Multimedia Storytelling Comm 1002 * St. John's University

Character and Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers. Worldbuilding often involves the creation of maps, a backstory, a flora, a fauna, different peoples and their technology, (And in many cases if one is writing speculative fiction, different races), including social customs and, in some cases, an invented language for the world

8 Tips for Worldbuilding according to the Masterclass Staff

• Decide where to start. Whether it’s the language spoken by the inhabitants or the apocalyptic landscape, pick the aspect of the world you’re most excited about exploring and start there.
• List the rules and laws. The inhabitants who live in this world you’ve created will have their own independent existence. What is their governing system? Who is in charge?
• Establish the type of world you want. Pick a genre. Is this a dystopian or fantasy novel (or both)? Does it take place in our Earth or is it an alternate earth?
• Describe the environment. What’s the weather like? How does it affect the world or planet? Are there natural disasters? Are there extreme temperatures? What natural resources exist in this location? How do people use the land? Establishing the environment and how it impacts the life within it can be a useful detail in the creation of your world.
• Define the culture. What do the inhabitants of this universe believe in? Is there religion? Is there a God? Do they have any sacred customs? What do they celebrate? Breathe life into the characters who populate this location by giving them a meaningful existence.
• Define the language. How do the inhabitants communicate? Is there a common tongue? Are there any ‘bad words’ that are off-limits? Knowing what can and can not be said in your world can be an apt source for conflict.
• Identify the history. What is the history of this place you’ve created? Have there been any world wars? Do the countries within your world have enemies? Are there rival races? Is there a sole antagonist? Providing the backstory for your world can give it an added dimension and make it feel more tangible.
• Use existing works to inspire. Revisit the works of successful authors to get inspiration. Never steal ideas, but review the work of other fiction writers to see how they answer the same worldbuilding questions within their own novel writing.

Characterization

The Character and the Novel

The novel expanded on the inner consciousness and psychological interiority of the characters. This also resembles the spreading of literacy and “silent reading” that developed from the printing press, as well as the values of secularity and humanism that were celebrated during the Renaissance: people started to be seen more than just through religion or their class status, and their thoughts were worthy of being considered.

The modern novel distinguished between the authorial and narrative voice: what the characters thought and felt vs. what the novelist was trying to communicate overall. Sometimes, these two voices could be in complete opposition (an unreliable narrator) This led to a more complex form of reading.

Characterization can be achieved directly, through the statements of the narrator (or another character) about the character, or indirectly, as when the reader deduces from actions, speech, or context key traits of the character.

In film, comics, and video- game narration, the visual presentation of physical traits, dress, facial expressions, and postures contribute significantly to characterization. These modes of narration can achieve rich characterization without using words at all, even when the characters are nonhuman entities or animals

Some characters appear with a passage of detailed personal description, including gender, race, appearance, age, dress, social position, and past experiences (as in a reference to a character’s recent divorce). This strategy of block characterization can be avoided by employing instead indirect or scattered brief references to a character’s physical qualities and social identity.

“FLAT” AND “ROUND” CHARACTERS FROM E.M. FORSTER’S ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL

Visual Storytelling

• What is unique to the medium of photography?
• How has photography been used to tell stories throughout the 19th and 20th centuries?
• How does the photograph function as a language?
• What are historical parallels with analog photography and today’s digital environment?

The Invention of Photography

The invention of photography grew out of an interest in the structure of light, and how to capture it onto light-sensitive material. This interest goes back to the history of civilization.

Extremely important to the invention of photography was knowledge of how sensitive to light certain materials were. More than 2,000 years before the invention of the camera obscura, the ancient Phoenicians (the first civilized nation in the world) knew that a certain snail left a yellow slime that turned purple in sunlight.

Famous Daguerreotypes

Documenting Reality: 20th Century Photography

• During the 20th century, documentary photography became a prominent force in society

Photojournalism and the Photographic Essay

• How does photography function with text to tell a story?
• What are different storytelling techniques of the photo essay?
• How has photo-journalism influenced American society?

