One of the best articles ever on what we at Starlight Runner accomplish as transmedia producers….
EXCERPT:
This is not about plonking a character on a shirt, or a doll in a toyshop. To the proselytes like Gomez, the task is to tell important stories related to the original material across the range of material. It is called transmedia storytelling.
On the phone, Jeff cited the webisodes for Battlestar Galactica as an elegant example. “Things were revealed about ancillary characters, or terrestrial creatures or certain concepts that could be viewed independently but gave you new insight into the characters and concepts of the show.” he said. “They made you want to go back to the show, and re-examine their characters and motivations – that’s a great transmedia mutation because it caused you to look at the ancillary and rethink whats going on in the main content.”
This makes sense as a marketing tool. The ancillaries reach far beyond the film, and can be made to point back to it. “Look at District Nine”, he said, “and its marketing. Almost everything in that marketing was canonical. That makes it fascinating, and helped to build the level of interest in the film. You are paying for that if you are a studio. However, you might also accrue a number of licensees for the tee shirts and magazine and comic books and toys, based on your IP. Why not go further and give them bits of canonical content so you are simultaneously licensing the content, and nurturing the storyworld? That is a major rethink for many of our clients to get that.”
To do this, the story elements have to be distributed across the media, and therefore ruthlessly consistent. Indeed, the central property has to be able to bear the strain of all this extra material. This is far more elaborate than ensuring all the properties enhance the brand – it cuts to the heart of the script and the world it creates and inhabits.
This is the bit that creates a model of development which explains just why and how the big tentpole franchises are filling our multiplexes – a process which can be subverted for our more modest purposes.
