Inception:
The art of storytelling predates the skill of writing – The very first stories were told orally, dating back tens of thousands of years. Many historians believe that the origin of storytelling was, in fact, an excuse to overcome failure and fear, to calm the fears within and the fears outside – fear of the wild. Fear of the unknown. Back then, the storyteller was usually an outsider, a wanderer wandering in the wild to gather insight as to why it rains, or why the sun rises; when he thought he had something interesting to narrate, he would gather his tribe around the fire, enlightening and regaling them with stories some of which would be crude or bizarrely crazy, while some would pique the interest of the folks. These stories would arguably be lengthy, and often sloppily told, going on for nights together (they didn’t know the three-act structure now, did they?). People would wonder about these tales and this would instigate a dialogue of sorts which, over the course of time, would lead to the inception of epic myths, legends, fables and fairy-tales which would eventually be passed on to generation after generation.
Toy(ing with) Story:
One can argue that there might be a million ways to define a ‘Story’. In a parallel universe, perhaps, there might also be a million definitions of ‘Definition’. But let’s define ‘Story’ as described by Tyler Weaver (Comics for Film, Games and Animation : Using Comics to Construct Your Trans-media StoryWorld, p.14) – ‘A narrative construction (be it any book, script, film, comic, etc.) in which ideas and themes are communicated in an entertaining and persuasive way.’
Storytelling today is everywhere – from movies, books and comics to news media, religion and architecture. Stories have been so etched in our daily lives that most of the times we forget that we are even telling one, for example, telling your loved one what you did the entire day, having a conversation with a friend at a coffee shop, making eye contact with a person across the room, writing in your dairy, trying to flirt with someone, and so on. Its presence is so strong that it affects our lives to a point where it defines our morals, behaviour, desires, love and sometimes, even hatred. Have you ever seen the latest movie at the nearest theatre and loved a character so much that you couldn’t stop talking and thinking about it, or have you hated a character so much that you just want to rip the pages of the book apart? At some point, everyone has done it, or at least wanted to. It is the basic human need to feel, and stories have this magical power that allows us to do exactly that.
In any society, the extent to which the people are engaged, moved and inspired by a story is determined by the rationality of the times they live in. This brings us to the question ‘What makes a good story?’ A story which stands the test of time can be measured by the themes and ideas which are universal and those which appeal to all the generations everywhere in the world at any given point of time. To do so, there has to be a certain extent of truth to it, be it fiction, comedy, or any other form of story. Why do stories of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet still have an impact even today? These stories have been adapted in million ways and continue to live and breathe as they did back in the day. Cats are said to have nine lives, but stories, stories never really die, do they? Yes, they might be forgotten by a generation, but like history they do repeat themselves, and someday some wanderer wondering would encounter them in some transmogrified form, thus establishing that stories, with humans, seem to evolve. So does the art of storytelling evolve too?
Trans-media – Rise of the media (landscape):
Trans-media Storytelling, as Jeff Gomez, CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment says – is a technique, a kind of philosophy for conveying messages, themes or storylines to a mass audience through the artful and well planned use of multiple media platforms. It is a type of communication and brand extension that broadens the lifecycle of creative content and opens up channels of dialogue (Trans-media Storytelling 01, 2010).
This type of technique is not new, he says. The Japanese have been doing so in Manga, where one character of a particular Manga strip appears in another as what Anthropologist Mimi Ito (Searching for the Origami Unicorn, p.112) describes it as Japan’s ‘media-mix’, where content is dispersed across various media platforms like gameboys, cellphones collectibles, including different location-based entertainment centres. On the other hand, all the media distribution of these franchises depends on hyper-sociability where they encourage various forms of participation and interaction between consumers (have you had a childhood where you collected and exchanged Pokemon cards, battled with Beyblades amongst friends?).
In the past, Hasbro has counted on this medium to promote its toy-line – The Transformers action figures and The Beyblade spinning tops. To generate interest among people for these action figures, Hasbro, in association with Marvel, created a comic series around the Transformers action figures in 1984. The comic series was accompanied by an animated series which ran successfully for four seasons and also included an animated movie. The storyline of the cartoon series deferred from the comics but the movie showcased the series of events in between seasons two and three. Hasbro and other companies associated with Beyblade have held official tournaments under ‘World Beyblade Battle Association (WBBA)’ just like it was in the Anime, enriching the experience of their fans in real world too.
Millions of kids had bought these action figures and spinning tops and would play with them with their friends, creating their own ‘battles’ with each other. They were, in fact, creating a broadened story-line for the series, although unknowingly. This was fan-fiction, as back in the day, people did not have Youtube or Twitter, in most cases. (There was a fan made short of the Star-Wars spinoff right after the first Star-Wars movie came out.)
