Storytelling Across Worlds

Transmedia for Creatives and Producers

Tom Dowd

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136071416
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Categoría: Film & Video

Don't restrict your creative property to one media channel. Make the essential leap to transmedia!

From film to television to games and beyond, Storytelling Across Worlds gives you the tools to weave a narrative universe across multiple platforms and meet the insatiable demand of today's audience for its favorite creative property.

This, the first primer in the field for both producers and writers, teaches you how to:

* Employ film, television, games, novels, comics, and the web to build rich and immersive transmedia narratives

* Create writing and production bibles for transmedia property

* Monetize your stories across separate media channels

* Manage transmedia brands, marketing, and rights

* Work effectively with writers and producers in different areas of production

* Engage audiences with transmedia storytelling

Up-to-date examples of current transmedia and cross-media properties accompany each chapter and highlight this hot but sure-to-be enduring topic in modern media.

Part 1 Understanding Transmedia Storytelling

Chapter 1 One Story

DOI: 10.4324/9780240824420-1

With transmedia you're not repeating the same story on a movie screen, a TV screen, a novel and a videogame. You are using each one to tell a complete piece of your story and combined they can all become a deeper, richer and more immersive experience.

–Jeff Gomez, CEO, Starlight Runner Entertainment¹

¹“5 Questions with Jeff Gomez, CEO, Starlight Runner Entertainment” accessed July 25, 2012, www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/04/11

What Is Transmedia?

Transmedia has many definitions, some of them new, some of them legacy and some of them based in non-storytelling mediums, such as marketing, merchandizing, and advertising. In many of these definitions, transmedia is conceptually interchangeable with terms like “cross-media” “multimedia”, “multiplatform storytelling”, “franchise” or even “interactive media” – associations and uses that can make the concept of “transmedia” a bit confusing. The definition of a transmedia narrative property used by the Producers Guild of America (which we'll get to shortly) differs from the definition used by transmedia/alternate-reality game pioneers like Jordan Weisman, who see transmedia as the use of multiple media fragments to reveal a previously unknown, or unexpected, hidden story.

In this book, we are expressly talking about the process of storytelling, of building the transmedia narrative property (the end product) in all its forms. We are particularly looking at how to tell stories that come from and exist in a larger intellectual property universe carefully designed and built to allow multiple iterations, expressions, and platforms simultaneously and sequentially. Though there are implications in the delivery of transmedia stories that fall within the territory of marketing, we are principally concerned here with those aspects that directly relate to the creation of narrative. The term we're using is transmedia storytelling. It is a bit cumbersome, so we'll often just say transmedia. If we're meaning transmedia marketing, or some other use of transmedia, we'll specifically call that out. So, if you see transmedia it means transmedia storytelling.

More and more, audiences want their entertainment experiences to transcend the medium itself and transmedia storytelling provides this by creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience that builds from multiple encounters with the narrative and elements of the property's universe, each medium making its own unique contribution to the unfolding story.

The Producers Guild Definition

Our cornerstone is the motion picture Producers Guild of America's definition of a transmedia producer credit, established in 2010, which has more or less set the industry standard for transmedia:

A Transmedia Narrative project must consist of three or more narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe.

Producers Guild of America, Code of Credits – New Media²

²accessed July 20, 2012, http://www.producersguild.org/?page=coc_nm#transmedia

(The entirety of the Code of Credits entry for transmedia producer is reproduced in Appendix F.)

The piece of language quoted above is interesting in that it specifically calls out a transmedia narrative project as having three or more narrative storylines existing within the same universe. It does not differentiate between how many platforms these discrete storylines must exist on, but we're going to operate under the distinction that a true transmedia narrative property has to utilize at least two different platforms – the more the better – to tell its stories.

The transmedia producer is responsible for a significant portion of the transmedia property's long-term planning, development, production and/or maintenance of story continuity across the multiple platforms and creation of original storylines for new platforms. This can include the creation and implementation of interactive endeavors to unite the audience of the property with the narrative, as long as they are related directly to the narrative presentation of the project and not simply marketing extensions. Media properties like Glee, True Blood, and Game of Thrones have been successful at developing interactive projects that engage their audiences through a variety of means, though not all of these have been transmedia storytelling.

