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Transmedia Through the Lens of Independent Filmmakers: A Study of Story

Structure and Audience Engagement

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of

the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Sonja Bozic

December 2018

© 2018 Sonja Bozic. All Rights Reserved. This dissertation titled

Transmedia Storytelling Through the Lens of Independent Filmmakers: A Study of Story

Structure and Audience Engagement

by

SONJA BOZIC

has been approved for

the School of Media Arts & Studies

and the Scripps College of Communication by

Joseph W. Slade

Professor of Media Arts and Studies

Scott Titsworth

Dean, Scripps College of Communication

ii Abstract

BOZIC, SONJA, Ph.D., December 2018, Media Arts & Studies

Transmedia Storytelling Through the Lens of Independent Filmmakers: A Study of Story

Structure and Audience Engagement

Director of Dissertation: Joseph W. Slade

Transmedia is the practice of spreading content over multiple delivery channels to create a more immersive experience for the audience. In a transmedia project, the sum of its parts is always bigger than each individual part, but each individual part, while creating its own unique contribution to the overall project, also has to contain the key premises of the main story. This study explains what transmedia is and how transmedia content creators translate their concept and/or idea for a story into a storyworld for multiple platforms. This exploratory case study research focuses on transmedia content creation in independent production as it expands structures from to other media, guided by the assessment of audience engagement, as a type of approach to storytelling (narrative or documentary). The study examines organic transmedia story content and audience engagement in four projects: Zenith,

Body/Mind/Change, Question Bridge, and The Deeper They Bury Me. Formal in-depth interviews were used as a data-gathering tool for case study evidence, on the premise that interviews are key to uncovering a participant’s motives and techniques for executing them. The point was to learn about story development from the practical strategies of the four selected transmedia creators. The data were divided into two groups: 1) story structure as determined by creators and 2) the likelihood of audience engagement.

iii Textual Analysis was used to look at the story content of the selected projects and to analyze audience engagement. All the projects demonstrate that using multiple platforms expands the dimensions of the story. Each project was different, had a different approach, and required different details in the incubation and production phases.

iv Dedication

In loving memory of Jelena Bozic

v Acknowledgments

Above all, I need to thank Vladan Nikolic for introducing me to the world of transmedia, for being such an inspiration and wealth of knowledge, for giving me support and guidance. A big thank you to Lance Weiler, for letting me into your creative world and for your enormous generosity; Bayete Smith and Angad Bhalla for your openness and willingness to share.

I need to extend my heartfelt thanks to my committee members. To Dr. Joseph

Slade, for all your support from day one, guidance, and understanding (sometimes without even talking). To Dr. Roger Cooper, thank you for your support and advice during the hard times. To Dr. Aimee Edmondson, thank you for joining the committee, your insights and understanding. To Rajko Grlic, thank you for being such an inspiration as a director and storyteller to learn much from and for a great communication.

I am grateful to all of my friends and family in the US and Serbia for surviving the roller coaster with me, for your encouragement and kindness. Some of them I need to acknowledge by name: Mikajlo for keeping me sane; Emily for “get ready for the world” treatments; Louis for Eugene ; Ira for being a fun editor; and Adam Victor for going above and beyond in your support and for being my parent away from home.

Lastly, I especially need to thank my parents and uncle for teaching me and letting me be who I am and supporting my life choices. To my sister Iva – thank you for being the greatest gift I have ever gotten, for every second of your support and love.

My eternal gratitude goes to my husband Aleksandar for surviving with me the unbearable times, for your love, and above all the financial support during this period.

vi Table of Contents

Page

Abstract ...... iii Dedication ...... v Acknowledgments ...... vi List of Figures ...... ix Chapter One: Introduction ...... 1 Areas of Interest...... 9 Story content...... 10 Audience engagement...... 11 Purpose of Study ...... 13 Approach to Study ...... 15 Organization of Study ...... 15 Chapter Two: Review ...... 17 Definitions ...... 19 Story Structure ...... 21 Worldbuilding...... 22 Platform choices...... 26 Incubation...... 28 Audience Engagement ...... 29 Story structure for user engagement...... 30 Levels of the audience engagement...... 32 Summary ...... 37 Chapter Three: Methodology ...... 39 Reflexivity Statement...... 40 Your Hospital May Be Hazardous To Your Health...... 41 The Eugene Project...... 44 Research Focus ...... 49 Theory Framework ...... 52 Textual Analysis...... 53 Audience response...... 53 Participants and Projects ...... 56 vii Data Collection ...... 58 Interviews...... 58 Audio and visual documents...... 58 Data Analysis ...... 59 Chapter Four: Results and Interpretation ...... 61 Transmedia Projects ...... 62 Zenith...... 62 Body/Mind/Change...... 64 Question Bridge...... 67 The Deeper They Bury Me...... 70 One - Producing Storyworlds ...... 73 Incubation phase...... 76 Production phase...... 78 Results and Interpretation ...... 78 Zenith...... 78 Body/Mind/Change...... 87 Question Bridge...... 98 The Deeper They Bury Me...... 106 Chapter Five: Analysis and Interpretation ...... 116 Stage Two - Audience Engagement ...... 116 Results and Interpretation ...... 120 Zenith...... 120 Body/Mind/Change...... 127 Question Bridge...... 132 The Deeper They Bury Me...... 138 Summary...... 144 Chapter Six: Conclusion ...... 146 Recommendations for Future Research ...... 150 References ...... 154 Appendix A: Open-Ended Interview Guide ...... 162 Appendix B: IRB Approval ...... 163

viii List of Figures

Page

Figure 1. IFC Center in ...... 5 Figure 2. A roadmap of transmedia worldbuilding, published by Tribeca ...... 25 Figure 3. The engagement pyramid - Phillips ...... 33 Figure 4. Mick Dicks diagram "Rules of Engagement." ...... 34 Figure 5. The end of the video with information for patients’ help ...... 42 Figure 6. Louis Zwiebel as Eugene Vassilyevich in classroom ...... 46 Figure 7. Louis Zwiebel as Eugene Vassilyevich in TED Talk ...... 48 Figure 8. The in conventional storytelling technique ...... 51 Figure 9. Film Zenith ...... 64 Figure 10. Intro to Body/Mind/Change ...... 65 Figure 11. The end screen of Body/Mind/Change ...... 67 Figure 12. Installation in the Museum ...... 68 Figure 13. Home page of The Deeper They Bury Me ...... 72 Figure 14. The end of The Deeper They Bury Me – Herman Wallace ...... 73 Figure 15. WHAT IF IT process of IF Lab ...... 77 Figure 16. The Zenith storyworld ...... 80 Figure 17. Ed Crowley’s locksmith website ...... 83 Figure 18. Jack’s table in the future ...... 87 Figure 19. The warning at the beginning of Body/Mind/Change ...... 90 Figure 20. in Body/Mind/Change ...... 91 Figure 21. 3D printed PODs ...... 93 Figure 22. Question: How do you know when you become a man? ...... 100 Figure 23. Profiles of the users ...... 101 Figure 24. The US map, the conversations by the states...... 101 Figure 25. The keyword - education ...... 102 Figure 26. Participants’ close-up format of the video ...... 104 Figure 27. The rejected design option for The Deeper They Bury Me ...... 112 Figure 28. Final design version for The Deeper They Bury Me ...... 113 Figure 29. Bhalla’s prototype of the website ...... 115 Figure 30. StopZenith website and Guy Fawkes masks...... 120 ix Figure 31. A viewer’s comment on Netflix ...... 122 Figure 32. A viewer’s comment on Netflix ...... 123 Figure 33. A viewer’s comment on Netflix ...... 123 Figure 34. A viewer’s comment on Netflix ...... 123 Figure 35. A viewer’s comment on IMDB page ...... 124 Figure 36. Vodo.net – Zenith – the third place most downloaded film ...... 126 Figure 37. B/M/C lab – PODs kept for its owners ...... 128 Figure 38. A user’s tweet...... 129 Figure 39. The user’s tweet ...... 130 Figure 40. The POD owners at the exhibition...... 131 Figure 41. Body/Mind/Change tour dates ...... 132 Figure 42. Pharrell Williams – Question Bridge profile ...... 134 Figure 43. Question Bridge – the website analysis ...... 135 Figure 44. Question Bridge Facebook announcement ...... 137 Figure 45. A review on Herman’s House IMDB page ...... 138 Figure 46. poster in the cell ...... 140 Figure 47. The Deeper They Bury Me – average visit duration ...... 141 Figure 48. Premiere at the New York Film Festival – panel discussion ...... 142 Figure 49. A user’s reaction ...... 143 Figure 50. A user’s reaction ...... 143 Figure 51. A user’s reaction ...... 144 Figure 52. A user’s reaction ...... 144 Figure 53. Mosaic – an interactive project by ...... 153

x Chapter One: Introduction

There’s never been a more exciting time to be a storyteller, and we’re sitting on

the brink of a whole new art form. We don’t know what it’s going to look like

when it grows up, but that means that we can try just about anything we want.

Andrea Phillips (2012, p.262)

Little known fact: The universe was introduced to the world in 1976 by a science- entitled Star Wars: From The Adventures Of Luke

Skywalker, a novelized version of the A New Hope, commissioned by George

Lucas, which was in production in Hollywood (Giovagnoli, 2011). Star Wars: From The

Adventures Of was viewed as a commercial flop, which failed to connect with audiences upon initial release. Even the quote on the cover “Amazing movie by

Twentieth Century Fox coming soon” connecting two media types (books with film) could not attract audience attention. As Giovagnoli (2011) pointed out, in 1976,

American audiences were primed for based on screenplays to receive publication after the release of the film. So Star Wars: From The Adventures Of Luke Skywalker languished on the shelves- until the blockbuster success of 1977’s Star Wars: A New

Hope when the novel became a bestseller (Giovagnoli, 2011). Lucas’s original intention was for Star Wars to be a transmedia project with a rich nine-part story that connected multiple media types while offering unprecedented opportunities for audience involvement. For forty years, the Star Wars story has taken place over , books, video games, apps, fan fiction, and so forth, forming links and bridges across platforms which encourage fans to collaborate, create potential content for the project and participate in a

1 series of experiences (Giovagnoli, 2011).

Star Wars is considered transmedia because it incorporates intertextuality which means that a single story thread plays out over more than one medium (Phillips, 2012).

For example, the romance between and starts on film, but the continues to develop in books. This pushes audiences to switch media to follow the course of their relationship (Jenkins, 2012, 2015). Star Wars has been able to cross the twentieth-century platforms (films, books, albums, video games) and adapt with technological advances to be omnipresent and dynamic following the twenty-first- century paradigm shifts (mobile devices, apps, social networks).

Many of these major paradigm shifts were brought about by the iPhone released in 2007, which marked a radical shift in communication and media consumption for the ensuing decade and beyond. Manovich (2002) compared the current media revolution and shift of our culture to the revolutionary impact of the printing press in the fourteenth century and photography in the nineteenth century. In the past, there have been other disruptions such as the printing press, radio, and television that altered our communication landscape (Phillips, 2012). New media have radically changed the way stories are created, distributed and consumed. The has democratized the means of production so that consumers with smartphones can record, broadcast, edit, and transmit stories to audiences around the world without movie studio backing, a publishing house, or physical media (Jenkins, 2012). As the result, we see changes in how the audiences view and consume media, in how they engage and communicate with the medium and among themselves. Further, it has completely altered the landscape for media content

2 creators by giving them new tools and new ways for reaching audiences. As Phillips

(2012) explained, creators currently are making new kinds of art that can exist only in the intersections between media; they are not simply taking old media to new places.

Witnessing an epochal shift in communication and culture is a novel experience, but being among the creators who are shaping a whole new art form is reminiscent of being part of an avant-garde movement.

Transmedia is a new art form that has emerged from these communication shifts and technological changes. Nikolic (2017) defined transmedia as the practice of spreading content over multiple delivery channels, such as film, television, mobile devices, books, magazines, online platforms, and so forth, to create a more immersive experience for the audience. In a transmedia project, the sum of its parts is always bigger than each individual part, but each individual part, while creating its own unique contribution to the overall project, also has to contain the key premises of the main story. This allows the user to comprehend the main idea of a project without having to consume all of its channels and platforms. Transmedia projects require audiences to be more active with the story worlds they experience. Transmedia audiences are asked to move from watching television to visiting a website, or from reading a to watching a movie in a (Dena, 2009). These actions are everyday occurrences in our media and technology-saturated society. The difference is that transmedia encourages audiences to use multiple platforms to experience different parts of the same fictional (or factual) world, which “requires engaging with many art forms, and seeing them all as being part of some greater whole” (Christy Dena as cited in Giovagnoli, 2011, p. 89).

3 Scholars and industry professionals often use the terms transmedia, multimedia, and cross-media interchangeably. According to Costello (2012), multimedia is any combination of text, video, audio, graphics, and animation in a format distributed in such a way that consumers can interact using a digital device. In contrast with text-only or traditionally printed media, in the 1990s multimedia was delivered via computer, usually by CD-ROM, before the World Wide Web surfaced. Cross-media means delivering the same content over multiple platforms; for example, a TV show is available on TV, online streaming, via smartphones, tablets, DVD, and so forth (Phillips, 2012). Nikolic (2017) added that unlike transmedia, cross-media platforms do not build on each other or expand the story despite the use of various channels. Cross-media focuses more on distribution impact and revenue potential. Transmedia attempts to create synergy between the content delivered via both old and new media, and focuses on an emotional, participatory experience for the audience (Pratten, 2015). The term old media has become synonymous with seven traditional formats of mass communication: books, newspapers, magazines, sound recordings, radio, and television (Costello, 2012). “Old media” implies obsolescence as if no longer in use, but of course merely refers to established media that retain utility and credibility. Costello (2012) explained that the term new media describes the emergence of digital technologies that have changed the ways that content is produced, distributed and consumed.

I was introduced to transmedia through the Zenith project, directed by Vladan

Nikolic, in October 2010, when the film portion of this project premiered at IFC Center in New York City. I had recently applied for the Ph.D. program at Ohio University,

4 wanting to focus my study on representations of homosexuality in media, but I instantly recognized the potential of transmedia and changed my focus. Creating and telling stories has always inspired me. I studied film editing for my bachelor's degree because I love constructing stories and connecting pieces of a puzzle into one coherent and meaningful structure. I saw transmedia storytelling as editing but on a higher level. Instead of putting together different scenes into a film, the transmedia creator designs a storyworld which is fragmented and delivered on multiple platforms, and allows the audience to connect all the pieces together into one meaningful story.

Figure 1. IFC Center in New York City

Some professionals define transmedia storytelling as the technique of telling a single story across multiple platforms and formats using only current digital technologies.

I would argue that transmedia is the experimental telling of a single story across multiple 5 platforms, but that iterations are not limited only to digital media. True transmedia applies appropriate media of various kinds to involve viewers in different parts of the story within the “storyworld” (Bernardo, 2014). It is important to emphasize that there is not yet consensus on what exactly transmedia rules and patterns are, and although the definition of transmedia varies, it is certainly possible to trace its main characteristics.

Hence, in 2010, The Producer Guild of America, provided a broad model of what transmedia structure is:

A Transmedia Narrative project or franchise must consist of three (or more)

narrative storylines existing within the same on any of the

following platforms: Film, Television, Short Film, Broadband, Publishing,

Comics, Animation, Mobile, Special Venues, DVD/Blu-ray/CD-ROM, Narrative

Commercial and Marketing rollouts, and other technologies that may or may not

currently exist. These narrative extensions are NOT the same as repurposing

material from one platform to be cut or repurposed to different platforms

(“Producers Guild of America,” 2010).

In the last decade, transmedia has become a trendy storytelling style not only for the multi-million dollar interactive experiences that involve games, websites, and live events but also for independent films that combine multiple platforms having in common a desire to engage an audience using digital and non-digital tools (Bernardo, 2011). This type of multiple platform distribution and monetization is not new. Major studios have been doing it for several decades (e.g., Star Wars, Terminator, Lord of the Rings, the

Marvel Universe, Harry Potter, and similar.). What is different now is that the

6 transmedia approach allows independent filmmakers to “own the audience” by directly connecting and communicating with the targeted audience without a multi-million dollar budget to find out what they like or dislike about their project and adjust accordingly

(Bernardo, 2011). Davidson (2010) pointed out that transmedia storytelling enables authors to share their fictional worlds with their audiences and to create evolving experiences that have the potential to progress in combination with their audiences’ input and participation. Transmedia creators create the canon of the fictional or factual world and can work with their audiences to develop various within the world as characters, events, and stories intertwine throughout the world (Davidson, 2010). Lance

Weiler (Giovagnoli, 2011) goes a step further and considers his audience collaborators, explaining that democratization of tools turns audiences into their own media companies free to publish for the world to see. According to Costello (2012), the shift to new media means that anyone can produce and deliver content to the public, bypassing gatekeepers characteristic of the old media system. This paradigm shift Costello (2012) calls democratization of the media because it empowers the individual with many outlets for personal expression. "Authorship is shifting, and as a result more people can be part of the storytelling. So in that sense participatory storytelling is an opportunity to take advantage of the connected world we currently live in" (Lance Weiler as cited in

Giovagnoli, 2011, p92). By having an option to bypass major broadcasters or distributors, the transmedia creators can retain control over their story and the rights to the intellectual property (Bernardo, 2014).

7 Transmedia is known by many different names, including branding transmedia, transmedia worlds, transmedia franchise, organic transmedia, DIY films and experimental multi-platform storytelling. All describe various types of transmedia, but none of these labels specifies exactly what true transmedia is. Branding and franchising, for example, are different, separate fields that have their own purposes and principles.

Filmmakers often use the word "brand" as a term for "well-known company." Pratten

(2011) explains that, in marketing terms, companies’ brands are the sum of all the conversations and opinions that people have about them and their products. The brand is the emotional and psychological response from customers when they hear the company’s name or see the company’s logo or products (Pratten, 2011). I would argue that transmedia is neither a brand nor franchise, but, rather, a storytelling style that emerges from branding, marketing and the evolution of Hollywood-type production. As Bernardo

(2014) points out, transmedia is about creating a storyworld – a story that, in its origin, is not formatted to any specific medium or format; includes interesting characters to allow the audience to interact with the story. Davidson (2010) added that transmedia storytelling means more than just getting the audience interactively involved with a narrative; it is about getting the audience immersed in a fictional or factual world and giving them the feeling like they have agency within that world, that what they do matters and has an impact on the related story they experience across and between media.

However, creating a captivating story is always the primary goal. Phillips (Jenkins, 2012) adds that every facet of the work should reflect that, but it is important to think about what elements of a story will actually sustain it, and what will not.

8 Areas of Interest

This study explains what transmedia is and how transmedia content creators translate their concept and/or idea for a story into a storyworld for multiple platforms.

This research on transmedia content creation in independent production focuses on the expansion of narrative structures from film to other media, including audience engagement, as a type of approach to storytelling (narrative or documentary). Since transmedia is a relatively new of storytelling, and research and theory are just now emerging, most of the information comes from industry professionals or a few media theorists such as Henry Jenkins, a gap between academic and industry worlds that needs to be bridged.

Recognizing this gap, Phillips (2012) notes that transmedia rules are still a little clumsy.

This is one of those elements of transmedia narrative where I feel like we haven't

yet established the right conventions and vocabulary. In film, you know how to

interpret a montage or a scene with calendar pages dropping to the floor. One day,

we'll have simple and agreed on method for showing an audience the best and

intended way to navigate a transmedia experience, even if we're not quite there

yet (Andrea Phillips, as cited in Jenkins, 2012, para. 14).

Fortunately, I was able to teach a transmedia class while researching this study, and also to participate in production. This allowed me to examine transmedia from both an academic and production standpoint. In order to deliver a single story on a single medium, certain rules and structure are needed. From the perspective of a filmmaker, I

9 expected to find specific rules used to produce a transmedia project that would describe it as a unique way of storytelling. The absence of transmedia storytelling rules forced me to use textual analysis to look at the story content of the selected projects and how the creators engaged the audience.

Story content. In order to understand how to create a project’s content for multiple platforms that will reach a broad audience, we need to understand its story structure and how it is being spread over multiple platforms. Transmedia is seen as an experimental storytelling technique, but it can also be seen as an avant-garde style in the new media era. Just as filmmakers experimented with styles and forms at the beginning of film history, transmedia creators are now playing with different media platforms to create a meaningful story. Maya Deren once described her avant-garde storytelling style in her An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1947) by emphasizing as a matrix where elements exist outside of the constraints of hierarchy, order or value (Hall,

1991).

In an anagram, all the elements exist in a simultaneous relationship.

Consequently, within it, nothing is first and nothing is last; nothing is future and

nothing is past; nothing is old and nothing is new…. Each element of an anagram

is so related to the whole that no one of them may be changed without affecting

its series and so affecting the whole. And conversely, the whole is so related to

every part that whether one reads horizontally, vertically, diagonally or even in

reverse, the logic of the whole is not disrupted, but remains intact (Maya Deren as

cited in Rabinowitz, 1993, p. 124).

10 Comparably to Maya Deren’s approach, transmedia storytelling technique requires creating a matrix of different platforms that serve as different entry points to the storyworld and are in narrative synchronization with each other. For example, if the audience only watches Star Wars films and does not or read

Star Wars novels, they only see a fraction of the Star Wars storyworld. Combined together, these isolated stories create a vast Star Wars universe and storyworld that transcends technology.

Audience engagement. “Audiences, empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersection between old and new media, are demanding the right to participate within the culture…. The power of participation comes not from destroying commercial culture but from writing over it, molding it, amending it, expanding it, adding greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feeding it back into the mainstream media” (Jenkins, 2010, paras. 7, 19).

