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Scott Walker gives plenty of tips if you want to create some transmedia story-telling. The core idea seems to be stick to your strengths, then hopefully you’ll get collaborators spawning their own ideas and artwork from what you have done.

Mike Monello was involved with Blair Witch and is now CEO of marketing agency Campfire. He argues:

…we like to tell stories across multiple platforms and we like to tell them through experience rather than pure content. …we do make content but our general philosophy is don’t necessarily be the storyteller don’t think of yourself as a storyteller but think of yourself as building a world and experiences that get people your story to tell.

He argues in favour of convergence. TV remains the main contemporary storytelling medium, but people want more and more interaction with those stories. Transmedia, to Monello, is:

…a storytelling word … stories that are not bound by any single media format. It’s what happens between a TV show and an online experiment, or between a book and a game.

That what makes it different than franchising where you take a character like Batman and put him in a video game and then put him in a movie and then we have a cartoon on the air and then we have comic books…

The difference is that when you think about transmedia storytelling, you’re thinking about the meaning that’s created between those forms of media and how each of those story builds a larger story.

I think the word transmedia is really an adjective, so you can have transmedia storytelling and you can have Transmedia marketing but I don’t think you can point to something and say “that’s transmedia”.

[my bold]

So its difficult to pull off, you have to reconceive story-telling:

Transmedia requires you to think about a story maybe the way an architecting thinks about a building… A transmedia story is kind of empty and meaningless until it’s occupied by people, and so you have to kind of design around behaviors, you have to design around more basic kind of desires.

The good news is that he thinks its a field ripe for the independents, so get into it, everyone!

Robert Pratten is discussing pacing in transmedia storytelling. As he says:

In an interactive, portmanteau-type transmedia story, the author tries to give the audience a good degree of freedom to explore and investigate at their own volition while still aiming to create a satisfying dramatic storyline. Broadly speaking, making these open world, non-linear stories thrilling can be tricky. A central problem of these experiences, assuming that a linear version of the story would be worth reading, is pacing.

He argues that pacing in transmedia lies in the four dimensions of story, ability to move forward, required reaction speed, and platform. they’re all inter-related and must be considered together. Some interesting diagrams well worth reflection.

And now for the NBT….

Intermedia, according to Simon Staffans. According to my definition of transmedia, I already think is must include a social media element, but this is what Staffans is getting at. Intermedia is “the flow of action and interaction that happens as a result of cross media or transmedia methods”. OK, terminology schmerminology. But my importantly, Staffans implores us:

This immediate, spontaneous, it’s-happening-now-and-gosh-I’m-in-on-it! experience is an area that is currently woefully underdeveloped.

So get on thy bici, ninito and ninitas!

Some new transmedia releases

I loved the previous Batman game. This one seems more of the same.

Not sure. Does it stray too much from the published story world? I’m not convinced that Tolkein can be built on the way that Batman can be, its such a different publishing tradition.

Transmedia for kids from Scholastic and Ruckus (no titles yet).

The Karada, ‘a transmedia horror story about a collapsing metaverse’, from Heroes author Tim Kring. Never got into Heroes, but I know lotsa folk did.