As I discussed in my previous article, the adoption of next-gen VR (ie VR 2016) is being led by the video-gaming community, and as such, has a good chance of becoming widely accepted in the vibrant and prosperous gaming industry. On the shirttails of widespread VR gaming adoption, other nascent use-cases are clinging on for dear life in the hope of riding the wave to fame and fortune – education, journalism, advertising, narrative and of course porn, to name but a few. But in the haste to label all things as part of the VR ‘brand’ we’re in great danger of diluting the message and trying to make it appear to be ‘all things to all people’. Doing so will end up reducing the potential awesomeness of PRESENCE to the lowest common denominator of ‘immersive’ and hence alienating the public who are expecting a lot more.

There are numerous HMDs (head mounted displays) in our VR Lab – Oculus, Vive, Samsung, Zeiss and Google Cardboard. All offer a fun VR experience in their own way but none of them are perfect yet. They all offer a glimpse of the future, and assuming Moore’s Law continues to drive technical innovation and bring down unit prices, Jill and Joe Consumer will at some time try out the latest VR gadgets and perceive them as viable and enjoyable ‘platforms of experience’ for a variety of entertainment genres. The danger is that if Joe and Jill try on the current iteration of VR ‘platforms of experience’ with unrealistic expectations they will be sorely disappointed. Movies, TV, and Mobile all took years to mature into a satisfying and affordable experience for the majority of consumers and in many ways, with this current generation of VR technology (NAB 2016) we are still at Ground Zero, Year One. The current crop of VR headsets and cameras are miles ahead of anything we’ve had before but we still have a long way to go before the technology is going to deliver on the full potential.

In the meantime, ‘experience platforms’ like HTC Vive with their concept of room-scale VR and interactivity, clearly show that the technology is already quite sophisticated and consumer friendly. And what room-scale VR also proves is the importance and power of PRESENCE – the ability to trick your brain into really believing that you are in that environment interacting with virtual objects. It doesn’t take long to get carried away in your Vive virtual world only to bang your body into some inanimate object you forgot was there. And with room-scale VR there is another pending battle looming large – which room do you sequester to make a safe environment for the total immersive virtual experience?

PRESENCE is the key to unlocking the power of VR. Without that neurological effect, the experience maybe amazing but it’s not VR. Transporting players and viewers into a make-believe world where the brain literally thinks it’s actually in that world is the real potential of VR. So the key to keeping VR real, is to not let the VR hype-stream currently swirling around the blogosphere detract us from the enormity of the task ahead and blow us off course as we journey into the unknown. As a certain Cristoforo Colombo was once heard to remark, “It’s just over the horizon isn’t it?”

In the spirit of the many intrepid explorers who have gone before me, I too shall be embarking on a journey of discovery this year. Armed only with my trusty 360-degree camera rig and a stereo mike, I shall set sail for NAB 2016 to interview the movers and shakers in the world of VR technology and content creation. My 360º reports from around NAB will be posted on ProVideo Coalition during NAB, so stay tuned and connect with us to see if this experiment in ‘immersive journalism’ will transport you to the amazing land of Las Vegas, where all your dreams come true – whether they’re real or not.

Recently, Mirada partnered with Headcase and ad agency Digital Kitchen to create an immersive VR experience to promote season two of FX’s hit horror drama “The Strain”. Mirada Technical Director Andrew Cochrane was intimately involved in that process, and we wanted to talk with him to find out more about the experience and what it means for more traditional media & entertainment professionals.

In the interview below, Andrews discusses how this technology influences storytelling, what the development process looks like, where someone interested in learning about VR should begin and plenty more.

ProVideo Coalition: The VR pipeline and capabilities at Mirada span immersive storytelling, incorporating 360º filming, spherical CG and visual effects, just to name a few. These things have the potential to completely change the way content creators approach storytelling, don’t they?

Andrew Cochrane: Yes, absolutely! We have a mantra that Mirada lives at the intersection of storytelling and technology, and everything we do embodies this. We believe very firmly that technology is the key to unlocking new ways to tell and experience stories, and we experiment with everything we can get our hands on. We try to push some new tech forward on every project, but not just for nerdy reasons, it’s because we want to be telling great stories and telling them in a completely new way. I think we are just at the very beginning of what is possible in VR, and we see a long exciting road ahead filled with endless experimentation and advancements.

With that in mind, how do you see these new approaches impacting an audience and their expectations?

Most people experiencing VR right now are experiencing it for the very first time. Their expectations vary wildly, and there is a big difference between someone who works in VR creation and a member of the general public. We aim for the general public, so we’re very careful in how the story starts and ends, and how we present the “rules” of each experience, and making sure that they are able to enjoy it without spending half the time wondering “what am I supposed to be doing?”

As VR literacy increases in the viewing public, we are going to be able to be a little more aggressive with our narratives and make some bigger leaps, but for now we are introducing the medium as much as we are advancing storytelling in it, so we are very focused on making sure that a novice viewer does not get overwhelmed or lost.

How do you see mobile phones being part of this experience?

VR is extremely exciting, and there is a lot of incredible hardware just over the horizon that is going to fundamentally change the types of stories we can tell and the ways that audiences will experience them. BUT we are very pragmatic about reality vs. promise.

Right now, Cardboard (mobile phone + cheap headset) is the only way that real, normal people can experience VR. There are GearVR’s in the world but not hundreds of thousands, and there are installations at events but not everyone gets to go to CES or Comic-Con et al. So for us, mobile is the only type of VR that actually exists as a viable consumer-ready experience. We think that it is going to be the case well into 2016, as the console and PC-based systems are going to take a while to reach any kind of volume to be a mainstream medium. If you want a lot of people to see your content, mobile is the only way to go right now.

Is the software and hardware you’re using technology that media & entertainment professionals will be familiar with?

The processes are very familiar to traditional media creation, but the tools and the under-the-hood pipeline are not. We can shoot, edit, conform, color, do CG and VFX and cleanup and make matte paintings and do sound design… all the capabilities we have in making a commercial or a film or music video are all there, and the terminology is the same for those working with us. But the science of making stereo spherical video is certainly a foreign one, and it is one that requires a new “set of eyes” – a new way of thinking and viewing and making creative decisions. We try to keep the technical under the hood and out of the way so that we can work with our brand, agency, network, and studio collaborators on ground that is comfortable and familiar to them, and to help them navigate the parts that are new and unfamiliar so they can make informed decisions and feel confident that they will get the result they are hoping for.

Let’s talk about one of your more recent projects. How did the idea to create an immersive VR experience to promote season two of FX’s hit horror drama “The Strain” come about?