Jenkins (Jenkins, 2013c) pointed out that participatory cultures are not new; they are manifestations of human desire to be a part of something. Familiarity with platforms helps. Phillips (2012) suggests that a great transmedia campaign uses the platforms with which its target audience is already familiar, and does not use the platforms of which that audience thinks poorly, or to which they have no access at all. For example, before the release of The Dark Knight, the movie’s producers launched a -themed transmedia marketing campaign called “Why So Serious?”. “Why So Serious?” was an alternate-reality game that encouraged rabid Batman fans to participate in real life and online. It began with election campaign posters for Harvey Dent suddenly appearing in

11 cities across America. A day after the appearance of these posters, they were vandalized.

This triggered a large online conversation between comic book fans. Websites related to the faux election campaign of Harvey Dent appeared online, along with websites from

The Joker, who owned up to vandalizing the campaign posters. These websites instruct audiences to go on real-life treasure hunts in cities across America, to participate in

Joker-related Halloween events, and attend fictional press conferences for the Harvey

Dent campaign. This made the rollout and promotion of The Dark Knight film more interactive and engaging than a simple movie launch. It blended multiple platforms with which audiences were acquainted and encouraged participation in online and real-world events.

In order to understand how to create a transmedia storyworld from concept to full realization, we have to understand the audience’s behavior and needs. In today's media landscape, content is often created in a way antithetical to how it was once done. In the traditional storytelling style, a person would write a script that would then be made into a movie or TV show, and the audience would react to it. Today, especially in transmedia storytelling style, the content creation is heavily based on the audience's needs and experience. Content creators are now trying to understand how the audience reacts to a specific medium in order to create content that fits those needs and experiences. The audience expects that each medium is utilized in its own style and that content will be attuned to conform to that medium's particular style (Phillips, 2012). Giovagnoli (2011) adds that a story also needs to inspire a great curiosity from its audience, and a certain inclination to move from one platform to another easily. According to Phillips (2012), in

12 the design phase, it is important to get to know who the target audience is in order to be able to structure the project to suit them. Although this research is focused primarily on the creation of the content, taking account of audience expectations is necessary.

Therefore, understanding the audience nevertheless requires an understanding of their behavior and needs. Existing theory such as Uses and Gratification (U&G) theory provides a general understanding of audience behavior.

U&G is an approach that focuses more on why people use specific media, rather than on the content itself. U&G is more concerned with “what people do with media,” in contrast to the concept of “what media do to people” (Ruggiero, 2000). Weiyan (2015) explains that the gratification of media depends on the social or psychological needs of the individual. Having this in mind, transmedia creators create content for multiple platforms based on assumptions about audience behavior and needs. U&G theory argues that viewers’ needs influence how they use and respond to a specific medium.

Transmedia merges different storytelling tools (e.g., film, TV, books, games, social media, the Internet, and so forth.) in the creation of one world, and each medium/platform has its own audience whose needs and behavior the transmedia content creator needs to understand. All those elements U&G theory helps to recognize and explain.

Purpose of Study

Again, because I looked at this type of storytelling from the perspective of a filmmaker, I expected to find specific rules used to produce a transmedia project.

Storytelling is a social experience. We have been telling stories since the beginning of culture to establish connections between others and ourselves and to make sense of the

13 world. As Pratten (2011) suggests, people tell stories to entertain, persuade and explain.

Since our minds do not like random facts we create our own stories to make sense of isolated events; we naturally and often subconsciously connect the dots (Pratten, 2011).

Since I understand how a single story is delivered on a single medium, I wanted to understand how a single story could be delivered on multiple media/platforms. Just as film language follows specific style and rules in order to create a great film, I researched transmedia storytelling techniques to find style and rules for future generations of storytellers. These rules are not set in stone, but they might form core knowledge that can be used to build and develop transmedia as a specific and unique mode of production. My personal experience as a filmmaker and an academic helped me understand, analyze and conceptualize transmedia.

Jenkins (2007) describes transmedia as storytelling that represents a process where integral elements of a story get systematically fragmented across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and harmonized experience, using the

Matrix and Star Wars as the primary examples. Ideally, each medium contributes to the story arc. Jenkins (2007) here speaks only about fiction storytelling, but transmedia is widely spread and used in the documentary world. This study does not separate the two because both types of storytelling have the same main goals: to deliver a compelling story and to be seen by a broad audience. As a bridge, Jenkins offers an even simpler explanation: “transmedia refers to a set of choices made about the best approach to tell a particular story to a particular audience in a particular context depending on the particular resources available to particular producers.” (Jenkins, 2011, para. 28)

14 Technology is developing at a phenomenal speed, and creative practical projects are keeping . Academia tends to lag behind because of the time it takes to thoroughly research any one given field, so the research has to attempt to catch up with the professional and technological world.

Approach to Study

This multiple case study explores transmedia storytelling as well as audience engagement by looking at the story structure of the following four projects: Zenith,

Body/Mind/Change, Question Bridge, and The Deeper They Bury Me. This approach will seek to define how each story is structured for multiple platforms and how the audience engagement figures in decisions. Useful is terminology borrowed from film to describe phases such as preproduction, production, and postproduction. Each phase requires a different approach and set of skills.

Data were collected through interviews and analysis of audio-visual documents of the four transmedia projects and then textual analysis was used to compare and contrast within a theory frame in multiple cross-case analysis format (Yin, 2014). A cross-case approach to the analysis was applied to develop a case description as the general analytic strategy (Yin, 2014). Following Yin (2014), I constructed a framework from the review of the literature, which yielded two different segments: story structure and audience engagement.

Organization of Study

Chapter 2 is the literature review on transmedia storytelling and its historical development with a view of story structure and audience participation. The overview will

15 provide a rationale for the research questions asked during the study. Chapter 3 describes the research methodology used to answer the proposed research questions through an exploratory multiple case study approach utilizing in-depth interviews and analysis of audio-visual documents. It also includes a description of transmedia projects: Zenith,

Body/Mind/Change, Question Bridges and The Deeper They Bury Me, and their phases of creation. Chapter 4 presents the findings relating to transmedia storytelling techniques, and audience engagement. Chapter 5 presents the findings of audience response on each analyzed project. Finally, Chapter 6 reflects on the study and highlights directions for further study.

16 Chapter Two: Literature Review

Transmedia as a concept is only a few decades old, and its origins lie more in practice than in theory. Transmedia can be traced back to recognition by publishers that novels could be adapted into motion pictures, by movie makers that tie-ins such as T- shirts and toys could extend audiences, by television producers that programs could build huge fan bases, and by web masters that the Internet could not only attract massive audiences but enlist them in the creation of narratives. Tipping points occurred when Star

Trek’s fans began writing thousands of their own stories around Captain Kirk and Spock

(K/S zines) and when viewers of CBS’s Survivor began voting cast members off an

Island and trying to hack the shows to anticipate what would happen next.

The term "transmedia" was coined by cultural theorist Marsha Kinder in 1991 as

"transmedia intertextuality" to designate works where characters appeared across multiple platforms (Phillips, 2012). Kinder used as an example the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a precursor of what is called an franchise today. Not until an article of 2003, however, did Henry Jenkins articulate principles of transmedia, an exploration that matures into his Convergence Culture (2006). The term entered the culture itself. By 2010, the Producers Guild of America approved the use of the title

"transmedia producer" as a valid production credit.

Constant advances in ever more sophisticated media technologies have boosted speculation on how best to combine their power to render human experience. That has meant inventing a vocabulary. Nikolic (2017), for example, has noticed that two frequent terms, media platforms and channels, are often used interchangeably despite their

17 differences. Both Nikolic (2017) and Pratten (2015) try to clarify the distinction. A media channel refers to the delivery mode such as TV, cinema, podcast, e-book, comic book, image, live event, text, and so forth. A media platform, on the other hand, refers to the peculiar characteristics of the channel: its precise sub-technologies, codes, protocols, and languages.

For example, YouTube, Vimeo, and iTunes all deliver video – so, from the

standpoint of medium and channel they are the same – but each one uses a

different technology and systemic approach to do that, so they would be classified

as different media platforms. Furthermore, formats – such as Quicktime or Flash,

AIFF, MP3 or ACC audio, TIFF or JPG files, etc., can specify how each medium

(video, audio, still images, etc.) will be encoded and presented, while the various

devices—iPhones, Android phones, Mac or PC, , cable TV, etc. will specify

how the media can be consumed (Nikolic, 2017, p. 164).

Even so, the terms are often conflated, leading to the confusion one might expect. The confusion underlines the observation by Bernardo (2014) that transmedia remains an elusive concept. At the same time, the lack of agreement on standards and rules has allowed independent creators to be innovative, to define transmedia by actually doing it.

Such independents have moved away from commercial franchise models such as the

Survivor, American Idol, , Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Global Frequency that Jenkins found so provocative in Convergence Culture, and to experiment with non- commercial projects constructed from the outset to live on multiple platforms. Audiences for those kinds of projects have come to expect customized and personalized multimedia

18 geared to audience participation (Giovagnoli, 2011; Pratten, 2011). These are often bold and fresh attempts at storytelling, and as usual with advances in media, theorists must scurry to catch up with experiments.

In short, theorists today are widening the boundaries of what constitutes transmedia, laying out approaches and pathways, validating ensembles, and endorsing intentions. Transmedia has established its potential for revising the way stories are told in the twenty-first century. To date, however, only a few scholars have focused critical eyes on these efforts.

Definitions

Believing that transmedia offers experience different from that of a single traditional medium Pratten (2011, 2015), Phillips (2012), and Nikolic (2017) emphasize that a degree of audience participation, interaction or collaboration needs to be included.

Other scholars have attempted to classify different transmedia approaches and capture essential elements, though definitions are still evolving, sometimes to greater bewilderment.

Bernardo (2011) originally broke transmedia into four different types: the brand extension type, the made for the web type, the transmedia worlds type, and the organic transmedia type. The brand extension type monetizes content by engaging an audience for the short-term. The made-for-the-web type, aka the “webisode” produces video content exclusively for internet audiences. The transmedia worlds type goes beyond the brand extension type creating an entire story universe from the original concept (the franchised films, comic books, games, amusement parks, fast food chain gifts associated

19 with Star Wars). The organic transmedia type spreads a narrative across platforms (online and offline media) to reach the maximum available audience. To illustrate the organic type, Bernardo himself created the project Sofia’s Diary – a teen TV series about 17- year-old Sofia dealing with life situations related to family, school, and relationships. The intent was to allow the audience to choose what Sofia should do next at the end of each episode, and then basing the next episode on the selected option. The project was available simultaneously on TV, radio, web, cell phones, and in printed media to allow the audience to follow Sofia’s story everywhere and interact with it.

Bernardo’s more recent Transmedia 2.0 (2014) depicts only three types of transmedia: the brand extension type, the made for the web type (called here the Stepping

Stone) and the organic transmedia type (or the transmedia franchise) in which he blends the last two categories defined in 2011 (folding "transmedia worlds" type into "organic transmedia"). Bernardo thus falls victim to the usual kind of confusion.

They have served as the basis of categories advanced by other critics. Most theorists accept just two categories: the "transmedia franchise" and the "organic transmedia". The first category is associated with a Hollywood type of production.

Phillips (2012) in fact calls it West Coast transmedia, Pratten (2011) Franchise approach, and Nikolic (2017) transmedia for marketing and branding. In the franchise type each platform stands alone, and the stories are lightly intertwined. Each platform can be consumed individually because each deals with a complete story (Phillips, 2012). At the other extreme – deliberately avoiding a Hollywood association – is type of transmedia production. Phillips (Phillips, 2012) calls this style East Coast transmedia,

20 Pratten (2011) the Portmanteau approach, and Nikolic (2017) original storytelling through transmedia. As Phillips (2012) points out, it draws on the tradition of , theater, and interactive art. This approach’s fragments of content resemble pieces of a puzzle that the audience must connect to form the storyworld and follow the plot (Phillips, 2012). This approach is common in transmedia documentaries dealing with social issues that can be used as educational tools or to raise awareness of a specific issue, have an impact on the public, and possibly persuade the audience to

(Nikolic, 2017).

One of the main advantages of transmedia is that a project can reach a broader audience if it is delivered via multiple platforms – it spreads as Jenkins suggested in

Spreadable Media (2013), where he insisted that “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead” (Jenkins,

Ford, & Green, 2013, p. 1). Both Pratten (2015) and Nikolic (2017) posited two primary goals for transmedia projects: 1) the artistic, which focuses on experiments with new forms of storytelling using new technologies and exploring new models of audience interaction; and 2) the commercial, which focuses on sales, marketing and branding.

Despite such confusion, attempts by academics and industry professionals to engage are

“a sign that people are making it their own” (Christy Dena as cited in Jenkins, 2013a, para. 4). However, whichever the approach, the narrative is the essential element that should drive the experience forward (Pratten, 2011).

Story Structure

Nearly everyone agrees that a successful transmedia project must create the sustainable storyworld that engages the audience through a careful selection of the

21 delivery platforms.

Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding means conveying information about the time, place, and of a story (Pratten, 2011). It is challenging to build a narrative universe that spreads across platforms and doing so requires close cooperation between production departments. Producers of successful transmedia examples (such as Lord of the Rings,

2001–2003) maintain that transmedia concepts have to be included from the beginning to create the DNA of a story (Phillips, 2012). Davidson (Gray, 2010) identified two different worldbuilding styles: pro-active and retroactive. "Pro-active" means that stories from the outset are designed for multiple platforms. "Retroactive" implies that a story becomes transmedia following content on a successful preexisting platform (e.g., turning a book like Harry Potter into transmedia experience by exploiting additional platforms).

For that reason, Zaluczkowska (2012) pointed out that a transmedia production model shifts the previously important roles of for film and TV to those of content creators such as directors or producers thus blurring the distinctions between concept, creation, production, and post-production.

Pratten (2011) adds that the framework of transmedia should be a virtual world that is designed to be incomplete by giving audiences the option to interact and interpret indefinitely. Askwit (2007) says that the interactive elements make for an ecosystem with opportunities for exploration, interpretation, and expansion ready to be defined by the users. Jenkins cites the challenge facing creators:

When I first started [in the business] you would pitch a story because without a

good story, you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off,

22 you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories.

And now you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and

multiple stories across multiple media (Anonymous screenwriter, as cited in

Jenkins, 2006, p. 116).

Jenkins, still the authority, established seven basic principles of transmedia storytelling. Pratten (2015) summarizes these as: 1) spreadability vs. drillability, 2) continuity vs. multiplicity, 3) immersion vs. extractability, 4) worldbuilding, 5) seriality,

6) subjectivity, and 7) . Jenkins (2009b) thought of the paired principles not as opposite elements, but rather as two elements that are correlated. Spreadability refers to the motivation and simplicity with which fans can circulate content through social media; drillability is the extent to which fans can explore the storyworld by searching deeper to discover hidden elements (Jenkins, 2009b; Pratten, 2015). Continuity is the consistency of the storyworld across many platforms; multiplicity refers to parallel universes in which the same stories get retold in a different (Jenkins, 2009b;

Pratten, 2015). Immersion refers to the ability to make the fans feel a fictional storyworld as convincing; extractability refers to the ability of fans to incorporate the actual world in the fictional storyworld. Worldbuilding is the availability of content to expand (Pratten,

2015). Seriality presents content delivered across multiple platforms in episodes or chapters; subjectivity refers to the point of view associated with different characters across different platforms. The last principle, performance, means that fans can actively engage with the storyworld (Jenkins, 2009b)

23 Worldbuilding elements. Theorists and industry professionals still argue over the essential components of transmedia (e.g., characters, plot, storyworld) and the several goals (e.g., engagement, participation, gratification) that transmedia strives to achieve.

(Jenkins, 2009b; Pratten, 2015). Askwith (2007) and Gomez (2011) both insist on the necessity of fostering a consistent and unified experience across all platforms; from the start each platform must expand the story universe; and each must include interactive opportunities for active audience participation.

While theorists agree that transmedia storyworld should be strategically fragmented and spread across multiple platforms, they offer few guidelines for designing a storyworld that will support a variety of platforms. All agree that the key factor that separates transmedia from a single medium is the availability of an interactive experience. However, it is hard to decide what should be considered first, the story or the experience, as Pratten (2011) pointed out, because writers may choose the story while producers may choose experience. A thin line between separates a robust, convincing story-experience and one that expands with additional platforms that could make the story worse, not better. To achieve harmony between the story and experience, transmedia creators have to clearly define story , characters, location, time, plot, and weigh commercial considerations and practicality. They must figure out how the project will be delivered on platforms that range from physical to mediated. They must decide what kind of audience participation they want (collective or individual). They must anticipate how that participation will affect the story over time, and what benefits accrue to the user. They must calculate what aspects should be reality-based or fictional

24 (Jenkins, 2009a, 2012; Nikolic, 2017; Phillips, 2012; Pratten, 2011, 2015). A roadmap published by the Tribeca Institute, which supports innovative storytelling, offers a graphic of summary of these decisions:

Figure 2. A roadmap of transmedia worldbuilding, published by Tribeca

Creating synergy between the content and participatory experience for the audience is crucial (Nikolic, 2017). But only compelling characters can furnish the central emotional link that can carry the audience across multiple platforms. The characters, whether fascinating because of their personas or their situations, transform a story from a passive to an immersive experience (Bernardo, 2014). For that reason, Dena when interviewed by Giovagnoli, compared designing a story-experience to designing a game in which players interact with characters in a game. Therefore, the story-experience and characters need to be robust enough to facilitate immersion (Giovagnoli, 2011).

25 Interactivity is a way for audiences to position themselves bi-directionally: the audience affects the story environment while they are being affected by it (Gaudenzi, 2013;

Jenkins, 2012). To summarize, as Nikolic (2017) concluded, it is vital for the transmedia sroryworld to achieve consistency of , characters, and plot of the main story across all platforms used for the worldbuilding.

Platform choices. The established model of broadcasting, when audiences had to wait at the specific time to watch the desired program, has changed. Now, audiences can access content at the time and on the device that they prefer (Bernardo, 2014). Therefore, to provide content that the audience will consume, Nikolic (2017) explained, selection of platforms for a transmedia project depends on a variety of factors, including the scope and project goals, the nature of the story and audience expectations, the budget, and available time and resources to realize the project.

Audience habits are continually changing with new technologies and transmedia producers have to follow those changing habits of their audiences (Bernardo, 2014;

Pence, 2011). Without any rules governing platform selection, scholars and practitioners evaluate platforms on the basis of fit with the story structure, desired experience, and targeted audience habits. First, defining the story (location, characters, time) and the targeted audience should determine the approach to the project. Second, after the approach is fixed, the creators should be able to decide on platforms and how to spread the project across those platforms (which part of the story will be told by which platform, the number of platforms and timing of release). Third, the creators have to define the type of audience involvement (passive, active, interactive, collaborative) and how these could

26 affect the project (too many choices can become overwhelming for the creators, while too few can be uninteresting for the users). Finally, they must decide on the timeline of the project (a month, a year, or open-ended) (Dena, 2009; Nikolic, 2017; Phillips, 2012;

Pratten, 2011, 2015). While a great book does not always translate well to a movie, the same is applicable in transmedia. A careful selection of platforms within a story frame will also help determine what story aspects to include or not include in order to create the most satisfying experience (Jenkins, 2012). Furthermore, each platform is a part of the meaning-making process and no one platform is primary while another is used exclusively for distribution or marketing (Dena, 2009; Giovagnoli, 2011). It is important that transitioning from one to another platform ensures that the project maintains narrative and consistency across all platforms (Bernardo, 2014).

Since technology is in constant flux, and there will always be a hot new platform to awake the curiosity of the audience, Giovagnoli (2011) and Bernardo (2014) suggest that creators not prioritize the latest marvel, but rather to pay attention to the ways people adapt to and manipulate technology, and concentrate on innovative narrative. Creators understandably tend to use a new technology for its novelty, to experiment and be on the forefront, but as Bernardo (2014) pointed out, there is a big difference between how creators envision the audiences will use such technology and how they actually use it.

And because we live in an age where the very media that delivers the story can be

used by the participant to invite more people to the experience (or tell them to

stay away), authors must make an extra effort to enrich and refine the story itself.

Quality is the winner of the Digital Age (Jeff Gomez as cited in Giovagnoli, 2011,

27 p. 91).

Nevertheless, the purpose of any transmedia project, regardless of storytelling technique and technology, is to deliver a story to the target audience. To achieve a symbiosis between the story, technology, audience engagement and smooth transition between platforms, it is essential to test the design storyworld.

Incubation. One of the advantages of the transmedia approach is to be able to test the story with a real-life audience. Since transmedia is a fragmented structure, it is possible to publish parts of the story via selected platforms, look for the audience's feedback, and adjust and develop the rest of the story. Most scholars agree on the necessity of testing because it can be difficult to predict precisely how users will consume the storyworld on multiple platforms; testing helps determine which elements of the narrative resonate with the audience.

Take it to where the people are. Let them touch it, let them break it. Learn from

that and continue to revise and develop. So, in the end, it is about giving the work

time to grow (Lance Weiler as cited in Giovagnoli, 2011, p. 93).

