the prespective of the runner ( the SEER) - and will be filmed in Thornton heath - The Seer will be running down Zion road , over White house lane, along the the victorian foot path that runns around the railway tracks , eventually leading into Newhaven Rd and into the bunnie whole. We will not be able to see the face of the SEER , it should be cut so that we cannot even work out whether the SEER is mail or female . The music will be played as if being broadcast on priate radio - with Radio DJ being the voice of Hendrix saying something like thie one goes out for all the SEERs out there !!! click into tune tommuch to young . Each time the Seer bumps into each other a still black and white image will flash up onto the screen showing the individual the Seer touches in a compromising poistion. Last person the Seer Touches should be Big D!!
So we need to cast the Seer , Big D and Hendrix. Should I use this as an oppotunity to introduce all the main characters ???? Right now I'm not sure , but what I am sure is its time for action.
I think I am going to go with the idea that Kris and I came up with at one of our morning tea chats - the SEER runing through the Heath as she touchs people she gets a flash of there past or there future. With the music to much to young by the Special's playing in the back ground. The clip of action will be shot from the prespective of the runner ( the SEER) - and will be filmed in Thornton heath - The Seer will be running down Zion road , over White house lane, along the the victorian foot path that runns around the railway tracks , eventually leading into Newhaven Rd and into the bunnie whole. We will not be able to see the face of the SEER , it should be cut so that we cannot even work out whether the SEER is mail or female . The music will be played as if being broadcast on priate radio - with Radio DJ being the voice of Hendrix saying something like thie one goes out for all the SEERs out there !!! click into tune tommuch to young . Each time the Seer bumps into each other a still black and white image will flash up onto the screen showing the individual the Seer touches in a compromising poistion. Last person the Seer Touches should be Big D!!
So we need to cast the Seer , Big D and Hendrix. Should I use this as an oppotunity to introduce all the main characters ???? Right now I'm not sure , but what I am sure is its time for action.
Monday, 16 August 2010
How does "Inception" stand up to Henry Jenkins 7 principles of transmedial story telling
I saw Inception over the weekend and was completely blown away by it. Whilst watching the I wondered whether this was part of a tranmedial adventure. So I have decided to see exactly how well it stands up to Henry Jenkins 7 principles of transmedia storytelling:
http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html
Does Inception pass the Spreadability vs. Drillability test.
Spreadability vs. Drillability
Spreadability: the capacity of the public to engage actively in the circulation of media content through social networks and in the process expand its economic value and cultural worth.
"drillability":Jason Mitchell "encourages viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the compleity of a sotry and its telling."Spreadable media encourages horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-term engagement. Drillable media typically engage far fewer people, but occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text's complexities."
Continuity vs. Multiplicity
Continuity: HJ:many transmedia franchises to construct a strong sense of "continuity" [between elements]which contributes to our appreciation of the "coherence" and "plausibility" of their fictional worlds.
Multiplicity:(X-men ; Ultimate X-Men_ Amazing X-Men - alternative realities dealing with the same characters)Multiplicity allows fans to take pleasure in alternative retellings, seeing the characters and events from fresh perspectives.
Worldbuilding:
Using transmedia extentsions the story teller creates a deep and rich world within which the main narrative takes place.
Immersion Vs Etractability
Immersion -the consumer eneters the world of the sotry - i.e theme park- extractability - the fan takes away aspects of the story which they can deploy in there evryday life - items from gift shop!
Seriality:
Transmedia Storytelling spreads dissipate ideas or story chunks across multiple media systems.
Performance:
Fan respond , by undertaking /creating/their own story extension , classically in form of fan fiction. Sometimes invited, sometimes not , but its always out there.
Subjectivity:
Within Transmedial story telling the central narrative is often explored through new eyes. This diversity of perspective often leads fans to more greatly consider who is speaking and who they are speaking for.
In order to do this I had a look at the official website:
http://inceptionmovie.warnerbros.com/
Inception fan Fiction:
http://www.fanfiction.net/movie/Inception/
http://m.fanfiction.net/s/6150055/1/
The Transmedial offerings on the official movie site:
Downlaodable content - Movie Posters , Screensavers, wallpaper buddy icons
Game that could be played to get tickets to the premier - so this was clearly in place before films release -
Premier streamed live onto facebook site.
