Understanding the audience is an essential part of storytelling. Telling a great story to the wrong audience can make the story fall flat. The author of a transmedia project needs to identify who the audience for that project is and what its characteristics are. With this information in hand, theContinue Reading
In the next few posts, we’ll look at the top level set of design tasks involved in a transmedia project. A number of key decisions need to be made very early in the design process for a transmedia project. These decisions will shape the direction in which the project willContinue Reading
Rather than trying to include a bibliography of citations in the individual posts on this blog, I’ve decided to list the entire bibliography here. In addition to referencing individual aspects of the blog posts, this bibliography can provide a useful guide to literature relevant to transmedia narratives. Aarseth, E. (2004).Continue Reading
The structure of a story has a significant impact on how users extract meaning from it. By controlling the order in which information is presented to the reader, by providing or withholding pieces of information, the author is able to affect the extent of the reader’s involvement and how theContinue Reading
One of the biggest challenges in writing for transmedia narratives is figuring out how to handle the contradiction between the inherently linear nature of narratives and non-linear nature of transmedia. Understanding temporal ordering as it relates to narrative design is an important aspect of the overall transmedia narrative design process.Continue Reading
The nature of transmedia narratives brings with it a host of information design challenges. The individual elements of a transmedia narrative – text, images, audio, video, and other forms of media – present their individual opportunities and challenges. “Each medium has its own affordances, its own systems of representation, itsContinue Reading
Creating a transmedia narrative can be a complex, time consuming, and frustrating task. So why bother? Aren’t books or film or stage productions or any of the other older forms of telling stories just as good? The full possibilities of transmedia narratives have yet to be realized, but the transmediaContinue Reading
The term “fictional world” is sometimes used to describe the “universe” within which a transmedia narrative is set (Dena, 2009, p. 21). The term “storyworld” has also been used to describe that “universe”. Dena specifically rejects the use of the term “storyworld” because some transmedia products incorporate game elements that areContinue Reading
I’ve been a writer in one form or another for all of my working career, starting out as an “ink-stained wretch” in the daily newspaper business. I’ve written lengthy feature articles for magazines, scripts for interactive video projects when the video was still played on 12-inch analog laser discs, andContinue Reading
The term “fiction” has been used in a number of definitions of transmedia narratives (Dena, Transmedia Practice: Theorizing the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World Across Distinct Media and Environments, 2009; Fahle, 2011; Kinke, 2011). Transmedia narratives, however, are not restricted to fiction; non-fictional narratives can also use transmedia techniques (Miller,Continue Reading