Andrea Phillip’s short excerpt, “What is Transmedia Anyway?”, clearly explains the term in a way that someone could be confident that they understood the term after only reading the brief introduction, even having been unfamiliar with it beforehand. This was me.

The passage is exciting as it introduces the reader to an interesting and relatively new story telling method into an arena of well-used (although still very wonderful) mediums. This opens up the writer to many new possibilities and opportunities to enhance or just manipulate their storytelling and the experience of the audience.

I would think that it is widely and inherently assumed that each separate story belongs to one medium; a book, a movie, a TV show, a photographic essay etc. This is the way that I generally thought about stories before the reading. Even pop culture which utilises multiple forms is generally not transmedia, for example the Marvel films retell and alter their comic narratives more than using the two media to tell a single story. West Coast-style transmedia is similar but does expand on one story, but it is East Coast-style transmedia which is the most exciting, as it invites individuals to experiment with the method.

I am looking forward to experimenting with transmedia, and hopefully I will see more of the form this semester and learn how to utilise it well after an introduction that opened my eyes to possibilities that should have been obvious in the first place.