You may have been walking down Queen Street in the past few weeks and seen an oddly conspicuous new diner at the corner of Queen and McCaul. Most likely the first thing you noticed was that, despite it being the middle of the day, this cafe is not open. As you examine the counter space, the cash register, and the interior decoration, you look in the fridges at the back and notice that they do not contain the requisite soft drinks, but intravenous bags full of blood. The cafe is, in fact, a vampire blood bar. The Uncle Sam looking down at you from the awning has fangs, accompanied by the words “CAPTURE HUMANS,” printed in big red capitals. It’s a scene from the new futuristic vampire movie Daybreakers, and if the promotional strategy worked, you should now be intrigued enough to see the film. Maybe you will even log onto the movie’s website and install the Facebook app that allows you to join a blood bank and deposit the plasma of your friends. And, when you finally see the film, your experience will be coloured by these other media. This technique is known as “transmedia storytelling.”
Juxtaproductions, which started as a sign-painting company in the early ‘90s, owns what used to be a convenience store at Queen and McCaul. Since mid-2009, when they promoted Harry Potter with a live “meet Malfoy” event, they have used the space as a sort of three-dimensional ad. “There is a movement in film toward 3-D,” says Patrick Little, owner and founder of Juxtaproductions. “We’re just trying to make what we do 3-D too.”
Little’s first foray into 3-D marketing was in 2004, when Juxta handpainted a shuttle bus, filled it with wax mannequins, and had Paris Hilton ride in it down Queen Street promoting her film, House of Wax. Juxta’s other projects have included a New York City newsstand for Watchmen and a “Die-in,” in which a number of actors and interns played corpses in the street, for Friday the Thirteenth.
For the Daybreakers display, Juxtaproductions collaborated with the filmmakers to recreate a similar coffee shop to one in the film. They even used I.V. bags from the film itself and made exact copies of the fictional newspaper covers. The Spierig brothers, who wrote and directed the film, supplied artwork saying “FDA approved” for the coffee cups, napkins, menus, and signs.
When asked how he felt about contributing to the stories in the films he promotes, Little was modest. “It might be a little bodacious to claim that in this situation we are influencing the narrative, but we do add our own accent.”
So, what exactly is transmedia storytelling?
Henry Jenkins, who coined the term in his 2006 book Convergence Culture, describes transmedia storytelling as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.” This definition comes from Jenkins’ keynote speech at a conference at MIT this past November called Futures of Entertainment 4. (The keynote can be seen in its entirety at techtv.mit.edu/videos/4720.) Transmedia existed for years before the Internet, in fact one of Jenkins’ primary examples is the worlds created around the origial Star Wars films. Nonetheless, the web makes this type of collaborative storytelling much easier because it brings all the delivery channels together. In the lecture, Jenkins highlights a couple of key aspects of transmedia: drillability vs spreadability, continuity vs multiplicity, immersion, extractability, and performance.
Jenkins used quotes from another prominent media theorist, Jason Mittell, to describe the dichotomy of drillability and spreadability: “Spreadable media encourage horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-term engagement. Drillable media typically engage for fewer people, but occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text’s complexities.” In practical terms, by paraphrasing Jenkins’ speech, I am “spreading” his idea. If you, the reader, are interested in what Jenkins has to say, you can “drill” deeper by watching the keynote yourself, reading Jenkins’ book, and following his blog (henryjenkins.org).
Transmedia focuses on both the continuous story of a central narrative and on a multiplicity of perspectives. The idea here is that through a number of different texts, a transmedia story can be retold from multiple points of view, adding depth to the narrative.
It is also an experience that relies on immersion, wherein the viewer enters the story, and extraction, wherein the viewer pulls elements of the story into the real world. To describe immersion, Jenkins quoted prominent Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke), saying, “Just as people wished to make pictures move, they also wished they could look inside a different world.” He went on to describe the panorama box, of which there are many at Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, where viewers stick their head in to look around and pretend to inhabit the world of the story. An extractable item might be a piece of technology for a sci-fi movie that is made as a nonfunctional real-world copy. The scene at Queen and McCaul is a combination of both.
