I think there’s definitely some risk in creating a story that’s spread across a combination of different platforms and mediums. It seems like the main danger is creating a story that is diluted and over-complicated by an ineffective segmentation of its narrative. Through the production of ‘The Barlow Enquiry’ I’ve begun to understand how one may go about creating a transmedia product without having to sacrifice the overall holistic quality of the product’s STORY.
I think one of the most important steps to take before ‘transmedia-fying’ a project is to evaluate what your story IS and HOW you can best spread its contents across multiple media platforms. Perhaps your story is particularly suited to a combination of comic-books and feature films, or perhaps you think your story would be best told through a range of text-based journal entries and historical artefacts…
In WEEK 7 I was finding it difficult to anticipate what ‘The Barlow Enquiry’ would look like as a completed piece of work. Because I’d never worked on a transmedia project like this before I couldn’t easily tell whether our story was going to come together or if our planned system of “evidence retrieval” would work effectively within the narrative context of the piece.
‘The Barlow Enquiry’ certainly evolved A LOT as we developed it – looking back on our initial ideas it’s crazy to see how far it’s come. In order to make sure that the final product would work well as a transmedia piece it was definitely important to continuously reevaluate and adjust the many moving parts that we wanted to implement.
For me the primary challenge came from an initial inability to visualise how the final product would come together when we reached WEEK 13. This actually focused my efforts on the development of a range of planning/pre-visualisation documents. I think taking on this ‘producer-esque’ role really helped me (and hopefully the rest of the team) gain a clearer understanding of what we were trying to accomplish.
As noted in my ongoing Story Lab reflections, I believed that the organisation and pre-production of ‘The Barlow Enquiry’ was going to be a key aspect of the project’s success:
In retrospect I think we should have spent more time in the first few weeks completely ironing out the project’s details and the nuances of our chosen interactive-storytelling format. While we were able to catch up and figure all of this out along the way, I think we could have significantly streamlined our production process through a heavier focus on the project’s structure in the earlier weeks.
Ultimately I think we were successful in realising our concept. I’m particularly pleased with how the story told through Atticus’ blog posts and the stories told within the evidence have blended together to form one multifaceted/transmedia narrative experience. Through the production of ‘The Barlow Enquiry’ and an ongoing experimentation with different storytelling techniques I’ve now developed a far greater understanding of what it actually takes to create transmedia products and interactive narratives. I’ve also realised just how drastically today’s multimedia environment has changed the way we CAN tell stories. Storytelling most definitely isn’t what it used to be.