by Marc Guidoni , published on 21.07.2009

Here too, like in Annecy and Paris, transmedia was all the buzz.

First, a few encouraging words from France Television:

Patrice Duhamel, the CEO of the Group, addressed documentary film producers with these words:

“Content and transmedia, these are the areas on which you should focus. Show us new talents, new writers…

Our problem, which is a common one for all the big historical media, is to bring back the under 35/40 age group towards television now that they’ve been seduced by the new media…”

Pierre Block de Friberg, the Head of Documentaries for France 5, also addressed the producers:

“We must systematically think of this global media approach from the start for all documentaries, and we will finance the surplus linked to global media. We’ve created wikidocs to complement the broadcast of certain films. The traffic they are generating is taking off. In addition, extras are created for special occasions: bonuses, chats, additional programs…”

The 2009 Sunny Side had also organized a professional conference with an international panel of speakers on the question of transmedia in the documentary field.

Two surprising trends emerged:

• The first transmedia form that seems to have emerged in the last few months is the combination of a classic television documentary with a web documentary, which is put online at the same time or sometimes before the “classic” TV broadcast.
• Thanks to the improvement of networks, the experience of a webdoc is very close to what we could find in an offline audio-visual aid: from the CD Rom of the 90’s to the DVD Serious Game of today.

A few examples:

- Stanley and Livingstone universe: www.history.com/expedition/game

- Waterlife universe: http://waterlife.nfb.ca/

- BBC tools: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ and www.bbc.co.uk/bang/

- The Challenge (Honkytonk Films and Canal+). The webdoc stops in its narrative form the moment the television film begins. Let’s not forget that Honkytonk produced, in collaboration with the newspaper “Le Monde”, a beautiful web documentary entitled “Monde du Charbon” (“World of Coal”) about coalmines in China.

According to the speakers at the conference, here are some of the essential questions we should ask ourselves when creating transmedia universes, especially in the field of documentary:

- Who is my audience and through which media can I reach them?

- Which simultaneous actions is the audience ready to take (ex: watch linear TV and be connected to the Internet?)

- How to make the audience participate or simply give it the feeling that it’s participating?

- How to offer the audience a truly multi-screen experience?

- How to place the audience at the heart of the media design process of the transmedia universe?

You can see this entire fascinating debate in English on this page