Photographic Theory

• Effects of eproducibility
• The semiotics of the photograph (what is its language, or message)
• Ethics of photo taking
• Publicity and the “hyperreal” image
• Social capital
• Exploitation vs. Critique
• Taking pictures as non-intervention
• Post-colonialist critique of the gaze
• The psychology of the image
• "Post-truth" and hyperrealism

Cinematography and Editing

ELECTRICITY & THE ART OF LIGHT

• Cinema was a product of the second Industrial Revolution, a phase of rapid standardization and industrialization from the late 19th century into the early 20th century.
• Electrification was called "the most important engineering achievement of the 20th century" by the National Academy of Engineering.
• The technology of film emerged mostly from developments and achievements in the fields of projection, lenses, photography and optics.

Early techniques that involve motion and/or projection include:

• Shadowgraphy (probably in practice since prehistoric times)
• Camera obscura (a natural phenomenon that has possibly been used as an artistic aid since prehistoric times)
• Shadow puppetry (possibly originated around 200 BCE in Central Asia, India, Indonesia or China)
• Magic lantern (developed in the 1650s, preceded by some incidental and/or inferior projectors)
• Stroboscopic "persistence of vision" animation devices (phénakisticope since 1832, zoetrope since 1866, flip book since 1868)
• Stereoscope: Hand-held viewers that created three dimensional effects by using oblong cards with two photographs printed side by side

THE NOVELTY OF CINEMA

• Cinema as a recent novelty in the field of entertainment was officially recognized in the 1900 universal exhibition held in Paris.
• Since the mid 19th century, the World Fairs became places for people to display the invention of new scientific, cultural and industrial items
• What was valorized in the Exhibition was 'innovation and technical development,' rather than the quality of films or company's commercial success. Nor was cinema seen as an instrument in favor of education and teaching and much less as a work of art.

MUYBRIDGE’S RUNNING HORSES (1878) — MAJOR PRE-CURSOR OF MOTION PICTURE

• Muybridge was a photographer who competed in a challenge to answer the question whether horses lift all four feet up in the air at the same time
• Set up a row of 12 cameras, each making an exposure in one-thousandth of a Second
• He was able to take crisp, clear images of motion due to the development of faster shutter speeds on cameras
• He used a lantern to project the images which were eventually drawings copied from the photographs onto a revolving disk
• Demonstrates the cutting of movement into individual ”frames”
• Crisp, clear images, when aligned already suggests movement

HISTORY OF EARLY FILM

• Edison Labs
• Lumiere Brothers
• Single Shot vs. the Cut
• George Melies: Science Fiction
• D.W. Griffith: “Birth of a Nation”

Inventions: Edison Labs

• Out of his labs in New Jersey, Thomas Edison developed some of the first movie technology
• 1894: Thomas Edison opens first kinetoscope parlor
• 1895: Edison’s Kinetoscope evolved into Vitascope (life scope) with Thomas Armat
• 1894: American Mutoscope Company

The Moving Image Industry

Hollywood: A Short History

The Hollywood Studio Age:1932 - 1946

• The period 1920-50 marked the “Golden years” of the Hollywood studio system. Films were produced rapidly and regularly. Often following a formula: Western, slapstick comedy, Film Noir, musical, cartoon, biopic… depending on the studio.
• The increased costs of movie / film making had created the Studio system with its complex financing and control systems designed to ensure that the mix of expensive technology, cast of actors and associated technicians and financiers would return a profit.
• There is a commercial differentiation between “movies” and “films”. Movies = popular entertainment with a mass circulation of copies of the movie. The audience being largely passive.
• The product of an industry dominated by the producer (money) in which there is no individual film-maker but a team under the producer’s control. (The studio system.) The director is hired to create the movie from the script. The final version is, however, the responsibility of the producer and editor.
• The director of a movie is known as: metteur en scene = an interpreter of a score / script

