The Process

So I wanted to share with you a little more about what exactly transmedia storytelling is and what goes into the process of telling a story this way, at least from my own experience. I am by no means an expert, but it might be interesting to at least see a student’s attempts at translating their work into this new medium. And hopefully, we can learn from my successes and my many, many “happy accidents” as Bob Ross would say.

When I worked on my story for my writing class, the only transmedia that I really wanted was the incorporation of video into the web comic format. I now know that this is not exactly what transmedia is, thanks to Velikovsky’s article that I shared with you earlier, so I suppose this was merely a new media story. Overall, I wanted to tell a narrative story with a website, and then secretly attach a web comic to it somehow that incorporated video.

What I did first was outline the posts for the narrative website I wanted, and then plotted out where the secret web comics would be attached within those posts. That way I could go through each time I made a post, and check off what was accomplished.  This greatly helped me with not just this project, but the project my partner and I worked on that I will discuss later.

Some problems I encountered with this project were mainly technical and due to my lack of knowledge. For instance, I am not a skilled web designer. I don’t actually know anything about web design in the slightest. But thankfully, I have friends who were much more knowledgeable about it than I was, and very willing to help me, despite still being students themselves. My best friend, and my partner (who both have studied web design and work in it) were both eager to teach me the basic html I would need to set up the secret web comic and incorporate video into the comic itself.

I used tumblr because I was familiar with it, and it is an easy blog site to manipulate with basic html skills (and I am just very much a tumblr person. Sorry blogger). It also offers a great queuing and scheduling tool that helped me space out posts that I needed to have happen at different times to create the illusion that someone else was writing and posting. I’m not sure how well I accomplished this, as it was for a class and had a due date, but I was satisfied with it, in the end.

I found the greatest difficulty that I had didn’t end up coming from the web portions of the project, but with video hosting, and my incredibly limited knowledge of anything beyond youtube. My initial desire with the project was to use gifs solely for the animation within the comic, but some of the animations I did were too long, and with time constraints, I didn’t take the time to separate the works in separate gifs. It was technically homework, and it was technically a final, and you know how us students can be with finals… But, if I were to go back and fix it that would be one of the first things I would do in order to get rid of the Youtube Logo on what was supposed to be surreal and magical.

The final product was a little cheesy in the end, but I thought the sentiment I wanted to portray in the story was very present, and that the web comic secretly strewn about worked well to advance the storyline along. I was proud of it, and I learned a lot from it.

But that was just a project with myself. I definitely had help from amazing friends and educators, but it lacked the collaboration that intrigues me so in transmedia narratives. It also lacked the interactivity aspect that I think is central to a transmedia narrative. My partner and I worked on a project more along those lines, and it was SO MUCH MORE work than we anticipated.

Our video blog version of the Little Mermaid was more work firstly because it required actors and filming. Which is already incredibly difficult. Cartoons are nice and fun because you control them. Actors, you cannot control (which can be a great thing and ended up so with our main actress who added a lot to our Little Mermaid character). This became frustrating in that we could not find enough actors to be in our video blog and had to fill in roles for ourselves. It ended up okay, but it would have been nice to have more people to work with, which definitely is a problem that can come up a lot: sometimes you just don’t have enough people to work with.

My partner was the director, co-writer, and did almost all the lighting and sound himself, while I was the production coordinator, co-writer, and whatever small tasks needed to be done doer. This worked out really well, actually, as he could focus on the artistic side of things, while I organized places to shoot, meals, schedules, and other needs and necessities. Together, like I did with my class story, we plotted out the story in advance, when situations would happen, how she would post these situations and where (which platform of social media), and what snarky comments she would leave in her video descriptions.

Now that filming is done for us (apart from editing), that part that we have had planned out is the next step, which is why I am excited to share this with you and have this blog. This is the transmedia aspect that I would very much like to learn more about, so that I can perfect the story telling that will go on in the social media worlds of our Little Mermaid. My partner is working on editing, and I am working on setting up the Little Mermaid’s tumblr, facebook (in world and out of world, which is a concept that I’m still getting my head around too), and youtube page, which once set up will be run by both my partner and I. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I think it’s going to be worth it in the end.

I’m really excited to explore this new method of storytelling, and I’m really excited to share it with you all too. I hope this was informative. Thank you for stopping by and I hope to hear from you soon!

Further Reading

For a more in depth look at the history of transmedia and a great explanation of what it really means, I would definitely suggest “Brave New Story World: An Introduction to Developing Transmedia Narratives” by Joe Velikovsky. 

This article strives to educate a wide audience on the definition of transmedia by exploring its history. By going through the history of transmedia, Velikovsky also shows through popular stories what is and what is not transmedia. Some examples he chooses are Star Wars, Twin Peaks, Lost, and BBC’s Sherlock. He focuses mostly on Star Wars throughout, showing how the first novel written in the Star Wars universe does not count as transmedia due to the fact that its canonicity was later revoked with the arrival of Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back. However, later novels do count as a form of transmedia due to being specific continuations and explorations of other characters that are not the focus of the Star Wars franchise.

This method is very effective for those who are unfamiliar with the term transmedia, but are familiar with popular fiction such as Star Wars. The examples he chooses to write about are all large enough franchises that almost everyone has certainly heard of them, and thus can have an understanding of their stories. Later, when he discusses Sherlock, he goes more into the modern methods of transmedia, with the accompanying blog that John Watson runs within the confines of the show, and viewers can follow along with gaining an extra look into Watson’s character. This is definitely a beginner’s look into transmedia, though useful for those more versed in transmedia to see a bit of the history of the medium.

