Building this project has been as much about learning human behavior as it has been about creating the project itself. You can imagine how participants will react to your transmedia creation, but it is impossible to anticipate the entire realm of possible human response.
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When you think of fake people what do you think of? Mannequins? Blow-up dolls? Most of the people you remember from high school? People don’t expect to meet fake people. Just as people are often shocked to learn that the actors playing their favorite soap opera characters are people other than the character portrayed on the show. Makes me wonder how many get well soon letters Larry Hagman received after J.R. was shot.
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If there is one thought that has gone through my mind as we’ve been doing a test run of our project it is this: “Thank God we didn’t attempt anything more ambitious.”
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Marketing your transmedia project, especially when your transmedia project is essentially a marketing tool for a standard media piece, is a bit tricky. Our project is designed to be a content supplement to the existing work and to attract new and different audience to KOLT Run Creations while deepening their relationship with their base. The delicate balance is to call attention to the transmedia piece but not at the expense of overshadowing the play. This called for a combination of tactics that included KOLT’s standard marketing practices and some innovations.
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When we first set out on a transmedia project one of our biggest questions was how was it all going to work? The combination of so many possibilities, our central expertise of storytelling and content development, and our lack of expertise in technical html coding hacking superpowers, had us a little scared to say the least. Then one day by chance at a TransmediaSF Meetup, we were talking with Robert Pratten about our proposed endeavour, and he said, “Why don’t you use Conducttr?” We melted. Conducttr is the engine of our project. With Conducttr, we have parameters of the physical mechanisms of the story. Knowing what we could and could not do mechanically allowed us to shape our story using our strengths (storytelling and content creation) and not have to worry about how we were going to make them work. (We just had to figure out how to use Conducttr!) Needless to say we always practice, or strive to practice, the Keep It Simple Stupid philosophy which helps keep the bar low. Jumping over lower bars at first is better than jumping over high bars.....
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Once you have a good basic idea of your project concept, your parameters and limitations, you are ready to get into the detail. Start with the Story. That’s Robert Pratten (henceforth to be known on this blog as RP)’s advice. He also recommends starting with a strong character with a specific story arc. So we began by detailing out a comprehensive sketch of our main character, Alison Potts. It’s probably my acting background, but I could spend all day creating character minutia (IE, “The first album she bought was “Spice up your Life”, etc.), but John reined me in. We then plotted out Alison’s story into a 6-act scenario that would be experienced by the participants plus a back-story section that will transmitted through exposition like so:
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First, a little side note to anyone who’s following along, this blog is actually about 2 weeks behind where we actually are in the development process. It should catch up eventually, but if suggestions you make don’t make it into the project, it’s because we’re too far along to implement them. Your input is greatly appreciated so we can improve for the next one, so please keep it coming! On that note, we got an email from Robert Pratten in regards to a topic in my last post that I thought might be helpful to other transmedia experience designer/developers. I used the phrase “suspension of disbelief”, to describe why we chose not to include a social media element in our experience. Meaning that we did not want players entering the experience at different times to be pulled out of the storyworld by seeing repetitive, incongruous or spoiler tweets. Here’s what Robert had to say:
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The ultimate high concept we settled on is one story, told primarily through an ARG*, bookended by two live events and with a video to boot. The heroine of our story is a modern-day british lass who is determined to use her scientific smarts to clear the name of her ancestor, one of the Pendle Hill witches. Her quest is upended when she encounters a number of mysterious, possibly supernatural occurences which call into question all that she knows to be true.
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Before we go any further in this account, there’s a very important piece that I’ve left out, which is our budget. Our budget on this project is ZERO DOLLARS. Ok, maybe fifty bucks to print some stickers, but the rest of it is blood, sweat and tears (aka OUR TIME) from John, myself and the good folks of the KOLT Run Creations production team. So constraints on the project include aforesaid budget and the need to create a concept that could be competently executed in two months primarily by two people. I’m going to describe our thought process here for the story and experience separately for the sake of being easier to read, but be aware that there was a lot of back and forth. It wasn’t like we sat down and thought up the story and then thought up the experience.
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On August 24, 2012 the Denver Museum of Nature and Science ran a little transmedia piece that revolved around the famous volcanic eruption that happened so many years ago in the greek city of Pompeii. The project garnered national attention on major media outlets , which is how we heard about it. It was billed as “Twitter updates based on the only eyewitness account of the disaster allow you to relive the eruption, hour-by-hour. Follow the courageous journey of Pliny the Elder, as recorded by his nephew in AD 79. His story remains as one of the most historically significant chronicles of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.” The project had its’ own website url http://dayinpompeii.com/ , twitter handle @Elder_Pliny , and hashtag #Pompeii24. Elder_Pliny had roughly 5,000 twitter followers at the start of the story.
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So now that we had a clear vision of what we want to accomplish, the next step was to create an engaging story and experience that would achieve the desired results. When crafting a transmedia project you must conceive of the storyline in conjunction with the user experience....
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For those unfamiliar with my personal FB page or our fLO Twitter feed, the term “gut churn” was lovingly lifted from this article by Jad Abumrad of Radiolab describing the feeling you get when you’re engaged in a creative endeavor in an unfamiliar format and you have no idea what you’re doing. Frankly, I think it’s something that any entrepreneur or business owner can easily relate to.
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a diatribe on transmedia storytelling, cause we're excited about it
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