The initial idea came from FX, as they wanted to create something big at Comic-Con to get fans excited about the start of Season 2. They knew that they wanted to try to do something in VR so they needed an experience developed to hit those goals.

We worked closely with Headcase to refine the initial approach to make sure that the viewer was fully immersed and felt like an active participant in the experience, which included the addition of subjective effects to simulate being injured / drugged as the story starts. FX knew that the best way to grab fans is to make them feel included, and nothing accomplishes that better than a first-person experience, especially a VR story like this.

What do the initial stages of a project like this look like? In terms of concepts and how the creative ideas come together, is it similar to the initial stages of a film or TV project?

In a lot of ways, this project followed a familiar development process for anyone who creates filmed content. There was a script, pre-production, location scouting, camera prep… all the normal stages. But of course, since the camera is an array of 17 lenses that can see in every direction, and the viewer is going to see it in a VR headset, there were a lot of narrative and technical considerations that you don’t normally have to worry about when filming something.

Locations were selected based on what would help tell the desired story while staying inside the technical constraints of such a shoot. We knew what would work, so it was a matter of staging everything so that lights could be hidden, camera motion was not hindered, and production design was able to properly dress the enormous warehouse areas in every direction. And of course actors need to be taught how to perform with this kind of camera array – where to look, how to move around it, when to address the camera and when to ignore it. All of these are lessons that we learned in our early experimentations over the last few years, and now we get to put them in motion on our productions.

Hearing that you actually disabled the touchpad to prevent viewers from accidentally pausing the video almost seems invasive…but it’s all about creating an experience, isn’t it?

I don’t think it’s invasive for one simple reason : 99.999…% of the Earth’s population don’t know that there even is a touchpad on a GearVR, and those who do know have often accidentally hit it while trying to adjust the headset!

We have shown thousands of people VR for the first time, in various headsets, and the decision to add external sync (with confirmation via the flashing LED on the phone) and to disable the touchpad came from the common pain points we have seen in introducing this medium to someone new: they never know how to control it. So we moved the tech out of the way and made it so that the experience remotely starts when everyone is ready, and there is no way to accidentally pause or break it. Sync was also extremely important for the “4D” elements like the rumble packs in each seat, so we did everything to make sure that the whole experience was perfect and there was no “how do I use this?” uncertainty for the viewers.

Audiences are able to interact with each other inside the story, which is a totally new experience for them. What kind of feedback have you seen around that?

Putting multiple headsets in sync adds a fascinating communal aspect to VR. You can hear your friends reacting to the same things you are reacting, and the crowd mind definitely amplifies your own reactions. Haunted houses are always better in small groups, and this experience absolutely benefited from the same human reactions that make that true.

While this kind of experience is currently difficult to accomplish (it is rare that 6 GearVR owners with the same apps ever gather in one location), we foresee communal and social VR as having an important place in the pantheon of great experiences yet to be created. Humans are social animals, and bringing them together to share a VR experience is going to be the key to realizing the full potential of the VR medium.

I’m always reading reports about how this technology is going to be the next billion-dollar industry. Is that kind of talk an exaggeration, or putting the cart before the horse? Or is it the reality that we all need to get behind?

We don’t have a crystal ball, but we do have a good handle on some of the facts: virtual reality is really fun, most people want to do more VR once they experience it, and it is a new medium with a lot of room to grow that offers content creators very exciting new ways to create. Unlike stereo 3DTV or smell-o-vision, this is something that people actually want, that they actively seek out, and it appeals to anyone who enjoys film, TV, commercial, music video, video game, web, and live interactive or immersive experiences… that’s a massive potential user base and I cannot believe that it will not be a multi-billion dollar industry over the next few years.

As a content creator, what’s the most exciting thing to you about VR immersive storytelling?

We use the term “world building” a lot in film and other traditional mediums, but I often find that term to be a little bit of hyperbole. VR is the first medium that I have been able to create in which genuinely creates a world that audiences can step into.

For me, this medium feels like the perfect combination of everything I have ever been interested in, some of which previously felt rather disconnected from each other. It takes my love of long take, fully practical, naturally acted cinema and adds my loves of high-tech immersive and interactive narrative. There’s even a huge element of improvisation and live event creation, which are all things that I have always loved but have rarely been able to mix with these other interests.

We often compare VR to a haunted house, and the stories we tell in it are more about user experience than they are about strict narrative, and that is incredibly exciting to me. I have always been more interested in having someone live through a 2hr zombie apocalypse than filming some characters doing it so you can live vicariously through their actions, and VR is finally a way to do that on a massive scale.

Where do you see this technology going in the next few years? Are movie theaters soon going to need headsets? Or will they be a requirement in the home?

I really don’t think we are going to see VR cinemas… VR arcades probably (at least I really hope so). The real power of VR is immersion and interaction, and sitting in a theater breaks that. I do think that social/communal VR experiences are going to have the strongest impact, but that requires hardware that is just not ready for consumers yet. So over the coming years we will go from mobile to room-scale VR, with hand and body/positional tracking. Not everyone is going to have a setup at home, they will be like big-screen TVs used to be, where groups of people will gather to try them out. The more inclusive VR becomes, the better. Think about how much Rock Band and Guitar Hero pushed console adoption – there was a few years’ span where you couldn’t go to a house party without someone busting out the guitars and drums. I think if we all do it right, VR can have that kind of impact, only with a much wider variety of experiences and thus longevity and appeal.

What would you tell a content creator who is very interested in learning about how they can tell stories in a VR setting? Where should they begin?

The single most important thing is to throw out everything you know. You’ll need it later, but at first, you need to approach VR as a new medium with its own rules. To really create you need to understand what is possible, and understand how it works (at least in a top-level sense). You can go rent a GoPro ball and start learning how to shoot or you can grab a free copy of Unity or Unreal and start learning how to create interactive VR apps. No matter what, someone who wants to create in VR is going to need to learn some new tools, and get familiar with terms like stitching, parallax, stereo spherical, coding, and a whole slew of brand new technologies. You need to study film, games, interactive and immersive mediums like interactive theater, get a basic familiarity with Android and iOS and soon PC software development, and learn how to code on at least a basic level. The tools are brand new, and the skill-sets are just starting to come together, but the future of virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality are going to rely on a new type of creator that is in very short supply currently.

A Recap

The market idea I wanted to test with crowdfunding was whether readers would like to go deeper into a story character’s mind to learn facts or skills like music or English. Non-linear narrative, you might call it. Based on feedback before the campaign, it seemed like it was a good idea, but two questions I wanted to answer were: ‘had we packaged this core idea right, or does it need work; and if it needs an iteration or three, will it ever be sustainable?’

