Transmedia & the Future of Filmmaking

There are a lot of theories as to why the movie business isn’t what it used to be. The financial crisis of 2008 significantly lessened private equity’s desire to sink investments into films, independent and otherwise. A number of great indie and semi-indie distributors (Warner Independent, Picturehouse, THINKFilm) have gone out of business in recent years, leaving the ratio of independent films made to those bought at an all-time low. And most of the lucky films that do land a distribution deal get one- or two-week runs in a handful of cities scattered across the country and then go to die on VOD, as most independent distributors lack the finances to allot them even the most basic P&A budgets. Yet the problem, as evinced by across-the-board domestic box office ticket sales figures, has a far simpler answer: People simply aren’t going to the movies as much as they used to.

Cinema was the dominant art form of the 20th century but, much as theater and classical music before fell out of favor with younger generations, so, too, is film beginning to go through a cultural outmoding. Thanks to Web 2.0, the Internet has shifted from utility status to something more akin to an entertainment form itself, and art forms don’t get outmoded without reason—they get outmoded because they’re replaced. Of course, the Internet isn’t fully developed as an entertainment source yet; surfing Facebook is fun, but it’s not the kind of experience that sitting back and watching a movie is. And while one can watch movies online with ease, one gets the feeling that it will take an art form endemic to the net’s properties to change the way we consume entertainment.

Enter the "transmedia" movement. A cinema/digital media hybrid anchored in filmmaking, this new brand of storytelling is defined by works that combine the typical moviegoing experience with more interactive elements, enabled by new media tools. There’s no standard formula for making a transmedia work—the field is too young to have ossified in form yet—so the new medium is being produced in varying iterations.

The first transmedia experience this journalist had was truly poignant. At the beginning of Chris Milk’s music video for Arcade Fire’s "The Wilderness Downtown," the user is prompted to enter the address of the home in which they grew up. The video then begins. Featuring a young boy running shown from various angles (in simultaneously open windows, thanks to the capabilities of HTML5, a new kind of Internet coding language), the video begins

to include overhead images of the area surrounding the house the user grew up in, using Google Maps technology. Eventually, as the video reaches its climactic moment, the boy stops running and arrives at that very house—the image of which is accessed by Google Street View. The music video then opens a page that asks the user, as the song continues, to write a postcard containing advice for his or her younger self.

Profoundly moving and shot through with sentiment, the technology the video employs enables it to strike a deep personal chord that would have been otherwise impossible to access. This transmedia music video is literally a different work of art for every single person who experiences it.

Milk’s video is just one example of how an otherwise traditional film might incorporate new media elements to become a transmedia work. It is, in fact, rather light on audience participation, compared to other approaches. Lance Weiler, a filmmaker and new media consultant whose name is typically the first to come up in discussions of transmedia (he’s been making transmedia work ever since he created a network of websites presenting his fictional narrative for 1998′s The Last Broadcast as reality, a marketing idea recycled for The Blair Witch Project), recently had a short film shown at Sundance called Pandemic 41.410806, -75.654259. Alongside the premiere of the horror short, about a brother and sister whose mother is possessed by some sort of zombie-like disease, Weiler created an interactive experience that took place during the festival itself, entitled Pandemic 1.0. The experience, also termed an "alternate reality game" or ARG, consisted of a website that named specific hidden objects that needed to be found around Park City in order to stop an outbreak of the illness portrayed in the short. Anyone in Park City could participate, viewing media on the website while they gathered items.

This sort of extra-filmic element not only takes a film from being "just a film" to being a work of transmedia, it serves as the defining mode of advertisement for transmedia works. While some transmedia films come to public attention the same way any other movie would— you can find Milk’s Arcade Fire music video through the band’s website, and Weiler’s work (as well as that of other transmedia filmmakers) often premieres at film festivals— the "trans" element often allows for new fans and viewers to be recruited into the world of the filmmaker. One imagines there were as many people who found the Pandemic 1.0 ARG website online and went from there to learn about the short film as there were those who went the opposite route.

