Food for Thought: More on Transmedia Storytelling

Reading Ted Hope's blog this morning I came across a really interesting article on Transmedia Storytelling by David Bordwell, the well known film academic out of the Univ. of Wisconsin.  I used to refer to Bordwell's website from time to time in college, but haven't really looked at it since, so it was really fortuitous that Ted Hope linked to it, and even more fortuitous that it was to an article on my new favorite trend in filmmaking.  Among other things, Bordwell does an excellent job differentiating transmedia storytelling from your typical franchise:

Some transmedia narratives create a more complex overall experience than that provided by any text alone. This can be accomplished by spreading characters and plot twists among the different texts. If you haven’t tracked the story world on different platforms, you have an imperfect grasp of it...In most film franchises, the same characters play out their fixed roles in different movies, or comic books, or TV shows. You need not consume all to understand one. 

While I don't really agree with his assertion that transmedia storytelling is more difficult to realize with a film as opposed to a serialized form of entertainment like television, generally I found his observations to be dead on.  To read the rest of this essay, click here.