Transmedia narratives offer storytellers a range of possibilities that are not available to those who create their stories with just one medium in mind. It is the possibility of creating a multidimensional storyworld in which the physical and metaphysical worlds blend seamlessly that has Mark Staufer excited about transmedia storytelling.Continue Reading
Early in the process of developing a transmedia project, it is important to identify the audience and some of its key characteristics. There question can serve as a starting point for audience identification. What are the demographic characteristics of the transmedia narrative’s audience (age, gender, urban/rural/suburban, income level, price sensitivity,Continue Reading
Who the call-to-action addresses and how it addresses them is another factor the transmedia designer should consider. Four types audience address factors have been identified (Dena, 2007): Many-through-one: A single call-to-action addresses all of the users of the transmedia narrative. Many-through-many: Many calls-to-action address many different users. Some-through-some: Some calls-to-actionContinue Reading
Storyboards are used to organize a story and list its key elements. A transmedia narrative can contain a combination of video, text, still photos, audio, graphics and interactivity presented in a nonlinear format. The first step in storyboarding a transmedia narrative is to divide the story into logical, nonlinear parts.Continue Reading
Looking at a character’s development can become one or more stories in the storyworld. One could ask the question of how the antagonist/villain in one story came to be a villain. A story set in an earlier storyworld time could describe the journey of the villain, with that character inContinue Reading
The major characters drive the plot through its twists and turns and move the story forward. The major characters fill a variety roles (Phillips & Huntley, 1996, pp. 36-38): Protagonist: The protagonist is the main character role in a story and drives the action. The protagonist will have a goalContinue Reading
Timeframe of Story A story has a temporal dimension that is created by changes that put the story into the “flux of history” (Ryan, Storyworlds Across Media, 2011). A story’s temporal dimension (story time) exists within storyworld time. See the three-part post on storyworlds – Part 1, Part 2, and PartContinue Reading
As transmedia storytelling becomes more common it is being rolled out across a variety of industries and in many different applications. Entertainment The transmedia approach emerged over the past decade in the entertainment industry. The Matrix franchise was one of the early transmedia narrative successes. The use of transmedia narrativesContinue Reading
A series of technological, economic, and consumer trends are driving the development of transmedia projects as a new form of marketing, entertaining, and educating. Understanding what these drivers of change are and how they impact the emerging transmedia field is key to figuring out how to navigate a turbulent future.Continue Reading
I am in the process of transitioning from Blogspot to WordPress for my Transmedia Digest blog. A duplicate of the content on this blog also appears on my blog at transmediadigest.blogspot.com and I will be running both blogs in parallel for a few weeks as I make the transition. IContinue Reading