Transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
From a production standpoint, transmedia storytelling involves creating content[1] that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives.[2] In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique pieces of content in each channel. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together (overtly or subtly), but are in narrative synchronization with each other.
History
Transmedia storytelling can be related to the concepts of semiotics and narratology. Semiotics is the "science of signs" and a discipline concerned with sense production and interpretation processes.[3]Narratology looks at how structure and function factor into narrative with regards to its themes and symbols. Scolari goes on to show how semiotics and narratology are ways to analyze transmedia. Often the same text may create different kinds of implicit consumers. Transmedia storytelling is a narrative structure that breaks through both language (semiotics) and media (narratology). Some effective strategies in transmedia storytelling include producing a fresh perspective on the original material and its original context across a new form of media. Transmedia storytelling is how well a story is comprehended across media. An effective strategy of transmedia storytelling does not take a passive approach, instead engages with popular culture making a story its own and providing new context.
When it comes to strict adaptation in transmedia storytelling which is translating one medium to another: a book becomes a film, a comic becomes a video game. There is also a history describing pure transmedia: the book is an exact prequel to the film, ending at the exact moment prior to the films beginning. The earliest example of this would be the Bible. During early ages when many people were illiterate, narratives were passed on verbally, through "live theatre" where they were acted out, sermons, songs and/or illustrations.
The origins of the approach to disperse the content across various commodities and media is traced to the Japanese marketing strategy of media mix, originated in the early 1960s.[4][5] Some, however, have traced the roots to Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) written by Samuel Richardson and even suggest that they go back further to the roots of earliest literature.[6]
By the 1970s and 1980s, pioneering artists of telematic art made experiments of collective narrative, mixing the ancestors of today's networks, and produced both visions and critical theories of what became transmedia. With the advent of mainstream Internet usage in the 1990s, numerous creators began to explore ways to tell stories and entertain audiences using new platforms. Many early examples took the form of what was to become known as alternate reality games (ARG), which took place in real-time with a mass audience. The term ARG was itself coined in 2001 to describe The Beast, a marketing campaign for the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
Some early works include, but are not limited to:
Ong's Hat was most likely started sometime around 1993, and also included most of the aforementioned design principles. Ong's Hat also incorporated elements of legend tripping into its design, as chronicled in a scholarly work titled Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong's Hat. ISBN978-1628460612[7]
Dreadnot,[8] an early example of an ARG-style project, was published on sfgate.com in 1996. This ARG included working voice mail phone numbers for characters, clues in the source code, character email addresses, off-site websites, and real locations in San Francisco.
These examples were successful because of the impact their multi-platform storytelling became. Star Wars is one of the most extensive because its world is built across a multitude of platforms. The Blair Witch Project is impactful with their multi-platform storytelling because their online marketing campaign marks the first use of web storytelling. The Disney empire needs to be mentioned because much of the Disney "formula" for youth products: this tends to be straddle the nonexistent line between adaptation and TM storytelling but their franchise approach floods the market with multimedia examples. Many comics from the Marvel Universe or DC Universe that have been adapted to video games, feature films, animated shorts, cinematic universes, etc.: Superman, Spider-Man, Avengers (origin stories, sequels, spinoffs) have been successful.
Definition
The study of transmedia storytelling—a concept introduced by Henry Jenkins, author of the seminal book Convergence Culture—is an emerging subject. Because of the nature of new media and different platforms, varying authors have different understandings of it. Jenkins states the term "transmedia" means "across media" and may be applied to superficially similar, but different phenomena. In particular, the concept of "transmedia storytelling" should not be confused with traditional cross-platform, "transmedia" media franchises,[12] or "media mixes".
One example that Jenkins gives is of the media conglomerate DC Comics. This organization releases comic books before the release of its related films so the audience understands a character's backstory. Much of transmedia storytelling is not based on singular characters or plot lines, but rather focuses on larger complex worlds where multiple characters and plot lines can be sustained for a longer period of time.[13] In addition, Jenkins focused on how transmedia extends to attract larger audiences. For example, DC Comics releases coloring books to attract younger audience members. Sometimes, audience members can feel as though some transmedia storylines have left gaps in the plot line or character development, so they begin another extension of transmedia storytelling, such as fan fiction.[14] Transmedia storytelling exists in the form of transmedia narratives, which Kalinov and Markova define as: "a multimedia product which communicates its narrative through a multitude of integrated media channels".[15]
In his book, You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story, Houston Howard describes transmedia storytelling as “the art of extending a story across multiple mediums and multiple platforms in a way that creates a better business model for creators and a better experience for the audience.” [16]
Both traditional and dedicated transmedia entertainment studios have fully integrated and embraced transmedia storytelling techniques into entertainment culture. It began as a search for a new storytelling form, native to digital content and communications channels. Developing technologies have enabled projects to include single-player experiences in addition to real-time multiplayer experiences such as alternate reality games such as Fortnite. While the list of current and recent projects is too extensive to list here, some notable examples of transmedia storytelling include:
Slide, a native transmedia experience for Fox8 TV in Australia.
