Designing For Augmented Reality – All Aboard The Transmedia Train

LOOKING FOR DESIGN’S PLACE IN AN EMERGING ENTERTAINMENT FORMAT – AND FINDING IT EVERYWHERE

scene from "L’Arrivé d’un Train" - 1895

One persistent scrap of film “fakelore” is that moviegoers in the 1890s bolted from theaters, terrified by footage of an oncoming locomotive in the Lumière brothers film L’Arrivé d’un Train.  Others are that The Jazz Singer was the first feature “talkie” with sync audio – and that D.W. Griffith invented “film language.”

More examples here.

Historians question the likelihood of spectators running hysterically from a sequence of flickering black and white images of a moving train.  Being pioneers in film simply allowed the Lumières to over-hype the thrill of seeing their movie – and who at the time knew better?

Likewise, Al Jolson wasn’t the first actor to be recorded on a soundtrack, but his movie was a financial triumph and is therefore most often referred to.  And, the D.W. Griffith credit likely grew out of the director’s self-promotion efforts years prior to The Birth of a Nation.

I couldn’t help thinking about these quasi-markers in film history, while attending the Power To The Pixel and Wired Magazine Cross-Media Forum held in New York last week.  As each new speaker introduced his or her contributions to the nascent format of transmedia, the “new” frontier of interactive entertainment, I thought about the story of the Lumières’ audiences.  I wondered which member, if any, of the panel would be able to claim his or her own shockingly real speeding locomotive and, with it, a place in history.

Transmedia is a form of storytelling that involves a traditional element like a film, video or book – and combines it with audience interaction via social media, story-specific merchandise, game elements and events, etc.   This allows the creators to delve much further into details that weren’t, or couldn’t be explored in the original film.

An ideal transmedia experience could be visually represented as a hole smashed into a piece of glass with thousands of cracks emanating from the center point of impact.  The movie, TV or web show is the center, and the cracks moving outward from that point each represent a possible offshoot of the narrative.

Ever wonder what was on a bookshelf or in an adjacent room when watching a scene in a movie?  In transmedia, not only is there probably a way to find out, but there just may be a number of cracks – or tangents, clues and surprises, intended for your discovery in doing so.

Transmedia’s momentum is beginning to pick up as more projects are introduced to finance partners and collaborators from across the entertainment industry.  Major players are also currently using the format to extend their top-earning properties like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, Microsoft’s Halo and James Cameron’s Avatar.

Valemont University website

Check out MTV’s Valemont series here to see an example of a transmedia “Alternate Reality Game” in use.

Writers and directors who currently create and drive these experiences refer to themselves as “story architects.”  The Producer’s Guild of America has also recently created a new category to recognize transmedia producers.

How and when visual designers will begin taking on more than a peripheral role remains to be seen.

In transmedia, the idea is that stories can – and should – be told across a range of media and in multiple formats, including those that are entirely visual or experiential.  That could easily translate to possibilities for interior and sets designers, animators, packaging & graphics experts, fashion and costume, interface developers and event designers – the people who already work to tell visual stories, bridge cultures and communicate complicated concepts daily.

You can find out more about transmedia here and here .

© Markus Horak, 2011

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