Comic Book -prolog
Protect your mind - Training programme. - interception between -link with facebook
Build your own poster....
More later
http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html
Does Inception pass the Spreadability vs. Drillability test.
Spreadability vs. Drillability
Spreadability: the capacity of the public to engage actively in the circulation of media content through social networks and in the process expand its economic value and cultural worth.
"drillability":Jason Mitchell "encourages viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the compleity of a sotry and its telling."Spreadable media encourages horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-term engagement. Drillable media typically engage far fewer people, but occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text's complexities."
Continuity vs. Multiplicity
Continuity: HJ:many transmedia franchises to construct a strong sense of "continuity" [between elements]which contributes to our appreciation of the "coherence" and "plausibility" of their fictional worlds.
Multiplicity:(X-men ; Ultimate X-Men_ Amazing X-Men - alternative realities dealing with the same characters)Multiplicity allows fans to take pleasure in alternative retellings, seeing the characters and events from fresh perspectives.
Worldbuilding:
Using transmedia extentsions the story teller creates a deep and rich world within which the main narrative takes place.
Immersion Vs Etractability
Immersion -the consumer eneters the world of the sotry - i.e theme park- extractability - the fan takes away aspects of the story which they can deploy in there evryday life - items from gift shop!
Seriality:
Transmedia Storytelling spreads dissipate ideas or story chunks across multiple media systems.
Performance:
Fan respond , by undertaking /creating/their own story extension , classically in form of fan fiction. Sometimes invited, sometimes not , but its always out there.
Subjectivity:
Within Transmedial story telling the central narrative is often explored through new eyes. This diversity of perspective often leads fans to more greatly consider who is speaking and who they are speaking for.
In order to do this I had a look at the official website:
http://inceptionmovie.warnerbros.com/
Inception fan Fiction:
http://www.fanfiction.net/movie/Inception/
http://m.fanfiction.net/s/6150055/1/
The Transmedial offerings on the official movie site:
Downlaodable content - Movie Posters , Screensavers, wallpaper buddy icons
Game that could be played to get tickets to the premier - so this was clearly in place before films release -
Premier streamed live onto facebook site.
Comic Book -prolog
Protect your mind - Training programme. - interception between -link with facebook
Build your own poster....
More later
Friday, 13 August 2010
Making the SEER Epic
My recent reading has made me realise that I need to develop the story arch of the SEER if I am going to create a narrative strong enough to bar the weight of world creation. My current story of a girl discovering that she is the SEER is simply not EPIC enough!!
After thinking about it and discussing the matter at length with Kris I have come to the conclusion that the real story here is the battle between good and evil played out by immortals who have chosen the Heath to be there battle ground and its population to be their champions. The SEER is the story of JJ.Jones an 18 yr old South East London home girl who discovers that she has been selected/cursed to be one of the Champions selected for the 2010 clash. Selected by Hendrix to be his champion , JJ as the SEER is tasked with protecting the Heath and those living in it, from the dark forces that are gathering around it.
The story of the SEER is a transmedial narrative told across a range of medias including film, comic book, blogs , and mini webeisodes and social networks (including twitterr, facebook.)
The Macro narractive is that of the SEER and her journey from troubled child to superpowered hero. This will be told over a film and comic/web comic strips. The Micro stories will follow the lives of some of the other charatcters in the Seers world including Vader (twitter- his journey from troubled tean to supervillian) : Big D Face book coming out of prision trying to find a way forward. 23yrs , at home with no job and a facsty sister. Hendrix immortal voice of the Heath podcasts. Jackson, immortal , and enemy of Hendrix and supporter of Vader (mini webeisodes). Dad. JJ face book and myspace! Music................Watch this space the SEER will awaken!
After thinking about it and discussing the matter at length with Kris I have come to the conclusion that the real story here is the battle between good and evil played out by immortals who have chosen the Heath to be there battle ground and its population to be their champions. The SEER is the story of JJ.Jones an 18 yr old South East London home girl who discovers that she has been selected/cursed to be one of the Champions selected for the 2010 clash. Selected by Hendrix to be his champion , JJ as the SEER is tasked with protecting the Heath and those living in it, from the dark forces that are gathering around it.
