From carrying out some research into the area I discovered that the Producers Guild of America defines that “a Transmedia Narrative project or franchise must consist of three (or more) narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe.” The storylines can be on the same platform or across many different platforms. In her book A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, Andrea Phillips does not agree with this however stating that transmedia is more about fragmentation where “the story has been broken into pieces”. Therefore rather than being about three storylines it might just be one storyline told across different platforms. I agree with Phillips interpretation as all it has really done is expand upon the Producers Guild of America definition. This is really in keeping with what i am trying to do in my Global Warmning piece.
The use of transmedia seems to fall between using it for business or for creative vision I can understand the uses for both of these but for the purposes of my project I want to stick with the creative vision side. However looking into the future it is something that I may be able to exploit commercially too.
Phillips also says that a media producer has four main purposes to using transmedia narratives these are;
1: Worldbuilding.
2: Characterisation.
3: Backstory.
4: Exposition.
My idea plays into all of these and will utilise all of these ideas. Building a world and story for my characters and narrative to inhabit, characterise the protagonist, provide a backstory (40 years worth!) and also to fill in the gaps and find a shorthand way of dealing with the exposition in a very short time.
Good case studies for looking at all of these are pretty plentiful and I looked at few to help me flesh out my concept and to learn from them. The Lost TV show used the Lost Experience to explain the Dharma Initiative. Also the TV show Mad Men had their characters on Twitter where the tweets explained their motives on the show and the Alien prequel Prometheus even created a fake TED talk to fill in the background of the character behind the Guy Pearce character Peter Weyland. Phillips states that these other additional content is created because it can be done cheaply and only involve one additional media platform, for example a website to compliment a film. An early example of this was The Blair Witch Project, where the website built the world of the film before it was released in the cinema.
However I feel that there should and could be more to transmedia narratives then just world-building and simply creating new stories around the edges of an existing story. Whilst these new narratives could be told on different media platforms and, for example, tell the stories of minor characters or the events that lead to the beginning of a film why stop there. Why not use them to create new worlds rather than to just provide back up and stretch narratives of other content.
I feel the ultimate purpose of transmedia narratives could be as Phillips states to create "a work that is meant to be entirely and natively transmedia from start to finish, and not a single-medium work at all – an experience that you give to your audience, not just a story you are telling them.” I agree and feel that transmedia narratives should be an immersive experience in their nature. Frank Rose although coming at it from a business perspective goes a step further and tries to pinpoint the elements that make up a transmedia narrative. He feels they are “told through many media at once in a way that’s nonlinear, that’s participatory and often gamelike, and that’s designed above all to be immersive”. He goes on to explain that this creates deep media that can take audiences further than a film or a TV programme could. Effectively creating an experience for the audience. This is exactly what I am intending to do with my piece by using multiple formats and platforms and even possibly including physical artefacts and even performance alongside the multi platform video content in a gallery installation environment.
This leads neatly into theatre where many productions productions have combined audience participation and gaming along with multi media elements to create immersive experiences. One example is the USC School of Cinematic Arts World Building Media Lab’s Leviathan project. Audiences use tablet computers to engage with the Leviathan, a flying whale created by author Scott Westerfield, and create their own narratives inside a physical and digital world. Another example of immersive storytelling is Punchdrunk’s (2014) production of Crash Of The Elysium, an immersive Doctor Who theatre production, which puts the audience in the action and gives them 60 minutes to save the world. During the adventure, the audience has to solve puzzles and stop the Weeping Angels. At the end of the production each member of the audience is given a letter from The Doctor thanking them for saving the world. The limitation to these immersive productions is that the audience has to physically visit a venue whereas other immersive examples can be experienced anywhere in the world using an Internet connection.
My initial idea with the piece was to make it totally online and weave a thread of video, text, images, web-sites, games and articles to create a linked narrative. This would not be obvious but spread far and wide but interconnected through hubs such as message boards, a blog or even social media. Internet transmedia narratives would not be possible without hyperlinks changing the possibilities and the way we think about narrative. In an online version of my idea hyperlinks would be needed but for the installation version I am providing the links in the space but the audience can relate to them however they wish. The Video content could possibly be screened on several screens computers, TV and projection space allowing. Or one screen but the content represented on there as online. TV and film which would allow a greater control of the order of the narrative. The introduction of physical content such as the props, ephemera and artefacts allows another link and these items and especially the photos link back to the video content and relate to that. Add in the potential presence of actors going around in character and it extends the world and links to the venue.
The idea of linked texts and stories has been around for years but the internet and hyperlinks have just made it more possible. Roland Barthes in his book, The Pleasure of the Text stated that “what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface; I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again.” By disrupting the linear structure of a book, the reader creates joins between two surfaces (for example the book and world around the reader). These joins give pleasure to the reader because they create their own connections with the author’s work. What Barthes was describing though was what happens inside one person’s mind when they read whereas hyperlinks allow connections to spread from one person to another, or from a source to another text creating a hyper-connectivity. Barthes sums this up well “in this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds, it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach”.