Bernardo (2014) calls this period incubation since the projects grow while creators use the real-time feedback to tweak the project. Testing and receiving feedbacks allow creators to pinpoint which characters and plotlines resonate with the audience and help them determine where to invest resources. Taking in consideration that each platform will have its own strengths and weaknesses, the goal of the incubation stage is to be objective about why a particular platform should continue to support the storyworld (Pratten,

2015). It is up to creators to design experiences precisely to be attuned to the language of

28 a particular platform and the expectations of its audience; the creators cannot expect audiences to change their behavior; therefore the creators need to adapt, not the audience

(Bernardo, 2014). However, innovative technologies are not essential to transmedia storytelling. The only criteria are the desire to tell stories, the impact that storytelling will likely have on the audience, and our need to communicate with each other, regardless of the format (Nikolic, 2017)

As Bernardo (2014) explained, the goal is to create new stories in partnership with the audience. Most transmedia producers or creators recommend reaching the target audience by providing them with the platforms they already use rather than those they do not use (Bernardo, 2014; Phillips, 2012). It is important to keep in mind that participation can be individual and collective. Jenkins (2013b) explained that a collective, social dimension is present when the audience engages, shares, feel connected, and cares about what other members of the community think. However, the decision about which networks people select as meaningful outlets for participation is almost always an individual decision; the corollary is that creators must recognize the right of individuals to choose not to participate (Jenkins, 2013c). Thus, as Nikolic (2017) said, the platform has to match the content. If the platform does not fit the narrative thread and the user’s anticipated experience, there is no real engagement, and the project misses its mark. As a result, a poor choice distances the viewers from the content, rather than immersing them into the storyworld (Nikolic, 2017).

Audience Engagement

We are freely moving across a range of media platforms making connections

29 between storyworlds. We make sense of a fragmented media landscape rather

more easily than anyone would have imagined (Jenkins, 2009a, para. 3).

Story structure for user engagement. Dena (2009) described user engagement as a process of assembling different parts of a story into a personalized collection while

Gray (2008), Phillips (2012) and Bernardo (2014) consider user engagement as the key element that pushes the audience to move from one to another platform by inviting them to interact with the storyworld or fellow users. Therefore, they maintain the most effective stories are inclusive, not exclusive. With changes in types of media consumption, especially the omnipresence of the Internet, Rose (2012) suggests that the dissolving of boundaries between stories and games, authors and audience, fiction and nonfiction, advertising and entertainment was inevitable.

Recognizing the potential of transmedia, independent filmmakers have embraced the transmedia storytelling style for their projects, attracted by the lower costs and the freedom to originate stories using new technology. Himself an independent filmmaker and transmedia expert, Nikolic (2017) advises freshmen creators to find organic, individual approaches to their stories, and to experiment with media platforms appropriate to unfamiliar audiences. Nikolic pointed out that failure can result when independents merely imitate the mainstream industry. Moreover, he reminds them, there are no standardized solutions. The modern audience wants a more authentic experience, compelling characters, and emotional connections.

Hypothetically, any single media story can evoke reaction (laughing, crying and so forth), but transmedia directly involves the audience in events that can resemble what

30 they may have encountered in real life (Giovagnoli, 2011; Phillips, 2012). New media formats allow immediate engagement with the storyworld by providing a space where viewers can interact with content, and/or with one another. Gaudenzi (2013) argues that active engaging alters the viewers into participants who are integral to the project, however it may have been originally construed. The best of such experiences foster a dialogue; "a truly interactive transmedia experience is signified by the participant's ability not simply to choose between two threats of narrative but to impact the narrative itself"

(Jeff Gomez as cited in Giovagnoli, 2011, p. 91).

Although interactivity and engagement are key, the audience still needs to be controlled and guided during the evolution of the experience so that it will have a lasting impact (Bernardo, 2011; Pratten, 2011). Otherwise, the audience might rob of its and transform the main character, say, into a successful person with a great love life, great friends and parents, and no setbacks, which would not be very interesting

(Bernardo, 2011). At issue, however, is the degree of control. In Bernardo’s project,

Sofia's Diary, Sofia resolved minor dilemmas – whether to be with a friend or to go out with her boyfriend – by asking the audience for advice. She would ask them as any friend would ask another, and the audience would reply (via SMS, calls during a radio show or social media). Having learned from the experiment, Bernardo (2011) suggests having a plot A that is controlled by scriptwriters and a plot B (small dilemmas) with limited control by the audience to encourage interactivity. Similarly, Gaudenzi (2013) says that the creators should not permit users to challenge the project’s framework, instead restricting their participation to adding photo, audio, text or video content. "Changing the

31 interactive framework would mean allowing participants to intervene at the concept level and/or to keep changing the platform/interface itself while the project is alive" (Gaudenzi,

2013, p. 192). Pratten (2011) and Gambarato (2012) presented two types of framework for participatory experience: closed and open systems. The closed system permits the audience to interact with the storyworld without changing it. The open system allows the audience to influence the story and change outcomes. Most of the critics agreed that transmedia creators should privilege the experience as they structure and design the interactive storyworld.

Levels of the audience engagement. Interactivity, although strategic in transmedia, need not be available on each platform of the storyworld. Some platforms will still be passively consumed to satisfy different needs and wants. Bernardo (2011) calls passive consumption the "lean back experience" and interaction the "lean forward experience."

Achieving a balance between interactive and more traditional styles of storytelling can be tricky especially while trying to keep the audience’s attention. Nikolic (2017) pointed out that most projects have an increasingly difficult time finding and reaching an audience. Viewers have become oversaturated, with progressively shorter attention spans.

According to Bruce Morton, a researcher at Brain and Mind Institute at the University of

Western Ontario, a human being nowadays has an average attention span of eight seconds, which is one second less than the attention span of a goldfish, and that is a four seconds drop in only thirteen years (Watson, 2015). Therefore, it is essential to provide content that the audience finds interesting and worth exploring.

32 Phillips (2012) explained that every media industry has its own version of the eighty/twenty rule. In transmedia that means that twenty percent of the audience is responsible for eighty percent of a project's activity. According to Phillips the audience is divided into three categories: eighty percent passive; fifteen percent modestly engaged in a limited way; and five percent superfans, active seekers participants, and recruiters of other users.

Figure 3. The engagement pyramid - Phillips

Likewise, both Pratten (2011) and Nikolic (2017) addressed the rules of engagement using Mike Dicks’ pyramid to graph what Phillips (2012) explained, but with small differences in percentages and categories.

33

Figure 4. Mick Dicks diagram "Rules of Engagement" (source: Pratten, 2015)

Disregarding the difference in percentages, Pratten, Phillips, and Nikolic agree that the majority of viewers prefer a passive experience. Phillips calls "superfans” and

Nikolic calls "producers" those who grasp content at the deepest level and interact with it.

The engaged (Phillips) or the players (Nikolic) are less involved than the superfans/producers, but still more oriented to participation than the inactive viewers.

Overall, in practical terms, transmedia creators design the storyworld to accommodate the passive majority, but hope that the small number of active users will help curate the storyworld for the passive segments by recommending, sharing, and communicating the content. Pratten (2011) refines the differences further by pointing out that participation might be passive (reading additional content and exploring the world) or active (voting, sharing, commenting, discussing, Tweeting and so on), but some participants can be thought of as collaborators who actually add new content to the storyworld that creators

34 can decide to use or reject. That level of participation, the creators hope, will be addictive.

In The Art of Immersion (2012), Rose drew on his research on how games and stories work on the brain. Rose explained that games are structured to stimulate the dopamine system as a way to reward user’s achievements. What he found interesting is that dopamine release falls and the users lose interest (1) if they are rewarded all the time or (2) if they are never rewarded. Rose concluded that the most effective reward pattern is one that is random (such as slot-machines) which evokes seeking behavior (seeking for gratification). Transmedia creators to a degree translate this observation by fragmenting the story to prod participants into efforts to find connections, not all of which will be successful.

Pratten (2011) bolsters his argument by citing four measures for engagement with media content: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence identified by Forrester

Research. Transmedia creators, he says, can use the four criteria to elicit not only the audience's interaction and contributions but also their affection and affinity towards the storyworld, to look at what they say and how they feel about it. It is essential to understand how the audience is being drawn to the content. Pratten elaborated on what he calls three stages of engagement: discovery, experience, and exploration. Pratten’s scheme enables creators to assess (a) the three stages of engagement (b) the kind of content required for each stage and (c) plausibility of the goals for each stage (Pratten,

2011). One medium within the transmedia frame may act as a discovery stage for another; for example, a book can serve as an introduction to the movie or game (e.g.,

35 Harry Potter). Giovagnoli offers insight here:

With a transmedia project, you start thinking of the fictional world and how you

can create an experience that can have multiple points of entry to encourage a

diversity of audience members to get engaged. One of the more successful design

strategies is to consider a major tentpole media experience that can support these

multiple transmedia rabbit holes into the fictional worlds (Drew Davidson as cited

in Giovagnoli, 2011, p. 88).

Pratten, however, insists on caution by reminding creators to remember that just because audiences like one platform does not mean they will like another. Audiences are fickle. For example, if the audience likes a book in the Harry Potter series, they will not automatically love and watch a movie version, let alone explore it (Pratten, 2015).

Obviously, creators need to target their audiences as precisely as possible.

One aid is extensive market research borrowed from advertising and marketing centered on collecting demographic and psychographic data. Nikolic (2017) explains that demographic research can focus on quantifiable characteristics of the targeted market groups, such as gender, ethnicity, age, education, social status, and income levels, while psychographic studies can amass information on users' personal habits and patterns of behavior, such as opinions, values, interests, attitudes, and lifestyles.

We have niche audiences and know how to speak to them in their own language.

Broadcasters want a broad appeal. I can tell you how many people watched today,

when they dropped out, their age and gender. That’s what the Internet allows you

to do – an immediate connection to the audience (Nordicity as cited in Nikolic,

36 2017, p. 92).

Nikolic (2017) added a reminder that even most YouTube content creators do not use

YouTube alone, but a variety of platforms to reach and communicate with their audiences. This can be important because, as Bernardo (2014) and Nikolic (2017) explain, a viewer might well choose content that has been recommended and/or shared by friends through social media networks over what a media portal might recommend.

Identifying social media preferences can thus have immense marketing value (Bernardo,

2014).

In short, in designing content, it is best to provide something for each of the audience types and do it in a way that offers an opportunity for attention, evaluation, affection, advocacy, and contribution (Pratten, 2011). The project needs to slide into the targeted audience’ lives (Nikolic, 2017; Phillips, 2012; Pratten, 2015).

Summary

To Jenkins goes credit for first articulating the principles of transmedia. His reflections on the psychological and technological impact of converging media remain the most astute. Where definitions are concerned, somewhat overlapping are Bernardo’s

(2011) outlines of organic transmedia, Phillips’s (2012) exploration of East Coast transmedia, Pratten’s (2011) focus on the Portmanteau approach, and Nikolic’s (2017) transmedia classifications. Some scholars who have addressed transmedia have occasionally failed to grasp the complexities involved as they try to describe what is going on, while others have produced texts so detailed that they seem for good or ill like manuals. Other theorists will surely appear, as will practitioners who might well correct

37 the theorists. This study deals with practitioners even as it borrows ideas from theorists.

RQ1: How does one create story content for multiple platforms in an organic transmedia project?

Transmedia storytelling is based on audience involvement and their collaboration with the project (Nikolic, 2017; Phillips, 2012; Pratten, 2011). Audience engagement and platform choices are intertwined concepts. Furthermore, as the literature review indicates evaluating audience engagement relies heavily on understanding how the media is consumed. How to gratify participants, however, is tricky, and different creators choose different platforms for different purpose.

RQ2: How does one engage the audience in each platform?

Different media tell stories differently by catering to audience habits and expectations. Creators examined here not only think about selecting specific platforms but also how the audience will use and experience them. Some of these creators design, produce, and distribute their projects successfully; some fail to achieve their goals. By examining story content, structure, and audience participation, this study finds ingredients necessary for effective transmedia projects. The third research question is:

RQ3: How do audiences engage with transmedia content?

38 Chapter Three: Methodology

As indicated in the introduction, this research focuses on transmedia content creation in independent production as it expands narrative structures from film to other media, guided by the assessment of audience engagement, as a type of approach to storytelling (narrative or documentary). It then evaluates the achievement of these strategies through Textual Analysis. The study examines organic transmedia story content and audience engagement in four projects: Zenith, Body/Mind/Change, Question Bridge, and The Deeper They Bury Me. According to Creswell (2013), a complex understanding

“can only be established by talking directly with people, going to their homes or places of work, and allowing them to tell the stories unencumbered by what we expect to find or what we have read in the literature” (Creswell, 2013, p. 48). For that reason, this research includes in-depth interviews with the creators of four projects to allow them to talk about their creative processes openly. In addition to in-depth interviews, analysis of audio- visual documents was conducted (Yin, 2014).

Transmedia, as an evolving field, does not have its own specific methods and methodology of analysis yet. Furthermore, transmedia projects are complex phenomena involving multiple dimensions, such as narrative, cultural context, marketing, business models, and legal frameworks (Gambarato, 2013). Gabarato explains how the scholars and media professionals Long (2007), Dena (2009) and Scolari (2009) have applied different methodological approaches and analyses from semiotics, , or ethnography to economics, marketing or branding to better understand transmedia structure and principles. Jenkins (2010) explains that dealing with transmedia is

39 especially challenging because the topic represents an intersection between fields of research that are normally held as methodologically separate.

In order to assess the production or reception of transmedia, the theoretical framework of this study is Textual Analysis for analyzing the ways in which creators produce their projects and use audience engagement elements to implement story content.

The same theory can be applied to an assessment of the audience's reception of each transmedia project. According to Yin (2014), “the analytic generalization may be based on either (a) corroborating, modifying, rejecting or advancing theoretical concepts”

(p.41) in designing the case study or examining “(b) new concepts that [arise] upon the completion" (p.41) of the research.

This chapter explains the methods employed for data collection and is divided into five sections. The first section is the reflexivity statement for the study. The second section has segments discussing the research focus, and the following section covers the theory framework. The fourth section provides information on the four selected creators and their projects. The final section highlights the specific qualitative data collection methods and explains the data analysis approach that was used in this research.

Reflexivity Statement

Reflexivity means that researchers reflect on how their , values, and personal background (e.g., gender, history, culture, socioeconomic status) shape their interpretations formed during a study (Creswell, 2009; Schreier, 2012). To avoid , all interviewees were asked the same questions. In addition to interviews, the cross-case analysis was used – the technique that treats each individual case study as a separate

40 study (Yin, 2014).

During the fall semester of 2012, I began my research in New York City with a group of people who formed a transmedia “Meet-up” group called StoryCode. This group brought together people from the film, gaming, and other media industries (e.g. TV, web designers, book publishers, etc.) to present their transmedia projects. It later expanded to include new media immersive storytelling (, augmented reality). During the meetings, I was able to see and learn about different possibilities in this emerging medium, and also to meet people who had experience in practice. I started collecting information by observing that the group focused specifically on filmmakers who have had successful experiences with transmedia projects. Additionally, my knowledge base grew by participating in two transmedia projects: Your Hospital May Be Hazardous To

Your Health and The Eugene Project.

Your Hospital May Be Hazardous To Your Health. In the spring of 2013, I was part of the "Tribeca Film Institute Hackathon: Storytelling Innovation Lab," a five-day intensive workshop that brought together content creators and technology specialists to produce six different interactive cross-platform projects. Each project had to address some social issue. The Tribeca Film Institute helped young filmmakers with exciting ideas create their projects by introducing them to technical specialists who could incorporate technical devices. The project I was part of, Your Hospital May Be Hazardous

To Your Health, designed and produced by PBS/Frontline and ProPublica during the hackathon, was published after only four days of work. Your Hospital May Be Hazardous

To Your Health is an interactive investigation of six about hospitals and patient

41 safety, with the objective of reducing patient harm in the U.S. The content is delivered in several different ways with a web-based video as the main platform. The audience can watch the six video chapters linearly or select a chapter and watch non-linearly. Attached to each chapter are links to different scholarly articles that appear above the play button.

After clicking on the link, audiences can read articles that support findings in the specific chapter. Additional options for each chapter include: clicking on highlighted drawings of people to hear their real stories; seeing the U.S. map with information on how each state tracks medical harm; consulting statistics to see the numbers behind patient harm; testing a case by answering the questions and seeing the results, and so on. At the end of the video are extra information, opportunities for patients to explore their own cases, and advice for ensuring safety.

Figure 5. The end of the video with information for patients’ help (screenshot)

42

In the traditional method of shooting documentaries, the director and team of Your

Hospital May Be Hazardous To Your Health would have to spend some time doing the research needed for the topic and doing all the administrative work in the pre-production phase. In the production phase, they would spend some time interviewing people who have had bad experiences in hospitals, rent expensive cameras, shoot these experiences in the specific locations, and deal with different kinds of legal and ethical issues. After the production phase, the team would have to spend an extended period of time editing the documentary and working on color correction and sound design. Finally, they would have to find a distributor for the project, or they would try to sell it to a TV outlet. It would cost a lot of money to fund the pre-production, production and post-production phases of the documentary, but nobody would be able to guarantee that it would ever reach a broad audience. Instead of creating it in a traditional way, Your Hospital May Be Hazardous To

Your Health was completed in four days during the hackathon, including both the video shoot and the technical building of the website. It was then instantly available to the audience. (The four days do not include the research period that preceded the production phase.)

Lately, larger film institutions are supporting transmedia storytelling style in documentaries, having realized the possibility of making a good product with less money that can be quickly available to a broader audience. The main point of transmedia is the ability to keep the audience actively engaged for as long as possible. Interactive new technologies and virtual worlds have increased possibilities for audience participation in

43 the creation of stories. My experience at the Tribeca Film Institute Hackathon with Your

Hospital May Be Hazardous To Your Health, an example of organic transmedia storytelling, inspired me to include documentary projects in this research. I followed up by putting my new knowledge to use.

The Eugene Project. I was lucky to have an opportunity to teach a transmedia class at Montclair State University. My lectures leading to the final exam dealt mainly with theoretical concepts about transmedia. For the final exam, my students had to develop a concept for a transmedia project for an actual client, to whom the class would present their ideas. After teaching the class for a year and a half, I decided to create a transmedia project designed specifically for the class itself. During the fall semester of

2016, Louis Zwiebel – a and actor based in New York City – and I created a real – time transmedia experience for students based on my lectures.

For years, Louis had been developing a number of different characters and storylines for an ongoing transmedia project of his own. Upon discussing what he might be able to share with my class as a guest lecturer, he and I decided that, rather than his simply telling the class about his project, he could do a presentation which, itself, could become a transmedia experience, and later be analyzed with the class. (I ran the idea past my department heads, and they gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up.) Louis and I then designed the whole experience based on my lectures about worldbuilding, , multiple platforms, audience engagement, copyrights and ethics. Louis asked me to send him any educational videos I had assigned the students to watch. In

44 order to build “the world of Eugene” and develop him as a character, Louis needed to create and plan all necessary details.

The premise was that I had invited a guest lecturer named Eugene Vassilyevich – one of Louis’s characters – and this Eugene would talk about transmedia. When the time came, “Eugene” showed up at the class and delivered a wide-ranging and rambling 60- minute lecture, in a heavy Russian accent, about everything but transmedia. He related stories about his life and how he got into the media business, and eventually turned the lecture into a funny, bizarre – yet, somehow, very inspirational – talk about life, expectations, and pursuing one’s own goals. Apparently, “Eugene Vassilyevich” was a media entrepreneur from Ukraine who immigrated to the US with his family. While his brothers were very ambitious and eager to succeed in the industry, Eugene was the opposite. He wanted to work on small-scale projects and just be happy with simple things. At no time did Louis or I let on that it was all a performance. Throughout the speech, Eugene wore a lapel microphone which was not connected to any audio equipment, clicked a small black box in his hand which was not operating any slide projections, and stood in front of a large blue construction tarp which he hung on the wall behind him. He never explained these peculiarities, and he subtly filmed himself the entire time with his smartphone resting on a desk.

45

Figure 6. Louis Zwiebel as Eugene Vassilyevich in classroom (source: personal photo album)

Eugene was funny and smart, but the entire presentation was very unusual for this group of students. To engage the audience – in this case, the students – I gave them the option to write a review of Eugene’s speech in exchange for bonus participation points.

In the following weeks, I assigned the students to watch a talk by Elizabeth

Gilbert, a famous writer – from which Eugene had liberally plagiarized. Then, I showed the students a YouTube video that I supposedly had been surprised to discover: Eugene had used his smartphone recording of his lecture in the class to fake a TED Talk – hence the fake microphone, slide remote, and blue tarp – as a way of promoting himself online as a motivational speaker.

After the students saw his phony video and realized that he had outright plagiarized from another speaker, I had them write follow-up evaluations of Eugene, to

46 see how their views on him might have changed. This was especially salient, because that week's lecture topic was Copyrights and Ethics. The first evaluations written by the students had positively vetted Eugene. All the comments said that they liked what he said about life, but they did not understand why he did not talk more about transmedia. The second set of reviews had more negative comments because the students were offended that Eugene had plagiarized part of his speech, and had manipulated the lecture on

YouTube to misrepresent himself completely.

At the end of this lecture, I made a Skype video call to Louis, and he appeared as himself, before the entire class. When Louis dropped his Russian accent, the students looked startled. After the students recovered from their surprise, Louis dedicated thirty minutes to explaining the nature of his and how he uses transmedia to convey varying storylines, then spent another twenty minutes responding to numerous questions from the energized and intrigued class.

The students loved it. They appreciated that I had augmented lectures with a transmedia experience. They realized that the lectures about multi-platform storytelling, worldbuilding, characterization, audience engagement, platform selection, copyrights and ethics were all incorporated into the experience. Most of all, they appreciated the fact that

Louis was such a convincing and committed actor and that he was willing to dedicate so much time and energy just for the students.

