Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

How to develop television shows for a social and multiplatform world

2012-01-26T12:17:00.002+02:00

The other day I spent 23 minutes watching a video from the BBC. It was 23 quite well spent minutes, as the journalist inquestion – Rory-Cellan Jones – had devoted quite a lot of effort to his subject, that ofthe future of television. The video features interviews with people fromMicrosoft, Google, Dijit, even Robert Scoble. The talks are all about how toharness the allure and the pull of television in a social and connectedcontext, and in the end of course how to make money from it all.

What the video shows, is that there are a lotof interesting ventures out there; Google TV, connected TV sets, lots of appsfor iPads and iPhones and Android gear and so on. But it also, quite clearly,shows that no one has really ”gotten it” yet. When, for instance, talking aboutconnected tv sets, the challenge is to get the masses to actually connect thesets, to see the benefits of doing so and have the benefits outweigh thediscomfort of actually having to go through the hassle of connecting the setsand using them for something else than plain viewing.

Here is where I see that tv program and formatdevelopers have quite a challenging task ahead of them. Content is King is theold rallying cry for the creative industries. Context is even more King, issomething that has been argued lately, especially if talking aboutmultiplatform, cross media and transmedia. Now, what we need to do, is createcompelling content in the right context and infuse it with that sprinkling ofmagic that will make it near impossible to resist as a connected, socialexperience.

Peter Cashmore of Mashable wrote a piece for CNN the other week, where he talked about today’s television hits not being”Must-See” television, but rather ”Must–Tweet” television; i.e. the sort oftelevision show that craves interaction – if not with the show itself, then atleast with other people experiencing the same thing right then. This worksfairly well with large live shows; the final of Idol, Champions League games infootball, the Eurovision Song Contest and so on. The challenge then, is how to createthis craving to interact, comment, laugh and scowl (which admittedly sometimesis more interesting than the show itself) for other types of shows? Well, Ipropose – admittedly from my limited point of view but nevertheless – fourpoints to take into consideration when designing, re-designing and developingtelevision shows for a social and connected world:

1. Create the foundations forsuccess. For many companies the first step will be to pull down the silosbetween different departments and make people talk to each other and actuallymake an effort to understand each other and see everything in the same light.For a successful multiplatform tv-based project to work, the programdevelopment people must make themselves understood to the tech people and themarketing people, and the tech and marketing people must make their realitiesstick with the development people. All else is simply counterproductive.

2. Do a lot of research and build on success (or failure).Andrea Phillips is quite rightly adamant in insisting that one does oneself adisservice by not looking at what has already been produced and distributed.There is absolutely no shame in standing on the shoulders of others; indeed,many of the best innovations, also in the media and television business, areprojects inspired by earlier failures or successes. From my own experience Iknow that almost whatever you try to create, someone has already thought of it.Which is all good and well, as you can use this to make your own project better…

3. Consider applyingtransmedia storytelling methods. Not every show should go transmedia, not everyshow should even be true multiplatform. They can still generate a buzz, stillbuild a hype, but do not need to go all the way. But for the ones that do gomultiplatform, applying transmedia storytelling methods will be of use toeveryone involved in the development and production and distribution parts ofthe process. As transmedia is based on developing a thorough background,storyworld, mythology and narrative superstructure, this will help immenslywhen trying to implement point 1 above – getting everyone to see the sameproject and understanding the same thing and work together towards a commongoal. It will help in the development process of any kind of television show,it will give pointers to where entry points can be implemented to invite anaudience to participate, it will assist in developing story archs and characters,it will help when keeping multiplatform content coherent and logicallyconnected between all parts… it’s all good, basically.

4. Listen and respond. This is one strengththat, say, a weekly game show has over a multi-million dollar drama series fromHBO. It is possible to listen to what people say and discuss on social mediaand use that to tweak the show. Also make sure there is staff dedicated to thejob – if someone has a great idea for the show on Twitter, respond! Drop a lineto say ”hey, can we call you to hear you out on that idea?”. No one knows whatgems might be unearthed…

I’d love discussion on this, so comment hereor hit me up on Twitter (or in person, if I’m at the same conference as you).More and better multiplatform / transmedia content for the people!

The Transmedia Beat

2012-01-16T23:40:00.002+02:00

As some of you might have noticed, I published”One Year in Transmedia” a couple of weeks ago, a curation of this blogcombined with a number of interviews with some really intelligent and creativepeople in the field of transmedia. In one of the answers – ”What instrument doyou see yourself playing in the transmedia orchestra?” – Andrea Phillips wrotesomething that got me thinking. She answered:

[…]I'd say percussion. I'm the inexorabledrumbeat that keeps each section on time and coordinated as the symphony playsout. With no beat, the rest of it kind of falls apart, doesn't it? And even inplaces where there is no drumming, the section is still an invisible presenceas the rhythm keeping time in your head. That's me!

This feels very true to me. If you talk about transmedia, oneof the most interesting challenges is how to engage the audience in whateveryou are trying to offer them, and once engaged, how to keep them engaged. Inthis, the “beat” that Andrea describes above feels absolutely crucial. Talkingabout rhythm it all makes even more sense:

Rhythm - Rhythm is made up of sounds and silences. These sound and silencesare put together to form patterns of sounds which are repeated to create arhythm. A rhythm has a steady beat, but it may also have different kinds ofbeats.

So you have the sounds of your transmediaproperty – the videos, the web sites, the blogs, the social media output and soon – developed and produced and distributed in order to catch the imaginationof your target audience and hook them to your story and your content. Then youhave the silences of your property. Some might call them ”sandboxes”, some”cheese holes”; they’re the parts of your story and your content that simplyare not there yet.

If you’ve designed your property and storywell and hooked your audience, this is where they engage themselves to contribute,create and communicate. It doesn’t matter if it’s an ARG or a treasure huntonline, if it’s contributing to a book or a graphic novel or if it’s somethingcompletely different. These silences are where you give your audience twosticks and a drum, and ask them to keep the beat going. It’s a possibility tobe genuinely amazed by the skill and the devotion and the creativity of theones who engage themselves.

Personally I feel the studies of the art of composing andcreating for a number of instruments bear a lot of resemblance, at the veryleast on a philosophical level, to the work of a transmedia producer, creatorand storyteller. Just look at one of the definitions of the specific term”upbeat”:

Anunaccented beat or beats that occur before the first beat of thefollowing measure. In other words, this is an impulse in a measured rhythm that immediatelyprecedes, and hence anticipates, the downbeat. It can be the last beat ina bar wherethat bar precedes a new bar of music. 3. The upward stroke made by a conductor to indicate the beat that leadsinto a new measure.

Anyone else feel this is a good definition ofone of the transmedia conductor’s important tasks? The task to get everyone’sattention and point to what’s coming next, to make sure the orchestra plays insync and the audience stays onboard.

I think I’m going to study some more music :).

2012? Bring it on!

2011-12-31T14:35:00.003+02:00

A year draws to an end and another one beckonsaround the corner, luring us in (as if we had a choice!) with promises ofunexplored territories, tears and laughter, friends and foes and a full 366days of shaping our own lives.

Most of what my 2011 has been about – at leastin a professional sense – is possible to read in the publication ”One Year In Transmedia” that was made availablefor free download yesterday. I won’t go into history further, except to way agenuinely heartfelt Thank You, to everyone I’ve met, talked to, Skyped with,had drinks with, tweeted with, chatted with, blog post commentated with… Thetribe that is the transmedia tribe is a trible overflowing with creativity,kindness, curiosity and quite a huge appetite for learning. I’m very happy tocall myself a member of this tribe.

Looking forward to 2012 I read and watched agreat post on a series of interviews with radio personality Ira Glass. Theadvice is simple, yet profound.

"Youwill be fierce. You will be a warrior...and you will make things that aren't asgood as you know in your heart you want them to be… and you'll just make oneafter another..."

Do listen to the series, it’s great stuff.

This is the advice I will take to heart for2012. I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist, not compared to the perfectionstsI know, but I have a hard time not working a little bit more… and a little bitmore… and a little bit more… before I even contemplate releasing something.With transmedia projects, this becomes multiplied, as there are more variablesto take into consideration, more strands of a story and a story world to workinto perfection, more technical possibilities to explore and evaluate…

So this is what I’ll try to do in 2012.Release more often. Fail more often, correct more often. Take feedback moreoften, evolve more often.

Here’s to a great 2012. Hope to meet you allthere, at some point.

One Year in Transmedia, second edition

2011-12-30T00:22:00.004+02:00

This is the second edition of the curation of this blog that I published a little over a month ago. I felt it was pretty incomplete without the voices of some of the other people in the field as well, so I decided to ask some questions of some people I felt were the right people to answer these questions. The result is here - the second edition, free for download under a Creative Commons license (just click the pic below to go to the Cloud App download).

Transmedia in Television

2011-11-18T08:57:00.001+02:00

It was with great joy I read Lisa Hsia’s(Bravo Digital Media) article over at Mashable yesterday. Entitled ”HowTransmedia Storytelling Is Changing TV”, it struck directly to the core of myprofessional life – the merging of television with transmedia storytellingmethods, meaningful multiplatform content, coherent strategies for development,production and distribution and a will to look beyond traditional models andinto an inevitable crowd-participation future. Lisa was talking at Storyworld a couple of weeks ago and my guess is that we will be seeinga lot of interesting stuff from Bravo during the coming years.

Lisa brings up some examples; Bravo’s own TopChef, Syfy’s Defiance (which I must admit I haven’t gotten the chance to check outyet) and Tim Kring’s new Kiefer Sutherland-powered Touch, out next year. She quite correctly states that the audienceis already social, already on many platforms, already expecting more than amere television show; the only thing therefore that makes sense is to fishwhere the fish are, and strive to create as exciting and as great (and as logical and as much”Hey, this makes sense!”) content as possible.

It is, however, the two last paragraphs in thearticle that I find the most interesting. Lisa, as Jeff Gomez did at Storyworld, talks about ”collaborative socialstorytelling”, where the fans can ”further the plot in a pervasive, meaningfulway”.

I fully agree that this is a sort of Utopiafor any developer and writer and producer of television content. Having theaudience engage to such a degree that they can collaborate in a meaningful wayto further a plot they are engaged in, will make the audience instantambassadeurs for your brand or content (unless you’re hoaxing them, and thenthe backlash might be severe). Looking at today’s television landscape, thisdoes not yet really exist.

The talent shows, for instance, engage peoplevia SMS (to influence, in a minimal way, how the plot evolves) and as a stormof comments on social media (which influences the outcome not a bit). The fewexperiments when the audience have had the chance to impact the evolvement of adrama / fiction on television or elsewhere have either been too difficult toproduce or ended up in a bad way, since the audience might decide a lot ofstupid things just for laughs (or, to put it more correctly, for the LULZ). Theexample of Mad Men is a welcome change from that, as viewers take on the MadMen characters on Twitter and handle them with utmost care, keeping in linewith the story world and narrative superstructure of Mad Men.

What I’ve derived from this is that, ascreators, we need to plan for the long haul. And when I say long haul, I meanlooooooooooooong haul. I.e., do not create a television series, brand ittransmedia, open up sandboxes for the audience and expect them to come over andplay nice. What everyone who creates new television shows must do, is createwith audience interaction always in sync with the rest of the development andbuilt on transmedia storytelling methods. Then, when the show gets commissioned,do the first season WITHOUT any transmedia elements. Heck, do the second seasontoo, without any transmedia elements.

After two seasons you should have amasseddata and feedback enough to a) have a firm grasp of what your audience wants todo with you and your content, b) have found any potential loopholes in yourtransmedia strategy. You have also seen that your series is a good one thatwill get a longer run, so the transmedia implementations are not producedunnecessarily. And, you’ve hopefully built a loyal fan base that knows as muchabout the mythology and story world as you do, and are keen to enforce therules and keep a straight line and a tidy ship, should anyone else try to stirthings up.

Basically – to go fast, you first need to goslow. Or something like that J.

One year in one book

2011-11-17T14:42:00.001+02:00

A brief notification to let you know; I took a long hard look at this blog the other day, read some of my previous posts and sat myself down with Scrivener. A fairly considerable amount of hours later I'd chosen some 1/3 of the posts (with comments, some of them), rewritten them somewhat, divided them into different themes and written introductions to each theme.

The result is a 77-page book / PDF with thoughts, musings, comments, interviews, ramblings and links, from the past 13 months of blogging about transmedia. It's decidedly from my POV, I feel I have to say, and should be read as such.

Here's hoping it might be of use to someone else as well!

Ten Advice for Transmedia Storytellers

2011-11-10T10:35:00.001+02:00

Disclosure – the following post is based on a brilliant list about creative photography that Chase Jarvis put up in October,which in turn was inspired by a post by Guy Kawasaki entitled ”What I learned from Steve Jobs”. What I’ve done is port the ten points Chase made to the fieldof transmedia, as I think they are all pretty crucial points for any creativeindustry – not least transmedia.

Experts aren’t the answer

Well, at least not all of the time. No onewill hold you by the hand and guide you to stardom, infusing you with sublimeknowledge and making you a shed-hot transmedia creator. By all means, do hearthe experts out; many of them have been there and done that. But there’s noneed to blindly heed their advice; it’s you who’re creating your stuff, notthey. One good example is the row this week over the so-called ”Transmedia Manifest”, a manifesto which IMHO would make for limited transmediadevelopment, if it was a guide that had to be followed.

Clients cannot tell you what they need

This is true in many creative fields; nonemore so than transmedia. Nevermind that many clients don’t even have viablesocial media strategies in place yet; dumping transmedia storytelling methodsin their lap and expecting them to make the correct calls all through thedevelopment and production process is to be inviting a major headache. Yourclients hire you to provide them with something. Do listen to them – it’s theirmoney and their property – but in the end, it’s you who have been hired tocreate kick-ass transmedia content. And if you’re good enough to have beenhired, you’re probably good enough to do the job.

Don’t aim for ”better”, aim for ”different”

(here I’ll just quote Chase straight off, ashis point is brilliantly made)

"It’s funny how related “better” and “different” are. If youaim for ‘better’ that usually means you’re walking in the footsteps of someoneelse. There will often be someone better than you, someone making thosefootsteps you’re following… But if you target being different–thinking in newways, creating new things–then you are blazing your own trail. And in blazingyour own trail, making your own footprints, you are far more likely to findyourself being ‘better’ without even trying. Better becomes easy because it’sreally just different. You can’t stand out from the crowd by just being better.You have to be different."

Big challenges create the best work

Strive to get challenges that push you to yourlimits. That’s the only way to become better at what you are doing. If, forsome reason, you don’t get such challenges, the only solution is to giveyourself such challenges. Implement new platforms, try out new ways of tellingyour stories, work on character creation if that’s something you feel you arelacking in, and so on. You want to be on the edge. It's the best place to discover something new.

The aestethics matter

Chase makes his point with regards tophotography, but the same goes for transmedia storytelling. You need to work onyour understanding of storytelling, of platform implementation, of graphics, ofproducing video content, of interacting with an audience in a logical andengaging manner, of handling social media challenges, of composing music,basically everything that is needed in the development and production oftransmedia content. It is crucial to know why one method or one solution is superiorto another; not only to explain to clients, but to yourself and yourdevelopment and production partners as well.

Strive for simplicity

I touched upon this in a previous post – theNOT of transmedia – and Scott Walker talks about the same thing in a post fromlast year regarding the ”gutter”. It’s as much about what you choose NOT to doas about what you actually DO. Just because you can do something, does not meanyou actually should. Simple is beautiful.

Fail fast and learn

There is no point in trying to avoid failureat all cost. If you want to be different, if you want to be great, if you wantto push your limits, you will fail from time to time. What matters is that youlearn from your mistakes and are able to implement the lessons learned in thefuture. This goes for design and development of content as well as for businessand distribution plans, and so on. If you do something and it works, do more ofit. If you do something and it doesn’t work, stop doing it. Re-design. Dosomething else. To quote Einstein on the definition of ”insanity”: ”to do thesame thing over and over again and expect different results.”

Know the difference between price and value

You might be tempted to go cheap to getassignments and deals in place. This might get you those assignments, but it’llbe devastating in the long run. You create valuable content, valuablestrategies, and you should price yourself accordingly. Also, value comes inmany forms – not least in the transmedia field. The value you create will get you the price that you deserve.

If you want to be the best, work with the best

This is simple but true. If you feel you areat the top of your game, you want to partner with people and companies who aretop-notch as well. This is of extreme importance when it comes to transmedia,as partnerships are a crucial part of almost any endeavour, to get all partsdeveloped in sync and produced and distributed accordingly. Ideally, to becomebetter at what you are doing, you’d work with people who are better thanyourself. Only people who aren’t THAT good seek to work with people less giftedthan themselves; in that way they get to shine in comparison. Don’t belong tothat group of people.

Create, and create more

It’s all good to sit around and contemplatedifferent projects, ideas, terms and philosophies. But this will get younowhere if you do not implement this in real projects that have a real,tangible output. Whenever you can create, create. Maybe it won’t be the perfectthing, but it’s the best way to learn and move to new levels of competence.Strive to get your stuff out there.

With that, I will now go create. See you on the battlefield.

The NOT of Transmedia

2011-11-09T14:44:00.001+02:00

Late yesterday evening, as I sat writing on atransmedia mystery/horror novel I like to keep at hand as my own personal petproject – a combination of jet lag and a full moon helps no end when you wantto work nights, see – I had a small revelation.

I had written a couple of pages and felt pretty good about myself, so I startedlooking over the mindmap of all extensions from and to the novel and from andto the story world the novel is based in (and trust me, as with all transmedia projects,these are legio) and a pattern suddenly emerged before me. It had a big fatheadline as well, that pattern – a headline that said ”NOT!”.

You see, as I gazed at the arrows and the dotsand the squares and the texts, I realized that transmedia is as much about whatyou decide NOT to use, as what you eventually end up actually USING. As wasstated at the Storyworld conference – all stories can be developed in atransmedia direction; not nearly all need or deserve it.

If your project does need and deserve to havetransmedia methods applied to them, it is very important to evaluate yourproject from the angle of ”what makes sense”. I.e., even though you’ve alreadyregistered the YouTube channel and you really want to produce them awesomewebisodes and put them out there – if all your project needs is a blog, anautomated e-mail response system and a novel, then that’s what your projectshould use.

The same goes for interaction with theaudience. I know many who argue that an inherent trait of transmediastorytelling is the activating and incorporating of the audience, inviting themto take an active part in the storytelling. I would disagree, as I believe youcan deliver fullfledged transmedia content without the audience doing much morethan choosing what to consume on which platform. I.e., use UGC or user interactionwhen it makes sense, NOT when it doesn’t!

The list goes on, but I’m sure you get mypoint. Your transmedia project will be defined as much by what you did NOTutilize within the scope of it as by what you DID utilize.

Best of luck :)

MIPCOM Panel

2011-11-09T13:53:00.001+02:00

I totally forgot to add it here: I was invited to sit in on the MIPBloggers Roundup Panel at MIPCOM 2011 - the very last session of the conference, and - IMHO - an hour of pretty open talks about the industry as a whole, "buzzwords" like transmedia, important deals and so on. Great fun! Here's the video:

Storyworld and the Real World - Five Thoughts

2011-11-07T11:43:00.001+02:00

So, an almost overwhelming week at Storyworldin San Francisco is over, jet lag is slowly fading, the heaps of work await andit’s time to take stock of what was learned during the conference. From my POV,as a creator and developer of tv formats – multiplatform, cross media,transmedia ones – here are a couple of points:

The transmedia crowd is a fine one

I’ve been involved in enough startups ofdifferent kinds to know what it’s like; the feeling of unity, the stage that Michel Reilhac called the ”Rebel Stage” of ”Us vs Them” (that in all fairness is now givingway to the Pioneering Stage where we’ll see more acceptance of the movement,best practices being carved out, and a route set to finally enter the BusinessStage). It’s a good stage to be in, no matter that everyone’s definition of”transmedia” differs somewhat from everyone else’s. What I like the most,however, is that most people involved in transmedia readily acknowledge thatwe’re better off thinking about ”Us AND Them” from the outset, a realizationthat can take other types of movement ages to achieve. Not to mention the factthat all the people I met at Storyworld were quite brilliant in their own wayand a genuine pleasure to meet and talk to.

Non-fiction transmedia is on fewradars

Most of the examples and most of the talks atthe conference centered around transmedia based in fiction. Of the examplesthat were presented during the speed pitches at lunch on Monday and Tuesday,only Storm Surfers could be described as non-fiction – OTOH, the backgroundstory on that show was more fleshed out that most of the fictional ones. Now,don’t get me wrong, I enjoy good fiction as much as anyone, both when it comesto creating and to consuming or experiencing. Still, I would have liked somemore talks on and examples of non-fiction transmedia; documentaries, televisionformats, non-fiction art etc. Creating transmedia formats for television, forinstance, is a process that brings with it a bunch of demands not encounteredwhen dealing with transmedia fiction; the need to be able to repeat for season uponseason, the need for financial sustainability, the need to find a backgroundstory to hook the transmediated content on…. Perhaps at SWC12?

Howzabout the audience?

I was extremely thankful to many of the peopleon different panels – Liz Rosenthal for instance – for insisting that we do notforget the audience at any time. I totally agree; having worked in traditionalmedia for 10-odd years, in radio for many of them and developing 50-odd showsduring those years; keeping close tabs on your audience and involving them asoften as possible is very much key. Acknowledging this, I would have thoughtit’d be interesting to invite someone representing the audience, or someone doingaudience / UX research to the conference? Again, perhaps next year we’ll see apanel of two-three avid ARG-players/ transmedia audience members paired withone or two researchers in the field, that could talk on transmedia from ”theother side”? As I stated above, the transmedia crowd is a fabulous one, but wemight be a bit environmentally damaged…

The art of getting lawyered up

The collective gloom that set in during thepanel on the importance of getting lawyers in would have been funny if it hadn’tbeen such a serious subject. Now, the panel members might have been bangingtheir own drum – I’ll not get into that debate – but the truth is, you can’tcover all your bases while producing and distributing transmedia contentwithout legal advice. Still, there is absolutely no need to pay thousands ofdollars to an established Hollywood lawyer, unless that is exactly what youneed. I would argue that anyone doing transmedia projects – or any kind ofcreative work – would be better off starting out with a project that is not ofuttermost importance to them, i.e. not the work of their lives, the one projectthat they burn utterly for. With a less important project, it is possible tomake all the mistakes, take note of them and make a better effort the secondtime around. Simon Pulman wrote a good post on this matter, from a USpoint-of-view, but most of the points are viable for transmedia people in otherterritories as well.

Network of networks

The meetup of meetups was interesting, asthere are quite a few meetups happening in the name of transmedia around theworld. I know there are a lot of efforts being made at the moment to get allthese in touch – which many of them already are – and create new ones wherethere is a void to be filled. For my own part I’d be looking to help create aTransmedia Nordic meetup, as we have quite a few practicioners, researchers andstudents active in the field. On another level, I’d be looking to see if aTransmedia Europe meetup could be organized, perhaps as a annual event. And,naturally, people from other territories would be more than welcome. Perhaps inthe context of some other happening, such as the Pixel Market orTedxTransmedia? Let’s talk, Liz, Nicoletta, Karine and everyone else who's interested!

All other thoughts I had, regardingdevelopment, distribution, partnerships etc, are things I’ll write about a bitlater as I force my mind to put them into the right context. Will keep you allposted!

Thank you all who were involved. It was anabsolute pleasure to meet you all. Looking forward to next year already! And,yes, thanks Alison, for pulling all of this together! Brilliant!

Guest post: Transmedia - Lessons learned

2011-10-24T17:43:00.005+03:00

The following is a guest post by Lucas J.W. Johnson from Silverstring Media in Vancouver. It's about trying to launch a project, realizing when to pull the plug, and using the experience to try anew. It resonates with me and some of the stuff I've worked on over the years; key is to fail, and fail often - and learn from your mistakes. With that, I'll leave the floor to Lucas:

Azrael's Stop

Back in January, I decided I wanted to start a transmedia project, something that I could get out there and start building a following. By then the call to “stop talking and start doing” had already begun, and I was eager to do it. And I wanted something that would be easy to start up and easy to maintain while I worked on other projects. In February, the beginning of Azrael’s Stop was released on the world.

A few months later, I found that the project just wasn’t where I wanted it to be. It didn’t have much of a following, I’d found a lot of problems with how I’d set it up, and I was starting to feel like I was producing sub-par content just to have content. So I pulled the plug and Azrael’s Stop went on hiatus.

I knew that I wanted to bring it back, though. Once I figured out how to fix all the problems -- which might either involve a previously nonexistent budget, or a lot of work. But slowly I’ve been building up those resources and preparing for a return -- a return which is now happening, next week, on November 1st.

The process has been an interesting one, and I think makes for a good case study in planning and execution for transmedia or digital media properties.

The Plan

The original plan for Azrael’s Stop hinged on a few key ideas. I wanted it to be something I could (1) start quickly and (2) upkeep easily, with (3) little budget but (4) the potential to make money.

(1) and (2) led me to the idea of Twitter fiction. Daily self-contained stories that fit within a tweet. Each would be about the same characters over time so they built up a world, but would be self-contained enough that you could theoretically jump in any time. I could write 140 characters a day, and do it for free. Twitter would also make it easy to share, easy to measure followers, and free to use. I also felt it was important that I wasn’t asking a lot of my audience -- I wasn’t asking them to give me hours of their time, just about 20 words of reading a day. I also wasn’t asking for money up front.

This stream of fiction would then be augmented by occasional bonus content. This might be a full short story, or a piece of in-world music, or maybe a video or little game. These would add to the story but not be necessary to it, but would provide deeper engagement for those who wanted it. And I would sell them for, say, 99 cents a pop -- to pay for their production, and ideally make a little money.

It’s the typical indie transmedia business plan -- free first level to bring in an audience, with deeper engagement at a price. The theory was all there.

I came up with a cool story -- the setting is a bar called Azrael’s Stop, where people are mystically led when they’re ready to die. The bartender is a 17-year-old kid who’s seen a lot of death and is struggling to deal with it. the story is about him and the people who come to the Stop.

I figured I was set.

The Result

The promise of using social media as a way to distribute or promote content is the potential for it to go viral and reach a large audience, and that was something I was subconsciously counting on. Because for any of my plans to really work, I needed an audience -- the common statistic for freemium business models is that 1-20% of your audience will be willing to pay for things. To quote Jayne from Firefly, ten percent of nothing is, let me do the math here, nothing into nothing, carry the nothing...

I was counting on the adage “build it and they will come.” And frankly, that’s just not true. They still have to hear about it, and my first mistake was assuming that my available networks -- Facebook, Twitter, word of mouth -- would be enough to get the seed audience to let it take off. But beyond talking about it a bit, I did no real marketing or publicizing.

