The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies

Matthew Freeman, Renira Rampazzo Gambarato, Matthew Freeman, Renira Rampazzo Gambarato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351054881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Medien- & Kommunikationsbranche

Around the globe, people now engage with media content across multiple platforms, following stories, characters, worlds, brands and other information across a spectrum of media channels. This transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies in media, cultural studies and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies is the definitive volume for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of transmediality. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize, problematize and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies of studying convergent media across multiple platforms.

PART I

Industries of Transmediality

1

Transmedia Film

From Embedded Engagement to Embodied Experience

Sarah Atkinson

Transmedia film is arguably the most dominant instantiation of transmedia storytelling phenomena. One only has to look at the history of transmedia storytelling where film is the primary media, and the key film and cinema-centric studies which have shaped the field of transmedia studies to appreciate its influence. From spin-off merchandise, to theme parks, to fan-made media—the film and cinema industry has led the way in the creation and commercialization of narrativizing the peripheral surrounding materials of film titles. Of course this is not a new concept for the film industry when it comes to film marketing, promotion, and additional revenue generation from peripheral products, as Thomas Elsaesser previously contended:

A film, an object we usually consider to be a self-sufficient work, possessing a narrative with its own mode of closure, is being created rather more like a land-mine: to scatter on impact across as wide a topographical and semantic field as possible.

(Elsaesser 1998, 156)

The genealogy of the transmedia storytelling “film” is often traced back to 1999, where two frequently cited examples can be seen to have both formed and in many ways shaped the basis of transmedia studies—defining the principles, practices, and techniques of what has come to be referred to as transmedia (storytelling) (Jenkins 2006). Those films are: The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Matrix (1999). The theatrical release of The Blair Witch Project was preceded by an extended narrative campaign which at the time was referred to as viral marketing. This included a fake television documentary which was aired on the SciFi channel before the film’s theatrical release, online websites, a comic and “missing” person leaflets distributed at the film festival, all which provided context, back-story and texturing of the fictional mythology of the Blair Witch. Subject to critical acclaim, cultural recognition, and notoriety, the film has also already been the focus of many academic studies. The Matrix universe, meanwhile, spanned a constellation of media platforms, including a trilogy of films, a comic book, the Animatrix series of short films, and computer games including Enter the Matrix. These different media were scattered with clues and links developed by the creators and augmented by the many surrounding fan interpretations of the expansive Matrix universe.

In 2006, both of these examples were considered to be exemplars of transmedia storytelling by Jenkins in his chapter “Searching for the Origami Unicorn” (which made reference to the film Blade Runner) and which centralized The Matrix as an exemplar of transmedia storytelling, identifying some of the key tropes and characteristics of the form with a particular focusing on the idea of transmediality as the entertainment form par excellence for the era of collective intelligence. At the time, however, Jenkins did not differentiate between “types” of transmediality, though these examples of The Matrix and The Blair Witch Project set the two distinct trajectories of transmedia film in motion.

Two Transmedia Film Trajectories

These trajectories have followed two quite distinct yet frequently converging pathways which have previously been defined by other practitioners and scholars, using various factors: these have included the geographic, intellectual property, and transmedia structures (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1Theorists have tended to delineate between two types of film-based transmedia

Blair Witch Project	East Coast	IP owned by creator	Centripetal
The Matrix	West Coast	IP not owned	Centrifugal

As Table 1.1 shows, these different theories can be mapped to the two seminal examples of transmedia film. According to Andrea Phillips, West Coast-style transmedia is “more commonly called Hollywood or franchise transmedia” (2012, 13), which operates at major film-studio level (such as The Matrix), in contrast to “East Coast transmedia,” which Phillips states “tends to be more interactive, and much more web-centric. It overlaps heavily with the traditions of independent film, theater and interactive art. These projects make heavy use of social media, and are often run once over a set period of time rather than persisting forever” (2012, 13–14), thus implicating The Blair Witch Project.