Films have not one but two ways to gain an audience:

through traditional filmic means, like festivals and theatrical releases, and through new channels being opened up by the films’ added components, found over the net and elsewhere. That being said, at the moment, transmedia films are certainly under the radar; plenty of people who work in the independent film industry are only vaguely aware of it. But those who do believe in the field believe in it fervently.

"There are a couple of different things that are happening right now," Weiler explains over coffee in Midtown. He is on his way to give a presentation about new media to a major advertising agency and speaks with the kind of clarity and focus that can only come from having honed one’s argument to a razor-sharp point over a very long period of time. "The marketplace for independent work is lousy. The realities of how technology is changing publishing are profound. I think media is becoming more fluid—[in the future] it will be moving across devices more easily. The shift from passive entertainment to more social entertainment is what’s happening.

"Ironically, originally stories were social. You’d tell stories around a campfire with embellishment. Then they

became top-down, and the
social aspect was discussing TV shows the next day with your friends at
a bar. But now we live in an on-demand culture, where everyone’s
ingesting media at different times. [Transmedia] enables you to be
connected to so many other people on the basis of the fact that they’re
experiencing the same work as you at the same time. This is the
evolution of storytelling."

Weiler’s
transmedia storytelling focus is on ARGs and the creation of communal
experiences that unite his audience in the sort of camaraderie he
describes. However, with transmedia being so new and unformed, different
filmmakers see different potentialities in the field. For Zeke Zelker,
who produced the interactive component of Pandemic, transmedia represents a way to monetize independent filmmaking as never before.

Talking about his upcoming feature film, Billboard, Zelker
explains, "From a very young age, I understood that you have
entertainment and then around the entertainment you have various profit
centers. My film is about a radio station that has a billboard-sitting
contest. How do those entities make money? Advertising. So I’m going to
use a lot of branding to raise the money for the film. Brand
integration. Not a bastardized aspect of what Morgan Spurlock did, but
actual integration, with real ads on the billboard in the film going to
companies that pay for it. For my last film, we put T-shirts in retail
stores, and had, on the tags, a link that would allow them to watch the
movie for free if they bought the shirt. I was making more money selling
the shirts than I would have been making from downloads of the film."

Zelker
explains that his ambitious project has many phases. He’s already
launched a radio station online to serve as the station that holds the
contest his film revolves around. He has opened the station to
submissions from any bands who want airplay; the bands who get the most
plays on the station’s website will see their songs used in the film.
Next, Zelker plans to travel around the country, holding auditions for
his actors and videotaping them. The audition videos will be uploaded to
a site on which the audience can vote for who they want to see in the
film, effectively crowd-sourcing his casting. Finally, after the film is
released, he plans to run a nationwide ARG that sends fans on a
scavenger hunt using clues that Zelker has dropped on various media
platforms—online and in the film—to find a painting used in the film.
The person who finds the painting wins $96,000, the same amount of prize
money as in the film’s billboard-sitting contest.

Zelker’s
all-out stimulation of his audience is indicative of the manic
possibilities of transmedia storytelling; his decision to allow fans to
pick his actors seems especially progressive. "I think the audience has
taste," he explains. "That’s what I believe in. Audiences will go to
things that they support, that they like. Like American Idol— the
person with the shitty voice is not going to win. So yes, I’m a
filmmaker; yes, I create my world; but I don’t believe that I should be
the complete tastemaker. Giving the audience the benefit of the doubt is
better than me being the sole creator."

Just
how much control to give the audience is something that has yet to be
figured out in transmedia works, but there’s no question that these
films need a significant degree of audience participation in order to
work properly. As online media consumption becomes more interactive,
with ubiquitous commenting opportunities for consumers, transmedia
filmmakers have realized that cinema has to allow room for the audience
to become involved in the art. "I have this theory called ‘the bullet
hole in glass,’" Weiler says. "There’s this central story I have, but
then there are all these other things coming out of that—things I want
the audience to crack out, to break away to a certain extent.

"I
think it depends on the creator. A lot of people naturally go to the
idea that it’s either solely controlled by the filmmaker or it’s being
wrestled away by the audience.