The story of the SEER is a transmedial narrative told across a range of medias including film, comic book, blogs , and mini webeisodes and social networks (including twitterr, facebook.)
The Macro narractive is that of the SEER and her journey from troubled child to superpowered hero. This will be told over a film and comic/web comic strips. The Micro stories will follow the lives of some of the other charatcters in the Seers world including Vader (twitter- his journey from troubled tean to supervillian) : Big D Face book coming out of prision trying to find a way forward. 23yrs , at home with no job and a facsty sister. Hendrix immortal voice of the Heath podcasts. Jackson, immortal , and enemy of Hendrix and supporter of Vader (mini webeisodes). Dad. JJ face book and myspace! Music................Watch this space the SEER will awaken!
Thursday, 12 August 2010
Transmedia storytelling semiotics and narratolgy
http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/477/336
International Journal of Communication 3 (2009), 586-606 1932-8036/20090586
Copyright © 2009 (Carlos Alberto Scolari). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial
No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.
Transmedia Storytelling:
Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding
in Contemporary Media Production
CARLOS ALBERTO SCOLARI
University of Vic
Catalunya, Spain
A very interesting article which really started me thinking about a number of issues as regards Transmedial story telling and the development of my SEER project. The article attempts to TRansmedial story telling through the lense of semiotics and narratology , 2 topics about which I currently know very little , but about which after reading this article I will explore in much more detail over the coming weeks.
Right from the outset Carlos made me consider my own project and the transmedial elements I intended to use. Quoting Henry Jenkins Carlos draws out two basic facts
Interesting example of telling stories over twitter
http://twitter.com/manvszombies
i'm following this to see how it unfolds. So still thinking about this and about what kind of story / whose story I want to tell .
Key to the ideas that have been introduced to me within this article are :
1)Its the Story stupid!
the concept of primary and secondary modeling systems. Within this he is referring to the work of Juri Lotman (1977) in which he introduced the concept that
"Verbal language is the primary modeling system in our culture, and the most important and basic cognitive device for interpreting the world."In essence it is through language that we understand the world around use.This was then amended by the work of Ferraro who said that it is in fact the narrative form that constitutes the basic tool for meaning and event interpretation. The suggestion being that it is NARRATIVE rather than language as the primary modeling tool.
Ultimately seeing the narrative/ story as an abstract idea that is then interpreted through language.So within the transmedial story telling it is primary modeling system that is then encased within the secondary modeling language defined by the relevant media.
Get the story right and then see how it fits into the different media.
2)Who is the SEER for. Who is the implicit consumer. From a semiotic prospective every text constructs its own reader(EC) 1979 - i.e every book talks to a specific type of reader , so the interest group its targeted at, so So a history of tank battles in second WW11 might be targeted at people who are interested in the second world war. that is virtual figure is the model or implicit reader. By reading the book you as the empirical reader are said to recognize that implicit / model reader and accept the proposal behind it , so making what was defined by Veron 1985 as a reading contract.Carlos goes on to point out that a single text can have a multitude of implicit readers. This is achieved by constructing a "sedimentary multilayer text that requires different cognitive skills and knowledge to interpret .The Simpsons would fit this bill , with a top layer aimed at children , and then another more complex layer aimed at adults , With another darker layer aimed at adults with a knowledge of policital satire and pop culture. The different viewer groups participate from there different positions of knowledge and understanding in the creation of Bart Simpsons world.Another way to create this multiple layer of implicit users is create a text with multiple paths , , each path telling the story from a different perspective.
The question is therefore who is the implicit consumer of the SEER? If it is Multiply consumers then you need to start thinking about Mulitpath or Multilayer text, for me that really means different access points to the story. Each point providing access to a specific target group. Each point though open to eanyone interested enough to seek it out.
Carlos creation of a "implicit consumer-nested structure of transmedia story telling is interesting and provides a visual representation of the transmedia consumer space:
single text consumer -single media consumer- transmedia consumer.
