Transmedia 101: Frank Rose, Zombies, and Immersive Story Telling

I received a gentle introduction to transmedia storytelling at a meetup last night organized by a NYC group dedicated to spinning yarns around a digital fireplace. My reason for going was to hear author and Wired writer Frank Rose, who provided much needed context for transmedia newbies like me.

In researching his new book The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, Rose explained how each media innovation triggered concerns–usually from the intelligentsia–that our minds were being enslaved in a Matrix-like alternate reality.

In this worldview, the diminishment of our free will and mental capacities started with the mass production of the written word, courtesy of a Mr.Guttenberg. Though some old fogies would argue that committing word to paper using a tech innovation known as the quill destroyed our ability to remember and reason–I’m talking to you Socrates.

Lecturing in front of about 80 or so transmedians at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Rose informed us that the conventional wisdom, circa 19th century, was that popular fiction in that scandalous new form factor called the novel wasted the time and loosened the morals of its readers.

When Dickens’ novels were serialized in the daily press–another new media mind destroyer–there was still fear that this by now established literary art would “throw us into a state of unreal excitement, a trance, a dream”.

These are familiar criticisms and was no doubt a source of amusement to those gathered transmedia practitioners in the audience.

One of those journeyman is Nate Goldman, a recent Boston University graduate and promising young non-linear teller of tales who was on hand to talk about his Undead End project.

Inspired by Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio drama, Goldman worked out a multi-pronged narration strategy involving fake news radio broadcasts aired on his college radio station and an accompanying web site and twitter personnas. This was all coordinated by Goldman to tell a story about a government lab run amok. Would you be surprised if I told you zombies played an important part?

From what I understand, Goldman used a Facebook page to attract students to become zombies (with help from the appropriate prosthetics) and then storm the streets near BU. This zombie uprising was dutifully reported on the fake news website. Non-zombies, by the way, could also play along by scanning well placed QR codes, which would lead to, say, a virtual rifle cache for defending humankind.

You get the idea.

One thought after leaving this meetup is that if we can only get these zombies to roam Wall Street and chew on the wrists of a few investment bankers. Wait, that’s another potential transmedia drama–I’ll put that in my things-to-do list.

To these outsider eyes and ears, I see familiar elements in Nate’s and another project presented called FanFan2 taken from guerrilla marketing, video games, bits of D and D, along with newer techniques based on crowdsourcing and collaboration technologies. All of this made more immediate and real with the Internet.

Perhaps this is a new way of telling stories, or just story telling with “more stuff”, as Michale Schur has put it. Interviewed in Rose’s book, Schur is the writer behind one of the ur-projects in transmedia, the Dundler-Mifflen Infinity episode of The Office (see the Infinity website below).

As for transmedia placing us into a trance or causing unreal excitement? I am not particularly alarmed.

Although there was a project I saw over the past few months that had GOP “candidates” engaging in a “debate” and broadcasting a few disturbing ads.

You mean that wasn’t a transmedia project?