For a property to be transmedia, it also has to be more than just adapting the same story to different media. Each expression has to tell a complete piece of a larger story. This is not an arbitrary decision – we as transmedia producers have to identify those aspects of the story or universe that are best served by the specific strengths of a particular medium. Our goal is to create multiple expressions of the story across various platforms that when taken as a whole create a deeper, richer and more immersive experience for the audience.

Transmedia is most conducive to those stories where there is a complex universe and rich backstory or mythology that can extend into an exploration of that universe via multiple (potentially interrelated) characters, each with their own stories that expand and deepen our understanding of that world. As Henry Jenkins pointed out in the Preface, The Matrix (Warner Brothers, 1999) is a good example of this. Our understanding of the property comes from information conveyed through three live-action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories and several video games. Much of the pleasure for the audience is in compiling this range of experiences and the story information gathered from each into a meaningful larger view of the universe, characters, conflicts and themes we call The Matrix. This said, not all stories should be a transmedia experience and one of our tasks as a transmedia producer is similar to that of all producers within individual mediums – figuring out whether this is the best possible expression for the story we want to tell.

This is one of the toughest lessons for novice producers – the temptation is to think any story can be told in any medium. But there are some forms of stories or story elements that work best as a live theatre and others that work best as novels and others that work as TV series and … you get the idea. The core elements of your story – character, conflict, and so on – all have to work in any of the media, however.

If we do have a property that does benefit from or work best with multiple expressions of the story, each individual expression must be a satisfying experience on its own terms and yet also make a contribution to the larger intellectual property narrative as well. In other words, we need to be able to watch J.J. Abram's 2009 and 2013 Star Trek (Paramount Pictures) films and have a complete coherent story experience, but at the same time, if we have read the prequel comic series Star Trek: Countdown (IDW, 2009) (which bridges the 2009 motion picture and the Star Trek:The Next Generation television series) or the Star Trek Ongoing (IDW, 2011 – present) comics (which bridges the 2009 and 2013 motion pictures and connects the new films with events seen in Star Trek: The Original Series in the 1960s), we learn additional narrative information that makes for a deeper and more complex understanding of the larger story. Transmedia guru Henry Jenkins has pointed out that this is similar to game designer Neil Young's concept of “additive comprehension” or the ways in which we compile information from each part of the story we encounter which then causes us to reconsider or revise our understanding of the larger narrative as a whole (Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collides, NYU Press, 2006).

Transmedia, Intellectual Property and Franchises

Before we dig much further in, we're going to lay out a set of definitions that hopefully make what comes after easier to understand. If you are hip-deep in media production and transmedia, you probably already know these terms and if not here they are.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO):

Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works and symbols, names, images and designs used in commerce.

IP is divided into two categories: Industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs and geographic indications of source; and Copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures and architectural designs. Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs.

What is Intellectual Property³

³accessed July 27, 2012, http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy further elaborates:

Intellectual property is generally characterized as non-physical property that is the product of original thought. Typically, rights do not surround the abstract non-physical entity; rather, intellectual property rights surround the control of physical manifestations or expressions of ideas. Intellectual property protects rights to ideas by protecting rights to produce and control physical instantiations of those ideas.

Intellectual Property⁴

⁴accessed July 27, 2012, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/

Both of these definitions/explanations focus heavily on the idea of legal rights associated with the dissemination, distribution, publication or control of otherwise intangible ideas. For us transmedia professionals (or aspiring) the majority of concepts and issues around intellectual property are outside our concern. When we talk about intellectual properties, or IP as it is often abbreviated, we're talking about a universe of story possibilities presentable and creatively expressible in a variety of media. Let's reiterate: when we talk about intellectual property we're talking about an overall or over-arching story that can be told in a number of media. And when we're talking about a story, we're not just talking about the simple expression of a story, like “Bob loves Alice, but Alice is actually leader of a band of rebellious ghosts seeking more fulfilling after-lives. Can true love prevail?,” but rather all of the creative effort and expression that goes into it – what the story is about literally (rebellious ghosts), figuratively (the quest for true love) and thematically (what defines life and living), what actually happens in the story (the plot sequence and elements), the characters of Bob, Alice and whomever (or whatever) might be in the story, the world and setting the story takes place in (is it our realistic world, or something more heightened or stylized?) and the overall style and tone of the story (tongue-in-cheek? serious and gory?). For us, the intellectual property is all of the narrative-related creative components.

