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DEFINING THE FUTURE
Starlight Runner president and CEO Jeff Gomez told MipTV delegates this week that the skills needed to tell stories across multiple media are now worthy of special designation. Jonathan Webdale reports.
Transsexual. Transatlantic. Transmigration. Transmedia. Transmedia? The spell-checker turns red. Something must be wrong. It’s not in the dictionary. It’s not a proper word. Remove your tiles from the Scrabble board. No score.
This situation will change if Jeff Gomez (left) has his way. The president and CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment has more than 20 years’ experience developing video games and digital extensions for franchises including Pirates of the Caribbean, Prince of Persia, Tron, Halo and Avatar. He’s helped created ‘online universes’ for brands such as Hasbro, Mattel and Coca-Cola.
He feels it is now time for a new moniker to describe what he, Starlight, and a small but growing band of producers are doing. Transmedia is its name.
Anyone even vaguely familiar with digital media will be accustomed to its proponents’ propensity to shroud their work in impenetrable vocabulary, which somehow sets them apart from tradition.
Some would argue it’s pure elitism, or worse an effort to disguise the fact that behind the supposedly dark art lies nothing more than the same narrative skills that people have relied on since the days of cave paintings. Multi-platform? 360-degree? Do we really need to add transmedia to the lexicon?
“We’ve been licensing movies and TV programmes into other media platforms and consumer products for many years. What’s new is that transmedia storytelling is the process of conveying messages, themes or storylines to a mass audience through the artful and well-planned use of multiple media platforms,” says Gomez.
“This is something that’s developed from scratch. It’s planned and implemented from the get-go. That’s something fairly new.”
He offers a few examples: The Truth About Marika ? a TV series and alternate reality game made for Swedish pubcaster SVT by a firm called Company P, which is now working with Tim Kring on a project called TEVA. Heroes Evolutions, the online and graphic novel extension of Kring’s landmark series, also gets a mention.
“The show was veritably designed for transmedia implementation and it’s documented that the transmedia extensions of Heroes for NBC Universal have generated 10s of millions of dollars each season in additional revenues,” says Gomez.
He gives ABC’s The Dharma Initiative, a digital spin-off from Lost, credit too. Series creator and executive producer JJ Abrams gets listed alongside a number of other Hollywood heavyweights- Joss Whedon, Jesse Alexander, Naren Shankar and Bryan Burk- as among those worthy of the transmedia epithet.
“These are producers who are aware that in order to retain a certain degree of control and certain amount of financial interest in extensions of their stories on TV they have to become creatively involved with the marketing division of the network or the licensees, the people handling the video games and things like that,” says Gomez.
“Because they’re getting involved they’re able to roll out a vision that is a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more pop culture than a television series.”
Aren’t we just talking about people who get the internet? “It’s not just that. It’s a matter of people who have the capability of bridging creative and marketing for example, who can manoeuvre their way across multiple divisions of large companies like Disney or Viacom,” says Gomez.
“They speak the language of different media platforms ? the web, mobile and video games ? and yet at the same time can defend and protect the integrity of the intellectual property where it initially launched, which in this case is TV.”
Starlight has formed a coproduction alliance with New York-based animation studio Curious Pictures to devise TV animation that’s designed to work with the web, video games and mobile, and a similar arrangement with an unnamed European player is on the cards.
“It is a lot of work but we’re no longer preparing content that’s going to be two hours long. We’re preparing to interact with a large audience and furnish them with hundreds of hours of content,” say Gomez.
At the core of any transmedia property there needs to be a ‘narrative mythology’ or what he calls a ‘vast narrative’ profiles of all the characters, locations, objects of any significance, and an entire chronology of the fictional world, replete with descriptions of the central themes and brand essence that’s being communicated.
“These mythologies are vital, they are platform-neutral and they should be created before you even think about what the TV show’s going to cover or what the website is going to address,” says Gomez.
He is adamant that the skills involved in devising these warrant special demarcation and points out that the Producers Guild of America (PGA) is in the process of ratifying ‘transmedia producer’ credit. He neglects to mention that he sits on the PGA board, which no doubt means the word will be appearing on the Scrabble board soon.
Jonathan Webdale
16 Apr 2010
© C21 Media 2010
Ongoing props to Jeff Gomez for defining and advocating for the unique skills of transmedia producers
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