There is lots of thinking about if the text is alive on line and being created, subverted, adhered to and developed by others who is the author. I want to try and maintain control of the audience and to get them to accept my preferred reading. Whilst this is possible to a greater extent in the confines of a gallery installation it is obviously much trickier online. Lorenzo Cantoni and Stefano Tardini stated that “hypertext authors do not design actual texts or dialogues, but only sets of syntactic rules and basic elements, i.e. they produce a sort of grammar.” This grammar provides the rules in which the hypertext system can respond to a reader. “In other words, hypertext authors design potential dialogues, which will become an actual communication…only when one reader navigates through the hypertext’s structure”.
This makes creating the text hugely difficult because each reader can choose or even create their own path through the hypertext, so an author needs to design the rules of all potential paths that a reader could take. Therefore Cantoni and Tardini are correct about hyperlinks if you analyse them in isolation; they are the rules that link everything together. I however think that you need to look at the complete process and that narratives are told when one piece of media is linked to another not the links that others create. If creating the work online hyperlinks are tools an author can use to create a narrative and build a world, much the same way that a director uses editing to create a film narrative.
Transmedia content and co-creation with the audience online becomes complicated if the author starts the story and the audience develops or even completes it. I want o remain a tight grip on my own work as the content is just a Trojan Horse for selling the idealogy of waking up to the global warmning issue. Also i am trying to sell it as real, with real characters and a real situation and I am unsure how audiences will react to this. Will they want to develop the story or hopefully research around it and find the digital footprints or trail of breadcrumbs I will hope to leave out in cyberspace. I want to remain the author and create the characters and the situation they find themselves in but I do want the the audience to respond but not to make it their own.
Henry Jenkins’ in his book Convergence Culture thinks along similar lines. He points out that “transmedia storytelling is the art of world making,” and because of this fans are “actively reshaping [these worlds] to satisfy their own fantasies and desires.” For immersive narratives the author has to create a fully realised world that can sustain multimedia content and be deep enough to satisfy the audiences’ desires. This means that the author has to create a fictional framework that is rich with content and characters. Therefore fans have more to engage with, compared to a story told on a single medium, and can tell their own stories around the author’s original content. I like Jenkins arguments and interpretation that fans become more invested in the story because “to fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gathers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience”. I am not too sure i will have fans BUT as long as I regain control I am excited about the idea of a fictional world and want to explore if not desperate for them to build it further. My aim is to get them to be puzzled by the enigmatic characters, narrative and world that I create and for it to get them talking about the global warming issue through a backchannel of being interested in the story. My fear is that the facts and the issue will get lost and enveloped by the fiction and drama so I need to make the ideology and message integral and to maintain control of this.
Star Wars is a great example of immersive storytelling. The films provide the story that is the framework for the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which has created books, comics, toys, games and TV programmes. Star Wars set the precedent for creating new worlds, spin offs and content as well as related commodities and merchandising. It has proved to be the roadmap for success for many a franchise that Lucas did see coming and grossed him $4 billion pounds as he took less to direct Star wars but instead took the rights to the characters and merchandising. The Star Wars franchise with it's numerous film, TV, animation, book and toy spin offs and merchandiding is not just a money spinner but perhaps the best example of transmedia.
So if transmedia immersive storytelling is the future, what will happen to the old media? Jenkins explains that “cinema did not kill theatre. Television did not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to co-exist with emerging media… Old media are not being displaced. Rather their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies. i agree with this and that trans-media can embrace old media connecting elements such as the novel, film, featurette, Web site, and digital reading device. This will give the audience an enriched experience of a narrative, by engaging with more then one medium. This is what I aim to do in my piece and to combine old and new technology. this creates a richer experience and will open the piece up to a huge variety of audiences. Also my aim is to convince the audience that the stroy and characters may be real and the more clues to back this up from all areas of the media old and new, hi-tech and lo-tech.
Presently there is no and hard definitions on the grammar of transmedia narratives and this may be why currently there are few successful transmedia examples. Rose highlights this fact by stating that “at this point in history, it’s impossible to say how immersive these story worlds we’re building will actually become.” It seems likely that the reason why immersive transmedia narratives are not common on the Internet is because the grammar of these narratives has not fully been established. There is no blue print or road map to success. I however like this and that the field is still being explored, defined, developed and that the fronteers are unknown and it is an area for experimentation. There are clear elements that need to be included in transmedia narratives like hyperlinks, multi-media, non-linear, participatory and immersive, but each element’s role has not been fully defined. This could be linked back to the invention of storytelling in early cinema. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter invented editing by intercutting two pieces of film together to create a story. However it wasn’t until 1915 when D.W. Griffith defined the grammar of editing which created a unique cinematic experience. Therefore transmedia narratives could be in the same transition period. We have are beginning to discover the elements that allow creators to tell stories in a transmedia environment, but the grammar of those elements is still being refined and defined. It is a really interesting area and I am looking forward to being part of that process.
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