Talking about transmedia: 4 courses
We have been advocating storytelling here in a more complex way. Bring your narrative as an immersive experience to your audience: tell it across different platforms. Meet your audience in every channel it is active, and adapt your story to the specific channels you use.
There are many words to decribe these forms of storytelling, we experienced cross media storytelling is used often, as is liquid storytelling (see post) or transmedia storytelling.
We could round up some articles for you about this important topic or reproduce some wise definitions from smart people for you. But there is so many material on the web talking about it - we couldn't surpass that. So we choose to present some talks for you that we found interesting, from different parts of the world. Transmedia storytelling is recognized as a most important technique these days in nearly every market or culture. Everywhere people involved in experimenting or producing stories share their insights and give examples. Here are four:
1. Cross media vs Transmedia. I hope your French is good. Mine isn't, but this video from a Sorbonne faculty is so enlightning it is understandable even to those who easily mix up French with Russian. It claims that there is a very simple distinction between cross media and transmedia storytelling: the first is parallel storytelling of a whole story on different platforms; in the second the story is fragmented and divided up on different platforms. Nice short animated education.
2. Henry Jenkins is a former MIT professor, specialized in modern communications, journalism ans social media and known for his knowledge of transmedia storytelling. In this TEDx talk from 2010 he merely describes the history of transmedia storytelling and how different user groups are using it. Browse the TEDx library on storytelling and transmedia, because it's loaded.
3. Foot, Cone & Belding and the modern Cinderella story.
In the Madrid office of this famous muli-continent ad agency they produced this video on how they think about transmedia storytelling. Spain, or the latin culture, is active anyhow in the storytelling theatre worldwide; but since English is the ruling language here we sticked to this version.
4. Gary Vaynerchuk is a metaphorical American Dream guy, Russian immigrant and self made businessman, now an internet and social media guru. In this talk he speaks about how fast forms of media come up and go down. And he stresses the need to develop pure and honest storytelling, use many media and above all: do different things on different platforms.