Transmedia Storytelling, Social Games and Hollywood
Ideas March 26, 2010
Courtesy of Jerome Kashetsky
Last week, DigiBC and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT)–in production with a handful of other partners like Emily Carr, Telefilm Canada and the CFTPA–presented some of Los Angeles’ biggest social media experts and personalities to a sold-out Vancouver crowd. The workshop was appropriately titled, “Social Networking in Transmedia Hollywood: A Strategic Masterclass.” The gist? The discussion formed around the landscape of transmedia storytelling in Hollywood: How is it different from a traditional story arc? What does this mean for producers, biz people, game designers, artists and marketing strategists? How is TV and film content being consumed as new media platforms like Facebook, mobile and social networks proliferate? What does the economic incentive look like for content creators in this world? (Show us the money, por favor!) And lastly, how can we actively involve and engage the audience through transmedia storytelling?
As we’re always glad to participate in forums that deal with socialization on the web, this event was a natural fit for us. In particular, we were interested to hear (and offer our thoughts to content creators) about what the experts thought about monetizing content–in the context of social games and entertainment properties–through micro-transactions. Gregory Markel, an SEO expert from Infuse Creative (@infusecreative) echoed our sentiments that micro-transactions are great way to generate revenue. He agreed that using “non-cash transactions,” in particular, to keep audiences engaged was something more businesses needed to think about. We mentioned this concept in an earlier post, but essentially, in “non-cash transactions,” a player doesn’t directly pay money directly to the content producer, but performs some task for which the producer/advertisers/game designers indirectly get paid. The most obvious example would be the “offers” delivered by SuperRewards or one of the other CPA networks, but broaden the view and it could be any number of tasks within the game that adds value for other players, sponsors, or the game developer. We think the implications of applying the techniques built and perfected by the free to play, micropayment based, games to more traditional media content are potentially huge, especially as traditional advertising revenues continue plummeting.
Personally, I felt that there were shared anxieties from businesses about creating content that could (and would) appeal to the different target audiences on different platforms. The ways in which businesses can measure success on these new platforms was also something that many people wanted to know about. (To RT or not to RT?) How did the experts address these issues? Darcy Jouan, President of Slam Internet, a company that develops online content for CBS’s television show the “Ghost Whisperer” offered great insight for content creators. He recommended developing companion content to existing brands (TV or film). He believed however, that the challenge for content creators was staying consistent in storytelling through new platforms (so to extend the franchise or help build brand equity). As he explained, in many instances stories are re-purposed and repeated from their original form to a new platform and this doesn’t work all the time. Peter Huh, Co-Founder of Vimation and Shira Lazar (@shiralazar), an Emmy nominated “Media Empress” both emphasized the importance of online video. They stressed that videos needed to be presented in a more authentic way, as this could lead to audience engagement that builds a stronger brand overall.
While I would agree with many of the points raised, I think that one (exhilarating or terrifying, depending on your point of view) challenge for content creators that remains that there are as yet no rules for how you come up with a transmedia story arc from the ground up. How do you ensure the movies, video games, smart phone applications, books, and other media are appropriately weighed and all necessary elements are there to form the whole story? Based on the latest news from Hollywood about transmedia storytelling, I think we’re not the only ones thinking about this. What do you think of this space and the potential it holds? As always, we’d love to hear from you so drop us a line.
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Great points about the difference between a transmedia narrative and a non-transmedia narrative.
There were conflicting points of view presented at last week’s ‘Transmedia, Hollywood S/Telling’ conference about just this. While many Hollywood creatives are actively pushing transmedia storytelling projects from inception, Diane Nelson (head of DC Comics) said she preferred NOT to hear project pitches that were presented as built for transmedia rollouts. For her, the story (singular) came first, not the world of stories (plural) – she preferred to gauge the viability of transmedia extensions based on the success of the initial offering.
And that’s the big difference between transmedia storytelling and much of the rest of entertainment. Transmedia storytelling involves the creation of a *world* in which multiple stories are told across multiple mediums and platforms. It’s not the same story ported across mediums.
Can you extend a single movie/TV show/comic into a transmedia storytelling experience post-release? Absolutely.
Can you create a transmedia storytelling property that launches multiple stories simultaneously across multiple platforms? Absolutely.
But the latter is infinitely harder than the former, both from a narrative perspective and a production standpoint.
And understanding the difference between narrative extensions of the story/world (which contribute meaningfully to a new understanding of the world) and marketing extensions of the brand/property (which can help build community but do not necessarily contribute to world narrative) is important when you construct your rollout (though ideally, all marketing efforts are narrative extensions…ideally).
One option is to have long tent-pole content (often called the mothership) shouldering the large world narrative arcs. The tent-pole content is both supported by and contributes to the smaller story-level arcs that can play out across other mediums (think Battlestar Galactica webisodes that drill down through smaller sub-plots that were not or could not be covered in the TV show).
Focusing on the tent-pole content and using it as a springboard to identify where it makes sense to explore new world narratives through other mediums (with an eye towards matching the strengths of each particular medium with the story being told) is a good way to start with a rich world setting that has the potential for transmedia storytelling while not committing to a transmedia rollout at launch.
[...] A blog entry about our recent Social Media session in partnership with DigiBC can be found here: http://www.ayogo.com/2010/03/26/transmedia-storytelling-social-games-and-hollywood-2/ [...]