By Karim Ahmad
This is part 2 in a series of posts I’ve been obsessively writing on storyworlds lately. Part 1 was published on Indiewire last week, where I discussed the community-building advantages to creating a storyworld of content around any single piece of IP. Part 3 is now available here.
What I want to discuss here is the how. Assuming you already want to, how do you reboot your process to allow for multiple interconnected stories to exist within a singular storyworld? Well, that’s the first challenge, is that you have to really want to. Innovation is hard, it’s time-consuming, and you have to be willing to question all aspects and habits of your storytelling process. Easier said than done. It takes discipline. And often times, it required working way outside your comfort zone. But if you’re like me, that prospect will excite you as much as it terrifies you. So what does that process look like? What are some of the challenges and pitfalls to avoid? Here are some of the takeaways from our process reinventing FUTURESTATES series from an anthology series of scifi shorts into a collaborative and immersive storyworld of content. Our goal was to make the series stickier by creating interconnections between stories and by creating multi-platform access points for users to engage with the content.
Lesson #1. Weave collaboration into your process as early as humanly possible. We selected filmmakers based on very short story synopses – in some cases only a paragraph long – all sourced from the Wish for the Future project, which we collaborated with Lance Weiler on, envisioning a better future for all of humanity. Then convened all seven of our chosen filmmakers to collectively design a storyworld from those initial ideas. It was like a TV writers room, with mere seeds of stories to work from, but even that required some reverse engineering. God forbid they all came to the table with fully formed treatments.
Lesson #2. Collaboration is harder than you think. But if you’re building a storyworld of content, it’s going to take you forever to do it all on your own, so you really have to suck it up and collaborate. I’ve found that the defining question when collaborating is, how much or how little to differing visions need to integrate? Sometimes, a storyworld can allow for different interpretations – differing visions that can both be canon. But if your stories need to talk to each other somehow, then differing visions can be problematic, and they can break your storyworld logic, which is really bad. In that case, someone needs to play the role of the arbiter of the storyworld; the increasingly important role of the Transmedia Producer. Because ultimately, the storyworld and its rules have to be the boss. If there are inconsistencies in these rules, it makes for a fractious and potentially unsatisfying experience. Trust me, people will notice. So constant communication between everyone is key. A Transmedia Producer facilitates that.
Lesson #3. Bring your interactive team to the table on day 1. Our filmmakers had a couple screenplay drafts under their belts before we brought in our interactive team. Ironically, that’s precisely what I did not want to happen. But it’s hard to find the right people for these kinds of projects. So start looking now. If you’re a filmmaker that is not actively looking at the kind of content that’s being made in the world of interactive storytelling, and who is making it, you should be. Soon these guys will be just as important to you as your DP or your editor. For me, they already are. When you do bring them on, be clear about your goals. What is the desired experience you want your user to have with this world? Is it a mystery, a puzzle, like FUTURESTATES? Is it a call to action? What is the desired emotion you want to elicit? What role does the user play in the story? Is there a way to accommodate those users that just want to watch and not actively explore? After all, you certainly don’t want to punish those users who want to have a traditional viewing experience. So the lean forward and lean back models need to be worked in from day one, and you need a team to help you do that. But for the love of God, collaborate. Share ownership. Creative technologists are just that – creatives.
We worked with the interactive studio Murmur, who participated in a second group convening, and added a tremendous amount to the process and the entire experience. They created an eighth story that connected the whole experience together – a meta-narrative – told through short video artifacts peppered through an immersive web experience. It gave the whole series a clear spine. Again, ideally, this would have started sooner, but overall, the process worked well, because we were developing the films and the interactive story at the same time. That’s the key. These elements all have to work together, so they all need to be developed incrementally, together. If you’re thinking about the story and the platform as separate, you’re doing it wrong. Platform is story. User experience is story.
Like any project – linear or no – there were hiccups along the way. There are just too many moving pieces for something not to go wrong. But because there was consistent communication, the pieces fit together. Did this process work? You tell me, we just launched the project at futurestates.tv
Whether you think it worked or it didn’t – whether you think it’s a compelling experience or you don’t – the process yielded something unprecedented. I’ve never seen a web series like this. It just doesn’t exist. And that novelty – coupled with all the myriad pieces of content that work as access points for discovery, all of which are intensely spreadable – helps us build community.
In part 3, I will explore a different approach to storywold creation. A leaner approach.
Karim Ahmad is the Senior Digital Content Strategist at the Independent Television Service (ITVS). You can follow him on Twitter: @the_karachi_kid
Karim will be participating with Ted Hope, Michel Reilhac, Liz Rosenthal, Tiffinay Shlain, and Lance Weiler on Wednesday, May 28th at 11A PT on the interactive think tank talk show: ReInvent Hollywood. You can read more about the specific episode here, where Karim also shares some examples of what he feels are good examples of the “new look of storytelling”.
