Storytelling and the Illusion of Authenticity | MimeFeed

via nomimes.com

Maureen McHugh on the illusion of authenticity & transmedia - well worth reading

"...Almost every project I’ve worked on has drawn on a completely new and therefore naïve audience. While there are conventions to ARGs—the countdown, for example—the stories seem most effective when the plot of them is rather conventional. Too unconventional and the novelty of form and story feels overwhelming for the audience. But if the audience has a sense of where they are in a story—oh this is the part of the story where something criminal happens, oh this is the part of the story where the hero rescues the scientist, etc—then they can follow along, just as everyone knew that crossed arms and hands flat against breast meant that the heroine had been dealt a harrowing emotional blow. But just as Duse’s doing it with the boy’s arms felt fresh, learning that the girl has been kidnapped in an email feels intimate, startling, novel.

So achieving ‘authenticity’ requires novelty in an established convention. The audience needs some level of comfort and some elements of surprise. For now, Transmedia is pretty much always surprising for the audience. I suspect that in ten or twenty years, we may have to work harder at it.

I, for one, intend to milk this moment for all it’s worth."

Posted via web from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales