This blog post is a little late in going up (but better late then never??)

In our second week of Story Lab we played by the foundations of narrative – plot, character, time and temporal order – and how to play around and ‘remix’ these elements. In our group, we came up with a story surrounding a male protagonist who, due to life circumstances, has to move into a haunted house (which he initially purchased as an investment property) and begins a relationship with a goblin. After writing these out on cards – we played with switching the elements around and discussed how this impacted (or didn’t) the narrative.

We then had to come up with four ideas surrounding this concept – a screenplay, a comic, a short story, and a video game adaptation. This allowed us to see how transmedia ideas can come out of a simple story. It pushed us to think for creatively about our ideas and how they can be adapted to other formats to act as ways to further our storytelling abilities.

We used the case study of The Dark Knight in class to discuss how transmedia can help to promote a story and introduce the audience to the world of your story before your film is released. I thought this campaign was incredibly effective in establishing the main rivalries in The Dark Knight (i.e. Batman/The Joker/Harvey Dent) and also created an interactive space for fans to interact and engage with the story before they had even seen the film. More information can be found at http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/why-the-dark-knights-viral-marketing-is-absolutely-brilliant/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpuC7HhCPWA – those were the best resources I’ve found outlining the campaign. I think while not the typical definition of transmedia, I thought the use of crowdsourcing information and pushing the fan base to create parts of the narrative themself were incredibly interesting.