Mistake number two, as Dr. Christy Dena points out in her video “7 Things”, is that your peers are not necessarily your audience. They’re all working on their own stuff, and while they might offer an RT here or there, they’re less likely to be your huge fans -- the huge fans that will pay for content and spread your project far and wide.

But even were I to find some audience and get some eyes -- and I did, to some extent; I had about 50 followers on Twitter when I pulled the plug, which isn’t nobody (how many were bots? don’t know) -- there were underlying structural problems that actively worked against audience expansion and retention.

The first was a problem with the premise -- if I’m only providing tiny pieces of content so you don’t have to spend a lot of time with my project, then you’re not spending a lot of time with my project. You might read a piece in the fleeting stream of tweets and immediately forget about it. Even if you wanted more, there was precious little to engage you.

Pieces of fiction that short have other limitations -- no room to describe people, for instance. So it was very hard to visualize the storyworld.

Twitter itself became a barrier to entry -- individual tweets could get lost in the stream easily, and as much as we digital types might love it, a whole lot of people still don’t use it or understand it. “You just have to go to the profile page and scroll down!” fell on deaf ears. After two months, I finally added Facebook to deliver the same content, something I should have done from the start, but it never garnered that much interest either. It was too hard to figure out what was going on; it was too hard to care.

I made other mistakes. In an attempt to harvest an email list of fans, I made it so you’d have to sign up to access the archives on my blog, which was just creating a barrier to entry for people to check out the story. I tried running a contest to engage the audience and attract more fans, but that still requires an audience to start (I promised the top 10 entries a prize; I got five entries -- which, interestingly, hit the 10% of my followers rule). I gave away a song as the prize, which meant that the only people who might have been willing to pay for it already had it (“It’s creative commons, people will share and remix and it will spread!”). And by month four, I felt I was being too rushed, just trying to keep up with content no one was reading and monthly bonus content no one was paying for. The project was getting away from me. So I pulled the plug.

The Redo

But I wasn’t giving up. I needed time, I needed to figure a lot out and do a lot of work, but I knew I wanted to bring Azrael’s Stop back. But first I had to fix it.

Step 1: Twitter wasn’t good enough. I needed a dedicated blog/website with an RSS feed, and without the slightly-too-constraining 140 character limit; somewhere people could land and consume content and find out more. I also wanted to be as many places as possible -- to not be losing audience just because they’re not on Twitter. So I got a website designer to collaborate with and put up azraelsstop.com; the content will also be available daily on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, and monthly archives on a host of other sites like Wattpad and Scribd.

Step 2: I also needed enough content from the start to draw people in, something that would set up the world and story before being restricted to microfiction. So I wrote an introductory story, a prologue that introduced the characters and setting and hopefully make you care for them. I also collaborated with a couple of artists to have some more artwork associated with the project, to help bring it to life for the audience.

Step 3: Plan. Edit. Raise the quality of the project. Keeping it as something I could do quickly and easily must not stand in the way of quality.

Planning out the entirety of the rest of the project also allows me to know what’s coming when something might require extra production time. And it lets me say that the project will come to an end after one year -- I’m not asking my audience for some unspecified time commitment. And if it’s successful, I can still do spin-offs or future “seasons”. (The storyworld is certainly rich enough for it, as I’m planning to use it for future projects anyway.)

Step 4: Make it as easy as possible for the audience. Any time you put a tiny barrier in, you lose audience. The website will feature a little teaser video, an explanation of what the project is, and a breakdown of where to start -- either full archives where you can easily get all the available content, or a quick summary of the story so far so you can just jump right in if you want instead. I’m trying to make all information and content as easy to find and access as possible.

I’m also removing the paywall completely -- even the bonus content will be available to everyone for free. What does this mean for the business plan, though? Well, I’m a little less concerned about making money than experimenting with the form and finding an audience. But at the end of the project, I will create and (probably self-)publish a collection of all the content (with a bit extra), which I will then sell. An e-book, and album, and maybe some more stuff I have up my sleeve.

Step 5: Market. Get the project out there more. Get it in front of people. Talk it up in guest posts. ^_^

* * *

You can’t count on social media to do your work for you. You can’t rush into something and assume it will work.

Look at it from an audience perspective. Imagine all of your possible audience members. Build it for them.

Make a quality product, and spread it widely.

And always keep re-evaluating the project. Fix it if it’s broken. Who knows, maybe I’ll be back here in four months, with new lessons learned.

Azrael’s Stop will re-launch on November 1st at azraelsstop.com.

Disciplines merging in transmedia

2011-10-18T10:25:00.007+03:00

One of the most interesting and at the same time most challenging aspects of transmedia is getting everything to gel flawlessly. It was pretty hard back in the days of interactive television (try telling an MHP programmer that the interactive set-top-box-game he was programming would need to a) look like the rest of the graphics on the show and feel like a natural part of the show, b) be confined to a certain part of the screen abd a certain size to accommodate for video feed on rest of the screen and c) take the show into consideration, not just work on its’ own…phew!) and it’s still a pretty daunting proposition.

It’s extremely important to identify which platforms make sense to use when developing a transmedia project. This in and of itself will give you some minor headaches. Why not use all of them? You really should build an app, or should you? It is a process that needs to be done, and done thoroughly. Will you be launcing and ARG of some kind? Will you have live events? Are you looking at drama webisodes, or do you need television or newspapers or even billboards to cut through to your audience? How about social media, e-mail and so on? The better you know your story (and your target audience!), the better you can choose platforms. The better and quicker you choose platforms, the easier you will have to find the right people to partner with, another crucial part of any transmedia project.

In a post called The Transmedia Manifest the so called High Flyers group, appointed by the Frankfurt Book Fair, took a look at how stories will be taught in the future. It’s a good manifest, encompassing most of the features that make transmedia methods so effective to use in a disrupted media landscape. The 11th thesis of the manifest reads:

Collaborative work
The story-universe is developed in collaboration by a versatile and interdisciplinary team, whose range of skills can meet the demands of experience-based storytelling.

In my book, all the other points of the manifest are dependant on this one. There will be no intriguing multiplatform story, if you can’t get the right people in to produce, program and create for the different platforms. There will be no ”taking advantage of the strenghts of a medium” if you or someone else your team does not fully understand and master the different media that are to be used.

Nick DeMartino wrote an interesting article the other day, looking at transmedia through the goggles of classic media scolar Marshall McLuhan. His pronouncement that ”the medium is the message” is one that media students all around the world have been indoctrinated with for decades, and in many a way it’s still an apt description of where we are today. That makes it even more crucial to create partnerships around the development of a transmedia project, to fully understand the media involved and thereby be able to convey the message, the story.

To wrap up this short post, I’ll readily acknowledge that things are not as bad as they were some 5-6 years ago, when my role as a creator and producer to a large extent meant acting as a translator between writers/directors and programmers. Today most writers and directors (at least those who have been working with multiplatform content development) understand the importance of knowing the possibilities and limitations of other media platforms outside their own main field of interest. Vice versa, most programmers can look at examples and best practices from previous campaigns and see how the tech and the software can bring about a much more engaging and immersive experience if integrated with the story from the beginning, taking into account all the demands and the possibilities the story and the mythology brings with them to the table.

And to finally conclude; if I could wish for one little thing, it’d be something like the collaborative film community at Wreckamovie, only for transmedia projects. Anyone?

MIPCOM 2011 roundup

2011-10-07T09:16:00.000+03:00

Packing my bags, ready to leave MIPCOM behind for yet another year. Cannes surprised us all with a weather more like mid-July than early October, although as I look out to sea now, some sort of autumn storm is churning up waves and whipping the palms around quite mercilessly.

I don’t know if it was the weather or something else, but this market lacked a lot of the doom and gloom that had been prevalent at most of the MIPs since 2008. Back then we were heading into the unknown of a recession and everyone had their wallets in a tight grip; this year people were a lot more upbeat, seeing possibilities and doling out money in a steady flow. Which is a bit strange, as we’re heading into yet another recession… but on the other hand, TV viewing figures are up, brands are obviously spending, it wasn’t as bad as feared last time around, so psychologically speaking it makes sense, I guess.

To highlight some of the stuff over the week I managed to catch over the week – and we had so many meetings over the week that I missed most of the sessions, (un?)fortunately – the most obvious one is that the term ’2nd screen’ is exciting to most people. It is quite possible that the fact that people are on a mobile device of some sort – be it smartphone, tablet or laptop – while watching tv, is a fact that has finally penetrated the mind of most people in the business. Perhaps they’ve watched their own kids while they watch tv? The only thing I know is, ’2nd screen’ was the buzzword of MIPCOM 2011.

To this I might add that our lab did studies on interactivity during a tv show – we did the first interactive quiz show in Finland, with set top box interactivity and Javabased interactivity for smartphones, back in 2004 – studies that clearly showed that people felt more engaged with a tv show if they were interactive via a set top box. They felt more personal, but also more detached, if they did the exact same interaction on a smartphone. That says something for connected TVs, I guess, but at the same time you need to factor in the value of having a personal experience in a group, like a family.

I saw some funky stuff being presented by Ex Machina, the people behind PlayToTV, for interaction via iPhone / iPad etc. They use HTML5 which helps it run on anything (and I think HTML5 is going to change the game plan for many companies over the next year or so. Imagine creating something that doesn’t need to be ported to 1000 different devices, something that just works, the way you intended it? Nice.). I spoke to a company from Wales, Little Lamb, who are doing tv shows paired with watermarked iPad apps for 3-5 year olds, for them to interact with a tv show on iPads together with their parents. It’s all going more and more 2nd screen, more and more interactive…. And let’s not forget ’social’!

The talks at MIP showed that more and more people ’get it’; where ’it’ is the fact that most of our audiences have already moved into a very social space. We – and most importantly our content, what we’re offering – need to find out logical and natural place in the same social space. Not intruding, as you wouldn’t like someone bursting into your house while your there with your friends, promoting some tv series that’ll premiere in a week. Just being there might be enough, so that the step to engage or interact is as short as possible for any possible member of the audience. There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to create word-of-mouth for your stuff; it’s only a matter of doing in the right way. Here, again, honesty is key. Tell what you can tell. Be open with what you can not tell. And have a plan for how to harness the audience you do engage.

Got to run to the airport now, try to fly home in the storm that’s apparently racking the whole of Europe. Until MIP in the spring, or somewhere else!

Some thoughts on crowdfunding

2011-09-13T12:33:00.001+03:00

Last Thursday I attended the webinar ”Transmedia Outsold or Sold Out”, hosted by the people behind the Storyworld Conference. Informative, thought provoking and all around a well spent hour (check out hashtag #swc11 for tweets from the session, or go here to take part of the recorded session (needs e-mail to access)).

There were other people listening to the webinar as well, amongst them Tom Liljeholm from my neighbouring country Sweden. Tom has been involved in The Truth About Marika, in Conspiracy for Good and is now working with new transmedia project The Karada (which btw sounds absolutely fab). Tom asked me if I was going to Storyworld or not. I replied that I’d love to go, but funds weäre not readily available. Tom had the same problem – a burning urge to be at the conference this year where Transmedia would be in utter focus, and that would attract an amazing host of people connected to this form of storytelling, but a serious lack of funds to support such a trip.

I mean, we can bicker on about the definition of transmedia (and I agree that it, for several reasons, public funding one of them, would be good to have a definition to cover all bases) but at this conference chances are some pretty awesome things are going to happen. Not only at the conferences, but at breakfast, at 2.30AM at the Smuggler’s Cove, or somewhere else ☺. Naturally, we want to be there.

The idea sprung within a couple of minutes. ”How about a crowdfunding campaign?” ”…. Well…. Yeah! What is there to lose? Some of our time, perhaps, but who needs sleep anyway? Mead and mushrooms will take us through the next couple of weeks no problem!”

And so the campaign ”Get Tom And Simon To Storyworld” (or ”Where the Wild Vikings Roam” or ”Trip To Transmedia” or a number of other titles) was born.

It’s now on it’s 5th day, and already it’s exceeding expectations. We chose IndieGoGo for no particular reasons (aside that Kickstarter is still closed to non-US ppl). We could have gone with Sposume, or perhaps InvestIn, but IndieGoGo was recommended to us so IndieGoGo it was. We set a goal of 2700$, which is what the actual flights would cost just about, and set it to run for 2 weeks so as not to leave it too late before the actual conference.

Some reflections on the process so far: when crowdfunding, really really think about your perks. What do you want to offer people in return for their support? For us, the Transmedia Viking t-shirt has been the absolute favourite. Perhaps we should’ve gone for the set of underwear as well? Ah, next time ☺.

Also, be prepared to be a bit of a pain in the ass for your social contacts. You WILL be asking for endorsements, for RT:s, for blog posts about your campaign, for just about anything that will give you more exposure. Most people are surprisingly OK with all of this, perhaps because they’ve tried crowdfunding themselves. I will readily say that I for one will always RT the crowdfunding efforts of contacts in the future, and look hard at funding them to some extent as well. It’s a small effort for one person, but it can mean the world for a certain project.

I am looking forward to the next 13 days and hoping for some serious traction and some more funding. I’m already amazed though, as right now we’re at slightly more than 18% funded, so only 82% still to go. Wish us luck!

Our progress so far - actually a little bit to the west of the Faroe Islands right now!

The transmedia format

2011-09-08T14:27:00.000+03:00

I recently stumbled (again) upon this good post by Jason from The Connected Set on why television is an integral part of a transmedia format. Coming from a television background much as Jason, I guess it is no surprise that I agree with him on most of his points.

Television is still very much a powerful player with it comes to getting viewers and audiences engaged in your content. That engagement in turn will generate traction for other parts of your transmedia property – or the other way around, as, for instance, HBO’s Game of Thrones showed this last spring. I wrote a piece for MIPBlog at around the same time, wondering if there was going to exist such a thing as a transmedia format. I wrote at the time:

”The one thing that will be sure to stem the rise of the transmedia format at this year’s MIPFormats and MIPTV is simply the fact that very few formats are transmedia at this point. As more and more projects are initiated, more and more tools are made available and more and more success stories unearthed, however, expect this to change, as transmedia simply offers so many logical and compelling ways to engage consumers more fully into your content.”

Since then I have become more and more acutely aware of the need that transmedia can have of television. TV still boasts impressive revenue. TV has tried and tested (and admittedly sometimes a bit outdated) business models. TV knows (again, a bit outdatedly) how to calculate success. TV has a broad reach.

Now, show me the transmedia project that would say no to impressive revenue stemming from tried and tested business models, with calculateable success founded on a broad reach.

So, as much as television needs to be looking in the direction of transmedia to be able to offer an audience the multiplatform approach many take for granted today (”if this show doesn’t invite me to do something on a 2nd screen (that ties logically and seamlessly into the show itself or the world the show depicts) I’ll just use that 2nd screen to bitch about it on Twitter. Or play Empires & Allies on Facebook”) transmedia needs to be looking at television as an integral part of many transmedia projects. And not as an add-on either, like a reversal of the state of affairs when tv shows should have interactivity at all cost, leading to slap-on, underdeveloped and seriously underwhelming interactive content being published regularly. Nope; just as much as multiplatform or transmedia content need to be developed at the same time as a television show, so must a television show be developed at the same time as the multiplatform and transmedia content.

On that note, see you all at MIPCOM perhaps? :)

Transmedia - 13 months and counting

2011-08-23T11:16:00.009+03:00

Greatly inspired by Laura Flemings post "My Year In Transmedia" I realized it’s been over a year since my eyes were opened to transmedia storytelling as a way of developing and distributing stories. Since then I’ve happily embraced transmedia (as I define it (a definition that can be found at the end of this post, so as not to distract from the rest of the post)) in almost every project I’ve been working on. Looking back, I thought it’d be nice to do a wrap-up of sorts.

Background

Briefly about where I come from – I’ve worked in media since the late 80s, when I as a teenager started out in radio. Since then I’ve worked for newspapers, television and for over seven years as a radio show host, editor and producer. I’ve lost count of how many shows I’ve developed over the years, but 50 might be a fairly correct number. I’ve always preferred the immediate and quick nature of radio (not to mention the instant feedback and the interaction with the audience) compared to the more cumbersome nature of television, or the ”telling people what happened yesterday” nature of newspapers (although I love writing).

In 2005 I transferred to my current position as a format developer, originally for interactive television formats (an AFDESI Award nominated quiz show with set-top-box interactivity and live Java-powered mobile phone interactivity tied to the broadcast stream one of the first efforts) but quickly moved on to cross media formats (where our children’s language training game show ”The Space Trainees” was nominated for a Digital iEmmy in 2010). So, that’s where I was in 2010, when I applied for, and got accepted to, the Pixel Lab in Cardiff.

Transmedia – the first contact

I’d blogged some stuff about transmedia (or T-Media as I, for some reason, had called it at the time) but had never really gotten my mind around the concept in a way that made sense to me. The week in Cardiff changed all that. For the first time I understood how powerful a concerted effort over several media can be when trying to tell a story and engage an audience. While there were many brilliant tutors and experts attending – Steve Peters, Michel Reilhac, Christy Dena and so on – I remain deeply indebted to Jeff Gomez. His one hour long presentation, telling about ”the notion of distant mountains”, of mythologies, narrative superstructures and canon is what made my mind click into the right places, all at once.

THE PIXEL LAB 2010 - Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment - Creating Blockbuster Worlds & Transmedia Production

View more presentations from power to the pixel

Jeff's presentation (minus some "secret" slides)

I came back from Cardiff, mind ablaze with ideas and an urge to convey said ideas and concepts to my colleagues, to get everyone on the same page and develop what we’d been working on so far. Easier said than done, I can report in hindsight, but since then, as I said, I’ve integrated the transmedia mindset into almost all projects I’ve been involved in.

Transmedia everywhere

As I see it, almost every aspect of a professional life can be aided by approaching it from a transmedia point of view. Even such a thing as your company’s profile will benefit; traditionally, you are very much supposed to think about what your company is and what it represents, what are your key strengths and what are your strategies. But how to tell the story (or stories) of your company, that’s something that’s often neglected. By transmediating this process – by creating and documenting the mythology of your company, the stories of your personnel and your products, ny carefully thinking about the consumer’s entry points into your company, you can create a coherent whole, that everyone in your company can communicate to anyone outside of your company in the same way, keeping everything intact and keeping the image of your brand within the desired frames.

Building this kind of mythology can also help in unexpected ways when it comes to future strategies (”how does this future possibility fit into our mythology?”) and even product development (”what’s the story of the new product we are about to create?”). For instance, look at Apple’s three year old promotional videos for the first aluminium cased MacBooks – they ooze this kind of storytelling. Now, apply this over different media, using the exact media most applicable for the story you want to tell… you’re there.

Example: The story of the MacBook.

Thinking, developing and blogging

I had been blogging on and off for several years, but in October of last year I felt an urge to start documenting the aha!-moments and the thoughts arising from the development work I was doing. My first post was one aptly called ”Musings on transmedia development”, which I still think fits the bill 100%. Since then I’ve blogged from conferences and s eminars, from fair trades and academical get-togethers; always with transmedia at the forefront.

Funny thing was, whereever I looked, I could see transmedia possibilites. Jeff had talked about using transmedia to create a symphony of stories and narratives; in a post called ”Creating A Transmedia Symphony” I playfully took some online advice on how to create a musical symphony and put all the advice into a transmedia context. It actually worked a treat!

As always, there is a sizeable gap between thinking, talking and writing about something and actually doing and producing something. I was in the fortunate position of being able to do both, as we were working on transmedia development all through the last year, while I was also working on a project of my own (still under development ☺ ), and most of the conclusions I’ve come to, I been conveying via my blog, which at the same time functioned (and still do) as my development notebook, to which I can go back and check on previous thoughts and mirror them on current development issues.

The Network of Transmedia

As with many niche professions, transmedia people are still fairly few and far between. The power of social media and most predominantly Twitter has made it possible to discuss with and learn from some extremely brilliant minds in the field of transmedia. I’ve been most fortunate to be able to travel from Finland to meet some of these people in person, be it at the MIPs or at the Pixel Lab, at SXSW (where the discussion on the term ”transmedia” really took off (and one I won’t be trying to solve in this post thank you very much ☺)) and MPBS. There’s no point in me dropping names here; suffice to say that the network of transmedia professionals is a most generous and caring (not to mention funny, witty, intelligent and creative) bunch of people, one that makes it a joy to browse through the #transmedia Twitter feed every morning. It is also most encouraging to see how many transmedia projects are in development, getting funded on Kickstarter, getting the backing of major broadcasters, brands and studios…

The future

In the past few days I’ve received some notions that transmedia might be vaning. There are conference people debating on whether to include a panel on transmedia or not, there’s industry people fed up with the buzzword. More than a year on from my ”transmedia awakening”, I’m not the least worried. As I see it, the buzzword ”transmedia” might ultimately become redundant, as people (especially people who are supposed to pay for all of it) become fed up with a term that can span basically anything. The buzzword might disappear, but the practice of creating, developing and producing transmedia content, that's a practice that will just become more and more vital, interesting and necessary.

Transmedia: the art and practice of telling stories on multiple platforms. connected via a common story world and mythology, offering different entry points into the same and deepening an audience's engagement and immersion via interactivity and compelling content. This can be one story with different aspects spread over different media, or multiple stories, set in the same world or with the same characters involved. Simple as that.

Transmedia and multiplatform business

2011-08-13T16:31:00.004+03:00

I am currently attending the Multiplatform Business School in Ronda, Spain, a five day workshop on, well, how to do business in an age of multiplatform content. It’s been some highly instructive five days, with something like 9-10 projects participants brought to the workshop being constructively criticized and developed further in a timely fashion. An NDA prevents me from going into these projects in any greater detail, but there could quite possibly be some really interesting projects appearing from this group in the coming year.

I usually keep my transmedia goggles as necessary, which it was, for the most part, this week. Looking at transmedia from the business angle is, for me, one of the most interesting ones. As I see it, unless you either have got the backing of a) a governmental fund for an educational transmedia project or one that helps the society in some way or b) a chunk of money from the marketing budget of a film or a tv series or a brand, you will want to be able to create something that can generate revenue in the future, revenue enough for you to be able to keep your transmedia project going, develop it further and/or have money to make the next project you want to do.

It’s basically just like any other business; you wouldn’t be manufacturing shoes unless you were pretty sure you can sell them for a profit. Likewise, I don’t think it makes sense to develop and produce an elaborate transmedia project unless you can see it generating enough revenue for it to be worth it for you (artistic efforts aside, as I can see that happening to an extent).

The five days here in Ronda have given me some thoughts on precisely this matter, some of which I though it prudent to share here (and perhaps initiate a discussion that will let everyone learn more regarding this area):

- Partnerships are important. I could probably rephrase that – partnerships are crucial (unless you’re a mega-huge company, which precious few of us are). When you’ve developed your transmedia idea or project to a level where you can clearly see how it would play out, and once you have material to show and a selling pitch and feel comfortable enough to talk about your project with possible partners, make a real effort to identify the right ones. You might want to partner with a marketing or media agency to find the right brands to work with, you might want to partner with a production company to gain more muscle behind your project, you might want to hook up with an app developer to create the app that is crucial for your project… the possibilities are many. You can find these through Google, through industry contacts and so on; the crucial thing would be to pinpoint WHAT you need and WHOM you’d want to partner with to do it (yeah, and IN WHAT ORDER). Basically: all the areas that you feel you do not master, consider a partner (and take these in the right order; you’re in a more advantageous position when you deal with a brand, for instance, if you have a strong distribution partner lined up already).

- The fragmented media world is a familiar concept for everyone. The challenges are many; how to stand out from the crowd and get noticed, how to keep the audience engaged and immersed, how to communicate in a way that does not clash with the tone and feel of the other parts of the project and so on. But to this comes the challenge on how to make money off of all of this. Getting sponsors in is a way (but make sure your value proposition is an attractive one when dealing with them or you won’t hook them), while other possible ways include app purchases, extra types of content accessible in exchange for FB credits… Something as simple as a Paypal button or perhaps even a Kickstarter campaign for some certain aspect of the project could also be effective. But still, all of these need to serve the needs of your story and your mythology, not just your wallet; consider carefully what will be the right solution for you.

- ”Transmedia” as a term is still – unsurprisingly – something that people, also the ones in the industry, have widely different views on. On every aspect for that matter – what it is, why it is, how it should be done, what the advantages are… So, my advice would be – do, by all means, name your project a transmedia one, but make sure your pitch and presentation is clear and without glitches. It’s just so much easier for buyers to say ”No” than ”Yes”, and ”transmedia” is a term that possibly can make people feel unsure about what they’re actually being pitched.

There was a helluva lot of other stuff as well – the importance of emotion in your project, the impact of mobile… Which I’ll be happy to write about a bit later.

The ”Why” of Transmedia

2011-06-21T15:48:00.003+03:00

I’m thrilled to see a great many transmedia projects springing up all around the world, in different settings; from marketing campaigns for blockbusters and tv series to crowdsourced international mystery-stories, from web based crime fiction projects to socially engaged documentaries – the powers of transmedia storytelling are being grasped and acted upon my a steadily increasing number of practitioners. The like-button is firmly pressed for my part.

One thing I myself have found to be of great importance to keep in mind when developing stories and content for a transmedia project is the simple question ”why”? It might sound naive, but believe me, it can at times be a hard question to answer, at least in a way that would satisfy yourself, let alone anyone you would like to invest in your project.

A simple ”because I (or we) can” just does not cut it. That’s a sure-fire way of developing something that doesn’t fit together in the seamless and logical way that’s crucial for any transmedia project. There are just too many pitfalls along the way; there is no need to go digging them yourself.

”Because it’s cool” or "because it's what everyone is doing nowadays" are hardly better reasons. Yes, it will be cool, providing you get it right. Chances are you won’t, and it will not, therefore, be particularly cool. Yes, many others are doing it. This does not mean that you, necessarily, should be doing it as well.

If it’s a transmedia marketing campaign for a release of some kind, that makes it infinitely easier. It’s ”to raise awareness of this particular property” or ”to make people engage in the content and get more viewers in through word-of-mouth”. In this sense you know what you’re aiming for and your results are possible to observe, analyze and draw conclusions from.

Another reason, especially if we are talking about a transmedia campaign connected to an existing property (the new Pottermore instalment might be an example) can be ”to extend the storyworld and offer more content to an engaged audience”. This is a reason that probably could be adapted to most transmedia projects, and in that sense needs more clarification – is it ”to offer alternative or complementary stories set in the original storyworld”? Or is it ”to give the audience a playing field, a sandbox, intended for user generated content”? Is it something else?

It can also be ”to explain the background and the history of the main property in the story” or ”to expand on the mythology through new stories” or even ”to act as a behind-the-scenes view of the main property” (especially in the case of transmedia documentaries).

Whatever reason you have for developing transmedia content (and the answers to the ”why?” above are probably as many and as diverse as the number of transmedia projects in existence), ”Why?” remains a good question to ask, at any point of the development, production and execution phase.