The reason I followed the partnership approach was principally driven by the fact that like many just starting out, my community was nearly entirely comprised of people who knew me personally. Making things tricky in terms of gaining public interest was the fact that our untested concept relied on unknown characters, which, as you’ll know from the publishing and movie world, is a tougher sell than using familiar characters or products. The really big hurdle, however, involved reaching a paying public in the high-end story app market, which presently is not very big and may never offer a return.

Answering this cheaply was why I put the idea and starting visuals on Indiegogo, where, with the correct preparation, any exposure we gained through the campaign would not be lost even if we didn’t reach the tipping point. In fact, the effort would actually work towards building awareness of the fledgling animation and storytelling company behind the idea. Did the approach work? Let’s see:

• SEO keyword-rich interview in leading international platform within key B2B market
• Interview in national government-run site frequently visited by firms and students (a key source of future high-end B2B demand and supply)
• Nomination in inaugural state crowdfunding prize
• An offer for incubation space
• Links from well-ranked media supporters in Australia, Germany, US, the Netherlands and Mexico
• A regular blog in PVC ; )

Did we reach a key multiplier with this approach and exposure? No. And I have a good idea why, but first I’ll explain how the first three were achieved, as a specific approach was required for these to occur.

Platforming

I explained our partnering approach in detail in my earlier post, but in summary, it firstly involves collecting funds before you start your campaign so that the first reach goal is transparently underwritten. You then use the reach goal concept to state what you are actually seeking. The upside with this approach is that it reduces risk in the eyes of potential partners, thereby increasing the likelihood that they give you platform time (either an interview or a link etc). That said, the reach goal concept is not hard wired into the platform code at present, and many potential backers will only look at the little green bar and the percentage. Those actually interested in your concept will read on and/or play the video to see that you are taking this approach to guarantee a minimalist product. So if you have reached your key market and they want your idea to happen, this is probably not be an issue. Others, however, will likely move on.

The second step is that if you are given any platform time to promote your idea as a result of your partnering approach, you should find a way to link or mention those who have helped getting your idea towards the public eye. Highly-ranked platform time, particularly on sites where advertising cannot be bought, is extremely valuable to all involved, because it acts a vote of confidence for your idea (and those somehow connected to it). Those mentioned will more than likely be happy to refer to the interview in their own public communication, thereby broadening exposure further. In that sense you are very much like a Master or Mistress of Ceremonies while running a campaign. So enjoy the stage time, but make sure you hat tip those who helped make it happen.

Timing

Major events, whether industry fairs or holiday events, can be harnessed to increase chances of being featured, as the webmasters may be looking for content from those doing something different around the theme. These featurings can be referred to when making further interview requests. If you are very lucky, published interviews may also bring you to the eyes of innovation prize nominees, as happened with us. The nomination leaves us in an interesting situation. Voting for the prize will occur after our campaign has finished, and feedback through the campaign suggests we really do need a prototype to show what’s envisioned. Responding to this feedback, one week into the campaign I added a diagram and an extra shorter video. But this is not the same as a prototype, which enables people to more clearly see the idea as being part of their own lives.

Running Successive Campaigns till you get it right?

Here I tip my hat to Etienne Garbugli. During a chat after a talk he gave, Etienne made the point that the idea from the days of print that “once something is done and printed, it’s done” no longer stands true in the digital age. Today, iteration is the name of the game. So there really is nothing wrong with going back, repackaging the core idea and pitching again. The question is whether investing in a prototype and makeover for a second pitch will help us reach the tipping point and therefore the screens of those who would be interested in our product. That’s a judgement call in an uncertain market. But let’s say feedback post-campaign suggests a second campaign, what would I do differently this time around?

Setting up for a campaign based on organic sharing

The partner approach we took for this campaign is really only suited to those unknown creators looking to build awareness to help test a new idea, and, as a flow on from this, to build exposure of the startup or creator behind the idea. It doesn’t suit those working with a little public exposure already, or those who may not need to leverage the exposure. Next time I would look at focusing solely on building organic sharing. A lot of good advice has already been written about this approach, but the best summary I have found so far comes from Jeff Hays. Instead of paraphrasing, I’ll just point you in his direction so you can get a full picture

In our case, here is what I’d do:

• create and test a basic prototype/screening with people in advance
• show users engaging with the prototype or screening in the pitch video
• if you can use familiar characters or products as a vehicle or reference for your idea, it will be easier. But if you want to introduce your own characters, consider using a familiar spokesperson. Rik Mayall, my all time favourite actor and comedy idol who gave me so much happiness as a kid, was to be that familiar figure after he agreed (and had apparently even loved) the script I sent his agent for the audio book of Tom Thorneval. Rik very sadly passed away two days before he was due to record in the studio
• during the campaign (and generally) provide Facebook fans with links to articles concerning the themes you deal with and that they will find useful (hat tip to Jere Suikkila here)
• consider a backer who would match the private donations up to a certain amount
• use more visuals to explain the concept to reduce word count by 50% (most of the talking will be done by the prototype anyway)
• create a list from personal contacts acquired in the past and during the campaign, and email twice before campaign starts
• use this list to find out what potential backers might like as a perk/reward – perhaps it has nothing to do with the product you are aiming to make!
• Remember that these days, everyone is a publisher – even you. So consider filming short interviews of others in your local industry. Make the theme one that will benefit others interested in the industry e.g. ‘how to make hardware less hard’. This will give you content for your social media that interviewees will send their networks to check out, while also giving your own fans a break from your spamming : ) You also build your network this way (hat tip to the senic.de boys for that one).

And that’s it. To finish, voting for Addison’s Tales will take place on this website between November 1 and 14, 2014*. If you like the idea, please give it a vote. I wish you the very best with your own crowdfunding project.

*Voters may have to scroll down to see the Addison’s Tales entry – then they can click on the heart next to it

The Fellini film 8½ is perhaps one of the best films about the anxiety and creative crisis of making a film. In the 50 years since the film was made, the challenges faced by anyone trying to produce a film or television program have only increased. Creative issues aside, there are a lot of new issues. Technology has certainly become a dominate one. New technologies appear on a regular basis that promise to make your film or television production both easier and less expensive. What those promises don’t reveal is the anxiety from the new complexity and problems created by those technologies.  To solve that problem you need to know how to ask the right questions about new technology. Once you know the needs of your production you can start asking the right questions about how a new technology is going to help you finish the job.

