Transmedia & the Future of Entertainment

Extracted 10JAN2012 from http://www.nypress.com/article-22745-transmedia-the-future-of-filmmaking.html

The financial crisis of 2008 significantly lessened private equity's desire to sink investments into films, independent and otherwise..

Cinema was the dominant art form of the 20th century but, much as theater and classical music before fell out of favor with younger generations, so, too, is film beginning to go through a cultural outmoding. Thanks to Web 2.0, the Internet has shifted from utility status to something more akin to an entertainment form itself, and art forms don't get outmoded without reason—they get outmoded because they're replaced...

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

"The marketplace for independent work is lousy. The realities of how technology is changing publishing are profound. I think media is becoming more fluid—[in the future] it will be moving across devices more easily. The shift from passive entertainment to more social entertainment is what's happening... [Transmedia] enables you to be connected to so many other people on the basis of the fact that they're experiencing the same work as you at the same time. This is the evolution of storytelling." [Lance Weiler, a filmmaker and new media consultant whose name is typically the first to come up in discussions of transmedia]

As online media consumption becomes more interactive, with ubiquitous commenting opportunities for consumers, transmedia filmmakers have realized that cinema has to allow room for the audience to become involved in the art...

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

"There's this thing video game designers call a 'golden path'—there's a definite way that the majority of people are going to experience the game, and the designers plot that. A lot of the interactivity in a video game is really just the illusion of interactivity. It's about engaging the audience and giving at least the feeling of volition. But as the artist you have to have the sense that you are, in some way, controlling it, blending the craft of storytelling with the illusion of agency." [Tommy Pallotta, producer and director of transmedia films]

At this moment, the possibilities for where transmedia might go are endless, but it's clear that it's going somewhere...Of course, this is all purely speculative; there are different ideas about the degree to which transmedia should genuinely enable audience participation rather than merely provide the illusion of such. Which side wins out has yet to be seen.