PS. It was swiftly pointed out to me that one - perhaps one of the most central - reason for transmedia would be "to generate revenue" and in the long run "to increase the value of the IP". I will concur, although I will add that at the moment I think most of the transmedia projects we are seeing are pretty happy just to break even. Thanks Simon Pulman for pointing it out. DS

Transmedia, Time and Context

2011-06-03T13:50:00.002+03:00

I’ve been totally bogged down with work the past few weeks. Sat in front of Final Cut Pro for most of the time, alternating with meetings and social media strategy planning... I can now confidently say that you can NEVER be too prepared to launch a new project. You can also NEVER be too ready to adapt to things that happen around you, that will influence the story you’re trying to tell. We’re up now, though, here, with the first installment. Working on the rest as we speak.

This in turn has led to me not being able to keep up with all the excellent posts on Twitter, all the new projects and seminars and meetups etc springing up all over the world. Will now try to make amends, not guaranteeing anything though!

Still, a couple of posts got my mind working overtime these past couple of days. Andrea Phillips wrote an excellent post on Time and Transmedia, highlighting the challenges facing anyone working in different time periods within a story, in a real world where viewers can start experiencing that story from just about any point possible. In the comments, Scott Walker pointed me to a post of his that I’d missed last year, on the challenges and possibilities of collaborative transmedia storytelling. Many good points, and with so many people moving into the field of transmedia from numerous different angles, these posts are simply required reading.

My point of view on these matters come from the field of creating a transmedia experience from scratch, without any previous brand or franchise to fall back on. It is an experience that is unfolding in real time, which at the same time will live and prosper drawing on the power of the long tail. In this context, context is, as we have found, crucial. There will be many people entering the story from many different angles, and the story might have unfolded to just about any point. As I see it, there are some points that need to be taken into consideration:

- The foundation needs to be solid. In order to attain this, you must have a grasp of the time line of the project, and a general notion of the story archs and the schedules involved. At the same time, you cannot lock everything into place (at least not with a project like ours, that is expected to run and run) or you will be stifled.

- The foundation needs to be communicated clearly and without any discrepancies. This goes for communicating outside the team producing the content as well as within the team. In this matter, the task of simplifying is crucial. Test and try and test again; if the story world and the basis for the stories you are about to create and tell people is blurry, press the ”sharpen” button immediately. This is not to say that everything needs to be told from the start – quite the contrary – but everyone involved, be it a viewer, a user, a programmer, a writer… everyone needs to see the same thing when they look at your story world and your story.

- Once this is achieved, you need to drop the reins, but give some clear options on how to interact, how to create within your world etc. This goes when it comes to letting an audience interact and create, but also when it comes to not locking down people on the project, but instead give them the right tools and the motivation to, themselves, create and interact within your project. It is nigh impossible to put all this on one person’s shoulders – much better (and much more true!) to give key people the mandate to interact with each other and with the audience, within the context of your story and story world. You’d be amazed at what springs up.

- Finally – don’t panic! With most projects you’ll be involved in that are of a more documentary type – like ours – there will be humans involved. Everyone will also know that there are humans involved. Everyone also knows that humans make mistakes. Mistakes can even be beneficial, as long as you handle them in a way that makes sense within the context of your story and your story world. In a life-affirming, warm story and world, you laugh it off and the audience laughs with you. In a dark and brooding and violent story arc, you behead someone on the team with a vicious snarl towards the audience, and the audience winces in terror but nods knowingly (and this is purely fictional then, of course. If you really behead someone on your team and refers to this post in your defense, I will not be held responsible).

All in all, there are soooo many aspects to think about. I won’t even go into the challenges of interacting with different brands and companies, all with their own strategies, or interacting with collaborators, also with their own strategies, as such instances are merely on a case-by-case basis. I will, however, report on findings along the way. And, yeah – comments are open.

Transmedia methods, when and where to use them...

2011-04-29T17:08:00.002+03:00

I was asked to write an article for Digital Book World (up here) on transmedia and publishing. As I researched and wrote the article, a debate was on involving amongst others Mike Monello on Twitter about transmedia vs transmedia methods (i.e. transmedia is transmedia, but a lot of projects that aren't transmedia are using transmedia methods). I can totally understand this thinking, even if it will not affect the way I develop stuff in any sense, but it got me thinking about what methods should be used when, and where...

I do not have the time to write that post now, but will strive to in the next few days. Until then, Glada Wappen as we say over here, as we prepare to celebrate the onslaught of spring :)

The Transmedia Gardener

2011-04-25T23:37:00.000+03:00

So, spring is in the air, finally. I’ve been holed up in a studio and have had no time to blog at all. Which is perfectly fine, as I’ve instead been able to actually DO something. Always a nice feeling, especially if the end result will be as good as I think it’ll be. Will post on the project in due time!

Spring is in the air, the snow had melted (partially at least :P) and it was time to sharpen all necessary utensils to get to grips with what passes for a garden around these parts. Standing there, looking at the devastation revealed by the receding snow, my mind started turning around the similarities between that and what I do for a living.

See, gardening and transmedia development, they’ve got a lot in common. No no, hear me out! Like with gardening, where the soil is the one most important aspect – more important than, say hours of sun or how much you water your plants – the foundation needs to be strong and needs to be built and prepared in the right way for any transmedia project.

All that soil-work then, is laying the foundation for the planning work you’ll do for your garden. This then, is totally dependent on the location you’ve got for your garden. Is it a spacious one, where you can spread out and imagine different settings, different themes, different … well, yeah, Entry Points? Is it a narrow ledge, with room for only the barest necessities, like some herbs and suchlike? Is it sunny, is it shady? What are your possibilities, and what are your limitations?

In a transmedia setting, this is equivalent to both your a) budget and b) project. Naturally, what resources you have will affect what you can plan for your project. But more importantly, the project itself will tell you what can – or rather should – be done in the context of the project. Do not order an iPhone app just ’cause it’s cool, if it doesn’t fit your project naturally and logically. At the same time, make sure you don’t order that pine tree plant if all you’ve got is a 3 m2 patch of grass behind your house.

Now, if you look at a garden, you need to plan for longevity or short bursts. Is it going to be an explosion of colors in spring that will then fade away, not needing maintenance, or do you prefer a garden where different things are in bloom at different times of the spring, summer and autumn? When developing transmedia, you need to take these things into consideration as well – are you merely marketing a major release later on, so a quick, massive burst will do? Or are you in it for the long run, maintaining your stories and your story world for months and years on end? Be prepared though – it’s extremely easy, in gardening as in transmedia, to underestimate the time and effort needed to complete a vision and maintain it properly.

I could go into how you chose your plants correlates with how you chose your platforms, but I won’t. Instead, I will end by saying that gardening could learn a thing or two from transmedia as well. I’ve yet to see an immersive, interactive, crowdsourced garden, for instance. If there is one, I’d love to see it.

Now then, MacBook and spade in hand – off to the garden! Or was it the study??

MIPTV 2011 Wrap Up

2011-04-08T16:26:00.006+03:00

So, Friday and writing this while flying back from six days of MIPFormats, MIPTV and Connected Creativity. I see no real point in going throught the proceedings in too great a detail in this post, as you can find all live blogs, links to videos and pretty great insighty stuff at the MIP Blog pages here. Kudos to James, Angela, Stuart and anyone else involved, they did an absolutely marvellous job of keeping people – including me – up to date with what was happening. I’m going to try – as was suggested to me – to Storify my tweets from the past week. I’ll let you know when I’m up to scratch on that.

Gavin McGarry asked me during his wrap up session what had been the key things I’d seen or experienced during these past days… and in a way, there wasn’t anything really new to get me excited and up-in-arms, not directly. In a way, the Palais was still filled with people selling or buying animated series, drama or documentaries, much as it has been for the past six years I’ve been attending.

A new deal on the horizon

But still, something is clearly afoot. You hear about Netflix commissioning series from major producers, Facebook teaming up with Warner Brothers to offer tier one movies for Facebook Credits, Google earmarking 100 million dollars for low-cost content for re-branded YouTube channels… TV is under pressure. Yet, in my book, it’s a good pressure, as the aforementioned ventures are great examples of cost-effective ways to get content to people via services they use daily anyway. When thinking of combining content with FB and YouTube there are also a lot of possibilities from a storytelling and transmedia angle – challenges, yes, but first and foremost possibilities.

One possibility I for one will be looking into is the possibility to combine content distribution with the very well working platform that BitTorrent can offer. Now, as CEO Erik Klinker pointed out, they offer a distribution platform and over 100 million active users, but they are not going into commissioning or producing. Again, I don’t believe this is the only or ultimate solution, but is is A solution, and one that could work very well in combination with others.

Such a lot of people are touching on the convergence between mobile and televison and online and what have you. Still, these days gave me the feeling that – as I tweeted during the week, with regards to SXSW vs MIPTV – you have social media and location based services people on one side, trying to figure out how to reach the massive audience and the massive revenue streams that television still has to offer, while on the other side are the television people, scratching their heads while trying to figure our how to integrate social media and other new servicese with their shows and online content. What is needed is some sort of translation service and/or facilitating service that would just put the right people together with each other and explain one’s viewpoint to the other . (Need something like that, give me call ☺ ).

Mind over matter

This was what Connected Creativity along with their Experience Hub was about, at least as far as I understood it. To a point it worked well; the talks at MIPCC differed quite a bit from the ones in the Palais. Many of them gave great insights into areas I had been lacking in. Especially Tomi Ahonen’s talk (where the way he delivered it was half of the experience), the talk from Fjord on the future of augmentation and AR, Facebook’s visions… I heard so much good things said about Tiffay Shlain’s presentation, which I unfortunately missed, but will try to catch up on later.

On the other hand with regards to Connected Creativity, so many of the people who would’ve needed to hear those talks were in meetings at the Palais or elsewhere during the sessions – not to mention that there being an extra and pretty substantial fee for registering to MIPCC had deterred a number of people from even registering.

The Experience Hub was a nice feature – a big tent quite close to Lionsgate by the beach, essentially straight ahead if one decended the stairs from Riviera Seaview – showcasing a lot of new technology to, with luck, be part of the entertainment and media toolbox in the future. For example, Emotiv’s helmet with it’s almost magical use-this-to-control-anything-on-the-screen-in-front-of-you-with-only–your-brain powers was pretty amazing. We’re getting one for research purposes – as we have a state-of-the-art User Experience and Media laboratory – so I’ll let you know my verdict when I’ve had the chance to play around with it for a while.

IMHO one of the best speakers at the MIPTV panels was Kevin Slavin of Starling.tv (see more about his talk here). Many others touched on the same subject, but he was the clearest and most to-the-point; what the industry has been thinking of as the ”audience” or the ”consumer” or the ”target group” or the ”ratings” are actually human beings, and they set the agenda. They can be as much a part of your story as any scripted character (or show host, or contestant) that you as a producer choose to show as part of the content. If there is a vacuum – as in there not being any Mad Men characters on Twitter – the audience will fill that vacuum for you (there are over 20 Mad Men characters on Twitter to date, registered and managed by fans). If they like (or even better, love) your content, they will also take extremely good care of these characters.

So, a much frowned-upon term....

This then is where the magic of transmedia would enter. Only that transmedia, in the setting of MIPTV, still is more of a hindrance than a help when trying to get something commissioned. As we all know, it is a lot easier to say NO than YES, if you are in acquisitions, and making people unsure about what they actually are buying is a sure-fire way of making the likelihood of a NO reach 99,5%. And, unfortunately, ”transmedia” is still a term that often makes people at least a little bit unsure of what they exactly are being pitched. As Nuno Bernardo said, many a good sales pitch has been ruined by not stopping in time and instead continuing with the fatal words ”…this is also multi-platform, integrating the web and mobile solutions…”. What we need are a lot more great transmedia tv examples to point to – ”hey, like that one, but a little bit different, yeah!”.

Will try my best to do my part on that account.

So, a mix between the old and the new, this week’s MIP – now more so than ever, in my book. Thanks again to all the great people I met – both old friends and new – and hope to see you all again in the not too distant future!

MIPTV Round Up Day One

2011-04-05T10:31:00.002+03:00

The first day of MIPTV drew to a close, as the lawn in front of Grand was packed with people, the beer was as good (and as expensive) as ever and the Cannes night was a very (for a Finn) suitable +15C.

Whereas MIPFormats was a lot about discussing the creative challenges, rights issues and suchlike of formats, MIPTV is, as always, about business. Still, there are a number of interesting panels and talks going on during the day, where creators and industry people share insights and cases. I was quite happy to see a panel on Transmedia, called ”Transmedia Storytelling: How to achieve Creative Excellence?” – especially as the panel featured people like Nuno Bernardo (Sophie’s Diary, Final Punishment), Christopher Sandberg (Truth About Marika, Conspiracy for Good), Tracey Robertson (The Lost Experience), Tom Thirlwall (Kate Modern) and Matt Costello (Polar Productions).

Transmedia at MIP

Now, the live blog of the session is up here, and the whole of the session can be viewed on YouTube here, so I won’t go into detail on what every said during the 1h+ session. Some notes though:

- It seems like the divide is still there, between creatives, tech, marketing etc. ”Sometimes I have made the mistake of pitching a tv show really well, only to – at the end of the pitch – go into multiplatform aspects and possibilities. Then every department must get involved, and no ones wants to assume responsibility for the project”, said Nuno Bernardo more or less. So yes – even though we are getting there, slowly but surely – there is no one person that is a great creative, great producer, knows all the tech involved intimately… Teamwork is a must. We just need to get the teams to work together better and understand each other better.
In my opinion, that is also one of the strengths of thinking transmedially when building a project (no matter if it is drama, game show, news, documentary, kids show…). By building the ”world” of your project and defining core values, it’s place in the world and all actions and reactions that can happen in that world and why they can happen, it is infinitely more easy to explain the content and what you want to achieve to anyone who gets involved, be it tech, creatives, marketing people or anyone involved in the production.
(For example news; they are set in the real world obviously. But to create a good news show, first create the world that is the news show, everyone working with it, all the facilities, all the equipment, building up all the thoughts and the values you want to promote through your news).
- I also can’t help but ponder at the difference between the crowd at SXSW and the crowd at MIPTV – especially, as I tweeted yesterday, the fact that many of the tech-savvy social media and localization service and funky-photo-app-people at SXSW are really really eager to somehow get into television – partly because that’s where some money can be found but to a greater degree because that’s where they can reach an audience better and get involved in ”real” content. At the same time we have a lot of tv and media people here at MIPTV thinking about and wonder how on earth to capitalize on social media and other types of emerging tech and services. I can’t but think these two worlds would need to collide at some point - which will happen, I’m sure, and #MIPCC is perhaps a step in the right direction.

Please do watch the video, or read the live blog, some nice takes there.

Content 360

I had a look at the pitches for the Content 360 competition in the Fremantle/RTL category (which was called Interactive & Cross Media but was quickly rebranded ”Transmedia”, much to the surprise of the people pitching). Four pretty good efforts – one location-and-app-based national treasure hunt, one build-communities-with-music-and-extreme-sports-and-compete-between-communities, one make-your-online-profile-your-lottery-ticket-in-an-online-game-show and one convince-audience-to-part-with-their-money-and-give-to-you-for-your-cause. Not bad ideas at all, will be interesting to see who wins – revealed tomorrow, Wednesday, night.

Fresh?

The Fresh TV Around The World showcase was actually not all that fresh, IMHO, as much of the stuff on display was things looking a lot like stuff we’ve seen before. Here’s the list of the shows shown, from my Twitter feed:

1. Trasformat (Italy) - decode disfigured pics of celebs
2. Honey Pack the bags (Banijay)
3. The Shuffle (Shine) – sort stuff in right order, get clues by performing challenges
4. The Call (Zodiak) – based on prank calls, must prank call friends to win
5. The Recruits (Talpa) Find recruites to finish challenges to go on and win
6. You Deserve It (SevenOne) - main contestant gives money to someone who deserves it (mother etc)
7. Holding out for a hero (ITV) - three contestants play for prize to make someone else's dream come true
8. Still Standing (Armoza) - 1 against 10, and a bit of Million Pound Drop as well
9. The Magicians (Shine) Three magicians in pairs w/celebs compete
10. Impossible (2waytraffic) - 1 couple against 1 magician; is the trick impossible or not?
11. Lady Burlesque (Veralia) - talent show, next burlesque star
12. Dance Cam Slam (MTV) - compete in dance contest via web cams
13. Ano 0 (Canal 13/Chile) - apocalyptic game show, 22 ppl have survived devastating flood
14. Family Explorer (Zodiak) - 5 families out in the wilderness, competing for cash prize
15. Flashback (Warner Bros) - physical game show + memory skills
16. The Village (All3) - couples must charm villagers to win a home in the village
17. A Farmers Life for Me (BBC) - 9 couples compete to get a farm for a year, through farming challenges
18. Love Triangle (Eyeworks) - contestant must chose between two lovers
19. Man Up The House (Eyeworks) - man & friends get to renovate the home, w/o wife getting in the way
20. How to live with women (DRG) - Men go to bootcamp to learn how to live w/ women
21. Service w/ a Smile (Shine) - mentally disabled persons working in a hotel, fulfilling their dream of a real job
22. Beauty and the Beast:Prejudice (Zodiak) where "beauty junkie" lives together w/ disfigured person #miptv
23. It Gets Better (Shine) - 8 celebs who've been victims help other victims
24. Sun, Sex and Supsicious Parents (Zodiak) - parents peeping in on kids doing naughty stuff
25. Meet The Parents (All3) - boyfriends must impress potential in-laws, only thing is, they are actors + hidden camera

I had unfortunately missed out on all the fun that happened in the Experience Hub tent outside the Palais, but went there for a quick look; lo and behold, I saw a fairly interesting product, showcased by Metaio from Germany – a slick app-based participate-in-television-through-AR-tv solution that I think I need to examine a bit closer; might be good to integrate in some format in the future.

Finally a quick CONGRATULATIONS to the Emmy winners of yesterday, nice party and SO nice to see Shankaboot from Lebanon pick up an Emmy. Well done!

Second day starting now, with meetings, meetings, and then the kick-off of the Connected Creativity – will be back with that later.

MIPFormats Round Up Day Two

2011-04-03T22:06:00.005+03:00

So, second – and final – day of the MIPFormats are done and dusted, and it’s time to evaluate what became of it. Generally speaking, I’m very much in favor of there being a weekend dedicated to formats (which I would, being a format developer by trade). There was reportedly 600 people signed up for this years MIPFormats, but I doubt all showed up at the same time, as I don’t believe there were that many people in attendance at any of the panels I took part of.

I will say that I was slightly disappointed in the lack of fresh-thinking stuff on display during these two days. The winner of the Fresh Talent Pitch was basically dating for seniors, with a bit of elimination and some sexy young bodies thrown in for fun. Not to take away from the creators of that format – I believe it will get produced, and I believe it will get ratings. It’s just doesn’t ooze newness in any way.

Furthermore, the formats that were shown later on in the day under different circumstances – from showcases by big companies to Fresh Format-looks at new stuff – not really much caught your imagination. Just twists on things we’ve seen before (while the Hypno-surgery format was a bit new, I’ll admit that, not that I’d probably watch it…☺ )

Some light

So, you say, do something better yourself then, eh? Yeah, I am trying to. I believe that the next-to-last panel I witnessed, which was the second part of the MIPFormats Interviews sessions – featuring Scott/Ogilvy, Morley/Sony, Brickle/Monterosa and Fenton/Zig Zag – talked the most about where we are heading. Brands are increasingly looking to integrate themselves into content. Producers NEED to look at how to integrate these brands, so that it is done in a natural, logical way and not forced upon the end consumer in the bullyish kind of way we’ve witnessed before.

We all know that the money that was in the TV industries – from the broadcasters that is – isn’t really there anymore. So fresh money needs to come into the game. IMHO this is where transmedia storytelling enters the fray, as this gives any creator a multitude of options to integrate brands into a storyworld, and brands a multitude of options to connect to content that fits in with their core values.

An example

A very simple thought experiment – what if one of the side characters in a television show blogged about her life outside the show? And what if she, in that off-tv life, got a job at a certain brand? That brand could naturally be integrated in the show, and have it’s own, scripted life on the blog. Where it could tie in to real life events; when the character tweets about an upcoming promotional event – the next day the event is launched for real… blurring the lines between real and fiction, and creating engaging content.

I won’t delve further into the takes from the day, as you can see the sessions and read the comprehensive live blog by the competent people of ReedMIDEM and MIP here. Instead, I’ll have a beer and tend to that bloody foot of mine :P

Remember, it is a kindness to buy formats from people with crutches!! ;)

MIPFormats Round Up Day One

2011-04-02T23:31:00.003+03:00

So, MIPFormats occupies the two days pre-MIPTV, showcasing a lot of up-and-coming formats, discussing format rights and format disputes and during this first day taking a look at the future of the format business in general.

Format Futures

The day started off with a look at the Format Futures 2011, where David Jenkinson from C21 begun with a brief look at which conclusions the C21 Formats Report 2011 had drawn. Amongst the facts – 91% of buyers say they will buy as many formats or more than last year, 60% say they are going to buy more (which is nice if you are selling formats of course). Top three in format genres are thought to be Constructed observational documentary, Expert-led factual entertainment and social network-related formats, while elimination-based reality formats and cooking/food formats are seen to be waning. Happy to see that Finland is thought of as the 6th hottest country when it comes to new formats (behind the US, the UK and Holland, but ahead of Israel and Japan). I’m pretty sure the formats report will be available online at some point, as it was shared to all attendees at MIPFormats, will notify when I know more about that.

The talk featured Karoline Spodsberg from Banijay, Nicola Söderlund from Sparks Network and Jan Salling from Nordic World. Big take-aways from that was Spodsbergs opinion that "We will be moving away from constructed formats to less constructed, more story driven types of formats" (which resonates well with the creation of more transmedia type formats) and Sallings very true take on the questions of rights and revenue splits - "Big challenge is to retain rights for producers; no plug-and-play solution. Need to give more back to producers" (so true, more shares to the one creating will mean that more and better will be developed and produced in the future). There was also a big concern about the consolidation of the business – everything is becoming one big company, so whom should new concepts be pitched to? David Jenkinson wasn’t too concerned - "as companies consolidate, the people that don't like it leave and found new companies".

The session about mediating format disputes was set up as a sort of play where two fictional production companies went head to head regarding two very similar formats. I had to leave the session before the end, but I will echo Mikko Silvennoinens opinion: “Let's discuss real cases please! Come Dine vs Four Star Dinner. Survivor vs Celebrity Get Me Out of Here”. Key point, try to come to some sort of solution and not go to court.

Fresh Formats in the Factual vein

In the Fresh Formats this Saturday (there will be another tomorrow) the focus was on Factual Entertainment. To recap, I will make it easy for myself and copy my tweets from the sessions. Here are the 12 featured formats:

1st format: Shedding for the wedding, from CBS, engaged couples losing weight
2. Coming Soon: Love, 5 single/famous women search for true love (Israel/Endemol)
3. Threesome, where three ppl share a flat and experiment sexually (Norway, DRG)
4. The Joy Of Teen Sex, from Zodiak. Advice on teen sex in walk-in clinic
5. Teenage Boss (DRG, Norway) teenager takes responsibility for family financies for 1 month
6. Hijos de Papa (Plural, Spain) 8 rich kids kicked out, must adjust to tough jobs to manage
7. Working Girls (endemol, UK) lazy ladies (WAGs?) whipped into shape by biz women
8. Junior Doctors (BBC) 7 newly qualified doctors, their 1st month documented
9. Toughest place to be a Paramedic (BBC) ordinary people go abroad to test themselves in hardest jobs
10. Cover Me (2waytraffic) 2 music stars create new hits based on each other's work
11 The House That Made Me (BBC) Celebs back in reconstructed childhood homes
12. You can't take it with you (Fremantle) following families as they prepare wills

All in all, not all that many really exciting formats. I did get the feeling I’ve seen most of them before, in one take or another. The Threesome and Teen Sex ones were slightly interesting, but then again they would, wouldn’t they?

The Freshest of Talents

The Fresh Talent Pitch was the last session I went to, where six formats had been chosen by The Wit to be presented to a jury consisting of Anniea Wegelius from SVT/Sweden, David Lyle from Fox Look and Colin Jarvis, formerly BBC. The six formats were BuS STOP from Spain, Crossword is coming to town (Germany), Dracula Tour Challenge (Romania), My Baby's Name (France), On the Wave of Love (France) and Queen of Style (Germany).

Of the six formats the Dracula one was the one with the richest story possibilities. I believe it didn’t win mainly since it was not really thought through to the end – there is a great backdrop, but the icing on the cake (and parts of the filling as well) just aren’t there yet. I’m convinced it will get made though, just need some more work. Bus Stop was a dating format based around a bus driving to different cities – definitely needs some work – while Queen of Style had “possibilities in any direction” (which is never a good thing to say in a pitch, as a potential buyer can think in a lot of directions and, like most people, dislikes to be confused, especially in a business meeting) which probably was it’s downfall in this competition.

My Baby’s Name had a complex game setup that I didn’t quite get – about guessing the name of an unborn child – and didn’t feel quite thought through either. As Colin Jarvis said, he thinks it may be better as just a part of another show. Crossword is coming to town was about painting a giant crossword on a town square and have a team try to solve it, with the help of the town’s population. It was a good public service-minded idea, and rightfully won the creator, Uwe Stanz, the Entertainment Masterclass scholarship. Nice one!

The winner then, was a French format called “On the wave of love” from NeweN. Seniors have a right to love too! So they are put on a cruiser with five suitors each, and one is eliminated in every harbor. Tricky things pop up as well – Mystery Suitors for instance, and the fact that the crew on the ship are sexy little young things (male and female) that can try to woo the seniors as well. Now, I don’t know if I would watch it, but as the jury also obviously saw, it does have potential. So, congratulations!

The last word

More tomorrow, but as a conclusion, and having been banging on about the powers of transmedia storytelling (and blogging for ReedMIDEM today on the possibilities of transmedia formats) I will say that I’m not surprised there are no transmedia formats on display. Not surprised, but I would have liked to be surprised by there being some. Perhaps ours are featured next year ;).

Until tomorrow!

TransMIP 2011 - a first look

2011-04-01T21:09:00.002+03:00

Tomorrow sees the kick-off for a week of MIPness in Cannes, France. Leading out are two quite different events: MIPDocs is focused on documentaries, and is an established part of the MIPTV setup, where producers and buyers sell and buy a multitude of documentaries over the course of two days. I am not registered for MIPDoc, so even though I would be utterly surprised if not a large part of the documentaries featured could (and perhaps should) have a developed transmedia side to them, I will not be able to comment in detail.

