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When an author set out to tell a story in years past, he or she typically did so on paper, a typewriter or by typing at a computer.But today, storytellers find imaginative ways to share their ideas with interactive and visual elements. On modern mediums like Twitter, Vine, YouTube and other mobile applications, storytellers are crafting tales in ways that would have been unfathomable a decade ago. Offline, too, authors have begun rethinking the traditional concept of the book in ways both innovative and unorthodox. Might a story be better understood as a set of machine parts? How might destroying a book actually bring its messages to life?Here are nine ways authors are revolutionizing the way stories are told....
Anyone who’s taken a shortcut and skipped the primer while painting a room knows the kind of results you can get. Uneven. Unpolished. The primer sets the stage for a beautiful wall.
That’s kind of the idea behind the storytelling website Primer Stories, says Tim Lillis, one of the creative minds behind the site, which mixes medium-form written pieces with lots of eye-catching visual effects.
He thinks the stories should be just long enough to prime readers on the subject – about 1,000 words — while also acting as a primer of intellectual paint.
Story topics can be ambitious, but Lillis and co-creator Joe Alterio were intent on crafting narratives that are digestible for both longform lovers and listicle lushes.
“We realized that somewhere along the line, the important ideas were losing the battle of marketability,” Alterio says. “So, how do we give them a little bit of that flash while still retaining that core, essential part of the idea?”
From beginning to end, a transmedia story should be a social phenomenon, one which draws people together and unifies them through shared experiences. At present, the industry is obsessed with creating toys and applications which are too exclusive. They do not address the primary goal of storytelling—bringing individuals together by revealing some truth about the world around us.
Like the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ stories of the 1980s, these gimmick driven products isolate rather than connect your viewers. Well designed alternate reality games are popular because they immerse players within the same social experience (the same way big talent shows like Idol or The Voice do but on a smaller scale). The players are unified toward a common goal against a common evil.
If transmedia is to be even more successful in the future, we need to concentrate on designed experiences that are socially inclusive which have the power to bring people together through common interests and goals. This will require that we take more care in designing the path along which our readers and viewers access our stories. Transmedial producers have a tendency of creating interactive experiences that are overly complex which ultimately deter audience engagement across every available piece of content. We need to define the ‘path’ between audience access points much like the map function on a video game so that audience members know where they are in relative to the story as a whole and where they’re going, regardless of which piece of content they’ve accessed.
The first sign that Reif Larsen's Entrances & Exits is not a typical e-book comes at the table of contents, which is just a list of chapters titled "Location Unknown." Click on one of them, and you'll be transported to a location (unknown) inside Google Street View, facing a door. Choose to enter the house and that's where the narrative, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure string of vignettes, begins. As the book's description reads, it's a "Borgeian love story" that "seamlessly spans the globe" and it represents a fresh approach to the book publishing industry.
Larsen's book is one of the inaugural titles from Editions at Play, a joint e-books publishing venture between Google Creative Lab Sydney and the design-driven publishing house Visual Editions, which launched this week. With the mission of reimagining what an e-book can be, Editions at Play brings together the author, developers, and designers to work simultaneously on building a story from the ground up. They are the opposite of the usual physical-turned-digital-books; rather, they're books that "cannot be printed."...
All our stories are ultimately a reflection of our humanity and the world we inhabit. We may not notice it but everything around us is steadily changing and so stories exist to remind us of who we really are and all the places we have and have not been. Dickens, Rumi, Achebe and all the other literary giants shared this unique ability to transport their readers to a different place, a different time. They would paint foggy March mornings in London with the same detail as the warm evenings in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran and in that moment all their stores would become our own forever...
New storytelling forms inspire us.
...We should not forget that producing multimedia content is as much about mindset as skills. Imitators of “Snow Fall” might mistakenly add bells and whistles that do nothing to enhance the story itself.
Multimedia storytelling continues to evolve as more journalists experiment with the possibilities opened up by new digital tools and techniques. I recommend three more recent examples that thrust the form in new and compelling directions...
...These are exciting times. New transmedia projects are cropping up left and right and the debate over ”what the definition of transmedia is?” seems to have taken a bit of a step back. All in all it feels like we’re slowly – or perhaps rapidly; these are things that can better be assessed in hindsight – moving towards a media and content world where there is no need to talk about transmedia, as every project is as transmedia as it needs to be to fulfil any potential that project might have....
Five Steps to Multimedia Storytelling Is a valuable, free course offered through Poynter News University.
TITLE:Five Steps to Multimedia StorytellingTYPE:Self-Directed Course T IME ESTIMATE:This course takes about one to two hours to complete.