The problems of dealing with new technology become obvious when you sit down and start to plan out a film or television production. All the old questions that plagued Fellini’s protagonist are still there but there are a lot of new questions that need to be answered. Technology provides a huge list of options for pre and post-production as well as distribution. It becomes challenging when you start to ask “What technology resources do I need?” and then balance that with “What resources can I remove to simplify the process of making my film?”. These are just two questions and you’re going to need to ask a lot of them before you can finally feel comfortable with your technology choices.

The correct questions come from anticipating your problems before they happen. This talent comes from a natural intuition about what issues might come up during production but you also need the ability to pay attention to the things happening around you. In terms of technology this means that you are always maintaining your technology literacy in a field that changes weekly. You need to stay current so you can anticipate which technologies are going to make your life simpler. You also need to know what additional problems are going to be created by using that technology. Staying current means asking the right questions when new technologies appear. 

This chapter is a case study of the kinds of questions that were used to investigate how the new technology of distributed databases is going to impact media production. It isn’t really a list of standard questions to evaluate a new technology, those don’t exist. It is an inquiry that tries to figure out why the new technology might be relevant to film and television producers. The answers are there to deal with one simple question, “Is this going to make my life easier in making this film/ television project?”.

Although most people don’t think about databases, they are usually the backbone for the production pipeline and distribution of any digital creative property. They usually operate transparently in the background but there are some changes in the database technology, specifically distributed databases that are going to change the way media production does business. I sat down with Frank Huerta, the CEO and Co-founder of TransLattice, and his team to talk about the disruption and opportunities that are going to come in the media production space with distributed databases. 

What story are you telling people in the Entertainment space about what technology can do and what you think the role of distributed databases is going to be?

The world is global and not centralized. The world is getting data and moving data to various locations throughout. The world itself is going to move towards a distributed database concept. With our distributed database [TransLattice] we’re going to allow people to work and interact with content in a completely new way. With a distributed database you have the ability to have database nodes deployed in multiple geographies, close to the users, both on premise and in the cloud, and it works as one single unified database. We can then move the data closer to where the users are accessing it. That helps reduce latency and the whole system keeps track of all its transactions that are happening in real time. It will also provide additional redundancy that you couldn’t get before, that you can’t get with current systems easily because we can actually make the data redundant in multiple locations very easily. We can also localize data, we can say ‘we don’t want this data to be located in China’ and I want this data to be in the cloud or in India or wherever. We see similar problems storing and syncing data in media production. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to store data or you’re trying to keep people in sync across locations or across platforms.  You’ve got the same kinds of problems with keeping the data in sync.

I’m looking at the range of potential uses for this technology. I’ve been looking at the production side but you’re talking about the distribution side as well.

Absolutely, we have another customer that uses TransLattice to handle their subscriptions to their assets and also keep track of their gamers who are playing. They keep track of everything that is related to the subscriptions and the usage across all of their various assets, whether it is their film assets or their games or other things that are related to their properties. So we can connect games, movies and other forms of entertainment together into one unique database. Right now a lot of that stuff is siloed in multiple individual databases. We can now combine them into one and have the running in multiple locations and on multiple platforms.

What would you tell film, television or transmedia producers are the top three technology issues that they need to be aware of right now?

I think one is production workflow. I think the second is going to be protecting assets and making sure things don’t fail in whatever business you’re running. So, for example if you have a website you need to have multiple levels of redundancy, active redundancy going on. The third is really keeping track of data in certain locations, you need to be able to place data in certain locations. For example, you might not want to have data leave the United States, you may only want to have data located in certain places and that is very unique to distributed databases. I’ll add a fourth, as you’re adding new capacity around the world, for example, with joint ventures in various countries like in Russia, China and India, how do you expand your business globally easily so that you’re still writing on one data footprint?

There is a lot of hype around analytics and big data, how do you think that it is going to impact the entertainment industry and why do you think people should be paying attention to that?

A lot of what’s been done with big data is in the analytics area where you’re processing stuff for a couple of days and seeing if you can find trends in structured, non-structured data, stuff like that and I think that’s useful. I think you might be able to find trends in processing and programming and things like that. We’re using distributed databases to focus on the transactional side of things so we’re querying the data with various types of questions like ‘hey I want to see what happened on this day with this type of film and this type of animation, this type of game, whatever, and see if I can correlate that with traditional OLTP (online transaction processing), basically it simplifies transactions between systems such as banking or internet shopping]. In the past 5 to 7 years you’ve seen a lot of work on the analytics side of transactional data and a lot of people doing things like looking for a needle in a haystack on various types of things and trends. We’re using distributed databases to try to upset that traditional core business function of transactions that haven’t really had any disruption in 25 years. People have tried to do this distributed database before and failed and we’ve made a major technological leap to do this. So can handle large datasets, we can actually reduce the workload you have to do with all of the analytics because we can actually process a lot of stuff locally, in various regions, before it has to be sent off for analytics processing. We can make it more efficient.

What do you think is coming? What is the next big thing that technology is going to do for the industry?   

There are some clear trends in IT that are happening. One is that people need to expand their businesses geographically. That might be within their own city, within their own country or throughout the world. There will be partnerships and business arrangements that need to accommodate multiple places where you have data flowing in and out of, multiple partnerships,

Redundancy is certainly another one. You can’t have all these systems go down, we have so much riding on whatever we’re doing with our data now. With distributed databases you get unprecedented levels of redundancy, you can three or four copies of your data on each continent. If you suffer a global event like Hurricane Sandy or a major earthquake and it takes down an entire continent or even two continents you will be covered with multiple copies of your data throughout your distributed database system.

Another thing would be the protection of data from a privacy standpoint. In certain cases data can’t leave countries. You may not want your entertainment data, whatever it is that’s valuable, leaving a certain place. Distributed databases can help control that.

The last thing would be the complexity of media distribution. The distributed aspect for the entertainment industry is especially important now and into the future because all of a sudden you have more distribution endpoints than ever before because you’re delivering entertainment properties to individuals on their PCs, into their homes, into their cable networks and into their mobile phones. That would be very hard not to swamp traditional siloed systems. By putting your data closer to the edge of the network in nodes can really help optimize your end user experience.

There’s a lot of resistance in the film and television industry towards any kind of change. What are your perspectives on how change is going to happen within that industry? What kind of messaging and value propositions are going to need to be in place before people start embracing new technology like distributed databases?

TransLattice is in a lot of industries that are resistance to change. You really have to bring a strong value to the customer, especially as a smaller tech start-up. We hope to be able to let people expand their business; bring additional money in with our technology. Some obvious points are about providing redundancy and assurance that your site doesn’t go down and cost you a lot of money. We think our value proposition is a dramatic improvement over what you can get today with current technologies. We’re 50 to 70% less expensive than the big vendors with a higher level of redundancy and better response time.

