McKee’s hierarchy of story structure provides a set of breakpoints at which a story can be moved from one media platform to another or one medium to another. While McKee developed his hierarchy of story, act, sequence, scene, and beat (McKee, 1997, pp. 34-42) to describe the story structure ofContinue Reading
The fourth level of design tasks is at the scene/sequence level. This is the level at which the design decisions made earlier in the transmedia narrative design process are used in the development of narrative content. Story concepts and narrative structure are translated into individual scenes and sequences and theContinue Reading
Computer graphics (CG) and 3D modelling are providing new options for the creation of still images for transmedia stories. In the past, you either took photos or created images by hand using pencils, inks, or paint. The emergence of increasingly sophisticated 3D modelling software over the past two decades hasContinue Reading
A storyteller alone in front of audience has a human voice, some gestures and facial expressions, and perhaps a few simple props to tell the story with. The creators of a multimillion dollar Hollywood epic film, on the other hand, have the full range of modern technology to tell theContinue Reading
Designing a transmedia narrative to be location-agnostic also provides the author and audience with more flexibility than designing it to be location-dependent. Location-dependency can take at least three forms: Requiring the user to participate in a narrative or some of its elements at a specific location (e.g. having a gatheringContinue Reading
Designing a transmedia narrative to be time-agnostic provides both the author and the audience more flexibility than making it time-dependent. Time-dependency can take at least three forms: Requiring the user to participate in a narrative or some of its elements at a specific time (e.g. scheduling an online or realContinue Reading
The interactions and in-game events in well-designed ARG mimic real life and don’t announce themselves as elements in a game (Szulborski, 2005, p. 13). The virtual world is not modeled through a symbolic interface. Rather, the interactions in an alternate reality game can take many forms and are generally designedContinue Reading
Designers will need to deal with a broad range of issues when addressing the deceptively simple question of whether the transmedia narrative focuses on individual versus shared participation. At one time, individual participation with a medium meant taking one’s book and retiring to a favorite spot, while shared participation involvedContinue Reading
Where the character archetypes provide a framework that begins to describe who the characters are and what that drives them, the character roles describe the relationships between the characters. Character roles fall into three categories (Card, 1988, p. 59): Walk-on and placeholder characters: The walk-on and placeholder characters exist in theContinue Reading
A plot is a cause-and-effect chain of relationships that unify the actions, behaviors, and events in a story. McKee describes plot as the “writer’s choice of events and their design in time” (McKee, 1997, p. 43). He adds that plot provides an “internally consistent, interrelated pattern of events that move throughContinue Reading