Hollywood Studio Decline & Antitrust Lawsuits:1947–1959

• In the early 1930’s, the Justice Department found that the major studios were vertically-integrated monopolies. One monopolistic practice was block booking: licensing one feature film or group of feature films on the condition that the licensee-exhibitor will also license another released by the same distributor. Block booking prevents customers from bidding for individual feature films on their own merits.
• In 1946 the Department of Justice brought an antitrust lawsuit against the eight of the studios alleging violations of Sherman 1 and 2—restraint of trade and monopolization.
• Antitrust laws are statutes or regulations designed to promote free and open markets. Antitrust laws were created to keep the big conglomerates, or trusts, that were forming across oil, railroad, steel, and other sectors in the late 1800s and early 1900s from growing too large and powerful.
• 1946-51: Studios ordered to divest theatre chains - reluctance meant that they failed to capitalize on the possibilities of the TV as a medium for film.
• The Antitrust lawsuits, along with the emergence of television, depleted the box office numbers. WWII delayed the TV age but post war the threat of TV re-emerged. (We will talk more about TV in Module 8 on Video) Movie audiences peaked in 1946 – 80 million tickets sold per week. By 1953, ticket sales drop to 46 million per week.

“New Hollywood”: Mid 1960s- 1980s

• “New Hollywood” refers to a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in the United States. They influenced the types of film produced, their production and marketing, and the way major studios approached film-making. In New Hollywood films, the film director, rather than the studio, took on a key authorial role.
• The films in the 1970s came in many different varieties, as the socially conscious directors that emerged in the late 1960s grew in very different ways, influenced by music, literature, crime and war. The decade is most known for excelling in the crime-drama genre.
• In the years previous to 1970, Hollywood had begun to cater to the younger generation with films such as The Graduate. This proved a folly when anti-war films like R. P. M. and The Strawberry Statement became major box-office flops. Even solid films with bankable stars, like the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora!, flopped, leaving studios in dire straits financially. Unable to repay financiers, studios began selling off land, furniture, clothing, and sets acquired over years of production. Nostalgic fans bid on merchandise and collectibles ranging from Judy Garland's sparkling red shoes to MGM's own back lots.
• More of the successful films were those based in the harsh truths of war, rather than the excesses of the 1960s.
• With young filmmakers taking greater risks and restrictions regarding language and sexuality lifting, Hollywood produced some of its most critically acclaimed and financially successful films since its "golden era.”
• The 1970s saw a re-birth of Kung Fu, gritty crime dramas, horror films
• In the middle 1970s, films began to also reflect the disenfranchisement brought by the excesses of the past twenty years. Ie. Taxi Driver

Todd Berliner on "New Hollywood":

• Seventies films show a perverse tendency to integrate, in narrative incidental ways, story information and stylistic devices counterproductive to the films' overt and essential narrative purposes.
• Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s often situate their film-making practices in between those of classical Hollywood and those of European and Asian art cinema.
• Seventies films prompt spectator responses more uncertain and discomforting than those of more typical Hollywood cinema.
• Seventies narratives place an uncommon emphasis on irresolution, particularly at the moment of climax or in epilogues, when more conventional Hollywood movies busy themselves tying up loose ends.
• Seventies cinema hinders narrative linearity and momentum and scuttles its potential to generate suspense and excitement.

Postmodern Cinema: 1990s

• Postmodernist films attempt to subvert the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization, and tests the audience's suspension of disbelief.
• Typically, such films also break down the cultural divide between high and low art and often upend typical portrayals of gender, race, class, genre, and time with the goal of creating something that does not abide by traditional narrative expression
• Can experiment with non-linearity
• Can use different styles simultaneously (postmodern “pastiche”)
• Meaning is highly subjective
• Playful
• Recognize the vast media culture and the media history that structures our reality and our cinematic imagination

From Script to Screen

• Screenwriting is writing for the screen. (Recently, scriptwriting has come to refer to writing for video games)
• A screenplay is the written text of the drama: the guide, or map of how the story on the page will be realized into the story on the screen.
• A screenplay is a blueprint for production, a process that is collaborative, business-oriented and elaborate.
• It is written in a specific way and to a specific style, carefully guiding the reader through the unfolding narrative.