I would definitely recommend it for all of you who are interested in learning more about transmedia. It’s a very quick, enjoyable read, and I for one thought it was very helpful to learn what precisely does not count as transmedia.

Velikovsky, Joe. "Brave New Story Worlds: An Introduction to Developing Transmedia Narratives." Screen Education.68 (2013): 82-9. ProQuest. Web. 23 Jan. 2014.

Hello and Welcome to [Story Computing!]

Hiya, folks! 

My name is Sarah, and for a brief introduction, I am a college student, studying Narrative Studies (basically English and Creative Writing combined) and Animation, and working hard to consume as much as I possibly can about narrative, media, and storytelling from both my education and the Internet. I, myself, have explored working with new media in order to tell stories for classes and for personal projects. One of my projects I wrote for a class, is a multimedia web comic fashioned as an artist’s portfolio, and you can find here if you’re interested.  (Don’t forget to click the “hidden” links ;)). Another one that is the works still, is a project I worked on with my partner: a video blog retelling/sequel of the Little Mermaid story called “In the Tub with Marina”. Hopefully, very soon, you will be able to see the finished product!

I share this with you because the purpose of this blog is not only to assess, critique, and share the new media that have been popping up all over the Internet nowadays, but also that hopefully through this project, you, my readers, and I, can learn about how to perfect this new media with our own projects. The wonderful thing about the Internet is that we are creators and contributors. Together, I hope to cultivate an environment where we can discover how to be better creators and contributors and make the Internet the creative and safe space that it truly should be.

To do this? We’re going to look at transmedia, (which means utilizing other mediums such as facebook, twitter, video games, etc. to continue or expand upon an initial source for the story such as a television show or a novel, for the uninitiated), Internet folklore, video games, web comics, fan fiction, and everything in between. At the same time, we’ll be looking at traditional mediums, such as novels, comic books, film, and animation, and explore how these things are being brought into this new age (both in ways that succeed and fail). We’ll also explore the benefit of this media, and how it can be a force for change in the world. Narrative is not always for educational purposes or entertainment purposes—at times (and almost always) it contains a political, societal, or even psychological message indicating the spirit of the author, and the author’s time. It is my personal belief that almost all of our new media sends a message of our current generation’s beliefs, and how the world will change with their guidance. This will be interesting to note not only in the new media, but also in how the traditional mediums fail to come into this new age. But this is just one potential thesis—there will be many to explore, I can promise you that.

Some questions to briefly cover:

·      Why You?

o   The cliché goes that I’ve been interested in writing stories since I was little, and honestly, it’s a true one. I have been obsessed with all forms of storytelling from a young age. I have also been an avid illustrator for those stories. Once, an adult told me that I needed to pick one thing, and focus on that for my stories, and I was devastated. With the arrival of web comics, transmedia, YouTube, and so many wonderful things that independent creators are making, I realized that confining oneself to a certain medium was a thing of the past. Sure, maybe your day job is doing one thing, but with all these possibilities at our fingertips, our personal projects never have to be confined. I find that liberating. Since starting school, I have been dead set in learning how these different mediums affected readers, listeners, and viewers, so that I could discover the best way to tell multimedia stories. Thankfully, I have been given many opportunities in my educational career to analyze and study this topic.

·      Why This? Why Now?

o   Continuing from above, I think this is also the direction that storytelling is going in. I definitely do believe that we will always have novels, films, television, radio, etc., but I also believe that those things will change to better incorporate this new understanding of narrative. I think the future of these traditional mediums lies in multimedia and new media, and I think smart creators see that too. I would like to explore more how this will happen, and how it is happening, because from that I believe we can learn how to be better creators and consumers ourselves. We are in a transitional period in our history of narrative, and I would like to analyze that history and our future.

Luckily, I’m not the only one interested in this topic. For further reading, you should definitely check out these bloggers:

·      http://transmediame.wordpress.com/ This is the web blog of assistant professor of English at Rockford University, Kyle Stedman, who specializes in studying transmedia storytelling and how people are interconnected through the Internet.

·      Another professor, here at USC, Henry Jenkins can be found here, http://henryjenkins.org/, who specializes in studying fandom culture and is a prominent member of the Project New Media Literacies group, looking into transmedia and multimedia projects.

·      http://designingstory.wordpress.com/ Another student studying very similar things to what this blog will be talking about, and with real world experience and research done.

·      http://theonlinenovel.wordpress.com/ This blog is run by two writers looking to not only analyze online novels, webfiction, and other online content, but they write it themselves, as well as accept submissions of work, both analytical and fictional.

·      http://jaybushman.tumblr.com/ Jay Bushman worked with Hank Green of vlogbrothers fame on their first venture into fictional video blog accounts, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a partially interactive, transmedia story. This is his Tumblr blog in which he posts things he is interested in, working on, transmedia work opportunities, and his thoughts on transmedia.

And come back and check out some of the things we’ll be talking about here! Coming up will be an exploration of multimedia novels like Cathy’s Book and House of Leaves, Web Comics, Video Games and Alternate Reality Games, Failed and Successful Attempts at Entering the New Media Age, and more! :) Thank you so much for stopping by! I look forward to hearing your thoughts!