Transmedia – Tim Kring

Heroes – it all started with a television show.

Where did transmedia come from?  Started on November 17, 1978 during star wars holiday special.  On it, there was a short cartoon, which introduced a new character into the world.  So if you were watching the special, you wondered who he was.  That summer, on the release of the action figures, the character was part of the series, and was a limited edition.  For fans, it was a wanted item.  Create something on one platform that migrates onto the mothership of the company.

Heroes:  TK was a tv writer working in the traditional Hollywood model.  Crossing Jordan – procedural drama, one way of reaching audience.  Create content, push it out.  Only feedback, months later when show was on the air, was Nielson ratings.  Those ratings started slipping as audience migrated to other platforms.  Transmedia was to reach people where they were.

The show itself was about “saving the world”.  Put a message into the world about interconnectivity and global consciousness, post modern about what a hero is.

The wide, wide world of HEROES

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/125/the-wide-wide-world-of-heroes.html

The number 1 illegally downloaded show:  reflected fan base.

Marketing is now content.  Was Kring the one to curate the content?  A constant liaison between writers’ room and dot com room for NBC.  Everything pushed out audience came from the writers’ room.  Thin thread that connects you to a fan base is authenticity and that thread can be severed easily.

Who is watching the audience? It’s hard as things are moving so fast.  Most successful brands today are those whose audience fell they own the brand.  Guide them but let them feel that way.

Multi platform work could generate big revenue.

Get out of one way street of pushing content at people.  Audience wants to feel connection and to participate.  Want to feel they have influence.  The sense of participation is an absolute must now for building fan-dom.  To pitch a show in hollywood now, you must think about extension to other platforms.  Taking the property/idea/story and don’t put tv show at center, but put idea at center and decide what part of that can live on tv.

Interactive community has been absent in the conversation about sustainability but it is that community that will take a lead in moving things forward

Good fortune and ill fortune across time.  Vonnegut:  primary narratives – a bearable life, lose something important and regain it, overcoming misfortune.  Or a person who finds something they like, lose it and get It back.

Any story, from Tess of the D’Urbevilles, John Grisham, etc and plot them this way.

The other narrative is a graph of Metamorphosis.  A hopelessly unhappy man becomes a roach.

These are the narratives of sustainability.  The Kafka narrative is the same.  It’s an abstract notion you cannot participate in or change.  Environmental toxins, natural disaster, climate, illness.  Political corruption:  a society full of diabetics, chronically ill, health care system, etc.  Why does a salad cost more than a big mac.  Garbage in the north pacific, burn pits in iraq, etc.  Haiti – natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanoes linked to climate change.  Polar ice cap puts pressure on plates on earth surface.  It amplifies the corruption in building and construction etc.

Designers’ Accord – to answer what do w do in the barrage of negativity and apocalyptic imagery around the planet.  Y bring the creative community together, we can look at social, cultural, environmental issues together, creatively and optimistically.  Dependence on the collective wisdom.  DA:  a Kyoto treaty of design with 5 guidelines: personal and collective accountability )educate self and teams and clients to reflect greater responsibility and share stories about successes and failures.)  Collective initiative. Digital and face to face, town hall meetings, gatherings to work as a group.

Case studies in major publications – tackling issues of sustainability, the honest story, applying judegement at every step, a constant struggle.

Design educators with a changing value system.  Schools and companies around the world working together.

Sustainability can’t be seen as being beyond us.  Constant total length.  Your environment has two fixed points, between which any action creates reverberation through the system.

Seven ways to think about Sustainability in a broader terms in ways the interactive community can lead in:

