Jenkins – Searching for the Origami Unicorn

• “To truly appreciate what we are watching, we have to do our homework” – a really fascinating point, not just relevant to the Matrix Tied in w technology of era
• Media convergence – narrative no longer needs to be contained – and can’t be, once it gets so sprawling – to one medium
• Era of collective intelligence – each participant (author, reader, spectator, producer etc) informing and building upon each other, creating a circuit
• Each element must be self-contained, enjoyable without having seen any of the rest, and all must serve as potential entry-points into the narrative world
• Sheer amount of work that goes into successful transmedia stories means that they need contribution and collaboration from the “audience” – an outdated term for a passive group that transmedia audiences certainly aren’t
• A transmedia “base” (eg a film) needs to have enough resources to sustain the other platforms
  • I don’t know if transmedia will always need a base but at the moment, I think it absolutely does. It’s shifting, but to current, mainstream audiences the Matrix is a film first
• Don’t underestimate the power of the pause button
• The fine line between “smart storytelling” and “smart marketing”—transmedia is not licencing Darth Vader to Covergirl to sell branded lipsticks. Similarly, a video game can be a clumsy reinterpretation of the original media rather than adding to the world of the narrative
  • Cross-promotion (static) heading towards co-creation (fluid) instead
• Transmedia can’t be an afterthought – must be created from the ground up together, or carefully and relevantly included afterwards
• Fan communities as an extension of transmedia? What about fanfiction, headcanon, various theories people come up with?
• Co-creation – acknowledging and embracing different styles rather than going for a uniform look or plot structure
• “Storytelling has become the art of world building”
• Reliance on understanding from audience – assumes you have some background or common knowledge so you can piece together an inherent understanding. Leads to confusion when an audience member’s scope of knowledge is outside of the “pre-requisite”
• You can’t force the audience to participate in transmedia – how do you make them curious enough to explore the larger world of the narrative without feeling unfulfilled if they choose not to?
• Why the internet and fan communities are so important – you don’t have to understand it all, you just have to understand enough and know where to go and who to ask if you don’t understand

Giovagnoli – Plan Transmedia

• The audience member should get enough from transmedia to entertain themselves, and then a different experience from sharing with their community
• Essential guidelines for creating transmedia
  • Frequent clarification of small plot points in different media
  • Clear explanation of the relationships among different media
  • Presence of repeated bridges between media
  • Adoption of editorial strategies suitable for audience engagement
• Alternate reality games – an interactive game that uses the real world as its platform
• What is the ‘shape’ of the communicative system across media? Need a map to create a cohesive and well-linked world
• Flat and curved systems (the shape of the world’s universe). Flat is more straightforward, moving on a single infinite plane, whereas the curved universe sees the artefacts warp in organic or even unexpected ways
  • A spherical system moves its media together, shuffling them and growing them together
  • A saddle system disperses them, fragmenting the artefacts but allowing them to spread further
• Crucial narrative dimension of a transmedia project is the way the audience interacts with it and its call to action – and this must be controlled to an extent, or the transmedia journey won’t make sense and the audience will lose interest
  • Creation of a cross-media intervention principle: motivation to act (primer) > sense of action (referral) > reward for action done by audience (reward)
  • Primer: activated by suspense, curiosity (eg cliffhanger)
  • Referral: how to satisfy that curiosity (eg website link)
  • Reward: curiosity satisfied or encouraged, starting the cycle again (eg learning the ending)
• I don’t mind admitting that I struggle with physics and that the rest of this reading, no matter how hard I tried, skated over my head. Specifically, the relevance of it

Eco – Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertexual Collage 

• Recipe for a cult object
  • Love for object from the audience
  • A “completely furnished world”, where additions can be recognised as part of this same universe
• A successful cult object can be broken apart and still be recognisable (eg quotable lines, iconic sets)
• Again, the idea appears of a coded structure for representing archetypes – a huge reliance on a contemporary body of knowledge that’ll be redundant in a century
  • Important to find a point where these archetypes are still fascinating
• Element of déjà vu – not an unpleasant reminder of films that have come before and after
  • “Two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion”
• Postmodern films seek to emulate the organic, ethereal banality of Casablanca. Is it possible to succeed?
• Cult films have so many layers of this prescribed knowledge (or in-jokes, essentially) that the cultish element forms around people who are clued in enough to catch on. But this is more easily facilitated in the world of the internet, where you don’t have to get it by yourself – you just have to be part of a community where everybody gets it a little bit