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!