Transmedia Storytelling

The First How-To Strategy Guide to Transmedia Storytelling “Phillips’s book is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to make a career for him- or herself within the world of transmedia. Through her guidance, the reader is able to understand the fundamentals of transmedia and the power it can have when used with a compelling and strong story." —David Gale, Executive Vice President, MTV Cross Media “Transmedia storytelling is a bold and exciting new arena for creativity and innovation. . . . Andrea Phillips provides a compelling, thoughtful, and clear guide to a next generation of creators in this medium. She demystifies the process and proves that you, too, can push the envelope and be part of the future of storytelling.” —Michelle Satter, Founding Director, Sundance Institute Feature Film Program “An excellent and fair-minded primer and survey of the underpinnings and fast-evolving techniques behind multiplatform narrative. Andrea Phillips is one of a small handful of writers capable of both practicing and clearly conveying the principles of transmedia storytelling. Highly recommended!” —Jeff Gomez, CEO, Starlight Runner Entertainment “A no-nonsense guide for the fun-filled and strangely awesome world of transmedia storytelling.” —C. C. Chapman, coauthor of Content Rules and Amazing Things Will Happen Includes Q&A sessions with the world’s leading experts in transmedia storytelling About the Book: What is transmedia storytelling and what can it do for you? It’s the buzzword for a new generation—a revolutionary technique for telling stories across multiple media platforms and formats—and it’s rapidly becoming the go-to strategy for a wide variety of businesses. If you work in marketing, entertaining, or advertising, transmedia storytelling is a must-have tool for pulling people into your world. Why do you need A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling? If you want to attract, engage, and captivate your audience, you need this book. Written by an award-winning transmedia creator and renowned games designer, this book shows you how to utilize the same marketing tools used by heavy-hitters such as HBO, Disney, Ford, and Sony Pictures—at a fraction of the cost. You’ll learn how to: Choose the right platforms for your story Decide whether to DIY or outsource work Find and keep a strong core production team Make your audience a character in your story Get the funding you need—and even make a profit Forge your own successful transmedia career With these proven media-ready strategies, you’ll learn how to generate must-read content, must-see videos, and must-visit websites that will only grow bigger as viewers respond, contribute, and spread the word. You’ll create major buzz with structures such as alternate reality games and fictional character sites—or even “old-fashioned” platforms such as email and phone calls. The more you connect to your audience and the more you get them involved in the storytelling process, the more successful you will be. This isn’t the future. This is now. This is how you tell your story, touch your audience, and take your game to the next level—through transmedia storytelling.

Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling provides media students and industry professionals with strategies for creating innovative new media projects across a variety of platforms. Synthesizing ideas from a range of theorists and practitioners across visual, audio, and interactive media, Kelly McErlean offers a practical reference guide and toolkit to best practices, techniques, key historical and theoretical concepts, and terminology that media storytellers and creatives need to create compelling interactive and transmedia narratives. McErlean takes a broad lens, exploring traditional narrative, virtual reality and augmented reality, audience interpretation, sound design, montage, the business of transmedia storytelling, and much more. Written for both experienced media practitioners and those looking for a reference to help bolster their creative toolkit or learn how to better craft multiplatform stories, Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling serves as a guide to navigating this evolving world.

"This book proposes that the theory and practice of transmedia storytelling must be re-considered from a social impact and community development perspective, and that time has come for a rigorous critique of the limited ways in which it has been commonly represented. Transmedia storytelling has become one of the most influential and profitable innovations in the field of media and entertainment. It has changed the ways audiences interact with films, television and web series, advertising, gaming and book publishing. It has also shifted the practices around creation and dissemination of such content. This book asserts that the futures of transmedia storytelling for social impact or change are deeply tied to understandings of place grounded in human geography. Through a series of case studies of projects which challenge the status quo of transmedia, this book explores the elements of transmedia that can be used to amplify under-represented voices and make stories that signal a more inclusive and sustainable future. This book offers a valuable contribution to the literature in the areas of transmedia storytelling, narratology, digital fiction, electronic literature, locative storytelling, performative writing, digital culture studies and human geography"--

As media evolves with technological improvement, communication changes alongside it. In particular, storytelling and narrative structure have adapted to the new digital landscape, allowing creators to weave immersive and enticing experiences that captivate viewers. These experiences have great potential in marketing and advertising, but the medium’s methods are so young that their potential and effectiveness is not yet fully understood. Handbook of Research on Transmedia Storytelling, Audience Engagement, and Business Strategies is a collection of innovative research that explores transmedia storytelling and digital marketing strategies in relation to audience engagement. Highlighting a wide range of topics including promotion strategies, business models, and prosumers and influencers, this book is ideally designed for digital creators, advertisers, marketers, consumer analysts, media professionals, entrepreneurs, managers, executives, researchers, academicians, and students.

Transmedia storytelling is defined as a process where integral elements of fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels to create a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. This process and its narrative models have had an increasing influence on the academic world in addressing both theoretical and practical dimensions of transmedia storytelling. The Handbook of Research on Transmedia Storytelling and Narrative Strategies is a critical scholarly resource that explores the connections between consumers of media content and information parts that come from multimedia platforms, as well as the concepts of narration and narrative styles. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics such as augmented reality, digital society, and marketing strategies, this book explores narration as a method of relating to consumers. This book is ideal for advertising professionals, creative directors, academicians, scriptwriters, researchers, and upper-level graduate students seeking current research on narrative marketing strategies.

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling—typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape—this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the storyworlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman, the book reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing, and governmental policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of transmedia storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergence, popular culture, and historical media industries.

This book confronts the question of why our culture is so fascinated by the apocalypse. It ultimately argues that while many see the post-apocalyptic genre as reflective of contemporary fears, it has actually co-evolved with the transformations in our mediascape to become a perfect vehicle for transmedia storytelling. The post-apocalyptic offers audiences a portal to a fantasy world that is at once strange and familiar, offers a high degree of internal consistency and completeness, and allows for a diversity of stories by different creative teams in the same story world. With case studies of franchises such as The Walking Dead and The Terminator, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse offers analyses of how shifts in media industries and reception cultures have promoted a new kind of open, world-building narrative across film, television, video games, and print. For transmedia scholars and fans of the genre, this book shows how the end of the world is really just the beginning...

This volume charts the evolution of Pemberley Digital’s transmedia adaptations of nineteenth-century novels in order to interrogate the uneasy relationship between transmedia storytelling and consumer culture. It first examines two Austen-centered films, Lost in Austen and Austenland, that present “immersive” Austen experiences that anticipate Pemberley Digital’s transmedia adaptations, bridging traditional film adaptations and transmedia’s participatory culture. Subsequent chapters turn to Pemberley Digital’s transmedia adaptations of Austen’s and Shelley’s novels to argue that, although such adaptations may appear feminist in their emphasis on female protagonists, their larger narratives expose a subtext of anxiety about unstable gender roles, financial vulnerability, and the undervaluation of career-specific skill sets, both for the characters and the production company itself. The study provides a robust theoretical framework within which to read transmedia adaptations of “classic literature,” illuminating both the potential of, and the challenges facing, digital and transmedia storytellers and participants.