MIPFormat, on the other hand, is merely a year old and already branching out over two days, not one as was the case last year. The format business is reportedly worth upwards of 3 billion euros now, which makes formats a viable part of any discussion around the media industry. Transmedia formats are still few and far between, but this is something I convinced will change in the near future. One featured session is the Fresh Talent Pitch, where a number of chosen formats are pitched to the attending crowd. Amongst the finalists are formats such as Dracula Tour Challenge, which simply feels made to be transmediated. From the description of the format:

«Dracula Tour Challenge» is an adventure competition show in which foreign participants are brought to Transylvania to confront the myth of Dracula and the evil spirits that lurk in this land. The purpose of the show is two-fold. One, to create an entertaining, frightening and thrilling competition for viewers. And two, to provide a unique history of vampires, Dracula and other mythical monsters that originated in this extraordinary area.

Now, what storylines could not be spun from this story world? We’ll see what happens with the format.

There are a number of interesting talks during MIPFormats, many who have some connection to transmedia, be it about rights and disputes or creative workshops. But we have to wait until Monday and MIPTV before transmedia is really on the agenda.

At a talk called ”Transmedia Storytelling: How to Achieve Creative Excellence?” Jesse Cleverly from Connected TV moderates a panel with, amongst others, Nuno Bernardo (beActive), Tracy Robertson (Hoodlum) and Christopher Sandberg (Company P) in a session that will ”talk through their strategic thinking, their creative development philosophies, and their multidisciplinary production processes.” I can see many ways this panel could go, but I dearly hope, from an admittedly personal POV, that it will go in-depth on development and design matters.

Hot on the heels of that panel will be a screening of the four finalists of the Fremantle/RTL Content 360 category ”Interactive & Cross-Media Digital Entertainment Formats”. I have no idea what to expect from this, but one can always dream of a quartet of beautifully crafted transmedia formats that take your breath away, right?

There’s a slew of other interesting talks and panels as well, of course – like ”Monetising Content on New Platforms” or ”Multiplatform Engagement Through Apps” or why not “Connecting to Tomorrow's Audiences”. All of these have the potential to not only touch on transmedia but go a lot deeper into that sphere (which should be normal, as that would help keep content and story world in line etc etc). At the very least I expect to get a lot of interesting notions and hints that I can take back to my drawing board after MIP.

There is also the MIPCC, the Connected Creativity, happening at the same time as the ”regular” MIPTV. Here I’m hoping to hear more about mobile, apps and their ties in to the television industry. A highlight will be Gavin McGarrys wrap-up session on ”Building Cross-Media Strategies” on Thursday.

So, be warned, there will be a lot of tweets coming from MIPTV in the coming week. If you decide to unfollow precisely because of these tweets, do refollow back in a weeks time, ok? ☺

Transmedia – it’s kind of everything

2011-03-20T16:40:00.003+02:00

This weekend has been about recouperating from SXSWi, physically as well as mentally. Time zones are still playing havoc with my sleeping patterns, but slowly but surely things are settling into place again. Which is good, as there is much to be done.

In hindsight, SXSWi took the field of transmedia at least a couple of steps forward. I read this well written article in The Guardian, by Oliver Burkeman, on takings from this year’s SXSW festival, and one thing in particular resonates strongly with transmedia today, as I see it. Burkeman writes:

” It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world's highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I'd been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is "user experience", really? What the hell is "the gamification of healthcare"? Or "geofencing"? Or "design thinking"? Or "open source government"? What is "content strategy"? No, I mean, like, specifically?

The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. He looked slightly exasperated. "Well, from one perspective, I guess," he said, "it's kind of everything."

The many requirements

That’s what transmedia is evolving into as well, in my opinion. No longer is it good enough to know one field well, like television, or film, or online portals, or how to write a good story, although all these are still important. It’s just that it’s not enough anymore. When writing a story, you need to have a notion of the possibilities that story can give to an online entry into your world, or as an ARG, or as a graphic novel. It's like a CEO of a trucking company; today he needs to know the basics about SEO as well, to keep himself in business. Or the florist who needs to get savvy in the ways of Facebook, just to pick up on all weddings being planned.

When in pre-production for your tv series, you need to have an understanding for how the interaction with viewers can take place on Twitter, Facebook and so on. Most people – great people at what they do – really do not have that inkling yet. This again leads to examples of bulky, unwieldy transmedia that does not connect logically and seamlessly, as it has been assembled from the same set of pieces but with everyone involved looking at their own blueprint that they themselves have drawn up, without talking to each other overly much.

TAG

Here is where I think the Transmedia Artists Guild has made a timely entrance onto the transmedia arena. Because we have to learn, each and everyone of us. And the best way to learn is by doing, and talking to people who have been there, done that and got a number of t-shirts. Whether it’s about best practises or how to engage an audience, about how to connect an ARG in the best way or how to use characters Twitter accounts for best effect, I see the TAG forums as a great place to interact with other creators and developers and get their invaluable insights. If you haven’t yet, do sign up – it’s a place to talk and a place to find other people to discuss with that you do not first have to spend 30 minutes explaining the concept ”transmedia” to.

See you there!

SXSW Round Up Day Five

2011-03-16T16:27:00.003+02:00

My own participation in the SXSW line up this last day of SXSWi was cut short by a forced visit to St Davids Hospital in Austin. As a side not, let me just take this opportunity to accolade the medial service provided; all involved were extremely professional, kind and efficient. Wait to get in was 15 minutes tops. Kudos! On the other hand, waiting 2h for a taxi was slightly irritating; in the end a collague got a cab down at the Convention Centre in one minute flat and came up to get me.

So, even though being in Austin, this last day I had the opportunity to follow SXSW in the way most people actually do, those not attending that is; by trying to follow the right persons, read the right blogs and figuring out the essential hashtags.

ARGs tell your story

Adrian Hon from sixtostart held an – apparently – well attendend talk on ”Project 314: Putting the Game back into ARG”, which was about looking at ARGs as stand-alone experiences, can it work or not? As said in the description of the talk – ”we found that there are enormous advantages in creating an ARG that's attached to an online game; for one, you can avoid the irritating friction that always occurs when switching between media; for another, the ARG feels completely natural.”

So, ARGs promise to transform the world of entertainment and storytelling, but often end up not really delivering. They’ve been overhyped and oversold and are now in a state of disillusionment – on the other hand, that means the only way is up! One great way of scaling ARGs is to automate them – example is www.smokescreengame.com - but this comes at the expense of the ‘magic’ of the story. And, which must be remembered, every extra action a participant needs to do in order to advance the story is an opportunity to just say "screw it, I'm giving up".

Adrian advocates, and I’m with him on this, not making ARGs so hard to play. The charm of ARGs isn't in the hoax - it's in the experience. Knowing how long a book is doesn't spoil the experience of the book. If you’re wondering how to make an ARG - steal success strategies from other types of games to improve the ARG experience.

All in all good advice. ARGs are a brilliant way to engage people, but just as Andrea Phillips talked about in her Hoax or Transmedia talk, with some of the examples she showed us, hoaxing might feel tantalizing and fun, but most of the time it’s seriously counterproductive. Trust your story and the way you’ve built your experience, let the people get immersed, and there will be no need to try to fool them. Above quotes were a condensed version of the #project314 hashtag.

The Transmedia backlash

Now, a big trend this year was the transmedia backlash which was very apparent during these days at SXSW. From @feliciaday stating being really tired of transmedia, to @jaybushman jokingly suggesting that he’d submit a panel to SXSW next year about everyone who hates the term transmedia, the term has gotten some severe beating from a number of sources – including @kevmoss, putting up this page on “Should I Feel Embarrased to Use the Phrase Transmedia?” for people to slug it out around the term.

In my opinion this is a very natural backlash. I second @glecharles who tweeted “Interesting to see the #transmedia backlash building. That's good; it's the step that comes before awareness and proper adoption. Go!”

It is also a question of so many people having to come around to the term, from developers and designers to marketing people and producers – it is quite natural that the term gets thrown around a lot and a bit battered in the process. I had a discussion with @geoffreylong over Twitter (before phone batteries and wifi connections let us up) and I totally agree with him – “Abandoning #transmedia because the buzz is wearing off is like abandoning the Internet after the dotcom collapse.” There is no need to abandon anything yet, but I can see where Geoffrey is coming from, as he is anxious not to abandon terminology that can help us build a standard for creating transmedia, a standard similar to “close-up”, “POV” etc in regular film-making. On the other hand I would argue that much of that terminology is moving away from technically-based and into more experience-based terminology.

All in all, we’re getting there – and I still think it’s nice that we do not have a definite definition of Transmedia yet. It’s more interesting like this ☺

Conclusion

I will conclude by saying that SXSWi is a blast. It’s also exactly what you make of it – at any given point, dozens of people are talking about interesting things, just go listen… or chat to the guy next to you; he might be the online traffic analytic from Canada that your project has sorely been missing, or the venture capitalist that is looking for exactly a project like yours. Almost guaranteed though, he or she is a nice and friendly person whom you can have an interesting discussions with. And yeah, find the right parties via Twitter, Yobongo or any other app you’re using, and try not to bust up your foot ☺

I’ll add some links to this post as soon as I am somewhere where the wifi connection is a bit better. Here's a link to Guardian UKs look at the tech presented this year. This is Fast Company's list of the most innovative companies in 2011. More links coming in the near future. Thank you SXSWi, and goodbye! Hope to see you next year!

SXSW Round-Up Day Four

2011-03-15T09:48:00.010+02:00

This Monday started out on a personally slightly unpleasant note, as I apparently had managed to get some sort of inflammation going in my foot. Basically, it hurt like hell with every step I tried to take. But, well, staying at the hotel didn’t really feel like an option, so after a prolonged an unsuccessful search for a crutch or a walking stick (and a visit to the First Aid centre at ACC – ”what’s your status sir? Do you have an insurance?”) I just decided to hobble along (but discounting sessions at Sheraton or even the Hilton, as I really didn’t feel like walking a lot.

15 minutes of transmedia blast

So, first session was a short and intensive one, as Anthea Foyer held a talk on Transmedia – Formula for Success at the Future15 track of the SXSW (which is basically everyone talking getting 15 minutes to talk on their subject). Now, hats off to Anthea for this session, which from my point of view was the most condensed and to-the-point one so far.

So, as Anthea did put it, there are five aspects to creating a transmedia property:

• provide your audience with new and exciting ways to participate with your content (as an example, their own Time Tremors)
* create multiple points of entry, maximize audience exposure and uptake. And yeah, it really doesn't matter if the audience understands what transmedia is; it is enough if they are comfortable with the platforms used
* drive content and audience through a number of interconnected platforms and channels. An example would be Cisco's The Hunt
* create a momentum of audience participation that is both sustainable and far reaching. There might be audiences you had no idea of, but your audience will find them. And yeah, gone are the days of forcing the consumer to consume what you want them to. Just remember, be agile - let people come in and tell their stories.
* make sure you create meaningful content and a great story. When you're in the story, you don't care about platforms or tools as you're immersed.

A fast and furious take on transmedia, and perhaps the best 15 minutes I spent in Austin this first time I was here. I sincerely do like when people who have done something can come and talk about their experiences and their conclusions from that. Thank you Anthea.

The future of television

I then - mostly because of said hurting foot - remained seated in ballroom E to hear more Future 15 talks. Richard Bullwinkle, Chief Evangelist of Rovi, talked about the Connected TV and about how the television is not a PC, however much you would like to make it into one. In fact, Rovi has pulled data from boxes in a lot of houses, showing that 86% of viewers have no idea what they are going to watch when they start watching television. Bullwinkle's point was then, naturally, that no matter if you didn't know, your box should know what you would want to watch and suggest those things to you (where I'm more inclined to think that it would be nice to open the box and immediately choose between two options - the "I handle this myself" option and the "OK then let's see what you'd suggest for me" option). Bullwinkle's take on it is to have a second screen be your navigator - your smartphone, tablet - and use that for better interface, personalized ads etc. Well, I don't know about ads - I'd much rather have it as one entry into a transmedia project, use it for storytelling... Fine, if a brand can fit into that without messing things up, why not? But story first.

A little while later, Utku Can from Mint Digital delivered an interesting quarter of an hour on TV vs the Web back channel. Now this is one trend being discussed at several sessions here, about The Hills and their backchannel, about the Twitter streams around the Oscars etc. And yes, TV is social, and the social has moved from the sofa to the web, just as @utku pointed out. Fact is that 52% of all people use the Internet while watching TV (and a staggering 77% in the age group 18-24). With chatter being inherently competitive, and much content lending itself beautifully to chatter, this will just grow and grow - so design for that, design for split attention! But recognize that the viewer will choose how to watch.

@feliciaday and @garyvee

The keynote with Felicia Day was a bit interesting; she is an entrepreneur and she's good at what she's doing. Basically what she said was "Do your own thing, find your audience, let them advocate you, have great content, don't sell out". All good advice.

Rounded off the day by hobbling into Gary Vaynerchuck's session on brands. The man is a maniac to be sure, but a lot of the things he says makes sense - brands have got to become humanized; less like that friend who calls you all the time to tell you stuff you don't really want to hear, but more like the friend YOU call when you want to talk to someone or needs to ask advice. Give first, worry later should be a motto. And yeah, like many others I've encountered during these days, @garyvee is a big believer in context. To quote: "if Content is King the Context is God. I'm obsessed with context." This holds true for transmedia stories as well; don't forget the context. And keep it real, true - authentic, not necessarily realistic.

...and an un-cooperative foot

All in all a pretty packed day, not to mention meeting such a lot of awesome people, also at some parties later on... Yesterday evening I ended the post thus:

(at this point I’m going to have to stop for the moment, as foot is killing me. Hospital next I think, which sucks majorly… I’ll be back with the rest later, bummed to (probably) miss the last day)

And to update - yeah, the foot was x-rayed, nothing broken, muscles and soft tissue getting an inflammation going basically. So, on crutches and following the last day over Twitter at the hotel, unfortunately. I'll blog about that tomorrow, I think :). And yeah, thanks everyone who've expressed their concerns and offered help - you're all brilliant. My foot says hi.

SXSW Day Three Round-Up

2011-03-14T07:44:00.007+02:00

So, Sunday, and a bunch of geeks – actually a pretty huge bunch of geeks – were grumbling about hangovers and daylight saving time. But, alas, there was nothing more to it but up and into the fray again (and yeah, SXSW gets a bit funnier if you participate in the #SXStarWars game as well – look the hashtag up, some real gems in there. Unless you’re a Trekkie of course…).

Today there were going to be a number of transmedia panels which I was looking forward to as our fully packed shuttle bus was hurtling down the Interstate 35 towards downtown. I’m not sure but I think there were even more people at the ACC today than yesterday; the badges are really taking over town (or at least a couple of blocks).

Creative leadership - pretty handy

No transmedia in the morning though, so Sarah B Nelsons talk on Creative Leadership was the first panel to go to. That ballroom – C, as it happens – was also packed. Guess everyone needs to know either how to be a good leader or how to know if their leader is not a good creative one.

Sarah had some really good points throughout her talk. I really like when people are talking about stuff they know, when they know it from experience from having been there, done that and gotten the t-shirt. Nothing like banging your heads against walls in order to gain some real knowledge about what works and what not, and how to deal with the stuff that doesn’t work. Sarah was also good at explaining this process and her experiences, which made this a good talk. For example, one of the hardest things about being a creative leader is setting the team off in the right direction from the beginning. To do that, one needs to kick off by asking people what they want to do within the project, not just about schedules, workflows and suchlike. Do that by goign through everyone’s goals, everyone’s fears and everyone’s expectations with regards to the project. And what every creative leader apparently should do, is get familiar with facilitation training. There was a lot more, slides are up at http://bit.ly/fRDExS so please go and have a look if creative leadership interests you. You could also look up the #creativeminds hashtag, there are bound to be some tweets still on that feed.

Transmedia in the house

Andrea Phillips held a good talk on Hoax or Transmedia, talking about something that we (and many others I’m sure) are wrestling with when developing transmedia content – to hoax or not to hoax? And if hoaxing, how? What pitfalls are there? There are better ways of doing it – LonelyGirl15 was first a public figure on YouTube and only afterwards a one-to-one phenomenon – and worse ways of doing it – Martin Agget was one-on-one to begin with, which made revealing the hoax to be much more negatively received.

Rabbit holes are also dangerous things. It’s very OK to send a scent box signed by HBO to get key people to talk about the upcoming (yay!) series Game of Thrones. It’s something completely different to send people anonymous, vaguely threatening letters as part of a stirring-up-some-interest campaign. That’s what not-so-nice people do, and you don’t want to be associated with them!

On Twitter we were simultaneously discussing possible Rules of Transmedia Engagement. I think the bottom rule should be “Don’t Be Mean”, or something along that line, or perhaps "Do Unto Others...". Also, as Andrea pointed out, one must always take into account the Risk of Harm with a project – if I design it like THIS, how will it affect the people playing or watching, bystanders, bypassers and so on? Also – do not mistake “realistic” for “authentic”. A world can be authentic, well made and compelling, and making people want to join that world, without it being at all realistic (probably “Pandora” as an example?).

The checklist Andrea came up with was pretty straightforward. 1) is this so realistic that people will be fooled? 2) what about people who see only one piece? 3) what potential ham could it cause and 4) can it get me sued? I will be sure to follow that list in the future.

Examples of storytelling

Moving forward, the Unexpected Non-Fiction Storytelling session featured @zefrank, Tommy Pallotta, Hugues Sweney and Caspar Sonnen. It was actually all about showcasing. Pallottas project Collapsus is quite intricate. He also showcased (premiered, actually) unSpeak, which is basically tackling hard questions through voice over and footage taken from YouTube. UnSpeak is opening up to the public in the near future, aiming at letting them mix stuff up as well and tell the stories of UnSpeak in their own way.

National Film Board of Canada showed their stuff, like the Pine Point documentary which is simply a beautiful piece of art. The prize of the bunch though goes to @zefrank, for several innovative ideas that he presented, like http://youknowI.ly and http://star.me , all craving user interaction. The difference between @zefrank and the others at the panel were, IMHO; that the others made content for the audience, whereas Ze Frank made content with the audience. Great quote to close that session, from Le Frank: If people would just pay attention to the narrative of their possible funding, they’d be a lot more successful.

#tmtm (or, can you make money from transmedia)

Alex Chapman and James Kay, coming from the legal angle, held a talk on Transmedia Transmonetisation. Can you make money out of it, basically. Ideas have value, but not until we have something produced can we lock down elements and key points and minimize the risk of someone else stealing it. There were a number of comments on Twitter on some of the issues. @Fflic ‘s summed up a lot of it: #tmtm session at #SXSW. Lawyers always assume that rights = cash and control. Sorry, Context is king. (to which I added “Content” – great content and great context belong together and feed off each other.)

The TAG Team

Finally, at the Transmedia Artists Guild session, everyone got together in a heap in the middle of the room (or at least moved themselves and/or their chair a bit closer). @vpisteve and @jaybushman did the most of the talking to begin with. The guild will not compete with unions – it wants to talk about transmedia, perhaps do some lobbying for the new forms of media and so on.
To begin with there were obviously many different opinions and suggestions and questions, which is understandable. TAG has put up a website, where you can register and go to the forum’s to discuss transmedia and what it actually is and/or look for a job or post a project of your own. It’s accessible at http://www.transmediaartists.com. There was even, after a while, some love for TAG from a union official in attendance.

Now, much of the talk was almost US only, but the challenges of developing and producing transmedia are universal. I sincerely hope TAG will succeed, because like Steve said: "A success for one of us is a success for all of us, as it helps establish working practices and genre”. Looking forward to linking up the transmedia that is being done in Europe with TAG at some point in time.

That long day was then continued within the framework of transmedia at the Driskill. Now, some parties later and a blog post later, I am seriously ready to hit the sack (and yes, I’ll sort out the links tomorrow for the post; do not have the energy right now).

Some extras

PS. Heard a lot of good stuff about Barbara Vance's talk and Frank Rose's Tron session - unfortunately they were overlapping. A Wired article by Frank on Tron is up here and a VERY comprehensive post about Vance's talk is up here.

SXSW Day Two Roundup

2011-03-13T08:00:00.004+02:00

Second day of SXSW was pretty packed. It wasn’t actually until today, with most attendees present and a full day of talks that it dawned on me just how big this thing is – at any given moment there are 30-40 odd talks going on, and it’s just impossible to go to everything that sounds interesting, especially as the events are spread out over ten different venues all over Austin. The shuttles don’t help much either, as the traffic makes it a quicker option to go on foot.

That said, it is possible to catch interesting sessions. The only issue then being that if you, like I found myself at a couple of occations today, are at a not-so-interesting panel, the option of going to another is not really a viable one, as you probably won’t get there before it’s over. Today also made me take note of Robert Prattens excellent advice – at a place like this, take the opportunity to go to talks that are a bit off from what you regularly do, as the ones that are about what you do can be a bit to basic.

The first session I attended was entitled ”The Last Broadcast: Entertainment is Social – What’s Next?” and featured Brian Johnson, Marcelino Ford-Livene (as moderator), Dr Jeffrey Cole, John Marcom and Gary Wheelhouse. I should perhaps have read the description a bit more thoroughly, it being about how our nowadays connected devices are changing into personalized entertainment platforms. And that was basically what the talk was about. Brian came in with some good points, for instance that the change in television as a media – it becoming more social, more connected, more online - is coming not because it is a marketing trend and not because the industry has decided so, it is happening because people want it to happen. Just at with most other things in society.

Other than that, the panel was pretty dire fare, never venturing far from the field of ”wow, people want to tweet about a show” kind of thing. Summing it up pretty nicely was a question from the audience, a man trying to build a social media strategy for his broadcaster, and asking the panel to help him with some advice as many producers were of the opinion that opening up to the public is a disaster waiting to happen – what should he do? Answer from the panel? ”Yes, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. I would not be opening up.”. In my opinion, in a connected world where authenticity, openness and a feeling of ”real” is the currency you trade in (other than the quality of your content, naturally), such an approach is not only outdated, it’s outright counterproductive. To be fair, Brian was of another opinion - "do open up, explain the context and social norms will prevail".

The AVAdventure showcase panel was a step in a totally other direction. 1693 Productions have launched AVAdventure, which is a tailorable solution to engage different-sized groups of people into what could be likned to an ARG or a flash mob. Is can be an interactive live play, played out over a day, or something shorter. It can be about education, promotion, music, basically whatever. People download an audiofile to their iPods and then, at a given moment, simultaneously press play and follow the instructions that they are given. Accompanied by actors and a script, they can play out almost everything, from the Declaration of Codependence to a music video.

It was an interesting talk, to be sure. In stark contrast to the previous session, these people were extremely used to losing most control over things that happened - for instance, if one of 100 participants had started their iPods 30 seconds early, that person was sure to be doing stuff that got everyone else going "what?", but in a good way. It still turned out very well and people had a great time. They’re only now thinking about sponsors etc. I think their way of doing things would have strong ties to transmedia, should one start to explore them.

At the keynote of the day (with a ridiculously long line to get in, almost the whole length of the Austin Convention Centre) Seth Priebatch of SCVNGR fame talked some interesting things about gaming. If the 2000s was the decade of social – connections, if you will – then the 2010s will be the decade of games, or influence, in that case. In the 2000s, Facebook built the layer of social on top of the world, now it’s time to build the layer of gaming.

As an example – the problem with schools is that the engagement is broken. The solution? Introduce status and levels. If school is a game, then grades is a games mechanic. But it’s a flawed one, as it allows some people lose. Instead, look at D&D and introduce experience points and level up. It works to change the rules; at Princeton, no one is supervising the tests. The Code of Honor that students sign also say that complicity is as much crime as the original offence. The result is that fewer and fewer people cheat. You can also use the power of leveling up in this context.

As Seth said, Location Based Services are not commonplace yet. But to get them more commonplace, go more loosely location based, not tightly; it can be enough that people say they are going to be somewhere, not that they actually are somewhere, for instance. A game that people played out in the audience also showed the powers of decentralized leadership paired with a a joint goal and and a countdown. The Game Layer think is interesting, and I believe future projects must take this into consideration.

Finally, on the panel on transmedia, Daniel Lorenzetti, R. Eric Lieb, Louie Provost and Christian Raymond were talking transmedia.

The players on stage were pretty experienced producers and what-not. That said, I don’t think the talk really lived up to the subject of the talk. The panel mostly talked about transmedia from a movie/film/Hollywood perspective. Not much talk of other forms of transmedia, not much advice in the way of how to create transmedia other than hooking it to some other content. All in all, a not too impressive panel. But some gems were to be found, like the fact that transmedia elements can prop up the project where the film Is not-so-good, but the accompanying game might be the best ever. That will keep people attached to your brand. All in all, you have the same customers.

All in all, a hectic day and a day that showed the wisdom of leaving a panel if you’re not impressed and go find something else. After the day we attended meetups and parties, which was nice. Now, however, totally knackered. Will now sleep, to be fresh and back tomorrow!

SXSWi Day One wrapup

2011-03-12T06:59:00.004+02:00

As the first day of first SXSWi is behind me, I thought I’d take the time to sum up a bit about the experiences.

Overall, SXSWi is a nice conference. Nice in every aspect of the word; the organizers are nice – friendly, welcoming, there when you need them, saying the right things at the right time (like the fact that you can help Japan and their earthquake/tsunami victims here). The venues are nice – granted, it’s hard to make a conference centre nice, but they’re trying. Above all, the people are nice. People I’ve spoken to in queues, people I’ve talked to next to me at seminars, just about everyone is nice and happy to be at SXSWi. Which all summed up makes for an über-nice experience, so far.

At the back of the 330 pages thick SXSWi book is a wordcloud derived from the 1000+ strong programming sessions. It’s no surprise that ”social”, ”web”, ”media” and ”meet” are the largest words in the cloud – slightly more surprising is that words like ”cloud”, ”app” and ”APIs” are barely visible. But yes, social web and media, and meeting the people who are doing this, seems to be what SXSWi is about – this year at least.

The two sessions I attended were the fireside interview with Tim O'Reilly conducted by Jason Calacanis. It was a good interview – although Jason had a pretty easy time, as Tim was pretty good at speaking about the things he was passionate about. Some gems that came out of that discussion were for example talks about brands; as Tim sees it (and I agree fully), brands that connect in the right way with their targeted audience can give them the feeling of being in on something unique, something special. ”Being in the club” was the phrase Tim used. He went on explaining how a great idea is great, but it must be able to pull a load of train carriages behind it. Furthermore, it must go where a lot of people want to go, to fill up the carriages. Must be inclusive.

Tim O’Reilly categorized himself as being best at ”recognizing patterns”. This allowed him to think of ads online, of Web 2.0, etc. This is something that can be summed up as pattern recognition = having good notions of what is happening + have a core set of strong beliefs, loosely held + meet a lot of interesting, passionate people + make sure one pays attention to what they have to say.

At the ”The New Frontier of Social Gaming” with Brian Reynolds of Zynga, we started off with a look at social media. Facebook to the notion of being social to a new level – now you could be social efficiently. It doesn’t necessarily mean deep social interactivity, but Facebook is good at light social touches, which is where social games come in.