47

Figure 7. Louis Zwiebel as Eugene Vassilyevich in TED Talk (screenshot)

For transmedia projects in general, I explained how it is important to understand the needs and behavior of the target audience and choose platforms based on the story and audience needs. When Louis and I were planning the whole project, we looked at our audience to find the best possible way to achieve our goal. In this case, my audience was young college millennials who spend most of their time checking their phones or computers and rarely pay attention to an entire two-and-a-half-hour lecture. In order to grab their attention, I used a mixture of live performance, online discussion boards,

YouTube videos and Skype interviews as my platforms. The results were better than expected. A few students said that they had never been so engaged in a class. I have learned that they have since been talking about it not only among themselves but also with their friends and family. Puzzled by Eugene's apparent lack of transmedia expertise

48 in class, it made them think, talk and analyze everything until the moment they learned that Eugene was just a character used for class purposes. From this unusual experience, the students were able to learn the basics of transmedia storytelling.

Research Focus

The literature review indicates that different critics have different definitions and categorizations of transmedia. Once again, this research is focused on “organic transmedia” as defined by Bernardo (2011), the type of storytelling by independent filmmakers where the story grows organically from a single narrative to gradually expand across online and offline media to reach the maximum available audience. More specifically, Bernardo’s (2011) organic transmedia differentiates between Hollywood commercial production style (Star Wars), and independent industry style (Zenith). All of the examples considered here proceed from film to other media, as created by independent producers. The main focus is not on defining transmedia practice but understanding the processes necessary for successful independent organic transmedia production. Nevertheless, narrowing the definition increases focus. As Jenkins said:

The more we expand the definition, the richer the range of options available to us

can be. It doesn’t mean we expand transmedia to the point that anything and

everything counts, but it means we need a definition sophisticated enough to deal

with a range of very different examples. What I want to exclude from this

definition is business as usual projects which are not exploring the expanded

potential of transmedia, but are simply slapping a transmedia label on the same

old franchising practices we’ve seen for decades (Jenkins, 2011, para. 26).

49 At the same time, organic transmedia has recently evolved because of the development of new technology. Today, it is easier to use alternative platforms (e.g. the web, social media, smart phone applications, self-published books, etc.) to tell a story than to secure funding for a big film or TV budget. For this reason, independent filmmakers are adopting organic transmedia experimental storytelling techniques as a viable alternative outside the Hollywood system. Branding, marketing and franchising tools whose only purpose is to earn more money are not the aim of the independent organic transmedia creators. The distinction is subtle. In commercial transmedia, the principal platform of the storyworld is usually film (or TV). Other platforms – the web, social media, applications, video games, comic books and so on – additionally layer the main story in order to further engage the audience. By contrast, independent organic transmedia creators do not necessarily have one central platform, but rather fragment their storyworlds from the outset in such a way to advance the main plot creatively, and create active seeking behavior of their audience. While an audience expects that content will be tailored to correspond to each platform’s particular language, organic producers insist that each platform must introduce something new to the whole storyworld – not simply to augment a film or TV program.

To explicate transmedia storytelling techniques, this study does, however, borrow film terminology (preproduction, production, and postproduction) for the transmedia storytelling phases. Each phase requires a different approach and set of skills to develop a story arc for multiple platforms. The story arc we are most familiar with is the model of a linear -driven narrative in a single medium. In standard story arc, a character

50 undergoes substantial growth or change from the beginning to the end. For example,

Oedipus starts as a king with a queen and winds up a man who has murdered his mother and plucked out his eyes.

Figure 8. The story arc in conventional storytelling technique

Organic transmedia constructs a filmic story arc from the outset to be adapted to other platforms. The object of the process is to create elements that will add up to a whole. The research questions are:

RQ1: How does one create story content for multiple platforms in an organic

transmedia project?

RQ2: How does one engage the audience in each platform?

RQ3: How do audiences engage with transmedia content?

The multiple case studies clarify how organic transmedia stories are developed.

The research is necessarily exploratory since data are hard to collect (Shields &

Rangarajan, 2013). According to Yin (2014), an exploratory study is called for when the

51 existing knowledge base may be poor and the available literature provides no conceptual framework. Shields and Rangarajan (2013) also explain that exploratory research often relies on secondary research such as multiple case studies.

Case study methods, a qualitative research technique, investigate what-, how- and why- types of questions (Wimmer & Dominick, 2006) which for exploratory research can provide significant insight (Shields & Rangarajan, 2013). Qualitative research aims to understand experience as seen in context (Yin, 2014); the focus is on understanding different perceptions, aspirations and interests of transmedia creators and the perceptions or performances of their audiences.

Case studies use as many data sources as possible (Wimmer & Dominick, 2006)

“to illuminate a decision or set of decisions: why they were taken, how they were implemented, and with what result” (Yin, 2014, p. 15). Used carefully, case studies should elicit the details of the story structure used in organic transmedia and how audiences receive those details.

Jenkins (2011) suggests that it would be much better to examine prior examples to see where and how various pieces have (or have not) worked. Jenkins ( 2006b, 2006a) also suggests that convergence – essential to transmedia – involves (1) a change in the way the media is produced and (2) a change in the way media is consumed. Reading in the light of criteria shapes the two categories of data analysis in this research.

Theory Framework

Although transmedia is a complex concept, existing media theories should be helpful. Textual Analysis will analyze the elements of each story.

52 Textual Analysis. Textual Analysis is a technique for gathering and analyzing the information on various cultures and subcultures by interpreting texts such as films, TV programs, magazines, clothes, graffiti and so forth, and understanding the world in which (McKee, 2003). Text refers to an element that creates meaning from which the researcher draws conclusions. In order to fully appreciate and understand the potential meaning of text for audiences as well as the effects of text, a qualitative research approach to Textual Analysis is required (Macnamara, 2005). One of the approaches and roles of textual analysis is descriptive which “provides insights into the messages and images in discourse and popular culture represented in mass media” (Neuendorf, 2002, p.

53). For transmedia projects, as an interdisciplinary field, in-depth descriptive analysis of content is necessary. Qualitative Textual Analysis is case-oriented research which

Schreier (2012) explained is a holistic approach; here the total is more than the sum of its parts, also the premise of transmedia. The main advantage of such a strategy is the in- depth understanding of each analyzed case. Macnamara (2005) points out that textual analysis researchers have a dual view of the media, balanced between whether media create or reflect public opinion, attitudes, perception, and culture.

Audience response. New technologies give the audience more and more media choices for motivation and satisfaction. Users of new media are most attracted to information formats that speak to them in a more personalized voice even in a wider, entertainment-rich context. According to Ruggiero (2000), new media possess three characteristics not associated with traditional media: interactivity, demassification, and asynchronicity. Interactivity allows users to refine their consumption of the media.

53 Ruggiero (2000) explains interactivity as the degree to which new communication systems are capable of responding to user commands. Demassification is the ability of the media user to select from a wide menu (e.g., the Internet allows individuals to fit messages to their needs). Asynchronicity refers to the concept that messages may be staggered in time in contrast with TV or film where the audience watches the content from the beginning to end on a pre-set schedule. New media, especially the digital ones, allow for access at times of the consumer’s choice. With such asynchronicity the consumer’s manipulation of media becomes flexible, allowing here much more control than traditional media (Ruggiero, 2000). All three characteristics are baked into transmedia story creation. A transmedia content creator needs to foster interactivity to engage the audience deeply, give its members the ability to select from a wide menu of different platforms (demassification) and make each platform available at flexible times

(asynchronicity).

It is important to remember that viewers' needs influence how they use and respond to a specific medium. Gratifications can be obtained from the content (a specific program), familiarity with a genre within a medium, overall exposure to the media (film and TV), and the social context in which it is used (watching alone or watching with a group) (Ruggiero, 2000). Transmedia creators take into consideration the influence of a person's mood on media choice (e.g., boredom encourages the selection of exciting content, and stress encourages the choice of relaxing content). The same program may gratify different needs for different individuals. Different needs are associated with

54 individual personalities, ages, backgrounds and social roles. Transmedia creators tailor content towards such audience behaviors to provide gratification on various platforms.

Ruggiero (2000) views the audiences as active; they actively seek out specific media and content to achieve gratifications that satisfy their personal needs; transmedia turns on this assumption. It is the individual audience members who decide to view the media; they seek value by their individual choice (Rossi, 2002), the essence of transmedia experience. Transmedia allows audiences to actively seek the content and type of medium that best fits their needs. The individual’s preference is thus more relevant than any specific content, and is manifest, for example, in the option to choose one rather than others of the various platforms as an entry point to a storyworld. The entry point will lead to the next one on a different platform, guided by the viewer’s personal preference, choice and/or needs. Creators obviously must recognize these facts, and try to construct content and platforms to capitalize on audience preferences. Transmedia thus provides a wide range of choices that will meet audience needs. At the same time, meaningful interaction on an individual level is predicated on sharing experience that goes beyond passive consumption of the content. In a sense, successful transmedia mimics face-to- face communication on the assumption that people love to socialize and be part of a community. A transmedia storyworld thus should be designed to give the illusion of social experience by encouraging individuals to connect emotionally with the characters. Again, it is important to take into account that the audiences have different levels of engagement and therefore different types of experiencing the storyworlds. The

55 levels vary from passive consumption to active participation or collaboration (Nikolic,

2017; Phillips, 2012; Pratten, 2011).

For transmedia creators, it is essential to look at the relationships among the media content, the social content and the behavior of the audiences. Rossi (2002) states that people in an urban society have become dependent on new technologies for information to make decisions concerning their everyday lives. Since each person's needs are different, what medium a person will depend upon is going to vary. TV or film still holds relevance for older generations, but newer platforms such as the Internet, social media, and games speak the language of younger generations. In order to reach broader audiences (always with regard to social background, age, behavior, and needs), transmedia uses multiple platforms; the more each platform has to offer, the more useful it will become. For this study, the understanding of audience behavior is necessary for two reasons. First, it helps understand the ways in which creators predict the audience response to each platform and create according to those responses, behavior and needs.

Second, it helps analyze the data regarding the success of each project by looking at the types of audience engagement.

Participants and Projects

For this study, the four creators were selected because of their work in the world of transmedia; their professional knowledge and experience made them ideal candidates.

Two narrative fictional transmedia projects and two documentary projects were selected for analysis.

The projects and their creators are:

56 1. Zenith - Vladan Nikolic (narrative)

2. Body/Mind/Change - Lance Weiler (narrative)

3. Question Bridge – Bayete Smith (documentary)

4. The Deeper They Bury Me – Angad Singh Bhalla (documentary)

Vladan Nikolic, the director of Zenith, is one of the most well-known partisans of transmedia narrative worlds and Dean of the School of Media Studies at the New School in New York City. Started in 2008, the Zenith project set some basic transmedia storytelling principles. Lance Weiler, also recognized as a pioneer in the transmedia world because of his mix of storytelling and technology, is a founding member and director of the Digital Storytelling Lab at Columbia University. Body/Mind/Change is significant for its innovative use of technology to communicate with the audience in order to create a collective immersive experience. Bayete Smith, a photojournalist who combines photojournalism with social documentary for his multiple- platforms storytelling, is a professor at New York University. The Question Bridge project is unique in that it pushes transmedia beyond electronic media by expanding its story to communities, educational institutions and museums to provide safe spaces for dialogue on race and heritage. Angad Singh Bhalla is a director who, as a cultural and social anthropologist, specializes in film projects that highlight rarely-heard voices. The significance of The Deeper They Bury Me lies in its use of film techniques and new technologies to explore and expose some important human rights issues.

57 Data Collection

Interviews. Formal in-depth interviews were used as a data-gathering tool for case study evidence, on the premise that interviews are key to uncovering a participant’s motives and techniques for executing them. The point was to learn about story development from the practical strategies of the four selected transmedia creators.

Interviews were transcribed and notes were generated by analyzing projects so that data could be categorized. The interviews were scheduled via email or phone. Two of the interviews took place in person and two via the free video calling software Skype.

Each interview began with an introduction of the researcher and the purpose of the research. The approximate one-hour length of the interviews was sufficient for the list of open-ended questions (provided in Appendix A). Additional explanations of questions were provided at the interviewee’s request.

Audio and visual documents. The components of the projects were: film, interactive websites, social media, YouTube videos, material objects, and books. An analysis of the produced projects dealt with the content of story structure, the choice of platform and the resulting audience engagement in organic transmedia. Some analysis of the technologies was also inevitable.

Access. Personal contact with transmedia creators led to the agreement to be part of this study with Nikolic (2013), Smith (2015), Weiler (2015) and Bhalla (2016). All of the interviews were conducted during 2016. The access to audience response is limited to existing information available through online analytics and statistics, and also each creator's inputs.

58 Data recording and storing. Interviews were captured on a Voice Memos application on my phone for audio recordings as method and tool for data collection. The audio recordings will be destroyed once the research is completed.

Data Analysis

The data were divided into two groups: 1) story structure as determined by creators and 2) the likelihood of audience engagement. During the planning of the story, transmedia content creators decide which platform will be used, not only to structure the story best but also how to best meet the users’ needs. Since successful transmedia storytelling relies on audience behavior and needs, creators try to predict audience engagement. Therefore, the analysis was divided in two stages.

For the first stage of data analysis, textual analysis was used to focus on transmedia creators’ strategies during the design and production phases of each project in order to produce a story that grows organically across platforms to elicit audience participation. For this study, the four different transmedia professionals were interviewed and the story structure of their projects was analyzed. Detailed analysis of story structure was made possible by watching all of the selected projects to get information about the applied storytelling technique. The analysis dealt with the content of the story by looking at its structure, characters and choices of platforms used to engage the audience. The information gained during the interviews about each project design and production phases was compared and contrasted with the final version of the projects. The focus was on the choices made by the creators as determined by their assessment and predictions of audience responses. To conduct textual analysis, Schreier’s (2012) inductive case-

59 oriented approach was used in which analysis is limited to aspects relevant to answer the research question; an approach that involves in-depth analysis and interpretations of various data such as images, text, verbal, symbolic, and communication data

(Krippendorff, 2013; Neuendorf, 2002). Inductive analysis involves working from specific observations of categories which emerge from the data to a broad conclusion

(Macnamara, 2005; Schreier, 2012).

The second stage of analysis involves interpreting how did audiences engage with each of the four selected projects. A general strategy was to categorize and analyze data

(Yin, 2014). For this study, it was essential to evaluate each platform used in each project to learn which story parts provided the gratification to the audience. Detailed analysis was possible by looking at the final design of the storyworlds and how the audience responded to each story element. The process of data analysis at this stage involved preparing the data, conducting textual analysis and interpretation of the larger meaning of the data (Creswell, 2009; Saldana & Omasta, 2017). The following step was developing a case description whose results and interpretations are presented in the next chapter.

60 Chapter Four: Results and Interpretation

This research deals with how transmedia content creators translate their concept and/or idea for a story into a storyworld for multiple platforms. The research focuses on content creation, and on the expansion of narrative structures from film to other media, as the creators take into account audience engagement. Storytelling categories emerge from the analysis of interviews and audio-visual documents of the four selected transmedia projects: Zenith, Body/Mind/Change, Question Bridge, and The Deeper They Bury Me.

The research results of this study are divided into two stages; the first stage answers the first two questions while the second stage answers the third question. Again, the research questions are:

RQ1: How does one create story content for multiple platforms in an organic

transmedia project?

RQ2: How does one engage the audience in each platform?

RQ3: How do audiences engage with transmedia content?

Although the results of this qualitative study may not be transferable to other examples of transmedia projects, they offer insights into the transmedia storytelling techniques.

The first section of this chapter provides a detailed description of the four selected projects. The second section presents the first stage of analysis and major findings answering the first two research questions regarding the creation of transmedia storyworlds. The final section provides the summary.

61 Transmedia Projects

Zenith. Directed by Vladan Nikolic, Zenith is a dystopian fantasy about two men, father and son, in two time periods – the present (the year of 2012), and forty years into the future (the year of 2044) (Nikolic, interview, 2016). The story of the father, Ed

Crowley, is set in the present; he is a priest who becomes obsessed with conspiracy theories and drops out of normal life, trying to investigate a grand conspiracy that he thinks he has discovered. We learn about his story through a series of ten videotapes that he has left behind. His son, Jack Crowley, who lives in a future where people have been genetically altered, gradually uncovers the tapes. “As the story unfolds, we piece together the father’s story, and follow the son’s journey, but the last scene of the film changes everything we have seen thus far, and puts it all in question, inviting the audience to interpret the film for themselves” (Nikolic, interview, 2016). The ultimate idea of the project was to explore how people form opinions and construct their concept of reality.

The project was inspired by a psychology experiment from the ‘60s, the Milgram experiment, focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal consciousness in which participants thought that they were tasked to do one thing, while actually they were the real subjects of the experiment. Similarly, Zenith examines how external realities affect the internal world of the individual and his/her behavior. Nikolic explained that Zenith’s narrative had been structured along Surrealist storylines, where fact and fiction, reality and altered states coexist and bleed into each other. Also in the tradition of , the idea behind this approach is to disassociate the viewer from

62 his/her pre-conceived judgments in order to explore the presented concepts with fresh eyes.

The transmedia project Zenith lasted almost two years. It involved elaborate back- stories, and alternate plots spread across over sixty websites, partnerships with other websites and blogs, the ten tapes the main character left as a message, live events, social media and film. If a user explored this composite world, he/she would get a much deeper understanding of all the concepts and ideas behind Zenith than just watching the film version by itself.

The storyworld opens with one of the lead characters in the movie, the locksmith and conspiracy theorist Ed Crowley. He is introduced to the audience through his website

(http://crowleylocks.com/) and his blog (http://priestoftruth.com/), as well as his

YouTube videos, where he talks about various conspiracies

(http://www.youtube.com/user/thepriestoftruth). Ed talks and writes about various mysteries and conspiracy theories but when he starts writing about an ultra-secret conspiracy entitled Zenith, he suddenly disappears. After Ed disappears, a shadowy group called stopZenith appears on the web (http://stopzenith.com/), announcing through websites and social media that they have received a note – that Ed Crowley has been kidnapped but has left a series of tapes behind which point towards the mystery of Zenith.

It is intentionally unclear on the part of the filmmaker what Zenith is exactly – whether fact or fiction – but these websites build buzz and draw audiences into the storyworld.

The tapes were released in nonlinear order via YouTube and Ed's blog. Tape six, the final tape released on the web, is the beginning of the film that transports the audience forty

63 years in the future. When the film is released, Zenith is revealed to be a fictional story.

Film Zenith, the main platform of the storyworld, premiered in 2010 at IFC Theater in

New York City. As the movie continued its theatrical screenings in 2011, the transmedia team launched parallel movie-related social media sites, including a Facebook page, a

Twitter feed, and a Jack’s blog “from the future.”

Figure 9. Film Zenith (source: www.zeniththefilm.com)

Body/Mind/Change. The project, created by Lance Weiler, is explained on his website, Body/Mind/Change (BMC) as an immersive storytelling extension of an exhibition called David Cronenberg: Evolution. David Cronenberg is a Canadian filmmaker and actor who is one of the principal creators of the visceral horror genre, also called body horror, which explore people's fears of body transformation and infection. In

64 his films, the psychological and the physical are typically intertwined (Cronenberg &

Rodley, 1997). The BMC project stars Cronenberg himself and

takes audiences through a Cronenbergian storyworld inspired by the film

Videodrome but reimagined for the twenty-first century and brought to life across

three platforms – online, mobile, and the real world. With plotlines and game

mechanics involving biotechnology start-ups, body enhancements, and emotional

learning systems, Body/Mind/Change presents the plausible found

in Cronenberg’s work as science fact. With this multi-platform immersive

narrative ride players experience first-hand the emotional steps involved in

merging with technology to transform and evolve oneself, one of the key themes

Cronenberg explores in his works (Weiler, 2016, pt. Body/Mind/Change).

Figure 10. Intro to Body/Mind/Change (source: Body/Mind/Change website) 65 Body/Mind/Change was launched in the fall of 2013 at the International

Film Festival (TIFF) Lightbox as part of a traveling Cronenberg retrospective and an exhibition that was scheduled to travel around the world for four years. The whole project was a collaboration between David Cronenberg, TIFF, and Canadian Film Center Media

Lab.

In Weiler’s Body/Mind/Change interactive concept, a fictional Los Angeles-based biotech company called Body/Mind/Change Labs has licensed the technological concepts seen in Cronenberg's sci-fi horror films such as Videodrome and used them to create a new lifestyle product. The product is called POD (Personal On-Demand) and is a biotechnological "recommendation engine" implant designed to help its human hosts effortlessly discover their needs, loves and desires (Hutchins, 2016). The interactive experience has an episodic and is designed with game-like elements so that audiences go through three different levels of simulations answering questions to create the personality of an artificial intelligence companion, POD. Body/Mind/Change's system tracked users' reactions to the questions to create a unique 3-D printed POD, personalized to reflect their personalities. Body/Mind/Change is a web-based interactive experience that connects with Cronenberg’s retrospective and exhibition to construct a larger Cronenberg world.

66

Figure 11. The end screen of Body/Mind/Change (source: Body/Mind/Change website)

Question Bridge. This is a transmedia project consisting of a documentary-styled video art installation, an interactive website, a mobile app, an education curriculum for high school students, community engagement events, a book, and connections to social media such as Facebook and . It is designed for Black men of all ages and backgrounds to ask and respond to questions about life in America (“Question Bridge,”

2014). It was created to stimulate connections and understanding among Black men primarily to illustrate the diversity of thought, character and identity in the Black male population from a point of view that is rarely seen in American media (“Question

Bridge,” 2014). The creators wanted to break negative perceptions by representing and redefining Black male identity in America through conversation among Black males on a variety of different topics. As described on the Question Bridge website, it is a strategy to

67 foster honest dialogue, by one person asking a question and another person giving an answer, which can then elicit healing.

