The above video was shot by Scott Walker during one of my presentations at San Diego Comic-Con, during which I spoke about some of the controversy which has surrounded the definition of transmedia over the past six months or so. I've largely stayed out of these conversations, though you can find a very good summary of the debates here.
I've been focusing on other projects and also I've been more interested in the shapes these discussions take than seeking to intervene in them directly, but over the summer, in a range of venues, I've been pushing and proding at my own definitions to see if I can capture some of my own shifting understandings of transmedia, especially as I am preparing to teach a revamped transmedia entertainment class at USC. Today, I am going to try to put some of this still evolving thinking into writing in hopes that it helps others sort through these issues.
Much of this is covered in the above video so if you process things better in audio-visual than in print, you have your options. I've heard some gossip that Jenkins was going to issue a "new definition" of "transmedia": this is no where near as dramatic an overhaul as that, just some clarifications and reflections about definitions. This definition still covers, more or less, what I mean by transmedia storytelling:
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 it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.
A great conversation about the multiple forms of how transmedia is being applied and how we can assure the differing platforms create an extension of narrative. This is very important to successful creation of transmedia. It's not just rehashing the same content on differing platforms.
Due to technical difficulties, we've been delayed in sharing with you the videos from our April Transmedia Hollywood 2 conference, jointly sponsored by the cinema schools at USC and UCLA, and hosted this year at UCLA. We hope to be back next April at USC with a whole new line up of speakers and topics, which we are just now starting to plan. In the meantime, check out some of these sessions, which should give the ever expanding Transmedia community plenty to chew on this summer. As for myself, I'm flying down to Rio, even as we speak.
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC. (Some of my comments here got me into trouble at the time and I hope to post something here soon which explores the issue I raise here about the role of radical intertextuality within the same medium.)
Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play": Designing Virtual Worlds--From Screens to Theme Parks and Beyond
Hollywood has come a long way since Walt Disney, circa 1955, invited families to come out and play in the first cross-platform, totally merchandised sandbox -- Disneyland. Cut to today and most entertainment corporations are still focused on creating intellectual properties to exploit across all divisions of the Company. However, as the studios and networks move away from the concrete spaces of movie and TV screens and start to embrace the seemingly limitless "virtual spaces" of the Web as well as the real-world spaces of theme parks, museums, and comic book conventions, the demands on creative personnel and their studio counterparts have expanded exponentially.
The traditional processes behind TV programme–making are breaking down. Illustration: Brett Ryder
Storytelling has always been at the heart of the best media, be it a TV show, a documentary or a game, and there is no doubt that with the expanding choice of technology – from smart mobile phones and tablets to TV sets that have internet connections – we are seeing an ever–increasing convergence of storytelling on different platforms. But as this convergence develops, one of the key questions now confronting the media industry is this: who's in control of this explosion in creativity?
The answer might seem obvious. Surely, it's the commissioners who grant producers the chance to broadcast on their channels. Or maybe it's the producers and directors themselves with the ideas for the programmes or films that have the whip hand? Or perhaps it's the writers who ultimately have control?
Stories rewire communication for a transmedia world
Published on April 26, 2011
The problem: How do you rise above the noise?
Every day you wake up to a flow of information. Your alarm clock sounds and you check your smart phone for email and Facebook posts. You scan a newspaper over breakfast; listen to the radio as you head to work. You get a warning about local traffic from your navigation device and have it search for the nearest coffee bar on the detour. Your assistant sends a text message saying that your first meeting has been delayed. Your day has only just started, you haven't even sat down at a computer and there is already a constant conversation. It's the same for your customer.
We live in a socially-networked, transmedia world. The wealth of information across so many channels is both an opportunity and a challenge. We need effective organizing systems and filters that connect information in the world with things that have meaning and relevance. This is true of the sender and the receiver. We need to find a way to break through and hear or be heard, whether you are an individual, an organization, or a brand.
The solution: Transmedia storytelling
Transmedia storytelling is quickly becoming the new standard for 21st century communication. Transmedia storytelling uses the tools of the storyteller-emotion, engagement, universal themes, personal connection, and relevance-to create a communication experience instead of a message. Get over thinking it is only about entertainment franchises. Transmedia storytelling moves a brand from slogan to interaction between the company and the customer. It unites executives and teams with focused goals and a common purpose.
The reason: Storytelling speaks to all levels of the brain
Stories are the brain's way of organizing information - in other words, how we rise above the noise. Stories package information for rapid comprehension by engaging the brain at all levels: intuitive, emotional, rational, and somatic.
