Say What? Transmedia Storytelling

Ever since DIY Days Philadelphia I've been thinking a lot about Transmedia Storytelling and how when employed skillfully, it can generate a constant and varied stream of revenue for the players involved. For those of you new to this buzz word, Transmedia Storytelling is "storytelling across multiple forms of media with each medium making distinctive contributions to the audience's understanding of the story" (thanks Wikipedia!). Pioneered by indie mavericks like Lance Weiler and the Blair Witch team, the Transmedia approach has slowly been entering our collective consciousness, evolving in tandem with the way we receive and perceive information in the digital age. Unlike in traditional unidirectional storytelling, where the audience receives the given information for a fixed period of time, this new media process is multi-directional, with multiple authors and architects helping to build the new fictional reality in which dynamic new narratives can play out over an indefinite period of time.

And with multiple points of entry (read: distribution outlets), there are multiple points to eke out a couple bucks. With the potential to create revenue streams through providing premium content, early access to new story developments, events and merchandise (to name only a few), transmedia allows a single product--whether a movie, a toy, a novel or a song--to be profitable long after the intial buzz has died down. Or in the case of television, keep viewers tuning in season after season.

Take the Star Wars franchise. The feature films alone have generated a cumulative worldwide box office of more than $4 billion. That doesn't even begin to factor in the novels, videogames, and toys that provide a constant stream of ancillary revenue. Then there's the Clone Wars cartoon feature and subsequent TV series. I know it's taken a beating in the press, but when viewed within a transmedia context, it takes on new significance. The Clone Wars reintroduces that original product from 1977 to a new Y2K audience. To the middle-aged geeks who grew up with the original trilogy, this new venture may seem abhorrent. But to the generation of pre-teens who were born after Al Gore invented the internet, The Clone Wars represents an exciting new world of sci-fi lore that started on the big screen and continues on multiple smaller screens.

This exciting new approach to storytelling is the wave of the future. Born out of the internet and a growing tech-savvy population, transmedia storytelling provides an alternate digital reality for people to connect with each other. It replicates in the online space the shared cinematic experience of a packed movie theater, or that of a story being told around a campfire and sustains the audience's interest long after the intial content has been consumed. Hopefully, opportunities to build these new complex alternate realities will continue to grow and when the time comes for me to look for my next career move (only 6 months from now!) a job working for a company like Starlight Runner will be waiting for me.