Jeff Gomez: The transmedia approach

Transmedia has come to mean something fully unto itself, Transmedia is no longer synonymous with cross-media or cross-platform. Transmedia is a subset of those things that allows for the conveyance of messages and themes and narratives across an array of media platforms in an artful and carefully orchestrated manner.

The results are a dialogue with your audience through the use of technology to respond to that story in some way. That’s something that we haven’t had that happen in a very long time. In fact it hasn’t happened since before the advent of the industrialised world.

We have been conditioned to believe that stories, that narrative is linear and limited. It has a beginning middle and end, it lasts half an hour, an hour perhaps two hours, the life of the reading of a novel.

A story used to be something that was ongoing and sprawling and messy and contingent on the response of your audience as you sat around that fire and related the narrative. Now this has come full circle.

Where did the idea of transmedia storytelling originate?

Some people have a broad sense of what transmedia storytelling is all about and therefore will allow for different iterations of the same story in different media formats. And so you can go back to batman in the 1960’s, which had a comic book a TV show, a feature film and all kinds of licensed tie ins and call that a transmedia implementation.

While there is a certain truth to that, it wasn’t so by design.

When you look at Japanese pop culture in the late 60 s’ and early 70’s, where one visionary (Leiji Matsumoto) who perhaps created a popular manga (Galaxy Express 999) was encouraged to supervise that storyline as a TV series, as a series of Feature films, as a direct to video series of shorter films, as video games and as toys. Each of those components comprised a different facet of the story.

This was the actual model that George Lucas was looking at when he was inventing the Star Wars universe.

What makes transmedia different from a cross-platform approach?

It’s important to keep in mind that transmedia storytelling and production are not game development or game design, this is a different animal. You will find that some people who talk about transmedia in game like terms. There are no winners or losers in the transmedia audience, there is not a points system, you are not playing some kind of elaborate hide and seek game or a scavenger hunt or things like that.

Its about building a universe and inviting someone to spend time in it because they find it aspirational and they are taking value out of it on a personal level, the way you would out of a great movie or a great piece of music.

How did you get into transmedia storytelling?

I was working for Valiant Comics which publishing the Turok comics at the time, and it got acquired by Acclaim entertainment the video game company. They wanted to leverage the super hero characters in comics as video came content so they didn’t have to pay Marvel or DC a huge licensing fee.

I was asked to select the character and develop the game with the game developers at Acclaim, and I chose Turok and the thing that I was allowed to do by the publishers was to develop a website that contained back story for the game, and I was allowed to tie the comic book narrative into the game narrative without repeating the two narratives. One would lead into the other.

On top of all of that, I put my name and email address, this is in 1994-95, out into the world and said “if you like Turok, talk to me because I’d like to get your feedback on what you would like to see in the sequel”.

And WOW! I got ten thousand email addresses within the first week or two of advertising this in the press and the response was overwhelming. Turok became a $420 million video game franchise for Acclaim and whatever it was that I was doing, they asked me to do it again.

I was one of the first to be involved in the creation of video games that began a direct dialogue with fans. I was just used to that having been a columnist, someone who wrote comic books and things like that. It was wonderful, but it’s just now I was in a much bigger arena

How important is a transmedia approach for today’s big budget movies?

One of the reasons (Starlight Runner Entertainment) is successful as a company is because it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain these tent pole franchises.

When you are investing that kind of money, you would like to maximise the potential of the intellectual property that you are cultivating.

So Instead of simply coming out with two hours of content, what if you had a means at your disposal to generate dozens or hundreds of hours of content?

You come to Starlight Runner Entertainment because in transmedia you are building upon the story world that is featured in that screenplay and in that movie and you are vastly expanding it so there is enough raw content, enough if a resource for dozens of people to begin building ancillary content that lives up to the level of content and quality of the original.

Do you think user generated content will play a big part in future transmedia projects?

User generated content is relatively new part of Transmedia content.

Is there room for user generated content to become part of the canonical universe? I say absolutely yes, but it hasn’t really happened yet in any really great way, or any expansive way, but it’s going to. There need to be systems built and put into place that allow for the leveraging of the goodwill of fans and the work of fans.

It’s definitely going to be a major aspect of transmedia storytelling in the next five years. It absolutely thrills me and I have every belief that we are going to see some fantastic outcomes from all this.

Now does that mean I’m a believer that every fan out there is capable of adding something canonically to a universe, absolutely not. It is a rare talent that can make that kind of contribution, but I believe that there is a buffer space that can allow for the expression of any fan out there to be placed within a kid of buffer area and have the truly good content that is being worked on by fans, pushed somehow by the fans themselves towards me, the visionary, the brand holder.

What projects that you have worked on are you especially proud of?

On a personal level, there are a few transmedia implementations that I am very proud of because I was the inventor of the universe. Take for example Hot Wheels, those little cars.

We built a transmedia implementation for (Mattel) in 2002 that persists to this day. Any animated content, any story content you that you are seeing around Hot Wheels cars originated here at Star Runner Entertainment.

The characters and the universe and the cars and how they work were all invented here. And that’s something that I was very proud of.

Jeff Gomez will be sharing his wealth of experience at this week’s FilmXtended X|Media|Lab conference in Melbourne, more info is available here.