1. A system is more than the sum of its parts.  The hippo roller – an easy way to transport vast quantities of fresh water rather than the previous method: women and kids have to miss out on education etc to drag five gallon buckets, leading to loads of associated problems, etc.  Environmental, cultural, social and economic factors.
2. In systems thinking, there are feedback delays.  Adjustments take a while to be manifested. Decisions based on knowledge immediately available.  Design trap, you design for the symptoms, not the problem.
3. ?
4. Creating the right measurement of success.  In US  it’s the GNP as our indicator of prosperity but it only reflects the money in the economy.  This can be challenged:  the Master Plan deigned by HOK architects with Bio-mimicry Guild  Biologists who work with designers and architects.  The Lhasa: ecological performance standards for the built environment, looking at what the land did in the ecosystem before buildings.  They build everything so that buildings perform in the same way.  Exaggerated present will diminish
5. Selecting correct lever for change:  People tend to identify the wrong thing to change when they’re building something.  Government in Romania noticed drop in birth rate so they forbade contraception and abortions.  Burst of births but then it levelled out and mortality rate of likely mothers spiked due to lousy abortions.  Also abandoned kids in orphanages.  Goal was to increase birth rate but they pulled the wrong level.  Mythology of design isn’t really accurate; change the rhetoric to reflect the way the world works.  Lever for change: NAKED PIZZA.  Four guys in New Orleans who built a shack for pizza, the healthiest pizza. Take the concept and scale it as a trojan horse into fast food industry, competing with unhealthy companies.  Diff goal to fast food industry (make money) but rather than activism or whole foods mentality (expensive) they use pizza as Trojan horse to talk about these issues.
6. Leading thinker – Dana Meadows.  Systems thinking and slinky.  Latent structure of slinky and its behaviour are inherently linked.  A system cannot behave differently unless its structure is changed. The HUB, started in London in 2005.  Shared space for social entrepreneurs in a networked environment to provide a context for enabling collaboration.  Putting people together to share ideas.  Novel business environment and support social entrepreneurs with new access to capital, maintaining their missions.  Global structure is bringing ideas to fruition.  Structure and behaviour are connected.
7. Issue attention cycle.  Cycle with five different phases.  A group discovers a problem in society, set out to change, realise costs, peters out.  Rising of public awareness about a problem.  When public gets awareness about political or social issue, degree of public action inversely correlates.  Excitement but inaction.  Designers Accord could become a victim of this.  A few hundred thousand people getting interested in a topic has a tranquillising effect.  The think someone else is handling it.  Sustainability movement could get fatigue and opt-out around it.  People think someone else is looking after it.

A system is made up of elements and interconnections that are highly organised to achieve an overall goal or purpose.  For change, you have to change the purpose or goal to change the system’s behaviour.  Interactive community is conspicuously missing.  Be the connecting voices between the disciplines and articulate the purpose for the creative community at large.  The interactive e-community is the one to do it.

What if social media were about social impact.  What is games were for addressing  issues?

Interactive community is the connective tissue between various universes.

We exist at the pleasure of system – culture, economy, environment, society.  Interactive community must lead – this is the time to make the change, to use the innate qualities of interactive-ness, systems thinking to make change, communicate with audiences and each other.

The Matrix, Sorority Girls.  Storyline carried through a variety of different media.

Warner Brothers – Terminator salvation: interested in transmedia and want to incorporate throughout new properties.

District 9

Not a static thing anymore.  Transmediamatrix.com

Big business of all kinds is doing it:  random house, NBC, Warner brothers, etc.

Juan Garcia – convergent media producer, University of Texas

Transmedia – the wizarding world of harry potter.

LOST – ABC and Disney working on a LOST theme ride

Take you out of the show and into the series.

Glee:  actors from the show will sing songs from the show on a tour.

Can transmedia storytelling extend into nonfiction?  Yes.  Biggest success in this area is the Obama Campaign.  An unknown person with soaring popularity after taking advantage of fan fiction (obama girl, obama mccain dance off, remix), images, Social etworks and using social media to further the character and the brand.  Images and video spread to great results and contributions were welcomed and added to the whole perception of Obama as a person.

Larger first transmedia person was Jesus Christ.  If you were not literate in the middle ages, you found out about jesus through story, song, stained glass, etc, all adding to the vision of the person, another piece of the puzzle.  (Gomez and Jenkins)

We are born story-tellers, so we can incorporate transmedia into reality and non-fiction easily.

Gowalla – location based application service a big part of how we’re telling stories.  As we get more mobile, etc. and add more information to our patterns, we will be able to incorporate video etc, which is important in terms of the idea of video graffiti.  Being able to drop your info and leave it in a location so it becomes a part of the location’s and the person’s history.  Generations to come will be able to associate with this history and information.  Another platform being used and adding transmedia into reality.

Also important for history capture and perspective. You can see something from many different angles, dropping video graffiti allows people to interact.  Augmented reality meets transmedia.

Reality is already cross platform, complex enough for us to allow characters and stories across platforms.  Humans have been experiencing transmedia in our lives forever.

If I Can Dream project.  Ificandream.com:  more than 50 high def cameras set up in a house in LA.  Interact wot people thru twitter, facebook ,etc.  And this is only one piece.  Exclusive deal with hulu for a weekly show, radio broadcasts, etc.  Each of the 5 people are aspiring artists and you’re catching them before their careers are launched and yu become part of their success.  You can submit your own audition, but unlike Big Brother, there’s no voting system, just mean to to capture individual’s lives and see their interactions, daily video blogs and each piece adds to their  character and your sense of them as people.  You can interact with them.

