What the Frey?

I must admit I had no idea what James Frey had been up to since the 'A Million Little Pieces' scandal (A book, which, in a fit of masochism, I actually read). I watched that poorly received film, 'I am number four', though it was so forgettable I barely remember it.  I didn't realise it was based on a book, let alone one by Frey. So I was quite surprised to come across this article, on Frey signing a seal with Fox, Google and HarperCollins for a transmedia YA series.

On reflection, I suppose one could make a case that the whole million little pieces, oprah-scolding awkwardness was actually an ill attempted piece of transmedia storytelling, mixing his 'life-story' as elaborated in interviews, etc with a novel. However, with that, the schlocky-ness of IAN4 and now reading about his fiction factory that doesn't credit authors, he leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I'm all for innovative transmedia projects that even team up with Google, such as this one announced, but I worry that Frey might not be the best person to help build positive concept of transmedia in the public consciousness. I will watch for the results with bated breath.

The Art of Immersion

On my recent holiday back to Australia, I had the opportunity to read Frank Rose's 'The Art of Immersion', and as was to be expected with anything that delves into transmedia, it had me completely absorbed. Rose doesn't offer any sort of blue-print or road map about how transmedia ought to work, but rather gives up a survey of many fascinating examples of transmedia from recent years.

Similar structurally to Henry Jenkin's 'Convergence Culture' which I read a couple of years back (it even goes over some of the same examples), it captures transmedia activities from the last few years. The pleasure from the book comes from the anecdotes and discussions with the producers of transmedia - I loved the insight into Howard Roffman's role in the creation of the Star Wars bible at Lucasfilm, the world that Cameron built for Avatar, or even the happiness factory for Coca-Cola. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the book for me was the discussion of brain function in relation to games and dopamine release - it provided a simple and useful understanding.

It would be nice to have a comprehensive survey listing all the transmedia narratives that have been attempted to date, perhaps with some sort of categorization for narrative that were intended to be transmedia, and those that have evolved to be such over time. There seem to be a lot of standard examples these books keep coming back too (Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Matrix, etc), and I'd find it useful to have a detailed map of the history of transmedia.

Ultimately though, what I'd love is a theory for how transmedia narratives should be created. Where does one start - with the characters or the universe? How do you break down the elements of the story, how do you determine which elements fit best in which media? What bits of the story do you give away for free (adverts) and what bits do you think the audience should pay for? There are so many questions that could be addressed by a good Theory of Transmedia Creation... I hope someone comes up with one soon!

Iron Man and a Comic Template

I recently watched the new Iron Man movie, efficiently titled 'Iron Man 2', and thought it was pretty enjoyable action romp. What intrigued me was that some of the criticism I had read before seeing it said it wasn't very good, as the plot was too complicated, the film was too 'wordy', etc. Most of these criticisms seemed disingenuous - the critics seemed to like Robert Downey Junior's performance, but deemed the story too 'complex' for an action movie audience. Not surprisingly, it has done very well at the box office, and the story really isn't that complex, it's just that it has a lot of characters, some of whom are minor and are clearly being set up as cross-overs with other productions within the Marvel universe. This is primarily where the criticism of complexity came from; in old world thinking, crossovers equal tacky franchising and are therefore 'bad'.

This of course got me thinking about transmedia. I enjoyed the introduction of these minor characters in Iron Man that may have screen time in their own films or others coming up, and when I got home afterwards I immediately looked up the characters and their back stories. I came across the very useful site SuperHeroDB,  where you can find a biographical history of comic book characters, including which books they have been in and which other characters they have a history with. It's all interlinked, so I had fun clicking through different characters back stories as they related to each other. Comics have a long history of not locking characters into a single narrative. There is a well understood ethos of character and narrative overlap in the comic community, and it happily crosses into other mediums, like tv and film.

When Alex Leavitt asked 'Where Is Our Transmedia Mozart?', he questioned from what discipline the first great transmedia creator would emerge, and bucked against the automatic assumption is would be from film. While a diverse technical understanding is needed in film, and thus it would seem they are suited to create work across a variety of mediums, film is still very much about linear narrative. I think comic authors, with their flexible narratives that cross and overlap but can also be enjoyed individually, and their combination of both textual and visual narrative skill, are more poised to be our transmedia mozarts. The 'classic' transmedia example, The Matrix, was produced by a couple of comic book geeks, and of course comics were an essential part of the canon. Marvel is currently trying to develop it's universe of characters in much the same way as Disney, with an intelligent eye towards franchising and product overlap, and I can only hope that in the process they might produce some of the first truly great transmedia stories.