Narrative Structure of the Screenplay

• Screenplays are built around a narrative- a sequence of events made up of various constituents that come together to create the whole
• Constituents include character, dialogue, and action
• There are two levels to narrative structure: story and plot. The story is the emotional character arc, and the plot is the order of events.
• “Structure and character are interlocked. The event structure of a story is created out of the choices that characters make under pressure and the actions they choose to take, while characters are the creatures who are revealed and change by how they choose to act under pressure. If you change one, you change the other (McKee, 1999)
• The term “journey” is often used to describe the road the characters travel from start to finish (physical journey, emotional journey)

Three Act Structure

• A base for all screenwriting models. Roots in Greek tragedy- beginning, middle, end.
• Can be based on sequences or mapping the “hero’s journey”, etc.
• Act 1: Setup (1/4)
• Act 2: Confrontation (1/2)
• Act 3: Resolution (1/4)

How to set action in motion

Film Criticism & Ways to Analyze Films

1970s-80s: The Birth of Film Studies

• Video made it possible to study the history of film
• Film Studies Coincided with philosophers like Derrida and Foucault who developed historiography and archive studies
• Coincided with post-structuralist philosophy like Jacques Lacan
• Christian Metz greatly influenced structuralist / formalist / Semiotic analysis of film as language
• Film theory includes Feminist film theory, post-colonialist film theory, psychoanalytical film theory, Marxist film theory

Feminist Film Theory

• Feminist Film Theory emerged out of the second wave of feminism and largely developed by the introduction to Women’s Studies in 1960 and 1970.
• In the 1970s, the women’s movement aimed to increase the presence and agency of women, whilst film studies recognized the value of visibility and popular culture within what is essentially a political project.
• More recently, scholars have expanded their work to include analysis of television and digital media.
• Analysis inquires into: the representations of the female gender; the representation of female characters; the status of women in the film industry
• Feminist Film Theory also concerns itself with identity – how we create identity- particularly around gender. An example of this juxtaposition lies in the kind of passive roles assigned to women that are meant to expose or solidify the opposite “masculinity” which the male character or heteronormative character portrays. In modern film structure, male’s dominance or “maleness” is defined in contrast to the passive feminine role.
• Feminist Film Theory also looks at how domestic violence is portrayed on screen or how it is left out, but generally, how women’s issues such as rape and domestic violence are conveyed through film
• Feminist Film Theory must involve itself in intersectionality. It examines how women of colour are portrayed next to their white female counterparts as well. Or begs the question- where are the shows that have a woman with a disability as the protagonist? Feminist Film Theory also might look at how women of a particular colour or body type are cast and in which kinds of roles?

Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)

• Mulvey argued that historically, the camera follows the gaze of the male character while the female characters are often the object of the voyeurism. Studied examples of Alfred Hitchcock’s work
• Mulvey discusses the ‘Male Gaze’ — mainstream cinema is constructed around a series of ‘gazes’ for male pleasure.
• This includes the characterization, the camerawork, and the narratives
• Females are objectified for the (sexual) pleasure of the male viewer. Females only experience narrative secondary by identifying as a male
• Voyeurism is the pleasure of looking and plays a huge part in the sexual objectification of women in film. It’s the third person in the room- the audience who is capable and meant to identify with the male character, and in viewing the female is able to have her for their own viewing pleasure.

