Thank you to everyone that's been supporting the Parasites transmedia project and thanks for all the offers of help!
We will have more details to follow shortly but I wanted to reassure everyone that progress is being made. A lot of work is being done off-line or behind the scenes to provide the foundations that we can all build upon.
The diagram below highlights the complexity but most importantly our approach.
What we're in the process of creating is a Project Reference Guide. Those in the TV industry might think of this as the "bible" - the document that informs everyone where the story is heading across the season(s). "Bible" is a bit too religious for my liking so we're calling it by what it is - a reference source :)
To create the bible..*cough*.. reference guide, we have to first start with our premise and then work our way through describing and developing the world (a dystopian Britain 500 years from now ravaged by global warming and political corruption), the characters (various leaders, visionaries and crooks that inhabit this new world) and the plot (what drives these people and how do they conflict with each other? who is our hero?).
It would be easy to think that we could just develop a story and then implement it across multiple media and multiple platforms. But the media and platforms lend themselves to different interactions, form factors and uses. And we want to tie everything together as described in my earlier post.
The diagram below shows the relative amounts of brainpower we're spending on the different elements. The game, you see, potentially provides the most immersive experience and hence requires the most consideration and planning. The movie on the other hand only allows the audience to view through one window on to the world. It's also fair to say that a lot of what would be done for script development like character backstories etc. that would be evident in the movie if not explictly shown is being done under the "game" heading even though we know it'll be used for both.
If this were a democracy, I'd cast a vote for "score" because bible, encyclopedia and atlas don't really embody the metaphor of singularly collaborative work in concert spread across clefs, keys, dissimilar instumentation and a variety of meters.
http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2009/10/world_building_as_design_explo.php
Posted by: Scott Ellington | October 28, 2009 at 05:40 PM