“The story is just the beginning, what matters is the world. The world contains more stories than a single text can,” said Jenkins, turning his attention to L. Frank Baum who wrote The Wizard of Oz as well as 20 other Oz books over the span of as many years. Baum even gave guided tours of Oz through lectures with slides and film.
The world of a transmedia narrative is built, sometimes by one author and sometimes by many, through a serial of different media: one film can lead to a number of comic books, an animation special, a few video games, and a few more films, as in the case of The Matrix, the primary example of transmedia Jenkins highlights in Convergence Culture. Each individual text creates its own subjective view of the larger story.
Finally, performance is what makes transmedia an experience rather than a text because it encompasses fan activity. In performing interpretations of a story, members of the public shape what that story is. Jenkins uses the phenomenon of high schoolers performing songs from Glee on YouTube, but I prefer the Soulja Boy dance, which relies on the performances of fans from all areas of society coming together on YouTube.
So, what is the future of entertainment?
While transmedia can, of course, be a vehicle for marketing, it’s more importantly a template for narrative that can be infinitely adapted, even applied to nonfiction forms of storytelling such as documentary and journalism. One point of contention around transmedia is whether or not it can be more than just a marketing tool. Could it one day become a more integral part of storytelling? Will we see the ideal situation that Jenkins envisions: viewers and producers collaborating on building worlds? And does the incorporation of transmedia into more established forms of entertainment make a difference?
Joanna Miles, VP of Marketing at Maple Pictures, the distribution company for Daybreakers in Canada, describes the installation at Queen and McCaul as an overwhelming success. The installation included one live event, in which actors dressed up to look like vampire baristas gave out free passes, water bottles, and temporary tattoos. Says Miles, “We tried to make it more than just handing out passes in an empty location. We actually had some live, undead people in the room with them.” This took place the Wednesday before opening weekend, and Miles tells me that the Scotiabank Theatre down the street was number two in North America for ticket sales on opening weekend.
At Futures of Entertainment, some of Jenkins’ ideas were met with skepticism. During a seminar focused on quantifying usership, Jack Wakshlag, Chief Research Officer of Turner Broadcasting (owners of CNN, Cartoon Network, and a number of American cable channels) made some serious waves by claiming, in a room full of eager tech geeks, that the average Internet user watches three hours of online video every month, while the average person in North America watches 35 hours of traditional TV each week. The discomfort in the audience was audible: amid hushed insults you could hear the tweeting of a hundred iPhones. Wakshlag also said that the data on online media is decades behind what it should be for proper business research. “We don’t have anything to measure transmedia except what people say. And if you believe what people say about transmedia, nobody watched the OJ trial and nobody watches wrestling. So we simply don’t believe what people say.”
“There are three things I must know: how many, how often, and how long? If I can get the answer for those three questions for online, TV, and radio, I’d be happy, but nobody’s doing it yet.” For Wakshlag, an executive at a major television company, the new experiences of transmedia are interesting experiments, but they can only augment the television experience. “People are watching more TV on their regular television sets, and that allows us to create a foundation to try all kinds of new and cool stuff. And that’s what we do. We just launched George Lopez online … And yes, we know that that show has got to succeed on television for George to make his money back … but we want to provide people that option and that opportunity. Do we think the numbers are going to be large? No. But we have to accept the fact that even though the numbers aren’t large it can still be successful because that’s where my most engaged customers go.” After enough back and forth with the audience, it was clear that Wakshlag was not just a relic of the TV generation caught in the past; in fact he had quite a bit of sobering and relevant information. As one Twitter user named @Malbonnington put it: “Jack Wakshlag is hilarious, a brilliant addition to the #foe4 panel; experience counts, he did his PhD before most of us born.”
As of the time of writing, Wakshlag is a bit more hopeful, as two marks of progress have emerged. “First, CIMM (Council on Innovative Media Measurement) has hired a director and posted draft proposals for multiplatform measurement research,” Wakshlag wrote in an email, “Second, looking at TV and Online, Nielsen is going to measure computers and TV sets together by August so that if someone watches a show on their laptop, it will count in the ratings.”
