When I signed up for Immersive Writing Lab I thought it was a fancy name for working as a digital add on to film and TV, not realising that it is a term in itself to cover writing with all platforms in mind rather than each platform as an add on. I have heard of multi platform and 360 marketing but these have all been extensions of an original article like a TV show, film or web drama. Immersive as I understand suggests that all these bases must be touched at concept stage.
I know a guy who tried to launch a mobile phone drama linked to a website with profiles as well as a FB page and Twitter. I think the reason it failed was that he sought to sell it for a one off payment for £1.50 on iTunes. Or it may have been awful, I don't know since I thought paying for content in that way was not what the internet is about.
I know people pay more for film and music but the film and music that sells in quantity, even artists with a small fan base making less than 50k a year, to reach that stage have become, however small a brand. What my friend tried to do was to become the brand with the digital only and without the support of anything bigger like a branded website to link with his web drama.
For any of our groups to be successful we need three things. Content, the story world and the ability to produce that content, a sponsor who has an external advertising budget to promote our content and platform savvy marketing to tailor our content to suit the attributes of those various platforms.
As we worked through the day on Sunday I thought the Audience was looked at far too late down the track. In most business ventures the Audience / Customer is key and my group developed a project that Julian annoyingly kept calling the Comedy; I'll come back to that point. We found ourselves late afternoon trying to work out who the audience might be.
We might have looked at Audience first and then what platforms/technology that Audience used and how would we reach them, then design the Story World, Characters and Story strands. With this approach we would have identified more readily how we would use different technology platforms throughout the story development rather than return to the story world as we did late in the day.
Your group was Northumberland Thriller, there was a Moon group that I think was Sci Fi, but our perfect Stepford type world was referred to as Comedy. I think, and I am sure it is something that Phil Parker has written, that Comedy is a tonal issue. The important thing is story; you story world will be dependent on how good a story you create before you build in the thriller elements.
Audiences will warm to the heart in the story and be excited by those thriller tensions. This might suggest that all genre is an add on but I think that whatever genre the groups steer towards it is the underlying stories that provide the heart and that the genre elements are the tropes and conventions we expect or might expect to be subverted within that particular genre.
I don't see our group, which at the moment is called Persephone as a comedy project. We are aiming for a wide and complex story world with story strands that might be seen as Romance, Thriller and Political. These stands will all have moments of comedy as much as they will have pathos.
We may have a strand that is close to sit-com, another strand, that is boy meets girl, loses girl and when they meet again as changed characters poses the question can they rekindle the love they once had or will they fight to the bitter end.
We will also have intrigue, a thriller about a character from another’s past who might bribe, menace or possibly kill. All these different genre stands are possible in as much the same way as they are in Desperate Housewives that is often described as a Comedy Drama.
Yes Michael I've done quite a bit of investigation into Transmedia and even written an article about it for the Journal of Screenwriting but I have to say I haven't fully clicked about how to write it until this weekend at the immersive event. I think you are right that it requires an approach which considers audience from the start but I think that writers usually have to think of an idea first and work from there. Our group got caught up in the story and we then had to think hard about audience participation - I suspect we will now go back and think of that again when developing the idea further.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both you and Phil Parker that comedy isn't a genre but most people do talk about genre in that way. I agree your idea has lots of potential for all sorts of story developments and that is what makes a good immersive project. Labels like comedy are there to help sell a project and to help others understand what kind of beast it is I think. I think all good immersive projects will have a number of genre at work in their worlds but maybe it helps to identify the major strand or the one that will be used to engage the audience first. It will certainly help to identify ours as a thriller so as to be able to engage the interest of audiences in a storyworld (Northumberland) that may not at face value seem immediately compelling.
I think that we were divided into genre groups at the event to make it easy to find people that we would be able to work with quickly - I'm guessing here. It helps with structure too I suppose when you are having to devise quickly. However I think the really exciting thing about this way of writing and spinning out stories is that as long as you can keep your audience with you can go in whatever direction you like and change that direction more easily too.
Anna Z