Skins, a transmedia extension of the Channel 4/Company Pictures TV show by Somethin' Else in the UK.
Halo, a video game series created by Bungie and currently developed by 343 Industries that has evolved to include novels, comic books, audio plays, live action web series and an upcoming live action television show from Paramount+.
ReGenesis, a Canadian television series with a real-time transmedia (alternate reality game) extension that took place in sync with the episodes as they aired.
MyMusic, transmedia sitcom by Fine Brothers Productions as part of YouTube's original channels initiative, one of the more robust transmedia experiences.
Clockwork Watch, an independent project about a non-colonial steampunk world, told across graphic novels, live events, online and a feature film created by Yomi Ayeni.
Defiance, a television show and video game paired to tell connective and separate stories.[17][18][19]
The HIVE Transmedia Project, by Daniel D.W. is a sci-fi novella series incorporating QR codes within the text to multimedia and a simulated reality story.
Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu is an ongoing webcomic since 2013. The narrative is supplemented with a Twitter account of the main protagonist.
Pokémon, There are video games, television shows, and card games all that use Pokémon as a center and point of entry. There is no one text that is the origination of the Pokemon series, but the games Pokémon Red and Green were the starting point from which the franchise derived.
The Hunger Games, a young adult book series adapted to wildly popular movies and fan fiction based on the character plot lines
September Mourning, the project was created by Emily Lazar in 2009 and spans upon comic books, music, NFTs, and more
Scolari uses the example of 24 to show how transmedia storytelling occurs. 24 originated on Fox as a TV series but within a few years, it had generated a complex network of comics, video games, books, mobile episodes, etc. around the main character Jack Bauer and the Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU). Scolari writes that 24 creates a complex semiotic device for generating multiple implicit consumers who can be classified according to their relationship with the media.[citation needed] At the first level, there are single text consumers or those who just read the comic or play the video game. The consumer can understand the story without having to consume the rest of the texts. On a second level, 24 constructs different single media consumers. Here a viewer can enter the narrative world by watching the TV series every week. Finally, 24 created transmedia consumers because there are different media across different platforms that the consumer can enter into.
In "Digital State: How the internet is changing everything" (2013), author Simon Pont argues that transmedia storytelling is a theory that is at last starting to find its practical stride. Pont cites Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus (2012), and specifically the three viral films produced by 20th Century Fox as part of the advance global marketing campaign, as vivid executional examples of transmedia storytelling theory.
Where Robert McKee (Story, 1998) argues that back-story is a waste of time (because if the back-story is so good then this is surely the story worth telling), Pont proposes that storytellers like J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof have "pretty much lined McKee's argument up against a wall and shot it".[20] Pont goes on to argue, "Parallel and non-linear timelines, 'multi-verses', grand narratives with crazy-rich character arcs, 'back-story' has become 'more story', the opportunity to add Byzantine layers of meaning and depth. You don't create a story world by stripping away, but by layering".
In "Ball & Flint: transmedia in 90 seconds" (2013), Pont likens transmedia story-telling to "throwing a piece of flint at an old stone wall" and "delighting in the ricochet", making story something you can now "be hit by and cut by".[21]
Shannon Emerson writes in the blog post "Great Examples of Multiplatform Storytelling" that transmedia storytelling can also be called multiplatform storytelling, transmedia narrative, and even cross-media seriality. She also cites Henry Jenkins as a leading scholar in this realm.[22]
Transmedia storytelling mimics daily life, making it a strong constructivist pedagogical tool for educational uses.[23] The level of engagement offered by transmedia storytelling is essential to the Me or Millennial Generation as no single media satisfy curiosity.[24] Schools have been slow to adopt the emergence of this new culture which shifts the spotlight of literacy from being one of individual expression to one of community. Whether we see it or not, Jenkins notes that we live in a globally connected world in which we use multiple platforms to connect and communicate.[23] Using transmedia storytelling as a pedagogical tool, wherein students interact with platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr permits students' viewpoints, experiences, and resources to establish a shared collective intelligence that is enticing, engaging, and immersive, catching the millennial learners' attention, ensuring learners a stake in the experience.[25] Transmedia storytelling offers the educator the ability to lead students to think critically, identify with the material and gain knowledge, offering valuable framework for the constructivist educational pedagogy that supports student centered learning.[26] Transmedia storytelling allows for the interpretation of the story from the individual perspective, making way for personalized meaning-making[23] - and in the case of fully participatory projects - allows participants to become co-creators of the story.[27]
In "The Better Mousetrap: Brand Invention in a Media Democracy" (2012), Pont explains, "Transmedia thinking anchors itself to the world of story, the ambition principally being one of how you can 'bring story to life' in different places, in a non-linear fashion. The marketing of movies is the most obvious applications of thie concept. Transmedia maintains that there's a 'bigger picture opportunity' to punting a big picture to additional platforms. Transmedia theory, applied to a movie launch, is all about promoting the story, not the 'premiere date of a movie starring...' In an industry built on the conventions of 'stars sell movies', where their name sits above the film's title, transmedia thinking is anti-conventional and boldly purist."[28]
