Responsive Research: Transmedia Storytelling 101

Today we had a brief seminar about the rules of transmedia and how it has come to be so important in our line of work to be knowledgeable about. We learned briefly what transmedia was all about, using the Transmedia Storytelling 101 details from Henry Jenkins. Basically Transmedia Storytelling is about taking one media and putting it in another whether it is a film, game or comic. It is a technique that uses the telling of a single story or experience and takes it across multiple platforms and areas. It can be used to create different kinds of content that can also add to the original one, and give little tit bits that people want to find out to create a more in depth experience and create a synchronisation.

There are now so many different examples of transmedia, in which we can clearly see where content has been added to create a better understanding of the world in which the storytelling is set, and below are a few examples of the best ones that are out there at the moment:

Lord of the Rings
When looking at Lord of the Rings it is very obvious that they have used Transmedia Storytelling to be able to endorse the project even more. Of course Lord of the Rings started out from the books, and above anything The Hobbit, and these were then made into short animated films to begin with in the 60s, which didn't really work out very well. Until Peter Jackson got his hands on it and then blew everyone away with his trilogy of films that made way for everything that followed. Along with the book, animated short and films, they then had the games that were released to go along with the films, that was later followed by stand alone games that developed off that and then even more recently, Lord of the Rings Online, which again puts it own spin on it. Along with these there are also more books that have been released to explain the world further before the era when Lord of the Rings was set and even stories of individual characters that we met briefly at some point in the book, like Tom Bombadil. Then not to mention the board games, card games and action figures that have been made.

Harry Potter
Another, once formally a book, series to be part of the Transmedia Storytelling subject is Harry Potter. This is again another brilliant example of how one  book series can be blown out the water by the amount of stuff that has connected it all together and made the world even bigger than it should be. Along with the original book series, we then have the film series that was recently finished, the games to go with the movie adaptations, the LEGO games that were produced to stand alongside it and also then the board games, interactive DVD game, card games and then again, like Lord of the Rings, the action figures and sets to build. Were Harry Potter differs is that because it only have the stand along book series, they had fans who wanted to delve deeper into the series so two books were released to stand alongside these, which were produced for Comic Relief, and they were Fantastic Beast and Where to Find Them and then Quidditch Through The Ages, both books that where mentioned in the original series. Alongside this J.K Rowling has created Pottermore which is an interactive website that has been set up for fans to be able to give them even more information on the world of Harry Potter and everything about it.