The project started with its first platform, the art installation, which premiered at the 2012 New Frontier. The team recorded a total of more than

1600 question and answer videos (combined) from over 160 men in nine cities in

America, which were than shaped "into an insightful, provocative and entertaining five- screen video installation" (“Question Bridge,” 2014). After Sundance, the art installation moved to the Brooklyn Museum and then to over thirty museums, festivals and institutions.

Figure 12. Installation in the Brooklyn Museum (source: Brooklyn Museum website)

68 In his interview for this research, Bayete Smith, a co-creator, explained that generational dialogue was one goal and pointed to the example of a young man who posed this question to elders: “Why didn’t you leave us the blueprint?”. That led to creating the “Blueprint Roundtables” community events designed to create dialogue among Black males of different ages (“Question Bridge,” 2014). Those events, launched in late 2012, provided a supplementary space in which the attendees were able to continue the dialogue and “identify practical roadmaps to success for Black men and boys.” (“Question Bridge,” 2014).

Additional platforms, released in 2014, were the interactive website and app in which people were able to open a profile and contribute to the conversation. The goal was to expand the conversation and make it easier for Black males to participate across the country. Questions and answers are still being constantly added to the website and app, to create a living archive of Black male voices that can be searched by location and timeframe – essentially generating a map of Black male identity (“Question Bridge,”

2014). Each video can be shared on Facebook and Twitter, or embedded as a video link to other websites; a new hashtag (#) can be created beside the existing ones. When the user hears the question, he can select someone's answer or add his own answer. Above each video is the name of the person answering; the user can click on the name and see that person’s profile, picture, self-description, and the number of conversations in which that person has been involved.

Published in October 2015 by Aperture, the book Question Bridge: Black Males

In America is a selection of questions and answers ranging from the comic (“Do you have

69 a problem eating chicken, watermelon and banana in front of white people?”) (“Question

Bridge,” 2014) to philosophical (“Why is it so difficult for black American men in this culture to be themselves, their essential selves, and remain who they truly are?”)

(“Aperture,” 2016). Another part of the Question Bridge storyworld is an education curriculum designed for high school students, available for free, focusing on themes of broad identity, conflict resolution, and inclusion (“Question Bridge,” 2014). The curriculum is online, and teaching artists can be hired to conduct training sessions in the

Question Bridge method (“Question Bridge,” 2014).

The Deeper They Bury Me. This transmedia project consists of a , a web-based interactive documentary and social media such as Facebook and

Twitter. The story centers on Herman Wallace, who spent forty-one years in solitary confinement at the infamous Louisiana State Correctional Facility in Angola, Louisiana, for killing a correction officer (“Witness,” 2015). The documentary portion of the project is called Herman’s House. In it, a young art student, Jackie Sumell, asks Herman

Wallace: “What kind of house does he dream of?” (Sargent, 2015) because she was curious about a long-term prisoner’s perspective. The documentary explores the creativity of both, the prisoner and the artist, as they create a house that Sumell builds a model of as part of her art installation. Sumell communicates with Herman via phone on a regular basis and the two become close friends during the process. The story is told through Sumell, as the main visible character, and her process of creating the art project; but including only Herman’s voice since he is locked in a cell. Eventually, the art installation becomes secondary while her emotional, personal connection with Herman

70 becomes the primary focus. Towards the end, she is no longer merely an artist, but also an activist for Herman’s rights. Herman Wallace was himself a Black Panther activist who, together with Albert Woodfox and Robert King, fought for better conditions in

Angola prison. In 1972, he and Albert were allegedly framed for the murder of a prison guard and placed in solitary confinement (“Witness,” 2015). Ever since that controversial conviction in 1972, Wallace lived in the six-by-nine-foot cell for a crime he denied he committed.

Using technology and animation, the interactive web platform allows the user to look around Wallace’s small cell, and around the imaginary house he designed with the artist Sumell, and learn more about his conditions in the prison. The interactive documentary is triggered by a pre-recorded phone call from Herman; the user is asked if he/she wants to accept the call. After taking the call, the user can explore Herman's world in segments as the user “moves” around the designed space. The experience takes the form of a twenty minutes phone conversation with Wallace, which symbolically reproduces the allotted time allowed for a prison phone call. As users navigate the space,

Herman's voice tells the story via “the phone,” which gives the audience an intimate relationship with the character. He talks about the general infrastructure of American prison buildings, the toll the cell has taken on his life, and explains his investment in the imaginary house (Sargent, 2015). The user can click on some of the objects in the cell or the house, and find a short video clip in which Herman shares information about the consequences of his isolation, the permanent camera surveillance, the lack of privacy, and mental deterioration (“IDFA,” 2015). Animated portions portray his dreams and

71 desires, while archival footage illustrates his early life and the prison system in the

United States. A high point in Wallace's life, temporary relocation to a communal dormitory, ended abruptly when he was returned to a daily regime of twenty three hours in his cell relieved only by one hour of exercise (“IDFA,” 2015).

Figure 13. Home page of The Deeper They Bury Me (source: www.acallfromherman.nfb.ca)

The documentary ends on a positive note with the hope that Wallace will be free until we learn from the web-based interactive portion that he died three days after being released. The social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, function as marketing tools for the project. The pages have updates on the screenings, festivals, and news related to the project or to prisoners such as Albert Woodfox, who was released from solitary confinement after forty-three years in February 2016.

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Figure 14. The end of The Deeper They Bury Me – Herman Wallace (source: www.acallfromherman.nfb.ca)

Stage One - Producing Storyworlds

Again, organic transmedia involves storytelling carried out by independent filmmakers where the story grows organically from a single narrative that gradually expands across online and offline media to reach the maximum available audience. The selected participants and projects demonstrated that the scope of their story was so rich that it outgrew the frame of a single platform storytelling; hence, they looked for alternative options in building their storyworlds by suiting content to platforms that will engage audiences. This part of the analysis elaborates on the first and second research question:

RQ1: How does one create story content for multiple platforms in an organic

transmedia project?

RQ2: How does one engage the audience in each platform?

73 Long (2007) emphasizes that transmedia is the art of worldmaking. Creating a strong transmedia project requires designing a world around characters who can engage audiences over multiple platforms. After analyzing the two fictional narrative projects

Zenith and Body/Mind/Change, it was found that creating a fragmented story for multiple platforms was precisely planned and designed from the beginning. In the case of the two documentary projects Question Bridge and The Deeper They Bury Me, the filmmakers discovered later that the material was so rich that it was suited to alternative media as well. In all four cases, however, the creators thought it was necessary to build the world around the main characters.

Although transmedia is an elusive concept there are still recognized protocols.

Worldbuilding requires consistent elements across all platforms: the plot, characters, look and feel of the storyworld. Pratten (2011, 2015) explained that the storyworld requires

“canons,” a set of rules, beliefs, principles, characters, events. Everything in the storyworld must be in canon; otherwise “the stories won’t ring true” (Pratten, 2015, p.

64). Even so, each platform has to bring something new to the whole that engages the audience; consistency does not preclude novelty.

Usually, a story arc is developed and structured for multiple storytelling platforms, starting with a single medium. In standard story arc, Nikolic (2017) explained that the protagonist, driven by his/her motivation, progresses on a journey through the story that usually consists of overcoming a series of progressively more difficult obstacles in order to realize his/her objective. Additional media require equally precise planning. Therefore, production of transmedia projects involves designing, structuring the

74 storyworlds, and making artistic decisions in such a way that than evoke audience engagement.

Transmedia methods of production require an interdisciplinary approach to a project that brings together people from different fields such as: film, gaming, coding, web-designing, user experience design, and so forth. Depending on the nature of the project and selected platforms, the principal team creates each platform in sync with the storyworld. That means establishing a space for collaboration where teams can agree on the core design principles that will be applied in the projects. Precise communication and collaboration among team members are necessary from day one.

The interdisciplinary nature blends what used to be the three segments of preproduction, production and postproduction into a seamless approach without lines between each phase. Nonetheless, the four project creators indicated that each project had two distinguishable phases of work: incubation and production. First, the design phase, which resembles preproduction, outlines the look and feel of the storyworld. Bernardo

(2014) calls this phase incubation since, in addition to designing the storyworld, it requires prototyping, construction of components, and even testing on predicted audiences for real-time feedback. Second, the production phase constructs and finalizes the project, which resembles the traditional mix of production and postproduction. There are few practical rules for production. With the twenty-first century paradigm shift from old to new media, storytelling fields such as filmmaking, web design, video game design, social media and so forth inevitably blend together in an entirely new way. That means, at a minimum, that transmedia projects are usually unique.

75 Incubation phase. Incubation (design phase) requires that collaborators from different platforms come together, plan the story structure, and design the experiences unique to each platform by trying to anticipate audience participation.

Pratten (2011, 2015) explained that during this phase there are six key components: defining a story, experience, audience, platforms, business models and execution, all of which are supposed to reinforce each other. Feedback should be constant. “Rather than try to tackle all six considerations in a single swoop, allow your ideas to evolve through multiple iterations – start with a small concept, run it through all the stages and see what comes out. Now start again, this time taking the outputs from each stage and feeding them into the other stages” (Pratten, 2011, p. 3).

Gaudenzi (2018) developed a production methodology called WHAT IF IT.

WHAT IF IT is a process used during incubation by implementing a mix of distinct production methodologies such as software, user center design, design thinking and storytelling to help creators to choose the best platform and interactive communication strategy (Gaudenzi, 2018). Because the ultimate goal is to involve audiences, WHAT IF

IT gives priority to the user center design to better ensure interactivity. Gaudenzi runs a lab called IF Lab (Interactive Factual Lab) for creators to develop their projects by collaborating with industry professionals. It is “a mini-incubator where ideas could be tested, mentored and developed. The fundamental point was to introduce design thinking into [what she calls] the production process and to encourage people to work with designers and coders from day one” (Gaudenzi, 2018, para. 5). Again, feedback is essential. Gaudenzi’s procedure is a five-step process: (1) the concept is defined, (2)

76 tested with the group of collaborators, (3) followed by revised formulation, (4) prototyping, and (5) testing of the prototype with potential audiences. In the first step creators define what is the story they want to tell, decide why it is important, and to whom: – the targeted audience is understood from the beginning. Next, the team of creators interacts among themselves – researching the audience, defining the user experience, and accessing the emotional core of the project. Afterward, the team formulates the project challenges and the user’s impact on the story. The following step is to ideate (imagine and project) how to develop the user journey by creating wireframes and storyboards. Finally, the team creates a prototype to test the user experience, review the feedback, and adjust accordingly.

Figure 15. WHAT IF IT process of IF Lab (source: Gaudenzi, 2018)

77 Production phase. During this phase, the planned projects come to life. The production of each platform will depend on the nature of each particular media component within the storyworld. All of the interviewees made clear that different parts of the story are produced most of the time simultaneously on various platforms, which means that the post-production and production of each platform overlap. The structures planned during incubation are launched.

However, not all projects include the core team from day one. Some projects expand over a period of time and teams of creators change and evolve depending on the selected platforms. Since all four of the selected projects were produced before research for this study began, observing the actual production was not an option. Hence, this section relies on a detailed description of the process from the creators’ perspective after the fact. Structures and the content, nonetheless, are clear enough.

Results and Interpretation

Zenith. For Zenith, Vladan Nikolic constructed a world around the two main characters, the first in the present in 2012, the second in the future in 2044, as each searches for the same grand conspiracy. Nikolic felt that the size of the whole story transcended film structure, requiring additional platforms. Inspired by a psychology experiment Milgram from the ‘60’s, Zenith puts its viewers (and users) in a position to question their own roles and perceptions of their lives and realities. In such a design even the passive viewers of the film can analyze themselves, ask questions and be intrigued. A very abstract idea for a film, it was presented as a futuristic about conspiracies.

The idea of the experiment is a framework for Zenith story structure.

78 The storyworld of these themes is very rich and open to many interpretations,

which is what the project was about. There is no one right answer, but only

questions the viewer will raise, and hopefully will learn something new while

being entertained during the journey (Vladan Nikolic, interview, 2016).

Design of the storyworld arose from the idea of bridging the present and the future through a fictional conspiracy. Nikolic (2016) explained that the story takes the present reality and amplifies it into a hyper-real context, and highlights our current conditions and issues more intensely, rather than portraying imaginary or mythical contexts of Sci-Fi stories. The audience is introduced to the story through websites, videos, and blogs associated with Ed Crowley, the main character. All of the platforms lead to the film where the audience can follow the main portion of the Zenith story. Ed’s son, Jack writes the blog from the future that functions as an epilogue to the story.

Two reasons were for our story arc: to have an interesting story experience and to

use it as a marketing tool. We spent a year building the world through the

websites, but if you dig deep, you would see that it is all about something fictional

(Vladan Nikolic, interview, 2016).

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Figure 16. The Zenith storyworld (source: www.zenithtransmedia.com)

Zenith’s incubation phase. For Zenith, specific logistic and planning assumed a standard film style to be directly correlated with all other platforms. Since creative decisions do not always match available recourses and possibilities, limited funding forced a novel approach:

We made a few websites that were entry points to the story. One was the project

Zenith about a company for genetic experiments where people could sign up.

Then there was a real company who makes the spy equipment where we linked

our website. If you go to Zenith website, you would see that it was hacked by the

group stopZenith so we presented it as two groups: Zenith, the strange corporation

who is doing weird experiments and stopZenith was the group who wants to

it. In 2009, when we decided on the image of the stopZenith group, our

web designer told us about the Anonymous group which at the time was only the

80 group of hackers protesting Scientology and they weren't known. We liked the

idea of the masks and it matched our style completely because Zenith wanted to

stay anonymous. Then we made the stopZenith website and filmed a lot of videos

in which people with masks said stop Zenith in different languages, and that

Zenith is threatening humanity. Their websites were linked to existing websites

and blogs about conspiracy theories. The main idea was that the Zenith is a

corporation controlling people’s lives and changing their states of mind and the

stopZenith is fighting against them (Vladan Nikolic, interview, 2016).

Although Nikolic mentioned that the Zenith universe spread over sixty websites, he also explained that his team designed only a few websites and the rest were existing websites and blogs that collaborated with the Zenith team. In order to create a Zenith universe, Nikolic and his colleagues played with elements from real life. The story about

Zenith was connected to real news at the time. Today, consequences would be different for linking stories with real news.

It was linked to the real news about the financial crisis in 2008. We took the real

news about bankers and said that the Zenith is behind it. In the beginning, it was

all mystery, a mix of reality and fiction. We spent a few months doing only that.

Since there was no budget to promote these sites, the team approached various

bloggers and other websites linked to conspiracy theories, alternative news, and

later SciFi blogs and websites, offering banner-swaps and content in exchange for

promotion. Zenith’s transmedia team controlled and ran 60 external websites,

providing content to support the movie. Out of hundreds of targeted sites and

81 blogs, several responded positively, and this started building the initial interest for

Zenith. The film was never mentioned, only a mysterious Zenith conspiracy, with

clues and pieces of tapes strewn about the web, which provided clues and pointers

to Zenith (Vladan Nikolic, interview, 2016).

Targeting and recruiting the mentioned audience groups served the purpose of story promoters. Although this work was part of the incubation-design phase, the team of

Zenith called it something else. As Nikolic said, it was

the seeding period. The goal was to slowly build interest and awareness of

something called Zenith. To augment content, many of the sites linked to actual

news and other conspiracy-related websites. This lasted for almost a year, while

the filmmakers determined the distribution timeline and strategies for the film’s

release (Vladan Nikolic, interview, 2016).

Following the “seeding period,” Nikolic moved to production by simultaneously working on several story components to further engage the audience and through them promote the film.

Zenith’s production phase. After carefully planning and promoting buzz around

Zenith, planting the seeds of the storyworld, strategically partnering with different existing websites and blogs about conspiracy theories, Nikolic was able to produce a story introducing the characters. After creating Zenith and stopZenith portions,

the third part of the story was Ed Crowley who had his website as the locksmith

and looked like the real company. If someone googled for locksmith services,

Ed's website would show up in the search with the real phone number. On his

82 website was a link to his personal blog, which was stylistically copied from the

blogs about conspiracy theories, where Ed wrote about Zenith. After a few

months, we got some traffic, and it was around 60 websites connected, and each

website had much content written by people who followed. The story actually

begins after a few months when we announced that Ed was missing and that he

had left the first tape. We released the part of the first tape which is on YouTube

channel and stopZenith website (Vladan Nikolic, interview, 2016).

Figure 17. Ed Crowley’s locksmith website (source: www.crowleylocks.com)

83 Officially, the Zenith project starts in the present day with Ed Crowley, the locksmith and conspiracy theorist. Following Nikolic’s specifications, the team copied the blog style of a conspiracy theorists, but they also carefully matched the style of locksmith websites to resemble a real locksmith service. Correspondingly, the look of

Ed's tapes shows him talking to the camera also to match the style of existing YouTube conspiracy theorists. Nikolic explained that if people had called the number of locksmith services, they would reach an answering machine asking callers to leave a message.

Afterward, someone would call back and explain that Ed had moved and was no longer working as the locksmith. All the mentioned websites were cross-linked so that the audience could find the information.

All of the later work was accomplished in parallel with production and postproduction of the film. Nikolic added that "pre-production bleeds into production, it is not so separate because you work on different parts in different phases." All of the work led to the main part of the story, the film,

The tapes weren’t linearly released, so the audience would have to connect the

parts of the puzzle until tape 6, which is the beginning of the film. The idea was to

get to tape 6 when it would reveal it was all about the film. Before film premiered

in October 2010, as word-of-mouth was spreading, and various forums and blogs

started asking ‘What is Zenith,’ one of the main partner-websites, Above Top

Secret, who have 2 million visitors, and in collaboration with the Zenith

transmedia team, announced a competition, offering a $500 reward for the first

individual to correctly identify the purpose behind the website for a fictitious

84 company Wadjet Industries, which leads to the shadowy Zenith conspiracy.

Hackers discovered in 3 minutes that Zenith is a movie, that I’m a director, where

I live, my phone number, etc. This created strong buzz and interest online, as well

as the creation of a core audience interested in the film (Vladan Nikolic,

interview, 2016).

Again, the film starts with the sixth tape of Ed in the present, in 2012, which is immediately followed by Jack, forty years in the future, taking the tape out of the video player. He sits down and talks to the camera explaining that consciousness is the totality of a person's thoughts and feelings. Then, the audience hears Jack, while still talking to the camera, as voiceover saying: "That's me, Jack, or dumb Jack if you will... Who is

Jack? What does he do?" Jack’s communicating directly with the audience grabs their attention from the beginning. Soon after, by listening to the same voiceover of Jack, the audience learns that future humans have been genetically enhanced always to be happy, a state of permanent numbness. Pain makes people feel alive for which they need expired medication from the past that Jack just happens to sell. Because the world also has been robbed of its language, people have not been able to express themselves. Every day, Jack records words such as: virtue, excellence, rightness, goodness, justice, and faith that no one else knows anymore. The implication is that what is not possible to be expressed in language does not exist in human minds. The set design of the scenes in the future suggests a failure of emotions, connections, and communication, a stripped down post-apocalyptic world. The set features an old TV, a radio, a VHS player to play Ed's tapes and other antiques, the reason why Nikolic calls Zenith a retro-futuristic thriller.

85 The story of two characters in two different time periods sounds clear and the audience follows until the end, which changes everything. The last scene shows Ed’s son

Jack in a mental hospital talking to his doctor who calls him Ed Crowley. The year is

2012. The audience learns that Ed/Jack had a rare form of brain tumor and was operated on to have it removed and then replaced with genetically improved brain tissue as part of an important experiment, which Ed/Jack signed an agreement to do. He had also developed epilepsy, which resulted in complex seizures which caused language problems and numbness. The end suggests that the whole story exists only in Ed/Jack’s head and it was all part of his medical condition. However, Ed/Jack goes to his room and start writing a letter: “My name is Jack Crowley, I'm about to die, but that's not the story…”

The letter claims that there are more than ten tapes and asks the audience to find number eleven. This last unexpected event is supposed to trigger the audience to rethink the whole story, to question authority, our roles in society, and the function of language in our communication. The end hopefully re-engages the audience, which must decide who was the experiment’s subject, Ed, Jack or the audience itself. The end finally provides the reasoning behind the set design of “the future” in which “Jack” lived. The fragmented story structures of the storyworld are left deliberately incomplete to leave room for audience interaction and interpretation. The last platform of the Zenith universe is Jack’s blog from the future in which he continues the story. That portion targets the most avid fans who wanted to follow further. Ideally, audiences would come up with alternative explanations, the desired outcome for any mystery.

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Figure 18. Jack’s table in the future (source: Zenith, the film)

Having limited resources for production, Nikolic found alternative ways to tell his story and engage the audience by first targeting the niche group among conspiracy theory fans who served the purpose of spreading the word about Zenith and thus broadening the audience. Nikolic successfully accomplished his goal of promoting the film while also providing additional story paths. By carefully researching behavior of conspiracy theory followers and by speaking their language, Nikolic delayed discovery that it was all part of a fiction.

Body/Mind/Change. The world in Body/Mind/Change was on the platform of

David Cronenberg’s work, mainly his early satirical films dealing with corporations. For

Lance Weiler, those elements inspired a web-based interactive experience. Weiler explained how he built the world:

87 I spent a lot of time with the team I worked with laying out a plan and strategizing

how we could build something that would allow people to feel like they were in

David Cronenberg world. One of the early narrative concepts I came up with was

this idea that David’s work, his IP [intellectual property], the science and

technology that is found [in] his films, that he is taking that intellectual property,

and is licensed to a company called Body/Mind/Change. [sic] The BMC is using

that as a foundation for a series of next-generation human implants with the goal

of evolving humanity, and that felt [like] a really nice jumping off point (Lance

Weiler, interview, 2016).