Transmedia storytelling is also used by companies like Microsoft and Kimberly-Clark to train employees and managers.[29]
Anders Gronstedt and Marc Ramos say "At the core of every training challenge is a good story waiting to be told. More and more, these stories are being told across a multitude of devices and screens, where they can reach learners more widely, and engage with them more deeply."[30]
However, transmedia storytelling isn't used much at lower education levels. Children would thrive using transmedia storytelling worlds in their learning, but many of these worlds have copyrights linked to them. Transmedia storytelling has yet to tackle learning and educating children, but there have been a few transmedia worlds that have begun to show up with education, mostly by Disney.[31]
Transmedia storytelling is apparent in comics, films, print media, radio, and now social media. The story is told different depending on the medium. With social media, the story is told differently depending on which social media platform someone uses (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) The scale in which the impact each medium has differs from medium to medium. Before social media, radio and print media were the primary medium to connect with an audience. With the advancements in technology, social media has become the go-to medium to reach a large group of people in a fast amount of time. In the ideal form of TS, “each medium does what it does best — so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption. That is, you don't need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa.”[5]
For the purpose of studying transmedia storytelling and how information becomes spreadable across multiple media platforms, we can look at four strategies for expanding the narrative world of media texts. First is the creation of interstitial microstories. Examples of these are video games, online clips, or comics. Next is the creation of parallel stories. Here, the idea is to create another story that unfolds at the same time as the macrostory. Scolari uses the example of the episode "24: Conspiracy". Third, the creation of peripheral stories is considered spin-offs from the original stories. The example of 24 novels is used to show how texts have a weak relationship to the macrostory, but still connected to it. The final strategy is user-generated content platforms like blogs or wikis. These environments are open source story-creation machines that allow users to add to the fictional world. This could also be called fan fiction.
Each medium reaches a different audience. Traditional mediums such as radio, print media, and film, garner older audiences because of the familiarity of that generation with those specific mediums. Scolari uses the example of Shrek.[citation needed] It is a film for kids, but some of the dialogue contains jokes that are meant for adults. Thus, the same text is creating at least two groups of consumers - children and adults or parents. The millennial generation uses a combination of mediums because there awareness of traditional media and the advancements of social media. The Gen Z audience is drawn to the social media medium similar to the reason to the Gen X audience is drawn to traditional mediums, because of the familiarity of the medium.
Related Research Articles
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
Technological convergence is the tendency for technologies that were originally unrelated to become more closely integrated and even unified as they develop and advance. For example, watches, telephones, television, computers, and social media platforms began as separate and mostly unrelated technologies, but have converged in many ways into an interrelated telecommunication, media, and technology industry.
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative—narration—is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.
Diegesis is a style of fiction storytelling which presents an interior view of a world in which the narrator presents the actions of the characters to the readers or audience.
Gonzalo Frasca is a game designer and academic researcher focusing on serious and political videogames. His blog, Ludology.org, was cited by NBC News as a popular designation for academic researchers studying video games. For many years, Frasca also co-published Watercoolergames with Ian Bogost, a blog about serious games.
Interactive storytelling is a form of digital entertainment in which the storyline is not predetermined. The author creates the setting, characters, and situation which the narrative must address, but the user experiences a unique story based on their interactions with the story world. The architecture of an interactive storytelling program includes a drama manager, user model, and agent model to control, respectively, aspects of narrative production, player uniqueness, and character knowledge and behavior. Together, these systems generate characters that act "human," alter the world in real-time reactions to the player, and ensure that new narrative events unfold comprehensibly.
A story arc is the chronological construction of a plot in a novel or story. It can also mean an extended or continuing storyline in episodic storytelling media such as television, comic books, comic strips, board games, video games, and films with each episode following a dramatic arc. On a television program, for example, the story would unfold over many episodes. In television, the use of the story arc is common in sitcoms, and even more so in soap operas. In a traditional Hollywood film, the story arc usually follows a three-act structure. Webcomics are more likely to use story arcs than newspaper comics, as most webcomics have readable archives online that a newcomer to the strip can read in order to understand what is going on. Although story arcs have existed for decades, one of the first appearances of the term was in 1973 by Time Magazine for a synopsis of the movie The Friends of Eddie Coyle: "He accomplishes this with no sacrifice to the pacing of his action sequences or the suspenseful development of his story's arc."