As we entered the 21st century, the media landscape changed drastically. The internet took over the world, giving rise to new media platforms like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. Henry Jenkins (Henry Jenkins, 2009) says, “We are in a moment of transition – where the old media culture is dying and a new media culture is being born, an arrow where spectatorial culture is giving way to participatory culture. Where a society based on a small number of companies controlling the storytelling apparatus is giving way to a much more complex media scape, where average citizens have the ability to cease control over the media technology and tell their own stories in powerful new ways”
The Social Network:
Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2006) says “All media content is going to flow through a single black box in our living room – figure our which black box will reign supreme then everyone can make reasonable investments in the future.” The Black Box could be the Xbox, Playstation, Television, PC, Laptops, Notebooks, I-pads, Smart Phones and so on. The number of media platforms at our finger tips are becoming endless and are only going to grow.
He further states that the reason which makes the ‘Black Box’ concept a fallacy is that, with the technological change, we are witnessing a cultural shift as well, and a significant one, that too – Going forward with the technological connectivity and backwards towards that fire to a more collective creativity and consumption habits.
The generation of this 21st century is of, as we cynically call them, ‘internet babies’, for whom living without internet is akin to living without electricity. This new world is where one can start a revolution through a single image or a single tweet (For instance – The Arab Spring) or download the latest movies with a click of a button. People want their media when they want it, where they want it and they want it NOW. Call it greed? Call it search for the mysteries of the Universe. Lawrence Lessig aptly labels it as ‘Absorption’ (Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, 2008). All the technological developments of the 20th century (telephone, Television and eventually the internet) have groomed people for this fragmented play of trans-media. Every time someone watches a movie, they update their Facebook page with it, give constant comments on the movie/actor/director in their ‘tweet’ while watching the movie and eventually some write a review about it on their personal blog. Hard-core fans would dig deeper and try to find out more about it – Perhaps there’s a comic or a web series of it that they would love to know about, or at least search for a ‘making of’ video on Youtube. These comments, reviews by the people would attract or detract people from watching the film. It is a kind of disguised advertising, word –of-mouth publicity that would eventually decide the fate of that particular product. This is where Trans-media projects come in play.
What Trans-media does is it plays with these cravings of people by broadening the narrative to multiple platforms.
The Wise Guys :
Big Studios like Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Studio are cashing in on this. We have already seen a few of these projects where the Wachowshi brothers show the world the universe of Matrix. This type of media conglomeration of content for a movie at such a scale was a bold move which paid off, and how! People went crazy about it! Although this concept is almost a decade and a half old now, it is still new in all its glory.
Marvel Studios commissioned the Avengers franchise with number of individual movies like Iron Man, Thor, Captain America Series and then collaborated with all these superheroes to make Avengers. New characters were shown in the Avengers movie, which also has a sequel coming up in 2015. The Avengers became the highest grossing film made in Hollywood (Media Marketing and the Evolution of Narrative Structure).
Momento (1999) a film by Christopher Nolan was a feat in non-linearity. But what trans-media does is, it allows you to go up and down, right and left at the same time. Take the example of the popular T.V. series, ‘Heroes’, where every episode is followed by a graphic comic strip which is released on the web. Not only that, they sell different merchandise which have small back-stories about that product and different characters (Tim Kring, creator of Heroes on Trans-media). The Star Wars franchise has exploited this scheme rigorously with different merchandise, cartoon series, comic books, all of which has made George Lucas a billionaire. This indeed establishes that a trans-media narrative can generate way more money than traditional storytelling models did, given the times we are in as also the resources we continue to develop.
By spreading content across media, not only does it create excitement for the audience but also makes a lot of sense monetarily. Different platforms now have the ability to generate and expand income for the franchise. Creating new content is getting harder and harder day-by-day. When an original idea does come along, the studios would leave no stone unturned and are counting on this trans-media mode of storytelling (Marvel Wants to Flex its own Heroic muscles as a moviemaker).
Pirates of the Media – On Stranger Tides:
Further expanding on Jenkins’ theory of convergence culture, he talks about the theory of ‘spreadability’. But how is it relevant to storytelling models?
Distribution is when Warner Brothers decide to release a movie in particular parts of the world. Circulation is a hybrid grass-root system shaped by increasingly controlled yet unauthorised use of people choosing to pass on content based on their own choices and not based on what’s available to them on the broadcast dial. As this happens, Jenkins says, certain content gets enormous visibility not because it is been pumped out by broadcast media but by how it is spread by circulation of consumers. This content can be in any form, be it commercial (movies, music, comics) or for non-profit (campaigns, protests, etc) or even immature content (online memes, videos). Jenkins says, “It is those companies which know how to monitor and respond to unauthorised subscription and distribution of content can find ways to make profit from these processes, even if it means losing some control over the flow of content.” (Henry Jenkins on How content gains meaning and value in Networked Culture)
We need to further categorically describe the fine line between piracy and unauthorised use of media content while discussing trans-media. Piracy is immoral distribution of content to gain monetary benefits by people other than the producers, which is disruptive in every sense. But let’s take the case of many music bands, which have released their albums on torrents, allowed viewers easy access to get to know and to listen to them, which, in turn, has enabled these artists to have music tours, highly encouraged by those listeners; now many of them are big names in music industry. Take the underground music scene where new genres of music have emerged recently by new artists (for instant – Kygo) who have uploaded their mixes on Youtube and SoundCloud for free – this would not have been possible with the help of traditional media groups allowing them to release their albums to such wide audiences.