The reason that we keep saying that traditional marketing approaches no longer work is that the social web has created a new consumer psychology. Consumers expect you to earn their attention, not interrupt them for it. They want to see communications that are timely, interactive, personal, and, above all, honest. Whether you're an organization or an individual, you must communicate in a way that treats the audience with respect and delivers value--before the sale. A story can communicate who you are and inspire people at a higher level with your passion, purpose, and commitment to the customer's experience. It is not about selling, it's about engaging. Engaging people moves pre-customers to brand advocates.
This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone.
Over the past few years, transmedia storytelling has become a hot buzzword in Hollywood and Madison Avenue alike--"the next big thing" or "the last big thing" depending on whom you ask. Last year, the Producer's Guild announced a new job title, Transmedia Producer, a decision that has more or less established the term as an industry standard. More and more companies are laying claim to expertise in producing transmedia content. But many using the term don't really understand what they are saying. So let's look at what people are getting wrong about transmedia.
Myth 1: Transmedia Storytelling refers to any strategy involving more than one media platform.
The entertainment industry has long developed licensed products, reproducing the same stories across multiple channels (for example, novelizations). Increasingly, broadcast content is also available on line. And many films are adopted from books (or now, comic books). None of these necessarily constitute transmedia storytelling. In transmedia, elements of a story are dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms, each making their own unique contribution to the whole. Each medium does what it does best--comics might provide back-story, games might allow you to explore the world, and the television series offers unfolding episodes.
A great story starts with a single word and weaves it’s way into the subconscious eventually creating a visceral connection. The epic story reaches in to the soul and creates a desire to immerse oneself in it’s story world. These story worlds are one of the main stays here at the creativity lab. The entry points to a story are key in developing an engaging story world. Using transmedia as a storytelling device is how the Robots roll.
With their mania for film franchises, leading studios are behaving more like packaged goods marketers than the showmen of yore in pumping out movies, and appear more interested in taking direction from fanboys, brand managers and multimedia consultants.
So the time appears ripe for consultants such as Jeff Gomez and Mark Pensavalle, co-founders of Starlight Runner Entertainment. Their job: To make sure that stories and characters remain consistent as a movie is reincarnated as, say, a TV series, a video game, a theme park attraction or an online virtual world.
Their specialty is called transmedia, a term with roots in academia that has become the latest buzzword for entertainment that spans multiple media platforms. They have worked on some of the industry's highest-profile properties, including the movies "Tron: Legacy" and "Avatar" and the video game Halo.
"We think we have shown that different media are like instruments, and when you put them together, you can create moving symphonies," said Gomez, who oversees the creative aspects while Pensavalle focuses on the business side.
Spinoff entertainment from movies isn't new in Hollywood. Even "Lassie" was treated to endless sequels by MGM in the 1940s before being turned into a live show on the fair circuit, a radio series, a network TV series, a cable TV series, books, comics and a merchandizing bonanza that included a line of dog food.
In the past, such renditions and products were typically considered ancillary, to be licensed to the highest bidder. As a result, video games, comics, websites and movies would vary in the complexity of their storytelling, if they didn't outright contradict what came before.
But fans today, who can stay involved with stories and characters around the clock thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, are more sophisticated and less tolerant when it comes to deviations from the script.
"The merging of technology and media today demands that we're more holistic in our thinking," said "Tron: Legacy" producer Sean Bailey, president of production at Walt Disney Studios, which launched the movie in December along with a theme park show, toys, video games and an upcoming animated series. "It's no longer OK to be sending mixed messages."
Although studios actively manage their franchises on the business side, some are just starting to build up the same internal capability on the story side.That has provided an opening for firms like Starlight Runnerand rivals such as 42 Entertainment and Campfire, which do similar work with a marketing bent.
On "Tron: Legacy" and the second and third "Pirates of the Caribbean" films, the six-person team at Starlight, based in New York, served as a bridge between the filmmakers and the people behind the theme park attractions, games and cruise line shows.
The Starlight team helped flesh out storylines for spinoffs that fit the movies and came up with moments to connect the different incarnations. In one such "transmedia tip," Olivia Wilde's character in "Tron: Legacy" discusses how she was saved from death. Players of the video game Tron: Evolution — a prequel to the movie — would recognize the reference, since they are the ones who rescue her at the end of the game.