Brian Clark’s (2011) definitions, meanwhile, are based on the difference of the treatment of intellectual property (IP) ownership in the geographic-based polarities. For Clark, West Coast “thinks more in terms of franchises … and starts from the perspective that creators won’t own the IP” and East Coast “starts from the perspective that creators own the IP.”

Jason Mittell’s centripetal and centrifugal models focus on the structuring of the transmedia universe. He states: “expansionist approach to transmedia, using paratexts to extend the narrative outward into new locales and arenas through an approach we might term ‘centrifugal storytelling’” (Mittell 2014, 264). Here Mittell uses the television series Lost which spread its narrative universe across books, website, online videos, and an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) (but is also clearly applicable to The Matrix model), in comparison to: “the alternate vector, creating transmedia to fold in on itself in a centripetal fashion” (Mittell 2014, 270). Mittell points to the transmedia strategy of television series Breaking Bad which focused on increasing the depth of audience engagement with the key characters through a mobile app, additional webisodes, and a fake advertisement, which are strategies that follow from The Blair Witch Project in its deepening levels of engagement with the mythology and the characters involved.

Building on these ideas, I propose my own distinctions between these two pathways that I refer to as franchise and campaign transmedia, but as I will demonstrate through the course of this chapter, these categories are almost always subject to convergence and cross-pollination.

Franchise and Campaign Transmedia

In their purest forms, examples that fit into these two categories tend to follow the proscribed characteristics as detailed in Table 1.1—with The Matrix strand representing the franchise model and The Blair Witch Project strand representing the campaign model.

Franchise transmedia follows the IP model—licenses are sold to creators to adapt and extend the IP across different platforms. The dictionary definition of franchise is: “An authorization granted by a government or company to an individual or group enabling them to carry out specified commercial activities, for example acting as an agent for a company’s products” (Oxford Dictionaries online 2017).

Although the Oxford English Dictionary also recognizes the use of the term franchise as a “general title or concept used for creating or marketing a series of products, typically films or television shows” (Oxford Dictionaries online 2017).

There are numerous examples of transmedia franchises where film is the central component (the Marvel Universe, DC Universe, Transformers, Harry Potter) but it is rare for a singular film to be the genesis of a transmedia franchise (with the exception of Star Wars), since these franchises all began life as another media form, i.e., comic book, toy, or novel, and are then adapted into a film. Campaign transmedia film, on the other hand, always originates from the film. The definition of campaign is “an organized course of action to achieve a goal” (Oxford Dictionaries online 2017). The Blair Witch Project (1999) is the pre-eminent exemplar of campaign transmedia. Campaign transmedia is the more frequent type of transmedia practice which prevail in cinema—primarily in routinized marketing techniques for the film, which have used online web-centric, social media extensions. The cult, the independent and the underground of commercial cinema where innovations continue to emerge, transmedial tendrils which reach out to audiences through online social networks when films mutate into other forms and real-world spaces.

Table 1.2 shows these parallel trajectories of transmediality, and their points of intersection and blurring which I will now go on to discuss in more detail.

Table 1.2Transmedia film timeline: mapping the two trajectories of transmedia and their points of convergence

Year of release	1999	2001	2007	2008	2012	2013	2014	2015	2017	2019
Campaign	Blair Witch Project	Al/“The Beast”	“Why So Serious?”	Cloverfield	Prometheus	Body/Mind/Change	Interstellar VR tie-in	Star Wars Secret Cinema	Blade Runner 2049 VR tie-in	Star Wars world @ Disney
Franchise	Matrix		Batman/DC	J.J. Abrams Anthology Frachise	Ridley Scott Alien Franchise	David Cronenberg
Mode of interaction	Engaged	Embedded	Activated	Engaged	Engaged	Embodied engagement	Immersive	Experiential and immersive	Immersive	Experiential and immersive

Franchise and Campaign Convergence

The release of the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence directed by Steven Spielberg was preceded by a 12-week ARG campaign entitled “The Beast,” which merged some of the characteristics initiated by The Blair Witch Project, using the tools of the web, and The Matrix, utilizing mainstream film distribution tools such as the poster and the trailer, whilst layering real-world engagement in an ARG.

