Defining Transmedia Storytelling

Transmedia stories, at the most basic level, are stories told across multiple media. So ‘Transmedia storytelling’ is a term used to describe the attempt to create a number of entry points across different media platforms through which the audience can enter, not just a story, but an entire franchised world. The Project New Media Literacy website seems to define Transmedia storytelling as an exploitation of the way “consumers become hunters and gatherers pulling together information from multiple sources to form a new synthesis” on the part of the storytellers, in an effort to build brands:


 * “Storytellers begin to exploit this potential for transmedia storytelling; advertisers began to talk about branding as depending upon multiple touch points; networks seek to exploit their intellectual properties across many different channels.” (Project New Media Literacy)

Henry Jenkins also recognises that Transmedia storytelling “reflects the economics of media consolidation or what industry observers call ‘synergy’”(Jenkins, 2007), and we must admit that the economic incentive for the media conglomerate to expand its franchise as widely as possible is an incredibly obvious one. Tom Apperley in his article Citizenship and Consumption: Convergence Culture, Transmedia Narratives and the Digital Divide, refers to Marsha Kinder’s book, Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Videogames, where she links transmedia storytelling with consumerism “at the meta-leval”:


 * “She recognizes video games as heralding a new media aesthetic which she dubs ‘transmedia intertextuality’ as an imbricated form of commodification, the ‘supersystem’. In this configuration, the consumption of one text leads directly to another through deliberate intertextual linkages forming a contained media supersystem that crosses many media platforms” (Apperley, 2007)

while this media supersystem might be linked to consumerism and driven by economic incentives, Marsha Kinder’s mention of ‘intertextual linkages’, and the ‘hunters and gathers’ as described in Project New Media Literacy, situates transmedia storytelling in a larger field of convergence culture. As Lance Weller, a filmmaker and a self distribution pioneer, reflects on his blog:


 * “I find the concept of telling stories across multiple mediums and devices not only exciting but a necessity. In many ways it mirrors how media consumption is changing and gives a degree of power to the audience to choose how and where they enter a story”.

The way we consume media in the context of convergence culture is integral to the understanding of transmedia storytelling, and as Christy Dena suggests, we need to address specifically how the user, the material and the narrative aspects of the work interact (Dena, 2004). Apperley sees transmedia as encouraging “the audience to experience a sense that each product is part of a wider mediated universe that is largely constructed in the minds of the audience through the process of assemblage of the diparate media” (Apperley, 2004). This process of assemblage of the disparate media was given a name by the game designer Neil Young, who called it ‘additive comprehension’, a term which is used to refer to the ways that each new text adds a new piece of information which forces us to revise our understanding of the fiction as a whole. Jenkins believes that in a transmedia story each medium should ideally make its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story and that “each individual episode must be accessible on its own terms even as it makes a unique contribution to the narrative system as a whole”, and as Dena further explains “most cross media works, like The Matrix franchise, have channels that are self- sufficient to a large degree (the film, comics, game) but also reference each other and indeed are needed to understand the work” (Dena, 2004).

The concept of a fictional universe is also an important part of Jenkins’ definition of transmedia stories, which he describes as being “based not on individual characters or specific plots, but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories”. Daniel Mackay has identified these spaces as ‘imaginary entertainment environments’ describing them as “fictional settings that change over time as if they were real places and that are published in a variety of mediums … each of them in communication with the others as they contribute towards the growth, history and status of the setting” (Mackay, 2001). Geoffrey Long also believes that “special attention must be paid to developing a stage upon which multiple storylines (often in different media types) can unfurl, and every story must maintain the consistency of that world” (Long, 2000).

Many scholars identify the need to distinguish between different types of transmedia storytelling based on how they were first designed (Long, 2000: 19). This differentiation is essentially the difference between adaptation and transmediation, where, quite basically, “retelling a story in a different media type is an adaptation, while using multiple media types to craft a single story is transmediation” (Long, 2000: 22). Similarly this distinction is defined by Mark Ruppel in Learning to Speak Braille as the difference between transmedia branding and transmedia storytelling, where, to him, the point of difference lies in whether it is a distinct and valuable contribution to the story (Ruppel, 2005). Jonathan M. Shiff, Australian producer of children’s television drama, while not specifically speaking about transmedia storytelling, recognizes that extensions on a story “needs to organically be part of the original concept” (Shiff, 2008).

LINKS

 * (see Audio of Interview with Jonathan M. Shiff)
 * (back Investigation and Research (Section 2))
 * (back Transmedia Storytelling)