The interview provides some new ideas along with some new challenges. The technology of distributed databases has the potential to be very disruptive, certainly in terms of distribution and production. The evolution of new workflows will happen and the transition will be guided by the ways that are recognized as most effective and least expensive.

Here are 4 easy steps to Transmedia Screenwriting:

1. 1) Create a ‘Story World.
2. 2) Create ‘Mystery Boxes’ within that world.
3. 3) Master the anatomy of the viral video.
4. 4) Shift your emphasis from storytelling to story making

1. CREATE A STORY WORLD

“The Periodic Table of Storytelling” reveals the elements of telling a good story.  In the same way Dmitri Mendeleev designed the original periodic table – a graphic representation of all the basic building blocks of the universe – artist James Harris created a graphic representation of all the building blocks for a story universe: the Periodic Table of Storytelling.

Harris has taken all the tropes; archetypes and clichés found in movies, TV, comic books, and literature and synthesized them into an elegantly realized chart.

Of all these ‘story molecules’, the orphan model (the Star Wars molecule) has proven to be the most popular way to initiate a transmedia story world. In the states, Star Wars was considered one of the first and most influential transmedia story worlds. 

This model is often used by J.J. Abrams. Many, like Pont, talk at length about J.J.’s transmedia genius.

Here are some examples of the orphan model:

It doesn’t hurt to throw a love triangle in there too: like Hunger Games (page 8).

Once you have developed this model, begin placing mystery boxes all around. This will help your story world link out into other media platforms.

2. CREATE MYSTERY BOXES WITHIN THAT WORLD.

Pratten made a good chart showing the different directions these mystery boxes can take you in your story world.

Mystery Box is a term I’ve co-opted from the J.J. Abrams Ted Talk of the same name.

Each character in the orphan model has immeasurable opportunity for mystery boxes. Here are some examples:

• Who is the orphan’s father?
• Why is the villain bent on destruction?
• Why are the outcasts outcasts?
• What-all powers do the MacGuffin(s) hold? How many are there?

You do not have to even ‘know’ the possibilities of opening the ‘box.’ Eszterhas says, “If you’re writing a mystery, let it be a mystery to you too” (169) and Paul Haggis always tries to write towards questions instead of answers. 

Below are some examples of boxes and their media platforms for LOST:

• Mystery Box – The Statue: (Lostpedia) Message Boards
• Mystery Box – Oceanic 815: (Find 815) ARG
• Mystery Box – Hanso Foundation: (The Lost Experience) ARG
• Mystery Box – Gary Troup: Tie-in Novel (Bad Twin)
• Mystery Box  – (Lost Missing Pieces) Mobisodes

3. MASTER THE ANATOMY OF THE VIRAL VIDEO.

Writer and analyst Kevin Allocca works with YouTube Trends, a spot for tracking the latest viral videos. He connects them to the communities that make the parodies, tributes and reply videos within the ‘viral planets’ of YouTube’s universe.

He’s composed a pretty simple formula worth mastering (for a scene in your show or ads for your story): 

Tastemakers + Community Remixing + the Unexpected = Viral Video.  

Tastemakers are mostly celebrities, talk show hosts, and news anchors (spend some PR bucks!). Community remixing refers to the fans on the various media outlets: it has to be easy to remix and share. The Unexpected means the story/scene/video itself has to have an M. Night Shyamalan twist in it.

I do not have the data yet but the people at Mullen who made a viral mother’s day video pointed some things out about their video brake down. They introduced a twist 45 seconds in and then their M. Night moment was 3 minutes in. I would suggest making the videos 3-4 minutes and doing the same.

4-minute videos share the best on social sites.

Below are some viral examples from LOST:

• The ‘we have to go back!’ scene
• The ‘who’s in the coffin?’ scene
• The ‘not Penny’s boat’ scene (probably the best)

4. SHIFT YOUR EMPHASIS FROM STORYTELLING TO STORY MAKING.

Encourage fan pages, real-time hashtag conversations with the characters, and wiki forums.  The audience members are the story makers and the audience has an audience.  The research also shows that 91% of viewers would feel compelled to tune in more often for things happening in real time. 

This is the ultimate shift in transmedia screenwriting: writing towards an open culture of crowd sourcing. This is what makes the periodic table so appealing; it is the result of audience collaboration.

As Lan Mochari points out, ‘the big problem with storytelling is it’s a one-way street’ with your script or brand doing all the talking.  Web 2.0 changed our world from ‘one to many’ broadcasting to a ‘many to many’ experience.

Transmedia screenwriting isn’t about you broadcasting your message to the masses with a digital media megaphone. It’s about story making, where as D. Berkowitz puts it, the script (or brand) narrative ‘facilitates and taps into the stories people are creating and sharing with each other.’

Dr. Chester Elijah Branch is a best-selling author and Transmedia Architect, teaching transmedia courses internationally. He studied digital and social media marketing at Inbound2014. His Doctorate is in Business and Leadership with a focus on transmedia consulting. The former President of Walt Disney Pictures endorsed his Transmedia Storytelling eBook as a ‘must have’ guide to transmedia storytelling.

But what if your fan-base is little more than a handful of people who know that you’ve ‘been working on something for a bit’?

Sadly, unless you have a physical prototype that you can show with pictures (it doesn’t even need to work, but it should make people think they’ll be cool by having it), you are going to have your work cut out reaching any more than those people who know you’ve been ‘working on something for a bit’ – regardless of the reward-based platform you’ve chosen. Big and small platforms alike are principally an attractive and easy way to present your idea with efficient fund collection and management systems tied in. They might help you raise some unexpected funds from people you don’t know, but this will only occur once you’ve worked seriously hard for the platform. In short, your idea will probably not only tank, it will tank quicker than you can say Panzer.

Crowdfunding for exposure or funds?

The good news for non-tech creators who find themselves in the ‘unknown’ category described above is that there is something that all crowdfunding platforms can provide if you plan appropriately: A six week event that can bring you very affordable and potentially wide exposure. This is also the case if you already have a working prototype and want to market-test an idea before going full scale with it. Today’s post is principally about generating this exposure through reward-based platforms, partnering, and preparing failsafes if things aren’t where you’d like them to be. If you are successful in reaching a certain level of exposure, let’s call it the tipping point, you may see funds from outside your circle start to come in. Because our campaign is happening now, you can see for yourself whether the suggestions I make have worked on the final day of the campaign in terms of your desired objective – funding or exposure. Yes, I am warmly inviting you behind the scenes of a live crowdfunding campaign.