The ARG was “seeded” by clues in the film’s posters in spring 2001. One of the credits in the baseline of the poster was a “Sentient Machine Therapist” named Jeanine Salla, an unfamiliar role to those normally seen in a film’s production credits, prompting audiences to search for the name online which revealed Jeanine’s (fictional) home page and blog. Thus began the game experience which, as Andrea Phillips stated, “turned a fire hose of content on its audience” (Phillips 2012, 28). This widespread textual scattering that Philips refers to was characteristic of “The Beast’s” experimental and pioneering nature; textual dispersal logics became more managed, controlled, and predetermined in subsequent campaigns. It was in the “Why So Serious?” promotional campaign for The Dark Knight (2008) that the ARG format evolved sufficiently to cohere a logical narrative pathway in a traditional narrative arc, which led to the events depicted at the start of the feature film. A survey revealed that 63 percent of the respondents saw “viral marketing and the Alternate Reality Game ‘Why So Serious’ as absolutely integral to the film’s narrative” (Brooker 2012, 84). “Why So Serious?” employed a treasure hunt campaign in which a website released the details of over 300 locations of bat graffiti across the globe. Audience members were encouraged to photograph the sites of the graffiti and upload them to the website. For each one that they successfully uploaded, they were rewarded with a frame from the trailer. These engagement techniques represented a blend between the commercial and renegade/underground—tactics associated with campaign transmedia were successfully deployed to promote a franchise-based film, through harnessing social media and web interfaces in new ways. These types of extensive “real-world” campaigns were few and far between; far more common are scaled-down transmedia extensions that are delivered and dispersed via social media platforms.

Transmedia Film and Social Media

The rise of social media and digital devices from the mid-2000s onwards has significantly invigorated transmedia activity around film releases, the types and tropes of transmedia film storytelling tactics have become more sophisticated, designed, embedded, and nuanced.

An example of this is the additional narrative and textural extensions for the film Prometheus (2012) which were designed specifically for mobile interfaces and viewing. These included a number of YouTube videos, a website of the film character Elizabeth Shaw’s Project Genesis, and another website where audience members engaged as an employee of the fictional Weyland Corporation, as well as synchronized second screen apps to be watched simultaneously with the film (see Atkinson 2014, 84–86). The Prometheus web-based campaign was aligned to the cultural language and expectations of its imagined spectator. In May 2012, the campaign used LinkedIn to target key social media “influencers” inviting them to apply for a vacancy on the Prometheus project. Information taken from the user’s curriculum and profile were used to generate personalized messages. Prometheus represents a coming-of-age of the mainstream ARG/transmedia film campaign, where corporate sanitization becomes an implicit theme within the experience. The viral aesthetics which characterized previous campaigns and their “underground” conspiratorial nature, are replaced in Prometheus by a veneer of corporate logics and aesthetic of officialdom, and the social media mores of the time.

Before Prometheus, the theatrical film release of Cloverfield (2008) was preceded by a pre-release online ARG (discussed extensively in Atkinson 2014), where aspects of content were released across YouTube, including fake news videos and various websites of fictional organizations (that are not mentioned in the film), including additional non-film characters.

Although both Prometheus and Cloverfield have been assigned to the “campaign” stream as indicated in Table 1.2—both films were part of existing franchises, Prometheus was part of the Alien franchise which originally included Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1993) and Alien: Resurrection (1997). Prometheus was positioned as a prequel to the original Alien film, although this was vehemently criticized by fans of the franchise as oblique and unrelated.

Cloverfield is part of the J. J Abrams anthology franchise which included the manga Cloverfield/Kishin comic book (2008), the original Cloverfield film and the subsequent Cloverfield Lane (2016). The ...