They also led what Gomez called Tron 101 and Pirates 101 sessions for corporate executives at Disney, in which they outlined the mythology behind the franchises and explained the do's and don'ts of creating products connected to it. Those seeking to use Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow character, for instance, were warned that although he's selfish and a trickster, he would never murder an innocent person or act out of malicious intent.
On Microsoft's video game Halo and Hasbro's toy line Transformers, Gomez and Pensavalle had the opposite task: to simplify the mythology. Both brands had built up complex and sometimes conflicting narratives over the years that the companies behind them wanted to streamline as they prepared to launch games, toys and TV shows.
The Starlight team had to figure out which story points and characters should be discarded to clarify "the essence of the brand," as Gomez calls it. For Transformers, they recommended that Hasbro pare the number of characters with overlapping traits, a suggestion that fans can see in a new animated series featuring the alien robots.
In each case, Starlight creates a "bible" of 100 to 400 pages that lays out facets of the fictional universe, similar to those used for years on TV shows and comic book series.
Such documents are usually distributed only on a need-to-know basis, Gomez explained, because they contain the "super-story arc," a mythology of the universe that can be used for years.
The process doesn't always go smoothly, however.
On "Avatar," the Starlight team spent time with director James Cameron and his producing partner, Jon Landau, to learn their vision and communicate it to 20th Century Fox, the studio backing and distributing the film, for use in spinoffs.
But some of the resulting products, in particular a video game, were widely panned.
"I think our transmedia campaign was mediocre," Landau said. "We were concerned about letting our partners in on what we were doing early in the process, but the lesson is that next time we need to do exactly that."
"Deep Media," Transmedia, What's the Difference?: An Interview with Frank Rose (Part One)
Wired contributing editor Frank Rose is releasing a new book this month which will be of interest to many of my regular readers -- The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories. It is a highly readable, deeply engaging account of shifts in the entertainment industry which have paved to way for more expansive, immersive, interactive forms of fun. He's talked to key players -- from Will Wright and Jeff Gomez to James Cameron and George Lucas -- and brings back their thinking about the changing media landscape. As he wrote me, "at various points in my career I've focused on technology and at other times on entertainment, but when I joined Wired in 1999 I started writing about both together."
Rose has been exploring some of the key concepts from the book through his blog as he's been working through the project. I suspect when I teach my transmedia storytelling class again at the USC Cinema School next fall, this book will be on the syllabus, since it manages to condense down many of the key conversations being held around these much discussed topic into language which is accessible and urgent.
When I first heard of his concept of "deep media," during a talk Rose gave at South by Southwest, I was intrigued by its relationship with what I've called transmedia entertainment. And in fact, I've been asked about the relationship many times and didn't really know what to say. So, naturally, given a chance to interview Rose for the blog, that's where I started. It sounds like his own thoughts on the relationship have evolved over time and in interesting ways. As the interview continues, we talk about world-building, the relationship between games and stories, the interweaving of marketing and storytelling, and the impact of 9/11 on interactive entertainment.
You write in the book about what you call "deep media." What do you see as the core characteristics of deep media? How do you see your concept relating to others being deployed right now such as transmedia or crossmedia?
To me it's mainly a question of emphasis. Are we focusing on the process or the goal? Transmedia, or crossmedia, puts the emphasis on a new process of storytelling: How do you tell a story across a variety of different media? Deep media puts the focus on the goal: To enable members of the audience (for want of a better term) to delve into a story at any level of depth they like, to immerse themselves in it. Not that this was fully thought out when I started--the term was suggested by a friend in late 2008 as a name for my blog, and when I looked it up online I saw that it had been used by people like Nigel Hollis, the chief analyst at Millward Brown, so I adopted it.
That said, I think the terms are more or less interchangeable. I certainly subscribe to the seven core concepts of transmedia as you've laid them out. I also think we're at an incredibly transitional point in our culture, and terms like "deep media" and "transmedia" are needed to describe a still-evolving way of telling stories. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if both terms disappeared in 15-20 years as this form of storytelling becomes ubiquitous and ultimately taken for granted.
Over the past few years, transmedia storytelling has become a hot buzzword in Hollywood and Madison Avenue alike--"the next big thing" or "the last big thing" depending on whom you ask. Last year, the Producer's Guild announced a new job title, Transmedia Producer, a decision that has more or less established the term as an industry standard. More and more companies are laying claim to expertise in producing transmedia content. But many using the term don't really understand what they are saying. So let's look at what people are getting wrong about transmedia.