The Bechdel Test

• The Bechdel test first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip “Dykes To Watch Out For’. In a strip titled "The Rule,” which features two women, who resemble the future, the women discuss seeing a film. One woman explains that she only goes to a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:
• Are there two or more women who have names in the movie?
• Do they talk to each other?
• Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?
• This argues that the majority of screen time of female characters consisted of them talking about male characters. The film strip was acknowledged by a wide array of theorists and writers

Bell Hooks

• Hooks is an impressive feminist author has written significantly on feminism as it pertains to women of color, contributing greatly to Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Feminist theory
• In her book Reel to Real, hooks discusses the effect that movies have on any given individual, with specific emphasis on the black female spectator. She argues that, although we know that movies are not real life, "no matter how sophisticated our strategies of critique and intervention, [we] are usually seduced, at least for a time, by the images we see on the screen. They have power over us, and we have no power over them.”
• In her book Black Looks: Race and Representation, in the chapter "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators", Hooks discusses what she calls an "oppositional gaze". She discusses it as a position and strategy for black people, especially black women, to develop a critical spectatorship in relation to mass media.
• Describing how for her, the "gaze" had always been political, hooks explains how she began to grow curious of the results of black slaves being punished for looking at their white owners. She wondered how much had been absorbed and carried on through the generations to affect not only black parenting, but black spectatorship as well.
• Drawing on Foucault’s thoughts about power always coexisting with the possibility of resistance, hooks discusses this looking as a form of resistance, as a way of finding agency, and declaring: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality

Postcolonial and Race Theory

• Postcolonialism = the relationship between nations/ areas that have been ruled / colonized.
• Postcolonialism refers to the time after the period of colonialism, (mainly through flashbacks).
• It is often rendered controversial and relates to identity politics.
• Postcolonial theory addresses identity matters, race, racism, ethnicity and gender.
• It deals with resistance, conflict, challenges to western schools of thought (including religion and law, creativity/ capitalism and spirituality).

Structuralist / Formalist Critique

• The theory explores, or demystifies, how films create meaning through codes and conventions (or semantics and content
• This is built from Roland Barthes’ analysis of the photographic image: Denotation / connotation ; Sign / signified
• A shot of someone looking sad, then a shot to a glass of water and back to the person, the audience would understand that the person was thirsty.
• The use of editing, a particular shot or lighting technique can all emphasize a meaning, emotion or reaction from the audience.
• How the different elements create an effect and have a style. Film is art and therefore is not a reproduction of reality; it is a constructed illusion.
• Auteurs create their own style - for example Quentin Tarantino and his use of dialogue and close ups and how they communicate ideas, themes and an emotive response to their audience / fans.

Psychoanalytic Theory

• Developed in the 1970-80s associated with critical theory which analyses film from a psychoanalytical standpoint.
• The viewer is identified as the subject of the ‘gaze’ what is constructed by the text.
• What is on screen (mise en scene) is the object of the subject’s desire.
• Identification is normally through the male protagonist for the subject / viewer.
• The theory argues that the film seems to offer a completeness to the subject / viewer, although this is always an illusion (as films are merely constructions of reality).
• Jacques Lacan (French-Freudian-Philosopher 1901-1981)
• The main idea is that the theory deconstructs both the spectacle of cinema and the elements of film, which are both shaped by the unconscious.
• The unconscious has been broken down into four areas:
• The Filmmaker’s Unconscious ; The Character’s Unconscious ; The Audience’s Unconscious ; The Unconsciousness of Cinematic Discourse.
• It is also worth looking at Freudian theory in relation to this.

The Future of Cinema

• In an essay written in 1955, titled The Cinema of the Future, cinematographer Morton Heilig predicted that filmmaking would advance to the point where it can “reveal the new scientific world to man in the full sensual vividness and dynamic vitality of his consciousness.” Heilig outlined many of the properties of virtual reality – but didn’t use those words, given they hadn’t been coined yet.
• With many filmmakers having swapped traditional cameras for 360 cameras (that capture views from all angles), the current moment is comparable to the intensely experimental early years of motion pictures during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
• According to VR guru and artist Chris Milk, films of the future will offer tailored immersive experiences. They will, he tells BBC Culture, be capable of “crafting a story in real-time, that is just for you, that uniquely satisfies you and what your likes and dislikes are.” Milk prefers terms like “story living” over standard nomenclature such as “storytelling."
• An array of rapidly developing technologies offer thrilling potential for the future of motion pictures, some suggestions including
• The rise of AR (augmented reality)
• AI (artificial intelligence)
• The ever-increasing capacity for computers to power detailed digital worlds.
• “Volumetric” (Beyond single flat screens)
• Neural Diversity