(one show) (only TV) (everything)
Carlos breaks the 24 (TV/transmedial show ) into a narrative core ( TV show for me the SEER comic + film) this is the Macro stroy. The other narratives , for 24 ( the comic , the webeisodes etc for the SEER the twitter, the face book and miniwebeisodes?)
the micro narratives need to fill in the gaps between the chunks of marco narrative. So within the SEER universe the twitter and face book will need to sit in between the web comic. With a daily strip as probposed , this may mean bring characters into the story by way of alternative paths. So we may have a twitter prequel to the film for some of the main characters, which then runs parallel to the Macro story.
This idea is the expanded as regards expansion of a transmedia world to:
Level 1.creation of interstitial microstories
Level 2 : parallel stories - a secondary story unfolding at the same time as the main story.
Level 3 : Peripheral stories- exploring stories of some of the more peripheral characters - these stories sit along side but do not intersect the main marco story arch.
Level 4 Fan made content.
International Journal of Communication 3 (2009), 586-606 1932-8036/20090586
Copyright © 2009 (Carlos Alberto Scolari). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial
No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.
Transmedia Storytelling:
Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding
in Contemporary Media Production
CARLOS ALBERTO SCOLARI
University of Vic
Catalunya, Spain
A very interesting article which really started me thinking about a number of issues as regards Transmedial story telling and the development of my SEER project. The article attempts to TRansmedial story telling through the lense of semiotics and narratology , 2 topics about which I currently know very little , but about which after reading this article I will explore in much more detail over the coming weeks.
Right from the outset Carlos made me consider my own project and the transmedial elements I intended to use. Quoting Henry Jenkins Carlos draws out two basic facts
- each media element must be self contained enough to be consumed autonomously - so can you understand and enjoy this product without reference to anything else!
- each medium employed must be used to do what it does best!
Interesting example of telling stories over twitter
http://twitter.com/manvszombies
i'm following this to see how it unfolds. So still thinking about this and about what kind of story / whose story I want to tell .
Key to the ideas that have been introduced to me within this article are :
1)Its the Story stupid!
the concept of primary and secondary modeling systems. Within this he is referring to the work of Juri Lotman (1977) in which he introduced the concept that
"Verbal language is the primary modeling system in our culture, and the most important and basic cognitive device for interpreting the world."In essence it is through language that we understand the world around use.This was then amended by the work of Ferraro who said that it is in fact the narrative form that constitutes the basic tool for meaning and event interpretation. The suggestion being that it is NARRATIVE rather than language as the primary modeling tool.
Ultimately seeing the narrative/ story as an abstract idea that is then interpreted through language.So within the transmedial story telling it is primary modeling system that is then encased within the secondary modeling language defined by the relevant media.
Get the story right and then see how it fits into the different media.
2)Who is the SEER for. Who is the implicit consumer. From a semiotic prospective every text constructs its own reader(EC) 1979 - i.e every book talks to a specific type of reader , so the interest group its targeted at, so So a history of tank battles in second WW11 might be targeted at people who are interested in the second world war. that is virtual figure is the model or implicit reader. By reading the book you as the empirical reader are said to recognize that implicit / model reader and accept the proposal behind it , so making what was defined by Veron 1985 as a reading contract.Carlos goes on to point out that a single text can have a multitude of implicit readers. This is achieved by constructing a "sedimentary multilayer text that requires different cognitive skills and knowledge to interpret .The Simpsons would fit this bill , with a top layer aimed at children , and then another more complex layer aimed at adults , With another darker layer aimed at adults with a knowledge of policital satire and pop culture. The different viewer groups participate from there different positions of knowledge and understanding in the creation of Bart Simpsons world.Another way to create this multiple layer of implicit users is create a text with multiple paths , , each path telling the story from a different perspective.
The question is therefore who is the implicit consumer of the SEER? If it is Multiply consumers then you need to start thinking about Mulitpath or Multilayer text, for me that really means different access points to the story. Each point providing access to a specific target group. Each point though open to eanyone interested enough to seek it out.
Carlos creation of a "implicit consumer-nested structure of transmedia story telling is interesting and provides a visual representation of the transmedia consumer space:
single text consumer -single media consumer- transmedia consumer.
