Great Post Series by Mark Harris on Managing THE LOST CHILDREN Storyworld with WordPress: Part 1

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Excerpt from Mark Harris' series on WorkBook Project:

"Organizing Our Data

The first thing I need to say is I am no expert on Transmedia or ARGs or anything like that. There are many other people who are. So this post is not meant as me preaching The Truth down from on high. This post is meant as an exploration of what I am working on now, in the hopes that it sparks some others’ imaginations. In the interest of us all learning, I’m simply sharing the process we’re going through right now.

The second thing I need to say is that this is not a tutorial, and not something that just anyone can do. I’m actually writing some software for this, and the things I’m talking about here will require more custom software to deliver to users. Eventually, if this works, I will likely write a set of WP plugins to simplify this process and make it something anyone can use. But for now, I believe that ideas are what count, and I think many people will be able to understand the ideas here and maybe contribute some of their own.

This is sort of an experiment in stretching WordPress beyond it’s original purpose. The goal here is to see if we can use WordPress as a place to maintain our entire storyworld, and then feed that storyworld out to our various platforms; Tweets, Text Messages, Phone Calls, Location-based content, blogs, etc. The benefit here is that all of our data is in one place, it can be queried, analyzed, related, tagged with metadata, etc. Another benefit is that we are using a good deal of free tools...."

Mark Harris on The Lost Children & Multi-Faceted Storytelling | The Filmmaker Magazine Blog

The IFP’s Cross-Media ForumNYC is coming up April 19, and, as it approaches, several of its participants will be blogging for Filmmaker. Today’s first post is from Mark Harris, who will be presenting his new project, The Lost Children, at the event. Click on the link above for more info and tickets.


One of the things that excites me the most about “Cross-media,” “Transmedia” or whatever it is, is the idea of telling a story in many different ways. I know this may not fit into a lot of peoples’ definitions of these terms, but it’s an opportunity, I think.

Face on Mars

The "Face" on Mars

When I say telling a story in many different ways, I mean using Stanslavsky’s “magic if” in a slightly different way. For instance, the feature film THE LOST CHILDREN, treats the story of Evelyn Hamilton as a documentary. The events in the film are told as if they may all be in the protagonist’s head, and they may not. The “found footage” model is perfect for a case like this, where we want to audience to interpret what they’re seeing on screen. This is what makes things like UFOs, the “Face” on Mars, “Nessy” so exciting to us. These images that are not clearly distinguishable, so our imaginations go to work and build stories around them. That’s what I wanted in the feature film of THE LOST CHILDREN. I wanted to meet the audience half-way, and ask them to bring their imaginations to the table.

So the feature film makes certain assumptions about the universe the story is set in. But, what excites me about ”Cross-media,” “Transmedia” or whatever is that the other platforms you tell a story on, are under no obligation to conform to that universe. One of the things I will talk about at the Cross media forum on April 19th is how we’re going to try having other platforms make entirely different assumptions about the universe of the story. So one platform might assume that it’s all real. Another platform might assume it’s all in people’s heads.

I'm looking forward to hearing more about this one!