The Xtend Story App: A Solution for Transmedia Storytelling
Situation Analysis
Extensions and products of Batman: The Animated Series
Where to start…
It was Christmas Day, 1993. My dad and I had been talking about it for a month and the day was finally here. “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm” had finally come to theatres. I was a huge fan of its predecessor television series “Batman: The Animated Series,” so I was doubly excited to see it on the big screen.
I’d seen the trailers multiple times as they played during my cartoons , and I’d studied the ads in my comics for what felt like an eternity. All of the waiting eventually paid off. The movie received great reviews, was successful at the box office, and most importantly, my dad and I loved it.
I remember the familiarity the movie created because the animation style and all the voice actors were the same from the TV series; it immediately felt right. No context was needed. No backstory. I knew everything that I needed to because I’d seen every episode of the show.
Little did I realize that this was my first real experience with transmedia storytelling.
What is Transmedia?
Industry leader and transmedia advocate Henry Jenkins defines it best: “Transmedia storytelling represents the process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of a story.”
In short, transmedia is telling a story in multiple parts across multiple media.
Purpose
Every story is not meant to be contained in film, or text, or a bubble gum wrapper. Different aspects of stories perform best in other mediums. The continual popularity of converting books to movies demonstrates just how much is lost in the translation of text to film. For good reason, the on-going joke has been “The movie was good, but the book was better.” Ask any Harry Potter, Hunger Games, or Jack Ryan fan which they prefer and they will most certainly choose the story in book form.
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“When you’re confined to one platform, you’re being confined to the best format that works on that platform. When you take a one-platform approach, you’re limiting how you can tell that story and you’re limiting how you might market that story.”
Ira Rubenstein,
Chief Digital and Marketing Officer
Interactions
Now more than ever, we have the ability to choose whatever products in media we want to interact with. In the 1980s there were 12 channels available on broadcast TV, the 1990s brought 55 channels, and now there are over 2,000. This isn’t including outlets that did not even exist 20 years ago, like YouTube, podcasts, and social media. With so many options available, it comes to reason that if someone is interacting with your product, they want to be.
The expansion of choice is not limited to only these mediums. Twenty years ago, streaming music was in its infancy with sites like LimeWire and Napster, which were illegal. Now, we have Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music. At the same time, film has also found ways to build out past the traditional “big screen release” with streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. With both of these instances, the public demonstrated that they have evolved alongside these new delivery methods and have integrated them into daily life.
Digital Music DownLoads (2000 vs 2020)
Movie Releases (2000 vs 2018)
Cave drawings, hieroglyphics, illuminated manuscripts, etchings, and so many more. We had benefited for so long by using multiple media together – pictures and words – to get a message across, but when plain text became the norm in recent times, all of a sudden pictures became taboo.
“Traditional thinking has long held that truly great works of art and literature are only possible when the two are kept at arm’s length,...words and pictures together are considered, at best, a diversion for the masses, at worst a product of crass commercialism. As children, our books had pictures galore and very few words because it was easier. Then, as we grew, we were expected to graduate to books with much more text and occasional pictures and finally arrive to ‘real’ books – those with no pictures.” ”
History
The cinema poster for The Blair Witch Project
Matthew Freeman, author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling posits that the start of true transmedia began in the late 19th Century with the works of L. Frank Baum, author of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and a number of other books in the same universe. Baum helped develop a huge following for his vivid fantasy stories about a faraway land by using transmedia to build anticipation for new titles. The author accomplished this by arranging window dressings to show what some of the settings in the book would look like. This created a physical manifestation of the lands and places in the book that up until that point only existed in people’s imagination.
Baum also used more nontraditional ways of working with a playwright, newspaper publisher, and promoter to bring more attention to his books. Using a combination of all these different mediums allowed Baum to create new levels of hype for his books and imaginary universe.
In 1966, a new series premiered on NBC called, Star Trek, which chronicles each of the missions taken by the crew of the starship USS Enterprise as they explore the galaxy in new adventures every week. Over its three seasons, the show sent shockwaves across the world that would eventually make it an icon. Since then, there have been six other iterations of the TV show, 13 movies, two animated TV shows, an estimated 860 books, and countless video games.
The 1999 independent film hit, Blair Witch Project showed what was possible with transmedia in the modern age. Though the movie is fiction, the marketing content never led people to believe that. Leading up to the release of the film, a website was created to house heavily-curated tales and “new stories” building upon the Blair Witch legend. In the following months, SyFy aired a series chronicling more of the phenomena with a faux documentary. After the film debuted, a comic book capturing more stories was published.
Probably the most widely agreed successful example of transmedia comes from another 1999 movie franchise, The Matrix. The Matrix was such a complex idea that it almost required the use of transmedia for the audience to be able to fully comprehend the experience. As Freeman told me, “with The Matrix, both critics and fans complained that individual components of the world were too difficult to understand, or rather didn't make sense without the other components. That can be quite alienating for audiences.”
