Here's the Lance Weiler presentation from last week's Power to the Pixel conference in London in which Lance shares his view about where storytelling is going.
What's very interesting to me is that I've been looking at the same issues and coming up with similar conclusions. Where I believe we share a common outlook are:
Why do we need to go transmedia? Well, because the same story can reach out to many different audience segments (via the different media) and for any given segment it potentially increases the number of touch-points (meaning that the more someone sees or hears about your "movie" the more likely they are to take an interest in it).
Why does transmedia result in services rather than products? Well, because building relationships and creating experiences means an ongoing commitment to the audience and not just a final product that's put on a shelf to be sold. This is already evident with RPGs where people have invested hours of time playing and building their own internal world. And I can say from my own experience that if someone doesn't develop a Commonwealth expansion pack for Fallout 3 so I can see what's happened to Dr Li then I'm going to be very upset!
In designing the open-source Parasites transmedia project, I've taken the audience' social needs as the starting point for developing the project, as the diagram below shows.
Show me the money
Lance presents the idea of leveraging the data that surrounds your "movie" and using the information you collect about the audience to make money. There's definitely an opportunity here and it's an approach already being taken by many companies (see Free by Chris Anderson for the examples).
The problem with building a business plan on data comes if you need to sell it to a third party; because then you need the permission of your audience to capture and sell it. And of course you need someone willing to buy the data that isn't directly enjoying the experience you created. Both invite conflicts.
You could, however, effectively sell the data back to the audience in the guise of an improved experience but then the data is an enabler rather than the service that's bought.
My opinion, as built into the Parasites business model, is that there is evidence that people will pay for the following:
These are the four pillars of future business models and it need not rely on massive audiences. But it does rely on a greater understanding not only of audiences but of people.
If you're in any doubt about these ideas, ask yourself why people pay premium-prices for a cellphone ringtone that lasts a few seconds but won't buy a three minute song?
While writing an upcoming article for Indie Slate magazine on Transmedia I came up with this infographic that illustrates the difference between the typical..well..let's say "Hollywood franchise" that leaves us all disappointed when we consume all the media and a transmedia project in which each media should be satisfying in its own right but consuming all the media delivers that "wow!" factor.
I've had a stab at creating maps of the UK and London following 500 years of global warming. If anyone knows of better reference sources or wants to make better maps, please contact me!
Here's the two primary sources I used: A Channel 4 map of UK in 2080 and this amazing flood map tool! I raised the water level by 14 meters :)
Note that initially the gameplay will focus on urban London but expand as the online population grows. The London map needs quite a lot more work actually - need to go down to borough level and then down to buildings & rooms.
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.
In creating the Parasites transmedia story, it's important for the online game to dovetail with the movie & live events (screenings) in an elegant way. That means not overly complicated, not contrived and not an irrelevant add-on. The movie, events and online game need to offer parts of the whole and yet be satisfying in themselves.
The best approach I'm finding to achieve this seems to be to take an idea through successive iterations of each media. The good ideas snowball - reinforcing their merit with each pass - while single-media ideas melt away.
Note that each media has its own demands. For example, for the movie to work, the audience should allow the director to guide them through the story and in doing so have the drama unfold. Whilst for the game it's the player that finds his/her own drama. Both complete parts of a larger story but the method of engagement is different.
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