News and Blogs by No Mimes Media (and friends)

As I said in Part 1, because the artform takes stories and shatters them into pieces, it’s a lot easier for the audience to put the story back together if it’s a kind of story they recognize. If it’s, in other words, a conventional narrative. So, say, detective mysteries tend to make pretty decent transmedia stories. In print stories, I like to break conventions, use less well understood conventions, and generally fart around. In transmedia, I’ve had to learn that I can make the character as complex as I want, but the structure of the narrative better be pretty simple.

The funny thing about transmedia storytelling is that for all it’s reliance on conventions, the artform itself doesn’t yet have many established conventions. And the ones that it has are probably conventions that will fall away as audiences learn the artform and as technology gets better. Read more

Click to Download Video

Last month, Maureen and I were honored to be part of a day-long series of panels put on by USC and UCLA Film Schools called Transmedia Hollywood: S/Telling the Story.

Now, videos of the entire day have become available. You can download our panel, ARG: This is Not a Game…. But is it Always a Promotion? (Jordan Weisman, Will Brooker, Ivan Askwith, etc.) directly from their site, or go here to catch all the videos from the entire day (they’re still in the process of adding all the videos).

Human beings construct narrative. It’s what we do. We impose meaning and cause and effect on events. We say, this happened and then because of or it, that happened. We do it even when it’s not true—which is how places like Vegas stay in business. If you’re flipping a coin, and it comes up heads nine times in a row, what are the odds on the tenth toss? 50-50. Statistics are not narrative. Read more

(Maureen McHugh)

This is part one of a six part post based on a talk I gave at Duke University. Check back on Wednesdays for subsequent posts.

I write transmedia. Or crossmedia. Or ARGs. As transmedia/crossmedia/ARG producers, we take narratives and spread them in pieces across multiple platforms. We tell part of the story as a movie, part as a website, part as an email.

This creates a number of storytelling constraints.

• First, most things on the internet need to be short. Read more

It’s funny, but stories on the internet often evoke stronger emotions than stories on television and movies. That’s not to say movies and TV don’t make people feel. Field of Dreams probably made more men cry than all the funerals the year it was released. It’s my sense that people feel that interacting with a character—by email or phone, for example—makes it all feel more real. I never thought much about it, just accepted it as fact. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I think that it’s true that interaction plays a big part. But I also think that in twenty years, the effect will have worn off.

No Mimes was at a joint conference between USC and UCLA at University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in March. The conference, called Transmedia Hollywood, was a long and interesting day. Many smart people. The thing that we do, tell distributed stories on multiple platforms using interactivity, has a bunch of names, transmedia being one of them. There are lots of long discussions about what we do, what the essential components of the artform are, and whether or not it is an artform, all of which are pretty interesting.

But I’m not going to talk about that because I think it’s an impossible question. Read more

Here’s a great article from NewTeeVee on the recent development at the Producer’s Guild of America: The Transmedia Producer.  Thanks @LizLet!

Here’s a nice @Tubefilter writeup of our Transmedia/Hollywood Panel:  Hollywood Asks ‘Are ARGs Always a Promotion?’