One of the things I don't get about film is that insane amount of jargon. Actually jargon is the term I would use for this field. I would say something along the lines of vocabulary. Yes, film has an insane amount of vocabulary. Why? Maybe it's to sound cool; I don't really know. I just know that I now have to devote a part of my brain to it, even if I don't want to.
At this particular moment 5:17 pm on Wednesday, 43 minutes away from an accounting event, I am rather all over the place. Maybe I'm just too busy. Or maybe I hate this text. But I will tell you this, "I hate this text." Can someone just please give me an outline of this work? I can then search like a transmedia storytelling fan and find the meanings behind each paragraph. Look, I even found one about Barthes Codes. It's simple really. Don't make it harder for me. My time is valuable.
Notes from the text:
Part 1. What is Transmedia Storytelling?
Convergence Culture:
A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms with each newHenry Jenkins
text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.
Here the drive toGeoffrey Long (pg 14-15)
continue exploring the franchise is increased by promising not narrative repetition, but extension. While each could be experienced separately and still be enjoyable, each component became part of a single unified storytelling experience.
According to Jenkins’ definition, transmedia narrative might be graphed thus:Geoffrey Long (15)
Although each component can be experienced individually, they all clearly exist in
relation to each other in the larger transmedia story.
Screen Bleed:
Matt Hanson, the founder of the digital film festival onedotzero, refers to the practice as ‘screen bleed’ in his 2003 book The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age:Long pg 17
Originally a technical term (when non-broadcast safe colors, which are very bright or color-saturated, bleed into other areas of the screen), screen bleed is a useful term to appropriate to describe a modern narrative
condition where fictive worlds extend into multiple media and moving image formats. I believe the condition of screen bleed is proliferating due to the immersive 3D worlds we explore as game players and digital media consumers. This is why all-encompassing mythologies are the most resonant with contemporary audiences. After all, if a gaming experience is so involving, so cinematic, why shouldn’t we expand the experience into film or interactive online worlds, where each strand of narrative offers a new dimensional layer? (Hanson 47)
Media Mix:
Mimi Ito, meanwhile, refers to the Pokémon/Yu-Gi-Oh transmedia model as an example of a ‘media mix’:Long pg 17
By linking content in multiple media forms such as video games, card games, television, film, manga books, toys, and household objects, Pokémon created a new kind of citational network that has come to be called a “media mix”… Rather than spoon-feed stabilized narratives and heroes to a supposedly passive audience, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh invite children to collect, acquire, recombine, and enact stories within their peer networks, trading cards, information, and monsters in what Sefton-Green has called a “knowledge industry”. These media mixes challenge our ideas of childhood agency and the passivity of media consumption, highlighting the active, entrepreneurial, and technologized aspects of children’s engagement with popular culture.
Cross sited Narratives:
Marc Ruppel refers to transmedia stories as 'cross-sited narratives', declaring them to be "a unique product of cultural and economic convergence, a process of narrative convergence". Ruppel defines 'cross-sited narratives' as "multisensoryLong pg 18
stories told across two or more diverse media (film, print literature, web, video
games, live performance, recorded music, etc.)".
Transfiction:
Long pg 18
By transfiction I refer to stories that are distributed over more than one text, one medium. Each text, each story on each device or each website is not autonomous, unlike Henry Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling. In transfiction (a term to counter Jenkins’, though they should be the other way around!), the story is dependent on all the pieces on each medium, device or site to be read/experienced for it to be understood. Basically, no single segment will be sufficient. These will vary between being experienced simultaneously and sequentially. Examples we see now areWhat Dena describes is perhaps the most stringent definition of transmedia storytelling. Under Jenkins' definition, each transmedia extension can stand on its own as an individually enjoyable entity – so one could play Enter The Matrix or watch The Animatrix without seeing the original Matrix films and still enjoy each of them independently. Under Dena's 'transfiction' definition, however, the independent media forms couldn't stand on their own any more than an individual chapter of a novel taken out of context.5 Dena’s transfiction might be graphed as follows:
parallel narratives with TV shows that you can participate with by answering a quiz on the Web, mobiles, etc (especially here in [Australia]). But, we'll see stories, not just games being experienced this way. In consequence too, we'll see more technologies for having ‘hyperlinks’ between media. Using blue-tooth [sic], wireless, infra-red or something.4
Hard/Soft/Chewy
To this end, I'd like to propose the term 'hard' for transmedia narratives designedLong pg 21 (pre existence vs post? Am I right with this?)
as such from the outset. Examples of this might be anything Christy Dena might consider to be ‘transfiction,’ such as Orson Scott Card's transmedia franchise Empire, or the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII series of video games. 'Soft', then, would represent transmedia narratives that are only created after some original media component proved successful, like the spin-off video game Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerebus or the eighth season of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer currently being published in comic format by Dark Horse Comics.
Part 2: Adaptation vs Transmediation
Retelling a story in a different media type is adaptation, while using multipleLong 22
media types to craft a single story is transmediation.
In her essay “Literary Film Adaptation and the Form/Content Dilemma”, ElliottLong 22
describes multiple models for considering adaptations in this ectoplasmic fashion: a
‘psychic model’ suggests that the ‘spirit’ of a story can migrate from one body to another,
as from a novel to a film; a ‘ventriloquist model’ suggests that a film grants the spirit of
the novel a new voice; the aforementioned ‘genetic model’ suggests that the novel and
the film share a similar ‘deep structure’ similar to DNA; a ‘merging model’ suggests that
the spirits of both film and novel combine into one entity in the mind of the audience; an
‘incarnational model’ suggests that the invisible spirit of text aspires to visualize itself in
film; and a ‘trumping model’ suggests that the spirit of the novel had been misplaced all
along, and was always meant to really be a film.
Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully experienceJenkins in Convergence Culture
any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and
gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels,
comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and
collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will
come away with a richer entertainment experience.
Resources:
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/narratology/modules/barthescodes.html
A website about the different codes. I really like this website since it simply states what is and what is not. Let's say I have some attention disorder. I would rather read this and not waste my time than reading a sixty page report. Sorry.
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