As transmedia-makers we care about all of these things because these are our building blocks. Our main project may directly tell the story of Bob and Alice, but we can create a tie-in novel that deals with Alice's backstory before she met Bob, or an interactive tablet game that focuses on Fizzle, her sarcastic but equally ghostly cat sidekick. We can tell other stories of other ghosts in the world, or if there's a ghostly version of our world we can tell stories there.

All these components, all these elements – story/theme, plot, character, setting and to some extent style/tone (which informs the other elements) – are valued parts of our intellectual property. If our property is solid, they are all working together to support each other and if they aren't, there will be problems. As transmedia-makers, we have to understand how all these parts fit together since in many ways it is a big three-dimensional puzzle; moving or changing one of the pieces in the wrong way could blow the whole thing apart.

Throughout the book we'll use the terms intellectual property and property synonymously. We'll use the terms platform or medium to refer to the type of expression of the property, such as motion picture, television series, video game, novel, comic book and so on. So a given intellectual property can have multiple expressions on a variety of platforms or media.

We'll also use the term franchise, and for a long time franchise and intellectual property basically meant the same thing. We're going to broaden the term franchise to include the intellectual property, all of the various platform expressions, all of the marketing … everything, the whole burrito related to the property and how the market experiences or access it. (And that's the last crappy food analogy we're going to use. We hope.)

Stumbling Toward Transmedia

While we can talk about the ideal transmedia development process as the careful planning and development of a larger narrative that has a coordinated presentation to its audience via multiple methods or storytelling platforms, the reality is that there are few great examples of that process … yet. Many of the properties we might call transmedia include iterations of story that were not conceived simultaneously, but rather were created sequentially. Alien (20th Century Fox, 1979) did not start out as larger intellectual property, but grew from the original motion picture to a sequel (Aliens, 20th Century Fox, 1986) that spawned its own sequel (Alien, 20th Century Fox, 1992) and branched out into video games, comics, novels and additional films, and even crossed over into two other film franchises, Aliens vs. Predator (20th Century Fox, 2004) and Prometheus (20th Century Fox, 2012).

The process here is similar to building a house by adding rooms to a small existing structure (a shed perhaps?) rather than designing and creating a blueprint for all the house's rooms at once. Our goal in transmedia development is to design a house – not build a room and then keep adding to it. We want to treat transmedia as simultaneous development of its various (or at least its initial multiple) expressions rather than think of it as a sequential series of additions to the mythology, themes, conflicts and universe.

For all these reasons, you will see the term transmedia used in a variety of ways to refer to a variety of projects and intellectual properties, regardless of how they came about. At best, we can identify some of the ideal defining characteristics for transmedia, but the terminology is still in flux. The bottom line is that transmedia storytelling is about story, a story whose individual components have to capture the imagination and fully engage an audience who wants to discover a larger universe filled with narrative possibilities. And transmedia storytelling is what we are all about.

Transmedia Storytelling for Producers

We've just gone on somewhat about what transmedia storytelling is, isn't and might be to some. Since we're targeted this book at both producers and creatives currently working in different media it makes sense to first define what we mean by a “producer”… and that depends on what medium we're talking about. (We'll look at transmedia for creatives later in this chapter.)

Different media (and we're focusing on our “big three” here – motion pictures, television and video games) define the term “producer” differently and in fact they have different roles and responsibilities in each of those media. Though we're going to touch on each of those and their differences, in many ways we're really talking about any producer of transmedia narrative properties, which is to say any individual responsible for overseeing and managing one or more interconnected transmedia narrative projects. The credit/title of transmedia producer that we mentioned earlier is one bestowed by the Producers Guild of America and pertains to motion picture and television projects under their jurisdiction, but members of the Producers Guild aren't going to be the only managers, coordinators or facilitators of transmedia narrative properties.

First, let's look at the different roles of producers in each medium and then a look again at who a transmedia producer (as per the Producers Guild) or transmedia producer (not part of the Producers Guild) could be. Each of the examples below are quick-and-dirty explanations for those who may not know what each type of producer does in the different areas. (If you are in that medium as a producer, you know full well that your role and responsibility is far more complicated than we've depicted here, for brevity's sake.)

Mo...