Missed this from Andrea Phillips! good discussion below: The Transmedia Canon - Deus Ex Machinatio -

I'd like to revive the conversation about what belongs in the transmedia canon. It's definitely something the community has discussed before, and will again, but it's also something of an evergreen topic, right? And I have a sneaky ulterior motive here -- this is related to A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling

That's right, fresh on the heels of my denouncing someone else's effort at crowdsourcing, here I am doing a little crowdsourcing of my own! But since the conversation will take place out in the open, I'm hoping all of us can benefit from it.

So: What's your transmedia canon? What are the five or eight or ten examples of prior art you think every new creator should be aware of? And do they represent the scope and breadth of the art, as opposed to ex. being a list of, say, notable film marketing campaigns?

I'll come along and offer my own list in a couple of hours. But mine is very ARG-heavy (natch) and I'd like to develop something with a little more representative of the entirety of the art. Tell me what you think belongs in and why!

Transmedia: Five stages to selecting your Right Platforms – Part 4 | Via Shareplay

Handy post in a series from Shareplay! Grazie!

"This reveals step 4 of Robert Prattens five-steps to Selecting the Right Platforms. The content of this blog post is paraphrased from Prattens words in his post.

Stage 4: Consider the timing of platforms relative to each other

Unless you have unlimited resources it’s likely you’ll have to prioritize how platforms are released and to do that it will be helpful to define your objectives. Set your objectives with reference to your business model and resources.

See Prattens post for Table 5 and Table 6, that provide examples of roll-out strategies dependent on different business models. Note that the steps can and may need to be combined or they may overlap. There’s no hard and fast rule – the purpose of the approach is get you thinking logically and covering the bases.

Until now very little has been said about the story. It hasn’t been ignored – it’s been there as a touchstone throughout these four stages – the next blog post will reveal the last of Prattens five stages: Considering the changes to the story to bake-in the platforms and timing."

/Janni

Mike Jones responds to the Buzz: Transmedia: confusing Style with Story - mikejones.tv

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Excerpt:

"...What we now call Transmedia - the art of storytelling across multiple platforms - is nothing new and the only thing the Digital age has really delivered to us is, to date, a larger diversity of platforms and modes of experience. What this means is not more or new types of Story, but rather more Styles for a story to be expressed. This is not to downplay the importance of individual platform Styles - just as an oil painter moving to watercolours needs to adapt their technique to engage with the possibilities of the watercolour Style, so to do writers and creators need to understand how their story needs to be adapted to take advantage of new platform styles.

But again the notion of Story and what a Story is does not change and has never changed. Indeed there is no compelling argument to suggest that modern transmedia is anywhere close to as big an upheaval as the inception of Radio and Cinema from an oral, theatrical landscape. By comparison transmedia is decidedly subtle.

Another way to express this perspective is to understand that Transmedia IS, by nature, Adaptation. And in this context the processes of Adapatation are no different in manifesting game and interactive forms as they are adapting a story from book to movie. Once we recognize that Transmedia means the introduction of new story Styles, not new types of Stories, we afford ourselves the opportunity to focus on what really matters rather than be continually distracted by the shiny newness...."

I posted my response on Mike's blog:

Hey Mike,

great post & nice to see you take this back to adaption - I'm writing a piece on adaptation & digital media write now. One point I would add is that when designing interactive/transmedia stories - user experience design - UX - is a huge consideration -designing for what people intuitively do on distinct platforms, which means engaging with different forms of play - touchscreen, installation, live performance, social web, game platforms - all are distinct modes of engagement. Core idea? people are your medium and design for what people do - that is completely different from telling a story

Archaeologists turn Kinect into handheld 3D scanner (Wired UK)

Archaeologists turn Kinect into handheld 3D scanner

On an upcoming archaeological dig in Jordan, University of California, San Diego students will have to make room in their luggage -- alongside the trowels and shovels -- for a Microsoft Kinect.

That's because the university's research scientist Jürgen Schulze and Masters student Daniel Tenedorio have created a modified version of the Xbox 360 peripheral that turns it into a cheap and easy-to-use handheld 3D scanner.

The Kinect can be used to capture 3D data by sending out thousands of infrared dots from a projector and then measuring how long they take to ping off of an object and come back to a CMOS sensor. A bog-standared video camera is used to take colour data.

Schulze and Tenedorio also plopped a five-pronged infrared sensor to the top of the Kinect to track its position and orientation in space with overhead cameras. This allows the user to hold the camera up like an airport scanner and wave it around an object (or person) to capture their data.

THIS is how you deal with illegal parking! AWESOME! The Mayor of Vilnius Likes His Bike Lanes | via Toronto Standard

“It seems that a tank would be the best solution” –Arturas Zuokas, the Mayor of Vilnius.

“War on cars,” indeed. Parking is a problem in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, where Mayor Arturas Zuokas says cars are parking with no respect for the law. The mayor was especially frustrated with the number of cars–including Rolls Royces and Mercedes-Benz–choking up his city’s bike lanes. So he got in a tank and did something about it.

His spokesperson, Irma Juskenaite, says the car in the video was bought specifically for the video.

“The mayor hopes that he will not have to repeat his performance to have drivers heed his message,” she told the Guardian, “although he says that he is prepared to do so.”

Building Hooks: Taking a Cue from the Harry Potter Series - nice post!

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"At the Merging+Media lab and seminar back in April, Anita Ondine talked about the need to build “hooks” into a transmedia property. This was the name she gave to those bits of story that are put in one medium that draw you to another medium, another part of the story. They’re the pieces of story that hook together the whole project, the things that make it one whole rather than a lot of pieces, the things that make it transmedia storytelling.
Last month, leading up to the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, I re-read the entire Harry Potter series. In a month. I’d only read the books once each, previously, way back when each first came out, so re-reading them — especially in such a short span of time — was a great experience and led to a lot of insights I had previously missed.
One of these, which I wrote about on my blog last week, is Rowling’s brilliance in setting up a story device in one book before having it be a vital part of another book..."

Transmedia MMO links to SyFy Series: Defiance Set to Bridge a Difficult Gap | by Emma Beddows

Gap

Defiance is marketed as the first multi-platform shooter MMO: a third-person video game which interconnects with a global television program on Syfy. It promises to deliver a “ground breaking entertainment experience” which allows users to influence the narrative through game play. The game and television series interconnect in a more sophisticated manner than previous attempts at coordinating such relationships have achieved. In the past, games have played exploratory roles in transmedia arcs, allowing players to explore the storyworld and landscape. Occasionally, game-play is structured around a predefined goal; the consequences of which will be realised in another form (for example, in Enter The Matrix, a gaming component of The Matrix franchise, users were allowed to “play-out” a plot point/mission which was later referred to in one of the movies). One of the barriers to greater connectivity between games and other platforms is production scheduling. Most of the time games-as-transmedia are built around narratives which are already complete in some other form. For example, whilst most ARGs allow users to participate with the text and its associated storyworld components (e.g. 2007s The Dark Knight ARG/campaign) users are powerless to affect change in the films narrative...."

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