(one show) (only TV) (everything)
Carlos breaks the 24 (TV/transmedial show ) into a narrative core ( TV show for me the SEER comic + film) this is the Macro stroy. The other narratives , for 24 ( the comic , the webeisodes etc for the SEER the twitter, the face book and miniwebeisodes?)
the micro narratives need to fill in the gaps between the chunks of marco narrative. So within the SEER universe the twitter and face book will need to sit in between the web comic. With a daily strip as probposed , this may mean bring characters into the story by way of alternative paths. So we may have a twitter prequel to the film for some of the main characters, which then runs parallel to the Macro story.
This idea is the expanded as regards expansion of a transmedia world to:
Level 1.creation of interstitial microstories
Level 2 : parallel stories - a secondary story unfolding at the same time as the main story.
Level 3 : Peripheral stories- exploring stories of some of the more peripheral characters - these stories sit along side but do not intersect the main marco story arch.
Level 4 Fan made content.
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Keys to transmedial stroy telling or Its the world not the media stupid!
http://lukefreeman.com.au/papers/transmedia-storytelling-the-art-of-world-building/#comment-169
http://transmediacamp101.wordpress.com/
Luke Freeman — Transmedia Storytelling: The Art of World Building ‘…separating the narrative (or fictional world) into kernels (pivotal events/knowledge) and satellites (elaborate events, non-essential to understanding the greater narrative). …narratives from the fictional worlds are exploited across different media … strategic gaps in a narrative evoke a delicious sense of ‘uncertainty, mystery, or doubt’ in the audience.”
This has suddenly struck me as pivital to transmedia story telling. Up until this week all my thoughts about transmedial story telling and so all my thoughts about how to develop the SEER had been focused on the use of different media platforms to tell different parts of the story. I have now realised that the truth is locked in the paragraph above, successful transmedia story telling is all about world building. The Character at the heart of the story must be engaging etc , but it is the world that draws the audience in and it is the "world" that ultimatley encourages audience participation.This idea of creating a world where you have kernals of information spread across a range of media platforms that sets the successful transmedia story telling apart from simple cross platform character explotation.Although the main story arch or narrative can and must be understanable and enjoyable on its own, it is in the successful seeding of knowledge/pivital moments within other media streams and story's that the true transmedial stroy can be found.The kernals of information broaden and deepen the enjoyment of the story by those who both the look for them...
What does this mean for the SEER? well it means that I must now focus on world building. The SEER's world must be real and present before the story of the SEER can be told!
http://transmediacamp101.wordpress.com/
Luke Freeman — Transmedia Storytelling: The Art of World Building ‘…separating the narrative (or fictional world) into kernels (pivotal events/knowledge) and satellites (elaborate events, non-essential to understanding the greater narrative). …narratives from the fictional worlds are exploited across different media … strategic gaps in a narrative evoke a delicious sense of ‘uncertainty, mystery, or doubt’ in the audience.”
This has suddenly struck me as pivital to transmedia story telling. Up until this week all my thoughts about transmedial story telling and so all my thoughts about how to develop the SEER had been focused on the use of different media platforms to tell different parts of the story. I have now realised that the truth is locked in the paragraph above, successful transmedia story telling is all about world building. The Character at the heart of the story must be engaging etc , but it is the world that draws the audience in and it is the "world" that ultimatley encourages audience participation.This idea of creating a world where you have kernals of information spread across a range of media platforms that sets the successful transmedia story telling apart from simple cross platform character explotation.Although the main story arch or narrative can and must be understanable and enjoyable on its own, it is in the successful seeding of knowledge/pivital moments within other media streams and story's that the true transmedial stroy can be found.The kernals of information broaden and deepen the enjoyment of the story by those who both the look for them...
What does this mean for the SEER? well it means that I must now focus on world building. The SEER's world must be real and present before the story of the SEER can be told!
Friday, 6 August 2010
transmedia "world creating"
Interesting and academic word press blog - certainly leaves me with ideas about how to take trans media research forward
It has suddenly occurred to me that I have spent so long thinking about CHARACTER the SEER that have forgotten about the world that she inhabits. Yes it is a character driven narrative , but to engage an audience to motivate them to explore , participate and engage , they must get something out of it. The question is what?
Is there a game that needs to be played ? ARG, what is it. This is perheps the really big question?
What is the world of the HEATH
- Inner city -street
If people are going to enter the world of the heath what are they going to get out of it?
What is it about this world that will draw them in?
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