There was a lot of talk around the subject, but the key elements were that if you want ot make a social game, concentrate on helping people socialize more efficiently. Take something everyone can play, a pretty game, simple and featuring a universal aspiration. Finally, provide tools for people to express themselves. One unique element is that no matter what time of the day you play the game, other people logging in at 3pm are playing the same games as the people playing seven hours later. Now, games should be fun. FUN, according to Brian Reynolds of Zynga, is being provided with a series of interesting choices, where he or she can learn and recognize different pattern and provide surprise and delight to the ones experiencing it. So how do you make a fun app? Prototype it, revise it, show it to friends. Revise it. Review it. If it’s still not fun and ready, try to evolve it further. Put more choices. Make these choices matter more or build a story with surprise, suspense and/or humor. Hide patterns in your content that the audince can find them along the way. Add some kind of social like connection, and / or build a story where I – the audience - is the hero. Basically a lot of stuff that goes for transmedia development as well; if your content doesn’t feel good enough or fun enough, perhaps try one of the methods above? And if you’re not already testing your content on a bunch of people and revising accordingly, start doing so now!

In the evening was an informal transmedia meetup, attendend by a host of peole, such as Scott Walker and Sheri Candler. I enjoyed the conversations, and above all the feeling that transmedia people everywhere are struggling with the same things – sustainability, a measure of understanding from the client’s part, acceptance and a want to immerse from the part of the public…. Still, these are just obstacles to overcome. Looking forward to a lot more discussion at the formal meetup, on Sunday.

Transmedia Rising - comments

2011-03-11T04:21:00.003+02:00

The JWT report of transmedia as a trend – Transmedia Rising, downloadable here – is a good read and shows pretty well where we are right now, in the world of transmedia (which evolves at a dizzying pace, but then again, what doesn’t). The report does have branding and revenue as core elements in the report; on the other hand, no transmedia project can expect longevity without a sound business model at its core.

I did have some thoughts on a couple of the topics discussed in the post: creating the flow and digital natives. We say transmedia but in my mind we really need to think sansmedia; there is very little we can create or come up with within the borders of a project (short of true telepathy or something suchlike) that there is not a viable technical solution for, or one that can be invented. This is not to say that we should not look at platforms or tools while developing and writing, as these many times can work as inspirational material and enablers, rather than obstacles. But to start a project with the assumption that ”this will be a television, web portal and iPhone app-project” and let that assumption define the story, story world and transmedia experience, that’s just plain wrong. The digital natives experience their content without thinking about platforms or codes used, they just do it. So must our content, our stories, do. Furthermore, it really is not enough to come up with new ways to tell stories and technical solutions for it, if we do not find new ways to empower the audience and let them have their way with the content - but in a way that we as creators can still be OK with.

Coming, as I am, from the world of television (television formats to be precise), this is a process and a way of developing and producing that absolutely MUST be viewed with positive goggles on. It is far to easy to look at ones’ television documentary or drama and simply give up on getting to grips with the challenges of a many-faceted story world with multiple intertwining stories; it is equally far too easy to look at such a project from a traditional marketers’ point of view and simply long to go back to selling those 30 second ad spots for the sitcom you represent.

The reality is, of course, that this is true if one lets it be. I would suggest quite the opposite; that such a project would give a producer a multitude of ideas, that can get an audience to engage deeper and truer in a story and a story world, it can give the producer and the developer invaluable contacts to their core audience, it can lengthen the life span of the content many times over… it is building an exoskeleton of pure titanium on a hitherto lovely but limited story, enabling it to punch through the traditional storytelling walls and invite an audience to follow.

For the marketer the benefits are even clearer. As the story gain more aspects, more details, more spaces to occupy, so will the marketer gain more possibilities to connect to a brand, to reach customers, to advocate the content and thereby the associated brand(s).

To quote JWT’s report:

For marketers, this is an evolution of the integrated marketing model: Rather than a consistency across multiple touchpoints, the goal is for different channels to communicate different things (within the overarching strategy), with an emphasis on putting the brand community at the center

.
Now, substitute “marketers” for “storytellers”, “marketing model” for “storytelling model” and “brand community” for “narrative superstructure” and it is very obvious that these are two sides of the same coin.

The JWT report is a good sign that transmedia thinking and development is getting into more and more people’s minds in a good way. I for one am looking forward to what 2011 brings - a year that has already started magnificently.

SXSWi 2011

2011-03-09T19:39:00.003+02:00

These are hectic times, with projects upon projects going (almost) too well, leaving me with scant time to delve into things to the extent that I would want. I and a colleague are, however, leaving for SXSWi tomorrow, which will be mighty interesting.

It's great to see that SXSWi features a number of talks on transmedia this year - and a lot of other talks that tie into transmedia, from a storytelling, a technical or a funding angle. To check out my schedule, have a look here (I used Harvest as my tool of choice, just worked best for me) (and yeah, erm... all those parties I have checked, I'm not going to ALL of them. I think.)

If you're there, hope to bump into you, if you're not, I'll write a comprehensive resume afterwards!

What Motivates a Transmedia Audience

2011-02-28T17:30:00.003+02:00

This must be one of the things that creators of just about anything wonder about the most – will people, my intended audience, feel motivated enough to partake of what I have to offer? Will they participate like I would want them to participate? Will they stick around? Will they advocate my content to their friends? Or will they just turn their back and go do something else that they think is better?

This goes for blockbuster movies, for television series, for indie graphic novels and yes, for transmedia projects as well. To try to get to grips with this challenge, big-enough companies do target group research, polls etc, while smaller producers and creators poll their friends and family but mostly trust their gut feeling.

I struggle with this as well, naturally. I am in the quite luxurious position of having access to a laboratory and researchers focused on media and user experience, with whom we at the format development department work closely to get to know as much as possible about the experiences people derive from what we have to offer. Granted, many times the bulk of work goes to getting the testing itself focused to such a degree that it actually helps us in the development work. But as we work on it, we refine it and become better, naturally.

Something I’ll be bringing to the development work, and to the testing, is something I just saw. This very interesting video from RSA.org, featuring a talk by Dan Pink, is about what motivates people in the workplace. Do have a look, it’s (as all RSA-videos are) very good indeed. Basically what is said is that research shows that motivating people to work better with more money as the sole reward works fine as long as we’re talking only about manual labor. As soon as we go into any kind of task that would call for creative work, the people who received more money worked worse and failed more often. On the other hand, ventures like Wikipedia, Linux and Apache show that people – highly educated, motivated people at that – will work and give of their knowledge and skill, for free. So, what is the reward? Autonomy, mastery and purpose, according to Dan Pink.

We’re big on doing stuff that we want to do ourselves, not things that someone tells us to do. We’re also big on the feeling of mastering something, knowing that we know this thing and we are competent in precisely this regard. Finally, we’re big on having a purpose; of knowing that today is a step along the way towards a goal, whatever that might be – from ”making the world a better place” to ”teaching people”, for instance.

This was the workplace, mind you. I am quite convinced that this goes for a transmedia project as well, where you would want people to interact, to participate, to become a part of your story world. To put it into the categories of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, if you want the audience to immerse, engage and participate:

- You must not guide them too much, or the feeling of autonomy will be lost. It's a tricky task, to leave enough openness for everyone to find something "new", and to be able to make their own way through your story and your world, and make their own stuff there; too much and you have no control (which might be what you desire), too little and you will have obedient people following your instructions (if there are any people left for you to instruct, that is)
- You must not make mysterious content that no one will ever master, or they will never get the feeling of being competent in your story world. Instead, perhaps, leave areas where audience members can become masters; masters of what they themselves have created within the ramifications of your story, or masters at guiding other audience members in understanding the intricate fabric of the story and the world.
- Finally, you must not build a story where the participation of the audience has no meaning for anything, where their actions or lack of actions has no impact and it simply does not matter what they do or not. Neither can you build a story world that has no purpose in itself, or there will be no reason for anyone to engage in it.

I’ll take these thoughts into my development work. I’ll let you know how it plays out!

Tools for Transmedia part 6 - HistoryPin

2011-02-27T19:35:00.002+02:00

Short post due to winter holidays...

This, HistoryPin, is a service that was launched in mid-2010 (which makes it ANCIENT, no? ☺) . I saw it back then, in May, and promptly forgot about it until @storytellin tweeted about the service today. Looking at the description of the service, I think HistoryPin is a tool that could be used for quite intriguing aspects of transmedia storytelling. Say that you are building any sort of scenario, and want to build on the history of the world you’re creating – by using HistoryPin you can a) get an excellent feeling for different places and views, what it felt like, back in the days, or alternatively you can plant your own photos, allegedly from that time and age.
You could even plant clues in these pictures, clues that can lead to other content elsewhere or give deeper understanding about some scenario in one of your storytracks.
The only obstacle might be HistoryPin itself, since I have no idea whether they would agree to hosting ”fake” pictures; on the other hand, deals can surely be made, and the pictures available for a certain time only, for instance.

Tools for Transmedia part 5

2011-02-25T22:28:00.002+02:00

There are constantly opening up new services and software that could be used in a transmedia setting, and I will admit it is hard to keep up. So a big thanks to Scott Walker for pointing me in the direction of two more of these, this time focusing on enhancing geolocating possibilities, Voxora and Geoloqi.

Voxora

This is a service that on the surface is basic, yet does something no one has done before (at least to my knowledge). Voxora ties in with your Foursquare account and lets you leave a message tied to the location you are in, a voice message that you can listen to yourself and that others can listen to as well, by calling a certain number.

Now, I have not been able to try this out, so I might be missing something. I think it would be a wonderful tool for just about anyone doing transmedia stuff; this could be used, for example, to leave voice messages for people at certain locations, messages that tie in with some sort of ARG or other – could potentially be quite powerful stuff.

It could also be tied to a viewing of a movie at a cinema, for instance; at the end of Avatar, if there would’ve been a number there to call, where Jake would have told me 30 seconds more of how life on Pandora went on after the humans had left, I would’ve called that number immediately. Basically, Voxora has potential to be of very good use for transmedia content developers.

Geoloqi

This is a somewhat similar service, but handier for a developer of transmedia. Through the interface – a world map with a simple interface – you can drop Geonotes just about anywhere (like dropping a geonote on the grocery store before leaving the house, which means you won’t have to bring a shopping list). Through the website you can also drop notes for other users – just know the username of the user and you can decide where on the map you want to leave a geo note for them. This note will then pop up when they go past that place.

Now, the ways to use this service in the realms of Transmedia are numerous. The only hitch being that at the moment you would need for people to sign up, and in some way, shape or form tell you their user name on the service, for you to be able to create these geo notes for them.

On the other hand, once you have their usernames, you just have to plant clues, information, greetings, reminders or conversation out there, in their geologically logical places. If you’re shooting a documentary, you could concievably have messages ready for different places that were seen in the documentary, places of interest, and have these messages communicated to people who are dedicated followers of the subject or of the documentary itself.

These were just a couple of examples, and more Tools for Transmedia are sure to spring up. In the meantime, does anyone have any experience of using the examples above? I’d be happy to hear more.

The Three Facets of Transmedia

2011-02-21T15:41:00.001+02:00

There has been an interesting discussion going on over at the Storyworld group on LinkedIn, about transmedia; what should be constituted as transmedia and what should be filed under ”flimsy cross media marketing”, to quote, and what should be taken into consideration when transmediating content. Deriving from that, I felt the need to expand on a couple of points, regarding the three different facets of a transmedia project:

The telling of a story

Transmedia storytelling is, at its core, simply that. By spreading out over different media and by creating a greater whole, we move deeper into the realms of transmedia. What it is, is basically the art and technique of telling a story, or rather multiple stories, connected directly or indirectly inside a larger story world and/or narrative superstructure and/or mythology.

As we all know, this can be done in many ways; through characters in blogs, through exciting and engaging television drama series, through sms, Twitter, Facebook, apps… The key is create the stories and the world, and use the platforms that comes naturally to the different parts of the story

Engaging an audience

The second facet is also crucial, that of embracing the audience and bringing them into the story/stories, to sandboxes or cheese-holes or perhaps even to less structured, more open areas in the structure of the stories and the story world.

This, of course, as many have discussed, profoundly changes the notion of an audience. Your audience is your audience, but at the same time they are your co-creators, investing themselves in your story and inevitably bringing change with them. It is then up to you, the creator, to choose just how much change you want. But generally, the more people invest, the closer they will feel to your content. Best case scenario, you not only have an audience and a horde of co-creators, you also have advocates that bring your stories to people in a fashion you yourself never could.

Financing your creations

The third facet is that of building sustainable financial structures, which have to be re-developed for each case, just as the stories and the worlds are re-developed for each new project. Transmedia projects have so many variables in play, that they inevitably become different from each other – more different than, say, television series or feature films. This leads to the creators needing to re-think the financing for every project; for sure there is a measure of recycling financing models from previous transmedia projects, but there will always be new possibilities in the context of a new project. This – sustainable financial structures – can take many shapes; from brands financing the lot to crowd sourced funding via IndieGoGo or a similar service.

Win-win-win

I firmly believe that to transmediate content opens up a whole lot of new possibilities to turn a project into a win-win-win situation, where you as a content creator win since you can tell more stories to more people in more ways, and get more and better (as in more fitting with your project) money in when you can play with a number of platforms and a number of stories. The brands or financiers win since you can target their message better, and since there is room for more financiers to partake - tv, online, books, mobile - the cost is less per participant with more bang for the buck as the end result. Finally the audience wins, as you have more money to make better content and make it available on more platforms to be even easier to obtain, engage and participate with and advocate for the audience.

The Phantom - a Theoretical Transmedia Case Study

2011-02-17T23:36:00.008+02:00

Yesterday, in a post about developing existing properties towards becoming transmedia properties, I warned everyone to leave The Phantom be, ’cause he was mine to develop. A jest, naturally, but today it actually got me thinking a bit. See, today, the 17th of February, marks the 75th anniversary for the iconic comic hero, who saw the light of day on this very day in 1936. I found an old Phantom magazine from when I was a kid and had a look; lo and behold, the foundation for a solid transmedia setting is there already!

Below is what could be called a Case Study of a Theoretical Transmedia Development (or CSTTD) (happy there were two ”T”:s in that abbreviation, or this post would’ve featured in some quite different google searches) of the existing property The Phantom.

The Phantom has always, for some reason, been most popular not in it’s country of origin, USA, but rather in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. Lee Falk, who created The Phantom, rewrote a lot of the background story at the same time as the actual first strips were being publised in 1936, building an intricate setting which almost could be part of the real world as a framework for the story.

The story of the Phantom

The Phantom is, as we all know, over 400 years old. Back then an ancestor was on a ship that was overtaken by Singh-pirates. Wounded, he managed to flee, was found by the pygmés (the ”bandars”) and woved never to rest until he was avenged. He created the mask and the costume, and after his death, left it all to his son, who left it to his, and so on, until today.

Do observe that we’re already talking ”distant mountains” here. Singh-pirates? Bandars? The Skull Cave? A lot of things to explore and dive deeper into.

Over the years – and the strips – the world of The Phantom grew bigger and bigger; a number of tribes appeared, a country (Bengali or Bangalla) where the Skull Cave and surroundings were situated, the Jungle Patrol overseeing justice in the wilderness, the island Eden, where all animals live in peace… strange going ons like The Little People and the slave trading nations in the north… freely mixing 18th or 19th century traditions and legends with the technologies of today, Falk and his co-creators created a rich world and a rich mythology – sometimes with different parts at odds with each other, but most often not – which would be just right for a transmedia developer.

The Phantom goes Transmedia

The Phantom has tried to revive itself – from the movie in 1996 to different features and fan clubs – but obviously not looked at their property from a transmedia angle. Some suggestions I would look at, were I to develop said property:

- What are all the different storylines that need to be collected? Can they be benchmarked against each other and either be removed from the canon of The Phantom or embraced, included and communicated to everyone associated with the brand? This goes hand in hand with….
- Re-writing the mythology, starting from the storylines that have been spared, to get as much flesh on the bones as possible and evaluating the efforts made already – how does it all fit together.
- Which of the canonical storylines are at home in the real world, i.e. which can, as a casual impulse, use for instance the Internet to perform a task. Myself, I’d like to work on the Jungle Patrol and how the Patrol was created in greater detail, opening up their web presence to today’s readers, adding twitter accounts, a continuous Help The Patrol online mystery game etc, and see what other stories can be derived from the Jungle Patrol without directly involving the Phantom.
- How can a storyline (or more than one) be translated to an ARG or suchlike, and where and how can such an ARG take place? The Phantom has bases all over the world and has been on adventures everywhere, which should lend any ARG-developing team a helping hand.

And of course, there are a multitude of stories, that have only been briefly touched upon in the magazine or the strips, enough to create a whole Phantom shadow world as a shadow of the real world.

I’ll stop here, but I think you get the point. You will be able to go transmedia with almost any project. But some are simply just already made for it. And once again – hands off The Phantom! ☺

Twain on Transmedia

2011-02-17T14:49:00.006+02:00

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
- Mark Twain

Through the wonderful world of Twitter, I was pointed in the direction of a post on Mark Twain and social media from last summer. Twain had, some 120-odd years ago, written a piece on how to tell a story. It’s a good and true read, and in many ways instantly transferrable to any transmedia project being considered or developed today. In his text Twain refers to the two ways to tell a story – the humorous way and the witty way. Says Twain –

The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.
The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.

The humorous story, Twain argues, needs an artist to tell it right. The witty story, on the other hand, is a story that could be told by a machine.

This is, I feel, a kind of crossroads where transmedia is today, as more and more people are beginning to see the uses of a transmedia approach to telling a story, as producers and companies can point to increasing revenues from transmedia projects and as technical and sociological means and practices open up newer, quicker and deeper ways of telling stories over different media.

Some will be – are, already, actually – going the ”comic/witty” way of developing and creating transmedia. To, again, quote Twain:

[…] the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you--every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

I see that as a great pointer to what NOT to do with a transmedia story. There is no magic and no fun – and most of all, nothing to discover – in a story that someone is banging you over the head with, no matter how the story unfolds over different media platforms and/or turns out hundreds of different merchandize possibilities. On the other hand, as the quote on top says, an ideal transmedia story could also have ”no order to it, and the reader (user) would have to discover his own.” …which is an approach that tickles the imagination a lot more vigorously.

As Bill Wren, who wrote the post on Twain and social media, translates Twain’s musings, there are two ways to tell a story; the right way and the wrong way. It all depends on your ulterior motives:

As Twain describes it, telling stories is manipulative. However, the reason for the manipulation is what makes it a good or bad thing. Doing it to delight your audience is good; doing it to bamboozle them into doing something that profits you, is bad.

So, with the possibility of transmedia as a term being connected to a lot of not-so-beautiful projects in the near future – and with Steve Peters’ tweet from yesterday, which I believe was a reaction to the massive transmedia hype at the NY Toys Fair (which actually was mostly franchising in the traditional sense), in mind – we might be wanting to take care of the term transmedia a bit more. For me, transmedia has been - and still is - a term that tells of possibilities and excitement, not necessarily revenue streams and franchising. If too many projects labels "transmedia" are told in Twains comic/witty way, we might be looking for a new term in the not so distant future.

On the other hand, terms are terms, and should not be taken too seriously. It’s what we create, why we create it, how we create it and how we execute it that matters. However, to round off with a final quote from the great Mark Twain, I think transmedia, in all of it’s momentum forward, might want to rein in a bit and reassess:

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation. - Mark Twain

Developing existing properties, a Simple Solution and SXSW 2011

2011-02-16T12:59:00.003+02:00

Some thoughts on this week in transmedia (so far)...

Developing existing properties

If there is one company that one should take example from when it comes to transmedia, it is probably Starlight Runner. Jeff Gomez and his team has worked a number of bestseller, like Tron, Pirates of the Caribbean and so on. This week the news broke that SLR will partner with UK startup Witchfactory to develop their Adore-franchise. This is a franchise already in place, based on the notion that there are fairies living in the real world, in the shadow of us normal humans. The franchise is skewed towards 5-9 year old girls and the artwork (which has already gathered a following and is generating considerable reveneue early) is just exactly right for the target group (I should know, my elder daughter is 10 years old).

In the urge to create new transmedia ventures, projects and stories, I believe this is something to take example from. There is already a multitude of possible transmedia stories there to be developed, expanded and told. Many of these have a loyal following, or at least the power of recognition amongst an audience. It does not have to be anything as iconic as Back to the Future, although it could be, now does it have to be anything as revenue-making as World of Warcraft, although it could be that as well.

The obstacles are pretty easy to identify, the biggest probably how to get the original owner of the content/franchise to agree to a transmedia development. It would obviously help to have the reputation of a company like SLR, but not many of us are in such a position. What you could do is identify the best brands or the best stores you would like to work with. Next, identify which of them seem to be the most accessible and the most progressive. Then, take a day or two to outline the blueprint for a transmedia development, including estimates of costs, and adding useful links to similar, successful, transmedia adaptations of similar content. Finally, approach. Perhaps get someone to vouch for you, or go attend the same conference as someone from that company. Even better, just drop them a tweet, a mail, a phone call, asking if they are interested in hearing more. You’d be surprised how many actually say ”yes”.

Then it’s up to you to create a good enough plan to hook the potential future partner, and then deliver. Just remember – it’s their story, so in this case THEY are the creator. Yes, you are a creative and yes, you work creatively, but you really need to identify the essence, the tone and the soul of their content, if you want to be able to develop meaningful transmedia content for them.

And yeah, hands off The Phantom, he's mine.

To hoax or not to hoax

Steve Peters had an excellent suggestion in a post yesterday. It has to do with stuff that has been discussed before, by me and others – to hoax or not to hoax people, especially in a transmedia setting.

I’m of the opinion that hoaxing most often is not the way to go. There are several reasons, but mainly it is put of respect for the user, and a feeling that if my content is good enough, I won’t need any hoaxing – the wilful suspension of disbelief will be enough. (Another side of the coin is ”telling the truth but not the whole truth, only the parts that fit into the transmedia story” which I am totally fine with – as long as the creators are aware that WHEN (not IF) someone finds out the ”whole truth”, it must not be anything that talks AGAINST the tone and feel and soul of the transmedia property. Otherwise, the backlash will be severe.)

Steve’s proposal is simple and great. Include a Fiction Tag to HTML, letting people easily find out if the site they are on is fiction or not. I support this; it would free us from gigantic logos intruding on our stories, and it would let ut NOT hoax anyone that does not want to be hoaxed, if we choose to use the tag.

I haven’t heard a simpler or better solution in, oh… several hours, I will readily admit. ☺ So, here’s hoping for an adaption!

SXSW 2011 Rookie Alert

I, along with a colleague of mine, will be attending SXSW this year for the first time. Looking at the schedules, the location of our hotel, the party listings and the amount of people attending, I would guess it will be a lot like the first time at MIPTV – a day or two spent walking around asking people where that session that started 15 minutes ago is being held, completely misunderstanding their advice, getting lost and ending up with a beer with some friendly guys from Australia.

If anyone care to give me some advice on HOW to prepare, WHAT is essential (it’s always something that’s so obvious to everyone that no one even thinks about it, like ”be at the registration office before 9.30AM otherwise you’ll NEVER get you badge”) and WHOM to listen to and meet, I’d appreciate it. Mail me at simon dot staffans at gmail dot com or leave a reply here. Thank you!

Content 360 - a transmedia opportunity

2011-02-12T17:11:00.005+02:00

I’ve been attending the MIPs (MIPTV in the spring, MIPCOM in the autumn) for six years running now; marketing our formats, building networks and relationships and keeping up with the trends in – predominantly – the television industry.

The MIPs have always tried to keep up with the times – granted, mostly with more than just a glint of ”where’s the next revenue stream going to come from?” in the eye – and introduce new elements every year. During my years there I’ve seen focus on mobile television, User Generated Content, interactive television, 3D television etc. There have always been sidetracks to the actual MIP-fairs; once upon a time one sidetrack was called MILIA (and searches still give the name is MIPTV featuring MILIA, where MIPTV is ”World’s premier audiovisual market” and MILIA is ”World’s largest interactive content forum for TV, mobile &broadband.”

This year MIPTV includes MIPFormats the weekend before and, during the week, features the sidetrack Connected Creativity, where ReedMIDEM, the organizers, team up with GSMA, the global mobile industry association, for something they call “A global forum uniting entertainment, technology and mobile media”. Still a serious focus on revenue streams, no denying that, but at the same time the mantra “Content Is King” keeps popping up.

Opportunity for transmedia

This is where the transmedia angle enters into the picture. See, in what has become a fixed event at MIP, they’re hosting the Content 360 competition, a competition where organisations and companies from the media industry look for new content in specific categories. Content 360 usually attracts quite a lot of entries, ranging from the pretty poor to some truly groundbreaking stuff. The prizes usually are a wad of cash and the possibility to work with the company/organisation in question to develop and produce the winning concept. So, this is perhaps more a chance for new developers and smaller companies to start forging a deeper relationship with a major player, than for a big development studio to come in and sweep all the prizes.

This year I personally believe that anyone who had done their homework and are adapt at thinking transmedially will stand a good chance to be picked for the final round, perhaps even win a category. For example, read what Clare Tavernier from FremantleMedia, who sponsors one of the categories, has to say about what they’re looking for in a good entry:

We aren’t looking for TV shows with extensions. We are looking for cross-media experiences in which TV is a part of the mix.
We will also look at the commercial and brand integration potential. We want creatives to really show a capacity in coming up with brand-friendly and market-friendly ideas.

Now, even though she says “cross media”, do tell me if a true transmedia project wouldn’t fit the bill a lot better – especially when you are talking about brand integration, as I’ve touched upon before in this blog.

Then we have the things you always have to worry about – will my submitted idea be safe? Will someone rip it off immediately? Are there any guarantees? And of course, one can never be 100% on the safe side. As soon as you’ve told someone your idea, a rip off is possible. We’re chosen to go with the Format Recognition And Protection Association, FRAPA, to register our ideas with all necessary timestamps. If you have an idea or a format, it might pay in the long run to take a look at their services.

So, you’re thinking, he’s done a decent job of selling that competition to us – but will he submit something of his own, eh? Answer is – yes, but in a slightly different setup than my normal dayjob. So in a way this is pretty stupid of you, you continue, asking for more competition? Answer is again, yes, in a way. But I believe the more good transmedia projects we get up-and-running, the easier it will be for all of us to create new transmedia stuff. It’s all good, basically.

See you all in Cannes in April, right?

What’s in a name?

This blog was for a long time named “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. Not that I had any preference for Mary Poppins, I just liked the word. Then, I changed the name, to “The Developer’s Log”, as I felt it better reflected the things I was writing about. And now, a U-turn, and the name is the same as it was before. The reason? There’s more to life – and to a blog – than mere work ☺. The content will, more or less, continue in the same vein as earlier.

