Transmedia: Storytelling for the Digital Age

Wired: "The year was 1999, and Steven Spielberg was preparing to turn Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report” into a $100 million action movie starring Tom Cruise. There was just one problem: The story was set in the undated future, and the director had no idea what that future should look like" ...

Christy Dena: "Of course, ‘worldbuilding’ has been around longer than transmedia, and is employed in many different ways" ...

Image: Flint Dille @ Transmedia Victoria by Christy Dena

“A linear story had a linear workflow, but now we’re in a nonlinear immersive space,” explained production designer Alex McDowell at a recent Flux 5D event titled “Digital Design and World-building in the Narrative Media Landscape”...

Halo entered the sci-fi scene as a video game in 2001 with the release of Halo: Combat Evolved on the original Xbox. Being strictly a video game, no one expected it to spawn the dynamic, evolving universe that exists today.

Lance shares his first hand experience in what it takes to build original storyworlds.

Irrespective of whatever differences they may have, Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, what they do have in common is that they are both British luminaries of comics with a keen interest in esoterica and magic. More than that, they both pursue theories of a meta-fictional cosmology that has threads running through all of reality.

Two types of choice make up the storytelling world of today: The first is the creator’s choice: the choices that we as content creators make to build the world of the story we’re telling. The second is the audience’s choice: limitless, and changeable at the click of a mouse or swipe of a finger...

[It's not what we put in ... but rather, what we choose to leave out of our transmedia story worlds ...]

The first thing to consider is that most lawyers do not understand the speed at which the digital world moves, nor the opportunity cost involved in spending months negotiating rather than creating.

Advice on when to engage legal services for transmedia projects.

What does he mean? All I know is that the Universe is a big place and there’s space for lots of us in it.

Stan Lee's had a hand in creating many memorable heroes and villains that have jumped from the pages of comic books to popular culture. Now, he's aiming to bring new stories for an impressionable audience: kids.

Matt Bolish: "Instead of telling a story set in this world, [transmedia creator] Coulson and company decoded tell the story of the world itself. They used the prolific descriptions of Westeros provided in the novels to inspire sensory experiences—sight, smell, sound, taste and touch—to turn passive audiences into something altogether different: tourists" ...

DRC: A look at the transmedia marketing campaign behind the first season of Game of Thrones.

Mike Jones: "Having read through all the entries in the [IWL Storyworld Competition] and written hundreds of pages of coverage and feedback on them, I feel somewhat like I’ve obtained a glimpse of the Transmedia writer zeitgeist - a macro-level snapshot of where the worlds writers are at right now in attempting to embrace and exploit the opportunities of a Transmedia world."

DRC: Here are his top 6 tips for writers hoping to work in this complex area.

"At the European Broadcast Union (EBU) TV Summit in Copenhagen last week, Transmedia Storyteller Ltd founder and CEO, Robert Pratten, presented our vision for future storyworlds"...

Discover the "Storyverse" of real world places, music and movies from your favorite book...

Building the world in which an alternate reality game or transmedia experience can play out successfully is like planning and directing a single-shot film.

What is new is the opportunity to tell stories and build worlds that are storytelling agnostic. Here the richness of a storyworld moves fluidly from one screen to the next as well as spilling out into the real world without a dependency on a traditional media source.