Transmedia Manifest in 11 Theses - Nice & Clear! Grazie to Authors Coelle, Costa-Zahn, Hank, Kokoska...

The art of storytelling has always been subject to change. Through the process of digitalization and the accompanying media convergence, we’re now on the verge of a quantum leap. We are no longer viewers, listeners, readers, users, or players.Today, we are “experiencers”, whose roles and behaviors change based on how we use and approach media.

With this reality in mind, we take this opportunity to propose eleven theses on the future of storytelling:

 
Thesis 1
Claiming reality
Fiction supersedes reality, becoming as immersive as possible.

 
Thesis 2
Rabbit holes
The story offers multiple entry points to the experiencer, depending on the medium and situation in which it is used.

 
Thesis 3
Story universe
The experiencer no longer follows one dramatic thread but chooses among several intersecting storylines, which merge into a single story-universe.

 
Thesis 4
Interactivity
Experiencers communicate with each other and with fictional characters thereby actively participating in the story and influencing its overall arc.

 
Thesis 5
Usergenerated content
The story-universe enables the experiencer to contribute creatively at selected points of the story.

 
Thesis 6
Transmediality
The story-universe does not limit itself to one single medium but takes advantage of the strengths of every medium to create something new out of their symbiosis.

 
Thesis 7
Location based storytelling
The experiencer becomes the vehicle of fiction by visiting real places where parts of the story-universe unfold.

 
Thesis 8
Lean back, lean forward
The story-universe attracts different types of experiencers by offering a variety of roles for more active and more passive media users.

 
Thesis 9
Infinitude
The story-universe has the potential to become a breeding ground for a neverending story through sequels, spin-offs and perpetual re-use of story-elements.

 
Thesis 10
Multipayment
The diversification of storytelling enables the freemium-payment-model, which prompts multiple contributions per experiencer.

 
Thesis 11
Collaborative work
The story-universe is developed in collaboration by a versatile and interdisciplinary team, whose range of skills can meet the demands of experience-based storytelling.

Original post by:

Authors
Maike Coelle
Kristian Costa-Zahn
Maike Hank
Katharina Kokoska
Dorothea Martin
Patrick Möller
Gregor Sedlag
Philipp Zimmermann

I've not Read Enough Pratchett: A life in writing & the Goddess Narrativia | The Guardian

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Excerpt:

"Terry Pratchett is having a statue made. It's a statue of a goddess, and he thinks she ought probably to be smoking a cigarette, and to be showing one breast. "There should be an urn, too. If there's an urn it's not porn – that's a Discworld cliché," he says, a bubble of laughter in his voice.

The goddess is one of Pratchett's own invention: Narrativia, the deity of narrative who smiles on writers (and perhaps especially sunnily on her creator). Discworld, created by Pratchett 28 years ago, is the fantasy world held up by four elephants balanced on the back of a giant turtle. It's a concept which started out as an affectionate lampoon of the sword-and-sorcery fantasy genre, but it has, over the years, become an increasingly sophisticated swipe at contemporary society, pointing out the ridiculousness of everything from Hollywood to the postal service, newspapers, banks and football.

And Narrativia has been beside him all the way. "If you've been a good boy and worked at what you're doing, then the goddess Narrativia will smile on you," he says, recounting his delight at a particular piece of her work, when he was writing Thief of Time more than a decade ago. He decided to call one of his characters Ronnie Soak. Soak is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse – the one who left before they got famous. His name was picked at random, so Pratchett was astonished when he noticed what it sounded like backwards. Suddenly, he knew of what this particular horseman would be a harbinger. "I thought chaos – yes! Chaos, the oldest," he says. "Stuff just turns up like that."

In typically ebullient fashion, Thief of Time also contains a sprinkling of yetis, a clock which will stop time and the Monks of History, whose job it is to manage time, moving it from where it isn't needed (underwater) to where it is (cities). AS Byatt said on the book's publication that it should have been nominated for the Booker prize. But it was a fantasy novel; it was funny; it was a bestseller. Unsurprisingly enough, it wasn't.And despite Pratchett's immense popularity (75 million copies sold of his 67 books), it took a while for the literary establishment to notice – apart from Byatt. She is, she says, still a fan today, calling him "a great storyteller, and splendidly inventive with the English language – both as farce and as comedy and as (successful) dreadful jokes for teenagers. I also think he's wise and morally complicated. And grown up, although he appeals to the young."

It wasn't until 2001 that Pratchett won his first major literary prize, the Carnegie medal, for his first Discworld novel for children, the Pied Piper-riffing The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. He's since been knighted for services to literature ("I think they must have had a bit of a snigger. Let's give a fantasy writer a knighthood, he should have some fun with that") and received a handful of honorary degrees, with Trinity College Dublin making him a professor...."

EtherFilms Taps HTML5 to Take Viewers Deeper Into Movies | Scott Thill via Wired.com

    Los Angeles production house Halo-8 Entertainment is banking on nonlinear storytelling with its upcoming delivery platform EtherFilms, which will give viewers greater control over how movies and other media unfold. For example, the interactive transmedia platform might serve up an extended version of a particularly fascinating interview or let the viewer dive into a comic book mentioned in a documentary.

    Halo-8 president Matt Pizzolo.
    Image courtesy Halo-8

    Anchored in the principle that programming should be oriented around content rather than format, HTML5-based EtherFilms will integrate multimedia from past and future Halo-8 motion comics and documentaries like Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods.

