While WIRED magazine deemed him “one of 25 people helping to reinvent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood,” filmmaker Lance Weiler calls himself simply a story architect, one who isn’t married to any specific medium.
And, in today’s fragmented media landscape, the ability to simultaneously deliver an entertaining or informative tale through print, cellphones, TV, the Web, and whatever technology comes next is more than mere innovation — it’s survival.
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Weiler has been pushing boundaries since about 1997 when he experimented with alternate realities — building a seemingly real case with court documents, 911 calls, and missing person flyers — for his film The Last Broadcast. His recent endeavor, Pandemic 1.0, appeared as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier and unfolded for attendees over several elements including film, mobile, social gaming, data visualization and real-world interaction.
Now there’s a name for Weiler’s work: transmedia, a term loosely defined as storytelling across multiple platforms. And, for this award-winner, the key to his success — and that of any content producer, really — is engaging the audience as collaborator.
What made you start experimenting with transmedia?
What was interesting to me — and you can see it across the work that I’m doing — is how technology or the connective world that we’re moving into can break the fourth wall. How can we put people into the shoes of the protagonist, extend the story and make them experience it in more than one form? I’m interested in how storytelling can evolve in the 21st century. How can I tell a story in an efficient manner where the audience becomes more of a collaborator in the work that I do?
Some feel that transmedia is becoming another generic buzz word. What do you think?
Transmedia is a transient term. Media, by its definition is going to be fluid. It’s great to have a term that people understand, but whether there was a term for it or not, I’d still be doing it.
With any term that becomes hot, a lot of people gravitate towards it and try to own it. The terminology doesn’t matter as much to me as it does to tell stories and develop work richly in a way similar to software releases where you’re doing rapid prototyping and putting it out to the world to see what people think.
But there’s a lot of movement in the category that’s legitimate. Guillermo del Toro opened a transmedia studio. The creator of CSI [Anthony Zuiker] started Level 26. Fourth Wall Studios secured financing and will be doing original transmedia projects and co-productions with studios. There’s a lot going on in Europe, South America and Asia.
| “How can I tell a story in an efficient manner where the audience becomes more of a collaborator in the work that I do?” |
What was the conceptualization process like for Pandemic 1.0?
It was born out of the desire to tell a rich world of what is essentially a Lord of the Flies tale. I built this universe that has various touch and entry points, multiple ways that the story can be pervasive. I wanted to extend and tell a story where adults have contracted a sleep virus and youth are left to their own devices.
I wrote the screenplay called Hope is Missing (HiM) that went through the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab. It was the first time that a feature film and transmedia project went through the lab. Pandemic starts with an initial outbreak that spreads across the world. We’ve raised financing to shoot serial content and stage transmedia events in London, Barcelona, Berlin, Rome. I’m very interested in seeing the story told from multiple perspectives around the world. HiM takes place 90 days after the initial outbreak in a small town in the United States.
I had a lot of room to do R&D around the story. In the lab, I put together a conceptual way of how I could tell the story in the real world. I shot a short [film] that was a style guide of what we would do in various cities. I crafted an extension that would sit in the real world and would involve a game layer.
What does story research and development involve?
The vast majority of films are underdeveloped. Story R&D is an amazing opportunity to richly develop the stories that I want to tell. It allows you to go through various phases, seeing if the story works, getting feedback, building relationships with audiences. I try different things to see what they like and what they don’t like. That’s not to say that I only do what audiences like, but it’s a great way to rehearse with actors, get a sense of the world, build the experience, collaborate, and try something in the real world and online, a better way to develop the story world. There’s a level of complexity to transmedia, so it’s a way to refine the process. Transmedia isn’t just a checklist — here’s the mobile, the game, the social media. I want to understand each of these elements and how they fit into the story — what makes them stronger not just as individual pieces, but as a whole.
How do you decide which platforms to use to best tell the story?
I design from a standpoint that whether it is on a device or platform, each should have a beginning, middle and end. I want to create an emotional connection to something. It’s really great to have someone on the edge of the seat. If I can do that in the world, lure someone into it, create that sense of thrill, I’m happy.
Whether it’s mobile, online, in the real world, in the cinema, or on the screen in the middle of the living room, it’s not about having just a series of things where you can’t get the answer unless you do this next thing — I want the story to build. If each part delivers, the more likely that more people will want to consume it.
I also work from story themes and the burning questions from characters, building across the story arc. If I’m going to do mobile, for instance, I have to find a way that a new application makes sense to the story that I’m telling. There might be amazing technology out there, but if it doesn’t reflect the emotional tone that I want, the theme I’m trying to uncover, or fit within what the characters are engaged in, I won’t use it. It’s kind of like what you do when you write and ask yourself, “Is this serving the story?” I apply that to my transmedia project.
There were so many moving parts with Pandemic when you introduced it at Sundance. How were you able to maintain the quality of the experience?
We developed software to help us schedule and time things out. I’m very interested in how data can be used within storytelling and how contextualized storytelling can facilitate more efficient delivery of story and bridge social connections. We modeled different cinemas after cities around the world and, when people checked-in, the virus would spread. We wrote an algorithm that would measure certain things, so that the story would ebb and flow based on real world applications.
How is transmedia transforming the audience experience?
In my personal work, I’m interested in that relationship. I’ve benefited greatly from social media and networking. I pay it forward a lot; that’s what I try to do with [the creative network and conference] DIY Days and the Workbook Project. I work hard to try to make things a little more accessible in an industry that’s been shrouded in secrecy, to uncover Oz working the levers.
Building a relationship with an audience that is real only helps me as a storyteller. It creates a checks and balance system. They feel like they are invested, and it sparks something creative within them.
One of the things that we’ve been doing that’s in closed beta is a mobile Android app that puts people in the shoes of the protagonist. We found that people are using it the way that they want. The players start to define it. But I want the participation to be in a filtered way. The stuff that really rises up, we reference and bring back. Working with the audience, seeing what sparks through story R&D efforts, and then bridging those gaps, gives the story more of a face. The relationship with the audience becomes more fluid.
Lance Weiler’s tips for getting started with transmedia storytelling
1. Test your story. “Start with using transmedia as a way to develop your story. Create simple extensions to your story using something like Twitter. There are a lot of free tools.”
2. Check out what others are doing. “For anyone emerging, check out The Workbook Project. We have a lot of transmedia practitioners who come through. Also check out jawbone.tv to see what’s out there.”
3. Expand possibility. “Release yourself from the literal translation of what you’ve seen. Free yourself from the confines. Then play and experiment.”
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Felicia Pride is a content producer. Visit her at feliciapride.com or @feliciapride.
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