But more to the point, there are interactive diehards that see transmedia as holding the potential to be more than just a marketing ploy, but a type of experience in and of itself. Nobody wants an overt sales pitch in this day and age; they want to feel like they connected the dots themselves. Mike Monello, who started in the entertainment industry as a producer for The Blair Witch Project (the marketing of which included a large email list of fans that contributed to the project and eventually flooded the Sundance film festival with enough emails that they had no choice but to show the film), has a company called Campfire (campfirenyc.com). Their campaign for HBO’s True Blood mobilized hardcore horror fan communities on the web through various media including blogs, message boards, and through the distribution of fake samples of the synthetic blood that is so crucial to the show’s plot. Their website boasted to bringing in 6.6 million viewers for True Blood’s premiere.
In a panel on “Stories in a cross-platform world,” Monello said, “For me, transmedia is freedom as a storyteller. It started out for me as economic freedom, freedom from gatekeepers, and now it’s turned in to freedom to use media in ways that are unconstrained.” Next to him was Brian Clark, CEO of GMD studios, which Clark described as an “experimental media laboratory.” Both Monello and Clark came out of the indie film world and brought a less-money-more-story approach to the question of transmedia. “Every place where you’re seeing what the pressures are in a big network, for us as independents who can tell stories in any way we want, transmedia is the result of the freedom of palette, not necessarily the goal. I tend to use the phrase ‘experience design.’” Clark sees transmedia as a way that producers can work with their audiences throughout the production process.
The Art of the Heist, a collaboration between Clark’s GMD and Monello’s Campfire, was an “alternate reality game,” or ARG, designed to market Audi’s A3, a compact luxury car. They staged a theft of the only A3 in America, where two men busted a window in the middle of the night at an auto dealership in Manhattan, stole the car, and were briefly chased by security guards. After this, a series of ads searching for the car in conspicuous places (the North American International Auto Show, classified ads, TV) led interested individuals to Audi’s website, where they could join the search. The cast included real art-detectives, a fake video game executive, a fake blogger, and videos of the happenings of the game. Users were even invited to secret live events where they could join the cast of characters on missions if they went deep enough. The user involvement went way beyond that of a normal viewer or reader. Clark puts it like this: “For me, one of the things that’s very different about transmedia is that I know the audience as well as the audience knows me. If someone comes up to me and says ‘I saw one of your films,’ I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s nice. Thanks.’ If someone comes up to me and says they played Art of the Heist, I’m like, ‘What was your username??’ They’re putting so much of themselves out on the line.”
Of transmedia storytelling Clark says, “If you’re doing it right, it’s a highly iterative process. If it hasn’t launched publicly yet, it hasn’t happened.” This is a crucial principle, because it’s just as important for the creators to respond to the audience participation as it is for the audience to respond to what has been created. In the process of The Art of the Heist, there was a major event that caused the companies to completely change the direction of the story due to what happened in the real world. Clark says, “We had an event at Coachella where people were supposed to break into a car and steal something from the car and when the car got delivered, [the deliverers] didn’t unlock it. So the players literally uploaded signs, pictures of them with the car with a sign saying ‘We were here, where were you?’ The solution we ended up coming up with was re-writing the villain. We came back to the client and said ‘OK—that’s not the bad guy anymore. This other guy over here is the bad guy, this minor character. Why? Because that’s who picked up the car and locked the door.’ You have to take that event and fold it back in to the narrative that you want to tell. And I think in most cases the narrative is much richer because of that. It feels more breathing, more living, more improvisational.”
As far as metrics of success go, Clark asks, “Did you live to make another piece after this?” Monello simply asks, “Do you have fans? I think that’s, ultimately, as a storyteller, the metric.” While it may not be the most profitable sector of the entertainment industry, transmedia storytelling is ripe for creativity. If your goal is to engage people, the model for how to do so in unprecedented ways is emerging.
