The IdeaLists

Transmedia, if you're unfamiliar with the word, is storytelling across multiple media. (Imagine experiencing a juicy plot line unfolding across film, book, comic, website, game, text message...) Of late, transmedia has been co-opted in the mainstream by geek marketers as a sort of puzzle-unlocking, AR-code-flashing experiment, usually functional with only the most loyal of fans. But its contemporary purveyors recognize its potential to bear both artistic and market fruit.

When Guillermo del Toro, Guillermo Navarro and Motion Theory launched their production playground Mirada Studios, they wanted to build a place where these traditional and new media markets could cohabit, offering up the perfect recipe of time-honored craft and technological possibility. In the past year, collaborations include an interactive exhibition for IBM’s centennial and the Chris Milk-directed ROME music video. Andy Merkin, Mirada’s Transmedia Specialist, gave us a peek into the narrative imaginarium’s creative and philosophical process.

What’s your favorite form of storytelling?

I have biases I’m aware of, but I won’t say I have a favorite. Puzzles, I think, are a huge part of transmedia right now. It’s a very specific type of person that wants to go and unlock something. Puzzles have a place, but I’d love to see where it’s going next. Because of that, I have a bias against interactive right now. It’s so focused on demanding interaction: “unlock a puzzle, and I’ll give you more narrative.” I think it could do a lot better job highlighting subjectivity, revealing how a protagonist-antagonist relationship can be flipped to show a different perspective. I definitely have a love for traditional media, film and TV, though those are now a format rather than a medium.

How important are characters to transmedia?

Characters are huge. You go to a movie to see a plot. You don’t go back to the movie to see more plot, you go back to see the character. That goes back to the problem I have with puzzles right now. Instead of following this character, you’re saying, “If you happen to be smart enough or care enough, you can unlock this and enter a new platform.”

From a production and talent management standpoint, you’ll see things like The Avengers: so many superstars in one project. Most of the major studios use that tactic very sparsely because the cost of hiring several big stars in one movie is massive. In Harry Potter, they had to get Daniel Radcliff and the entire crew to be those specific characters for years. In a way they’ve given up personal movie stardom, if that makes sense. In the 80s, you would go for the star, like Tom Cruise, but now people are going to see characters. It will be interesting to watch talent negotiations in the next couple years. Packaging and contracts will be very affected by people and their relationships to characters.

There are so many creative and technical moving parts in the ROME music video. Do you have to speak a lot of different industry languages?

People in traditional creative production have pretty well established vernacular. They’re used to an art director saying, “Make this look beautiful!” and the production tries to get it done. In new media, someone designs something and hopefully it plugs into a development pipeline. Right now there’s a demand for very technical people to speak design, rather than design oriented people to speak development.

How do you approach user experience when communicating a story that applies to multiple platforms?

For IBM it came up, how did we want the interactive to be featured? Instead of saying interactive, I like to say effortactive. What we produce is just a lot of organized information. It’s not that someone is interacting, but that they’re flipping through a bunch of pages until they find what they want. The overall theme of the IBM project was the “Path to Progress.” We modeled that concept through live data feeds and interactive components to make it so both extremely brilliant IBM engineers and a 7-year-old kid could appreciate and understand what was going on.

Is technology changing storytelling?

Coming from MIT there’s a lot of people who talk about using technology to reach new levels. Technology doesn’t exist really. At some point a pencil was massive technology. Now if you say, “I wrote this paper in pencil,” someone would ask, “Why wouldn’t you use Siri?” I try to ignore the technology side and pay attention to the fundamental story side. Of all of the work you see here, all the computers, all we’re making is information. All we’re saying is, “sit down for a moment, I need to show you something."

As mobile web becomes increasingly a part of us, do you think we’ll start to become characters in the media we consume?

That fourth wall will always exist, but it won’t become a feature of a story. There’s a myth of a French guy that came up with some 100 stories or so that define humanity. (He of course then lost the list, if it ever existed.) The protagonist-antagonist relationship will always exist. Westerners don’t understand a story when it doesn’t have a certain arch to it. That will always be there. But if you start adding a story features that will react to everything you say and do, people will stop paying attention to the arch and start paying attention to themselves.

I took a look at The Department of Human Management website you just launched. I experienced alarm, anxiety and the same emotions one would get from a narrative arch, but I’m not experiencing it linearly. Is this marketing, an offshoot story, what’s the strategy?

When the third installment of The Strain Trilogy came out, the publisher came to us for a marketing idea. Readers who’ve already read the first two have an expectation for the third. We took the rules of this world where humans are no longer the predominant species, if we ever were. The books have some intense themes about concentration camps and turning in your neighbors. So we place these societal rules into a medical environment, which lives online.

What’s going to be the use of this offshoot?

That’s the forever question in transmedia. It’s there; it’s a plug that can be used. The Department of Human Management is not in the books. Anyone who reads the first two would understand the clues. We have the things in there to build out fandom. It’s not necessarily the goal. We were asked for a marketing idea. All marketing for media is telling you information about information. It’s providing a little bit of information that entices you. That’s what we we’re trying to do with the book.

Well, it’s true; now I’m really curious. What is the biggest obstacle facing transmedia becoming mainstream media?

On the industry side, the biggest problem now for transmedia is hearing pitches like, “We have the feature film here, a video game there, and we’ll plug it into print and TV…” It’s fantastic, but who do you pitch that to? If you go to Warner Brothers, do you talk to a transmedia person? Not yet. You’re still pitching to a film person. Then you walk over to the TV department and talk to someone else… When I first started working in this space, most of the people recruiting me were new media, digital folks trying to push into traditional markets, people making webisodes hoping to push into TV. I want to go the other way, taking traditional media, films, books, and make them a full transmedia experience.