At Transmedia Lab, we’re not just imagining transmedia content, we’re creating transmedia content! In the prestigious lineage of Media Lab, which creates “technologies for a better world”, our aim is, on a more modest perimeter, to create content for a “digital” audience.
Never before have we had access to, and consumed so much content, especially images. Screens are everywhere and they are multiplied: each household has on average 4,4 screens available! These screens complete each other depending on context and use: direct TV for the family, video on demand, catch up television, “user generated content”, shorter mobile content etc… Our emotional experiences from all these different environments change, improve, diversify.
The content, however, doesn’t yet seem to have taken full advantage of these multi screen uses, and is usually still conceived for one main medium. But the mutation of audiences is accelerating, driven by the influence of the young generations. It’s been recently proven that a teenager has the ability of doing 5 different things at the same time on different screens! 15% of video is being watched otherwise than through a television screen, and this percentage is twice as high for the youths!
Today, there are real possibilities for enhancing content for a transmedia storytelling. Through complementary stories taking place across several media, using different angles adapted to the different media, the consumer can discover a universe with multiple ramifications; he can continue living the story through Internet, embodying this participative culture: he becomes the “spect’actor”.
Transmedia storytelling begins with the writing: developing episodes with the different screens in mind, offering stories with open endings, providing the Internet users with dramatic “material”. It’s also a question of mobilizing collective intelligence and creating a community around the content: developing the audience returns between media, encouraging virality with annotations and “tagging” of the videos, offering games that are massively multi-user friendly (alternate reality games).
The idea of Orange Vallée with this blog, is to unite our energies around transmedia content. We want to create an open tribune to reflect on new ways of working, a place of exploration and audacity bringing together players from different worlds. Our final goal is to come together to create value for the consumers: by serving their uses, by creating communities that they will bring to life, by bringing together creators and audiences.
Manifesto ! by Nicolas Bry, Marc Guidoni, Jean-Yves Le Moine
EDITO !
Public and consumer uses are changing. Naturally navigating from one media to another, audiences follow their favorite contents on any kind of screen: cinema, TV (linear or catch up), mobiles, web, videogames… In certain media, these audiences that are immersed in the 2.0 culture also develop an active participation mode, take ownership of the stories, navigate between screens, increasing the audience numbers and becoming more and more involved as actors in their own stories.
Orange would like to assist this evolution and boost the development of programs that are intentionally transmedia oriented to answer this demand. In a way, it’s the ultimate union between content and network !
The first initiative is the creation of this blog: Transmedia Lab. Open to all professionals, this blog will be a way of initiating and consolidating thoughts, announcing events, being at the crossroads of different initiatives.
Xavier Couture is the Head of Orange Contents
Better than Moore !
These are the new bases of creative thinking. How to ask the narrative questions; the subtle link that connects two imaginary worlds: the ones of the author and of the reader, audience or viewer.
This first Transmedia Lab Barcamp has held all its promises. A wave of enthusiasm is rising. But behind this moment of innovative exchange, something important is at stake: to make a program’s structure coincide with its broadcast medium. The question of the relationship between the signified and the significant, between the medium and the message, has always been around. Theatre was the first manifestation of a collective creative message. We came out of the primitive form of the storyteller to take the path of the imaginary re-creation of a world.
Each epoch has had to adapt to new forms of transmission. The latest to date are cinema and television. The acceleration that has followed the appearance of numeric technologies is a brand new challenge for the creative world. Transmedia Lab has this vocation, and the enthusiasm which we realized would not be stopping after this first meeting, is a sign that creative energies have joined the law of Moore. Get ready technologists, creatives are back. They’ve understood the benefit that they can and must draw from their capacities to use all types of screens. The audience becomes the co-narrator, the narrator becomes the actor, all these mixes will revolutionize the different forms of writing. We’re off, this Barcamp, bursting with energy, was a historic first. The challenge of networks and screens has been launched and it’s being taken up. Creatives, get your neurons in gear, we’re going to beat this good old Moore.
“Breaking the old borders !”
