Very Nice Post from Andrea Phillips on Time and Transmedia - Deus Ex Machinatio

Time and Transmedia

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 4:27PM

Transmedia narratives have a distinct problem with chronology, and the more fragments you break a story into, the harder it becomes to manage. The problem is on two fronts: How you expect your audience to consume the narrative, and the timeline for your actual story. I've been mulling over the passage of time and its implications for transmedia a lot lately, and thought I'd share where I am so far.

Expected Vectors

West Coast Hollywood-style transmedia tends to exist as a series of inter-related snapshots, each existing at a single point in a story universe's chronology and presented to the audience in single, finished pieces -- often a single tentpole piece of media that spawns a sequel, and then another, and then spins out from there.

One begins the Star Wars experience by watching Star Wars, the movie. Right? One can safely assume that anyone reading any Star Wars novels or comic books, or playing any video games, has already seen the films. That means that as a creator, you can use a sort of shorthand for knowledge you can reasonably expect a reader to have -- you don't need to explain what a Jedi is in every book, or who Darth Vader is, or the fact that Coruscant is where the senators all hang out. Your audience will remember.

Except that there is a generation of kids whose first contact with Star Wars comes from Clone Wars, the animated series. Which means their path into the universe could be completely different, and if a Clone Wars viewer were to pick up a copy of Tatooine Ghost... they might be a little lost. Context is everything.

The solution for this

via deusexmachinatio.com

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http://www.deusexmachinatio.com/blog/2011/5/31/time-and-transmedia.html#

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