Another example of large scale unauthorised content exchange was seen in America which later benefited the distributors, when Japanese Anime were hard to come by. These Anime were traded, shared, and unauthorised English subtitles were created for the American viewers to watch through underground video circulations. Soon, this lead to the inception and growth of an informal market for Japanese Anime, where the fans wanted to create a base of Anime movies to be shown in the United States. The commercial distributors tapped on this market to further broaden the bridge and allow media to be distribution in a more controlled manner.
Kung-fu Panda is a kind of a cross over character which lives in China but speaks and acts like an American. This cross-culture character portrayal is another epitome in a form of story-telling which was never possible before.
Piracy and copy-rights are two pillars of story-telling which will have to be re-sculptured or maybe even demolished in the coming times. There have been times where a certain producer cannot make a movie on a particular comic strip as he does not own the copy rights of it, even though he has a billion dollar idea for it – Hollywood has had many cases where productions were shut or scripts were stalled for this very reason. With the emerging trend of remix media, there would slowly but steadily be a change in this regard.
Joseph Gordan-Levitt’s ‘HitRecord’ is an online collaborative production company that makes movies, short-films, comics, books and other media products based on the content created by someone else, which has been uploaded previously on the site. In other words, people can build on others peoples’ work irrespective of any copy-right issues. A simple picture can be turned into a movie and later on, it can be turned into a book, or a character of it can be thrown into a different movie, book or picture series. It is a platform where all the artists have complete creative freedom to dwell upon someone else’s idea and create new content- much like the philosophy behind brainstorming. Levitt’s company has created great fan following and has produced a number of interesting, highly appreciated media pieces. Levitt has spoken about how creative control should not be limited by copy-right control. This is all in the wake of creating new forms of stories which have never been created before.
Conclusion:
Let’s take a moment and look where we are in the history of time. Just a hundred years ago, filmmaking was a relatively new concept, and today, movies are everywhere. Our fathers grew up in an era where telephone was a novelty, and today, we can’t survive for a day without the Internet. Times are a-changing, and they are changing fast. We are living in this hybrid inter-connected world where communication has never been so quick and so easy. The forms of communication, the basics of “hi” and “hello” are changing rapidly too. Isn’t it safe to say that the way we are telling stories are changing too? There is a saying amongst hackers “You can be who you want, what you want on the internet”. This has opened doors which never existed in the first place. This has simultaneously resonated with the way people are sharing and telling stories. Content is created and spread in ways that was never possible before. In the words of Jenkins, “What we are seeing in the Digital Age, as the public begins to take media in their own hands and begins to assert its right to retell these stories, the public is taking the media without the permission of copyright owners and innovating, experimenting, re-contextualising and responding to those images in new ways.” (Henry Jenkins, 2009)
This participatory culture has given rise to a form of collective intelligence which was never possible before. This collective intelligence, in turn, has lead to the creation new data and this new data can be conceptualised into new matter and studies, given that humans have always had the ability to narrate it as a story. As the new media forms have arisen, it has enabled the average people to share their own stories. This has resulted in the emergence of different perspectives which were never allowed to be showcased by the media producers. Jenkins says “As we expand you with the power to tell stories, we have the potential for stories to grab our imagination, to touch our hearts that comes not from the entertainment infrastructure but from some average citizen somewhere whose reality has never been depicted before on the screen.” (Henry Jenkins, 2009)
Is storytelling a platform that is growing beyond the realms of linearity? As per the latest media trends and changes in our world, it would not be entirely possible to assert the same negatively, would it?
Bibliography :
Weaver, Tyler, 2013, ‘Once Upon A Time. . .’, In Comics for Films, Games and Animation : Using Comics to create your Transmedia StoryWorld, Burlington, MA, Focal Press
Gomez, Jeff, Transmedia Storytelling 01, 2010, Available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Om5GmI6Vrw>. [October 31, 2010]
Jenkins, Henry, Henry Jenkins, 2009, Available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibJaqXVaOaI>. [September 21, 2009]
Transformers, Edited, April 1, 2015, Available from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers>
Beyblade, Edited, March 30, 2015, Available from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyblade>
Jenkins, Henry, 2006, ‘Searching for the Origami Unicorn’, In Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide, New York USA, New York University Press (Reading Log Week 3)
Lessig Lawrence, 2008, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, New York, USA, Penguin Press
Whitehouse, Kendall, Media Marketing and the Evolution of Narrative Structure, 2012, Available from <http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu/kendallwhitehouse/media-marketing-and-the-evolution-ofnarrative-structure/> [May 7, 2012] (Reading Log Week 4)
Kring, Tim, ‘Heroes’ creator Tim Kring on Trans-media storytelling, 2009, Available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWyo00IoXo8> [October 10, 2009]
Waxman, Sharon, Marvel wants to flex its own heroic muscles as a moviemaker, 2007, New York Times, Available from <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/businessmedia/18marvel.html?pagewanted=all> [June 18, 2007] (Reading Log Week 4)
Henry Jenkins on How Content gains meaning and value in Networked Culture, 2012, Available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAffkJpYnPI> [May 24, 2012]
Joseph Gordan-Levitt, Available from <http://www.hitrecord.org/>