Transmedia dreamed it, you did it. In a few weeks, what started as a good intention, a desire, a conviction that we needed to burst the windows open, became a reality. In a few days, we will get together to choose 5 of these 11 projects to follow. But they’ve all made an impression on this first edition of Transmedia. They all constitute a founding myth for a new era of imagination and creation. “Inventing is thinking sideways” said Albert Einstein. Congratulations to all, it’s a pleasure to reconnect with you on Thursday, our hope of seeing these new forms grow to serve the new technologies are living up to the challenge. Multiplying the occasions of seeing and listening, increasing the size and the debit of the pipes is not an end in itself, it’s sometimes even a danger. We came together to tackle this challenge, to make it an opportunity for the expression of imagination and to allow each person to contemplate the numeric world like a vast playing field for creation and invention, breaking down the old borders. 11 projets en finale
Xavier Couture
La nouvelle vague transmedia
Nous avons la conviction que d’ici 5 ans, la production audiovisuelle sera men majorité conçue plurimedia : une série TV, un film, un documentaire trouvera un écho sur Internet ou sur le Mobile. Préparez-vous, la vague transmedia va déferler sur tous vos écrans !
Le transmedia est à la conjonction de deux phénomènes :
une évolution des usages : les spectateurs combinent les écrans pour consommer du contenu. Aujourd’hui plus d’1 millions d’utilisateurs Orange visionnent de la vidéo sur mobile chaque mois. On voit apparaître des comportements de “multitasking” avec une activation simultanée des écrans; les nouvelles technologies rencontrent des routines pratiquées depuis les débuts de la télévision : Grace à Twitter on commente des émissions comme la Nouvelle Star ou Koh-Lanta en prolongeant le traditionnel commentaire en famille ou devant la machine à café !
la diversification des réseaux de diffusion : elle représente une opportunité majeure pour les créateurs d’enrichir leur univers narratif et de mettre en scène des formats inédits, immersifs et interactifs, aux croisements du jeu, de la fiction et de la réalité; cette diversification s’accompagne d’une démocratisation des moyens de production : une caméra HD qui permet de tourner un film projetable en salle ne coûte plus que 10 000 €.
La nouvelle vague transmedia n’est pas près de s’arrêter car elle répond à un besoin des diffuseurs de ramener les jeunes vers la télévision, il faut aller chercher cette audience là où elle est. Le transmedia, dans son essence, est un levier fort pour pour faire circuler le jeune public d’un media à l’autre.
Cette vague est nouvelle parce qu’elle fait émerger des métiers innovants : en langage transmedia, on parle de “story architect”, d’experience designer” et de “community manager” ! Elle induit une nouvelle manière de travailler, en équipes pluridisciplinaires, dans une transversalité qui brise les silos entre entités anciennes et nouveaux media. Cela induit un rapport de cocréation entre auteurs, producteurs et diffuseurs.
Orange a créé il y a plusieurs mois le Transmedia Lab, qui a donné naissance à un blog participatif sur le storytelling transmedia (www.transmedialab.org) et à une offre d’accompagnement tout au long de la chronologie d’un projet : formations professionnelles en ateliers, coaching de projets, outils permettant d’accéder aux réseaux Orange pour optimiser la diffusion de programmes transmedia. Orange a désormais une longueur d’avance dans l’élaboration et la mise en oeuvre d’un dispositif nativement transmedia.
La plateforme du Transmedia Lab est un espace d’échange qui s’inscrit dans une démarche ouverte à tous, elle fédère un réseau de compétences. Elle laisse place à la créativité et à l’émergence d’une nouvelle forme d’écriture servant à naviguer sur les différents écrans d’un consommateur. Dans cette optique de renforcer ses liens avec les producteurs français, le Groupe a aussi lancé les ateliers Orange de la création pour des projets innovants multi-écrans ainsi que la part numérique de la Fondation Beaumarchais, avec la SACD.
Nous sommes réunis pour relever le défi du transmedia, en faire une chance pour l’imagination et permettre à chacun de contempler le monde numérique comme un vaste terrain de jeu pour créer, inventer, en fracassant les vieilles frontières !
Xavier Couture