In contrast to what has been described as organic transmedia, where a story organically grows across platforms, Body/Mind/Change was created as a connecting tissue between Cronenberg’s traveling exhibition of memorabilia and a retrospective called David Cronenberg: Evolution. Cronenberg’s films and the exhibition existed already; Body/Mind/Change connects them into one unified Cronenberg universe.

Cronenberg’s work explores humans’ physical and psychological fear of body transformation. The exhibition included artifacts from the films, including the helmet from Videodrome and the pod from , as examples of the filmmaker’s style and themes. Videodrome follows the TV programmer of a small television station who stumbles upon a broadcast signal featuring extreme violence and torture. The conflict starts when the signal's source takes over his mind and he loses touch with ordinary reality. The Fly is about an eccentric scientist who invents a set of telepods for instant teleportation from one pod to another. Both films challenge perceptions of reality and

88 consciousness, themes prevalent throughout Body/Mind/Change. Although Weiler used artificial intelligence technology and interactive web design for Body/Mind/Change, he preserves the visual style of Cronenberg’s films. Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to capable of mimicking cognitive functions of the human mind

(Brynjolfsson & Mcafee, 2017). Body/Mind/Change consisted of three simulations in which the user had to communicate with the artificial intelligence named Kay by answering a variety of questions to teach Kay emotions, which are then uploaded into a

POD; an actual physical artifact. Kay lacks emotions and needs human help. If the user completes all three simulations, Kay’s learning will be physically manifested in a 3D printed Personal On-Demand (POD). If the user does not complete all three simulations,

Kay dies.

When you go through all three [simulations], you birth your own POD, and that

POD is a container for the artificial intelligence, but that POD is 3D printed, and

it's based upon an algorithm that collects a variety of data as you go through the

experience (what did you watch, how did you respond to the questions, where did

you click on the screen) and if you make it through all 3 simulations which are 20

min each then 3D printer would fire up in the museum space and would start

printing your own unique POD. That is how it worked (Lance Weiler, interview,

2016).

To experience the Body/Mind/Change, the user needs to register by providing name, email and password. Next, a warning explains that the experience is emotionally distressing and traumatic “for those brave enough to engage.” Moreover, if the user

89 cannot commit to twenty minutes of the first simulation, the POD will die. That way, the user is responsible for the "life" of an organism. Weiler’s careful selection of the words for those brave enough to engage encourages the user to prove him/herself.

Figure 19. The warning at the beginning of Body/Mind/Change (source: Body/Mind/Change website)

The interactive starts with a close up of David Cronenberg, who says: “Hi, I am

David Cronenberg. I am very excited to partner with Body/Mind/Change and contribute to its groundbreaking POD recommendation engine” (David Cronenberg,

Body/Mind/Change, 2013). Following this introduction, the user listens to Cronenberg giving more information about the POD; he says that humanity is at the threshold of a new evolutionary age. To achieve genuine greatness the user has to go through physical and intellectual symbiosis with the POD, which can help lead to a smarter and more

90 purposeful life. Life is an adventure and the POD is a partner. Cronenberg announces that he is the first recipient of the POD. He finishes by inviting the user to join.

Figure 20. David Cronenberg in Body/Mind/Change (source: Body/Mind/Change website)

The introduction establishes authority by having Cronenberg “talk” to the user directly. As the user teaches Kay, the AI, about emotional intelligence, the POD recommendation engine maps aspects such as needs, love, and desires to match the user's answers. The “intelligence” of the POD depends on how much the user is willing to share. The more information provided, the smarter the POD will be. While the user is aware that it is all fiction, he/she is encouraged to openly and honestly participate in the experience to avoid creating an unintelligent organism. The POD mirrors its creator’s behavior and represents a physical manifestation of love, needs, and desires it learns from its creator-user. Each POD is unique, personalized because its look and shape are based 91 on the user’s responses; no two users will give the same answers to all questions within the three simulations.

The first simulation is about trust and disgust, the second about fear and anger, and the third about joy and sadness. Kay needs human help to be able to understand the world. The communication format is simple; the user sees red text on the black screen, and the style of the letters resembles that of an old computer program from the eighties.

The user can answer questions by selecting from a provided list or by typing something novel in a provided space. The questions range from “What is your best memory?” to

“How many sexual partners have you had?” The narrative structure of each simulation is animated by with Kay’s eagerness to learn about different emotions and behavior.

Questions such as What will change if you die?, and What will die if you change? are existential. As the user communicates with Kay, the organism grows slowly.

In the first simulation, after David Cronenberg’s invitation to join the adventure, participants watch videos. In the first, Kay creates a character, Elena, a registered nurse tormented by childhood trauma, and soon after a second, her brother Blake. The video foregrounds an erotic scene, although it is not clear whether Elena enjoys the activity or is being hurt by it. Texts of different thoughts and feelings appear on screen, and the users click on the ones they think most appropriate to educate Kay about emotions. Next, the user learns that Elena is pregnant, and that Blake is in a wheelchair. The second simulation starts with Cronenberg saying: “Hello? Hello. This is my voice. This is David

Cronenberg. We think you are ready for the next stage. Do you want to change the world with us?” (David Cronenberg, Body/Mind/Change, 2013). Kay then runs a second video

92 with scenes from the characters’ pasts. In this video, a chaotic sequence shows young

Elena and Blake in a car, arguing. She is apparently hurt when the car stops abruptly.

Another disjointed sequence shows Blake on the ground covered in blood after the same car hit him. In still another segment, Kay runs a scene in which Blake is a doctor who performs a medical procedure on Elena; it is not clear whether Blake is performing an abortion or if he is pushing something into Elena’s stomach. The simulation ends with

Cronenberg telling the users that their work is very good. By now, increased knowledge makes Kay grow larger. In the third simulation, a new nurse character is introduced.

Elena and the nurse sit on the floor of an abandoned building. Elena disappears as if she were only a digital image and the nurse remains. Finally, the nurse is in a forest, lying on the ground and experiencing pain. Her body shakes, she throws up, and then an organism emerges from her body. The POD is now formed and ready to be collected at the exhibition.

Figure 21. 3D printed PODs (source: Body/Mind/Change Twitter) 93 Weiler’s approach symbolically presents overarching themes of Cronenberg’s work: bodies are vulnerable, and cause humans’ anxieties about themselves and their relationships. The immersive experience is designed to make the user internalize the disquiet of Cronenberg’s films.

Body/Mind/Change’s incubation phase. Weiler explained his approach to designing a project and collaborating with people on his team:

I try to make it adaptive as possible. The way I would start every project is: I’ll

start with almost like the 21st-century writer's room where I'll bring together as

many different stakeholders as I can from a variety of different disciplines. I’ve

seen my collaborators have shifted [from] not just being a production designer,

my producer, my DP [director of photography], but it shifted to [how] I work with

UX [user experience] specialist, data scientist, creative technologist, and

researchers. What I do is when we start a project we will have a lab that runs from

a day to weeks, and we would use it as a way to craft what the experience will be.

I’m very much about a rapid generation of ideas but run through methodology and

framework that's conducive to collaborative work. It's not sitting and

brainstorming, there is a lot of things we do that are exercises and techniques we

use to help to determine what emotional core is, where we are headed, what are

we trying to do (Lance Weiler, interview, 2016).

Again, it is necessary to determine the story structure that will best convey the project’s message and provide an experience for the audience. Since the targeted audience was fans of Cronenberg, Weiler had to develop a story that would replicate the

94 experience of characters in Cronenberg’s films. That meant the story structure had to be interactive so that the audience can empathize. In Body/Mind/Change, Weiler did research to get started:

Usually before I come in into something like that, I'll have some basic ideas that I

think it would be interesting to execute based on some research I've done. For

instance, when I did the one around Cronenberg, I came in with the idea of BMC

and David licensing his IP [intellectual property] for the science and technology

within his films. Then what we do, we run through the methodology called EDIT

[Empathy, Define, Ideate, Test]…. That methodology borrows from design

thinking, narrative design and game mechanics play. We run these labs and all the

stakeholders are around and we run through a variety of different exercises and

methods in order to distil down intelligence of the group to make

sure that we are all on the same page (Lance Weiler, interview, 2016).

The interactivity of Body/Mind/Change’s narrative means that the user must make decisions to move forward in the story. As final result, the user receives a personalized object called a POD. The incubation phase is critical, not only to create a project but also to test and analyze whether what is being planned is feasible. As WHAT IF IT methodology suggests, during this phase, in addition to developing the story, it is important to define the user journey so that the project can be designed to serve its purpose.

A lot of what we do is rapidly prototyping to see if it works, break it and then

continue again. A lot of the work is using some software processes, using some

95 design thinking processes and that is usually how we start a project. After, I

would spend time thinking about the motives, the themes, thinking about what I

want something to feel like emotionally. The technology would usually come a

little bit later (Lance Weiler, interview, 2016).

As Weiler pointed out, technology was secondary. It follows discussion of the story and the emotional core of the human experience it should evoke. Later, the selected technology translates the demands of the story and what type of experience is imagined for the audience. For Body/Mind/Change, the team had to work with an algorithm that could fashion different personalized PODs based on the data collected during each individual encounter. During designing and prototyping, Weiler uses primitive tools such as paper, cardboards, markers, play-doh, and so forth to construct the experience and look for possible challenges, errors, and glitches. The project is usually tested with collaborators, students, and meet up groups for purposes of audience research. Based on the feedback he received during this phase, Weiler made changes to the concept before moving to the production phase.

Body/Mind/Change’s production phase. Weiler explained that to develop and produce the story, his production process changed from a “waterfall method” to the “agile method and scrum”. “Waterfall is very similar to the film; waterfall is: I don't do the sound design until I lock the picture” (Lance Weiler, interview, 2016). Agile and scrum methods are software development processes that require research, designing, programming (or coding), testing, modifications, and maintenance. The Agile software development, as explained in its manifest, among other principles points out the

96 importance of collaborative work, using the consumer’s (in case of transmedia – the user’s) satisfaction in an early stage and being open to changes even in the late development stage (“Agile Manifesto,” 2001). Similarly, by using the srum method, the creators make decisions based on the research, not speculation (Schwaber, 2004). Weiler does a lot of planning, prototyping, and testing because his production approach combines film language with design and gaming processes. He incorporates four essential principles to ensure that the created storyworld will resonate with the audience.

Four design principles that carry across the work I do are:

1. Trace – what I found over time is that people want to see a trace of themselves

in the story and they really respond to that

2. Granting agency – how do you move people from being an individual in

experience to being part of the team within an experience? What is the balance

between individual vs. group?

3. Thematic frame – very important when you have multiple platforms: what is it

anchored in, is there a common language around it and how to establish that

language, things that are expected within the experience – Body/Mind/Change

had it to an extent in terms of world of Cronenberg and overall arching theme:

Who am I and who are we, what is family, which is inherent in David’s work and

worked very well with idea of giving a birth to something new [POD].

4. Social movement or serendipity management – in transmedia, or however you

want to call it, there is a tendency to over explain things and a tendency to be

really concerned with making sure that every part of the experience is very clear.

97 There is a great value to have a mystery, there is a lot of beauty in: show, don't

tell. A lot of transmedia work would over tell what it's trying to do and it won't

create these experiences. The idea of social movement and serendipity

management is: how can you leave gaps that allow people to come together and

find meaning in something collectively and they laid their meaning over it (Lance

Weiler, interview, 2016).

Thus, building Body/Mind/Change centered on the story and the user journey at the same time. Again, Body/Mind/Change, together with the retrospective and the exhibition, is part of the storyworld called David Cronenberg: Evolution. Each element is one unit of the larger structure, capable of communicating with the audience in its own style and language. But each element is in canon. The result, Weiler hopes, is a new experience that arises from the whole. Even those unfamiliar with Cronenberg’s films will be able to understand the story and immerse themselves in his world.

Question Bridge. The stimulus for Question Bridge was an experiment of Chris

Johnson, a professor at California College of the Arts, who used video to ask questions and get answers from a particular group of people. The purpose of Question Bridge was to create a dialogue between people who would not usually communicate, to bridge different demographic groups within the Black communities in the and to create a safe space for the Black male population to conduct this conversation. Bayete

Smith, a co-creator, explained how the world of Question Bridge was formed,

Foundation is in this idea of people being able to pose questions and receive

answers to those questions, and how that communication could be executed in a

98 profound way via video. By separating people [geographically] and using videos,

as a mediator, the idea was that people could be more open, honest and candid.

My collaborator Chris Johnson came up with the concept of using video in

combinations with questions as a question bridge in the late 90's. He dealt with a

few people who are wealthy and didn’t live in traditionally black neighborhoods

and several people who are low income and lived in traditionally black

neighborhoods. He kind of built this bridge between these income gaps (Bayete

Smith, interview, 2016).

Question Bridge was born to provide communication tools for a Black male population using ongoing narrative and platforms. Unlike plot defined by a conflict between characters pursuing a goal and facing obstacles, Question Bridge’s narrative contains no specific conflict to be resolved. Instead, by soliciting participation, the structure is built by the participants who ask or answer questions. The project presents a live video ethnography of the Black male community spread over multiple platforms.

The first released platform, a five-screen video art installation, has a linear documentary-style progression that can be consumed as a passive experience. The five screens of a life-sized talking heads play different videos; one video appeared of a person asking a question, and then replaced by another video of a person answering that question. This style simulates a conversation. The content of the installation led to a printed curriculum for high school students as the second platform. The third platform, a website, resembles a social network and provides richer content. The art installation is composed of more than 1600 question and answer videos from over 160 men in nine

99 cities in America; the website, still live allows other people to contribute questions and answers (“Question Bridge,” 2014). The fourth platform, an app, similar in function to the website, is adjusted to smartphones. The last “platform” includes community events.

The interactive website and the app expand the dialogue beyond the museum set up to a broader audience. Both the website and the app offer two general options for participation: one is race and gender-neutral viewer, and the second is for Black male.

The first provides a semi-passive experience because it involves a low level of engagement. The viewer must nonetheless lean forward to select videos he/she wants to see by scrolling, navigating by simply pressing arrow keys (left, right, up, and down).

The website and app have four viewing modes: selection by question, selection by profile, selection by a U.S. state, or selection by a keyword. The following pictures show the four different navigation options of the Question Bridge website and app.

Selection by questions:

Figure 22. Question: How do you know when you become a man? ` (source: Question Bridge website)

100 Selection by profiles:

Figure 23. Profiles of the users (source: Question Bridge website)

Selection by states:

Figure 24. The US map, the conversations by the states (source: Question Bridge website)

101 Selection by keyword:

Figure 25. The keyword - education (source: Question Bridge website)

By contrast, a Black person who wants to participate has first to create a profile to be able to ask or answer questions. The profile is called a fingerprint profile, reflecting the assumption that each participant leaves a fingerprint by joining the online community.

When the user creates his profile, he can choose to upload a new question or to answer some of the existing questions. His profile will show how many questions he has asked and how many answers he provided, his saved favorite videos, and short personal information.

The potential of the material for engaging participants governed the selection of platforms for Question Bridge. Only multiple platforms could provide access to different socio-economic levels and groups within the Black male population. Moreover, multiple

102 platforms could offer communication between participants within the targeted groups that otherwise would not be enabled.

The platforms, not characters or plot, formed the story arc. The art installation and the documentary simply introduce the audience to the interactivity premised on questions and answers. The web platform and the app broaden the story and supplement the educational curriculum and the Blueprint Roundtable community events. For the creators the community events reinforced the importance of public dialogue. Each platform augmented the ones preceding it, providing different pathways or channels for enhanced participation.

Question Bridge’s incubation phase. As with the other projects, Question

Bridge’s incubation phase created the initial story arc. Bayete Smith elaborated,

We came up, with the help of our postproduction producer, with the idea of

having the piece with five channels so it could simulate stepping into the

conversation. We had to think about two different aspects: to deal with the

technical aspect of getting it to play on five channels, how that could actually

happen, how could we get that synced, and we had to figure out how the content

could be engaging. We went through the questions and created a list of what we

thought were the top questions, based on the significance of the question and

answers. We looked at the content and worked to create a narrative within each

question and answer sequence and then between different sequences themselves.

The idea was [to] use these questions and answers to create a story and a narrative

arc so that, as viewers are experiencing this, there is something to keep them

103 engaged. From a visual standpoint, we thought how to keep people to look at

talking heads for hours at a time, and it's tricky. That is how we got the idea of

five channels that resembles a conversation, and we could play with different

faces appearing and disappearing to be more visually dynamic (Bayete Smith,

interview, 2016).

Initially, this project was imagined as a simple documentary but the responses from participants triggered the multiple platform structure. First, of course, was the art installation followed by the printed curriculum, the interactive website, and then the app.

In a sense, the content in each platform had to be incubated separately, with a view to merging the channels sequentially. As Smith explained, the look and feel of the project was determined by the desire to simulate the conversation. Realism was important, so the videos used close-ups of participants to suggest actual face-to-face communication.

Figure 26. Participants’ close-up format of the video (source: Question Bridge website)

104 It wasn't necessarily a challenge to think about how our ideas could be applied to

another platform as much as it was a challenge of figuring out how to execute

those ideas and have them be cohesive together. A lot of that were technical

things related to dealing with the internet, coding and designing website and also

dealing with the app and coding and designing that (Bayete Smith, interview,

2016).

After precise planning, selecting the technology and templates for the user experience, the team shifted gears.

Question Bridge’s production phase. Smith’s production processes, linear as each was, began overlapping:

A large portion of how the different platforms relate to each other in terms of a

story also relates to the order in which we produce them. It was based on

resources as well as us considering what the timing would be best for each

component. We started working in 2007, we completed the video installation at

the end of 2011 and premiered it in January 2012 at Sundance Film Festival and

simultaneously at the Brooklyn Museum and Oakland Museum. Then we rolled

out the curriculum, which was completed in 2011 before the installation, but it

was corrected after we premiered the video installation. The art installation toured

across the country in 20 different cities, and we also created a theatrical film for

places and museums where there was no budget or space for the art installation.

While touring, we worked on finalizing the website and the app, both introduced

105 in 2014. We also worked on the book, which was published in 2015 (Bayete

Smith, interview, 2016).

The Question Bridge story structure was not defined by its content but rather by its purpose, to provide communication tools for the Black community spread over multiple platforms. Each platform is constructed to engage the audience through interactivity. Both styles of building transmedia projects require a compelling story, whether the storyworld from the start is strategically fragmented across platforms or placed first on one platform and then grows beyond the initial idea into multiple platforms. Question Bridge begins by aiming at the Black male community but expands its target to the general public, a sequence that influenced the order of platforms.

The Deeper They Bury Me. Similarly, the world around Herman Wallace was built on Bhalla’s footage and audio recordings of phone conversations, which then led to the documentary Herman’s House and only then to the web-interactive portion The

Deeper They Bury Me. The first platform was the documentary film with a linear structure for a lean-back experience. At the beginning, Herman’s House was the only platform planned for this project. The documentary presented Herman’s life through the eyes of Jackie Sumell, the artist with whom Herman was working on building a dream house as an art installation. In the interactive The Deeper They Bury Me, the audience can enter Herman's world without Jackie. This facilitates a deeper and more personal connection with the character. The interactive portion, a simulation of one of Wallace’s phone calls, gives the audience insight into Wallace’s mind. Participation mimics first- person experience, as opposed to listening to someone else’s explanation.

106 We didn’t want the interactive to be a companion piece. You don’t have to watch

the film to understand the interactive and vice versa, but at the same time, they are

not redundant. When you watch the interactive, you hear a lot of content that is

not in the film. In the film, you need a guide [who] is Jackie, because you don’t

see Herman and you need someone to guide you through his life. In the

interactive, you don't need a guide, you guide yourself. There are a few things that

overlap, less than 10% of the audio is in the both platforms (Angad Bhalla,

interview, 2016).

The documentary, filmed between 2007 and 2010, came out in 2012. The story is a linear three-act structure that starts with an introduction to Jackie Sumell. As her connection with Herman Wallace grows, the audience gets a closer understanding of

Wallace’s own inner perspective. The documentary uses film language to convey

Wallace’s feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. In the film, to better communicate

Wallace’s isolation, Jackie builds a life-sized model of a solitary confinement cell. Using tight shots and wide shots, the director compares and contrasts the visuals of the cell model with open wide city spaces that suggest the freedom that Wallace lacks. The camera is often handheld and follows Sumell’s . In addition, she also builds a model of Wallace’s dream house as a fantasy that liberates Wallace from his cell.

Sumell’s character evolves from a curious and young artist to a motivated activist fighting for Wallace’s rights. After the art project, Sumell moves from New York to New

Orleans to find a parcel of land to build an actual house for Wallace in order to give him hope and a reason to fight. The audience gets to know Wallace through the phone

107 conversations he has with Sumell (and the director), about the art project, their collaboration, and through stories of Wallace's sister, and several friends. The strength and sanity of someone locked for more than forty years is remarkable. Stereotypes collapse early on. Wallace is articulate, well educated, wise, and calm, not something audiences would expect from a black person in prison. Wallace is well spoken to the point that he sounds as though he were the narrator of his own story. Not for a moment does the audience perceive Wallace as weak. In contrast, Jackie Sumell and Wallace’s sister seem worn down several times. They are devastated by his situation, exhausted from the constant struggle, destroyed by the hurricane in New Orleans, but Wallace never breaks down. He is calm, at peace, often helping the sister or Sumell to overcome their despair. Sumell curses constantly throughout the documentary, while Wallace never uses profanity. Animation fills in places when the video cannot illustrate what Wallace is saying. Although the audiences never see Wallace, his presence is stronger than any other visible character’s.

