A Week of Trembles with Dark Detour

From the Dark Detour website

Horror has always seemed to be a pathfinder genre for transmedia. Horror lives or dies by its power to keep an audience guessing, and dancing between platforms is a great way to maintain an air of mystery. With the advent of social media and our evolution towards constant connectivity, it's even easier for scary stories to invade your life.

If you're into horror and want a taste of transmedia, join Dark Detour. It's a week-long multi-platform horror story that hooks you into the story of drifter musician Talbot Griffin as he makes his journey from New York to California, keeping tabs and feeding updates to his growing fanbase online. The creators invite participants to follow the hero on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Swarm, where the story will play out in real-time until the presumable Halloween climax. 

That's pretty much all I'll say because, well, that's all we know. There are more questions than answers at this point—not least of which is, how will the audience play its part? The site hints that this could be a bit pervasive in that you might get some creepy updates beamed straight to your phone. Ah, connectivity.

We don't know much about our hero, yet. He only just begun documenting his travels online today. So, if you're interested in following Talbot and experiencing a unique horror story over the next week, head to the Dark Detour website and join ASAP.

There's not much to catch up on. It's only just getting started. 

Copious Notes at StoryWorld Quest

How fitting for a transmedia conference to come to Edmonton within a week of this blog's birth. Today through Sunday, I'll be spending most of my days at NAIT for StoryWorld Quest, where I'll be learning loads about transmedia, getting inspired, and networking with "content creators and technologists creating the future of new media." 

Something tells me this bodes well for my upcoming creative endeavours. 

The conference hosts a fairly diverse selection of workshops and panels covering pretty much all media platforms and exploring the bridges between. There are a handful that I'm especially pumped for, but my conference experience tells me that the sessions that don't jump out on paper will turn out to be the best in practice. Here are some gems:

• Initiating Transmedia Storytelling In Your Organization is going to be particularly germane to my work with the Edmonton Heritage Council. What does a non-profit heritage organization want with transmedia, you ask? Well, our Edmonton City as Museum Project is dedicated to finding new ways of telling Edmonton's story, and we're looking to everything from film and music to augmented reality to give local history some kick.
• It Starts with the Story will be a great primer for somebody who's just starting with transmedia. Listening to others talk about their approach to story in the rapidly merging media world will hopefully bring together some of the ideas floating around in my head.
• EDMONTONVILLE – The Art and Business of Horror: Edmonton is gaining steam as a horror aficionado's playground. I've seen much of the film output, but it'll be great to see what some of Edmonton's best and brightest in horror are doing to give Edmonton some cred.
• The Importance of Narrative & Story in the Creation of Dragon Age because videogames exist on their own as participatory narrative experiences, and few do it as well as BioWare. 

Check back throughout the weekend as I try to make sense of everything and try to put my thoughts on the page!

Why Transmedia?

Parthiv Haldipur. "A pampered culture." From Flickr used under CC BY NC 2.0.

I've never been particularly keen on taking notes. I'm better with images, but I'm not much of an artist, either. I prefer images in the ephemeral sense, the potent ones that pop into your mind and stick around for only a few second before disappearing back into the ether.

For me, transmedia storytelling is reaching into the ether and building stories from those brief, elusive and often disparate pieces. It's capturing and connecting the dots, translating to a narrative, and finding the best way to take advantage of their limitless shapes and forms.

Transmedia Storyteller gives a simple definition of transmedia as “telling a story across multiple media and preferably, although it doesn’t always happen, with a degree of audience participation, interaction or collaboration." That medium could be film, music, print, web, theatre, spoken word, graffiti, skywriting--the possibilities are endless. It might seem daunting to think of telling stories this way, but it's the only way I've really ever been able to do it.

My adult life has thus far focused on only a few artistic interests: literature, film, hip hop, and electronic music. Those interests encircle a insatiable curiosity for cities, people, and social patterns, as well as a fascination with world-building. It's no coincidence that the subjects and forms that I love combine so frequently and naturally, and cause me to explore further. When I listen to hip-hop, I listen for its reflections of urbanity, from the hood-set lyrics to the funk and jazz samples behind them. Or, I'll find references to literature, and myself delving into stories of the Harlem Renaissance. Likewise, the best electronic music walks a line between being both organic and futuristic, much like a city, and the aural soundscapes give me visions of the urban scenes that would play out over top. This is what art is all about, telling a story and encouraging exploration elsewhere, perhaps even in other forms.

When I write stories, I'm often held back by a tendency to make my writing all-encompassing, to include every detail on the page and leave no stone unturned. When I learned about transmedia, it took massive pressure off my my writing, showing me the freedom to leave loose ends in one place to be tied up elsewhere.

It keeps stories moving, constantly changing, and if all goes to plan, keeps the audience on the lookout for what comes next.