However, by using transmedia in three feature films, three video games, an online animated series, and two comic book titles over the course of a decade, The Matrix trilogy overcame these challenges with a current gross of $1.6 billion at the movies, and another installment planned for Spring of 2020.
The 1980s sensation Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is one of the biggest properties to reap the benefits of transmedia. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created the characters as a joke and printed 3,000 copies of their quartet’s first story. Within three years, Eastman and Laird’s turtles would take animated TV by storm, lasting for 10 seasons. To compliment the series, an extensive toy line was produced that proved to be as successful as the show. In an attempt to capture big-screen viewers, a movie was produced that ended up being the most successful independent film of its time.
Dropping In
The most common thread in all of the previous examples is the lack of guidance to help the audience find each expanded story and different medium. How are fans supposed to find these vast resources if they don’t know they exist or aren’t properly told where they are. This is even more necessary to do for casual purveyors of stories.
For example, what keeps many people from reading comic books is because they’re intimidated about how to even begin following a title. The two biggest publishers, DC and Marvel have 78 and 43 titles respectively. With various storylines for each character, it’s understandable why some people feel uncertain about how to start reading.
Even after the unprecedented success of the Avengers:Endgame film, which brought in over $2.5 billion, the comic industry failed to see any substantial number of viewers make the transfer over from consuming the content onscreen to consuming it via the original comics (See attached chart).
'Avengers' Comic Sales (March-June 2019)
“Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption. Redundancy burns up fan interest and causes franchises to fail. Offering new levels of insight and experience refreshes the franchise and sustains customer loyalty.”
Evolution of Story & Fandom
“Reading a book today can be as simple as clicking the ‘Buy’ in the Kindle app. As fans need less energy to acquire and experience fan objects, they have more energy to spend on finding new ways to express their love for them. They have responded to this extra time by doubling down of supplemental activities.”
The digital age has allowed fans to expand their knowledge, own more merchandise, and grow their love of a chosen brand by making so much content only a click away. This surge in fandom has proven to be rewarding, but depends upon the merchandise and content being available to meet the needs of eager fans.
In 1968, when Star Trek was still a relatively obscure show, it managed to create a following with the science-fiction community. A few die-hard fans went as far as to create original zines (a small, low circulation, fan-created magazine) for the show. The zine, Spockanalia featured original Stark Trek themed art, short stories, poems, and commentary by fans. Though Spockanalia only had five issues over three years, the creator of Star Trek called it “required reading.”
Though their content is outside the publisher-ordained material, fans can be relied on to create content that is worth being consumed and adds value to the story for brands and their audiences.
A copy of the Star Trek fanzine, Spockanalia.
Copies of the Star Wars fan newsletter, Bantha Tracks.
A word on Star Wars
When Star Wars broke onto the scene in 1977, it totally changed the film genre, but more importantly, it broke ground for new transmedia storytelling. After its record-breaking run at the box office, fans were left wanting more and the creators were ready to deliver. Star Wars creators created a whole new market by producing merchandise, most notably toys, to accompany the movies. From the main hero to the random robot in the background, eventually every character had a toy and, more importantly, a backstory.
In 1978, only a year after the film’s release, Lucas Film, the production company of Star Wars, started producing The Official Star Wars Fan Newsletter, later renamed as Bantha Tracks. This quarterly publication pointed fans to new comics that would soon be available, included updates about the next movie, helped you find other fans in your area, and previewed new merchandise. Lucas Film would go on to make books, video games, multiple television programs, and many more expressions of media, all in the same universe, influencing each other.
“There’s no question that George Lucas was a founding figure in the evolution of modern transmedia storytelling.”
-HENRY JENKINS
Various pieces of marketing used in The Dark Knight marketing
Transmedia Marketing
While world building through marketing is its own form of transmedia, it tends to lead up to a certain release and then stop. These campaigns are great for setting the tone of a movie, book, or show, but they’re only serving that one piece of content, and not the entirety of the universe.
Not everything with images or characters related to a brand are considered transmedia, as some manifestations are simply marketing. Lunch boxes, book bags, slippers, birthday balloons and so on do not need to participate with telling a story. What they can do is keep a transmedia brand active in the public’s mind. It’s hard to forget Spider-man when he’s on every shirt, bike, and toy commercial.
The gold standard for a transmedia marketing campaign most certainly comes from the 2008 blockbuster The Dark Knight serves as a great example of content outside of the movie adding depth to the product. Fifteen months before the movie was released, Warner Brothers began the campaign. In the end, it captured over 11 million people across 70 countries to participate.
Gary Rosen, one of the creative leads on the campaign describes just some of the events: “The campaign spilled over into the real world as fans called phone numbers written in the sky, found phones the Joker left for them inside birthday cakes, and helped project the Batman signal on buildings in New York City and Chicago… everything came out of one mission – to bring people into the world of Gotham City. To make Gotham City real.”