User-generated contents
•More examples of UGC (we need a taxonomy of them!)
Implicit consumers
•If every text constructs its reader, them transmedia storytelling is constructing a multilayer consumer(s).
Strategies
Strategies:
•Creation of interstitial micro-stories
•Creation of parallel stories --> evolution --> spin-offs
•Creation of peripheral stories (satellites) --> evolution --> spin-offs
•Creation of user-generated-content platforms (fan-fiction)
Taxonomy
Taxonomy:
•TV-centered transmedia storytelling (24, Lost, etc.)
•Book-centered transmedia storytelling (Harry Potter, etc.)
•Comic-centered transmedia storytelling (Batman, Spiderman, etc.)
•Cinema-centered transmedia storytelling (The Matrix, etc.)
•This classification should be discussed! The ‘media- centrality’ may change (The first text? The most successful? The most important from a narrative perspective?)
Transmedia storytelling is not just a semiotic affair:
Transmedia storytelling --> More $$$$$$
Branding
•Holocron: FileMaker DB with more than 30,000 entries (characters, planets, weapons, etc.) for supporting the franchising business.
•In the past 31 years…
–Star Wars movies: $4 billion / Merchandise: $15 billion.
–“Careful nurture of the Star Wars canon—thousands of years of story time, running through all the bits and pieces of merchandise—has kept the franchise popular for decades”.
•From product placement to transmedia storytelling. The brand is not inside the fiction anymore, rather the fiction is the brand.
•Transmedia storytelling was not invented by George Lucas…
•Transmedia storytelling is not new.
•Disney: may be the first modern
mass-experience of transmedia storytelling (first construction of a multiplatform narrative universe).
•Why is it so important today?
–Digitalization
–Media explosion.
–User-generated content platforms and culture.
–Hypertextual experience makes easier to follow different media.
Research agenda
•To learn more about TS narrative structures: analyzing the structure will increase the possibilities of creating new stories (Propp, 1928).
•To analyse implicit consumers. This classical semiotic issue could be very helpful for producers, scriptwriters and media programmers interested in producing complex textual structures intended for a broad spectrum of consumers.
•To analyse fictional world expansion strategies.
•To analyse transmedia consumers.
