Merging+Media 2011 Transmedia Lab

So, it looks like I got into the Merging+Media lab being held in Vancouver on April 28th and 29th, 2011. I’m pretty excited about it, only 24 people from across Canada have gotten into the lab which is going to be lead by Anita Ondine. She’s got a lot of experience in developing transmedia properties for film and is currently producing “Pandemic” for Lance Weiler’s next film “HiM”. He’s currently one of my favourite independent film producers as he’s got the business savvy that has allowed him produce his own films, distribute them and make money without ever having to deal with a distribution company. This has been the largest roadblock I’ve encountered to getting transmedia properties up and running in Canada so I’m looking forward to the feedback and expertise in the room.

It sounds like I’m the only one in Alberta who got into the lab, everyone else is from Toronto and Vancouver. Given the increasing interest in taking storytelling out of traditional media, I’m expecting to hear about a lot of new and creative approaches. It will also be interesting to see how the changing hardware market is going to influence how media is going to be produced and consumed as well. It always comes down a great story but it is becoming a very interesting time to be a storyteller.

Babelgum Pixel New Media Pitchfest

I’m sure everyone has heard of, or been to, a Pitchfest. These kinds of events are like speed-dating for screenwriters and development executives. Usually a screenwriter will be trying to sell a concept or a script for a television series or a film in a very short amount of time, often a few minutes. The development executives are there to listen to the pitches in the hope of finding new material to make into creative properties. If it is an organized event they might offer some useful feedback, most often they’ll take your card and tell you that they’ll call. Maybe sometimes they actually do.

What is interesting is that media is changing very, very quickly. It would make sense that pitch sessions would start to become very different as well. One of the first attempts that I’ve come across happened in London just a few days ago. The Power to the Pixel festival in London has a pitch session this year aimed specifically at cross-media pitches. The Babel Pixel Pitch Award had 120 submissions from 14 different countries. The news release has a list of the 7 top entries that were able to pitch to a panel of judges. All of these pitches are an attempt to spread the story across multiple mediums but some of these are designed to be a lot more engaging. Of the seven entries that made it to the final pitch session, five of them explicitly define an Alternate Reality Game as a component of the pitch. Most of them have film, television and video game components as well but this idea of having a more complex vision of a creative project is an exciting and challenging new area for media.

What would have been as interesting as the pitches would be the panel they put together to evaluate them. It would need to have a lot more depth than a film or television Pitchfest. Those kinds of events are filled with the agents and development executives from film and television that often show up to these kinds of sessions. Most traditional media producers are firmly committed to a traditional, linear approach to creative properties. Instead, a cross-media Pitchfest would take a real multidisciplinary jury that would be able to communicate with each other using some semblance of a common language. Groups of individuals that can form a community of peers and talk about New Media proposals must be rather rare at the moment.  However, they can’t stay rare forever. The Babelgum Pixel Pitch event had a jury of 26 individuals from media, video games, film, television and academia. It was a huge number of people to evaluate the seven pitches. This may well be the size of a jury to evaluate these pitches as they are complex, multi-layered and cover a wide range of competencies. It will be interesting to see the evolution of these juries as they will need to evaluate these new breeds of narrative pitches and provide the kinds of feedback that are going to make it feasible to move them forward to development.

I’m looking forward to what comes out of this year’s pitchfest. I’m also hoping that some of these pitch sessions make it onto the web in video format so I can take a look at them in detail. Hopefully I’ll have a postmortem of those sessions for next week.

Screenwriting and cross-media

Writing a script for an ARG is very much like writing a script for a film. The narrative has to be engaging and cohesive and tell a story. The major difference is that you are not always thinking visually about how that script is going to be implemented. When the story development is written up in blogs, emails and text messages you need to think about the story from the perspective of the character themselves. You still need to be aware that whatever is created needs to be able to tell the story, not provide an explanation of the narrative. Whatever is written needs to speak for itself and allow the viewers to develop the narrative themselves.

In many ways the writing is more intimate and confessional in nature. Although many ARGs have video and audio segments, they also rely on original writing from the characters themselves. Rather than having the narrative interpreted and edited they are relying on the original source material for much of the story itself.

The script outline will need to be taken and broken into scenes that can be accommodated within the structure of the ARG. Once this basic breakdown occurs, the script can be written into a full 90-120 page script. The contents of the script will reflect the affordances of the media that will be used to cover that segment of the script. For example, a personal narrative of a character could be captured in a vlog or amateur video. The nature of that media would need to be reflective of the storytelling approach being taken by the ARG. If the project is meant to be told exclusively as a first person perspective of the story, there would be no professionally shot footage of those scenes.

Alternate Reality Game Design

The concept of an ARG doesn’t seem immediately intuitive. Several diagrams that follow illustrate how narrative compares between ARGs and other narrative genres such as film and video game. They might help to clarify the design paradigms as well as identify some of the distinct components that are currently used in the implementation of ARGs.

Figure 1. Film Narrative
In general, film runs through a linear course with a narrative that is usually in a three-act structure. The story structure builds towards a crisis, resolution and finally a conclusion. There are some exceptions to this approach. The film Late Fragment (2007) was North America’s first interactive film that allowed a non-linear approach to a narrative about three characters in the film. Eventually, the viewer would uncover all of the narrative elements but in order to make sense of them, they were required to make meaning of the narrative themselves.
Figure 2. Video Game Narrative

Video games often have a narrative running through them that ties together the various levels that must be played to finish the game. The narrative can have varying levels of importance within the game itself. A first person shooter, such as Halo (2001), had a narrative running through the entire game to provide a back-story and context for the game levels. It was not critical to that actual game play to be aware of the story or understand its implications. Other games, such as the role-playing game Knights of the Old Republic (2003), had a detailed and branched storyline. Understanding that narrative and interacting with it could significantly alter the outcome of the game and the experience of the player.

Figure 3. ARG Narrative

ARGs have a design that covers a variety of passive and active media. The narrative elements are used to tell expose the story to that participants and the challenge elements provide the points when a player needs to actively engage with the ARG to continue the narrative. The order of the media does not have to be set in a way that immediately makes sense. In some ARGs the challenges help the players discover components of the narrative but there is an additional challenge to place the media into an order where the story actually makes sense.