Disclosure: I do a - non-paid - monthly guest blog post for ReedMIDEM, the company behind the MIPs.

Moving with the times

2011-02-07T22:35:00.014+02:00

I come from a background of traditional media; newspapers, radio and television. I still feel that especially television can play an important part in a project, since it is a tried and tested way to reach people, a way that many are familiar with and can accept fairly easily (and no, I’m not talking about television as being watched on a television set, but the notion of a television show, no matter where and how you view it. The 30 minute slot, the feeling of a sitcom, the soothing tone of a well-spoken voice over, all the things that we accept as natural parts of a television show). So, naturally, I keep track of what happens in my old – but still very current – areas of the media landscape.

This year, we are witnessing the beginning of a small upheaval that just might turn into a bigger one. Over at Hulu, CEO Jason Kilar wrote passionately about the new ways of consuming television and his firm belief that the traditional television companies would have to move with the times and rethink as more and more people are abandoning traditional television. Ty Braswell wrote an excellent piece over at Venture Beat about 2011 being the make-or-break year for television. A quote from the end of his post:

2011 will be the most significant year in the history of television. We are days away from the tipping point. Industry leaders who fail to organize with their competitors will see their business evaporate. Digital natives are already becoming comfortable and savvy getting TV and movie content illegally.

2011 will be a very good year for people in the business of television if they realize that television as we know it has gone away. For the start-ups and their investors, a tremendous opportunity has been created: Whoever teaches the television industry how to monetize content and make it easy to access will become the next big thing.

Granted, that was written to a large extent from a financial and distribution angle. I do believe, however, that this will be a positive thing for transmedia storytelling. As is discussed and hoped for in the posts mentioned above, we are looking – perhaps forced to look, but still – at a significant change in the way people consume television, a change that will be for the better and in a more coherent way will touch on the viewers' way of living and consuming. This space is not yet occupied, and in my eyes it does have a decidedly transmedia-ish shape.

Using transmedia storytelling as a way to re-invent television makes absolute sense to me. That is the best and - I was going to say "easiest", but that's probably not the right word - most accommodating way to utilize the fact that many a loyal and engaged member of any show's audience has already torrented it from any number of sources weeks before it hits their territory via traditional television, and are viewing it on their laptops. In such a case, perhaps clear call to actions in the content of just that show means that "delving deeper into the story" is just seconds away. Remember, these are people who have not just switched on the television set and are watching your show because they have nothing else to do. These are active and engaged people, who have taken the effort to download YOUR show rather than anyone else's, because they like it. Don't throw that away!

I firmly believe that television as we know it will not exist for that long. Yes, there will be television sets, although the way t use them will evolve. Yes, there will be television shows, although their function might evolve as well - from being the end product to being the lunch vehicle to engage an audience into your story world. And as the term "I'm watching television" moves to whole new contextual levels, so must the content and the stories we want people to listen to.

Learning from virtual worlds

2011-02-06T23:16:00.006+02:00

I really do like when people say or write things that I find are absolutely 100% true, and useful to boot. In an article about Branded Virtual Worlds (i.e. Habbo, or why not Hello Kitty Online, or any other franchise branching out into the virtual world) the emphasis was, naturally, on virtual worlds, but many aspects are directly transferrable to whichever kind of transmedia format one happens to be working on. The best quote:

"Transmedia storytelling shows that while users enjoy engagement and can navigate the different types of media, they do need a good story to lead them through the experience," says Elisabeth Unverricht, senior planner at agency G2. "The crucial success factor for any type of virtual world is ease of access, offering instant as well as continuously rewarding experiences through storytelling and a good mix of lean-back and lean-forward moments."

While this certainly is true for virtual worlds, this is also very true whether you are making a transmedia project around a documentary, around music or around a television drama series. Some terms could perhaps be rephrased. It is not only a story that should lead the users through the experience, it is probably several. That which should lead the users through the experience is the story world, the mythology, that has been built up around and under the story you are telling. This story world, canon, mythology… needs also be easy to access and focused on the giving of "instant but also continuosly rewarding experiences."

I feel the last point might be the hardest to realize in a transmedia setting. The plot(s) and the storyworld must be very well developed and very supportive of each other to give a good mix of lean-back and lean-forward moments. To get the users/viewers to engage to the point of leaning forward and finally participating requires clear call to actions, a good story to draw the user in and a clear, logical route for the user to take, no matter which entrypoint he or she chooses.

On funding transmedia, part two

2011-02-05T14:44:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I read a post by David Wilson over at Transmediator, which raised a number of legitimate concerns with regards to how everything is becoming content creation, commodifying storytelling and wrapping everything in a thick layer of ”how-can-we-make-money-out-of-this-then”. To quote:

Finance is terribly fragmented. Independent producers get money any which way they can: sales agents, brand owners, vanity angels, arms dealers… and they often have to give any equity away to get the thing made.

[…] Independent producers must now present business plans, franchise opportunities, enterprise investment schemes, marketing plans… no wonder everything has turned into ‘content creation’. We are forced to juggle lots of pieces and do this predominantly on our own and without any money in our pockets. And this is damaging to the end product, because too much time is spent fundraising and not enough on development.

As anyone who has had a great idea but no means to get adequate funding to get that idea developed and into production can testify, it’s not a good position to be in. On the other hand, there is the question of marking your idea to market; if you can’t get anyone to cough up the dough to make it, perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to start with? Then we could go into the debate about how to pitch your project, how to meet the right people and so on… But that is sort of a different ballpark.

I a couple of previous posts I’ve been banging on about the need for transmedia projects to have a sound financial footing. I have a hard time believing that all the creative people into transmedia storytelling at the moment will have the energy to keep creating content if there is no financial windfalls at any point. That’s why I think – contrary to David’s post – this dilemma should be viewed as an opportunity, not an obstacle.

See, if you work together with people who can get you sponsors, who can get you funding, who can sell your project, AND you can integrate that which they bring to you into your story world, making it a natural part of the mythology you are building, you will at the same time create a stronger story world that will be more attractive for future sponsors to hook into – especially as they can compare your world with the values they themselves stand for, and see that they match. (And if they don’t match, you might want to look for another sponsor ☺ ).

No, there are no clear-cut models yet, and I do not believe there will be a one-approach-fixes-all-solution to the problem. For instance, getting modern-day companies to sponsor your medieval history drama and make them fit naturally into the story world might be a bit difficult. But get a brewery in and you might come up with a solution. Ultimately, it is down to the content you create, the story world and mythology you build. As I said, if it is truly impossible to fund, perhaps it needs a bit of re-working?

David starts his post with the legendary quote: “Build it and they will come”. Thing is, they’re already there. We just need to build it. For that, we need funding, and for that, we need to look at how we develop and produce transmedia.

The Long Haul

2011-02-04T00:04:00.004+02:00

I tweeted this question earlier today, but 140 characters is pretty short when struggling with difficult terms and even more difficult nuances. What I would love to discuss with other people in the same field is the question of formats and transmedia, especially when thinking about marketing and localization etc.

The terms

To be clear with the terms we are talking about, when I say ”format” I mean that which in it’s most traditional sense is a television format. The recipe and the know-how, the production notes and the hard- and software needed to re-make a certain show or series in another territory – that is a format. And formats is a big business nowadays; not only stuff like Big Brother or Millionaire, hundreds, if not thousands of formats are being marketed and produced, in every genre from game shows to children’s TV.

It also makes perfect sense – if a show has been successful in a certain territory, and you can buy all the knowledge and content needed to re-make your own version of that successful story, you would most often go that way, were you a commissioner or acq. executive who needed to not be in the red when the financial year draws to an end.

Now, as most people agree on, transmedia is the telling of one or several stories over two or more platforms, with the stories all being connected to a greater storyworld, the mythology of the stories and their context.

So, to the point I’d like to discuss: formats and transmedia.

Many, if not most, transmedia projects are one-offs. It is a crime novel with a Facebook connection, or perhaps something tied to a live event with people searching for clues within a certain time limit. As I’ve preached before, I firmly believe that we should also look to create transmedia projects that can run and run, of their own accord and with a sound business plan as part of the core. I.e., what I want to make is transmedia formats, that can be localized, marketed, and enjoyed in different territories, without losing out on the story, the mythology, the narrative superstructure.

Some questions

What I’d welcome some thoughts on is basically:

- Can transmedia be formatted, and still not lose out on the crucial story and storyworld?
- Are there genres that would be more suitable for transmedia formatting than others, or are we talking on a project-by-project basis?
- Any thoughts on whether a transmedia project having run in one territory would make audience engagement deteriorate in later territories due to it not being ”fresh”, or is there just a lack of localization (which in a transmedia setting probably should be called ”creative wipe”, cleaning off and drawing new content on the same blackboard)

Discussions are welcome. Will update when I know more about this.

On transmedia and funding

2011-01-28T23:19:00.006+02:00

Andrea Phillips wrote a passionate and very good post some days ago on why transmedia is not marketing. I can’t but agree with the points she makes in her post, as I am not a marketing person by trade, nor a born seller (although I’m getting better at it). On the other hand, I do believe that I will look at a couple of the points Andrea makes from a slightly different angle. She wrote:

For one thing, [marketing transmedia projects] are a lot more likely to be able to pay the team a living wage, which means the creators can afford to spend more time and care instead of working on it in off hours and weekends. And more money means a higher production value; dollars spent translates pretty well into better-looking video, better-sounding audio, and sleeker, glossier websites. Audiences like that.
And even more important than improved production values, money lets you promote the story. This is crucial -- you need to pull people into your project.

Now, in my book this is not a bad thing (and no, I don’t believe Andrea thinks it’s bad either, in itself). In fact, I feel it is a necessary thing, for any project, transmedia or not. Yes, I am a storyteller. Yes, I create transmedia projects. Yes, I want to get a living wage and pay the ones I work with a living wage as well. And yes, I want it to look as good as possible, give the best experience possible and attract as large an audience as possible.

To do this (unless you happen to film your kid getting his finger bitten by his brother and generate a gazillion views off of that), the project needs funding. To get funding, you need someone willing to pay for the project. To find those willing to pay for the project, you need to make it worthwhile for them. Therefore, as I’ve mentioned before, the crafting of a viable business plan that fits your transmedia narrative superstructure, but at the same time give sponsors and advertisers value for their money, is in many ways as great a challenge as creating the transmedia content itself. And these things are interconnected – your content, with your stories, your mythology, your theme, will point you in the right direction when it comes to finding possible sponsors and partners that will fit into your story and your storyworld without disturbing them and taking away from the experience of them. This in turn will give both you and your sponsors better value for the money.

The reason I started writing this post was an article from A Think Lab, written by Bonnie Buckner and Dr Pamela Rutledge about “The Power of Transmedia Storytelling – using the technique for effective marketing campaigns”. It has a number of good points that any transmedia producer, no matter how small-key or artsy, can take to heart and use to good advantage. No matter how small a producer you are, you still want a great number of people to take part of your content. Says A Think Lab re: the great possibilities a transmedia approach gives anyone who is in the marketing business:

A story invites rather than sells. […] Today’s consumer lives in a world where a genuine brand dialogue, not “marketing message,” is expected.

I feel we have an obligation, as early-wave transmedia producers and creators, to create not only great projects but financially viable projects that can be used when explaining the term transmedia to a business and media world that hasn’t really opened their eyes to the possibilities a transmedia approach provides yet. I would dearly like to point to a dozen great transmedia projects with a stable financial plan as a part of the project structure the next time I go pitch a new project to potential financiers :)

Doing it the transmedia way

2011-01-24T13:04:00.004+02:00

Working with transmedia is one thing. Working transmedially, that’s something else, at least in my book. The two thing do go hand in hand, in a way – if you ARE working with transmedia, starting to think in a transmedia fashion about the way you work opens up possibilites.

In his book ”The rules of work” Richard Templar talks about roles in a working environment. He statest that:

Basically your Role is how you fit into the team – and yes, we are all team players. We have to be, in this day and age.

Looking at how many transmedia producers approach their work, this is very true. You need a transmedia producer to work with the other producers and the creator(s) of a certain property, especially if you are looking at developing and producing something a bit bigger. It goes without saying that defining the roles of these different team members is a crucial part of any project; who is responsible for what, who has clout when it comes to the development of a certain content and who needs to know what and when.

Working ”transmedially”

Transmedia, however much a buzzword it has become in the past few months, is a very powerful instrument when you get it right. So why not use it to make your teamwork better? If you build the storyworld, the mythology, of your project with the same careful and precise devotion as you build the storyworld that will be the content of your project, you will – according to my/our experience – receive a number of benefits:

- Everyone involved in the project will know their role intimately, and can naturally interact to change their role to fit themselves as persons even better – as long as it does not break the transmedia principles of theme and tone
- Integrating new co-workers or external partners in the project is easier when you have a story to connect to. This is not saying that you should start explaining transmedia principles or dive deep into storyworlds when talking to potential partners, but it will give you the means to explain the gist of the project in a coherent, logical and always similar way.
- Pitching your project suddenly becomes much easier. Not only do you know your content, you know your project and everyone’s role in it, and you know your own role as well.
- Defining a transmedia setting for your project also gives ideas on how to implement the project on different platforms, and how to use different platforms to the greatest advantage
- By defining the transmedia setting, the storyworld, for your project, you will by default also (at least partly) define the role of your company (and affiliated companies) in that setting. This can lead to new aspects on your company and possible future projects and cooperations.
- If you want to make additional material available, which in a transmedia project is almost a given, approaching the way you work transmedially will help you no end when it comes to amassing "behind-the-scenes"-material, making-of-documentaries etc

The roles

As for how to define different roles, it might not be the most productive way to go down the drama route, as there is less call on archetypes like ”Hero”, ”Sage” or ”Villain” when you sit around a table brainstorming stuff. I think the best way is to define roles according to the people connected to a certain project, but there are places to start looking if inspiration is needed.

For instance, Dr Meredith Belbin, who has been researching into team work roles for over 40 years, is one place to start with the definitions of nine distinct team roles at the core; the Plant, the Resource Investigator, the Co-ordinator, the Shaper, the Monitor Evaluator, the Team Worker, the Implementer, the Completer and the Specialist. Have a read at the Team Role Theory site for more information.

Conclusion

Taking the opportunity to apply transmedia principles not only to the content you are working on but also to the work processes themselves, has the potential to add a surprising amount of value to not only your work, but to the way you work as well. Try it – you might just like it.

Must connect, must make sense.

2011-01-18T22:08:00.006+02:00

Today I read a good post by Pamela Rutledge over at Psychology Today. She talks about the psychological power of storytelling and brings up some points that I find are absolutely crucial for transmedia developers to take into consideration when developing their stories. I’ve touched upon the subject before, in Transmedia - the Story, the Experience and the Needs, since I believe that storytelling in a transmedia setting makes it possible to satisfy a greater number of needs than most forms of traditional storytelling. For example – we’ve all come out of a movie theatre, euphoric, with a deep sense of wanting to know what happened to the characters after the movie ended. Or, in the case of Avatar, LotR and many others, wanting to be a part of the world we have just gotten a glimpse of. Transmedia storytelling can fill this need, at least much better than other methods.

But we need to be wary and know what limits we are working within. As Rutledge writes:

In spite of all the excitement, however, the human brain has been on a slower evolutionary trajectory than the technology. Our brains still respond to content by looking for the story to make sense out of the experience.

And this is so very crucial. The different parts must connect, but must also make sense. Whichever way a user/consumer/viewer chooses to enter a narrative superstructure, they must fit logically into the mythology and the storyworld.

In a post about themes, deriving from Jeff Gomez’s and Starlightrunners way of working with coherent themes in transmedia projects, Lucas J.W. Johnson writes that:

…. there should be a broad theme present to unify the pieces, to actually allow for that dialogue between the stories of the property.

So this is one way of looking at it, although not at all at odds with what Rutledge writes about . As I wrote in a comment to Lucas’ post, the different parts of the terminology are not mutually exclusive in any way. Rather, they build on each other and support each other. With a solid theme to lean on, your stories will unfold HOW they should. WIth a solid world, they will unfold WHERE they should, and with a solid superstructure they will unfold WHEN they should, etc.

Always keep on track with your transmedia narrative. As Rutledge writes:

Humans seek certainty and narrative structure is familiar, predictable, and comforting. Within the context of the story arc we can withstand intense emotions because we know that resolution follows the conflict.

This is not to say that it doesn’t pay to experiment with storytelling principles, especially when we can plan for audience engagement and user interaction in a much deeper way, when planning transmedia. I simply find it is always of the essence to – from time to time – go back to the basics, to mirror what I’m working on against “how it always has been done”. A mix of both, with logical connections and attractive content coupled with clear calls-to-action, that is the future.

Tools for Transmedia part four - MyHistro and Magma

2011-01-15T11:44:00.004+02:00

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.

Quick post - Shadow Cities and context

2011-01-07T09:32:00.004+02:00

Scott Walker asked me on Twitter: "Can you elaborate (or quick blog post) to clarify re: Shadow Cities and missing context?" This was in reply to me tweeting re: Shadow Cities that "been playing Shadow Cities for a couple of months now - verdict: yes, but would benefit from context." So here a quick post to elaborate, as 140 characters is a bit limiting.

To recap - Shadow Cities is a Finnish startup, in Beta mode in Finland. It's a quite nice iPhone game, that uses OpenMaps and GPS to put a magical layer on top of the "real world", a layer in which you and a lot of other mages do battle. Two teams compete, the Animators (or "Hippies", as we affectionally call ourselves) and the Architects (or "Narks") for the win in each campaign, which lasts about a week each. As a mage you can build Dominators to conquer Gateways and collect energy. With this energy you can maintain Spirit Catchers (to catch spirits, which you need to get points for your team or donate to research to get Mana Potions which replenishes your mana) or Beacons, which act as waypoints for your team mates to warp to, over great distances. You can also build Traps to thwart your enemies spells, or Heal other players or Dominators or Beacons, and you can naturally attack with the "Z" spell. You gather experience points and advance in levels and get more perks, better spells etc.

So, all in all a compelling game. These past few weeks have seen numerous rule changes - as it is in Beta mode - some for the better, some for the worse.

What I severely lack is the context, which I believe the game would benefit immensely from. The background story is flimsy to say the least; "Animators vs Architects!", yes, but why? There are no NPC:s, not even static ones... there should be a story world, as the game world has been built very nicely on top of the real world, a story world to get campaign ideas from and to let players draw more inspiration from. If Gray Area, the company behind Shadow Cities, would do that - get some good transmedia storytellers onboard - there is the possibilites for a major transmedia campaign; comics, board games, tv series, you name it. As it is now, it's a compelling game and a unique game plan, but not really there just yet.

Transmedia - The Steady Burn

2011-01-03T08:13:00.005+02:00

There is an interesting discussion going on regarding the possibilities and implifications when talking about transmedia and localization – i.e. segmentation, catering for the needs of different demographics through the powers of transmedia. Simon Pulman wrote a great post stemming from Shakira, Jeff Gomez and Rosetta Stone, to which Alison Norrington responded with some good thoughts on the cultural perspectives and Lucas J.W. Johnson pitched in with an interesting post about the dangers of ghettoization (be sure to read the comments too, all good stuff!)

Transmedia - engaging in the long run

Looking at the issue from another angle, I have always felt that one of the major strengths of transmedia is the possibility to add the Steady Burn to any project you’re working on. If, in a project, the tv series premiere or the major motion picture release is the bright flash that catches everyone’s attention, the transmedia story archs can provide the steady burn that keeps people huddled around your story fire.

All previous advice still apply, naturally. The different transmedia parts of a story must fit together, they must stay true to the overall mythology and canon and they must be executed with utmost care. My point is rather to look at parts of what you’re creating as just that – the steady burn, the log you put on the fire to ensure it does not go out, that final piece of wood that makes the tinders just perfect for roasting your transmedia marshmallows on.

In this sense my thoughts tie in with the discussion above – I feel that including the awareness of localization, of catering to different segments of your audience via different storylines, is a powerful thing in this aspect.

To exemplify: If a tv series has ended and there will be over half a year until the start of the next season, you will have viewers that symphatize with different characters in your story. Now, as the steady burn until the next bright flash, let the ones following your hispanic character continue to do so via her YouTube videos, the ones following your gay character continue via Twitter updates, the ones following your divorced suicidal middle aged white mail character do so via his blog etc – and plan these updates to a) stay true to the story world, b) move off on their own mini-story-archs, as a sort of interlude and c) tie them all together, so that anyone watching the first one or two episodes of the next series of the tv show will find references to these storylines that have acted as interludes. (Of course, that first show must also work for anyone who has not been involved in the interludes as well, but that’s a given).

The Long Tail in a transmedia world

Now, Venture Beat has an eye-opening article on how social media advertising is replacing traditional media advertising. We all know this has been happening for quite some time already (just look at how traditional newspapers are faring) but when, for instance, Proctor & Gamble declares that they will be moving the lion share of their tv advertisement money to social platforms, this will have broad implications for anyone in content production.

Looking at the example above, I was talking about the tv series being the driving platform for the story line. This will probably be true for the forseeable future as well (even though the largest amount of people watching said tv series will have torrented it, watched it online somewhere or just basically NOT sat down in front of a television at a set time each week), since tv is a great media to tell stories via and since most people are used to the 30, 45 or 60 minute spot and it's dramaturgy. What will not be true - and has not been for some time now, regarding many productions - is that tv will be the major source of revenue for whatever story/property you are producing. The "long tail" model is no longer only about distribution but also production. Revenue will come from online, mobile, you name it, and the content will need to take this into accord, be tailored, localized - basically developed according to the best transmedia principles.

In the example above, I would look at a scenario in the very near future where the sole aim of the television series - even if it is am HBO mega series or suchlike - is to build the mythology and the story strong enough to engage people in the Steady Burn between series, where the major part of the revenue stream is found through subscriptions, donations, fees, etc.

Interesting times ahead.

Make sure it fits!

2011-01-02T00:25:00.002+02:00

Note: this might be too basic for some, but as I noted above, I’m keeping this blog as a notebook for myself as well; most of the musings here have come as a direct consequence of pondering on the development of ideas I’m working on, and I know there is a considerable chance that I'll forget them if I don’t jot them down. This is a typical one :)

It may be a bit early to start talking about complacency with regards to transmedia. It’s a form of storytelling that didn’t have a proper name until some five years ago, and only during the past few months has managed to penetrate the minds of the industry and the audience to any greater degree.

Still, and I will willingly point the finger at myself as well in this case, any transmedia project (as with any other project) runs the risk of falling into the pit named ”We’re doing it as it should be done”.

Now, do read me right – there are a number of talks and presentations and discussions on the Net on how to create and produce transmedia, and these talks, presentations and discussions are for the most part spot on and simply required hearing/reading/watching. What I’m saying is that you always have to mirror the advice, the blueprints and the examples against what YOUR transmedia property is about.

As an example – in connection to one project I’m working on at the moment, I was quite convinced that producing something tangible in the form of a graphic novel, a photo book or a hard-covered short story would help the project along; grounding the mythology, the canon, in something tangible, while at the same time adding perceived value to pitches and discussions. Now, while this may be true for many transmedia projects, I have since come to the conclusion that such an approach will not suit this particular project. Yes, there will quite probably be printed material in the future. Yes, it will build on the same narrative supertstructure. Furthermore, it will have it’s own business model. But it will not be the first contact anyone will have with the particular project, simply because it it not in the nature of the project.

To conclude: evaluate each and every option and make sure that they themselves stay true to the core of your story. It is not merely about the content (although the content of course needs to be consistent, logical, engaging etc), it is as much about the way it is delivered, the way it is received, the feel of the communication… everything needs to fit. If you feel it does not fit, don’t do it – or at least don’t do it in the way that does not fit.

The Value of Truth in Transmedia

2010-12-31T00:17:00.001+02:00

There are many important aspects to consider when starting out creating a transmedia property. There is creating the mythology, the narrative superstructure, as deep and rich as possible. There is timing all different releases, and making sure the right things get released on the right platforms. There is securing a sound financial basis to stand on – i.e., where’s the money going to come from?

Every aspect is vital, some to the core of the story being told, some to the framework around the story that lets it find its’ audience and gives its’ creators and producers funds to work with to take the story in the direction it is supposed to go.

But since everything about a transmedia project, in my opinion, goes back to the need to engage an audience and give them the best experience possible, I’ve found truth to be the most important aspect.

”Truth” in transmedia, as I see it, is the simple fact that everything needs to fit. The things that do not fit must also fit, as non-fitting parts (carefully planned, naturally) or be re-developed or omitted. We as human beings can tell when things are not as they should be, when they are not true. We might have been conditioned to set aside our beliefs, or willingly believe in certain things, but if we just let our instincts guide us, we mostly have the gut feeling of what’s wrong and what’s right, what’s ”True” and what’s false.

”Truth” in transmedia is keeping in mind that platforms do not matter, OS or programming languages do not matter. What matters is the story and that the users experience it the way you as the creator/producer planned for it to be experienced.

”Truth” in transmedia is a fragile thing. It can be shattered by a wrongly worded tweet from a character in a series. It contains a lot of pitfalls – and I know from my own experience that you, as a developer, will fall into many of them. The trick is to recognize when you’re in a pit and quickly get your ass out of there before anyone notices. You might need help to climb out of the pit. You might experience resistance, in the form of partners, sponsors, financiers, directors. But you know what ”truth” means in your creation. Stick to that.

Tools for Transmedia part three - WireWAX

2010-12-29T14:54:00.007+02:00

I first laid my eyes on WireWAX’s technology for producing clickable videos at this years (2010) Pixel Lab in Cardiff in July. Paulina Tervo of WriteThisDown Productions had used the technology for her documentary work on the Ethiopian village of Awra Amba, adding clickable sections that nicely and seamlessly let you know more about the subject at hand, communicate with the people of the village or take you to a shop to buy goods from the village. All in all, really neat and handy.

The really funky thing, technologically wise, is that everything is embedded in the video itself, you can take the video to any site anywhere and all the clickable things are the same. It’s a stand-alone solution that seems really really nice.

Since I talked to the guys and saw the service for the first time, WireWAX has taken off a bit more. No wonder, as the service to me seems like a no-brainer. If you want to show a video online, why wouldn’t you want to engage the audience more? There are so many possibilities, especially with touch screen devices, to bring the audience deeper into your storyworld and engage and excite them.

There is certainly the artistic view to be taken into consideration; one should not tamper with a video created to convey a message or a feeling. On the other hand, if the video (as all transmedia properties should be) is developed with all the different parts, technologies and storytelling devices integrated from the beginning, in this case the WireWAX technology, then that sorts the artistic issue out. The end result is also guaranteed to be better.

