Transmedia: the quiet revolution

BY Lars Guignard

There’s a quiet revolution brewing and if you haven’t heard about it yet, you will. It’s called transmedia and it’s about the integration of fictional worlds across multiple media platforms. Put simply, transmedia means telling a story not just on TV or film, but also on your phone, your breakfast cereal box, your comic book, the internet, and every other media platform out there. It’s not about simple repurposing–telling the same story again and again–but about creating fictional worlds in which different strands of the story can be explored on different platforms. The movie, the videogame, the mobile phone app, and the website each look at the story from a different perspective bringing out nuances in the primary narrative in a layering that could only be dreamt of before.

Jeff Gomez, transmedia writer, producer, and CEO of New York based Starlight Runner Entertainment, is a pioneer in the field. His first transmedia writing project started with Turok, the videogame, and it snowballed from there. Now Gomez is the transmedia guru behind Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as the upcoming Tron (to name a few of his credits).

Speaking of transmedia from a craft perspective, Gomez, like many writers, talks first about character: “the number one position to concentrate on is character. If you don’t have a believable and aspirational character with whom the audience can identify, there’s very little reason for them to want to transcend the first media platform let alone seek out multiple media platforms. It all starts there.” ‘Aspirational,’ in  Gomez’s sense, refers to a character that is more than just relatable. It’s about a character with qualities that the audience finds actively desirable; qualities that they wouldn’t mind sharing themselves.

If such a character is the wellspring of the transmedia experience, then theme is the river. A strong theme is essential so that the many modalities of the transmedia narrative can be pulled together in harmony. All those story strands have to be guided by a clear principle and that, in effect, is the difference between the transmedia we are seeing today and yesterday’s merchandising and licensing efforts–today’s stories have the potential to become coordinated, holistic entertainment.

As an example, writers of TV comedy are familiar with the notion of a callback: a particular joke might be made in the first act of the script, which is referenced later in the show to an even bigger laugh. In the world of transmedia, callbacks are that much more powerful because they’re made not just to a line of dialogue but to an entire experience.

As Gomez explains, with proper planning, the videogame of a particular franchise might get released before the movie. Your character in the videogame might be someone you’ve spent a hundred hours or more with by the time the movie releases. You are intimate with that character; you’ve become that character. The feature film might have an entirely different protagonist, someone who is only tertiary to the video game. But if the protagonist in the movie makes a callback, sending out some kind of acknowledgment to the videogame character or his/her experience, the immersion in the fictional world is deepened and the connection to the overall narrative is reinforced. And that’s where transmedia is going–if complementary story platforms are effectively coordinated, transmedia may promise the richest, most immersive story experience ever known.

Of course, to write transmedia effectively, you need to understand what works and what doesn’t on different platforms. Just as television typically makes use of closer shots, telling less spectacle-driven stories than you might see in a feature film, so every other platform has its strengths and weaknesses. A story told on your mobile phone can offer incredible intimacy. If the murderer from a thriller calls you up, you’re going to notice. But mobile phones are also used in small frenzied snatches of time– much less say, than the typical allotment a gamer might give a console videogame. Likewise, people’s YouTube habits dictate that webisodes need to be short; a writer needs to get in and get out fast.

Writers will need to connect very consciously the storylines and limitations and audience expectations inherent in the platform.

Please see the print edition of the magazine for the full article and much much more.