ABOUT SELF-DIRECTED COURSES
In a self-directed course, you can start and stop whenever you like, progressing entirely at your own pace and going back as many times as you want to review the material.
Want to spread your wings beyond print reporting, but don’t know where to start? In this course, you’ll learn the basic steps of telling your story with multimedia. You’ll discover ways to map out your story before you head out to do your reporting. And you’ll learn when to use such tools as audio, video and graphics.
WHAT WILL I LEARN? - Upon completing this course, you will be able to:Identify the elements in a multimedia story. - Understand which stories are more suitable for multimedia - Sketch a concept for a story - Identify tools needed to gather content in the field...
Knowing whether or not your project should be classified as transmedia can be a complicated, daunting question. In order to put you at ease so you can get back to writing, filming, coding, community building, or whatever is required to bring your project to life, This Is Transmedia created a simplified flowchart:
The immersive multimedia documentary, built using Zeega, tells the story of the impact of oil drilling in North Dakota. Todd Melby wants to tell small stories. Hardly an impossible goal for a journalist, but when you’re looking at something as big as the explosion in oil drilling in North Dakota, the scale of the story can get out of hand. In less than five years, the state has tripled its oil production; the Census Bureau estimates western North Dakota (where the oil is) will see its population increase by 50 percent. Big story. So Melby decided to to tell the macro story in a micro way, focusing on the roughnecks who come to North Dakota in search of jobs, the daily experience of working on an drilling rig, and the families whose lives are upended by the oil patch. The result is Rough Ride, a multimedia experience that takes an intimate, documentary-esque approach to telling the story. Split into a series of chapters, Rough Ride divides up the various players and scenes found throughout North Dakota’s rapidly expanding oil country, intertwined with interactive graphics, photography, and first-person video. (It’s not something easy to embed in an article like this; you really do need to go to the site and let it play to get the experience. Go full screen if you can. It’s immersive in a way that a 600-pixel-wide frame can’t be.)...
Coming to an ad space near you: Entertainment moguls Ron Howard and Brian Grazer are looking for new ways to tell stories through marketing.
This graph tells us that shorter videos are better for getting people to watch the whole thing. After all, most business video is created to serve up a pre-packaged message, so the longer the video, the less people will watch. It's also noticeable that after a certain point the engagement average flattens out -- so there's not a major difference in engagement for a 4-minute versus a 10-minute video.... [When it comes to video, shorter is better. ~ Jeff]
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A few times a year, we'll deliver a season of incredible bespoke interactive experiences that will inform, engage, and delight. It may be an RPG about climate change, a story about self-immolation with musical accompaniment, or a visual compliment to a popular podcast, but one thing's for sure – it will be awesome.
For the past week or so, I’ve been engaged in a running Facebook Messenger conversation with an impulsive, irresponsible twentysomething named Jessie. She uses all caps when excited; chats with me during job interviews and dates; consults me about her bad decisions; and sometimes even follows my advice. She is also, I should mention, a chatbot—an automated script being served to me by a computer program. But don’t judge me too harshly for spending time with her. Our conversation is also a game and a story, and Jessie is a narrative vehicle with whom, like a character in a novel, it is possible and even enjoyable to empathize. Last week, Facebook joined companies like Kik and Microsoft by inviting any company to build a chatbot for its Messenger platform. The typical hypothetical examples were transactional. An airline might build a bot that helps passengers book tickets. OpenTable might build one to take restaurant reservations. Uber could build one through which its users hail a ride. But if chatbots are, as we’ve been promised, the next evolution of apps, some of them will surely be games. It was the job of Rod Humble, the game developer who created Jessie, to figure out what that meant....
Shield 5 is a captivating new thriller that follows a wrongfully accused man on the run, desperate to clear his name. It has a lot in common with shows like Homeland and 24, except for one tiny thing: Each episode is only 15 seconds long.
Shield 5 is a new dramatic and cinematic series being released on Instagram in installments, just one recent example of what is being labeled as "social cinema." It is the brainchild of British director Anthony Wilcox, who was looking for a quick project to work on while he finished developing a bigger feature. "I’ve done a few short things online as a director-for-hire, and the fast turnaround of those things excited me. I was looking for a way to do that, but telling my own story," Wilcox told Fast Company....
So you are a film student or filmmaker and you’re interested in telling a story that will stay with your audience beyond the “fade out.” Let’s say you want a webisode to go viral. Or, a couple of years ago, you heard Disney and Fox talking about transmedia. Now you’re wondering how to stay on trend with these big distribution companies. How would you even begin to write, shoot and produce a story that is “transmedia” ready?