    Then, it will hand the narrative controls over to the consumer.

    “EtherFilms will turn films and comics into hyperlinked worlds of story you can interactively navigate based on your interest,” Matt Pizzolo, Halo-8 president and Godkiller comic creator, told Wired.com in an e-mail.

    “That means jumping from an animated film to the digital comic that tells a character’s origin or extending an interview in a documentary, or even jumping to a different documentary altogether for further insight on a topic,” he added. “So film is a just vessel through which you navigate the content world. The universe grows like a wiki, which fundamentally alters the experience of watching films or reading comics.”

    Nina Lassam on the Transmedia Novel Experience and the Mobile Market | Digital Book World

    By Nina Lassam, Marketing Evangelist, Wattpad  | @nlassam

    Interactive eReading apps are some of the most popular apps in the mobile marketplace. Many of the most successful ones ­invite readers to experience a portion of enhanced content on their mobile devices with an additional element of gamification or imagery that builds on what is found in the paper book. As fiction continue to move onto screens, their possibilities expand beyond the source text to create a new market for publishers and entertainment producers.

    At Wattpad, we recently launched a new transmedia eReading project with beActive Entertainment that invites readers to become gamers, creators and observers in a 360-degree story experience hosted on an eReading environment. In other words, rather than interactive elements that enhance the original narrative, the story itself is designed to be told across multiple interconnected formats.

    Readers will find the YA novel Aisling’s Diary on the same screen as the story’s webseries adaptation. Each chapter of the novel and corresponding video will be syndicated weekly, similar to how a traditional cable television program would be aired. As viewer behavior shifts to incorporate social media and additional formats, the audience for transmedia projects continues to expand. Our goal with this project is to incorporate popular story sharing formats (text, film and social media) onto one platform.

    Sweet: How Tintin got real | via Stuff.co.nz

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    Excerpt:

    "The boy reporter's journey from cartoon panel to big screen is complete. Adam Dudding goes behind the scenes at Weta Workshop to find out how they did it.

    The moment when Chris Guise learnt how Belgians get dog poo off their shoes was a thrilling one.

    Guise, an artist with Wellington's Weta Workshop, was in Antwerp on a fact-finding tour for Steven Spielberg's new Tintin movie, filling his camera and brain with the streets and flea markets and docks and castles that populated Herge's cartoon tales of the indomitable spiky-haired boy reporter.

    "I saw these little metal plates in doors, at the bottom," says Guise. "And I thought, 'What the hell is this?"'

    A Belgian colleague explained: "That's for scraping dog poop off your shoes." Aha! It was precisely the kind of detail Guise had come to discover. He made a note, took a photo and kept moving.

    Guise's seven-day European adventure was just one symptom of the mania that gripped hundreds of artists, animators, designers and computer operators for years as they created the motion-capture blockbuster, which is released later this month in Europe and will reach New Zealand and American cinemas around Christmas..."

    The Internet Isn’t Just Another TV Pipe | via TechCrunch #infdist

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    Excerpt from an original post by Ben Decker:

    "...With the Internet though, these models break. As we lose control over distribution, consumers gain the option of alternate content paths, both legal and illegal, rather than waiting at our checkpoints. And as the world fragments, we lose our ability to aggregate audiences. Of course, this latter point matters less and less, as businesses gain the ability to speak to consumers directly (first through web sites and now more effectively through social networks), and then even they get disintermediated, with consumers shifting their reliance from ‘push’ brand messaging toward ‘pull’ recommendations from their peers and reputation systems (think Amazon star ratings, and now Facebook).

    I believe there’s a solution, one which doesn’t run from, but instead embraces the openness and interactivity of the web. I believe television, and all traditional media industries, must shift to a collaborative model, where we use our premium resources as a vacuum to suck in value creation from partners and users, the way digital firms like Apple, Google, and Facebook do. We should take advantage of external capabilities where they’re preferable to our own (eg distribution), and release our own differentiated resources to open innovation (eg content and ad sales capabilities). The job of the media company will shift from producing and distributing content alone to orchestrating production and distribution ecosystems.

    In all our interactions—with suppliers, but most critically with the audience—we must also shift from one-off transactions to ongoing relationships. No longer can we simply push our products to people and call it a day—sell them a DVD and that’s that. Me must shift to a services model, where we build ongoing communities of interest around our content and the service we sell becomes access to that content. To this end, we must work harder to foster user contributions and user-curation around our shows; create second screen and social experiences that deepen the engagement of our viewers; offer games, gamification and, other forms of interactivity. We must personalize media experiences and offer recommendations.

    The opportunity here is extensive: continual subscription revenue streams, a secure distribution model (services are harder to steal than goods), a sustainable advertising model (based on deep user knowledge and a recurrent opportunity for persuasion), customized and continually evolving products, and the chance to capture free labor, knowledge, and creativity from our customers. It’s what Blizzard and Zynga did with games, Netflix with video, Zipcar with vehicles, and down the line as all business gradually join ‘the mesh.’

    As Netflix has demonstrated, disrupting one’s own business is perilous work. But it’s been done. Facing crises, companies like Cisco, IBM, and P&G have taken tens of billions of dollar restructuring paths to come out fundamentally different, vastly more successful companies. Firms like AOL and Best Buy are in the midst of trying. Of course, the alternative is the long slow fade to irrelevancy of a Yahoo, Borders, EMI, Tribune, or Blockbuster..."