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by: David Tiley
Screen Hub, Wednesday 21 July, 2010
Jeff Gomez, transmedia proselyte, is a high priest of a development model which proves there actually is a secret conspiracy to control us all. This is something you should probably know.
Jeff Gomez, who owns Starlight Runner Entertainment, has one of the best roles in the screen sector. In public he is called a transmedia producer - a role he helped develop - but his task is actually much deeper than that.
Transmedia producers manage the spread of a project across its attendant media and ancillaries, which can encompass comics, novels, music, toys, spin off series, webisodes, and the vast range of product-based tie-ins, which in turn can involve the placement deals. It is about spreading the brand, creating new connections and opportunities, tracking the monetisation, and resolving the complex intellectual property issues. It is connected to the original property, to project income, to marketing, and the management of fans.
This is not about plonking a character on a shirt, or a doll in a toyshop. To the proselytes like Gomez, the task is to tell important stories related to the original material across the range of material. It is called transmedia storytelling.
On the phone, Jeff cited the webisodes for Battlestar Galactica as an elegant example. "Things were revealed about ancillary characters, or terrestrial creatures or certain concepts that could be viewed independently but gave you new insight into the characters and concepts of the show." he said. "They made you want to go back to the show, and re-examine their characters and motivations – that’s a great transmedia mutation because it caused you to look at the ancillary and rethink whats going on in the main content."
This makes sense as a marketing tool. The ancillaries reach far beyond the film, and can be made to point back to it. "Look at District Nine", he said, "and its marketing. Almost everything in that marketing was canonical. That makes it fascinating, and helped to build the level of interest in the film. You are paying for that if you are a studio. However, you might also accrue a number of licensees for the tee shirts and magazine and comic books and toys, based on your IP. Why not go further and give them bits of canonical content so you are simultaneously licensing the content, and nurturing the storyworld? That is a major rethink for many of our clients to get that."
To do this, the story elements have to be distributed across the media, and therefore ruthlessly consistent. Indeed, the central property has to be able to bear the strain of all this extra material. This is far more elaborate than ensuring all the properties enhance the brand - it cuts to the heart of the script and the world it creates and inhabits.
This is the bit that creates a model of development which explains just why and how the big tentpole franchises are filling our multiplexes - a process which can be subverted for our more modest purposes.
Gomez is creating bibles for films or television series which go far beyond the bible as we understand it in series production, although we are familiar with the basic notion. It is an intricate description of the world, the characters, the connections, timelines, backstory, any fantastical elements or conventions or special devices. It articulates, binds and bounds everything.
He used the example of Tolkien, saying, "Middle Earth was built on an enormous amount of research and development. A hyper-elaborate bible with a whole language and world was made before he wrote 'The Hobbit'. So what we are building is closer to that model. A platform neutral development of the storyworld."
read more.... www.xmedia.com
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