The Starting Situation

After focussing on the Addison’s Tales project for the last couple of years, I found myself in the ‘unknown entity’ position a week before our campaign launched on September 7. In a perfect world, I would have already alerted all those on my subscriber list a few times in advance to help ensure that 20% to 30% of my required funds would come through during the first few days. This is highly desirable to demonstrate early traction. Due to my focus on the product, however, my subscriber list consisted of me under the pseudonymous ‘Tester One’ and ‘Tester Two’, and a lovely teacher in Australia somewhere who probably thought she was subscribing to something else. A rounded average of 0 hits were being made to the company website, and our Facebook site was followed by 97% of people whom I either knew directly, indirectly or who had once wished me well.

Here’s the (very) low down:

So, how did we get that boost in hits on the day we began? Using Gimp, I managed to knock together a campaign image composed of excellent works from the 2D and 3D animators and post it on Facebook. Nothing groundbreaking, but I felt it to be clean and uncluttered, and it fitted within the ‘no more than 20% text requirement’ for boosted Facebook ads (600 x 315 pixels). The tip here is to ensure you prepare some really attractive visuals well in advance and make sure your accompanying text (typed into the ‘what have you been up to’ section) is no more than a sentence or two.

Soon after launching the campaign on Indiegogo I gave the post a $60 ‘boost’, targeting those I felt would respond best to our product. In the first day of the campaign, a Sunday when mothers in many countries are often home with their kids, it received around 1200 likes. Many of these likers did not visit the pitch page however, although many (roughly 80) did visit our Facebook page and like it – a fan increase of 55% in a day with a broader CPA of 5c. Incredible, I felt, until I saw that these likes were not converting into donations. Was it my fault for not activating the Paypal payment option thinking that I couldn’t accept $US donations to a Euro account? This after selecting Germany’s Indiegogo just for that purpose? Ahem …

Schoolboy Error 1: You can activate your Paypal account to receive the foreign currency you are collecting.

I quietly corrected that little d’oh on Monday. The good news was that many of my lost potential backers had nevertheless gone on to explore the company website, resulting in that first peak you can see above. Below is also a look at the Facebook figures:

Structuring your pitch and concept to aid partner search and acquisition

The first media well-wisher, PVC, came on board the following day, and you can read last Monday’s post here. I had already reached out to PVC to see if they would like to hear of my approach to digital storytelling and got the reply that the crowdfunding aspect would also be of interest, and also how we’d brought our social media partners on board. This approach boils down to 3 points:

1. Who’s involved in the production of your idea
2. Who’ll like it
3. Who’ll like you

Under the first point, there will be quite a list you should be able to quickly determine. What software or tools do you use at each step and when moving between steps in the workflow? For example, we reached out to Wetransfer as we transfer files with this service. A discrete product placement at 2:02 in our pitch video shows our reliance on them. They also happened to fall into point two, since they have a strong art focus as well as being a fellow bootstrapped startup. We also use MuseScore to write our music, and again, because we are downstream in the supply chain and taking a fresh approach to stories and songs, we quickly found some affinity with them.

Point two can include local innovation centres, any potential multipliers (in our case teachers) and the organisations who will want to reach your multipliers and final audience. The point here is to explain how they gain: can they be featured in the video, pitch page, or in your project somehow, can they be early reviewers, audience, guests etc? You can try journalists here too but expect to send one or two follow ups during the campaign to receive a reply – they will often only come on board either after or towards the end of the campaign once they see it is of public interest. Instead, focus on tapping the powers of your partners’ social media initially, as this really is the modern broadsheet, and what you can offer your partners in return. For this you can even consider writing helpful pieces for accomplished online magazines with a specialised focus in your field ; )

The final point can include alumni, clubs, organisations and individuals associated with any competitions you may have won. Repeat this thinking for every person attached to your team.

Implementing failsafes prior to the campaign

This is possibly the most important factor for unknown creators who take the partnership approach. There is no reason for your crowdfunding campaign to tank, especially if you are using it to build awareness or market test or are using the flexible funding option where you pay higher commission if you don’t reach your first funding goal. The internet is both permanent and brief – permanent in that all casual observers will always see if your campaign succeeded or failed by glancing at the final figure; brief in that they rarely care to look any further to find out why. This means structuring your first reach goal to be a minimalist version of your bigger idea, or a component thereof. You should be able to reach this goal yourself via planned injections if third party funds don’t reach the milestones you set in advance. This may involve either putting aside your own cash for the purpose, or calling on your close backers who believe in you and your idea to transfer funds to your account in advance.

But isn’t that what the fixed-model of reward-based crowdfunding is designed for, also known as ‘all of nothing’? Yes, but there is a psychological component that this can’t really address. Because why would anyone give you anything when it’s not clear your project is going to reach its first goal? In most cases, people don’t want their money back once they’ve given it – they want to see the project completed. This is one of the aspect of the reward-based crowdfunding that some equity-based platforms partially address by assessing concepts before they go live. Nevertheless, you can address it yourself by showing people you back your idea by transparently putting your own cash into your campaign to bring it back up to speed at regular points if funding levels aren’t where they should be. Like having ‘skin in the game’ if you will.

Some campaigners might prefer to do this using the anonymous donation option. They needn’t, because this is an opportunity to use the update function to show that you, an unknown doer/maker/entrepreneur with a cool idea, are willing to underwrite your own idea to guarantee at least its minimalist version gets to those early backers who took the risk to back you at the very start. You should then aim to have the first reach goal passed by the third week (earlier if you choose), working all the time on building your exposure, and leaving sufficient time to reach the goals you want to reach. The more media partners you have on board prior to your campaign the less likely you’ll have to take this step, as your funding will be ‘organic’, but it should nevertheless be planned for.

This approach won’t help you get more backers if you can’t reach the exposure tipping point, or if the idea still needs sharper customer/audience focus, but it does send a clear message that you’ve done your homework and you’re thinking of your early backers (who may in many cases also be your friends), those on your team and your partners. All your subsequent reach goals above your first reach goal should also be set out clearly on the pitch page at the start of the campaign. At the moment, adding stretch goals is written into the body text and not entered into fields, so new goals don’t automatically ‘open’ upon the attainment of the last. This may be addressed in time, but for the moment, don’t fall into the trap of thinking ‘if we get this amount, we’ll put the next reach goal up’. That shows a lack of planning and the suggestion that you don’t expect to reach the first goal. Remember, if you must invest your own cash, at the end of the campaign you get that investment back minus the commission and potentially fx fees, but that commission is what you are paying for the exposure, the platform itself, and the bonus chance to be featured in the platform’s newsletter (usually activated when about a third of funding goal is reached and if your idea impresses the powers that be who make the newsletter). If it’s funding you’re after, then growing this exposure to the tipping point is really your aim, bearing in mind that you can use the buzz as part of your wider, more traditional capital-raising endeavours.

Now for the caveat. I have not seen this transparent approach before and I cannot guarantee how your potential backers will perceive it, but I do feel it can bring you closer to point where you’ll know your main idea was at least seen for you to better gauge the extent of its audience potential. The reason I implemented it in our campaign was that in the months prior to the start, we reached out to a number of potential sponsors we respected. The response was always the same: ‘nice idea but make it happen first’. So we needed a way to keep the door open for those sponsors we wanted on board, and for whom we had spent time crafting individualised pitches just in case (in a perfect world) all our sponsorship packs got sold and the campaign was a success. From there it seemed that by making a completely obligation free down-payment on behalf of some sponsors in the form of a ‘corporate reservation’, we would also help ensure our campaign remained on track if we detected any early warning signs (in essence demarcating ourselves as an underwritten campaign and not a ‘naked’ one) and thereby be able to use the campaign itself to acquire further partners to increase exposure.

To find out more about the project, check out the video below or visit our Indiegogo page.

Addison’s Tales: The animated musical storyworld for mobile devices from Wivern Digital on Vimeo.

When the iPad first came out, I was intrigued by the storytelling possibilities of haptics and what role they would play in the works of future writers and content creators. I was also interested in seeing how the iPad would be used as a new storytelling canvas, and how long it would be until we saw hybrid concepts that were not film, game or book, or even a blend of the three, but something quite original that re-examined the connection between narrative and this exciting new medium.

Now, having spent the last 3 years actively exploring this question via music and animation through my work with Wivern Digital, an independent digital production house, I thought I would share some learnings. In doing so, I hope to prompt a discussion from other creators and directors who are also exploring this medium from different and innovative avenues.

Figuring out what we can capture and create is an ongoing process, and we can’t wait to see this project fully realized. To find out more about the project, check out the video below or visit our Indiegogo page.

Addison’s Tales: The animated musical storyworld for mobile devices from Wivern Digital on Vimeo.

In this first installment I will retrace undiscovered pioneer projects of Singaporean content creators.

As a culturally and socially engineered nation, Singapore is redefining itself on a regular basis. During the rapid society development of the past 50 years, adaptation of innovation and new technology happened almost instantly as Singaporeans embrace everything that brings the city state forward even faster.

For instance, Singaporean filmmakers have been heading the Stereoscopic 3D boom in Asia in 2010 and are currently pushing fast forward on content and production for the emerging VR wave ignited by Oculus Rift and similar experience enhancing technologies.

“Onward, Singapore”

It comes at no surprise that this “Majulah-culture” claims its collaterals, primarily, when it comes to artistic identity and cultural heritage. The ongoing struggle of creative definition is constantly prevalent. What is an inherently Singaporean story? What is a Singaporean storyteller’s artistic signature that would define and stand out outside the borders of the island nation?

When it comes to new media, and transmedia creation in particular, South East Asia has yet to leave a mark on the international stage. In fact, the common perception in Western countries is that practices of new story formats have not taken any roots within the region. However, cross platform and transmedia-like narratives have been around for years, especially in Singapore.  

I found early pioneer projects that took place parallel to the the first wave of transmedia success stories in the West. Although these projects were scarce in number and limited in scale, most were already backed by major brands and barely originated in academia.

Singapore’s media culture is very much based on the believe to get things working on a commercial level first. If they don’t fly instantly, resources are drained in order to diverted  them to the next best thing that is labeled innovation. But these tactics also come with a significant paradox, especially in the realm of new media. As shown below, there have been hugely successful commercial projects using elements of transmedia storytelling for brand building. Yet, as other agencies failed to replicate the success by bluntly copying the proof of concept approach, resources were routed back to maintain the status quo that serves traditional KPI arrangements.

There have been impressive pioneer projects in the past six years (this is as much as I can track back productions among my local peers). Only, none ignited a real “transmedia revolution” that disrupted the traditional structures of Singapore’s media industry to a critical mass point. Despite momentum projects simply failed to gain significant traction in the long run. This is commonly attributed to the comparatively small market size as well as the vast diversified nature of different local cultures, religions and media consumption habits.

“We’ve done that before.”

More than in the West, content creators not only struggle to educate the audience but also the industry stakeholders. Going beyond the buzzwords filled PowerPoint presentations has been proven significantly challenging as timelines are always set too short and financials only made available for quick fixes. The understanding that audience building requires its due diligence and cultivating an infrastructure is paramount fails to sync with corporate thinking models and long term gatekeeping license deals.

Thus, it is not so much a matter of “catching up” but rather to find the right properties and stories that resonate with a local audience as well as communicate the iterative opportunity windows for media stakeholders. “Hyperlocal” has been a center approach, but it bears the conundrum of not being able to translate abroad while causing censorship issues domestically.

Another challenge in defining Singaporean story culture for local content creators is the generally critical audience perception of everything that is produced for the home market. Despite a strong patriotic sense for national community and unity, local content always gets scrutinized and instantly compared to foreign production values.

“The Way we act is not the way we talk. The way Koreans act is the way they talk.”

Naturally, this applies primarily to dialog driven TV dramas. While Korean dramas are held as prime role model, maintaining a strong and devoted followership in Singapore, in-house dramas from the National Broadcaster are barely taken serious. Besides budget and production issues this circumstance is also rooted within a language acceptance issue. Free-to-air TV is not allowed to use local dialects of any sort, like Singlish. English language programs, in particular, have fallen under a harsh rejecting response as they are deemed contrived opposed to productions from the US or UK.

Imported stories always seem to gain more attention as the audience has a closer connection, whether this is rooted in ancestral heritage or simple pop culture affection. Addressing this situation with stories on a smallest common denominator strategy is increasingly destined to fail. In an age where viewing habits have seen radical change programs are no longer in tune with a population that is so diverse as this city’s ethnic melting pot.  

Once the notion of “One Ring To Rule Them All” is vanquished the market will open up to agile niche programming based on rapid story prototyping with the audience’s very own participation.
 

To understand the path Singaporean creators went in order to define local story culture, I collected in chronological order four highlight productions of the past six years. More to follow soon.

[2008] GPS film – Nine Lives
GPS Film is a location based mobile cinema experience that was developed by School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University assistant professor Scott Hessels and a group of his students lead by local filmmaker and transmedia pioneer Kenny Tan Seah Hiang. The project was supported by Nokia and users could experience a fragmented movie experience based on their own location by using GPS enabled phones or PDAs.