I
think with transmedia you can section off parts that can be explored by
the audience, but keep those separate. I don’t mind letting go of
certain aspects. But with other aspects—if I’ve written 12 drafts of a
script, there’s no room for modifying that story."

For
all of the talk about transmedia as a major technological progression
in storytelling, there has been relatively little discussion of the
artistic merits of transmedia works—almost all discussion seems to
concentrate on the way the works utilize media platforms.

"One
of the problems I’ve found with transmedia is that people tend to talk
about the technology and platforms before the story and characters,"
says Tommy Pallotta, a producer of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, who recently directed a transmedia film called Collapsus (which
Weiler, everpresent in the field, actually co-wrote) for a Dutch
production company. The film, available in its entirety online, is a
cautionary tale about a future in which environmental disaster provides
opportunities for geopolitical espionage. It features intermittent tasks
the user must perform (i.e., descramble a telephone conversation), as
well as frequent (fictional) news segments that interrupt the film to
comment on the narrative developments (though the viewer can skip these
segments if they desire).

"Telling
a successful story is always a challenge," Pallotta continues. "To tell
it on multiple platforms creates a greater challenge because you’re
asking a lot more from the audience. You need to find your character and
story first, and then go from there to a compelling reason why you need
multiple platforms."

The
only transmedia filmmaker with whom I spoke who seems to have any
reservations about the field, Pallotta explains, "Every transmedia
project you see is going to be different because people are still trying
to find the right form. With Collapsus, I didn’t want to jump around platforms. I tried to create a single destination for everything. My goal with Collapsus was
to create a stand-alone experience that is not ephemeral. Obviously, it
becomes individualized based on how people interact—you and I doing it
have different experiences—but it’s not a choose-your-own-adventure
either. I thought of it as annotated storytelling: if you want to go
deeper, you can."

I
ask Pallotta about his take on the idea of transmedia works giving up
some degree of control to their audiences. "I am a fan of audience
participation, but I also think audiences like to be told a story," he
says. "There’s this thing video game designers call a ‘golden
path’—there’s a definite way that the majority of people are going to
experience the game, and the designers plot that. A lot of the
interactivity in a video game is really just the illusion of
interactivity. It’s about engaging the audience and giving at least the
feeling of volition. But as the artist you have to have the sense that
you are, in some way, controlling it, blending the craft of storytelling
with the illusion of agency."

At
this moment, the possibilities for where transmedia might go are
endless, but it’s clear that it’s going somewhere. The ultimate question
seems to be what filmmaking will look like once transmedia’s done with
it: Will audiences feel understimulated without multiple streams of
video available to them during the course of a film? Will they feel
disconnected from works that don’t engage them on an individual level,
or in real-life activities? Will they demand the ability to provide
feedback on elements as crucial as casting decisions?

Ultimately,
the effect of transmedia on film may prove to be not dissimilar from
Web 2.0′s effect on the previous Internet. Web 2.0 has given us an
Internet mired in what many consider low-quality product (a result of a
lack of quality control), such as personal blogs, music covers uploaded
to YouTube and the like; it has also given previously niche fields and
causes the ability to attract enormous (and fervent) followings with
heretofore unknown ease. Transmedia’s emphasis on democratic user
participation, multiple streams of entertainment/stimulation and
narrative threads that interlock over various platforms is in keeping
with the principles of Web 2.0.

If
what occurs is a Web 2.0-ing of filmmaking, one suspects future
iterations of film could consist of artistic decisions that are heavily
informed (if not made) by the audience, as well as a greater ability for
niche films to find their audience communities. It sounds like a
solution to the revenue issue—one that comes at the cost, perhaps, of
artistic quality, depending on one’s belief in whether or not the
audience has taste. Of course, this is all purely speculative; there are
different ideas about the degree to which transmedia should genuinely
enable audience participation rather than merely provide the illusion of
such. Which side wins out has yet to be seen.

"We’re
still in the silent era of transmedia filmmaking," Weiler tells me.
"We’ve just realized we can take the camera outside."