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories, presenting the story in its entirety. It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. The term is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov. Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).
Henry Guy Jenkins III is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He also has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education. Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder and co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has also served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks. In 2013, he was appointed to the board that selects the prestigious Peabody Award winners.
A media franchise, also known as a multimedia franchise, is a collection of related media in which several derivative works have been produced from an original creative work of fiction, such as a film, a work of literature, a television program or a video game. Bob Iger, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, defined the word franchise as "something that creates value across multiple businesses and across multiple territories over a long period of time".
Multi-platform television is "a mode of storytelling that plays itself out across multiple entertainment channels". Each medium that the story unfolds across makes a distinctive contribution.
A motion comic is a form of animation combining elements of print comic books and animation. Individual panels are expanded into a full shot while sound effects, voice acting, and animation are added to the original artwork. Text boxes, speech bubbles and the onomatopoeia are typically removed to feature more of the original artwork being animated. Motion comics are often released as short serials covering a story arc of a long running series or animating a single release of a graphic novel. Single release issues of a story arc are converted into ten- to twenty-minute-long episodes depending on content.
Semiotics of music videos is the observation of symbolism used within music videos.
Multimodality is the application of multiple literacies within one medium. Multiple literacies or "modes" contribute to an audience's understanding of a composition. Everything from the placement of images to the organization of the content to the method of delivery creates meaning. This is the result of a shift from isolated text being relied on as the primary source of communication, to the image being utilized more frequently in the digital age. Multimodality describes communication practices in terms of the textual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual resources used to compose messages.
Film semiotics is the study of sign process (semiosis), or any form of activity, conduct, or any process that involves signs, including the production of meaning, as these signs pertain to moving pictures. Film semiotics is used for the interpretation of many art forms, often including abstract art.
Transmediality is a term used in intermediality studies, narratology, and new media studies (in particular in the phrase ‘transmedia storytelling’ derived from Henry Jenkins, to describe phenomena which are non-media specific, meaning not connected to a specific medium, and can therefore be realized in a large number of different media, such as literature, art, film, or music. The medium from which a given phenomenon originated is either irrelevant or impossible to determine; it is not an adaptation of a phenomenon from one medium to another.
Nuno Bernardo is a Portuguese writer, producer and director. Nuno has become recognized for his ability to create innovative stories that are told across multiple platforms. In the last decade, using his unique approach to storytelling, Nuno has created and produced more than 200 hours of entertainment, from feature films and TV shows to videogames and books.
Convergence culture is a theory which recognizes changing relationships and experiences with new media. Henry Jenkins is accepted by media academics to be the father of the term with his book Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. It explores the flow of content distributed across various intersections of media, industries and audiences, presenting a back and forth power struggle over the distribution and control of content.
Secret Story Network is an online interactive storytelling experience which operates live role-playing games. Hosted over WhatsApp, SSN was created in 2017 by film, multimedia, and transmedia artist Krishna Stott, creative developer at Bellyfeel, and known for the earlier award-winning interactive film projects Crimeface (2008) and Bolton Storyworld: Codename Winterhill (2016).
↑ Scolari, Carlos A.; Bertetti, Paolo; Freeman, Matthew (2014), "Conclusions: Transmedia Storytelling and Popular Cultures in the Twentieth Century", Transmedia Archaeology, Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp.72–77, doi:10.1057/9781137434371_5, ISBN9781349492961
↑ Steinberg, Marc, Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan.p. vi
↑ Tvorun-Dunn, Maxim (2022). "'I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together' Transmedia convergence of the Beatles' psychedelic years (1966–1969)". Popular Music History. 14 (3). doi:10.1558/pomh.19863. S2CID257647587.
↑ Palmer, Landon (2020). "All Together Now: The Beatles, United Artists, and Transmedia Production". Rock Star/Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.58–95. ISBN9780190888411.
1 2 3 Jenkins, H. "Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: An Annotated Syllabus", Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24:6, 943-958 2010.
↑ Wilson, M. E. (2004). Teaching, learning, and millennial students. New directions for student services (106). Summer 2004. doi:10.1002/ss.125
↑ Warren, S., Wakefield, J.S., and Mills, L. "Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions: Transmedia Storytelling", in Laura A. Wankel, Patrick Blessinger (ed.) Increasing Student Engagement and Retention using Multimedia Technologies: Video Annotation, Multimedia Applications, Videoconferencing and Transmedia Storytelling (Cutting-edge Technologies in Higher Education, Volume 6), 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.67-94 doi:10.1108/S2044-9968(2013)000006F006
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