Tools for Transmedia part four - MyHistro and Magma

Screenshot from MyHistro

MyHistro - telling stories in a new way

I just stumbled upon an Estonian startup called MyHistro, which looks a bit interesting from a transmedia point of view. The idea is to tell stories, but to do it in a new and more social way. What you do is you sign up (it’s in open Beta, so go ahead and try it out) and start creating your MyHistro. It is an event-based way of telling stories, where you create your different events (you can check my test-event of a trip from Helsinki to Vaasa here), geotag with Google Maps interaction, add comments, pictures and YouTube videos as you please, and arrange these in the desired chronological order. Anyone viewing can then ”play” your story, which takes the viewer through the events with the possibility of stopping to read more, examine photos or suchlike.

Now, the ones using MyHistro at the moment are for the most part people trying it out – there are stories about Manchester Utd:s football games, one story from a person training for a ski competition later this year and so on. But for a transmedia producer, this tool could come in handy.

Firstly, it could be used to tell the development of your property in the real world. I would, for instance, love to follow the shooting of the crowdsourced Iron Sky movie via a service like this, instead of reading a blog or Timo’s tweets, as they move from Germany to Australia and onwards.

Secondly, as a part of a narrative, it could very nicely blur the lines between reality and fiction. A series like Lowlifes (which I thoroughly recommend everyone to check out) could perhaps have used this as an additional way of telling one side of the story. Just about anything set in the real world could use MyHistro to let a fictional character tell a story in a new and interesting way.

The stories are, of course, instantly shareable on the most important social platforms.

Magma - publishing made easier?

The second service that could be interesting from a transmedia point of view is Magma from Denmark. It is not possible for me to recommend this service yet, as I have not tried it out – it’s a 30 day free trial, but I have not yet started one – but on the surface it looks handy. Magma is about publishing for instance a magazine or a book. It lets you ”simplify your flatplanning, organize your content and resources” and the most important from my point of view ”Collaborate on content creation and keep track of photos, files and text.”

In a transmedia world where many (me included, if it fits the project in question) advocates the publishing of a graphic novel or similar, to enhance the value of your content and establish the mythology/canon in a more tangible form, Magma looks like a tool that might be useful. I have been looking at collaborating with people from all over the world on different projects, and Magma might just be the tool for that. I will get back with a fuller review once I’ve had the chance to use the service.