As for how to use the WireWAX technology in transmedia storytelling, I can see many possibilities. The creators talk of clicking oneself on to the next video in a narrative sequence; I think that it could be used in online treasure hunts (”looking for clues”) or in deepening the understanding of the storyworld that we want the users/audience to immerse themselves into (think a segment of ”Avatar”, filmed like a scientific / documentary film, with clickable sections that launches explanatory videos narrated by Sigourney Weaver, for instance). Or something much simpler – or more advanced.

I’d have a couple of requests, as a developer – if there isn’t already, there would be nice to have the possibility to ”hide” the highlighted areas, making it more of an exploration mission to find what to click. Also, it’d be seriously funky if the clicks could launch stuff outside the window – this might be a big nono, but if it isn’t, I’d like that.

For some additional comments on the service, please read these insightsful posts. And WireWAX – congratulations!

Transmedia in 2020 AD

2010-12-26T11:50:00.003+02:00

(The background: our third child, a baby girl, was born on the 15th of December. Now, I’ve watched my other kids, born in 2000 and 2004 respectively, take to the new media landscape as if they’ve never done anything else before (which they haven’t, come to think of it ☺ ), mastering iPhones and iPads within minutes, watching VOD as naturally as any tv series and so on. As I watch that little infant live her first days on this Earth, I start to wonder what her world will look like, when she’s of the age of our older daughter. That’s where this post comes from, playing the part of Nostradamus for a brief while. And, yeah, take it all with a pinch of salt (although I WILL take credit for anything that turns out to be accurate :) )

AP / Reuters

As the year 2020 comes to an end, the eyes and ears of the world once again turn to the Annual Transmedia Academy Awards (ATAA). This year the host city of choice was Auckland, New Zealand. In their motivation for the, in many industry people’s eyes, strange choice of venue, The Transmedia Academy had previosly stated that

”… we wish to embrace the principles of transmedia also in our arrangements, showing that the powers of transmedia storytelling can bring the farthest corners of the world together at once, even in connection with a live awards event like this. Auckland, New Zealand, is therefore a natural choice and we are thrilled to meet you all there, live or virtually in late December!”

The award categories include ”Best ARG”, where the innovative LARP / mobile gaming / online adventure ”Natives”, where people around the world take on the roles of their native ancestors in a Sid Meyers ”Civilization” type of world domination game, is the overwhelming favorite.

A new category this year is the ”Collective Creation” Award. The description for the category states that ”for a long time, ever since transmedia became a widely acknowledged term in the late ’00s, the collective effort has been taken almost for granted. Creators have counted on the audience involvement, producers have relied on input and UGC from devoted fans and so on. At the Transmedia Academy we feel it is time to acknowledge the importance of creating transmedia storytelling collectively, with other professionals as well as with the public, and have therefore included this category in the proceedings for this years awards.”

The Awards ceremony will be held on the 27th of December 2020, at 20.00 Pacific Time.

Background: Transmedia became a household term in the early 2010s. Since then, the transmedia storytelling principles have intergrated themselves into all aspects of society, from education to business, from pre-school to university, from entertainment to industry. Although there had been a number of relatively successful transmedia ventures prior to 2011, it was the multi-billion dollar generating transmedia campaign ”Spy Game” that let loose the full powers of transmedia on the general audience in late 2011. ”Spy Game” began as a graphic novel, a book trilogy and a high-profile tv series from HBO, letting the audience take part of the storyline by adding themselves as characters and participating online or via mobile phones. With a 10 million dollar global cash prize up for grabs and a program to support and promote collective efforts over national boundaries, it was the first transmedia project to generate over 200 million dollar in revenue and has up until today grossed more than 400 million. The Transmedia Academy was founded in 2012, and funded partly by donated money from the ”Spy Game” project. The Annual Transmedia Academy Awards have been held since 2012. (Source: Wikipedia)

Holiday hiatus....

2010-12-19T23:45:00.003+02:00

.... with holidays fast approaching and a newborn baby girl in the house I will now take a couple of weeks off to concentrate on things that are NOT transmedia NOR cross media or any kind of media at all.

Hope you have a Merry Christmas and a successful 2011!

What makes a good transmedia format?

2010-12-19T23:20:00.005+02:00

It is very encouraging to see how quickly transmedia has become a trend that not only is a buzzword or a hype, but rather a phenomenon that seems to grab peoples’ attention and imagination and spur them on to think in new ways, create new things and talk to new people.

There are still probably as many definitions of transmedia as there are people talking about transmedia. These are not necessarily differing all that much from each other, but rather in a nuance here or a nuance there. It’s all good though; we should all fear the day when we have the definite definition of what transmedia is. That’s the day when it’s time to start doing something else.

It’s not just talk either. A growing number of people are starting to venture into the field of transmedia to tell their stories. These range from major multi-million dollar ventures to small dramas or documentaries with next to no financial power behind them. Some will fail, even amongst the colossal ones, but some will succeed magnificently, even amongst the small ones – such is the way of the storytelling business.

As more and more projects are being developed, there seems to be a need to look beyond the ”what is transmedia?” or ”why transmedia?” to the much harder ”should I and this project go into transmedia?”.

From my personal point of view, I know that some of the projects I work on lend themselves nicely to transmedia development. Building the mythology, developing a canon, working on different storylines to be told via different platforms – even if it is a documentary, a music show or even a game show, it is quite possible. On the other hand, I know that some other projects – good projects, in and of themselves! – would not benefit from a transmedia treatment. They are stories that either would not be enhanced by expanding the universe they exist in, or stories that would carry a much too hefty price tag, should a transmedia development and implementation take place.

Some people in the transmedia field were kind enough to give me their opinion on the matter, and there is a pattern, at least so far. Tyler Weaver – do check out Whiz!Bam!Pow!, a project I’m looking forward to seeing more of – was of the opinion that the story was the most important feature. As he said:

- The most important thing - a good story. I just want a good story well told. If I want to welcome the characters into my home (good or bad), it's a good story that I want to revisit.

We all probably agree with this. It has to be a good story, for there to be anything to build around. It also needs to be a story that can have a mythology, a universe of its own (even if it is our own, real universe we’re talking about). If it’s a thin story, or unengaging, or linear withour the possibility of other storylines touching it, there’s just no way it would ever make a good transmedia entity. (I do, btw, love that definition of a character in a story – ”if I would want to welcome them into my home” – and will happily start using it to gauge the characters in my stories).

Sparrow Hall, of Nightworks and Two Blue Wolves fame, shared his beliefs:

- What attracts me to transmedia: the ability to inhabit the environment/vibe of a story, to see deeper into characters. What engages me with transmedia: seeing how consistent art direction and tonality is achieved over multiple mediums. Subtlety. High production value even with little to no budget. Authenticity of feeling/language. Also the multiplatform aspect needs to feel compelling/enriching, not just a device to continue.

Many things to agree with. Also, naturally, the possibility to offer many entrypoints, as well as exit points, to and from your story universe, to let the users/viewers/audience participate, either freely or via the Swiss cheese model and to, through all these actions, find new stories where you thought there were no more stories to be told.

So, to apply this on what one should do when assessing a development project; if there is a reason for there to be more than one platform involved, and the content on these platforms are unique but can be and is being developed together, that is a good sign for a transmedia property. If you can see how the audience can participate, and to what degree, and if you can see this ”spread” of the story happening even without big bucks behind it, you’re even further on the road to a transmedia winner (or at least a doable project :-)

I’ll leave the last word of this post to Stephen Dinehart, who commented on the current hype around transmedia:

- I think perhaps the best way to see through the hype is not to listen to it. Just create.

So, let’s go out there (or, stay in here for that matter) and create. I'm really looking forward to the next few years.

Transmedia - destroying or enhancing franchises?

2010-12-10T15:04:00.004+02:00

I just read this excellent post on how a transmedia take on expanding a franchise can ruin the franchise beyond redemption. It rings absolutely true and is a danger that we all should be aware of.

From my point of view, which then would be the point of someone who has been developing formats for interactive television, cross media and transmedia since 2005, we need to make a distinction between transmediating an existing franchise and developing a transmedia property from scratch. That is what we found very quickly with the first interactive tv formats we developed, amongst them The Space Trainees, a childrens cross media language training game show set in space (Emmy-nominated this year, yay!). It started out as a show for interactive television, via set-top-box interactivity. While trying to integrate interactivity into the flow of the show, we found that we had to take several steps back to be able to integrate the interactivity in a logical way that did not disrupt the story we were trying to tell.

The same goes for any transmedia venture I can think of. As discussed in the post linked above, there is often a major danger of the ”cashing in on the success”-factor taking over. We used to call it ”slap-on interactivity”, when interactive services had been implemented in a late stage of the development and just slapped on as an extra layer on top of the show or the story. That was what it felt like as well, an extra layer that hindered you more than it enabled you. With any sort of existing franchise going into transmedia this rings true; make sure what new things you offer are integrated into the mythology, the storyworld, make sure they add to the canon of the storyworld and do not detract from it and make sure it all fits in a very logical way.

Now, the best thing is of course to start a transmedia property from scratch. In that way, as we ourselves quickly realized, you can let the different parts influence each other to create a logical and engaging whole. And I absolutely agree with the points about keeping the creative(s) in the loop - they know the story and the story world, and are the ones best equipped to see if a new addition fits storywise or not. So, just to find the proper story then, I guess!

Posting elsewhere

2010-12-08T00:04:00.003+02:00

As I have written about earlier, I'm blogging over at ReedMIDEMs MIPBlog as well. Just did a short piece showcasing interesting transmedia projects, past, present and future. I guess I could post a copy here, but that wouldn't feel fair to them, so here's the link instead :)

Funding transmedia - a comment

2010-12-02T08:19:00.001+02:00

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the debate in the comments on Simon Pulman’s post commenting on the presentation of the ARG Perplex City at the NYC Transmedia meetup a couple of days ago. Andrea Phillips presented the work they had been doing on the ARG, which in itself is an impressive and inspiring talk. The live stream is still up here.

Now, if you read the discussion, you can see two slightly conflicting points – the need to create great content and thus gain a loyal following that will interact, and the need to have someone stump up the money to pay for all that great content and the work you put into it. I think this is more and more the case now; back in the days a tv show could be bought straight up by a television channel, who paid what it cost to produce it. Nowadays you can’t make much of anything without a sound business plan as the foundation.

This is how it should be, I think. Yes, there should be creative freedom. Yes, there should NOT be intrusive ads that interfere with the story being told. But creating a viable business plan is as challenging creatively as creating the content itself, in many cases. It just juggles other parts of your brain, which can only be a good thing.

I also find that there is a shift going on in how people experience brands connecting to content they are attracted to. It is not about making people realize that they have to pay for great content, it’s simply about making people realize that great content can’t be made for free. The currency that your audience is paying you with for access to the great content (be it tv, ARGs, comics, webisodes, whatever) is not €€ or $$, it’s their time. This time of theirs, willingly given to you as the creator as payment for your work (strangely enough, even though their time is the only currency they can’t get more of in any way. Your content must be great!) is something that you can then sell onwards, to get the necessary funding in to make your project a financially viable one.

The trick is, of course, to do it with taste. I find for instance the writings on Propagation Planning quite interesting in this aspect, resonating well on a number of points with the workings of a transmedia producer. I also think a near-brutal honesty will work in many cases. Openly state that ”hey, we’re doing this, but we’ve only got funds up until three weeks from now. We’re working to bring in a brand, so don’t be startled if you see everyone changing to Toyotas all of a sudden, ok?”. If they like what you make – and they will, right? – then they’ll like you making more of it as well.

Users, meet Story. Story, meet Users.

2010-12-02T00:03:00.002+02:00

Disclaimer: some of my posts are down-to-earth stuff from a developers point of view. Others, like this one, are more of the rambling-philosophically-late-at-night kind of stuff. In those cases, this acts more like a notebook to jot down thoughts I'd otherwise forget. If someone else also finds something of use, that's brilliant.

There are two levels to it. On one level the stories are made up. But they're made up for a reason, and the reason has to do with a different kind of truth. It has to do with emotional and spiritual truths. It is a way of trying to use a lie, which is the story, to approach some deeper, more spiritual sense of truth. I don't mean truth with a capital T; I just mean small kinds of truth.
-Tim O'Brien

When creating a transmedia property, no matter what kind – be it drama, be it a documentary, be it a music property or just about anything else – producers (me included) tend to think of their target group. What will they like? What will excite them? What will turn them on, engage them and make them jump into the story? We perhaps even conduct research into the target groups to glean more information on what they really really think, what they’d like and which solution they’d prefer over all other solutions.

Then we tweak our stories, our worlds, our properties, so that they fit, thus creating a transmedia property in the same way as people in the industry have been doing traditional media for decades.

What strikes me as a transmedia truth of sorts, is that we are not only talking of the Users meeting the Story. In a transmedia setting, it’s as much, or more, about the Story meeting the Users.

Now, this can be very stressful for a newly–launched, young and insecure Story. As I think we all know from school, Stories don’t reach their full size until well into the third season. Until then, they easily fall prey to larger Stories or succumb to over-hyping, low ratings or the No-Hit Syndrome that has been plaguing many of the latest herds of Story-younglings.

Attenboroughisms aside, and again as in so many of my posts relating back to what I’m working on myself, I feel many transmedia projects forget this. The Story needs to be influenced by the Users, and the Users must feel that they have influenced the Story on a fundamental level, for there to be genuine trust and commitment.

Re: the quote at the beginning – I believe that we can use the lies (or the creative stuff) that all good stories are made up of to approach our audience, our users. I believe that in a transmedia setting, the small truths Tim O’Brien talks about are all the more apparent, allowing an audience to see or sense the truths embedded in the content and engaging them more. That’s also how I view the need for a Story to be able to change after meeting the Users. The truths at the core should stay the same, but the story, the lies, around – they can change.

Some good posts that made me think of these things - Andrea Phillip's post on ARGs and dancing with audiences, and Robert Prattens slides on Transmedia audience angagement and content strategy. Good reads!

Tools for Transmedia part two – ThingLink

2010-11-29T22:33:00.004+02:00

There are so many services and tools out there that could be used to enhance a transmedia property, enable creators to implement new solutions or just plain make it easier to do what you want to do with your story. A service that could be a good tool to implement for producers and creators alike is ThingLink, a venture from Ulla-Maaria and Jyri Engeström (of Jaiku / Google fame).

ThingLink is a fairly simple tool, allowing you to tag photos. As the ThingLink ppl say themselves, it’s ”a product identification tool that makes it easy to add clickable tags to any image on the web and share the tagged images on social networks.” What it means is that it enables you to use elements in pictures to help you tell more of a story in a quicker, better streamlined and more logical way than for instance hyperlinking stuff.

It looks something like this:

ThingLink is mostly geared towards advertisers and brands, which might want to have an easy way to forward interested customers to “more info” or “webshop”. But as I see it, it is a tool that can and should also be used for transmedia storytelling.

It’s a very handy tool if you as a creator want to keep a part of your story that you publish online to be based on, for example, just one full screen picture, ThingLinking your audience to different aspects, different storylines etc. It’s also possible to get a mass-tagging version of the tool, although I would feel the impact of one high-res, full screen, detailed image would be more attractive than a number of pics. It could be the entry point to everything you're offering online, or just a small piece of a much bigger puzzle - the ease with which you can implement it makes it a good tool.

I just have one small favor to ask of the developers - please include some sort of stealth mode, so that you can implement the tagging but without the spots on the picture. That would turn it into a great big Easter Egg hunt, which from a storytelling perspective is oh so much more fun!

And, yeah, it’s free to use btw. I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination and creativity.

Tools for Transmedia part one - Storify and Shadow Cities

2010-11-25T13:41:00.008+02:00

There are a growing number of services and tools available for people who want to create transmedia projects, tools that not only give creators a new way to get their stories out to people but also juggles the creative parts of peoples’ brains (in a good way, I might add!) Here are two quite different ones, Storify and Shadow Cities.

Storify is a ”real-time curation service” that lets a user build his/her own story from a number of sources (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube etc) and insert own comments to create a kind of a story around a subject. It’s easy to handle – what I found is that the most time-consuming part is finding the most meaningful content and arrange them so that the pieces fit together nicely and logically. In a way, it’s very much like writing a blog post, but more handy in many ways – not bothering with embedding, searches possible through the same interface etc.

A brief video explaining the concept:

As for using Storify in a transmedia project, a couple of the things that immediately sprung to mind were, for instance

• curating the storyworld, by being able to in one place give people access to the different narrative strands in a logical and informative (and why not entertaining!) way
• encourage users to use the service to glean new information from seamingly non-connected pieces of content (could be as crude as the classic ”take the first letter of every sentence in the five articles written on the subject and see what they combine too” or something more elaborate)

There are, I’m sure, a number of other ways to use Storify in a transmedia setting. It’s an easy tool that gives quick results that can be easily distributed to a huge number of users/followers. That in itself should be attractive to transmedia creators!

The other service is from the other end of the spectra. The iPhone game ”Shadow Cities” was launched by Grey Area of Finland a little over a week ago. It’s a game that uses OpenMap as the basis, and then puts a magical layer on top of the real world, a layer where the user participates as a wizard of sorts.

You sign up as a wizard for one of two sides; the Animators (or ”Hippies”, as the opposition usually calls them) or Architects (affectionally called ”Drones” by some of the Animators). Then the battle is on, to conquer Gateways that give you energy, to fight and catch Spirits, to Research new Mana Potions, to advance in levels and gain new Spells, and so on. Through Beacons you can jump anywhere in the world, even though the game is only realeased on the Finnish App Store as of yet. (It’s GPS-based, so where ever you are in the real world, that’s where you are in Shadow Cities when you log on. Turning on the app in a crowded place in a big city can very well land you in the middle of a serious magical fight… which is great fun! )

Now, the background story is flimsy to say the least. I do not think anyone has any idea about why we do what we do (yes, I’ve been playing it since it was released, addictive it is, yes!) apart from the need for there to be a struggle between two opponents for there to be the necessary competition. There are also some flaws in the game mechanics, but these are being corrected (hopefully) continously, so there is bound the be many improvements over the coming months.

This game does juggle the transmedia creative brain quite a lot, I must say. If the game engine would be licensable, there is no end to the fun we could have with this app. Think of being the Harry Potter of the real world, throwing ”real” spells as you move through the physical world, fighting monsters and evil stuff along the way (or be a Death Eater, if that’s your thing). Or connect it to something like TRON or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or suchlike; why not the Underworld property or just about any story where there already is implemented the idea of a ”layer” on top of our regular world.

Do check Shadow Cities out, when you get the chance. Here’s a short explanatory video to give you an idea of what it’s about (mind you, playing it for a week, there is a lot less running around and a lot more farming Gateways....)

Transmedia - the jigsaw puzzle

2010-11-23T15:12:00.001+02:00

From the first time I laid my eyes on Robert Pratten’s picture defining transmedia (slide 6 here), it made sense. When we started out creating formats some five-six years ago, interactive television was the rage. In Finland, where I work, MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) was the chosen platform for set-top-box interactivity. What baffled me from the beginning was the limits imposed on creators and users by that platform. It was like being taken back in time to the days when, as a teenager, I was excited about installing Windows 3.1 on a 386. The possibilities were not only decidedly not endless, they were very few to start with.

From the outset, we have worked along the principles that what we create and combine should make sense. Much as a narrative in any regular tv series, movie or documentary, the human mind is used to stories being told in a certain manner. You can tweak this manner of telling; if you do, however, you’d better have it thoroughly planned and tested from the start, and know what you’re doing. The end result might very well turn everyone away from the story you’re trying to tell otherwise.

The same applied (and still applies) to interactive television. What is created must fit logically with all other parts of the narrative, so as not to deter anyone interested in the story. With MHP-interactivity, this was nearly impossible. The slow connection, the weak processors, the slap-on effect… all added up, so that in the end we had to compromise the story, in order to be able to implement the interactivity. The end result? Working interactive television, yes, but nothing to write home about in terms of exciting end result.

Going back to the jigsaw analogy, I can see that what we were trying to do back then was to make a jigsaw puzzle with an axe as the only tool. End result? Four square pieces that a 3-year-old could fit together in under ten seconds. Yes, it was a puzzle. Yes, it fit together logically. No, it was not exciting. No, it was not what we wanted to do.

Looking at transmedia and the state of interactive platforms and possibilities today, not only do we creators have access to a multitude of tools that give us the possibility to make the most intricate jigsaws we can imagine (while of course risking that 90% of the populace give up halfway through the 10.000 piece puzzle, leaving the jigsaw in a box in a closet somewhere), we can also choose material to work with almost freely – heavy materials for stories that should stay put, light materials for stories we want to be spread. We can also hire the best artists possible to paint our jigsaw to be an absolutely beautiful creation. And it is increasingly possible to send some tools to the users themselves, letting them play around with the jigsaw and create their own pieces, or paint pieces we deliberately left unpainted with pictures of their own.

There’s never been a better time to make jigsaws!

Transmedia - the Story, the Experience and the Needs

2010-11-18T13:33:00.003+02:00

When Paul Burke commented on a post of mine a week ago he mentioned that there is a subtle difference between the story and the experience. That thought has been nagging away at the back of my head for a bit, so I decided to elaborate slightly on the matter.

At MediaCity, we have a number of very competent people working at our UX laboratory, doing research into user experience. Looking at stuff they put out is always enlightening, even when it doesn’t touch on your project directly. They’ve been talking a lot about the Needs of people and these Needs connection to User Experience. In my mind it feels very true, that taking these Needs into account while developing transmedia will result in a better User Experience in the end.

The Needs in question are six different ones (out of ten, developed by Sheldon et al); Autonomy, Relatedness, Competence, Stimulation, Influence and Security. My colleagues did a study last year, available here, that looks into these different Needs with regards to using interactive products and media. It’s a good read!

So, to look at these Needs and how to apply them to a transmedia development process,:

- Autonomy. This is a Need closely related to ”being real”, being oneself. Also to the flexibility of the product – can I use it anywhere, as it suits me? One good example right now is the as-of-yet only available in Finland iPhone social game Shadow Cities; I can play it anywhere at anytime over my iPhone, connected to the real world via OpenMaps, and it really enhances my Autonomy IMHO.

- Relatedness. The Need to feel connected to a bigger whole, a group of friends, the place where you grew up… basically, your place in the world and in the story (and in the storyworld, of course!)

- Competence. The Need to master stuff, to feel that you can handle what’s thrown at you. No matter if it’s cracking a code on a website or just finding the website in the first place; it’s the feeling of being competent and up to the task. (I.e. don’t make it too hard for people to master your challenges!)

- Stimulation. The Need that is most closely connected to creativity – the interaction with others or with media (or with the challenges you pose them in your transmedia narrative) spurs people on and stimluates them. Given the opportunity to express oneself brings out hte creativity in people. (Leave sandboxes for people to express themselves in!)

- Influence. The Need that is about reaching out to others, to communicate, to feel connected. Your users will want to be part of a whole, but also be able to influence that whole in some way.

- Security. This last Need is closely connected with experiencing that things work the way they should. A coffeemaker fills this Need, as it always works. It also fills the need in a different way, as it is a familiar machine, thereby strengthening the feeling of Security. The feeling that everything is as it should be. Conclusion: you might very well include things that don’t work, or hoax people, or make things be NOT as they should be – but plan for that and be aware of this need, Perhaps your users need a sancturay somewhere?

Feel free to expand on these ideas – I know many of them are applicable to our work right now, so I would imagine they could help some others on the way as well.

Creating a Transmedia Symphony

2010-11-16T15:40:00.010+02:00

I re-read the article in Wired on transmedia today, and found it as good a read as the first time. Coming to the last paragraph I read Jeff Gomez’s comment about transmedia and the birth of a new Mozart, ”We are going to see visionaries who understand the value of each media platform as if it’s a separate musical instrument, who’ll create symphonic narratives which leverage each of these multimedia platforms in a way that will create something we haven’t encountered yet.”

This rings true for me as an analogy of what many of us are trying to create. The question that popped up in my head was, however, “but hey, how do you create a “normal” symphony?”. Lo and behold, a Google search later I found this wikihow on, yes, how to create a symphony. After reading it, the analogy rings truer still. So, to translate the creation of a “normal” symphony to the creation of a transmedia symphony, these would/could be the steps to take:

1. Before considering creating a transmedia symphony, you most know a lot of the theory behind the storytelling and the structure, as well as the analysis of audiences and the different media platforms. If you have done this, follow the next steps.

2. Be inspired. Take some time, relax, bring som inspirational material with you somewhere and create. Wherever you are, when the ideas suddenly pop up in your mind, write them down, no matter how small. Keep letting life inspire you until you have a bunch of these ideas. Try to make your ideas connect with people on an emotional level.

3. You’re going to need some good writing and scheduling software. Set up your project thoroughly, with all the different elements in place from the beginning. In this way you can see how they fit together, and where strengthening is needed. The base of the project is the story and a couple of platforms. Unless you’re taking on a massive Hollywood project you shouldn’t need to worry about every possible platform and outlet. It’s all up to you, what you want your project to look like and how you want it to be perceived.

4. When you’ve selected the platforms you want to work on, go back to your ideas. Expand on them, build the world around them, put them in the middle of some context and think about how you would like to introduce them, and how you will digress from them as the narrative rolls on. Which ideas would be best at the beginning, or in the middle of the narrative? What should be the grand finale? Slowly add onto these ideas and interlink them. Make sure to stay within logical boundaries and watch for errors that would throw an audience off. This is of course unless you really feel you want some of these. Many creators throughout history have sought out theoretical guidelines, but if you encounter an opportunity to do something which breaks the rules but really feels right to you in the context of the piece, you might want to leave it in.

5. Eventually you will have a number of different, fleshed-out ideas going on. Try to get them all work in the same context, yet have their own unique style. You will use this to develop the different movements of your work. Keep expanding on these ideas, adding subplots, side characters, and so on. Watch and study other great transmedia projects to hear, see and feel how they progress, to help give you ideas of your own.

6. Eventually each idea will become a decently long plot. Do a walkthrough of all the different parts of your project. Does it flow right? Change and fix anything that does not feel right. Remember the interlinking of the different parts and how they should exist in the same story world and fit logically in the same context. Keep refining your project until it is complete.

7. This creative process may take a while, but by this step you should have a fully developed transmedia project down on paper. Take it to a group of people you know closely, or perhaps a group of students, and narrate the project to them, or ask them to partake of any material you have produced so far, like written text, graphic novels, online portals etc. Observe them partake of your idea. Did they experience it like you expected? Were their reactions the desired ones? Make sure you have the possibility to write down comments and reactions on the spot.

8. Go back to your transmedia mess and make a second draft with the comments and reactions taken in. Repeat these two steps until you are satisfied.

9. Take it to someone in the industry. It depends on your idea, but could be anything from a broadcaster to a production company, from a publisher to a telecom operator, depending on your idea and the platforms you’re concentrating on. Rehearse your pitch well, and reel them in with your great story and magnificent execution.

10. If you get traction and commissioning (or at least adequate funding) - Voila! Time to unleash your transmedia symphony on the world!