While the documentary was in postproduction, Bhalla began building the interactive segment, released in 2015. Not planned as transmedia from its inception, the corpus became a transmedia project when the content outgrew the single media format.

Angad Bhalla had been recording phone conversations with Wallace since he started communicating. As Bhalla said:

There was so much audio that we weren’t able to fit in the film. I knew that I had

so much more [than in the documentary], he is so engaging in conversations I had,

it’s a really valuable storytelling tool. In the documentary, we could only put

108 things that kept the story moving vs. the interactive, and we had so much freedom

because you can skip parts if you don't like it (Angad Bhalla, interview, 2016).

Since the interactive portion came after the documentary, it needed to be consistent with the documentary’s evocation of loneliness and isolation. The interactive portion became a virtual space for the audience to explore and understand solitary confinement. When combined, the platforms evoke a more profound, unified simulation of Wallace's world.

The Deeper They Bury Me is visually designed almost as an empty space, with very limited information, and clickable objects which trigger a short video related to

Wallace’s experience. The user experience is designed to simulate a twenty-minute phone conversation with Wallace. First, the user hears an introduction starting with: "Okay, here is the deal. My cell is so small I can only make four steps forward before I touch the door… Four decades in a cell. That is totally asinine" (Herman Wallace, The Deeper

They Bury Me, 2015). Hearing this grabs the audience’s attention immediately. The introduction ends with Wallace saying: “I am going to call you back,” after which the user hears the phone ringing and sees an "answer" button. Clicking on the "answer" elicits a voice asking the user to click "number five" to accept a collect call from Herman

Wallace from Louisiana Prison. When Wallace says: “Ok, I am back,” the story starts.

After listening, the user can choose segments to watch.

The interactive story is divided into eight chapters grouped into five segments.

Each segment becomes available after the user completes the previous one. The first segment contains two chapters: Surviving a cage and I can only dream. The Surviving a

109 cage chapter shows what Wallace’s cell looks like. Clickable objects open a new video, each of which combines an animation and Wallace’s talking on the phone. In the cell, the user can see among other things a poster of Malcolm X, a reference to the philosophy

Wallace followed and made significant by the circumstance that Wallace was imprisoned only two years after Malcolm X was assassinated. The I can only dream chapter discusses the art project of Sumell, first introduced in the documentary. The second segment has only one chapter, When I came to prison, in which the user hears from

Wallace that he was jailed on January 15th, 1967. Segment three consists of two chapters:

Life was so simple and My community, informative about Wallace’s life before jail and the community he lived in. Segment four also has two chapters called No justice and No peace. In No justice, Wallace talks about the reason he was locked in solitary confinement, as well as about the murder he purportedly committed. No peace breaks consistency slightly; the user hears Wallace’s lawyer. The lawyer presents an objective point of view, providing the facts related to the Wallace case. The fifth, final segment has the last chapter, called A step forward. Its most salient feature is a visually symbolic bird cage with open doors. Seeing it, the user expects to hear that Wallace was released.

Instead Wallace says that after more than thirty-five years in the cell, he was transported to a dormitory room, a somewhat liberating experience for him, only to be returned after eight months to the cell where he stayed until the end of his incarceration. An epilogue reveals that Wallace was a free man for only three days before dying from liver cancer.

To make the two platforms feel like an organic storyworld, Bhalla had to overcome challenges.

110 The Deeper They Bury Me’s incubation phase. Although Angad Bhalla produced and directed the documentary Herman’s House first, and then grew the interactive web-based portion out of the documentary, the process fell into two phases: design and production.

First, we brought people who had already done transmedia, and we talked to

them. They came with some thoughts and ideas. And then it was a long process,

years and years of preproduction [incubation]. One part of it was the National

Film Board [of Canada] was funding it, so they have their process. Another

problem was translation issues between film and technology people. Building a

website is not like doing a film. With the film, you can watch the cut and make

adjustments. But, doing a website you don't have that option. We had to come up

with the full structure without having ever seen it. We didn’t know what was

going on and it was much harder as the process moved on. We spent a lot of time

just figuring out the structure of the website and writing a lot of proposals and

[the process] became very difficult and half of the time I didn’t understand

it….The biggest challenge in pre-production phase was getting translated

technology to the content (Angad Bhalla, interview, 2016).

In transmedia, the look and feel of storyworld has to be consistent across all platforms. Besides the translation issues, it was difficult for Bhalla to not only transfer the documentary’s feel and look but also to accurately show the world of someone who had been in solitary confinement for over forty years. Bhalla had to reject some offered design options. This phase took several years.

111 In the film, it's more collaboration between director, editor and the team, but I’ve

never been in this world, and my producer told me that it can't be more

collaborative than these people are. We had to change [many] people; we had one

designer's team and we fired them, got another and then we had to work with the

programmers who were more collaborative during the process (Angad Bhalla,

interview, 2016).

The interactive web-based portion contains several short stories connected in a virtual space. Each segment has a title and an object that symbolically represents a from Wallace’s life. Symbolic representations of Wallace’s world, animation and narrative have to match stylistically Wallace’s experience. The rejected designs for the interactive world were beautifully done but did not match the style. A person locked in a prison since 1972 would have no experience of the digital age; some digital elements would thus be inappropriate.

Figure 27. The rejected design option for The Deeper They Bury Me (source: “Creative Mornings” – Bhalla presentation) 112 In order accurately to present a very limited, lonely and empty world, the final design used small objects in white, grey, and black that looked as though Wallace had sketched them. For verisimilitude, Bhalla asked Wallace to write out alphabet letters on a paper that could be used as the official font in the text of the web-interactive portion.

Figure 28. Final design version for The Deeper They Bury Me (source: The Deeper They Bury Me website)

The Deeper They Bury Me’s production phase. The creation of The Deeper They

Bury Me paralleled the postproduction and final stages of the documentary Herman's

House. While filmmaking came naturally to Bhalla, he found the interactive platform challenging since it was heavily based on audio recordings, which complicated designing a virtual space on the website. Bhalla's vision of the virtual space made up of short videos and Wallace’s “phone call” stories were technically difficult to achieve. He divided this

113 process into two steps: creating the videos for the website and creating the actual website.

As Bhalla explained,

I would see the process as two different things. First, we created 26-27 short films

of 1 to 2 minutes long and went through the regular process of editing. I worked

with the same animator that I did in postproduction of the film, but this was for

the interactive. For me, that was the familiar process; editing, visual effects, sound

design and mix. Another phase was putting all the videos into the website

and getting it to work. One of the biggest fights we had was about videos on the

website. The videos can't be opaque; there has to be an interaction between the

background and the video on the top of it. That was very hard to do. We had to

come up with a solution. The first team didn't do it, the second team figured it out,

but it worked one time on one platform. Then it took them a year to figure out

how to work it in every web browser. They didn't know it would be that

complicated. Everything was done for so long and this phase was just trying to get

it to work! Even when we launched it at the New York Film Festival in 2015, that

day we had bugs. And finally, when it worked, there were a lot of creative things

that I would change, but we couldn't go back (Angad Bhalla, interview, 2016).

114

Figure 29. Bhalla’s prototype of the website (source: “Creative Mornings” – Bhalla presentation)

Despite challenges, Bhalla was able accurately to present the experience of solitary confinement and expose its inhumane conditions. Organic transmedia usually conceptualizes and plans the multiplatform approach from the outset; in that way, the creators can strategize about which part of the story will be delivered through which platform. Because Bhalla initially planned only the documentary, the production path of the interactive portion took a long time to realize. However, the interactive component took the whole storyworld to a different level by providing an immersive experience for its audience – and thereby became an excellent example of transmedia.

115 Chapter Five: Analysis and Interpretation

Stage Two - Audience Engagement

This segment elaborates on the third research question:

RQ3: How do audiences engage with transmedia content?

Transmedia storytellers are story-architects who build storyworlds with which the audience can interact. The interactivity of transmedia storytelling permits audience participation to change from “lean back” to “lean forward” engagement. By interacting with the content, the audience is given agency within the designed storyworlds. Agency is “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray, 1997, p. 126). As Phillips (2012) points out, creators must anticipate who the target audience is in order to be able to structure the project to maximize engagement.

The audience can be looked at in two different ways. On one hand, the audience is composed of multiple individuals who will each experience the narrative differently, depending on factors such as an individual’s personal mood, accessibility of the media, and social context. For many people, that experience will remain limited (Phillips, 2012).

On the other hand, the audience can consist of individuals who respond to narrative, and who talk to one another digitally via social media, or in person. “Just as your work is hopefully greater than the sum of its parts, so too is the audience. It's smarter than the single smartest person. It's a living organism that makes decisions about how to engage with your story on behalf of a huge share of your audience” (Andrea Phillips as cited in

Jenkins, 2012, para. 6). According to Ruggiero (2000), audiences’ responses to media

116 content are determined by familiarity with a genre within a medium, by overall exposure to the medium (TV), and by the social context in which the content is used (watching a movie with the family or alone).

Transmedia creators must fully understand and appreciate both types of audience behavior, the individual and the collective. Furthermore, creators need to take them both into account simultaneously when creating the storyworld, which can be a tricky maneuver. Naturally, it is easier to design for the individual experience or to assume every audience member will be experiencing a story collectively, but a superior practice takes both angles into account (Phillips, 2012). The previous chapter shows how the four creators structured their storyworlds for both individual and collective experience. For example, Question Bridge’s art installation and community events presume collective behavior but the interactive website and the app encourage individual use.

Fully realized transmedia relies on audience engagement to create a fully immersive experience. As just one example, for The Dark Knight film, Batman fans were recruited to participate in a scavenger hunt style campaign called Why So Serious?, which required assembling pieces to solve a puzzle. True transmedia apply appropriate media to involve viewers in different parts of the story within the storyworld (Bernardo, 2014) while the interactivity turns the audience into users. As Gaudenzi further explained, interactivity transforms the passive viewer into the active user, who by engaging with the content then becomes a “doer”. The doer’s actions influence his/her whole experience by creating story elements, an action/reaction that transforms both story and doer (Gaudenzi,

2013). The interactivity allows the user to position oneself within the storyworld. Since

117 two of the four analyzed projects were documentaries, it is necessary to understand the relationship between the content and the users. We usually assume that the filmmaker constructs meaning during filming and editing. However, when User Generated Content is used for a web-documentary the many perspectives alter meaning. Authorship is no longer limited to creators, but extends to the users of an interactive interface which effectively reshapes the documentary but also the users (Gaudenzi, 2013; Rose, 2012).

Interactive documentary projects usually lack a strong narrative voice because it is fluid within a format that fosters interconnections that are dynamic, real-time and adaptive

(Gaudenzi, 2013; Manovich, 2002). Creators must build the storyworld and choose platforms from the beginning to take advantage of that potential.

Selecting platforms in particular will be determined by the story structure and the predicted audience’s behavior. Phillips (2012) suggests choosing platforms with which the target audience is already familiar, and avoiding platforms the projected audience will have less access to. For instance, if the project is a children’s story, those under the age of thirteen may not have access to social media, so content should not be displayed on social media. Skilled creators research their audience during the incubation phase in order to tailor the content towards audience habits and needs. When Nikolic proposed Zenith, for example, he and his team spent a year researching and targeting people who follow conspiracy theories. They examined what such people’s blogs look like, and what they talk about, and then designed the online characters to suit paranoid predilections.

Even though an expansive project aims at a broad audience, creators may know that content will be consumed on a hyperlocal scale. Jenkins uses an example of a high

118 school newspaper or a website focused on sharing news in a particular neighborhood; the circulation is limited but still reaches the local audience for which the information was intended. Such messages can motivate people to act on their shared interests; a collective identity may result (Jenkins, 2017). Rather than assume that each platform of the storyworld will be equally attractive to everyone, creators select platforms that will achieve local communication that permits passive and engaged users, and superfans to respond at various levels. They know that only superfans will explore storyworlds to the fullest, while engaged participants will be satisfied with modest interaction, and passive consumers may not bother much. Each platform has the potential for multiple levels of engagement and multiple fan bases.

Several factors influence the ways in which participants use elements in the various projects and are gratified by their interactivity. Those factors can perhaps be grouped into categories: 1) purpose of participants (entertainment, education, emotional gratification, ideological/political considerations), 2) accessibility of the media (financial considerations, technical expertise, time required for participation) and 3) the utility of platforms (higher or lower barrier to entry, ease of participation or navigation, coherence of the storyworld). Each of the four project teams based choices on predictions of how differently engaged audiences would react. Teams guessed at what type of gratification their projects would engender. This phase of the research analyzes how fruitful those choices were.

119 Results and Interpretation

Zenith. In 2009, audiences began to take notice of references to “Zenith” deliberately planted on blogs and websites already identified by Nikolic’s team as devoted to conspiracy theories. Conversations ensued, as visitors to those sites engaged in speculation. First went up online the team’s own websites Zenith and StopZenith. By accident, the team dressed figures pictured on StopZenith in Guy Fawkes masks. For better or worse, audiences immediately connected these figures with the infamous hacker group Anonymous, which had suddenly become a household name because of a high- profile hack.

Figure 30. StopZenith website and Guy Fawkes masks (source: Zenith transmedia website)

120 The association generated buzz about the project and quickly disrupted the story structure beyond its originally planned scope, attracting an even larger unplanned audience. Some confusion, of course, was inherent in the story world; Nikolic’s team thought of Zenith as a surrealistic experiment that was open-ended and never quite to be completed.

The team capitalized on the growing interest in these hints by releasing Ed

Crowley’s “Locksmith” website, his own blog and the YouTube videos that began to shape the outlines of a plot. In the videos, Crowley alluded to a Zenith conspiracy without explaining what it was, again a strategy to plant clues that the audience could pursue. The targeted niche were people who follow conspiracy theories and who were more likely to find the information online. Just how many participants were inspired to collect the clues is unclear, although the conversations on blogs and sites were dynamic.

When each person talked or shared something about Zenith, it helped the project gain bigger audiences. The more they talked, the more significant marketing tool they were.

The team nevertheless expected that participants would actively engage with the

YouTube videos, perhaps actually reediting some of the videos as a way of unraveling the deepening mystery. That proved unrealistic because only a few people actually did it.

Though the team specifically offered the option of reediting, this technical complexity was beyond the capabilities of most of those interested enough to watch them, and the idea was dropped.

Moreover, when conspiracy buffs took story elements in odd directions, the team reestablished a degree of control by partnering with the Above Top Secret conspiracy theory website (with a multi-million fan base) and offering a $500 reward to the first

121 person who could identify the purpose of Zenith. The hackers discovered in minutes that the Zenith organization was a fiction designed to promote the film. The film introduced

Jack Crowley in a scenario set in a future 2044, elevating the mystery to two-generational status as Jack complicated the narratives of his father. Although the film seemed entirely conventional science-fiction, the Anonymous associations and the partnership with the

Above Top Secret website caused theatrical screenings to sell out, though most audiences seemed content with passive consumption. Some members of the audience enjoyed the story’s open-ended structure, and may have been impelled to search out bits and pieces of the conspiracy on the other platforms, while other viewers clearly disliked the film. As

Nikolic put it, the audiences were divided between “people who loved it and people who hated it but that was our intention.” This polarization is best reflected in the Netflix reviews where people mostly gave either one star or five stars to the film; opinions ranged from anger to admiration. Out of a total one hundred seventy-six reviews the average score was three stars out of five. Reviews awarding one or two stars did not like the open-endedness (“thought it was lazy to do that to viewers,” Figure 31) and were disappointed by the paranoia and annoyed at the Anonymous connection (“It's too bad

Anonymous' name is on this because it only serves to water down whatever credibility or allure they have,” Figure 32).

Figure 31. A viewer’s comment on Netflix 122

Figure 32. A viewer’s comment on Netflix

On the other hand, five starts indicated approve of the open-endedness (“didn’t see the ending coming,” Figure 33). One person described it as “a surrealist masterpiece…. a cross section between Kafka, , Phillip K. Dick and J.G.

Ballard” while still calling it intensely original (Figure 34).

Figure 33. A viewer’s comment on Netflix

Figure 34. A viewer’s comment on Netflix

People who follow a specific genre of entertainment, in this case conspiracy theory/science-fiction, expect the canon to be observed. When genre protocols are

123 broken, people either love it (gratification exceeded their expectations) or hate it

(gratification was not achieved, it failed their expectations). Nikolic deliberately violated expectations with Zenith’s open-ended storyworld to inspire people to think and analyze, not merely to be entertained. For that reason, some viewers advised others not to try to

“solve” anything, but to experience the mystery. In any case, the team successfully achieved their goal of reaching wide audiences and sparking conversation. On the project’s IMDB page, a person added comment on the Zenith film at the end of 2013, three years after the movie premiered, which implies that the conversation among viewers kept going and that person, obviously, understood the filmmaker’s intention to creating a mirror of our society and ourselves (Figure 35).

Figure 35. A viewer’s comment on IMDB page

124 The types of platforms also affected responses. When the team was planting the seeds of the story by scattering them across other people’s websites, My Space was the principal social medium; Facebook and Twitter were not options for promoting the project at the time. Only later did the team share story information on Facebook and

Twitter, providing updates on distribution, showings and reviews. Additional interest was gained when PirateBay featured the stopZenith logo and the team released the first thirty minutes of the film on and then the entire film on Netflix in 2011. The Zenith team had to tailor their distribution strategy to the way they imagined audience behaved.

The team learned, for example, that the audiences for Netflix and Torrent did not

“overlap. People who use torrent websites don’t buy anything – they get things for free,”

Nikolic explained. Netflix at the time was more a DVD than a streaming service.

Moreover, he realized, “a huge percentage of the fans that have torrented ‘Ink’ are actually in other countries where streaming services like Netflix and aren’t available” (Vladan Nikolic as cited in Kaufman, 2011). Later, Nikolic released the rest of the film on BitTorrent too. However, partnering with BitTorrent proved to be successful strategy since “for several days, the interest of a few hundred or thousands downloads per day increased to above million,” Nikolic explained. This dramatic exponential increase in viewership was unexpected.

125

Figure 36. Vodo.net – Zenith – the third place of most downloaded films (source: Vladan Nikolic)

Interest does not necessarily lead to interactivity, of course. Zenith had different entry points to the story for different levels of audience engagement. Even though the story was easily accessible some effort and time were required because just stumbling on

Zenith was unlikely. Measured by the feedback Nikolic received, passive viewers, people who watched only the film, were a little bit lost and did not fully comprehend and appreciate the experience. Engaged audience, those exposed to the various elements who watched more than just the film, connected to the story, enjoyed the Zenith universe and chose to explore it. The core fans, a smaller percentage, actually followed every element of the Zenith universe. The engaged group was doubtless gratified by “solving” the mystery. It is possible that the open-endedness of the story and fragmented structure,

126 which at first seemed a virtue, actually proved to be a liability for those unable to sort out the plot. Although the creative team did not get rich from the millions of downloads, they were successful in reaching a much broader audience than they ever anticipated for a small-budget independent film.

Body/Mind/Change. Body/Mind/Change is designed to be a game-like experience. Rose (2012) explained that gamers are usually “addicted” to playing because they are challenged to pass different levels, achieve the game goals and feel gratification from being rewarded for their achievement. Body/Mind/Change proved unusually gratifying because the creators furnished physical artifacts as motivation. Of all the transmedia projects analyzed in this study, Body/Mind/Change is the only one that offered something tangible to its users, a strategy that proved to be successful. The user must complete the three assigned simulations. Each simulation has a finite goal but the user cannot reach the next level before passing the previous one. The user has to follow the story, learn about its requirements and teach the artificial intelligence about different emotions. Those emotions replicate the user’s opinion on different questions asked in the three simulations which correspond with the three posed questions of the Cronenberg exhibition rendered as: “Who is my creator?”, ”Who am I?” and “Who are we?”. The parallelism created coherence.

By speaking to Cronenberg's fan base, those who would visit the exhibition or watch the retrospective, Body/Mind/Change widened the Cronenberg universe while gratifying the superfan audience. That audience already has very defined preferences; they expect a specific style or genre, and they already are familiar with Cronenberg's

127 themes. They comprise a collective identity. Such people are willing to participate in a – not short –sixty minutes interactive experience whose story is not easy to follow. In fandom culture, time and skills correlate with values; fans are willing to work (Turk,

2014). The three simulations were released a couple of weeks apart and the PODs could be collected only after all three simulations were completed. During the wait time, avid users were able to visit and see development of their PODs in the B/M/C lab at the exhibit space. This prolonged strategy was a way to draw more visitors to the physical space (Weiler, 2016).

Figure 37. B/M/C lab – PODs kept for its owners (source: Lance Weiler’s website)

Instead of merely telling a story, the project challenges its users to analyze and evaluate each scene in order to provide the best answers to asked questions. In this project, the user is given a different type of agency. Navigating through pre-designed and defined space conveys only an illusion of power – no matter which option the user selects, he or 128 she will get the same outcome. But in Body/Mind/Change the user acquires power within the story frame by creating an organism that will depend entirely on its creator’s behavior

(answers, reactions, and interactions). Each POD is custom-made for its owner.

As Rose (2012) explained, the user should not be rewarded often but rather periodically for a more effective stimulus. Randomness is built into questions asked by the artificial intelligence, and the user's answers also vary. All those who complete the assigned simulations receive a POD even though the answers are hardly uniform, and that provides tangible gratification. Those users shared their posts or pictures via Twitter.