The narrative experience Tan created is title “Nine Lives” and revolves around a group of nine characters within a chase comedy. The characters interact with places the viewer travels through while watching. Developed as an open source project the entire concept already addresses Singapore’s fragmented urban structure by providing a responsive approach to storytelling.

Keep in mind, this was 2008, the dawn of the smartphone era. Video data on mobile phones was an expensive luxury and GPS enabled device penetration was only a fraction of what we see today. Despite developing a fully functional technological infrastructure during the past couple of years, this visionary type of storytelling has barely been touched upon. A circumstance that makes the introduction video below even more being ahead of its time.

Introduction video: http://vimeo.com/1434557
Trailer for Nine Lives: http://vimeo.com/1435129

[2008] Raffles Place Ghost
This 2008 produced marketing campaign for a Singaporean job portal went viral and even gained international attention. Centering around a supposedly found CCTV footage of a ghost appearing in an elevator after office hours the campaign’s strategy was to “own the concept of work life-balance”. Different to other marketing campaigns, Raffles Place Ghost had a specifically allocated budget for targeted content seeding. A virtue only few agencies maintain, even nowadays. The video was seeded in different online forums with the support of fictional characters searching for virtual clues. As the ghost video spread, online viewers began creating their own theories, sending in and posting self-generated content.

Case study video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKZMqVVJhjY

[2011] Terrorville
Terrorville was an interactive Game/Horror Film/Drama by Kenny Tan produced by Oak3 Films and Xtreme Productions. While navigating through the first couple of introductory episodes the audience could choose one of the main characters and follow his/her path to uncover a murder mystery in the Malaysian jungle.

Started in 2011, rolled out first in the Philippines in 2012, the online experience was expanded and ran until February 2013, concluding with a telemovie. Sadly, as most productions linked to local TV the content has been pulled after the scheduled running time.

However, you can trace back some steps with these links:
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/terrorville
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TerrorvilleTV/videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OEZ6w65AfQ

[2012]《96°C 咖啡》96°C Café
96̊⁰C Cafe was one of Mediacorp’s first projects created under the 360 Initiative banner. The executing Channel 8 is in general quite savvy when it comes to social media engagement with their audience and adopting new technology to their programming.

The series evolved around the titular fictional cafe and a love story. Functioning as prequel the story started out as an 8 part webseries, published on Xinmsn.com. After gaining popularity the show was adopted into a regular on-air drama series with 20 episodes. Additional content was delivered online including a full franchise package, blog written by one of the characters, songs to the show and lookbook to the actors.

Project page: http://entertainment.xin.msn.com/zh/96-cafe/default.aspx

For me, I always wanted to create a long-running series. ‘Dallas’, ‘ER’ or ‘CSI’ are examples of a successful long-running series and, in terms of longevity, they are what you are aiming for and the obvious benefit of this type of success is that you are gaining a sustained revenue stream. A transmedia approach allowed me to achieve that in the past with our series Sofia’s Diary, which was reversioned in more than 10 territories around the world, or, more recently, with Flatmates and Beat Girl. I see transmedia as a journey, where we start building a story and characters using digital platforms and social media engagement, then we extend it to multiple platforms, ending as a serialized TV Series or a Feature-length movie (or series of Movies).

All this needs to start with the story and proper character development and planning. Until I sat down to write Sofia’s Diary, back in 2003, there was no established format for transmedia storytelling. Looking back now, I can say that myself and my co-writing partner, Marta Gomes, had a lot of freedom in the process; a lot of freedom to learn, but freedom also to write what we thought would work on this new media.

We had no bible, no recognized format, and no guide (like the guide you would have, say, if you were writing a three-act play or a short story). At the time, we had one key tool in this learning process, because Sofia’s Diary had a large interactive element, we were day by day discovering what worked in transmedia writing based on the users’ feedback. If something didn’t work, the audience either complained or, worse, was unresponsive. Strong audience engagement and positive feedback were also, of course, helpful for us on this steep learning curve.

In transmedia storytelling, it’s important to remember that if you are going to achieve long-term success you have to plan long-term. Producers need to think about this transmedia journey and what this means is that when you are developing ideas, you have to map out exactly the type of platforms that are going to sustain the product for a long time. So, if you are going to have a long-running series, you really need to plan when you are going to expand and what media you are going to expand into. You will also need a base story and characters that will support hundreds of episodes.

When you are developing a transmedia bible, the first thing you do is write the entire story with all the elements, twists, character reactions and content snippets that will be distributed in all of the platforms. For instance, when we were producing Sofia’s Diary in the UK, we initially hired television screenwriters who had no transmedia experience. So, after they had written the storyline they were a little shocked when we took their scripts and literally tore them apart, divvying up the different story elements between the different media available. For example, a conversation that perhaps included a bit of comedy would go to the radio episode. An action-driven or a more visual scene would go to television. A monologue containing some private thoughts probably would go to a blog.

The question ‘what media should I chose?’ is closely linked to ‘how often should I use it?’ Ideally, there should be a sense that the content is always updating, that the story and your characters’ lives are constantly moving in parallel with the viewer’s life. In Sofia’s Diary, we wrote one episode per weekday, but there was always this sense created through blogs and social media sites that the characters were always there to update the audience with their perspective. Through all the different tools available, you can create an on-going conversation and engagement with the viewer.  Transmedia writing is always about engagement and interaction. 

On Television, most of the time you sit back and watch and, when it’s over, you forget about it and the viewer’s connection with the characters is gone. A transmedia show, however, needn’t be the end of the connection; instead, it is the start of the next part of the story. It works to re-engage the audience because, when the viewer goes to follow the story on social media or in digital platforms, they may get an opportunity to give their opinion or advice on a character’s latest dilemma. A crucial consequence of this method is that once they participate actively in the development of the show, the viewer is more likely to watch the broadcast or follow the new episodes.

Finally, it’s also important to remember that transmedia storytelling means that you have to tailor your content precisely to the different people who are consuming the show on different media. Remember, not everybody will watch everything, not everybody will participate and not everybody will follow the path you create to them, but for all these different audiences behaviors, the story needs to make sense and most importantly, characters need to be really engaging to make audiences come back for more content, whatever the media they choose.

Nuno Bernardo is the founder and CEO of TV, film and digital production company beActive. He is also an Emmy nominated writer-producer and the author of “The Producer’s Guide to Transmedia” and the upcoming “Transmedia 2.0” books. Find him on Twitter and Facebook.