...and after writing this down, the analogy still rings true. Granted, there might be a lot more involvement from different sources from the beginning - brands, partners, tech etc - but if I start developing a new transmedia idea, this could work pretty well! There is also other aspects, like the need for a viable business plan etc, but we're talking symphonies now, so I omitted those :)

(Credits go to the Wikihow users who wrote the original post: BoldStepFixer, Gewg, Johnny, Nicole Willson, Maluniu, BR, Sarah Eliza and KP, wikiHow user(s) Isabelle C, Getmoreatp, Geena04, J424, Tryme2 and Anonymous.)

Pitching transmedia

2010-11-15T17:02:00.018+02:00

(disclaimer: there are as many pitches as there are ideas, and as many ways to pitch them as there are people to pitch them to. With that in mind, I hope you get something out of this post.)

I’ve met a number of people who subscribe to the notion that what people do for a big part in their life is pitch ideas. It doesn’t matter what you’re thinking of – marriage proposals, what to cook for dinner, where to go on your next trip, when your kids should be doing their homework, what club to go to on a Saturday night – it’s all about how you pitch it.

Part of my job description (well, actually not part of my job description, but anyway) is to pitch; i.e. the ideas and the projects we work on have to be pitched successfully to get the necessary funding in for development work, the developed ideas must be pitched to participants, partners etc to go into successful pilot production, and the finished format must be successfully pitched to get a commission in the end. Lots of pitches, lots of different targets and goals.

What I have found challenging is pitching transmedia concepts. There is the issue that transmedia is a relatively new concept and hard to grasp. The people I mostly pitch to are executives and commissioners from more traditional media, television predominantly. Many of our projects have a strong TV connection still, as there is a still a lot of funding to be had from that area, and also, of course, because it's still a powerful media to tell stories in. These people know their line of work very well; they can ”see” the idea executed in their mind, they have an innate feeling for revenue streams, they know what would make a good show and what would require work, sometimes too much work. But ”seeing” transmedia is different, and I belive it needs a different approach to pitching the ideas as well.

The challenge is to tell just enough of the brilliant transmedia project for everyone to feel that they're hearing something unique and thrilling, that they simply have to be a part of and take part in. As transmedia projects often are complex workings, dependent on careful planning and execution, the full explanation is a lot to pitch and a lot to grasp. Personally I am a big fan of the elevator pitch - getting the idea down to a 30 second pitch that'll explain it to anyone. If I can't manage that, my idea needs working on.

This post is an attempt to gather some thoughts on the subject. Better pitching leads to more great ideas being commissioned, which we all want, methinks.

(There are a great number of other aspects as well, like for instance how to get in touch with the right people to pitch to, how to follow up on pitches etc. For some run-downs on pitching in general, have a look here, or here. I'll stick to the transmedia part for this post though.)

I’ve polled some people on their thoughts with regards to pitching transmedia, people from slightly different corners of the transmedia field. I asked about what they regard as the most important aspect when pitching a cross media/transmedia property. The thing they, and I, all agree on is the importance of getting the story through in a compelling and exciting way. Mike Monello, of Blairwitch Project and Campfire fame, told me that for him, it’s ”always the story through user experience. Technology only in the context of a specific tactic, and only if necessary. The storytelling that interests me the most isn’t complete without the audience/user, therefore it’s their experience that brings it to life.” (Q:s and A:s were done over Twitter, which explains some omitted words ☺ )

I will most definitely agree on the story being the thing that should hook the audience to your pitch. When I started out, I pitched badly. Really really badly. We were so proud of the tech we had included in our formats that we skipped a large part of the story, in order to explain how nicely all Java-interactivity and set-top-box-interactivity, along with the mechanics of the show fit together. After a dozen pitches during one hectic MIPTV day, I grew tired of the blank look on people’s faces and decided I needed to change my approach. So, yes, the story!

One drawback when pitching transmedia is that there are not that many comparisons you can make. When pitching a script for a movie, you could go for "It's like Godzilla meets Titanic, in space!" which sort of gives everyone an idea of what it's about (hmm, I'd like to see that movie btw :). In transmedia, possible comparisons are fewer, which leads to you having to stress the points that are easy to get and that hooks the audience immediately - so if you do not have those points and hooks, you really need to think about developing them!

The guys over at http://www.willyouhelp.co.uk and their interesting and potentially brilliant project Resonance are on the same track. ”[It’s the] story x 3. Must be good enough to engage & sustain across the platforms. [The] story hooks the reader. Tech … reels them in. ;)”

I like the notion of using tech to reel in audiences; using tech as a means to an end is what the content creation business is / should be all about. There quite a few instances where tech takes the more important role; this in turn leads to great examples of how to implement tech, but more seldom to content that engages an audience.

Thirdly, Dr Christy Dena, one of the pioneers in the field and the author of ”Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments.” listed the following points (which may change depending on the client, and are based on the project being unreleased as of yet, as Christy pointed out):

1) Start with story - theme, logline, synopsis, characters
2) A walkthrough of the experience (or part of it - the beginning & perhaps end) from the perspective of the audience
3) Aspects of innovation - the design principles, audience strategies etc
that sets this project apart as being well conceived (which includes a bit
of context)
4) The team - who are the awesome people involved
5) Timeline - what stage are we at, how much longer to go, what the
milestones are, when marketing will happen, when revenue intends to happen
6) Business strategy - including measurement
7) What we want/their role

Again, I’m definitely inclined to agree. These points make sense, especially if you are pitching the idea to a possible partner or financier that you belive has the potential of having a large impact on your project. In my opinion, the points also apply all the more if the person you are pitching to has at least a basic knowledge of the workings of transmedia and the benefits of a transmedia approach to a project. These points should naturally be a part of anyone's development work as well. It's a good way to test your idea, to try to do a walkthrough from a users perspective. Also, it's very easy to forget the last point - to have a firm grasp of what you see your role together with the ones you are pitching to. If you don't know, who will?

If you however have a 10 minute slot with an acquisition executive of a global production house, I would suggest you stick to the story, the hooks and the grand finale. Hook them and reel them in, make sure you get the go-ahead to approach them for a longer meeting with more executive staff involved in the near future. It’s always easier to say no than to say yes, if you are being sold something (like a transmedia project). But with a good enough story to hook them, you know they will not want to let it go easily. Make sure you’re interesting and exciting, avoid spaced-out and technological.

Finally, a couple of things: as Jeff Gomez suggested, always bring something tangible. A flyer is OK, a graphic novel or a comic is even better. Something to give your idea, your format, more of a physical presence. Just make sure it is up-to-date and repesents your idea properly. I don't think you need to have a drama-based idea to make a graphic novel either; make an episode of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire into a graphic novel, from the view of a participant, spice it up a bit and you have a great piece of fiction, which explains your game show.

And, when the questions about ”but how do we make any money on this transmedia stuff then?” start piling in, make sure you’ve read up on Robert Prattens slides on Measuring RoI for Transmedia.

I feel there is a lot more to say on this subject, but I'll stop here (for now :). I'd welcome comments, as there are a lot of people better at pitching than I am, and with a better track record of interesting projects. Hopefully we can make the task of pitching transmedia a slightly easier one :).

Transmedia - the story of the story

2010-11-10T00:17:00.004+02:00

I find it exhilarating and exciting to follow the current flow of interesting discussions and even more interesting projects and examples of transmedia bouncing around the Internet these past few weeks. Suddenly it seems like everyone is talking transmedia, from a great number of angles.

So, having read some tweets and comments on current transmedia projects today, I found myself sitting staring vacantly into space, my mind trying to grasp some thought that just did not want to be grasped. Irritating in the extreme, as I'm sure you all agree.

The glimpses I could see of the thought implied that it had something to do with the core and underlying premises of transmedia. I finally gave up and decided to start writing instead, hoping it’d show up.

After a while, it did. And with it, and in the sentences before this one that gave the setting and the background of it’s arrival, it brought the meaning of transmedia. It’s not the story you’re telling. It’s the story about the story, that gives your story meaning - that’s transmedia.

In that sense, we actually don’t need media. So, in the most simplified sense, there’s nothing for the transmedia to trans- around from and to.

OK, so we have no trans- and we have no –media. What’s up with that? I found myself thinking. Wasn’t it namely transmedia that I’ve been happily embracing for the past year or so?

Actually, I don’t think it’s transmedia I’ve been embracing. I have not, for instance, been embracing the production of storylines on three different media, stemming from the same storyworld but adding to each other rather than copying or duplicating each other. Or rather, I have, but that has rather been a by-product.

What I’ve been embracing is the thought process and the development process of creating more than you need, just in case (and there is always the case). The process of not saying ”this is enough, we don’t need more than this” but rather ”hey hang on, let’s elaborate on that for a bit”. The process of building the story, and at the same time the story of the story, to enable new stories and explain and expand on old ones.

It’s like you’re planting a sapling and nurse it to be a massive tree, trunk and all – even if audiences just pick the fruit, i.e. your stories, the stories would not be there to be enjoyed without the work before.

At this point, the elusive thought let out a sigh and went away, mission fulfilled. I will continue to grow the tree tomorrow, and at lot of other trees as well. See, the telling of the story, that tells of the story, that's work that's never done.

Until later.

PS. A couple of good blog posts from the last week or so - Simon Pulmans post reviewing and commenting on Brent Weinsteins presentation at the PGA Transmedia Masterclass some weeks back was a very good read, and a reminder of things to remember while developing. The post about hoaxing in transmedia, by @poburke was also a mighty interesting one, good comments and all.

Transmedia sans fiction

2010-11-02T09:55:00.009+02:00

I'm a big fan of @Jeff_Gomez, as you've probably noticed. He really opened my eyes to the powers of transmedia at The Pixel Lab in Cardiff last summer (and he also helped create the Magic The Gathering card game, which I thoroughly enjoyed playing back in the day :) .*

I've enjoyed listening to his visions and his presentations (a great and touching video from the TEDxTransmedia conference can be found here, and a review of his Cinekid presentation last week here) and firmly believe that more and more properties and stories will go the way of transmedia, for the better of all story-interested members of mankind.

One aspect that I'm struggling with at the moment is when a development project strays from the path of fiction, or never originated as fiction to start with. As with the examples Jeff talks about in the links above, well executed transmedia projects in the vein of Avatar or Pirates of the Caribbean have a rich story world to build on, to create stories in, just as it should be. At the same time, this is almost a prerequisite for creating these types of transmedia projects; you need that fictional world, well built and stable, to be able to tell your fictional stories that complement each other and build the world onwards.

The challenge, as I see it, is to figure out what happens when you base these in the real world, omitting or at least limiting the fictional elements. Is it still transmedia? Or are we then reverting back to cross media (if that indeed can be considered reverting?). If it is still transmedia, is it possible to base it in the real world and still create a good transmedia narrative?

My opinion is that this is more than possible. What you need to do is to create the narrative superstructure in as great a detail as when you create your fictional world. Just because what you're creating is based on the real world, doesn't mean you can take it for granted that everyone perceives this world the same way as you do - not even your collaborators on the project. When writing this narrative superstructure, the mythology of your project, you need to explain the essence of, say, London, as represented in your project (if London is a part of your story of course) in as great a detail as the essence of Pandora is explained in the Avatar mythology. You also need to be able to explain this essence, via the descriptions and the mythology, to each and everyone involved in the development and the production. I believe this is the only way to avoid mishaps in the production (such as people not realizing what you want to get out of the narrative, what feelings you want to convey, how you want people to interact etc). One hour spent on the mythology will save you five hours in execution; production and editing.

This will also assist you a lot when bringing new people into the development and/or production team. Finally, I agree with Jeff on one point he has been making; if you feel the need to make some material to explain your project, a graphic novel is a great way to go. And if you base it in the real world, so what? Who wouldn't want to be in a graphic novel??

* see Jeff's comment below; the honor of creating MtG goes to Garfield and WotC.

A guest post and a couple of questions

2010-11-01T20:26:00.004+02:00

I wrote a guest post for ReedMIDEMs MIP blog; it's geared towards the typical MIP-goer; i.e. a TV executive with a fair amount of years in the biz, just hearing about the term "transmedia" for the first time and wondering whether this will be a hype that'll fade away in a couple of years time, or something that they should take note of and start acting on.

I'm for the latter, so that's the angle I'll try to take in my guest posts. Not in a "do-this-or-be-DAMNEDFORALLETERNITY!!!"-way, but rather just to tell people what I know and show good examples that other's have done. Transmedia - or whatever you want to call it (I came up with the term "Sansmedia" the other day, since I'm fervently waiting for the day when we get rid of all "platforms" and concentrate on the stories being told) - is in my opinion the way forward, and I hope many others will recognize this as well.

I do, of course, as everyone involved in the transmedia business probably does, welcome a discussion on the subject. I started thinking about the multitude of people who are not aware of transmedia, who do not care about transmedia and probably never will. So, is transmedia a fad that'll fade? Will it merge with something else? Is it a phase we will go through on the way to finding an even better way of telling stories and engaging people? What do you think?

(I'll put my 2c in, in just a bit :)

The mixing of Real and Not Real in Transmedia

2010-10-29T00:42:00.006+03:00

(the musings continue, now with something I'm struggling with right now)

One particular challenge that I face while developing transmedia, is the thin line between being just about enough fictional, but not too fictional. I don’t work – or, should I say, I do not at the moment work – with drama-based transmedia projects; instead, the ones we’re working on now are music projects, game shows, kids formats, etc.

As I see it, one key element of any transmedia venture is the classical ”willful suspension of disbelief” (love the phrase, btw). You know that you have your narrative superstructure in place, it’s solid and will be a fine, nurturing growth bed. You have some – three, then, to go by PGA’s rules for a transmedia producer – different media platforms utilized. The different pieces of content support each other, either directly or indirectly, but are not duplicates of each other. What you need now is for the consumer / participant (the ”consupant”? sounds a bit constipated...) to go into your story, your narrative superstructure, and embrace the willful suspension of disbelief and engage him-/herself.

This is a bit easier when building a drama-based transmedia setting, as anyone connecting to the mythology of the story knows and has accepted that it is a story. When blending ”real” stuff with a narrative that contains fictional elements, the cracks are a lot easier to spot.

What I’ve found out so far is one fairly simple thing, yet hard to stick to while developing, writing and scripting. Simply – be as true as possible. If you embark on the mission to include real stuff – be it persons, objects, physical landmarks or whatever – in your transmedia project, these different kinds of stuff will be a lot more credible if they, to as large an extent as possible, base themselves and present themselves as their real selves. What you don't want is for these characters and stuff to show any light shining through them. They need to be as solid as possible - which is only possible if they are, for the main part, grounded in who or what they really actually are.

The only thing you need to add are the small fictional things that lets these real persons and real places function within your transmedia venture.

I’ll update with an example of ours as soon as we’ve got stuff to show ☺

Musings on transmedia development

2010-10-26T21:45:00.007+03:00

(Felt the need to write down some stuff re: transmedia development that have been bouncing around in my head for some time. It's basically just some reflections from the ground floor of the transmedia development factory...)

We started out as developers of interactive television-formats some five-six years ago. These were based on television as the core of the content, with interactivity included either via mobile phones or via digital set-top-boxes. We realized very early on that if you want to develop something that should accompany a traditional piece of content - like a tv show - you needed to develop the two (or more) together from the start. Thus you avoided the awkward feeling of added content being slapped onto existing content, without any form of seamless and enjoyable experience.

As time has gone by, we have thankfully been able to let go of the limited MHP interactivity for set-top-boxes and have happily embraced the cross media / transmedia approach to telling stories, be they music shows, kids shows, game shows or just about any kind of content. Now, some things are always good to keep in mind while starting up or being in the development phase of a transmedia project:

First off, make sure you're developing and creating compelling content - you need a great story to function as the framework, with enough holes in it for the audience to be able to fill in stuff themselves and become engaged in the story (Jeff Gomez's "Swiss Cheese-model"). Don't forget the narrative superstructure - build it solid enough to serve as a vehicle for this particular story, but also as a bed for future stories (from past, present and future in the story universe) to spring from.

Secondly (but developed at the same time so it all fits together nicely without any last-minute panic solutions, thank you very much) - logical ways for the audience/users to connect to the story, from platforms that are themselves logical ways into the story. I.e., do not make an iPad app just 'cause everyone else has one. If it's not essential for how you experience the story, leave it out.

Thirdly, get out there and get some traction for your content. Lots of stuff gets developed and produced and perhaps gets a blog mention or three, topping out at 452 users over a three month period. Don't do that. Get those people interested that can tip your little thing over the edge and into the abyss of a global phenomena. Get everyone to step over that invisible "WTF"-threshold (the threshold where you KNOW you should be doing something else but you're seeing thousands of people (who also should be doing something else) involving themselves in the story and having the time of their lives, so you think "Oh hell, WTF" and you jump right in). How? Read up on Propagation Planning. As they say - plan not for the people you reach, but the people they reach. Find your spokespersons. Be inclusive, not exclusive. Which nicely builds over to...

Be interactive. Listen. Communicate. You're probably not right every time, and others may have better ideas for your story and it's development. Face it - it is no longer yours only. Embrace that fact and take it onwards - it's all a good thing.

Lastly, don't leave people hanging. There's nothing worse than getting peoples expectations up and then letting them down. They have invested in your creation. Make sure they get full value for their investment. If you do, they'll be back.

Feel free to add stuff in the comments!

PS. Just read this in a blog text of mine from 2006, still agree 100% with the need to focus on content :)

"Myself? I believe that the changeover to new forms and ways of watching television will go much slower than people think, or hope for. I believe that in five years time there will be a small minority watching television via portable devices, while for the most part the audience will watch television in their living rooms, just like back in the 50s. I also believe that content is the most important factor, and that less energy and resources should be spent on developing and offer to people gadgets and trinkets they don't want or need, and more should be spent on doing great television shows."

MIPCOM apps - a review

2010-09-30T13:19:00.011+03:00

I was suitably impressed with the iPhone app launched for MIPTV this spring. Now we have two competing apps, the official MIPCOM app and a "survival gide to MIPCOM", launched by C21 and Warner Bros. Below, a quick review of the two apps. Which one do you need? (Note: this is of the 30th of September, so updates are most certainly coming up in hte next few days):

Official MIPCOM app

It looks shiny and nice, good graphics and a good interface (although the woman who serves as wallpaper looks like she's aghast that you've just showed her something very inappropriate). The options on the opening screen are easy to understand, the categories being Live, Conferences, Speakers, Attendees, Mailing list, My favorites, Videos and Photos/Maps.

The Live category naturally features nothing about MIPCOM yet, but offers instead stuff that was uploaded at MIPTV 2010. Good for a reminder on what went on then, but not much else. Conferences gives you a fairly good view of what's happening during the different days, and lets you go through to the different seminars and comment, upload photos and notify that you'll be attending. Nothing extra though - as a tip, perhaps if you notify that you are going to the Entertainement Master Class on Monday, you'll have something waiting for you there as an "early bird present"? Doesn't have to be much, a pen or whatever, but would be a nice touch.

Speakers gives you a iTunes/Mac-ish photo scroll which lets you browse the different speakers and read more about them, as well as comment. Again, it all looks good and moves slickly, but perhaps something a little bit extra could have been in the offering? Attendees lets you browse who's coming to MIPCOM. There are quite a few people, so a search option for categories (buyer, for instance) might help? Also, it's hella sluggish, so perhaps not putting all attendees in one big row is the best way? Clicking on a person puts you through to the Online Database (which then is a chapter all to itself)

Mailing list/websites is essentially links to updates from Reed MIDEM about the MIPs, nothing special as far as I could see. Videos are a bunch of best-of videos from MIPTV 2010, and one promo video for MIPCOM 2010. Photos/Maps is a clutter of, yeah, photos and maps. Although the maps aren't that good resolution and are not really that useful.

All in all, the official app feels at the moment like a last-resort backup for when you can't find your catalogue, or anyone to ask, or a MIPNews paper for that matter to check what happens next amongst the conferences. It simply does not feel as essential as the MIPTV app did this spring.

The C21/Warner Bros app

Well now, this is another creature. It's a "survival guide", implying that you'll most likely die at the Palais if you do not have this app installed. (hint, you might still just survive without it).

It's pretty cluttered with ads for C21 and first and foremost WB-productions, like "Pretty Little Liars", "Memphis Beat" etc. You're down to four categories: News, Local Info, What's On and Warner Bros.

The last category lets WB show you their shows, tell you their news and give you their contact info. All good, if you're interested in what they have to offer, or want to get in touch with them. If not, just skip that particular button.

News is a C21 RSS Feed combined with (at the moment) a couple of pictures, one audio clip and a twitter feed for - I presume - the #MIPCOM hashtag. Nothing essential, nothing to write home about, still might give you some interesting stuff to read if you have a spare minute or two.

What's On gives you the chance to sort all keynotes and seminars via date or via speaker, of which the speaker search feels like a good one.

But it's the Local News category that you'll be interested in, and not the Numbers subcategory with hotel hotlines etc. No, it's the combination between a map of the Croisette and Cannes beachfront combined with a listing of all bars and venues in the area, with a short description of every venue. And all venues are pinned on the map. Mmm, here we go :)

Conclusion

The official app is the one you will download, not use, and then delete in November at some point. The C21/WB app is the one you'll download, forget about because it really doesn't help you in your daily business at MIP, but which you'll pull out at 11.15pm on Monday night to check "goddam which bars are still open eh??". You choose the ooze.

TV Entertainment Forum

2010-09-24T15:38:00.004+03:00

Just back from London where i had the chance to take part of the TV Entertainment Forum, thanks to winning the Entertainment Twitch competition over at Combined Mind's web portal.

As a brief reflection on the day, I found it totally instructive as the heads of commissioning from all major broadcasters told the audience more or less what they were looking for, for which slots and what the budgets might look like. To put it briefly, most are looking to go into the cross media field (not quite transmedia yet, but getting there) with C4:s and Endemols The Million Pound Drop as a prime example. Sky are continuing with their "Fewer, Bigger, Better" policy, whereas BBC is looking for new talent and "crazy ideas", ITV wants scaled entertainment and C4 is looking for new talent both on screen and behind the scenes.

Recession or no recession, if you're active in the UK television industry, it looks like there's a bit of money laying around, waiting to be put into work in new and exciting shows. Go get'em tiger!

How did it go for me and my pitch? We'll see, but some healthy leads at least :)

Good article on the future of the web

2010-08-16T22:44:00.002+03:00

Steve Rubel has written an interesting article over at AdAge about the future of the web. Which, according to Steve, is pretty much non-consistent. See (and I find it hard to argue with him), with regards to mobile and tablet platforms - or screens, rather - Steve argues that "...we will need to rethink, remix and repackage information for an entirely different modality than platforms of yore."

Quite so. To do this, we need to think about not only the content itself, but also context, collaboration and adoption, as Steve says, and base it all on the all-important data, that which Brian Newman coined "the new oil".

It's an interesting read and well worth some minutes of your time. Found via a blog by Emily Chang and a tweet by @anitafiander.

The Pixel Lab - reflections pt 1

2010-07-14T22:20:00.003+03:00

I, as 33 others, attended The Pixel Lab in Cardiff last week; a lab focussing solely on transmedia, from every possible angle. Engaged in the lab were also twenty-odd tutors and experts, each with their own take on the matter (but, and which was slightly amazing to me, not contradicting each other, but rather building on each others presentations and views. This wasn't about agreeing on everything said, not at all, but rather about knowing that everyone had their own experiences and their own cases to bring to the table, and respecting that fact. Felt good, I'll happily admit.)

The format of the lab felt a bit odd prior to the event, as 17 producers WITH a project were paired with 17 producers WITHOUT a project, for sparring and workshop purposes. As a producer attending without a project, I was slightly sceptic - what would I get out of it in the end? This turned out to be a non-issue in the end. I actually think I benefitted more from not having an actual project at the lab, seeing as I could then absorb everything I learned and realized during the week with regards to everything we're working on, not just one specific project. On the other hand, looking at the projects that were participating - from the highly experimental "Mechanical Figures Inspired by Tesla" (which was the project of Helena Bulaja, the Croatian producer I acted as sparring partner for), to more straight-forward stuff like the follow-up project from the makers of "Outpost" (Zombies! Gotta love'em!)

All in all, it was a packed week. 10-hour days, absorbing, reacting, discussing, developing and most of all THINKING all the while, I've simply had to take some days off now afterwards to clear my head. So, what were the impressions and reflections for my part? There were some key points to take from this, I gather:

- Transmedia might be a buzzword of 2010. This does not, however, mean that it's a trend that will die away in the next couple of years. Transmedia is a revolution in storytelling; the audience is not only participating; the audience is now the story, and what used to be the story is the setting.

- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised! So said Gil Scott-Heron back in 1971. Today, this rings true for transmedia as well. There are a few producers who realize the possibilites (and to some degree, the limitations). There are some brands and perhaps even some channels that understand the hidden power that lies in making your audience invest in the story you are telling. But for the most part, traditional media remains traditional media, even if you hit it over the head with a transmedia axe. The week was filled with anecdotes about financiers, power houses in the media industry, colleagues, independent producers etc, just not being interested in transmedia at all (or IF interested, completely misunderstanding the topic). This fact made the Pixel Lab such an extraordinary event - there were fifty-odd creative people gathered to talk about transmedia for a week, and if we perhaps weren't really agreed on where the goal posts were located and what the best route to that goal should be, at least we were on the same playing field, playing towards the same goal. That felt good!

- Context is King, Data is the new oil, said Brian Newman during his (excellent) presentation at the Lab. In a way I agree, especially regarding data. But for Context vs Content, I still have to go for the latter. As was evident during the week, at least to me , was that as soon as a great story arch was raised or a great turn to a story was invented, everything else seemed to fall in place quite naturally. Well, perhaps it took some time, but it was somehow already there in the story, as soon as the story fell in place. What made this week so great was that it gave us a number of tools to help facilitate that "falling in place" process much easier, without banging our heads on a brick wall for months during the development process (as we did with The Space Trainees, for instance). So, for me Content is still King. But Context is dais the King is stood on, so everyone can see him, hear him and touch him.

- We need more venues like The Pixel Lab. There are already a number of interesting projects spawning from the contacts made during that one Lab week, and the contacts everyone made with other like-minded people from around the world were just impossible to calculate a value on. So - EU Media Fund, Film Councils all over the world, philantrophists and just about anyone who got a dime to spare - help finance more of these things. We need them, and the world does too! :)

Here are links to some of the presentations during the week:

Steve Peters presentation "Shattering the 4th Wall w Social Media-How the Future Will Tell Stories"
Mel Exon's slides on the social web, storytellers and brands
Brian Newman's thoughts on the Pixel Transmedia Lab
Wendy Bernfeld's (Rights Stuff) list of case studies of legal disputes, new media vs old media
Dan Lawsons reflections on the week

Thank you all again for a great week, hope to meet each and everyone of you at some point in the future!

//S