Figure 38. A user’s tweet (source: Body/Mind/Change Twitter)

Fans are like everyone else in seeking entertainment. Unlike non-fans, however, they emotionally invest themselves to a greater degree in fantasy worlds (Lewis, 1992).

In Body/Mind/Change, fans who want to connect with the storyworld on a deeper level than the passive viewers can become emotionally attached to the story through the objects they help to create. For example, one user shared via Twitter a picture of herself smiling and holding the POD that had arrived in the mail. Her hashtag #PODSQUAD indicates that she belongs to a specific community of people who own the PODs, whose

129 only source is Body/Mind/Change. That is significant because while the individual’s reception of an actual POD is something easily measured, it is clear that collective responses are at work. Predicting this fandom behavior, Body/Mind/Change provided gratification to those who completed the tasks as anticipated. One could hardly ask for a more salient example of media gratification.

Figure 39. The user’s tweet (source: Body/Mind/Change Twitter)

While Body/Mind/Change is an interactive experience designed for individual use, the participants could collect their PODs at the exhibition in Toronto (or other cities where the exhibition was presented) where they could share their impressions and 130 socialize. This result fosters a collective pride through exclusivity that bonds fans into a

Cronenberg community. That excitement can be measured: almost three hundred objects were printed during the Toronto exhibit, which lasted from November 1st, 2013 to

January 19th, 2014.

Figure 40. The POD owners at the exhibition. (source: Body/Mind/Change Twitter)

Fandom culture arises from prideful obsession, and some superfans are willing to share, comment, or participate so that their connection with the storyworld and the community is more profound. This explains the fact 73.59% of the Body/Mind/Change engagement resulted from social network activity where people steered others to access

131 the website (“SimilarWeb,” 2017). Non-Cronenberg fans were also stimulated to explore and learn more. Those people found the project engaging and entertaining enough to acquaint themselves with Cronenberg's work. The exhibition traveled the world for four years. During the project's life between 2013 and 2017, more than two hundred fifty thousand responses to Kay were collected, and hundreds of PODs were printed.

Figure 41. Body/Mind/Change tour dates (source: www.tiff.net)

Question Bridge. Question Bridge is an ongoing project that provides communication tools for a Black male population. The first released platform, the five- screen video art installation, was edited and pre-selected for the audience within a museum set up. The audience was free to move and explore, but they could only hear and see what was being offered at that particular moment in a controlled environment. 132 However, the installation created a sense of the identity issues of the targeted audience that fostered a desire to delve deeper. To continue the conversation, the audience could use the website and the app.

The website and the app rely heavily on audience participation. The barrier to entry is higher, requiring people to film themselves and upload videos. However, people interested in the project can embrace an option to create profiles for an ongoing conversation with others. For the creators, this option was supposed to create consistent traffic. The downside is that, once they have published profiles, people usually come back to them only a few times or not at all.

Nevertheless, the audience's needs for dialogue dictated additional platforms.

Realizing during the web creation that people use smartphones to connect to their digital communities, creators had to pivot and adapt to accommodate their audience's habits.

Adaptation, however, failed to stimulate an "addictive" behavior that ensured continual participation in the online community. Each video is a close-up of a talking head.

Although the content is informative and valuable, the video format is generic; the talking heads felt repetitive. For example, one of the participants is the famous musician, Pharrell

Williams, whose profile posed a question. Foregrounding someone famous and influential should have brought additional traffic to the website and the app but only one person responded to Williams' question.

133

Figure 42. Pharrell Williams – Question Bridge profile (source: Question Bridge website)

The web-interactive portion and the app of Question Bridge transition from the art installation to the community events. Those platforms are independent participatory artifacts containing user questions and answers. When the users select options or send videos, they are conscious that they are exploring, changing, and participating in a particular vision of community. The Question Bridge platforms thus provide only a framework for creating meaning, but interpretation results from individual initiative and collective response from the black male community. Question Bridge’s content heavily depends on the audience participation, but this means that it is not possible to know with certainty how this interactivity will affect each user. However, users shape the form of the interactive web portion and the app and by adding their videos become co-authors.

Merely assuming that gratification would be achieved by enlisting the users as collaborators on the digital platforms, the creators were simply guessing. Researching and understanding the needs and behavior of the targeted audience before creating and

134 launching a project is essential. The creators thought that the museum visitors would spend five minutes watching the videos. It happened that the exhibit at the Brooklyn

Museum, where it was shown first after Sundance, had to be reorganized since some visitors watched the entire three-hour installation (Aston, Gaudenzi, & Rose, 2017).

However, the website analysis shows that the average time the user spends on the website is two minutes. Co-authorship was an ambitious goal, but the audience seemed satisfied with spectatorship.

Figure 43. Question Bridge – the website analysis (source: “SimilarWeb” analysis)

Another reason Question Bridge failed to engage their audience continuously is that the creators expected participants to upload videos of themselves without any reward. The only gratification comes from being a part of a community, not all that different from bonding provided by existing social media platforms. This framework does not lead to greater dependency. Another reason is that the pleasure of using one platform does not automatically enhance gratification of another platform (Figure 43 – desktop vs. cell phone). Smith (2016) said: “We thought if the exhibits are successful, then people

135 will visit the exhibit and they might upload some additional content [to the website].”

Each platform needs to bring something new to the overall story in order to meet audience needs. On the website and the app, all the questions and answers showed a variety of different users' interest, but there was little novelty.

Moreover, the content is rational rather than emotional. As a result, Question

Bridge was more successful with the "collective" components: the art installation, the educational curriculum, and the Blueprint Roundtables community live events where people were able to socialize, talk, and exchange ideas in person. The discrepancy is obvious in the fact that until today, there are only around a thousand profiles created on the web even though more than three thousand people participated in the community events by summer 2015 (Aston et al., 2017). The success of the “collective” components let the exhibition travel the country for several years to more than thirty-five museums and visited by half a million visitors. To maintain momentum, the project continuously updated a Facebook and a Twitter page with announcements regarding the project or the topics for the Black communities. The last update, on the project’s Facebook page

(November 2016), announced that the exhibition was at the Smithsonian National

Museum of African American History and Culture, the Norton Museum of Art, and the

Cleveland Public Library.

136

Figure 44. Question Bridge Facebook announcement (source: Question Bridge Facebook page)

In 2017, five years after the project launched, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History became the permanent home of the Question Bridge project, including the artwork, the website, and trademark (“Media Impact Funders,” 2016). The website will be kept as a living archive for the audience to be able to contribute to the dialogue. It seems clear that the targeted audience best responds within the museum set up as an ethnographic archive.

Nonetheless, Question Bridge is a significant project that speaks to the Black community. In light of the Black Lives Matter movement, Question Bridge provides a safe place where black voices can be heard discussing social issues. Although failing to 137 engage continually, the target audience found relevant topics ranging from the philosophical to the ordinary. Questions can be probing such as: "Why are you offended when white people use the N word when we use it every day?" to "How do we learn to love our women?" (“Question Bridge,” 2014). That relevance explains why the project has drawn attention from academics, media influencers, and activists; professionals in the transmedia industry understood the importance and complex structure of the project, while the general public was content with the social events.

The Deeper They Bury Me. The traditional documentary, as a lean-back experience, engages the audience through its story, while the web-interactive provides lean forward experience by engaging the audience to navigate through the virtual space.

Both the documentary and the interactive of The Deeper They Bury Me evoke strong emotions, especially if those emotions reflect the audience's ideological/political considerations.

Figure 45. A review on Herman’s House IMDB page 138 Best described as a docu-game, the interactive segment forces the user to make decisions by choosing between the offered options. While the interface determines the user's activity, the user feels that his or her choices have an influence on the story’s outcome. The user is challenged and compelled to complete a segment to be able to move further in the story, which creates a more profound connection with a story that is somber. Although the interactive feels non-linear, the story unfolds linearly through twenty-seven short videos grouped into five larger segments. The user can choose which video to watch within the designed space by selecting clickable objects. For example, in the segment called Surviving a cage, the user sees in Wallace's cell some objects outlined in white indicating that a click will reveal more. Clicking on a jar opens talk about the claustrophobia of small cells; clicking on a toilet handle leads to reflections on lack of privacy; clicking on a picture of Malcolm X introduces Wallace's philosophy. The user's free choice is somewhat illusory, of course, since he/she is being guided by the story structure. Certain steps are mandatory, similar to a game design which rewards players for completing a proscribed level.

139

Figure 46. Malcolm X poster in the cell (source: The Deeper They Bury Me website)

The level of engagement is a low barrier to entry; the user is only required to explore the space and click on the options to hear Wallace's stories about his prison conditions, the toll the tiny space has taken on his life, and details about his imaginary dream house. Although brief, the information helps the user to understand solitary confinement. Wallace's calming and friendly voice makes each story intimate and conveys the feeling of close friendship. But, each story is also shadowed by urgency: every five minutes, the user is reminded how much time is left until the end of the call.

Subconsciously the user explores the virtual environment faster.

Simple tools of storytelling make this project highly engaging. It is easy to navigate, and as the story unfolds, the user develops a deeper connection with the character. Inhumane conditions are exposed in such a way that stereotypes are broken, and a new perspective on the prison system is revealed. The interactivity allows the 140 audience members to skip some parts and select what they want to see. The average time the user spends on the website is nineteen minutes and nineteen seconds, an indication that the audience feels rushed to complete the experience. It is possible to finish before the allotted twenty minutes ends only if the user skips some objects and chooses not to hear all the stories.

Figure 47. The Deeper They Bury Me – average visit duration (source: “SimilarWeb” analysis)

However, all users will reach the epilogue where they learn that more than eighty thousand prisoners are in solitary confinement. The creators used this fact as a "call to action," to translate Wallace's story into connection with the human rights groups linked to this project.

The interactive part premiered at the New York Film Festival Convergence section in 2015. The event was sold out, and the creators received standing ovations.

Although the audience passively watched the project on a big theater screen as a

141 demonstrator navigated through the story, they listened raptly to the panel discussion with the creator, Angad Bhalla, joined by Harry Belafonte, Steven Hawkins (Amnesty

International USA), Thenjiwe McHarris (US Human Rights Network), and Frank Green

(Prison Architect). The discussion reflected on Wallace's life but also focused on the possibility of change.

Figure 48. Premiere at the New York Film Festival – panel discussion (source: personal photo album)

The project screened in other festivals nationally and internationally to a successful reception. Many audience members described the interactive as mind-blowing and the best web-documentary they had ever seen. By exposing the injustice and

142 inhumane conditions of solitary confinement, the project reached the audience emotionally and ethically.

Figure 49. A user’s reaction (source: Herman’s House Twitter)

Figure 50. A user’s reaction (source: Herman’s House Twitter)

The Deeper They Bury Me is a well-structured transmedia project with the two major platforms fashioning the overall arc. The additional social media platforms,

Facebook and Twitter, allow the audience to express opinions and reactions, or be informed on related topics and receive updates on the screenings, festivals, and news related to the project.

143

Figure 51. A user’s reaction (source: Herman’s House Twitter)

Figure 52. A user’s reaction (source: Herman’s House Twitter)

Summary. The most successful projects were those that tailored interactivity to the needs of the targeted audiences. All four projects had merit and were supported and recognized by prominent institutions. Zenith was recognized by the

(SXSW) festival as one of the leading innovative projects in the field of transmedia.

Body/Mind/Change has also received awards, including one from the American Alliance of Museum for a blend of storytelling, media and technology “that has a powerful effect on its audience” (Weiler, 2016). Question Bridge was financially supported by The

Tribeca Film Institute, Sundance, the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and the California Endowment, and enjoyed well-attended exhibition in museums across the country, community events and curricula. Several festivals screened The Deeper They

144 Bury Me, which was produced by the National Film Board of Canada and received awards such as the Breakthrough award from the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab and the Website of the Day from Favorite Websites Awards (FWA) in England.

145 Chapter Six: Conclusion

We are just beginning to explore all the creative aspects transmedia concepts

have to offer, and while these practices are becoming increasingly needed and

popular, one should not underestimate the creative challenges of working with

rapidly changing technologies, and the amount of work involved in each of these

projects, especially for independent creators, who usually have to work with

limited budgets and resources

(Nikolic, 2017, p. 112).

All four creators used organic transmedia principles to explore exciting topics creatively. Zenith and Body/Mind/Change examined our perception of reality through fiction, while Question Bridge and The Deeper They Bury Me examined identity. Zenith is a potential future mirror of our society. Body/Mind/Change actually marshals the data of people’s lives into physical objects, a commentary on today’s online flow of information in the form of a quantified self. Question Bridge redefines Black male identity in the United States through many diverse, authentic individuals. The Deeper

They Bury Me creatively explores the humanity of a former Black Panther activist locked in solitary confinement.

Since the sheer content of each project was rich and enormous, all four creators felt the need to create a larger universe for their characters. All the projects demonstrate that using multiple platforms, far from being gimmicks, expands the dimensions of the story. Each project was different, had a different approach, and required different details in the incubation and production phases. Hearing from the project creators about their

146 creative decisions, the problems they encountered and how they eventually solved them reinforces the need for precise planning and cohesive structure over multiple platforms so that each can contribute something new to the storyworlds.

As Weiler pointed out, designing organic transmedia is not a waterfall process

(e.g., first editing the video and then designing the sound). Organic transmedia demands that different professions come together at the early development stage. Analysis of the four projects indicated that organic transmedia functions when every element of the story is carefully matched with the user's behavior. Failing to do so can result in a weak structure that will not resonate with the audience.

Nikolic’s team spent a year researching its niche target audience, understanding their behavior and planting the seeds of the story through relevant media. The result reached an audience far beyond the planned scope, despite the instability of online conspiracy theory communities. Body/Mind/Change’s higher barrier to entry actually was not an obstacle. People did sign up, did share data, and did invest time and effort.

Question Bridge, an important and robust project, failed to attract audiences to the online portions of the project, probably because its creators misunderstood or mistook the audience beforehand. Also, the project provided only a framework, not a story or character with whom the audience would connect. For The Deeper They Bury Me, Angad

Bhalla’s goal was to render the experience of someone in solitary confinement. He spent five years creating and designing the virtual space to capture the mental state of Wallace.

It proved to be the strongest and most successful story structure because of its simple manual navigation and selection of chapters.

147 I began the study when I recognized that no one had adequately explored how swelling technologies were vectoring together in new forms of storytelling. I expected to find emerging rules but discovered instead that transmedia is still intangible. If there is no one-size-fits-all model that can be universally applied, it is clear that transmedia is like a living organism poised in growth. The study did find, however, that certain principles revealed themselves: how to fragment a story, how to place those pieces on multiple platforms, how to ensure that characters inhabit those pieces, how to encourage audience to find coherence by helping to create a viable ensemble.

It is proved that audiences find gratification by consuming (1) the content they like, (2) on the medium they like, (3) in the environment they find satisfying. Three of the projects (Zenith, Body/Mind/Change, and The Deeper They Bury Me) conformed to those criteria, while only Question Bridge did not. The most successful teams designed the projects with the targeted audience (or at least with the audience in mind), not for them.

Those creators learned to test content before releasing it. Lance Weiler developed the most rational principles (trace, granting agency, thematic frame, and social movement or serendipity management) to guide himself during the incubation and production periods.

Such principles may become a production language for building a strong symbiosis between content, platforms, and users. All the creators are aware that the majority of their audience will be passive but hope that the more active will not only shape the final product but also enhance the enjoyment of the less engaged. That demonstrates again the experimental nature of transmedia, and the courage of those creators willing to risk novel approaches.

148 Although failing to reach audiences can be laid at the door of faulty story structure and pour platform choices, creators are up against audiences who can remain uninvolved because they claim to old consumption habits, or, conversely, because they cannot choose from among too many available media.

This study does not suggest that we should forget old media style and switch to transmedia. It does argue that we should be receptive to what may turn out to be a paradigm shift in formats, storytelling techniques, and audience response. That would not mean that we would discard “old” media that will be around for some time to come in any case. Not every story can expand to multiple platforms; some achieve greater impact by being told through a single medium.

Rewarding the audience is critical for of transmedia since it is premised on active audience "seeking." An immersed, rewarded audience will want to come back to the storyworld. One strategy may be to make transmedia projects move like games in which the user has to perform tasks on a number of levels, and receive rewards in each triumph.

“Gamification” integrates game mechanics into the storyworld to motivate participation, engagement, and loyalty (Hamari, 2015).

The study also suggests that the quest for a unified transmedia model is irrelevant.

What matters most is worldbuilding, audience engagement, and a multiplatform approach. Within that framework, different transmedia creators are free to explore, adapt and shape their projects. The beauty is in the fluidity of the format.

I have also learned personally from this study. My research inspired me to go beyond small interactive projects and the classroom setup. I collaborated as a transmedia

149 developer on a project called Teslafy.Me inspired by the scientist Nikola Tesla. Nikola

Tesla, a great electrical mind in the 1900s, predicted the technologies we find ordinary today: AC power systems, remote control, wireless communication, TV, the Internet, cell phones, video communication, and more. The concept was to expand a Tesla documentary by using an interactive web platform as an educational, informational tool, and to incorporate virtual reality as a window into how the world might look if all Tesla’s inventions had been made the way he imagined. The project was entered into competition in the 2017 Doc Tank Lab, East Doc Platform in Prague. The concept, awarded “Best

Pitch,” granted us participation in the Interactive Documentary Workshop in Nyon,

Switzerland for further development. Although the collaboration on the project has ended, the workshop was valuable. Furthermore, in 2018, because of my transmedia expertise I was invited to Nyon, Switzerland again, this time to present my project and later to be part of Gaudenzi’s lab where I had the opportunity to apply her WHAT IF IT methodology to structure and prototype the project.

Recommendations for Future Research

In 2001, Web 2.0 brought about a new era of rich media content, sharing, collaborating, social media and the first generation of digital natives – people who do not know a world without the Internet (Costello, 2012). When I started this research, some of the platforms did not even exist. Virtual reality (VR) blossomed in January 2016 at the

New Frontier of Sundance Film Festival. Only six months later, in July 2016, Pokemon

Go was released and augmented reality (AR) reached a peak. In October 2017, at the

Future of Storytelling conference, the main topic was artificial intelligence (AI). Around

150 the same time, Hollywood director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won a special Oscar for his VR project. In January 2018, at the Sundance Film Festival, two VR projects were sold for distribution. One was produced by director Darren Aronofsky. With the new wave of VR, AR, and AI, different professionals started to think that those new formats might replace transmedia. Future study of the transmedia potential of these technologies is obviously required.

One goal of my study was to help clear up misunderstandings between the new industry and academia. The academia always lags behind industrial innovation but academics can clarify terminology and evaluate transmedia. We know that decades were needed for film language and technology to establish themselves, and academics played a role in codifying that progress. Although transmedia is still in its infancy, technology is changing so fast that one year in the digital world is almost equal to ten years in the analog world. In less than ten years from now, generations of digital natives will start looking for jobs. Academia must recognize shifts and train students so they are not educationally and professionally handicapped. Future research should focus on bridging academics and industry professionals. Transmedia is taught in only a few schools primarily in the bigger cities. Transmedia is no longer just the future of storytelling; it is the present of storytelling. How long does an art form have to exist on the fringes before it is widely accepted in the academic world?

Academics have embraced the term “transmedia” just as professionals have started inventing new ones to distinguish more organic types of transmedia from commercial franchising. At the top of the list is “immersive storytelling,” which covers

151 both a single medium and multi-platform approach (virtual reality, obviously lends itself to an immersive experience). Stephanie Dinkins, a transdisciplinary artist, now calls transmedia “360-degree storytelling.” “360-degree storytelling” stresses to collaboration between authors and audience, a circle of reciprocating creative exchange. Lance

Weiler’s preferred term for transmedia is “pervasive media.” At some point, however, scholars and professionals will settle on nomenclature.

This field still has a long way to go. Thus far, foundations and festivals have mostly fostered new versions of transmedia (Nikolic, 2017), but revenue streams from user-generated content are attracting industry professionals. Now that digital platforms such as YouTube are more open to funding producers and talents, alternative storytelling styles are beginning to prosper. Acknowledging the timeliness of audience involvement,

Netflix has added an interactive section for audiences to shape narratives through a series of decisions. As an example, in the summer of 2017 Netflix’s new episode of Puss in

Book: Trapped in an Tale offered branching paths of story, leading from more than a dozen decision points throughout its length, with options for viewers to come back and explore paths not taken. A second Netflix interactive project is the children’s show Buddy

Thunderstruck, created to mimic video game play. And, in still another example, HBO produced a new interactive project called Mosaic – where audiences supposedly choose the outcome of a narrative directed by Steven Soderbergh. Such breakthroughs will doubtless occupy critics and scholars.

152

Figure 53. Mosaic – an interactive project by Steven Soderbergh (source: HBO website)

Future research will analyze not only financial and business models of transmedia but also truly difficult questions concerning intellectual property as platforms host increasingly diverse content. Technology, of course, develops at its own pace influencing our communication styles and therefore culture itself. A few years ago, we could not imagine transmedia and now professionals are moving at galloping speed to VR, AR, or

AI. In the next few years, we can expect that technology will develop further and change the rules of the storytelling game again. What will not change is the human need for stories. The audience will always be there, looking for stories to satisfy various needs, and future researchers will doubtless discover new rules of storytelling adjusted to future technologies. Future research will always be needed to define those very changes.

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161 Appendix A: Open-Ended Interview Guide

1. Describe your project and what is it about?

2. How was the story structured over multiple platforms?

3. What was your approach during the pre-production phase?

4. What was your approach during the production phase?

5. How did you engage the audience?

6. How did the audience use each platform?

7. Was your strategy successful?

162 Appendix B: IRB Approval

163 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Thesis and Dissertation Services ! !