Self-performance and small stories

What kinds of stories do people tell in social media formats? What similarities and differences occur in the narrators’ choice of subject matter and storytelling style?

How are stories embedded in the multilayered contexts of social media? How do different sites, interactive patterns, offline contexts, and participant groups influence the characteristics of social media stories?

What purposes are fulfilled when stories are told in social media? What personal, social, and discourse identities are constructed for narrators and their audiences?

— Questions from “Stories and Social Media in Context” By R. Page

What is Digital Narratology?

Digital narratology was the dominant research approach in the early years of digital interactivity (the 1990s, 2000s) Page broadly defines narratives as:

• Generated by the recognition of reported events, ordered within a temporal framework.
• Second, the inferred connections between temporally ordered events are attributed with distinctive degrees of narrativity where causal connections are understood as more narrative-like than pure temporality.
• Finally, narrativity is associated with sequences that signal a teleological focus, an overarching framework of complication and resolution, or a clearly defined point of closure attributed with interpretive significance.

However, Page argues that it overly focused on interactive fiction and not on the broad range of ways that stories are told through social media today, including contemporary genres such as blogs, digital storytelling, and life narratives. These contemporary examples challenge the three characteristics of traditional narratives.

Streaming music and the continuous performance of taste

• Streaming music was facilitated by the development of mobile smart phones in 2007 with 24/7 internet access
• Instead of purchasing and downloading content, users rent access to libraries from which they can consume content. This curbed, to an extent, the problem of music piracy of MP3s.
• Researchers find that “adoption of streaming leads to very large increases in the quantity and diversity of consumption” esp. in the first months after adoption, with the effects attenuating over time (Datta et al 2018)
• Sharing of content and the projection of identity on social media is seen as crucial to entice networks of consumers and is linked to Spotify’s initial success (Dewan and Ramaprasad, 2014).
• Streaming music has led to a culture of “performing” playlists for different contexts, and a new form of cultural labor to be enacted by the user

How do algorithms shape the stories we read (and the stories about us)?

“Humans are lodged within algorithms, and algorithms within humans” — Louise Amoor, 2020

• Can Algorithms narrate? According to Benjamin N. Jacobsen (2020), yes! Algorithms are fundamentally narrating agents just like humans.
• Algorithmic Emplotment: Platforms, digital devices, and algorithmic systems proliferating in society today increasingly seek to ‘emplot’ people’s data, ordering it and rendering it meaningful in various ways (adapted from Paul Ricoeur, 1983)
• For example, users encounter their digital past through a medium that algorithmically mediates and directs which aspects of the past one encounters.
• Jacobsen examines ”Apple Memories”, focusing on three particular implications of algorithmic emplotment, specifically for the ways in which the self is represented and framed within the feature: inevitable, multiple, and participatory.

Transmedia and Multi-platform storytelling

Transmedia is a concept born from convergence culture.

• Transmedia storytelling was a concept that emerged in the 2000s, during the period of Web 2.0.
• It also coincided with remix culture. Important theoretical figures of remix theory include Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, and Cory Doctorow. Henry Jenkins coined the term ‘Transmedia”.

To Jenkins, Transmedia storytelling "represents 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. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.”

“We now live at a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenagers bedrooms. The concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties that can exploit synergies between different parts of the medium system and maximize touch-points with different niches of consumers. The result has been the push towards franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.” — Henry Jenkins

What is transmedia storytelling?

• Transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) represents 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.
• Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.
• The platforms that transmedia storytelling uses are varied and may include digital media, story components, audience interaction, TV, radio, social media, comics, games, books, collectible items, and in particular, alternate reality games (ARG) a type of game that blurs the line between in-game and out-of-game experiences.
• The many channels allow for the development of layers, sharp changes, and plot turns. Story content is developed through different techniques to engage different people.
• While the most well-known examples of transmedia storytelling involve the science fiction franchises Star Trek and Star Wars, with action figures, comics, and games, transmedia or multiplatform storytelling now has a place in education, in branding, and in journalistic, non-fiction applications. This type of storytelling can be harnessed through franchises, marketing campaigns, entertainment content, children’s entertainment, educational platforms, interactive media, experimental art, and more.

• Cross media platforms may include film, online video, games, social media, email messages, voicemail messages, traditional books, comic books, murals, photographs, audio, action figures, t-shirts, and whatever other conceivable platforms exist.
• Transmedia intellectual properties often take the form of an ARG, which uses the real world as a platform and players (single or multiple) that may change the narrative and story outcome. Multimedia tools allow players to interact with characters in the story that game designers created. ARGs are often free, as in the Lost Experience that accompanied the TV show.
• Transmedia stories offer a rich, encyclopedic storyworld, which is a detailed construction of context or universe in which a narrative is set. The presence of a storyworld requires more learning and can be mined for further story development.
• Backstory, side stories, and prequels of the main property may be explored through other platforms and offers opportunities for the development of secondary characters and events, as well as non-linear exposition.
• Transmedia storytelling builds worlds for, but also with, fans. Fans may play games, watch movies, and buy action figures, but they may also contribute original stories based on the storyworld to fanzines and other outlets.

Characteristics of Transmedia Storytelling

• Spreadability: The knowledge of and interest in the property is spread through social media and the web, particularly by ardent fans.
• Drillability: The story also reaches through layers of audience interest to the core group of fans who will promote and spread the story through different platforms. Intrigue is created from complex plot twists and open-endedness as in Lost.
• Continuity: Uniformity and coherence of language and character across all platforms.
• Multiplicity: Incoherence across platforms, such as settings in parallel universes, retellings of stories, or original views of characters.
• Immersion: Good transmedia properties allow the audience to lose themselves in a rich and intriguing storyworld.
• Extractability: Having immersed themselves in the story, audiences can take some thing or thought into the real world. Examples for movies and games include t-shirts and toys. In journalism, this includes games or other transmedia properties, such as special editions, which allow the news story to live beyond the news cycle and continue to impact the lives of readers.
• Worldbuilding: The depth of detail that makes a narrative world seem more three dimensional.
• Seriality: The method for conveying a large amount of information in an interesting way. Seriality does not need to be linear.
• Subjectivity: Transmedia properties often tell a story from several character perspectives.
• Performance: Some fans of transmedia efforts become prosumers (producers and consumers), with costumes or crafting their own short-stories for fanzines to extend their vision of the narrative, as exemplified to the maximum by Trekkies. Transmedia storytelling is geared towards user generated content (UGC).

Transmedia & Media Franchises

• “West Coast-style transmedia: more commonly called Hollywood or franchise transmedia, consists of multiple big pieces of media: feature films, video games, that kind of thing. It’s grounded in big-business commercial storytelling”
• Transmedia storytelling reflects the economics of media consolidation or what industry observers call "synergy."
• Modern media companies are horizontally integrated - that is, they hold interests across a range of what were once distinct media industries. A media conglomerate has an incentive to spread its brand or expand its franchises across as many different media platforms as possible.
• Consider, for example, the comic books published in advance of the release of such films as Batman Begins and Superman Returns by DC (owned by Warner Brothers, the studio that released these films).
• These comics provided back-story which enhanced the viewer's experience of the film even as they also help to publicize the forthcoming release (thus blurring the line between marketing and entertainment).
• The current configuration of the entertainment industry makes transmedia expansion an economic imperative, yet the most gifted transmedia artists also surf these marketplace pressures to create a more expansive and immersive story than would have been possible otherwise.