There are four key elements you can pay attention to when creating your work that makes it easier to transition into something interactive and cross-platform....
S T O R Y T E L L I N G ... probably mankind's oldest communication megatrend. T R A N S M E D I A ... probably one of the most used communication megatrend buzzwords in mankind's recent history.
...“Transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
From a production standpoint, it involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives. In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique pieces of content in each channel. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together (overtly or subtly), but are in narrative synchronization with each other.“....
Almost two years ago in April 2012, we published our Top 5 Storytelling Apps, our pick of the best desktop and mobile apps to help storytellers share their narratives. In today’s digital world, storytelling and technology have become intrinsically linked – both feeding each other to make storytelling more engaging, more fitting to the demands and habits of audiences and offering never-before-seen avenues of interactivity.
Perhaps once the dream of journalism professors, multimedia storytelling is gaining momentum. Whether it’s journalists, filmmakers, documentarists, marketeers or brands – the importance of good storytelling is leading more people to abandon walls of text and a single media approach and instead adopt range of different media to draw in their audiences....
So without further ado, let’s take a look at Submarine Channel’s Top 5 Storytelling Tools...
As tech watchers debate the overuse of interactive tools in stories David Sarno says light interactive news stories don't go far enough. As a tech reporter at the Los Angeles Times David Sarno found himself frustrated that newspaper stories only engage “one lousy sense,” as he puts it. That would be sight.
Why couldn’t they be as interactive and entertaining as a video game like Grand Theft Auto, where a player can walk around a virtual city, drive a car, walk into a store (and, yes, kill people), and essentially have some control over a re-created reality?
Even when the iPad came out in 2010 (an event that Sarno prolifically covered for The Times) and made print media more touchable, Sarno wasn’t impressed. “At that time, and still largely today, what news organizations and magazines are doing is reproducing the print version on the screen,” he tells Fast Company. “It’s like two steps better than scanning in the print version and putting it on the iPad screen.”...
Innovative storytelling, audience engagement, and financial flexibility are key ingredients for newspapers to cope with pressures from competitors, budget constraints, and the speed at which technology is changing."It came as no surprise when The New York Times took home a Pulitzer for 'Snow Fall' - the immersive multimedia package impressed journalists and web designers alike with its seamless integration of text, audio, videos, photos and interactive graphics."The comments in "Trends in Newsrooms 2013," the World Editors Forum's report on the state of the news industry, about the attention-grabbing content, underlined the importance of stories that jump out at readers....
...Television is undergoing an analogous transformation. Although we sometimes watch with family or friends, we mostly experience TV in relative social isolation. We are disconnected from most of the people watching with us, deaf to the roar of the crowd during a game or the laughter of the audience after a punch line. We have learned to suppress our urge to talk about what moves us, settling instead for chance meetings at the water cooler the day after. But all that has changed with the sudden rise of realtime social media, particularly Twitter. Just in the United States, tens of millions of people are talking to each other as they watch TV. This year's Super Bowl alone spurred over 24 million tweets. After 80 years of sequestered viewing, television audiences worldwide have forged Twitter into a social soundtrack for TV. If you are not part of the soundtrack yet, chances are that you will be soon....
Transmedia is going to get big in 2013, which means lots of opportunity for independent transmedia producers. Here are five ways to stay relevant as audiences embrace transmedia...
Jacob Shwirtz: "As social TV continues to evolve, with more start-ups, more consolidation and broader impact on our industry, it seems appropriate to take stock of 2012 and try to foresee what 2013 has in store for the hottest buzzword in the media industry." ...But there’s something even bigger that 2013 has in store; a new understanding that has the potential to overshadow other trends. It may take until the second or even third quarter, but eventually industry executives will start to think of social TV as much more than a technology or a marketing/distribution platform. The big win, the ultimate expression and promise of social TV, is the understanding of digital and social media as storytelling media. TV’s best expression isn’t as a marketing tool for radio and social media’s best expression isn’t as a marketing tool for TV.... [Thoughtful exploration of social TV ~ Jeff]
Via The Digital Rocking Chair
Let’s get this out of the way, now — this, like many/most of my other lists, could easily be called “25 Things I Think About Transmedia.” It does not attempt to purport concrete truths but rather, the things I believe about the subject at hand. I am something of an acolyte and practitioner in the transmedia cult, and sometimes give talks on the subject (as I will be doing next week in Los Angeles). So, here I am, putting my transmedia ducks in a row. Please to enjoy.... [Chuck Wendig shares an entertaining point of view on Transmedia storytelling ~ Jeff]
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Storytellers are deconstructing books and getting innovative -- both online and offline.