Transmedia Storytelling

Transmedia is the technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats using digital technology, such as digital games, TV,blogs,twitter and other forms of social media and of course youtube.

From a production production point  it involves creating content, that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives,this is why facebook is always a platform in which transmedia storytelling is applied.A  transmedia production will develop the stories across multiple channels, which also have to be unique pieces of content, they must always have to be linked together and be in narrative sync with each other.

With the popularity of the internet in the 1990’s lots of creatives began using this technology to tell stories through the platform, early examples became known as Alternative Reality Games (ARG), which took place in real life.A good example of this is the ‘The Beast’ an ARG which was created to promote the Steven Spielberg film A.I.:Artificial Intelligence.

‘The Beast’ ARG was a game set 16 years after the events in the film,it was all centred around a character called ‘Jeanine Salla’. 3 entry points to the ARG was created, A promo poster with the name of the character and the text ‘Sentient Machine Therapist’ hidden within the credits. One of the trailers encoded a telephone number in the promotional text,and if a player called this number and followed the instructions they would recieve an email from an unknown source, another entry point was a simple code stating ‘Evan Chan was murdered  Jeanine is the the key’

Googling the name would bring up several pages set in the fictional world of the game , while going through these you would find more information out about the events.

The game went on for twelve weeks, it consisted of thrity diverse in-game websites , contact with actors playing the characters and partipacted in anti-robot rallies in New York, Chicago and L.A.

More about “The Beast’ can be read about on 42entertainments website, the producers of the game:

http://www.42entertainment.com/beast.html