Examples of Transmedia Storytelling

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The Matrix Franchise (1999-2021)

“The Office” (2005-2013)

Interactive Stories and Procedural Narrative

What is procedural narrative?

• Procedural storytelling is essentially the “set of rules” a story follows, not a story itself. Rules like “how” the story is told (from which perspective?) ... Procedural storytelling leads to the creation of unique places and characters that are wholly unique to the player.
• A transmedia text does not simply disperse information: it provides a set of roles and goals which readers can assume as they enact aspects of the story through their everyday life. We might see this performative dimension at play with the release of action figures which encourage children to construct their own stories about the fictional characters or costumes and role playing games which invite us to immerse ourselves in the world of the fiction.
• Ideally, each individual episode must be accessible on its own terms even as it makes a unique contribution to the narrative system as a whole. Game designer Neil Young coined the term, "additive comprehension," to refer to the ways that each new texts adds a new piece of information which forces us to revise our understanding of the fiction as a whole.
• The encyclopedic ambitions of transmedia texts often results in what might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story: that is, they introduce potential plots which can not be fully told or extra details which hint at more than can be revealed.

Procedural narrative is a design technique where a game's story consists of many fragments that can be collected, experienced and interpreted in many different orders and ways. Emergent narrative is the result of that collection and interpretation process — Edwin McRae 

Immersion, VR, and the senses

Presence: “the subjective experience of being in one place or environment when physically situated in another”

Virtual Reality

• Virtual reality has been presented in the popular press as a medium, like the telephone or television.
• The term ‘virtual reality’ was coined by Jaron Lanier in 1987 during a period of intense research activity into this form of technology. But before then, he had set up VPL Research – a company which pioneered research into virtual reality and 3D graphics which also sold the first virtual reality gear such as virtual reality glasses, data gloves and later, the full data suit.
• VPL Research patents were later acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999.
• Lanier partnered up with Tom Zimmerman – the inventor of the first data glove and together they produced a range of virtual reality products such as glasses, gloves and a relatively inexpensive head mounted display (HMD).
• Virtual reality became very popular around this time – especially in the 1990’s, but this soon dropped off due to a yawning gap between public expectations and technological limitations.

Haptic feedback, also known as haptics, is a technology that allows users to interact with digital devices in a more tactile manner. Haptic feedback makes use of vibrations, sounds, and other sensory cues to provide a physical feedback to the user, giving a greater sense of immersion and control, and ultimately providing a heightened sense of realism.

Virtual art is a term used for the virtualization of art. In other words, it is contemporary art created with the technical media developed at the end of the 1980s — computers, visualization casks, data clothes, data gloves, generators of 3D sound, digital sculpture and painting, stereoscopic screens and spectacles, etc.

Can virtual reality cultivate empathy?

• First, how do you measure empathy?
• Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has focused an examination of VR’s pro-social uses, exploring how the technology may be used to positively impact society. Its ability to create empathy is measured by participant behavior. For example, those who went through the VR homelessness experience indicated that they would be more willing to support tax increases for affordable housing than before their experience, and they were significantly more likely to support those efforts than those who did not go through the VR experience.
• However, according to Erick Ramirez in Aeon Magazine, “we should be skeptical of these claims. While VR might help us to cultivate sympathy, it fails to generate true empathy. Although they are often confused with one another, these capacities are distinct. Ramirez distinguishes between them like this: empathy relates to the cognitive and emotional abilities that help us feel with another. Empathy is what we use when we engage in perspective-taking. Sympathy, meanwhile, involves the capacities that help us feel for another. It doesn’t include imagining what it’s like to be someone else.”
• It’s also important to note that the same arguments about VR and empathy were made about the immersive powers of cinema...