Are we there yet?  Yes with Hollywood, investment, and yes with basic human ability to absorb and create social good.

In the non-fiction space, transmedia story-telling can empower consumers and raise media literacy.

Katherine Herdlich – San Francisco.  Runs Come Out and Play

Location-based Gaming.  Context means everything, not just the geo location.  Blurred lines between physical and digital mean you can play anywhere.  COAP wants public forum for play, city-sized fun.  Not virtual worlds or virtual reality.  Alternate Reality games.  STREETWARS KILLER.  Geo-caching – iphone app for this.

Scenic Route – take a walk with your mobile phone.  http://m.scenicroute.com

Zack Saul – Retronyms – See and Spell, a realtime location based game

Seek’n spell.  GPS location, download a satellite photo of surroundings, little letter tabs.  Recreational location- based game, real time and multi player.  Unexpected used of platform.

Brooke Thompson – freelance experience designer, ARG-fest.  Giantmice.com

Financing comes through branding partnership.

Break a story down into tiny components, allowing players to reconstruct it  by discovery.  Tends to be a little bit more lowtech.  Trying to engage people.

Aldridge:  a rewrite of HP Lovecraft.  Group of characters who can’t handle technology at all.  Where could they live?  13,000 square miles of wire-free zone in west virginia.  6 players were willing to go there, to a place in the middle of nowhere.  A train takes then to the top of the mountain and leaves them there.  The Place itself did everything for them as it was spooky.  Characters were hired to enhance the story.  A kidnapping, etc, which couldn’t have been done anywhere else.

In NYC, the characters would suffer in the face of technology.  A scavenger hunt that went all through the city, engaging players online through webcam system.  Clues held up to webcam, actors performed in front of webcam.  Remnants of Indian mounds – boxes containing spooky artifacts, etc.

Strong orientation towards story.  Other examples of ARGs that use space and technology.

I Love Bees, Last Call Poker, Why So Serious

Application:  Hidden Park

Seth Brebeck – Scvngr – global geo-game that uses wed-based toolkit

New platform for high tech location based mobile games, tours, and interactive experiences.

Jeweller promotion – high tech treasure hunt for lost diamond.

Scvngr builder – business model is about licensing the software.

Diamond Dashes

Smithsonian

Darpa Balloon Challenge: military research institute.  Challenge to take 10 red balloons and hide then in the US and whoever finds them first, via longitude and latitude, wins $40K.  Low tech and high tech game.  MIT team won, creating a meta game, creating viral and fast growing network to identify ten balloons around country.

Helicopter game onscreen and off.

Jason Wishnow – Director Film and Video at TED

Margaret Gould Stewart – User Experience manager at Youtube

Damian Kulash – OK GO

WHAT IS VIRAL VIDEO: a video where a significant amount of the viewership wants to become part of the distribution system; “anything with boobs or kittens in it.”

Something people can relate to and feel compulsive about sharing it with others, not purely about the view count.

Two main sections:  viral by accident (150 million views for Charlie bit my finger) and viral by intention

What makes content spread fast on the internet and how can you increase your chances – repeatedly not by accident.

It’s all about the content:

Viral content

James Watson at TED

Nicholas Negraponti at TED

Bill Gates at TED 2009 – unleashes mosquitoes into the room – baldness effects rich people, not malaria

Hans RIsling at TED – AIDS talk  – epidemic and pandemic, reveal after reveal to demonstrate new invention, solidified beam of the laser pointer.

Production Values are part of Content – backyard dance video shot in backyard with a borrowed video camera, practice routine, homemade style. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbdbVhBGETQ

Sense of wonder or surprise translated through appropriate production values.

How to spread – Tactics:

• Building your audience and a subscriber base – interacting with the community:  Failblog:  curating rather than creating content.  Relationship between content and audience.  Induce people to participate and make things around the things you make, will make people want to spread.  Encourage offshoots and parodies, etc.  Fighting Granny on Failblog.
• Embed:  no one wants traffic leaving their site.  Title and info is as important as anything else-  titles and tagging are key, don’t trick people with misleading thumbnails and info.  TED content is distributed on blogs, virgin America channel, obviously Youtube and the TED website.  Types of comments made act as great PR.  Intimate reaction between viewer and creator.
• OK GO domino video – State Farm sponsorship.  Corporate sponsor got positive comments and 17^th century patron of the arts style…
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w
• Surprised Kitten video.