Many works, particularly from Hollywood, are full of references, inspired by narrative styles, themes and characters from other media. These crossed references go beyond the film, book or TV series and become a world, a semantic universe, which we called the metaverse in a previous post.
A transmedia work, by its literally “multi” media form, and [...]
The conception of a transmedia story first begins with the story, a good story. But there’s not only the story, there’s the universe, there’s the way that the story will be developed through time and in the media, “controlled” by the creator or not.
With one story, a wonderful storyteller can keep you hooked for a [...]
September 27th 2009 was the airdate of the first episode of Heroes’ season 4. But Heroes is much more than a simple TV series. According to Jesse Alexander, its executive producer, as well as the producer of Alias and Lost: “Heroes was always conceived as a transmedia concept. This series is an integral part of [...]
Metaverse is a complex term coined by Neil Stephenson in his sci-fi novel Snow Crash, which, along with William Gibson’s novel
Neuromancer, was a source of inspiration for the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix universe. As Stephenson conceived of it in 1992, a metaverse is an immersive environment, a virtual 3D world that interacts with the real world. [...]
One of the great problems of television today is the ageing of its audience. Some of its detractors even say that it will die off with the last viewers. Of course, many young people still watch a lot of television, too much some parents might think, but it’s a proven fact that those we call [...]
Today, everyone can make a feature film in their bathroom!
Indeed, the digital creation tools have become simple and democratic. The other day I was at the Apple store in London, and a beautiful English woman in her forties was on the phone with her son, she was asking him, with a Final Cut Pro editing [...]
Content, technology and uses are the pillars of transmedia. The content to meet audience uses has to be intertwined with the technology.
This transversality is necessary. It requires a new interdisciplinary culture in which content, technology and uses form a complex system in the mathematical sense of the word. A system that cannot be divided up [...]
It is often said that success on the Web is essentially viral. But the spread of a viral buzz cannot be controlled. Transmedia should be based, on the contrary, on the controlled distribution of content.
If a viral involves fixed and finite content, spread solely by e-mail or by link, transmedia offers content that can be [...]
Our lives are increasingly fragmented. A quick breakfast on the go with your partner and/or kids, taking the kids to school and the work day usually begins with the ride to work. A common occasion for watching or listening music and/or more or less short programs on our mobiles or iPods. At work, between internal [...]
Alternate reality games blur the lines between the real and virtual worlds – between what we call reality and virtuality…. They prefigure what gaming has become in a hybrid world in which reality is enhanced by virtuality and virtuality consolidated by reality. There is no clear-cut definition of ARG, and we often range in this [...]
Good stories are serial, meaning they develop in the form of episodes that may follow a linear or nonlinear progression and reprise or rather continually renew one another. Everyone knows American series like 24, Lost, Heroes etc. These “cliffhangers” leave us in such intense suspense that we can’t wait to see what happens next.
We even [...]
The second opus in the Batman Begins series was not only one of the biggest box office hits ever. Like every Hollywood mega-production, it benefited from a marketing plan that far surpasses the budgets of even the biggest French pictures. It was also developed as a transmedia concept, and a fairly considerable portion of the [...]
We are touched by good stories. Our bodies and our senses can be touched. A good story touches us physically by revealing to us a different side of ourselves, a side that cannot be reduced to this body, which we often put to the fore or in the background as the case may be. So [...]
Everyone knows Lost and its heroes, the modern-day Robinsons, marooned on an island. What is less well known is that JJ Abrams developed a whole transmedia concept around the TV series.
From the very first episodes, he himself ran a forum on which all the fans of the series had a field day commenting, imagining the [...]
In the middle ages, man thought that the earth was flat. The discovery of perspective marks the beginning of the Renaissance, the beginning of modernity: man knows that the earth is round and he has adopted a point of view. He observes the world. Later, man went to the moon, he saw the earth from [...]
Ridley Scott, the man who made Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Hannibal, American Gangster etc., has just announced he’s working on a series of shorts for the web and television based on the universe of Blade Runner, the adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? Bit.blogsNYtime
The project [...]
Tron 2.0 www.imdb.com release is planned for 2011, it’s the continuation of the famous Disney movie.
Jeff Bridges will act the main character: Kevin Flynn. 2 years before the movie gets released, ARG has already started! http://www.flynnlives.com/.
For the next meeting : www.flynnlives.com
One of the first examples of transmedia was the simultaneously real and virtual Matrix universe of the Wachowski brothers. Everyone remembers the three movies, but there have been printed and Web comics as well, short films, Animatrix, a video game and a massively multiplayer online game.
The Wachowski bros. didn’t invent franchise marketing with spin-off product [...]
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The word “transmedia” was popularized by Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the MIT Media Lab, in one of his books entitled Convergence Culture. According to Jenkins, transmedia are complementary stories told on several media. He distinguishes transmedia from cross-media and multimedia, in which content is reiterated on several media, and [...]
The world is changing faster and faster! according to US futurist Ray Kurzweil, “We’re doubling the paradigm shift rate, the rate of progress, every decade. The whole 20th century was like 25 years of change at today’s rate of change.”
The consumer will no longer remain passive, he wants to be an active user. Descartes said: [...]
