If nothing else, last week's Story World Conference in San Francisco affirmed the reality of a new creative movement devoted to transmedia storytelling.
After years of building connections via online sharing and various ad-hoc collaborations, this gathering of the tribes of transmedia will certainly accelerate the movement by invigorating a cadre of practitioners and theorists, and generating buzz among content creators of many ilks.
It's a very big tent that has been pitched, sheltering artists, theorists, academics, service providers, vendors and allies, many with contradictory values and beliefs. Don't expect a manifesto any time soon.
And yet, listening to three days worth of panels, speeches, workshops, and networking (and 2000+ tweets), it's possible to extract some core beliefs of this movement that distinguish transmedia from "monomedia" -- the world of stories told in a single medium -- followed by some advice gleaned from more than 30 years in the indie film world.
Story World attendees on Day 3 at #occupytransmedia workshop
-- Story Worlds are not stories. This emphasis on worlds transcends the story and its traditional elements (character, setting, theme, plot, etc.) even while incorporating them. Because transmedia requires the audience to move from one medium to another, the emphasis in on "experience design," a job which is more typical in a game studio than on a movie set.
-- Audience engagement drives everything. To transmedia activists, the audience is an engaged, participatory, and demanding collaborator. Storytellers must invite audiences to "co-create," not just as fodder for marketing or promotion.The release of narrative control opens the floodgates for new definitions of story, script, narrative. This frightens old-school story folks.
-- Stories live outside the silo. Media are produced and funded inside a single silo, so it takes a lot of passion and will to spend the extra time and money to build a multi-platform story vision from the outset. Finance loathes split rights, as Zak Kadison, Chairman, President and CEO, Blacklight Transmedia noted: "Ever since George Lucas, studios don't want to give up any rights."
Perhaps that is changing, said David Tochterman, Head of Digital Media, Innovative Artists: "Transmedia is great because it gives me multiple ways to get a buyer to say yes," It also creates value for the filmmaker, according "conversation agent" Miles Maker who sees the emergence of "the attention economy." The story, themes, characters, and actors can generate content and audience engagement well before a film opens, though he admits, "filmmakers don't want to let the cat out of the bag."
-- Software is the bottleneck. "The biggest challenge to physically distributed narratives was the bottleneck of the gatekeepers," said transmedia pioneer Jordan Weisman. "With the onset of interactivity modes, the bottleneck is software engineering," which has a much more limited pool of talent. The emergence of new production tools and platforms will help the non-techies, including Coincident TV and Conductrr. Lance Weiler thinks of his transmedia projects like software, labeling versions 1.0, 2.0, etc. Indeed, his DIY Days, which preceded Story World, sponsored a hackathon.
-- Data is the new oil, metrics is the new gasoline. Most transmedia projects converge on the Internet, and most incorporate audience interactivity -- generating floods of very targeted user data which can be measured and can drive the revenue model and the story form itself. For the first time, audience becomes a strategic advantage for the content creator, not just the distributor.
-- Business models are a bitch. Whenever indies gather, they talk about money, and Story World was no exception. Virtually all successful models for transmedia to date have been financed as either patronage or commissions, as noted by Brian Clark of GMD Studios. Clark believes that "the next wave of innovation in transmedia storytelling is going to be about business models rather than storytelling forms." A popular tweet during the conference referenced the patronage model: "If you want to do transmedia, move to Canada." The emergence of an app market (for iPhones, android, TV and desktop) offers new avenues to test the willingness of the audience to pay for original and indie transmedia story experiences.
This movement is young and still in what one observer calls the "us versus them" phase, exemplified by a slogan I saw during one workshop: "After the big boys fuck it up completely, feel free to give us a call" So as a veteran of the indie video and film movement of the 70s, 80s and 90s, I offer a few observations as encouragement for this one.
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Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 2:56 PM by 
